from Escape from the Fat Farm, Marsh Hawk Press, Inc., publication date: May 2025
I confided this secret to my roommate:
Our biology teacher’s classroom was crowded with all sorts of weird things: specimen jars with mummified frogs, birds, squirrels, and other assorted dead things. But the jar I found astounding, that compelled my imagination, was the one in which a human head was suspended in a formaldehyde fish tank.
It was a head that had been cut in half, bisected from the top of the scalp down to the base of the neck. From one angle, you could see the cross-section of the brain, the empty nasal passages, the nose, and the mouth. But the real shock was what you could see when you turned the jar around.
It was a girl’s head, with wisps of blond hair down to her ear. She had a pert nose and pretty lips. Her single eye was closed as if in gentle sleep.
Mr. Wood never said a word about this relic, not where it had come from, nor what we were supposed to think about it.
In my case, I fell in love.
I couldn’t stop looking at her. I’d sneak a peek into the cabinet between classes when the classroom was empty. At first, I looked at both sides of her head. The dissected side was, so brutally ugly, so anonymous, while the other side was soft—a soft girl, perhaps about my age.
As I studied her, I forced myself to concentrate only on her human half. I could not keep myself from fantasizing about her.
Perverse or not, I built her a life history. I imagined she’d died young from some incurable disease or foolish accident. There had been a song on the radio some years before: ‘Teen Angel’, about a girl whose car stalls on a railroad track. Her boyfriend pulls her out to safety, but she runs back to find his high school ring, and the train mows her down. The boyfriend is heartbroken. He wants to know:
Teen angel, can you hear me?
Teen angel, can you see me?
Are you somewhere up above
And am I still your own true love
At some point I decided that her name was Jennifer. She was my girlfriend. We went on dates to movies in the village and learned to dance at a soda fountain with a juke box.
At this point, my roommate interrupted me. “Oh, come on,” he said, disgusted. “You didn’t really believe all that made-up stuff, did you?”
“Well, I didn’t know other girls,” I said. “Maybe I should have talked to the school chaplain or doctor or someone. But,” I told him, “Things between Jennifer and me were going along just fine!”
Right then, Anthony looked suspicious. Perhaps he was waiting for the punchline. “Go on, he said slowly.”
I fully confessed: “I really loved Jennifer,” I said. “The trick was to look at her only on the good side of the jar. If you turned the jar around to look at her on the other side…. “Well,” I said, “she’d just break your heart.”