Keepsake by Ali McLafferty

Every Sunday my father carried my mother’s head to the front porch and set it on the table to enjoy the sunshine.

Sometimes he’d throw something on the grill and wave to passers-by with his spatula. But usually he gave her space. She’d always loved sitting out there alone, back when she’d prop her long legs on the fence and pretend not to notice me peeping through the blinds.

He’d found the mannequin head at a garage sale, sitting between a porcelain eggplant and twenty-seven tiny brass turtles. “They’re her eyes exactly,” he told me. “Her turned-up nose.” When he took it home he carefully applied her lipstick, “Hot Tahitian Nights,” last seen as a comma-shaped smear on the windshield. He watched YouTube videos to cut her hair: thick bangs brushed over her eyebrows, wisps framing her face, her signature tufted pigtails.

From that day on, my mother was always with us. Her head sat on the table at mealtimes, secured by duct tape after she’d fallen face-first into her food. She drove with us to school, the seatbelt she never used to wear strapped over her forehead. And when I was found under the bleachers smoking a spliff with Jimmy Leroy, my father propped her on my desk and shut the door until I’d apologized to her.

When I left home for college, I found excuses not to come back. I stayed at friends’ houses, where mothers frosted cupcakes with lacquered fingernails and clicked across floors in heels. My father and I stopped speaking after my wedding; I hadn’t invited my mother’s head.

A week after his granddaughter was born, he finally came to visit—alone. He sat across from me on the couch, fists balled in his lap.

When he spoke, I was enraged to hear tears in his voice; I hadn’t cried since the hospital.

“You know,” he said, “people used to wear the hair of their loved ones in lockets. Keep funeral photographs on the mantelpiece. We used to keep our dead so close.”

“I don’t have anything of hers,” I said. “She never even went through a diaper.”

“They make dolls. Same birth weight.”

“No.”

“It helps, Jack. Especially for men. We aren’t supposed to—”

“I don’t want a fucking doll!”

Then he left, and I lay down next to my wife, who was staring at the bedroom wall.

Around midnight I crept into the nursery. Every night since we’d been home, I sat in the rocking chair cradling an invisible child.

But tonight someone was already there: my mother’s head was seated on the pillow.

I grabbed one of its pigtails and flung it across the room; it hit the wall with a dull thud and fell facedown in the crib.

When I picked it back up, there was a smear of “Hot Tahitian Nights” on the sheet. My father had reapplied her lipstick.

I tucked her bangs into place and adjusted her pigtail. Then I sat in the rocking chair holding my mother’s head until my wife found us in the morning.

Ali McLaffertyis a college history professor living in Austin, Texas. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Mslexia, The Forge, F(r)iction, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Small Wonders, The Belmont Story Review, The Good Life Review, a Flame Tree Press anthology, and elsewhere. She is also a visual artist whose work has appeared in several literary venues and has received a Best of the Net nomination. More of her work can be found at alimclafferty.com