The Headshrinker's Dilemma

Chapter One

Late night grocery shopping was the worst. Absolute worst. But it was also the best time to do it. The aisles were empty, check out would be a piece of cake because no one was there, usually just you and the graveyard crew that was itching for you to leave so that they could either continue to be on their phones playing whatever stupid non-sense gaming app that was hot without the potential interruption or trying to catch a nap underneath one of the counters, maybe even the back. That’s what Dale liked most. And the fact that he was a total loner. He preferred the solitude, the quiet, the calm, the complete avoidance of any possible confrontation because there was always the possibility of him touching you and… That thing would happen as he called it: the shrinking of heads.

Dale hated his superpower. It was probably one of the worst superpowers a person could have. Really. Headshrinking? The ability to shrink heads. What the heck was he supposed to do with that? he thought. It was comical, dark comedy, a satirical and antithetical take on superpowers. He had never seen anything like it in comics – because it wasn’t cool. But he also understood that real life wasn’t a comic book and how he got his powers, he couldn’t’ tell you. For months, he had tried to figure it out, trace back his actions, the places he’d been, things he’d seen and touched, people he’d been around (that was the easiest, very close to zero since he was such a loner, not counting his college classes, the only way to avoid that was to just not go to class and then he would fail and he didn’t want to fail out of college – he did want to do something with his life). But nothing. There was no linear backward trail that he could follow to get the answers that he needed. So, for the last six weeks, Dale had just resigned to the fact that he may never know and that the only thing left to do was try to avoid using his powers because there was nothing good he could do with them. Only bad – and he didn’t want to become the villain of his story.

As Dale careened around the aisle – he needed to find canned beans, he didn’t know where the canned beans were – he thought about Felicia. He tried not to. But he did. She was his first victim, how he found out about his powers. Because of him, her head was now an entire one eighth smaller than what it had been! It freaked everyone out when it happened. Naturally, it was an accident. Literally. He was walking to class, it was during an afternoon rush, one of the fraternities was out in the courtyard drawing up some attention for their upcoming show that they were going to put on, a guy bumped into him and then he tripped and WHAM! his hand face planted on a girl passing by, taking her down to the ground and him following. It was a mess, a few surrounding people fell down like domino pieces. As if embarrassment wasn’t enough, it got weird and then weirder as the girl, he later came to know her name, Felicia, began to scream. It was a shrill, very squeaky and whiny shriek, like nails going against a chalkboard. The sound was coming out of her; her head was shrinking and her vocal chords and all the anatomical goings-on that make up the natural body and how it functions began to change – like her voice, how she sees, hears, smells, most of the five senses. It was horrible. Dale ran.

Now, months later, Dale had what he had always wanted: solitude. Although it was forced kind of, the need for him to be distant from human contact because of his powers, gave him a sense of purpose ironically. He still had to go out for necessities, like he was doing tonight, and to one or two classes, he had gotten most of them switched to their online counterparts, but for the most part it was just him. Eventually, he did want to find a cure or someway to reverse his powers, but for right now, the best and only thing he could do for humanity was stay away from it –

“Give me your money!” a man shouted and then grabbed him from behind.

“What the –?”

Dale fell forward onto his cart, it tipped over and him with it. Dale crashed hard into the canned goods causing most of the items on the shelves to tumble down on him. Dale tried to gather himself, find his bearing, but before he could really form a thought as to what was happening, the man was on him again, lifting him off the ground and then slamming him hard against the shelves of food, cans falling, banging him in the head and shoulders and all over.

“Give me what you got!’ the man yelled, he noticed how muffled the voice sounded.

Dale blinked. His vision was off some, the fall, the cans hitting him, he could feel the immediate swelling and bruising around his face. He got a glimpse of his attacker. It was a man, low brimmed hat with a bandana around his mouth and nose, a common street thug.

The man groped him searching for his money. It was a violent rummaging of his pockets, jacket, and pants. He dug and prodded through Dale’s clothes as if Dale wasn’t inside of them. There were a lot of layers to go through, it was winter time and bitterly cold. Dale waited for someone to come help him; someone had to, this couldn’t possibly happen so openly in a store. But then Dale remembered that it was late, there was no one else in the store accept for a cashier and she or he, Dale couldn’t remember which one he saw when he came into the store – did he see one at all? Surely, someone had to be there – was nowhere in sight.

“Look you don’t have to –” Dale started.

WHAM! The man gave him a punch to the gut. It knocked the wind out of Dale.

“Shut up!” the man said as he finally pulled Dale’s wallet out.

The man rifled through Dale’s wallet, searching feverishly for cash, credits cards, anything that he could use, take. Dale stared at the man hard. He was desperate, the man, the thug, and at the moment unguarded. A thought came to Dale’s mind. He didn’t like it but he also didn’t like that he was being man handled and robbed. The thought: if Dale was going to act on it, he had to do it now, the window of opportunity was closing. Yes, thought Dale, and then he leaped forward, his hands in front, guiding the way. He grabbed the man by his collar and then moved to the bandana.

“What the –?” the man started.

Dale planted his bare hand over the man’s mouth and then the other hand carelessly over the eye, cheek, whatever was left of the man’s face. The man stopped moving. Dale knew what was about to happen: The man’s face began to convulse and then shake; the melanin that gave the man his brown skin began to drain out and the flesh of the man turned a sickly ash as his head got smaller and smaller. Dale could have stopped. The man was now out of commission. But Dale kept going. There was a small part of him that whispered to end it, not to become what he was about to become but then he thought about the kind of man that this thug had to be. How many people had this man stolen from? Roughed up? Hurt? Maybe killed? A surge of energy rose up inside of Dale and in it he could feel a pulling and then something reached the top and it felt like it had spewed over, out of him, but it wasn’t out, it was within. There was a loud sound, like a rushing wind, it was inside his eardrum, trapped like the sound in a seashell and then it was gone. And so was the man’s head, well almost.

Dale looked down in his hands. The man’s head had snapped off, a headless body was on the floor, the man’s head, the size of a pear, maybe an apple, was in the palm of Dale’s hand. It was surreal. Dale didn’t know how he felt about what he had just done. He remembered questioning inside himself whether to do it – let loose, let his powers go freely to do what they could. He had hesitated but in the end, he had let go and he knew it was because he wanted to. It felt good. The power. The letting go. The freedom. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, drug-like. And now, with the actual head of a human being in the palm of his hand, he didn’t feel remorseful, rather he felt satiated, fulfilled, as if what he had done was what he was born to do. Dale pondered this. Maybe he was a superhero, a dark superhero. He had just defeated a bad guy.

But now what?

“Uh… Hello?” a voice called out.

Dale looked from side to side. Someone was coming. He had to think quick. There was a dead body, headless in the middle of an aisle in a grocery store and he was standing over it with the shrunken head in his hand. This wasn’t good.

“Are – Are you okay? I thought I heard a… Noise? Did something fall?” the voice, female, was getting closer.

Dale sprang into action. He shoved the shrunken head into his coat pocket and then fell to the ground on his knees. He grabbed a hand full of the headless body’s clothing and as he stood back onto his feet, he pulled. Dale hurriedly dragged the body down the aisle, the opposite way that the voice was coming from. The body was heavy, more so than it would have been alive. Dale could tell. It was a different kind of feeling of weight; it felt hollow and empty, heavy but devoid, a weird and almost paradoxical nature but that was the best he could come up with. He was almost at the end of the aisle.

“Hello –”

Dale turned the corner of the aisle with the body just as the girl came around the corner. Dang it! She had to see something.

“What – Is – Is everything okay? Hey! Hey! Excuse me…”

Dale hurried. He picked up the pace. It was hard. He could hear the girl’s feet on the other aisle, she was in a jog. She was going to catch up with him. Dale twisted around, searching for what to do. She was coming. There. He saw it. He veered to the right some, pulling, walking backwards as fast as he could, almost in a reverse-run. The produce section was right behind him. The idea he had was crazy but it was the only thing that he could think of.

“Mister… Why -? Hey!”

She was near.

Dale was close.

He panted heavily. Exhausted. But he had to keep going. The girl was coming. Most grocery stores kept their produce and vegetables refrigerated from the bottom. There was a compartment that was below each section that housed the ventilation and ducts for it. There. Dale grabbed the end handle of one of the sections and slung it back. He then pushed and shoved the headless body into the space as fast and hard as possible, ramming it, cramming it into the space, bones breaking as the body contorted in ways that it shouldn’t. But who cared right? The guy was dead. And his head was in his pocket.

“Hey – !”

Dale had finished just in time. The girl had walked up. She looked at him curiously, suspiciously, and with good reason; Dale was standing awkwardly in front of the produce section in a cold sweat.

“I was… Why were you running? Are you okay?” the girl asked. “That aisle back there is a mess. What – What spilled? Some of the cans – did they fall on you or something?”

Dale took a hard swallow. There was only one thing that he could think of that may get him out of what he was now in. It was going to be embarrassing but he had to do it:

“I uh… I kinda had an accident… Could you point me to the bathroom?”

The girl looked at him blushingly. Embarrassed for him. And then pointed.