Penny’s Head

Penny’s head was not dripping, peeling, shedding, molting, or any number of synonyms they’d tried before. If they’d had a thesaurus, they’d have thrown it. But all Penny had was a pencil, some paper, and a desk. And, of course, a face that was falling apart, except not quite that. Something else. Something other. Something just beyond their tongue’s reach. 

Penny realized they were chewing the tip of their eraser, one of the few vices still possible when all you owned in the world was some stationery. Usually, in the battle between mouth and rubber, the eraser came out the clear loser. Lately though, the tides had been turning: as Penny pulled the pencil from their mouth, it brushed against the raw inside of their upper lip and dislodged a glob in the process. The pink flesh hit the table with an innocuous thump.  

“Whoa!” Loch said from the desk behind them, “That one looks like a slug.”

Penny made a point to ignore any comments from Loch that involved animal similes. Instead, they taste-tested more words. Disintegrating? No. Too dry. Crumbling? No, even drier. They ran their tongue over the newfound hole in the top of their gums. Metamorphosing? Maybe. It seemed too poetic, but perhaps that was the catch. Perhaps the answer was meant to fool the cynic. They jotted it down just in case.

“Psst,” whispered Loch, “What are you writing?” 

“Like I’d tell you,” Penny whispered back. He kicked their chair, successfully getting Penny to turn and give him a glare. 

“I hope you lose your nose next.” Loch stuck out his tongue at them. 

“I hope so, too. I’ll be out faster.” Penny didn’t mean it, of course. All parts had to go, eventually, but no one wanted to be without a nose for longer than you had to be. Dirt got into the crevices, mainly by the hands of kids looking to pull a prank in the endless void of their free time. Penny wasn’t much of a practical joker, but not out of any sense of moral superiority. They simply hoped their abstinence might lend them some cosmic protection if—when—they faced the same nasal desertion. 

“Liar.” Loch kicked the chair again. He didn’t really want answers. No one was given the same question, and no one knew the details of the others’ assignments. Loch just liked to kick chairs. It was another popular vice in the Classroom, if gnawing rubber ends wasn’t your fancy. But now was no time for psychoanalysis. Penny had a word to find. They returned to their sheet of paper, rolling syllables over their tongue until something settled down and seemed sweet enough to be believed. Penny sat up straight up in their seat.

“Decomposing,” they said, slowly, trying it out under their breath. The word felt different than the ones before—which could be a byproduct of having only half a mouth now. Or, maybe, it was finally the right one. Their heart raced as they crossed out metamorphosing and scribbled their new response across the paper: they were decomposing. That had to be it. 

Penny raised their hand. “Teacher!”

The Teacher was always quiet, save for footsteps that sat on the edge of contradictory: impatient but lumbering, stiff but eager. Penny slid over the paper for review once their eternal proctor arrived. The Teacher peered at the bolded letters, pulled out a pink pen, and wrote an A. 

“No,” Penny cried. “I’m right, I’m sure of it.” 

The Teacher’s head shook with that same slow pace. 

“You always get so upset,” Loch said, standing up in his seat to get a better look. “Why? An A is great!”

“But it’s the pink pen.” Penny slumped in their seat.

“So? Tons of people get pink marks.”

“Because they’re all wrong!” Penny spat the words so heavily that small bits of lip flew off with them. The Teacher’s hand swung to Penny’s jaw, turning their head sideways for a better look at the gap overtaking their mouth. The Teacher nodded in empty-eyed approval, released Penny, and trudged away. 

Then, Loch cried out: “It’s happening! The caterpillar’s about to fly.” The Class turned to watch, their hurried movements becoming a collective shudder. Isle was hanging on by an eyebrow, which had been swinging to and fro for days now. Loch once said it looked like a caterpillar stuck in sap. Penny had declared that a terrible comparison, but they couldn’t unsee it, the bushy figure hanging somewhat languidly, somewhat desperately. Now Isle was whipping the remains of her head wildly, slamming her eyebrow back and forth in the process. After a few minutes, the last of her snapped off and splattered on the floor. 

The Teacher was right, Penny thought dejectedly. What Isle had done was not decomposing. Their response had not been worthy of the blue pen—the color, all Students were told, that proved their answer had achieved the highest of marks, the pinnacle of correctness—after all. 

Now Isle was fully gone, and in her place sat a red stub of vacancy. But it was her silence that was still the most uncanny. Isle had once been the only one to keep up with Loch’s tongue. Personally, Penny didn’t think they would mind speaking less themself. It would keep them out of trouble, and help them concentrate on their assignment. This was a good thing for Penny to make peace with, given their mouth seemed determined to droop off first. 

“I’m going to miss you, when you’re like that.” Loch’s voice was muddled in a way they rarely heard.

“Don’t say that,” Penny snapped back, “you’re going first.”

Loch patted the craters filling his forehead and left cheek. “’S’pose you’re right.” 

For good measure, he poked his eyeball, which was full of indents where the gelatin had begun to peel away. He knew Penny hated that, hated the eyes.

The Teacher guided Isle by the hand to the front of the Classroom. Penny lifted off of their seat as the Teacher opened the door so they could try to peer past. But the Teacher was not only slow and silent but also impressively obstructive, and the two of them slid out without any indication of what lay beyond. As the door shut behind them, Penny slumped back and sighed. 

“You’ll find out eventually,” Loch said, patting their shoulder. “We all will.”

“Focus on your work,” Penny said, but gave him a small smile with all the mouth they had left to work with.

“But the twins are at it again. It’s mesmerizing.”

Penny had taught him that word, and now he wouldn’t stop wielding it in all sorts of incorrect contexts. In this case, however, the term mostly applied. The twins sat tucked in a far back corner of the room, where they spent their days pulling the skin off each other’s faces. The thing about skin, Penny had learned like the rest of them, was that it didn’t fall off before it was good and ready. That didn’t stop the twins from spurring on the process as best they could, slowly dislodging the bits of body that had the rotten job of being first defense against inevitable decay. Lately, the twins’ efforts had become fruitful. Yesterday, one had twisted out a fistful of scalp. The other had gotten a good chunk of a golden-brown iris, which had left Penny’s stomach twirling all night. 

This time, they were focused on the chins. Each clawed at the other’s with a somber dedication that, Penny had to admit, was kind of mesmerizing. The two pulled and pulled and pulled, and suddenly, in a stroke of luck, one chin dislodged completely, torn off with a nonchalance that reminded Penny of when kids picked parts off of the styrofoam trays that came around at lunchtime. The twin cheered and held the pyramidal chunk up in the air. The other twin was unphased. He persisted in his reciprocal efforts, digging into his brother’s face with both hands now. But the second chin would not budge. 

“Don’t worry, twinny,” Loch shouted, “you’ll get it eventually!”

Neither twin looked his way, too engrossed in their life’s work. Penny wondered if this was their assignment, to pull each other apart as quickly as they could, or if the mutual destruction was just based on a desperation not to be left behind. That feeling happened, sometimes, though they all tried not to dwell on it for too long. Whatever the case, Penny was glad to sit near the front. The twins’ work was not a sight they could tolerate for too long. 

In a turn of events, Loch’s mouth left and Penny’s stuck around. Once Loch had noticed the shedding lip, Penny felt it would have been strategic of him to shut up a bit more. The jabbering only made bits of pink skin and front tooth fly out faster. Unfortunately, Loch was incapable of this restraint and his mouth hemorrhaged rapidly. If there was one thing Loch would devise a plan for, though, it would be a safeguard for Penny’s continued torment. And so before his tongue fell out entirely, he forced them to learn a makeshift code.

“One kick means ‘what are you writing,’” he kicked Penny’s chair to demonstrate. “And two kicks means ‘can it, stupid.’”

Penny turned and kicked Loch’s foot, twice, before he could begin another demonstration.

“Good, you’re learning!” 

Penny eventually convinced Loch to go with a more robust system: one kick for yes, two kicks for no, and a series of shoulder taps for the alphabet. They practiced their language constantly, until they settled into a rhythm so comfortable they knew it was perfected. Or nearly perfected—Loch and Penny continued to debate which curse word three kicks should be short for. 

Loch’s molting was hastening at such a significant speed that it compelled Penny to try submitting the word accelerating to the Teacher. They received one of their lowest grades yet for that attempt, and Penny chided themself for letting emotions muddy the quality of their work. Soon, Loch’s face was about as gone as one could get, a stub of scabby muscle and membrane that sagged farther down by the hour. They all waited silently for the moment the Teacher would make the long walk to his desk, but the Teacher stayed seated. Instead, the loudspeakers at the front of the room crackled to life, and a soft, muffled voice made a decree: Henceforth, even the red stubs at the Student’s neck must fall off before they could leave. This evoked mixed reactions from the Students. Some cheered, others burst into tears. Penny simply looked over at Loch, trying to parse out some emotion from the remains of his fragmented face. 

Penny wondered where this new order came from. Perhaps it was a whim from the Teacher, but they thought this unlikely. Few of the workings of the Classroom were clear to Penny, but one truth seemed to be that the Teacher was merely stationed here. There had been another Teacher once, one who seemed to actually see the Students. Whenever Penny had submitted a word, that Teacher’s eyes had glimmered and mouth had twitched as if on the verge of telling them something important. As if the two were nearing actual conversation. Then one day that Teacher was gone, and this new Teacher was here, and Penny suspected the reason had something to do with the difference in their gazes, in their varying loyalties to silence. 

This last Teacher’s disappearance made Penny certain that there was Someone beyond that door calling the shots. Which begged the question, one they weren’t supposed to answer: Who cared so deeply as to monitor the state of their bodies this way? Who had the power to change the rules on them on a whim? And, most achingly of all, why did this Someone withhold the truth behind Penny’s lifelong question: what was happening to them?

With the little extra time that the loudspeaker’s decree offered Loch, the Class decided to bestow on him the most esteemed of farewells: a prank. Penny, the necessary translator, was persuaded to help under the threat of having the vitreous in their eyes scooped out bit by bit. Once the prank was decided upon, and the time set, a sense of giddiness hung in the air. Penny could feel all eyes on them. With little besides enigmatic assignments to occupy the time, these pranks held a distorted sense of festivity. After getting the go-ahead, Penny leaned backwards and played a tune of shoulder taps on Loch’s shoulder: S-P-I-D-E-R. Then, one of the newest classmates, Aubergine—still intact besides the nose—scurried her fingers up Loch’s leg. Loch jumped up, batting at the invisible pest on his thigh. They could nearly hear his shriek, if only he’d had a mouth to channel it. The Class laughed, but with enough restraint to signal camaraderie rather than simple malice. Penny quickly leaned over and tapped G-O-T-C-H-Y-A. In response, Loch kicked their chair four times—his working shorthand for “stupid,” or sometimes “shut up,” depending on the context. Both probably applied here. But then he put out a hand until he found Penny’s shoulder, and squeezed gently. This was new, but Penny understood the rough translation, and smiled.

The rest of Loch wilted off the next day. The last remnants of his face hit the floor with a splat, a sound so abstract to Penny that they barely registered its significance before the Teacher was on the way. Protesting was frowned upon. Penny had watched the twins embarrass themselves this way just days earlier, when their final moments had failed to align. The remaining twin had been stunned by the Teacher’s taser when he wouldn’t stop running towards the door. It must have stung, but not nearly as much as Students’ whispers of disapproval when he awoke. The twin had broken the Class’s unspoken, tepid agreement: that this was just how they had to go. You couldn’t talk about it, you couldn’t think about it, and you certainly couldn’t change it. 

And yet Penny could not stop from crying out as the Teacher took Loch’s hand and led him to his feet. Penny knew, on a very logical level, that Loch could not look around to say goodbye. Penny also knew Loch could not hear them shout his name. They ran to Loch anyways, smothering him in a hug. The two had never touched beyond kicks and shoulder taps, but Penny knew Loch would recognize their arms.

Sharpness hit Penny’s side. They shuddered and the world split apart.

Penny’s nose finally left. It was funny, remembering when they’d worried kids would fill in that crevice with erasers or spitballs. No one dared come near now. Penny was disappearing too slowly, and the others feared the lethargy was catching. Some blamed it on Penny’s outburst, deeming this a retribution from the universe. Others said the Teacher’s taser was cursed, that it slowed down the body’s natural undoing. Whatever it was, the others kept their distance. Only their whispers traveled Penny’s way nowadays.

Mostly Penny didn’t mind, but it gave them little else to do but become disillusioned. Lately, something was going wrong with their pencil. No matter what they wrote down, the graphite held a green tint that tarnished the muted gray it was meant to be. Penny tried erasing and re-tracing their words, swapping pencils with peers, even writing everything in cursive, but to no avail: their marks continued to bruise the page with an olive hue. The Teacher had taken to docking a letter grade for the gaudy color of their recent submissions. Penny had never felt like such a failure. They started to fear they would never achieve blue marks, even if their skin dripped away at the rate of molasses. Bitterness had begun to fill their mouth, tasting so sharp Penny hoped it would burn right through their skull and speed up their process. So Penny didn’t guess anymore. They replaced that task with one that provided far greater gratification: picking away at themself. Penny couldn’t remember the specific day things changed. One moment, they’d been all about trusting the process. The next, their fingers dug in and refused to stop. 

The skin-picking had started as an impulse, but Penny would be damned if they didn’t make it an efficient one. They were currently focused on their right ear. The plan was to then move to a feature on the left, and then another on the right, so as to whittle themself down while keeping as many functions at their disposal for as long as possible. The only exception to this strategy was the eyes. Penny was embarrassed to still be apprehensive about losing them. Without eyes, how could they look around to compare their demise to others, to hold on to the little evidence of existing that they had left in this world? No, for now the eyes stayed. They had plenty of other features to tinker with.

Penny couldn’t believe they’d ever shamed the twins, if only in their head, for taking matters into their own hands like this. There was a sense of power when Penny’s right lobe slid away from the rest of their ear. Cupping that piece of themself in their palm, before the Teacher confiscated it, had been mesmerizing. Mesmerizing. Penny regretted using that word. It made their ears ring. They grabbed the right one’s tip, dug in to grab the remaining folds of cartilage below, and yanked it all off. The Teacher’s broom soon led the flesh away. It felt so unfair, that small bit of themself getting out before the whole of Penny did. The thought of envying one’s own ear made them giggle.

The Teacher returned, some time later, with a new student in tow. Out one ear, in a whole new head, Penny thought, and giggled some more. 

The two walked to Loch’s old seat. Penny sobered. 

“Hi,” said the new voice, now sitting behind them. With only one ear, they sounded strange—not distant so much as distorted. “I’m Bee.”  

Penny turned to get a look at this Bee. They had forgotten what staring at a full face felt like. It was like a sunny day: pleasant in concept, but harsh if your eyes weren’t accustomed. 

“Penny.”

And that was all, for a while, until Penny felt a tap on their shoulder. Penny’s first reaction was to determine what letter the tap meant. But it was too courteous a touch to be Loch. And Loch was gone.

“Is this yours?” Bee asked. They slid some crumpled paper over Penny’s shoulder, which fell into two pieces once un-balled. The first page was full of doodles: dinosaurs, flowers, beetles, shoes. They were childish and half-finished and made Penny’s heart ache. The second was an actual sketch. Soft, blended lines captured the silhouette of curly hair and half of a mouth. A pitted face looking back with a grin. It was Penny.

“I found it in the desk,” Bee’s voice grew more distorted in Penny’s ear. 

“They’re not mine.” Penny said after a pause, folding the papers in half and handing them back. “Someone else sat at that desk. He’s gone now.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Bee. They furrowed their eyebrows. “I wonder what his assignment was.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t ask him.”

“Right, right. Of course.” Penny could hear Bee straightening out the papers again. They imagined that fullness of a face beaming down onto Loch’s work. Imagined the pages bursting into flames. Imagined the whole room burning down with it, all of their faces melting in the blaze—the only part that wouldn’t be exceptional. Penny hunched over their desk. They dug a hand into their scalp, yanked at a fistful of hairs with inches of skin still attached, and tossed them to the floor.

“Whoa!” Bee said, “He got blue marks.”

“Huh?” Penny froze in the midst of clenching more strands.

“There’s a blue A on the back of this one. Your friend must’ve gotten the prompt right.”

Penny turned to grab the paper, but the Teacher was already there, plucking the drawings from Bee with betraying speed. The crumpled sheets were escorted out the door to join Penny’s ear, and Penny’s lip, and Penny’s friends, and Penny’s answers. Penny sat, unmoving, for a long time after. Bee tapped their shoulder, tried to say something, but Penny did not hear it—originally out of willful ignorance, then out of functional impossibility. Penny had yanked off their other ear, severing all of their cautions and efficiencies with it. The new plan was to get their body beyond that door, to those papers, to Loch, as quickly as possible. 

Their fingernails dug into their forehead, then dug in again, and again, and again. The Teacher swept the bits of them away over and over, and Penny dug faster. They imagined the Class whooping and hollering at the frenzy—just as they had done for the twins and Isle and all those before—and Penny dug harder. They decided what was happening to them shouldn’t be part of a test, could never be contained to a few syllables on a page, would never be a simple matter of blue pen or pink or olive-green, and Penny dug so deep their fingers poked through the back of their skull. They clenched the mass of tissue, fat, and neurons that made up their mind, pulled forward, and felt the tangled nerves of their eyes caught in the mix. 

In the end, in those seconds between the only room which Penny had known and the unseen ones beyond the door, they hesitated. But only briefly.