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Peter Grandbois

TV Head

After smashing the last mirror, he took his head in both hands and removed it from his body.  Not as difficult a maneuver as you might think.  A simple matter of knowing which direction to turn.  Righty tighty, lefty loosy.  The problem came once the head was off and resting on the table, facing his body.  The beige button up barely covering his growing paunch.  Sprouts of grey hair curling out the collar.  A picture he’d seen before. 

He plucked out the eyes with his thumb and forefinger.  Nothing changed.  So, he tried to stuff the eyes back in the head, but they popped out and landed on the floor.  Now they were dirty.  Patting the wood, he found one, and then squashed the other with his knee.  He carried the remaining eye to the kitchen sink, feeling his way along the wall.  He rinsed it carefully and dried it with a paper towel.  That’s when he bumped into the portable television on the counter. 

The scotch tape was in the junk drawer.  He tore off long strips and taped the eye to the middle of the screen.  Feeling better now, he unplugged the set and placed it on his shoulders. 

He pulled a coat from the hall closet and stepped into the morning air.  Trash Day.  He was almost sure he could hear overstuffed trashcans rumbling down the sidewalk, autumn leaves crunching beneath the wheels.

“Morning,” his neighbor, Rick, would shout from next door. “How you doing?”

“Never better,” he would reply, standing proudly in the middle of his driveway.

The words echoed within the cavern of his head. 

He removed the TV from his shoulders and turned it so that the screen faced him. He tore away the eye and tossed it into the street, then dropped the TV on the driveway.  When it didn’t break, he picked it up and threw it down.  The screen shattered.  He knelt among the shards, fingering the fragments until he found one the right size. 

Stop. 

We’ve come full circle.  There must be a way out of this loop.  Or perhaps not.  Perhaps this circle is as close as we get to hope.


Peter Grandbois would like to remind the gentle reader that his brother Daniel (whose work also appears in this issue) is a younger brother and therefore prone to fits of exaggeration if not downright duplicity. Though this author does acknowledge the ignominious childhood nickname, he would like to take exception to the alleged "arrhythmic way he gyrated" while playing his guitar solos in the high school band, and take this opportunity to remind his younger brother of the class in astrophysics they took together while studying at the University of Colorado, specifically the unit on special relativity and quantum physics. It was not that said alleged gyration was arrhythmic but rather that said gyration created its own Einstein-Rosen Bridge to a parallel universe subject to a similar but subtly different tempo. 

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