I Need You Like I Need a Hole in the Head
By T.J. Robinson
She tells me she has a hole in her head, and I say, ‘Don’t we all?’ and smile and sip my drink, but then she says, ‘No, really,’ and takes off her bright blue baseball cap, and there it is—a hole in her head.
In the middle of her blonde bob is a circular window of translucent flesh. It’s about the same size as when you touch the tip of your index finger to the tip of your thumb—it’s A-OK. Through it, I can see her brain, pink as a boiled prawn and shot through with thick purple veins, all sopping with blood.
‘It’s my fontanelle,’ she says. ‘It didn’t heal properly.’
I can’t think of anything to say, so I say, ‘Cool.’ I don’t want her to think I’m freaking out, and I realise that I’m not—well, not about the hole. I’m freaking out about how much I like her. It’s her mouth—the faint lines on her lips, the edge of her two front teeth, the bubblegum tongue. She could say anything she wanted with that mouth and I would say, ‘Cool.’
I realise I’m staring. I realise she sees me staring. I realise she thinks I’m staring at her hole—oh no, I am staring at her hole.
She says, ‘I can put the hat back on, if you’d like.’
I can feel my face filling up with blood. I hope that the bar is dark enough to hide it, but her smile gets bigger the warmer I get. I say the word ‘no’ at least three times too many. Then I blurt, ‘Unless it would make you more comfortable.’
‘I’m fine,’ she tells me. ‘I only wear it to stop strangers from grabbing me and yelling, “Oh my God! Are you OK?”’
And then she laughs and I feel like I’ve been punched in the sternum.
She comes over to my house for dinner and I make ragu. There’s a moment when I look at her bowl and see the spaghetti tangled up in the sauce and how it kind of looks like a brain. She gets down close to it and shovels it in with her fork, like she’s afraid it’ll get away. Her hole peeks at me.
When we finish eating, we sit in the backyard and sip red wine in the last bit of daylight. My house is old and the terracotta paint job is peeling all over like sunburnt skin. She reaches out, tears off a small strip, and says, ‘Sorry.’
I put my hand on her thigh. She kisses me. After a little while, I realise that her eyes are open. She’s staring at the ground. There’s a tree in my backyard that sheds flowers and when they dry up they look remarkably like chicken bones. I can see her wondering if we’ve recently had a barbecue and I tell her, ‘They’re camellias,’ even though I’m not a hundred percent sure they are, then we go upstairs to my room.
In the morning, my room smells like skin and saliva. She’s a warm spot on my chest. I close my arms around her and she frowns in her sleep, my nose buried in her hair. I swear I can feel the tip of every hair on her body touching mine. I open my eyes and stare at her brain, watching for any subtle shrinkage or pulse.
We get breakfast while we’re shopping at the local market, eating pastries and drinking coffee at a beat-up wooden table, a canvas bag full of vegetables resting against my shin. The smell of fresh-baked bread and zesty herbs mixes with the taint of fish guts. Behind her is the meat section, a chorus line of severed beef legs hanging in a butcher’s shop—wet-pink flesh covered in marble-white fat, blushing around the severed edges. The colours remind me of her brain. So do the sudden wide-eyed glances at the crown of her head from the people stopping and starting their way past.
She takes a sip of cappuccino and pulls the foam moustache off her upper lip with her bottom teeth. My heart bobs against my ribcage like a red balloon caught in the corner of the ceiling.
I tell her, ‘I really like you,’ and for a moment she looks as surprised as the people seeing her hole.
Then she smiles and says, ‘I like you too.’
She invites me to a movie with her friends and I show up still warm from a long shower. Something about her has changed. The way she stands next to me feels weird, like her skeleton has been rebuilt inside her body at different angles. She tells them, ‘This is my friend,’ and I look at the smiling faces of all her other friends and see blank panic.
We buy tickets to a horror movie. The theatre is nearly full by the time we go in, and she ends up in the row in front of me. I sit through 90 minutes of people being hacked up with a rubber axe, red corn syrup splatter and latex tendons smeared across the screen. I feel like I can relate.
In the light from the screen, I can see the gleam of her head hole. I have a sudden urge to bend down and kiss it, press my wet lips against that translucent window—a sudden act of shocking intimacy.
I notice the people next to me noticing the hole in her head. They hiss and gasp, then stare at that circle of brain for the rest of the movie. I stare at my bucket of popcorn, shovelling more into my mouth until my lips burn with butter-salt.
After the movie, she tells me, ‘Early day tomorrow,’ and I go home alone.
A few days later, she shows up at my house unannounced. The first thing I notice when I answer the door is the red wool beanie on her head. I have a sudden feeling of being exposed, like my ribcage is spread open and all my internal organs are gurgling away for everyone to see.
We sit on my bed. She gives me a look of stinging pain as she tells me, ‘I really do like you,’ and I try to smile when I ask, ‘well, isn’t that a good place to start?’
She tells me why it’s a good place to end, running through a list of things happening in her life. I sit there and nod after each item, fighting the urge to pull that dumb red beanie off her head. When it’s done, she hugs me like I’m a clothes horse and says, ‘Bye.’
I go straight into the backyard and peel the loose paint off the wall, sweep up all the chicken-bone flowers, and think about all the things that must have gone wrong. I think about her brain. I think about shaking her head and looking in that little window for Magic 8 Ball answers. I know that the reasons are somewhere inside that soft, pink meat. They are being gathered up and put into black garbage bags and dropped down a long, dark chute.
I think about that cool, deep darkness at the bottom of her brain until the sun goes down and I finally fall asleep.
T.J. Robinson is a writer and editor based in Australia, living on unceded Wurundjeri land. He is the founder of the literary journal The Suburban Review, and in 2010 he won the Grace Marion Wilson Trust Emerging Writer’s Competition for fiction. Find him online at https://www.tjrobinson.org/.