Gapp's Basement: Heady

 

You can't take the metal from Spikehead's head. If you did he would tumble back and forth from the lightness.  He’d need boards attached to him from the back of his ankles to his neck to keep him up. Spikehead says without a spike he might die from unimportantness. For being heavy means you bulldoze through, and Spikehead does just that. He's thick and strong and he pushed his way through the streets and into this world. Always getting head starts.

When I try to ask Spikehead about his spike and his head and how the two ever met, he untwists the wrapping round his jaw a little too loose and his mouth falls off onto the floor. Jacob built us a ramp to use to so we could tie it back up again and that is when we thought Spikehead might like some pen and paper.

But he waved it away. Always with that rock hand of his, the knuckles taking out trees and those noisy bird and bag people on The Sidelines watching. Jimbo suggested stone tablets for the stone-clay man, but we feared Spikehead might use them for pillows and the last time Spikehead fell asleep in our town, the small ones of the basement snuck into his cracks and crevices to sleep. Spikehead then woke with a grunt and attempting to reach the critters in his knees and toes, he broke straight through several buildings and sank into the Trifle River. 

It wasn’t till a great storm approached, at a time of great worry, when the river gurgled and lurched its way toward us that the great stone body of Spikehead pulled itself together and rose up just in time for us to sandbag his feet and calves. In time for a reservoir, and Spikehead complained little during the months we enjoyed our summer swims. The moss grew like a fine hair on his legs.

We pulled him out before the winter hit and found a new home for him with all the luxuries a Spikehead would need. Many dark rooms, several chairs and mats and sofas. Padded walls and moss-lined pools of water. The type of home to be stomped in, one that could absorb the sound so as not to add any frequency to the spike in his head. At even the quietest of times, we can see the silky ground sand around that spike catch a breeze and carry away. In another part of this basement, in perhaps the unknownest of parts, there might be another Spikehead forming from those wind-carried sands. In small and even smaller groups they journey across the lands and settle against a cliff or even in the pits of the oceans. Perhaps one day we will journey to Spikehead’s home only to find that rusty, iron-woven spike abandoned on the kitchen floor.