Kristen de Kline #3 The Lost Head

But it wasn’t gelling. It just didn’t lead anywhere.

She turned the page again. A new lined page. Another start. But back it came:

“Even though she’s lost her head, she still may have some leaf”.

It remained there. Word for word. The head, the leaf, the loss, the possibility.

She switched around the ‘still’ and ‘may’  but that didn’t do much.

Something about losing her head made her think of a severed ear at the start of an old David Lynch movie, something about losing her head made her think of lines of police tape and sniffer dogs tearing under the basement of a squat she once lived in, something about losing her head made her think of people going off to asylums with names like Cherry Farm and Sunnyside.

She put another line through it and another and another but the lost head was very persistent. It wanted to be kept in the narrative but she couldn’t think of a place for it. She couldn’t didn’t couldn’t think where it could lead to.

There was a memory of a burnt out basement and the full moon in her eyes.

There was a memory of sniffer dogs tearing under the basement while a man in blue held different sized body-part bags tentatively in his hands.

There was a memory of uniformed bodies, with guns on their hips, running through her house and a distant sound of someone wailing someone screaming.

She came back to the poem in the morning. The first thing she did was get a big black TEXTA and slide it in bold across the sentence in question. But the lost head and the leaf did not want to be replaced with a story about an arm and a leg or Swedes taking over the Redhead Corporation and offering dodgy matches that took seconds minutes hours to strike. She decided on another coffee. Triple shot out of a Scrabble cup. Letter distribution: L-4, O-8, S-4, T-6 followed by H-2, E-12, A-9, D-4. L-O-S-T  H-E-A-D.

She hadn’t thought up another theme, she hadn’t found a new position, but the lost head would not disappear.

It remained there in the background. Word for word. The head leaf loss possibility.