Whenever Briana ate waffles for breakfast, she would place one drop of syrup in each of the squares. The butter, which she applied first, was smeared haphazardly across the golden grid. Pats of imperfect shapes, still cold and hard from the fridge, spread without reason, naturally. But the syrup: one drop per square, compulsively. At first I watched this morning ritual with wonder and curiosity, never interrupting her with a question, never letting her know I was watching. It was charming, sweet. But lately I’d become annoyed, when crabby in the morning, which was quite often these days, at “such a fucking ridiculous habit.” That was the case this morning, sending me to the hospital. After making the above comment, I slammed my hand down on the table, catching my plate, breaking it, and slicing open my finger.
I had filled out the paperwork and was sitting in the waiting room clutching my gauze-wrapped finger while trying to play “Hidden Pictures” in a month old copy of Highlights. I wanted to keep my mind occupied, calm. Looking for an apple in an underwater scene, I noticed that I had gotten blood all over the bottom of the page. It was while looking around the room, trying to determine whether or not anyone was eyeing me after tearing the page from the magazine, that I noticed him, noticed it.
On the other side of the waiting room was a man with a gigantic head. Not big, gigantic. It was the size of a planet. The color and look of his skin made it even more so: the flesh was dull and ruddy with wrinkles like canyons and pockmarks like craters. It was like the face of Mars before me. The rest of his body however was of normal proportions. He had normal-sized feet, legs, hands, arms and neck. This only made the head more unbelievable. I could do nothing but sit and marvel at it.
Moments passed until the head began to wobble and then slowly turn. Again I pictured Mars, rotating on its axis in space, when a horrifying thought came over me: I had been sensed by the head. It was now no mass of rock hanging in the skies but a living, breathing creature. And this creature was turning to look at me, to indict me silently with its enormous face. My gaze quickly returned to the magazine, bending my head down just enough so that I could gauge whether or not the head was truly bearing down on me. The massive sphere rotated at a near-glacial pace. I figured that every muscle in the man’s neck was taut and jutting outward, trying desperately to maintain control over the colossal weight that they held.
I was relieved to find that he wasn’t looking at me but the magazines on the table before me. Once he had determined that there was nothing of interest, or that the endeavor was too mighty, and returned the head to its original position, I waited several more minutes and then looked again. When I did I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked bigger. Was it growing? It must be! It now covered more of the wall and made a larger shadow upon the floor. All the components of it were bigger: the eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Even his hair had grown – though not larger but wilder. It was sticking up and out. I thought of the hairs atop it like tendrils, starved by a lack photosynthetic feeding, climbing the walls then burrowing through cracks to sup upon sunlight. They were desperate. Yet that desperation seemed unnecessary. Shouldn’t it be as apparent to them as it was to me that this head, the very land in which they live upon, was expanding so rapidly that soon it would not be able to be contained by these walls, by this building? That the force of this swelling noggin would soon be too strong even for oak, concrete and steel? That the building would soon be just a heap of rubble with nothing between them, the hungry hairs, and the providing sun?
After determining the sad fate of the building, I needed to know what would happen to its inhabitants. What would happen to the woman in the seat next to his? Surely she could see his head steadily filling her periphery. Hell, she could probably hear its expansion: a hiss like helium into a balloon; the cracking of bone as it gives way to the pressure, followed by the gushing of cartilage as it fills the fissures and then hardens. She must be too polite, too passive, too sympathetic to his woes. She probably imagined the look he would give her after she got up and took another seat across the aisle: one of discomfort and resignation to his utterly pitiful condition.
“Mr. Heard?”
The head revolved once again, this time to face the triage nurse.
“Come with me please, Mr. Head—Heard.”
This was too much. He got to his feet slowly, teetering beneath the weight of the massive globe. He put his hands at its sides to support it. In the fluorescent light of the waiting room I suddenly saw Atlas. This was not a man but the deity of the Golden Age enduring the celestial bodies. In that flash I realized that this was a place for mythological beings and their mythological troubles. I looked down at the bandage covering the gash in my finger. It was not worthy of the same stitches that would sew up the heel of Achilles. I watched the heroic figure quietly disappear down a hallway before I, a humbled mortal, left.
When I returned home from the hospital I apologized to Briana.
“I am just a man. A man plagued by fear and doubt. By weakness and pride. I understand that now. What I also understand is that I can conquer these. I can look to the Elder Gods and take inspiration from them.”
I could see that my honest, remorseful, yet admittedly grandiose plea wasn’t getting to the point fast enough for her. My mood had been elevated by the Titan head. That was no longer appropriate. I immediately became more concise. I told her about work. How the company was in decline, how unhappy I was there and how I was carrying that with me, leading me to lash out, often, and misguidedly, at her.
“You need to tell me these things.”
We talked a bit more before we embraced. I kept my finger away from her shirt and she noticed.
“Did you not get that fixed?”
I was about to start back up in that ostentatious tone, narrating for her the five act Greek tragedy, Atlas Teetered. Instead, I told her about the wait. We went to the bathroom to clean and redress my wound. It would heal. It would slowly, creating a scar big and ugly, but it would heal. Briana filled the bottle’s cap and then poured the hydrogen peroxide on my cut one drop at a time. It lessened the sting and I was thankful.
