wedge-head

For as long as he could remember, there had been a small wooden shim wedged in the back of his head, just below the bony bump, puncturing the taut trampoline of his brain stem and the skin above.  It was a nice piece of wood, with a small dark knot that looked like a stopwatch at the end farthest from his head.  It usually wasn't painful, in fact, he mostly forgot it was even there, except when he tried to wear hats or get his height measured against a white wall.  As he grew older, certain activities became more difficult, such as driving, or enjoying carnival rides; it was difficult to make friends when you didn't attend carnivals, and even more difficult when you couldn't give prospective friends a ride to said carnivals.  

The only pain that he experienced from the slice of wood came at night, when he would lay down on his back to sleep.  He would close his eyes, head resting in a pillow with the shim digging deep into the duck down.  He would remember things from his childhood, small red ducks, a bright green portable toilet in the shape of a turtle that his family would bring on long car rides, throwing rocks at tadpoles at a gray pond on Long Island.  Most memories were about water, or animals that lived in the water, but some memories were painful.  These painful memories came in floods, waves of desperation, like some tidal force was rushing up from his stomach into his lungs, splashing against his windpipe and frothing up to touch top of his mouth.  The time when his father bit his tongue in anger after he had found his son burning books in the parched woods with the matchbook collection that his father had collected from trips to hotels all over the world.  Or when his younger brother had screamed in fury, and everything turned into a tunnel, all that could be seen was his brother's face and all of the pain that he knew were held inside those eyes, and he realized that his brother was different from him, that they would never be close to each other, an ironic sort of relationship based on bagels and poking fun at religious fanatics.  When these memories came back in the moments before sleep, he felt the shim in the back of his head force it's way further into his brain, he felt the blunt pressure on his cortex, not sharp enough to cut, but sharp enough to break blood vessels on the soft gray-pink surface of his brain, small sharp splinters lodging themselves in the deep ridges and peaks that littered his control panel.  It was at these times that he felt true pain, pain as it was always intended, the pain that people felt when they attempted to embrace God on their deathbeds, a hurt that navigated his entire body like some lost army, poking and jabbing the inside of his body to see if anything was living or edible, or both.  The wood would flex and crack quietly, almost satisfied with it's niche, but not satisfied enough, always moving forward in the small increments, and he would hear inside of his own head the dry crackling sound of splintering wood, some kid with a shitty summer job splitting logs, nothing turns out even, and there are scraps of wood everywhere, littering the vast dry lake of his own head.  Eventually, he would start to think irrationally, imagined people  running very fast with small metal cars for feet, crunching metal and heavy breathing in a red room with black stripes on the floor.  These visions would take him away from the grain of the wood, and he would soon begin to sleep, to drift slowly towards complete blankness, nervous and confused, into the void of what he could never really begin to imagine, with a thin umbilical cord of spider's silk attached to his lower back, his life-line to life.  Then, everything was fine for a little while.

He one day decided to cut a hole in his mattress, so that there was a place for the squared-off end of the wood shim to rest when he rested.  It worked for a few hours, but then he rolled over, woke up, and without thinking, allowed his neck to go limp, head diving back towards the spring-loaded bed.  He thought about the wedge splitting his head in half, from back to front like a watermelon, and the wedge drove further than ever.