I’d been talking with Joshua for about an hour at the No Life Bar on Prospect Street when I noticed it: the knife sticking out of the back of his neck, just a few inches to the left of his spinal column. 

“Doesn’t that make it hard to breathe?” I said.

“It’s just a pain you get used to,” Joshua said. “Like anything else in life. There’s a few sacrifices. Can’t play basketball. Try not to sleep on my back.”

“How long you had it there?”

“Not sure exactly. Probably ever since I’ve been working at the shipping warehouse. What’s that—two years now?” 

“I don’t know how you do it, man.”

“What about that rock growing out of your forehead?”

“What are you talking about?” I said and felt around with my fingertips. He was right. There was something cold and stony that protruded about six inches out of my skull. I pulled out my cell phone and snapped a photo of my face. It looked like I’d been sculpted out of dull granite.  

“No offense, Ty,” Joshua said, “but I’ll take a dagger in my throat any day over that thing.”

At that instant, so many things started to make sense: the interminable headaches, the weight that pressed down on my eyes and suffused my sinuses, the feeling like I could barely stand up, the lethargy that billowed through the days no matter how much coffee I drank.  

I downed three, four beers, and made it home around midnight. I woke up Katherine, my girlfriend and told her everything. 

“You think I should go to the doctor?” I said. 

“That kind of thing usually clears up by itself,” she said. “I gotta wake up in like five hours, Ty.”  

“I’ve never heard of a rock—” 

“What about this damn hole in my temple?” she snapped and flipped her hair up to one side. It was about five inches across, with a clear view to the bone and veins inside her. “I’m worried it might start leaking. Or maggots will move in someday.” 

“It doesn’t hurt?”

“Course it does. All day and night. That’s why I pop the four-years-past-their-expiration -date painkillers. Damn thing just won’t scar over.”  

“Why didn’t you mention my…deformity.”

“It’s just a part of you. And I love you, stone growth and all. What’s there really to say?”

When I went to work the next day, it seemed almost everyone in the cloud computing office had something wrong with them. Lamar had his intestines bulging out between the bottom two buttons on his collared shirt. A diamond-shaped growth of lichen ran from Jenna’s collarbone to just below her left earlobe. Kenti had a colony of ants pouring out of her eyes when she started to talk. I went to talk to Alia in H.R. that afternoon.

“I’ve decided on an amputation,” I said. “Will workers’ comp cover this?”

“You sure you got that stone protrusion on the job?” Alia said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen at this office.”

“How am I supposed to know,” I said. “I wasn’t born with it.”

“Here’s a thought: check your driver’s license, bet you it’s been years since you renewed.” 

She was right. The photo had been taken over three years ago when I had to renew at age twenty-six. There it was: a rock, although smaller than it was, growing out of my head. I’d carried it through four jobs and two girlfriends and no one’d mentioned a thing. “I’ll see if my health insurance covers amputations.”

“That’s a serious procedure. You know a lot of people only get worse when they start chopping off body parts. Not to mention you’re gonna have to miss a lot of work for that. That’s not gonna look good with Ron.”

“Sorry Alia, I’m getting this thing off.”

That afternoon, I called the Krosnian Clinic. The man booking appointments told me that amputations, dissections, and wound in-fillings had been on the rise during the last few months. That made the wait time a little longer, but he was able to schedule something for about three weeks out. 

About a week into my wait, Katherine passed out in the driveway after coming home from work. She hit her head on the concrete, soaking her hair through in a small pool of blood. The delivery guy was the one who finally noticed her and helped me lift her inside. When she regained consciousness, I wrapped my shirt around her skull for a makeshift bandage and sped her off to the E.R. 

Around midnight Dr. Aloni came out with the news. Severe dehydration, maybe an amino acid imbalance, adrenal fatigue. A concussion from the fall. But they’d managed to stitch up the cuts from where she’d hit her head.

“What about the open wound on her temple?” I said. “Doesn’t that have something to do with it?”

“Funny, I never noticed it,” the doctor said. “But now that you mention it—”

“Don’t you think you should go back and do some tests?”

“Son, these things happen all the time. It’s simple stress. Have her do some coloring books, write in a gratitude journal, goat yoga. How’s her diet?”

“I mean we eat a lot of takeout. Microwave stuff. Don’t really have time to cook.”

“There’s the problem. Switch over to a gluten-free vegan diet. No artificial products. Two or three weeks of that and she’ll be brand new.”

On the way back that night, we got Katherine her favorite fried chicken sandwich with pickles and spicy sauce from the fast-food place on Prospect Avenue. She rested her head on my shoulder, chomping down her sandwich with gleeful bites during the drive home.

The next day, her skin had turned a lithic gray, and she ran a fever of 102 degrees. Every few hours her body began to shake, puddles of sweat cradling her back in the bed. I managed to get her to sip on sports drinks and bone broth, but her appetite was gone. 

After three days convalescing at home, Katherine got word that her biotech company was downsizing. She, and the other three temp workers, would be the first to get cut. But over the next few days, something strange happened. The glow returned to her skin. She started eating more. Spent most of her time watching old reruns of Press Your Luck and eating whole bags of chips and pounding soda in bed, like she was eight years old again. I couldn’t deny it: after a week, Katherine looked even healthier than before she’d hit her head.  

At last, the day for my surgery came. I went through all the usual rounds: blood pressure, temperature, weight. Agreed to the anesthesia and signed the in-case-you-die-sign-this waiver form. The doctor asked three separate times what I wanted to amputate. I pointed out the rock formation, showing him how different the stone was from my skin. Finally, he saw it. The nurse circled it with a blue marker, so there’d be no confusion once I was on the operating table. Before long, I was lying on a stretcher, wheeled off, and put under.

The procedure went exactly as planned. When I woke up, bandages ensnared my head like a mummy. I knew there’d be scarring, but at last, the headaches would be gone, the tiredness. All of it.  

It took about three days before I could manage to open my laptop. The pain medicine had dulled some of the agony from the surgery, but I still felt dizzy and lightheaded, like someone spinning around in an out of control hot air balloon. Katherine had to change my bandages every few hours as the bleeding drip wouldn’t stop. But the main problem was that the headaches still pounded their way through the painkillers. Like the rolling bellow of an earthquake. In fact, they’d only gotten worse since the surgery and all those missed days of work.  

Pretty soon after my surgery, Katherine had gotten into fireworks. She’d set them off in our backyard so I could see the red and violet streaks out the window as I lay in bed. She’d run her fingers through my hair, all covered as they were in ashes and smelling like saltpeter from the M-80s and bombettes. We kissed gently from time to time, smiling. One afternoon, Katherine said she wanted to start a riot grrrl band and went out and bought a drum kit with her unemployment check. She called her old friend Rena, who knew two chords on the guitar, but swore they were the important ones. Both of them were overjoyed.

 The first morning before going back to work, I wrapped myself in bandages, extra tight. I hadn’t driven in over a week and everything hurt: face, neck, back, even just sitting in traffic. The commute that I’d done for over a year-and-a-half seemed interminable, the cars like so many cicada husks blown down the four-lane freeway. At last, I hobbled in and was greeted by a round of applause from all my coworkers and my boss, Ron Kleath himself, his lips pursed in admiration, hands smacking against each other more loudly than the rest.

“You’re a damn fine soldier,” he said. “Doctor said you needed three to four weeks. But I told him, ‘You don’t know Ty. He’ll be back in one.’ And I was right.”

“You talked to my doctor about the surgery?”

“Of course! It’s what any boss would do for one of his best employees. A little human care goes a long way.”

“I thought it would be private and—”

“When I told him how important you were to the company, he was more than eager to share. Alright everyone, back to work. Just don’t forget, we’ve got donuts in room 217.”

Lamar, Cyndi, and Jenna came up and patted me on the back. I feigned a smile. Most of the other workers drifted back to their desks.

I spent the next fifteen minutes looking for room 217. Funny that I’d never gone to take advantage of the birthday cakes, candies, or croissants they brought in there every few weeks. I walked down the row of 210’s on the far side of the office, opposite my own desk. But between 216 and 218, there was nothing. I looked in the corner near the bathroom and checked to see if the conference room, where we had our Monday meetings, was perhaps mislabeled. Nothing. I wandered over to the front desk to ask our assistant Chelsea.

“Where are the donuts?” I said.

“Room 217, like always,” she said.

“Couldn’t find it—you mind showing me?”

“Well, not sure why you haven’t figured this out yet,” she said and leaned in toward me. Her mouth was just inches from me as she whispered. “Room 217 doesn’t exist.” 

“So, there’s no donuts for me?” I had never lost my temper, let alone at Chelsea, who didn’t deserve my wrath in that moment. But my voice boomed in the open office. I could hear the clanking of keyboards and swerving of mouses come to a halt. I decided to let the wave of rage come. “Not one goddamn donut?”

“We have bigger problems than donuts, Ty.” I looked around and all my coworkers were staring at me. Some had their heads tilted down and eyes up, to give the illusion they were still working. Others just sat there, mouths open wide, eyes fixated on the side of my head. Chelsea, at last, pointed to the floor. “You’ve been dripping blood this whole time.”

I turned around and saw it, a long red trail behind me, two inches wide that snaked back and forth from the far side of the room, past the vending machine, around the potted plant, and stopped at my feet. A hot trickle poured out through the bandages, and I grabbed them tighter to try to halt the flow. But it was no use. 

“Well, I’m not cleaning it up,” I said. 

“No one said you had to,” Chelsea replied. “But we can’t just leave it there.”

Several of the managers, and at last Ron, ran in to see what the yelling was all about. They traced their eyes along the serpentine blood line, their mouths agape. It was then that it happened.

The blood, like all that powdery filling from one of Katherine’s fireworks, began to explode. I ducked behind a desk and watched as the drippings boomed and crackled, as the wan carpet shot up in flames. Papers in wastebaskets were set ablaze. Soon the fire spread to the conference room and Jenna’s desk. I got up and sprinted for the exit, ears shuddering from the alarm, body drenched from the sprinklers soaking the scene below. 

When I got back home, Katherine and Rena had set up the drums and amp in the living room where a bunch of old Styrofoam boxes of takeout and half-eaten jars of peanut butter and torn up boxes of crackers lay scattered on the floor. As I leaned in to kiss Katherine on the cheek, I noticed that the gash in her temple had started healing itself ever so slightly.  I told them about what had happened at the office. I sat on the floor with a beer and listened to the distorted guitars and out-of-time rhythm of the drums and it seemed, maybe, just maybe, my headache had begun to fade away. They decided to call their first song “No Donuts.”

Z.D. Dochterman writes speculative fiction and teaches in the Writing Program at USC. His stories have appeared in After Dinner Conversation and Molotov Cocktail. You can follow him on X @zddochterman.