Maybe this has happened to you.
You take the sheets out of the dryer and there’s something wadded up inside a big sheet. The big sheet has twisted around it, creating a large, round pocket filled with whatever is wadded up.
As you start to untwist the sheet you think, “What if this is a human head?”
Then you stop untwisting the sheet because, although chances are it is not a human head, if it is, you have a whole lot of figuring out to do.
What would you do?
The right answer is that you would call the police. But you get a knot in your stomach thinking about the questions that the police will ask you.
“Whose head is this?”
“How did it get into your dryer?”
“Where is the rest of the body?”
And you don’t have the answers to any of these questions. If you tell the truth, “I don’t know, I was just doing the laundry and found it in a sheet,” you’re afraid that they won’t believe you. They’ll probably arrest you, because that’s what’s called “going by the book.”
As you pause, you consider that if there is a human head in there, this would be the moment that changes the rest of your life. From now on you will divide your life into two time periods: before you found the human head in your laundry, and after. And you think about how suddenly these moments can happen, and how you never see them coming. Maybe a car will take a turn too quickly or you’ll notice a lump on your breast in the shower. If you woke up every morning thinking “this might the day that will change the rest of my life in a bad way” you’d probably never want to get out of bed. That’s why you don’t dwell on the possibilities of disaster every day. But right now you have to, because there might be a human head in that sheet.
You wonder who among your friends and family would believe you, and you come to the conclusion: not many. If you vague-book on Facebook about how something difficult has happened, you’ll get a hundred comments promising unending support. But as soon as the headline comes out, “Human head found in woman’s dryer,” your Facebook wall will grow quiet. Your friends will talk behind your back about how maybe they didn’t know you at all, and that you must have a lot of darkness that you kept hidden.
And maybe you do, but you definitely did not put a human head into the wash cycle.
And the prospect that people won’t believe you fills you with panic because there’s nothing worse to you than not being believed. You’re compulsively honest. You try to balance your inability to lie with kindness and sometimes even silence, although not saying something at all is as challenging as telling white lies.
Maybe when you were a kid you watched Sesame Street and were both drawn to and traumatized by the episodes with Snuffleupagus, the wooly mammoth type creature that only Big Bird could see. When Gordon or Bob denied his existence you wanted to scream, “He’s real! Look behind you!” Maybe sometimes you did scream.
You never understood how Big Bird could accept the patronizing treatment of the humans without just flipping out on them or crumpling up inside. Eventually the Sesame Street creators realized kids need to think that adults will believe them, especially when they tell them about sexual abuse, so they made Snuffleupagus visible to the humans.
You want people to believe you, too. About the human head.
It’s like this other scenario that you sometimes consider. Imagine if a time traveler suddenly appears, out of nowhere, in the road. You’re driving your car and there’s no time to swerve. You hit the time traveler and kill him. Everyone thinks that you weren’t paying attention and didn’t see him walking across the street. They probably think you were texting. Nobody considers that he might be a time traveler. Your lawyer won’t even use that as a defense in court because he knows that it will fail. You hope against hope that the time traveler has something in his pocket that proves he came from a different time. But what? If you look at it realistically, you know you’re toast.
When you talk endlessly about this phobia, the fear of time travelers suddenly appearing in the road, your weary but sympathetic friend promises that she will go back in time and do something to alter the events, like push the guy out of the way or convince you to take another route. But then your head reels from the prospect of these alternate realities and you know that in at least one reality you’re rotting away in prison. So you thank your friend for her kind offer but continue to worry.
It occurs to you as you stand there with that sheet that not being believed, having your reality questioned, is one of the worst things that can happen. It’s a relationship-killer. If your own husband didn’t 100% believe that you did not put the head in the wash, could the relationship survive? Then it occurs to you that maybe he did it. And if so, do you cover it up? Do you turn him in or bury the head in the backyard? How did you even come to the point of considering burying a head in the backyard? And if he says he didn’t do it, do you believe him? Can you ever know someone enough, trust him enough, to have no doubt when the evidence is so compelling?
You’re undoubtedly worrying about who will believe you. I’d like to say right now that I will believe you, that I do not think you are responsible for that head that showed up in your dryer. But can I really say that? How well do I know you anyway?
Tags: faith, jody mace, life, questions, the butter
This kind of thing is why it seems to me good to try to run a human head through the laundry, even just once, so you can be confident you will know how to handle it when it happens.
Wow, yeah, this… sounds about right, per some of my weirder and more anxious internal monologues.
You know in Silent Hill, a little ghost demon girl appears out of the fog and you swerve and crash your car to try to avoid her, and get transported to the nightmare realm of Silent Hill? Yeah, I always worry about that. It started in high school, since between my house and the rest of town is a long, very straight road through a swamp, so it’s always covered in fog when the temperature drops at night. That’s my “time traveler.”
Or that scene in North by Northwest where the bad guys force the protagonist to get drunk and drive, and then he takes the cops to the bad guys’ house but the secret liquor cabinet has been emptied? That’s another scary one. No one believed him. It scared me that that could happen, because I knew I’d never drive drunk, but did the cops?
I just get irrationally, preposterously angry at all the goddamn socks for having the *nerve* to ball up and hide in the sheets like that. They’re doing it on purpose. They know that no one will believe me and that’s what gives them the satisfaction.
I love this allusion to gaslighting and relationship abuse. That our realities are only real to us, in a way. This is a wonderful piece of writing and it really brightened my morning… or darkened it, considering how you think about things.
i never have thought it was a head. i just see it and go “damn it, stupid socks. i bet they hid in there to not get clean”
Justin Noormand [10:08 AM]
which is a different type of crazy, thinking socks have a magical central nervous system capable of letting them think and act in the dryer
From now on, I will always think it’s a head… instead of usual when I’m thinking “oh great, what didn’t dry this time?”
I have never had this particular thought process before, though I suspect that now I will.
Definitely! I may never wash my sheets again just in case.
I’d previously thought of a “clean head” as someone who was completely bald. Now I’ve got a different mental image. Even a mental scent, the nice smell from the fabric softener sheet not quite masking the hint of corruption.
There is nothing under the bed. There never has been before, and there never will be in the future. Unless, of course, there is.
But no, you’re an adult. And as an adult, you know that the statistical likelihood of some sort of demon crab beast bursting from the darkness beneath your bed, locking its iron pincers around your ankles, and dragging you into its lair of suffering are astronomically unlikely. Unlikely to the point of impossibility, really. But then, isn’t that exactly what it would want you to think? Logic is the greatest weapon of the unnatural.
And when you think about it rationally, what’s worse? Getting into bed with a running leap every night for the rest of your life, a bead of sweat dripping down your forehead as you close your eyes and hope that your airborne form is too fast for that which lays in wait beneath? Or letting the hell beast pull one over on you, feasting on your entrails, your last thought as the blood drains from your body being why on earth you didn’t listen to your gut when you knew what was at stake?
You are an adult, and you know what needs to be done.
This is why I’m glad my box spring sits directly on the floor.
Yes, this.
Only substitute the Mummy creeping up behind you and smothering you in its dusty, tomb-scented embrace forever if you flush the toilet in the middle of the night when no one else in the house is awake. You can outrun it. If you’re back in bed by the time the toilet stops flushing, it goes back whence it came and you can sleep out the night. If not…
I mean, I have no evidence that’s what happens, but I’d like more conclusive proof that it won’t.
Don’t be silly, there’s nothing under the bed.
It’s in the bedroom closet. It’s *always* in the closet, which is why you have to make sure the closet door is 100% closed EVERY NIGHT even though you’re a 35-year-old attorney and homeowner. I mean, probably.
This is correct. Despite the fact that there isn’t really any real way for a whole person to fit in your closet, there is a monster in your closet.
I may or may not have been freaking myself out a few nights ago about vampire Gwyneth Paltrow right before bed, and had forgotten to close the closet door.
I’m sorry, but you are both wrong. It’s clearly lurking in the shower, which is why you must never EVER buy an opaque shower curtain and then insist on keeping it closed.
Still mad at my former roommate who somehow thought that “increased possibility of mold” was a higher priority than “near certainty that there will someday be a murderer in there, SERIOUSLY, THAT IS WHERE THE MURDERERS ARE GODDAMNIT.”
My cat knows how to open doors, and he likes to open my closet door randomly in the middle of the night.
I mean I ASSUME THAT IS WHAT’S HAPPENING oh god.
This was so good. Thank you.
I was convinced shockingly early in this article to just bury the head in the yard – the head goes in the yard and I never think or speak of it again. I may need to work on my ethics a bit.
Or think of it this way: any day you don’t find a head in the dryer is a good day!
Well, that’s what my new throw pillow says…
I really want to know what would happen to a head put through a dryer cycle.
(I don’t know what this says about me. I may have missed the entire point of the article.)
like a very dark and twisted “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie”
this was creepy and fun, especially the startling jump to direct first person address at the end
I live in the country. One morning when I went out to feed the horses, I found a leg in the hay rack. That’s all I’m going to tell you.
what. kind. of. legggggggggg.
I am a Celticist. We call them “tetes coupee” and we expect them to tell us important secrets, or to prophesy.
THIS!!!! I’m not alone! (Also, wonderfully written)
“Maybe when you were a kid you watched Sesame Street and were both drawn to and traumatized by the episodes with Snuffleupagus, the wooly mammoth type creature that only Big Bird could see. When Gordon or Bob denied his existence you wanted to scream, “He’s real! Look behind you!” Maybe sometimes you did scream.
You never understood how Big Bird could accept the patronizing treatment of the humans without just flipping out on them or crumpling up inside. Eventually the Sesame Street creators realized kids need to think that adults will believe them, especially when they tell them about sexual abuse, so they made Snuffleupagus visible to the humans.”
This hit me hard.
It’s true, too..
“In an interview on a Canadian telethon that was hosted by Bob McGrath, Snuffy’s performer, Martin P. Robinson, revealed that Snuffy was finally introduced to the main human cast mainly due to a string of high-profile and sometimes graphic stories of pedophilia and sexual abuse of children that had been aired on shows such as 60 Minutes and 20/20. The writers felt that by having the adults refuse to believe Big Bird despite the fact that he was telling the truth, they were scaring children into thinking that their parents would not believe them if they had been sexually abused and that they would just be better off remaining silent. On the same telethon, during Robinson’s explanation, Loretta Long uttered the words “Bronx daycare”, a reference to a news event on New York TV station WNBC-TV in which there were reports of alleged sexual abuse at a Bronx daycare center.”
Clearly we have both missed our calling as researchers for [insert generic CSI type show].
Now i am thinking about how my partner would reassure me that he knew I didn’t do it, help me hide the head, and never think less of me even though he would be sure it was me.
I am…. not sure whether to think it’s super romantic or utterly horrifying.
Don't get afraid, get angry. And possibly keep an iron poker in the bed.
This kind of reasoning is how I once convinced myself and seriously panicked that I might be pregnant. And I’d not had sex before.