Iris stomps hard onto the top of the shovel’s blade, leans into its handle, and lifts a pile of pink dirt from the waist-deep hole in the alleyway behind the house she shares with her parents. It is a chilly August morning in Smoot’s Pass, Utah. Tomorrow she turns fifty-four.

The headache she cannot vanquish knows what she is planning and it is materializing this early in the morning, she can smell it. It will transform into flesh, into preposterous and literal form. It will sink burning tentacles into the sockets of her eyes and scream lava, and so this morning she has to be patient. This morning she dumps her soil into a long mountain-range of a pile beneath the weeds along the base of the barbed wire fence separating her house from the trailers behind it: one great hump would point out the existence of a hole, and Iris would rather not be found out. She is still the mayor, after all.

So she digs quickly, delves into the cool red earth as she has done every morning for a week. It is impossible to ignore death in the narrow crack she’s mustered, but Iris tries. She thinks about how she paid extra for a shovel with a plastic handle because Orvil the handyman said it would cause fewer blisters than a wooden handle might. But her work has blown gigantic, birthday blisters into her palms.

It’s like the ancients always said – the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Mayans: life is math, and blood, and blisters. Iris has figured them to be exactly right. Exactly.

She thinks: “A woman earning $600 a month cannot afford defective gadgetry.”

She thinks: “This is poetic justice.” Because when she noticed all Orvil’s teeth were rotting, last year, she found a dentist in Franklin to pull them for free, but she has not been able to find the money for something to replace them with.

At least she has no splinters. At least she has come so far. She has.

And the sun is rising spectacularly, as it always does in Smoot’s Pass. It is the one thing the world doesn’t cheat the small town out of, and Iris is grateful for the pinks and purples of the clouds scattered in the distant sky. It is nearly eight and Iris has a water grant to put the finishing touches on. She spreads dirt over the piece of particle board she uses to hide her hole and lays the shovel behind the weeds at the base of her home. When she rolls her head gently between her shoulder blades, back and forth, she closes her eyes. Even behind her shut lids everything around her is trailers and weeds, is red earth sun-scorched light pink.

By noon, Iris has spent several hours at City Hall, a windowless, cinderblock building painted white. It contains a conference table surrounded by ten folding metal chairs, a particleboard bookshelf filled with paperbacks for the town’s library, filing cabinets, and two desks draped with computer equipment.

At one of the desks, she has been begging thirty pages of charts and forms to become convincing enough for the federal government to pay engineers to drill for water inside the city limits. Today is the postmark date, but the mayor’s raw hands keep distracting her by catching on the sharp corners of the document’s pages, causing tiny pains that collude with the impending headache, beckoning it to arrive earlier than she is ready for.

A life-sized photograph of her mother Ludy, the first mayor Kline, demands that Iris stay on task. It scolds her from its place on the wall opposite her desk.

It’s true: Iris is just the daughter, formerly drug-addicted, of the real Mayor Kline. Ludy was Utah’s first woman mayor. Ludy developed the county’s first housing projects, homeless shelters, and food banks. Iris is the leftover.

Her own fierceness she wasted dancing at the Commercial Club, or Willie’s, or the Wave. She sparkled, then. Words fell from her mouth in dazzling constellations. Her mind was miraculous and it was holy. Her connection to the universe was direct, and she understood how all this made her blessed.

She is mayor now: a straight woman, or a crippled woman, since she was thirty-nine. It depends on how you want to call it. Because the drugs and her holiness were connected, it turns out. In their absence is this headache that is deathly intense. She has traded her cocaine and her Jim Beam and her uppers with names like race horses for pain relieving drugs that dull instead of sharpen her wit.

The photograph of her mother says: mail the damned grant, already. It doesn’t know how commas and grammar and statistics and surveys are all blurring up in her mind in deference to her oncoming migraine.

Sunlight slams through the crack of City Hall’s front door and right into her aching head.

“I need the mower’s keys,” Orvil says, closing the door when he sees her wince.

When Iris met Orvil, he was living inside a rusted out pick-up truck shell, next to his brother’s house. She gave him work, found him a trailer to live in. And Orvil swears he’d rather an mouth empty for the rest of his life than the state of constant pain she found him in. But he’s gumming all his meals and he isn’t even forty. How can the mayor not feel she’s done more harm than good whenever she sees his sagging mouth?

He stretches his skinny arms towards the ceiling, arches his back and his whole body into what should be a beautiful smile. “The Job Corps kids mowed the cemetery last week,” the handyman grins, lips hugging gums, “but they made paths in the weeds.”

“Paths?” she asks, handing him the keys.

“Ways around the graves, I guess. They’re kids. Nobody wanted to mow over dead people.” He shrugs, laughing, as he rejoins the sunlight.

If her grant goes through, she thinks, she could buy Orvil teeth. They could plant actual grass in the cemetery. The fire trucks wouldn’t need to drive miles to Franklin to fill up with water. The city would be self sufficient.

But one mistake in Iris’s grant could prevent Smoot’s Pass from receiving anything. They won’t get the tens of thousands of dollars worth of water speculation and, if that goes well, an income for the city. And while six hundred and thirty three impoverished constituents may not impress a New York City mayor, they have been Iris’s salvation. She cannot fathom failing them.

An hour later, though, her headache has herded her home, into her parking place beside her parents’ house – she rents their upstairs apartment so she can look after them. On her way through the garage, which she always enters through to check in on her folks, she crams two of her father’s hunting knives into her coat pockets, which she does not usually do.

Her father, Guy, is reclined in his La-Z-Boy, not quite recuperated from his latest hip surgery. A half-eaten Spam and cheddar cheese sandwich rests on the tray beside him and Cops is blaring on the giant television in front of him.

If he was awake, she’d admonish him for clogging his arteries with fatty canned meats, and he’d remind her he’s eighty-five . He’d say,

“What you need is exercise. You need not to worry so much: that’s what gives you the headaches.”

Iris kisses his shiny head. Her body tingles migraine, but she finds the long tube extending from the gigantic, old-fashioned, Medicare oxygen tank, and follows it. She finds her mother at the end, reading in her La-Z-Boy, in the small den.

“Where’ve you been off to?” Ludy asks. Her blue eyes are always angry these days, always on the verge of tears. For five years, she has been infuriated by emphysema and old age.

“My grant,” Iris sighs, “I keep thinking I’ve forgotten something stupid.”

“So what?” Ludy says. These days every phrase her mother utters sounds like a carefully doled out puff of smoke. “They’ll call. Get it over the phone, if you did. And anybody wouldn’t give us our water is…” and she has run out of breath. Her slow moving arm motions for Iris to sit.

Iris owes everything good to this woman, twice over. She hadn’t been sober long enough for people to trust their purses in the same room with her when her mother’s first City Recorder was caught ripping the town off. She threw the job at her errant, eldest girl, who did not deserve the chance, but: who did not stumble. For ten years Iris sorted water bills, wrangled with the dozen or so town malcontents, converted the city’s paper files to computer databases, did everything she could think of to live up to her mother’s gamble. The town filled in the gaps in her life the way her drugs once did. People noticed her efforts: forty-seven of the voting eighty-three citizens in Smoot’s Pass stood behind Iris in the first election her mother didn’t run.

Now her mom is lonely and terrified and angry and she can barely breathe. Iris wants to visit, but a slight buzzing behind her eyes makes it certain she won’t be able to nap today’s migraine away, that it’s the real thing, arrived earlier than usual. Instead of caring for her mother she has to say, “I have a headache coming on.”

“You better go get some rest, then,” her momma says, “I’ll fix me some lunch.”

“I can get that,” Iris says. “You’re out of wind.”

“No. I want to do it,” Ludy says back, “Some days it does an old woman wonders, knowing she can still fry her own damned eggs. Even your daddy says it. I need to move around more.”

“That’s what he tells me,” Iris says, and though she isn’t sure she should leave, her eyesight is already blurred. When she stands, she almost tips over.

“I love you,” she says to her mother.

“Of course you do,” her mom says. “It’s why I bother with you.”

Upstairs, a minute later, another universe.

Another. Universe.

At the top of the landing, this same Iris leans against her apartment door without opening it because the headache is crouching down on the other side. This headache is killing her. Nobody believes it but her momma, whose own lungs have conjured rage enough to share with an army of invalids.

This is how it is now. Iris is the mayor of a small town in rural Utah and she lives with a monster that cannot be real, but what does that matter? It is real. And so though she hasn’t been a drug addict for years, she has been a legal imbiber of Imitrex, Maxalt, Cafergot, Elavil, Lortab, Prozac. Nothing works but the Lortab, which also knocks her out, knocks whole days from her life. Not only is she old enough to think she doesn’t have enough days left to live through wasted ones, but Lortab costs $55 a pill. Someday the grant paying her insurance might not come through: and then where would she be?

Ask Orvil’s teeth.

And tomorrow she turns fifty-four. Her headache will turn fifteen. Too old.

Her plan is simple: she won’t take pills today, and she won’t walk out without having vanquished the headache. She will kill it and bury it. She will. It is her gift to herself, terrifying because the headache is breathing arrogantly, loud as Darth Vader, behind her door.

“Baaaaaah!” she shouts, and the words propel her into the emptiness of her small living room. A shuffling of tentacles from behind the couch answers her back: it’s playing with her.

As if by command, her blistered hands begin throbbing and stinging. They are dirty with ink, and so she walks to her bathroom, listening as a soft scuttling follows. She turns the faucet to warm, and to avoid the demoralization of being attacked from behind, she watches her back through the mirror while sudsing. She rinses, pats her hands dry, and notices they are the same plum colored hue as the bath towel. Redder, maybe. Wrinkled as her mother’s, pulpish and still hot from her early morning digging. Her hands. Once they’re opened, it is painful to close them.

And then there it is: behind her, just outside the bathroom door. Mostly a lot of tentacles, so many that she has never seen its head, which she imagines is shielded by them. The tentacles are of course, green. They range in size, some the width of a child’s fingers, others as wide as standard plumbers’ pipes, and there are a ghastly few fat as the arms of muscle men. All are slithery and always moving, and they are studded by suction cups, some of which are filled with moss textured tangles of hair that burn to the touch. Sometimes a single, bloody tooth is lodged into the hair’s knots, and when the headache manages to shove them into Iris’s eyes or ears or gums they spin screeching, blinding explosions off into her head. She isn’t crazy, she knows she is hallucinating, but she also knows she isn’t. What she sees is always the same. It always smells like something steeped in the wet cigarettes put out in beer cans.

“Iris…Sweetie, what are you doing?” her demon lisps in its seductive way. “Are you going to put me in that Great, Big, Hole…” it begins.

Iris may be addled enough to see it, but she always at least tries not to address it. Instead, she grasps the handles of her father’s knives, inside her pockets.

The headache laughs, a miserable, hacking cough of a sound that shakes its whole body. It looks so ridiculous, so ineffectual, tottering away in the kitchen shadows like a deformed octopus. But it wants to kill her, and it begins doing what it does: it is leaping and this time she leaps, too. Planting the knives in front of her head, blades pointing towards the beast like demon horns, she gauges herself forward and screams something old and animal as they collide.

“Whooowa!” she screams as the headache bounces off her weapons at what seems like bullet speed, pounding back into the showerhead, which repropels it, somehow, into the framed copy of a prayer hanging above the toilet: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…. The headache slides onto the bench-like top of the toilet’s water chamber. A few skinny tentacles hold the bar of the unused towel rack, above where the prayer hangs, for support.

“You are just useless,” the headache moans, “Useless.”

She lost one of her knives in the scuffle, but she puts the other one back into her pocket, rubbing its cold handle meditatively, the way she would a worry stone. “It’s good I didn’t shoot you,” she finally says, imagining a bullet ricocheting off the headache and into her.

“Oh what do you care?” the headache pouts. “You want me dead. You, who can’t even bring jobs to Smoot’s Pass,” it keeps on, savoring each word it speaks. “And do you really think they’ll find water in the dried up dirt? You live in a desert, for God’s sake, and why aren’t you married? Too wrinkled to love? Men scared you’ll take their teeth?”

Even if it were a hallucination, why shouldn’t a knife kill it, she wonders. She wonders what she would look like to the rest of the world, as she has a thousand times, arguing with a beast she shouldn’t see. And she doesn’t know what more to do. It is getting harder and harder for her to think, and just now, Iris is unsure as to why she thought a knife would kill it.

Nobody has ever written about a migraine like the one sitting on her toilet-top. “And what if there was some sort of fire in town?” the headache is saying, “Do you think your bunch of illiterate volunteers can bump across the dusty roads you still haven’t paved? Are you fit to be a desert mayor?”
The image in Iris’s head was of cutting the beast into pieces that could not be revived. She is not crazy: the plan was illogical, she knows that, but the migraine has helped her to understand the unyielding qualities of the illogical. Why didn’t she imagine the migraine might be unstabbable? Her gesture was earnest, it seemed perfectly matched in absurdity to her pain. Can she have been the first person to have tried using a knife?

“Of course you weren’t,” the migraine says, waving its tentacles in loopy circles, to show she is loco. “You’ve got to stab you. That’s how it works. Dip the blades into the spaces behind your eyes.”

“I know that, you asshole,” she blurts, fighting tears, because she really does know that. Still, as a last resort, she grabs the neck of her giant bottle of generic mouthwash with her left hand, and inches away from the beast, towards the bathroom door. If it comes for her she’ll clobber it, she thinks.

“Mouthwash?” the headache heckles.

She promised she would make the headache go away, but a wrist-thick tentacle stretches towards her and she just watches. It rests upon the sink’s basin momentarily before grabbing it, and pulling the rest of its body over in a very grotesque and graceful fashion. Preparing another pounce. Since the sink is totally obscured by tentacles, the headache appears to hover in midair. Which brings her to this important realization: a flying headache would have been too much. If the headache could fly, she thinks, she would have slammed the knives into her temples years earlier. But it can’t.

The idea is enough of a gift to restore the mayor’s resolve: she disgusts herself, but she’s unwilling to give in, and so she works what little she’s got: she twists away the mouthwash lid and flicks the bottle’s contents at the headache in a single act of inspiration.

“Spzeeyaaagaaaaarrrrgh!” the slimy bastard howls, high-pitched and terribly, like the witch from the Wizard of Oz.

She repeats the gesture with the mouthwash and garners a second scream, a more doleful one that slumps the beast into a veritable tangle. Its limbs droop down from the hidden sink’s basin, resembling a mutant aloe. A dead aloe. Even its groans have changed tenor; they are a gurgling relative of the headache’s signature laughter: possibly death throes.

Knives, she understood, were ridiculous, but she sees now how they weren’t enough so. Sleepy serenity courses through her being as she begins pumping another round of neon green migraine avenger at her tormenter.

“Wait!” the headache’s scream is so forceful the mayor stumbles, bangs her head into the doorjamb. “I was kidding,” it says, regaining control of its tentacles, bending them against the sink like a bouquet of elbows.

But what else would a beaten nightmare say? She flicks again; the headache crumples in a long, hyperventilating bout of what is obviously laughter. She tries again, and again, until the bottle is empty. The beast’s laughter is nearly contagious.

“You shit,” she says.

“You watch,” it growls, “I’ll show you shit,” and it’s switched modes that quickly, it is devoid of mirth and looming towards her, larger than it was when it first arrived. Grayish vapors rise from its skin.

All along, her father’s knife has been waiting to reemerge from her pocket, and so she gives in. She closes her eyes, releases it from her pocket, and presses the metal blade’s tip onto her own temple.

“Do it,” the headache whispers, “Do it and I swear to God I’ll disappear.”

“Iris!” her father’s voice. He’s knocking on the door. “Iree!” – her nickname.

She decides to ignore him until it occurs to her that he’s actually climbed the steep staircase between their homes. On his new hip. It should be impossible, and so although her bathroom is a minty wreck and a monster her father will not see is raging, Iris dashes for the front door and the force that she has not vanquished hits her from behind. Tentacles sink into her head and chest in molten slivers. She doesn’t know where she has left the knives.

“Your mother,” her father says at the door, terror streaming across his face, “burned. I called 9-11…”
The screeching, blinding light filling up the spaces behind her eyes prevent her from hearing anymore. He could have called, but he didn’t, her dad’s scared, and her mother, and these Chinese firecrackers exploding in her head.

“Stay here,” she says, “Don’t try going back down, I’ll ring Gerald at work.” And then she’s careening down the stairs, her father, slumped up on the banister, is shouting that he’s calling Orvil, whom she knows is in the cemetery with no car, and might not arrive any faster than her brother will, driving all the way in from Franklin. But two men is better to get her dad downstairs, so yes, Orvil is coming, good, and who knows when the ambulance will get here?

Muddle, muddle, muddle, muddle

She can’t think right and then she is downstairs where Ludy is sitting in her usual place at the kitchen table. A mean looking line of finger-width burn runs up from the v-neck in her lavender sweater, up to the top of her collarbone where it disappears, but reemerges on both sides of her face, in the distance between her ears and her nose.

“It’s probably not as serious as it looks,” her mom says, “It was not as serious as it sounded.” Her eyelashes, eyebrows and the orange hair around her ears are singed bald, and the area below her nose is scorched reddish and gray, a cruel mustache. Something about not turning off her oxygen enough and lighting a match.
“It was just a poof, I didn’t catch on or anything, but I thought, maybe the tank would explode. It was just a poof, and I let out a scream, and Daddy come running in, on his hip,” she says, and waits for her daughter to say something about something but Iris is stuck, trying to remember what to do for a burn wound.

“It blasted me up, but it hurts, hurts like a bad sunburn, it stings right here,” she says, pointing at the weird, squiqqly line on her chest. “Stinging is a good thing, right?”

“Yes, momma,” she says, thinking the shock of explosion has given her mother back some wind, trying to push out the headache which is more and more in her way. Far away is this idea about how she might save the day, but she cannot see it clearly enough, there are only these fireworks and this noise, this talking, Wouldn’t make your mom dinner. Selfish, Iris. Suicidal, Iris, your momma can’t wait for an ambulance, you better drive her Ms. Mayor, you better write a grant, stab her with a knife, no don’t that’s the wrong thing, rub Campho-Phenique, Chamomile, Kaopectate, Ketchup, oops, you killed the Aloe Vera plant, now you’re going to kill your mom, you should have killed yourself, Jesus, never rub a thing on a burn victim, you can’t drive, you’re crippled, you cripple can’t even drive your mom to the hospital,, you can’t figure it out, you can’t figure it out, you can’t

“Gerald,” Iris says into the receiver, she has called his direct office line.

“Iris?” Gerald asks, “Iris! What’s the matter?”

“Mom’s burned herself, an ambulance is coming and dad went upstairs with his hip,” she screams or whispers, to her older brother, “I have a migraine. I can’t…”

Idiot, idiot, idiot, idiot

“Iris,” her mother says, “Iris.” Tears are actually coming out of her mom’s eyes, now, and it is Iris’s fault. The truth is, the new mayor of Smoot’s Pass is a helpless, shaking, nauseous creature. If tears would come out of her own eyes to join her mother’s they might be able to relieve some muddle, but hot green limbs are jammed into her eyes like knuckles. Nothing can escape them.

“Gerald is coming, Momma. And Orvil. Daddy’s calling Orvil.” A tentacle is jammed across her tongue and up into her nasal chambers where it lets out dabs of pain like a satanic sparkler. That words can escape her body is astonishing. Far away, her mother is still crying, and Iris thinks that in a way it is good. Her mother has needed to cry for a long time. But this is only a fleeting thought, one far up above her like a blimp and mostly Iris is holding her mom’s hands and trying to remember that idea she needs, and then there it is: the idea. The Lortab. She should take the Lortab, half of one so she isn’t completely zonked. It would be better.

Coward, foolish snitching snatch of can’t even make your momma lunch, can’t follow through you evil witch, watching your momma suffer, selfish, selfish hag.

She has the Lortab already halved in her purse, but that’s upstairs and her father is upstairs. How will she speak to him? There isn’t a way to do it, there is no way. She has to.

You can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t

“I’ll be right back,” she says, pulling away from her mother, who does not want to let go.

You cunt, you cunt, you cunt, you cunt

“I’ll be gone a minute,” Iris says, and she runs a long time through something that is more than a staircase and two doorways, something more like loud, black, bright, gummish, oily, stinking spit and then she is talking to her father upstairs in her apartment. He is sitting in her armchair, on the phone, crying like a helpless man. She yells because otherwise she’s not sure the words will come, “I called Gerald. He’ll be here.”

The knife she dropped is gleaming hell-like on the table next to him. Her father says something that sounds like a high-pitched version of bees buzzing, or television fuzz. She nods and treks back down through the headache mucus, to her mother. By the time she gets downstairs she has translated what her father was saying: put a cold rag on your mother’s chest. The pill is in the pocket of her purse. She swallows the medicine without water, a leftover talent from her pill-popping days.

Bitchy, whiny, crippled druggie, draggen down Mayor, loser lady can’t perform the job she was elected to, disgusting dull dong of slime.

Orvil is in the kitchen with her mom when she comes down.

“Jesus, everybody here looks like shit,” he says, toothless. The lawnmower is in the driveway: he’s driven it all the way across town. He is wiping the tears from the first mayor’s eyes with a Kleenex, holding one of her hands. Iris doesn’t faint, though she intends to as soon as her brother arrives. For now, she fills a pot with water, adds ice cubes and picks a clean, blue rag from the kitchen towel drawer. She drops it into the pot to soak it.

“Poor, Ludy,” Orvil says, “Poor old Ludy.”

“Thank God you’re here,” some part of Iris says, as she uses superhuman strength to bring the pot of water to her mother, “My head,” she says, and out of nowhere a shrill ringing from the weight of the pot jolts into the pain she’s used to, it digs into her head and she drops the pot, metal hitting the floor smacks into her eardrums and the ice water singes her legs where it touches.

“I’m sorry, Momma,” Iris says, picking the cloth up from the floor, but can she use it now, on her mother? Will it cause infection?

“Orvil,” she says, because a vision of the manila envelope that has to be mailed out today has wrapped itself around her neck, is choking her, “I need you to mail the grant, it’s in my car.” She isn’t sure her words are leaving her mouth, but she continues, she is victorious, she remembers, she is fighting, fighting, losing shit

“Iris,” somebody says from far away, again. “The ambulance is here.”

She can’t answer, she can’t see who is in the room with her mother. She can’t see her mother and she’s lost the plan.

“We’re following it,” somebody, it must be Gerald, says, far away. He must be standing heroically above her.

At eleven p.m. a sudden, lucid remembrance of the day jars Iris from a shipwrecked sleep. After rolling out of bed she leans into doorframes, counters, and bookshelves to help herself from the apartment, where she doesn’t even remember having gone. She edges herself down along the banister, into her parents’ place. Following her: a mound of drugged tentacles dragging the demon instead of sprightly propelling it. She hears it, but she’s in no danger of a full-on attack. It’s waning, it isn’t even in her head.

“You’re a real hero,” it mumbles from somewhere behind her, “A real hero.”

Downstairs, she follows the oxygen tube to the kitchen table, but her mother is gone. Down the hall, she pokes her head into her bedroom. Empty. Her father’s room, across the hall, is empty.

“All you had to do was give back a little of the care your parents gave you and look what you’ve done,” the headache says, “You are an ocean-sized moron, a deluxe moron. Did you think they elected you moron, not mayor?”

“I’m going to get you one day,” she says.

“You’ve got a better chance of digging up a new head in that hole of yours,” it yawns.

Calling Gerald’s cell, or even texting, Iris thinks, is a bad idea. It is liable to wake them and chances are good they just got to sleep.

“And besides, you are too big of a freak, too big of a moron to touch me,” the headache drawls, “You are a masturbator.”

Iris calls the desk at the hospital and the nurse on duty confirms her mother has been admitted. “She set off the oxygen tank,” the woman says, “It’s lucky she wasn’t blown to bits.”

“We’re grateful,” Iris says, annoyed. And then she finally puts her finger on something she was trying to think all night. “I thought oxygen wasn’t flammable,” she says.

“No,” the nurse says, “It just helps things burn. It’s physics, not chemistry.”

“Physics,” Iris says. Gerald and her father are probably spending the night in Franklin to be closer to the hospital, she thinks. First thing in the morning she’ll drive over her daddy’s pills. That’s something she can do.

“Your mother’s all right,” the nurse says, “She’s feeling no pain.”

“Right,” Iris says, “Thanks.” Physics, chemistry, Iris doesn’t care. Not until she turns around and sees that the headache, too, is snoozing. With its tentacles spread around the sides of the oxygen machine, which it has fallen asleep on top of, the beast reminds the mayor of a giant’s mildewed mop head. She tiptoes over to it, looking for the face. All she can see, though, is a slit about as wide as her hand. It looks more like eyelid than mouth, but since she doesn’t imagine it could see with its eye hidden behind its tentacles, she decides she is looking at her demon’s dirty lips.

They make her shudder, these lips. They compel her to unplug the oxygen machine and roll it down the hallway, softly so as not to disturb its sleeping occupant. It’s a large machine, not meant for real transport, and bulky. But she rolls it outside and down the wheelchair ramp, onto the gravel drive and underneath the dark autumn sky, and feels good. She begins to feel better than she has in months. Even the Lortab haze is clearing.

Slowly, slowly she edges her monster and its bed of physics around the house and towards her hole. When she arrives, she’s disturbed to see somebody has moved the board from the top. Kids. Most likely some kids discovered it. Or dogs. But still: “Hello?” she says, and nobody answers. Nobody is around because it’s the middle of the night.

At the crevice’s edge, she realizes the machine is too wide, that it isn’t going to fit all the way inside. Which is not so bad because when it blows up, the size of the hole won’t really matter. The explosion is the important part. The real problem is that if she rolls everything straight into the grave—why mince words– there will be no way to guarantee the headache won’t wake up and run off. Or attack. It could wake feeling as alive as she does right now. So the headache has to go in first, and then she’ll roll the machine on top of it.

Never, willingly, has she touched the beast. When it rides her for days on end its skin burns like several tons of stomach acid. How will she get it into the hole? The tank is too unwieldy to tip, but perhaps she can pry the monster off with her shovel? Her blisters balk at the idea, but she picks her shovel up anyway, slides its head beneath the beast.

What’s difficult is keeping the beast’s weird body from slipping off the shovel. She ends up whacking the whole thing around in a way that somehow flips the monster face down into the hole. Peering down into it, she discovers that the headache has feet. Downy, hot pink ones, the size of tangerines. They are wearing bright, red stilettos, which are peculiarly satisfying to Iris because she doesn’t find them surprising. Not at all.

It crosses her mind that nothing is able to wake the headache, and for a slight, silly moment Iris worries it is dead before she remembers that she wants it killed.

“Mayor,” somebody says behind her. The shovel is in her hands, her mother’s oxygen tank, beside her. She is the mayor, she turns.

“Oh, Orvil,” she says when she sees his slumped, skinny frame. “You scared me.”

“I noticed your hole. It’s no wonder your hands are so torn up, lately. For a mayor’s,” he grins, holding his own beaten hands out for her to see. Without teeth, a mouth at night looks full of terrible darkness. But when he had teeth, they were black and brown and maybe she wouldn’t have seen them, either.

“This is private, Orvil,” she says, after a long silence.

“I sent your papers in. I told the new postal kid about how important they are, and the dude postmarked them for yesterday,” he grins. “And then I had dinner. And then I got this feeling, I wanted to come find out how your mother is.”

“Mom’s okay,” Iris says, “Daddy’s with Gerald.”

“Tough old engine,” he says, and Iris wonders if in this instance, she can order him to leave.

“I dug at the hole some more for you,” Orvil says, “Feels good to dig, is what I was thinking it would feel. And then it did. In the cool earth. It’s the opposite of mowing. Especially today, down under that sun. I was thinking the graves, the people down in them, were hotter than me, you know? I don’t think their graves feel like this one.”

“I need to be alone,” she says to him.

“But you’re crying.”

It’s true. She touches her cheeks with her hands and they come back wet, even though she’s feeling fine. She’s feeling fine.

“You going to blow it up then?” he asks. “Our hole? With your mom’s air?”

“I need the explosion,” she says.

“No. No, most ways you’re probably going to blow yourself up.”

“Yeah,” she says, “Well.” The headache is officially up. It is sniffing around the hole. Or something. It is making a sniffing sound. It doesn’t seem to be interested in her for the moment. Her Lortab’s effects are still shielding her from the bulk of her pain.

“What’s your mom gonna breathe with when she gets back from the hospital if you’ve blown up all her air?” he asks. “It’s not right. Specially when you’ve already got a pretty good sized hole. You make a bigger hole, you’re gonna have to look for things to bury.”

“I’m fifty-four today,” she says, “I’ve been clean the last fifteen years of my life, except for my headache medicine.”

“Congratulations,” he says, smiling.

“I mean, I’m not clean. I mean what kind of ‘except’ is taking Lortab every day?” she says, and finally she can feel where the tears are coming from. “Orvil, I can’t even kill myself.”

“Well you’re the goddamned mayor,” he says, “Shit.”

“Shit,” she echoes, as he walks over to her and takes her in his arms, and she imagines kissing him, her tongue inside Orvil’s gums, but he grasps her close to her chest like a brother, and just holds her a long time. Until a fowl smell begins emanating from the hole, and Iris realizes what the headache was doing. It was taking a dump, it has done so already.

Iris turns away from Orvil, to watch the headache climb from the hole, holding onto the wheel of the oxygen tank to brace itself. It doesn’t look deadly, but it is deadly.

“Can you see that?” Iris asks.

“Guess I can’t,” he says.

“You are a beautiful, woman,” the headache says to Iris, “Sometimes you are more than I can handle.”

“It feels like death,” Iris says, “It gets up inside of me and I can’t get rid of it.”

The migraine crosses the street, high-heels clicking mightily. It won’t come back for a few days, which means: she knows it will come back.

“Look up at all the stars!” it yells over to her, and a few of the neighborhood dogs start barking furiously, “Nothing like a lot of bright stars after a good shit. I mean, nothing.”

“When I was fifteen my daddy beat me so bad I passed out and then he locked me in the cellar for three days without even looking in on me. My momma neither,” Orvil says. “And the thing was his shotgun was down there with me, and I spent the whole time deciding whether to shoot him then me, him then her then me, or just me. It was cold and I was hallucinating. But when he finally opened that door, the light burned in, and I still hated him to the core of his bones, but somehow I didn’t feel like killing anyone. I hated him, but what I wanted was to get away so I didn’t shoot any of us.”

“I am going to get you a pair of teeth,” Iris says, “I swear it.”

Orvil smiles. “I know. It’s because you’re the hero, Iris. You’re the hero.“