Off to the Garden Your Head Goes

FICTION by Elizabeth Tankersley ◈ Photo credit: Wiki Commons |

An ambitious young scientist becomes obsessed with death and fails to get ahead in life.

The question of how long after decapitation a head can survive has yet to be answered fully by science ... Four seconds, however, is what Jonathan McGarthy had catalogued so far in his research. Certainly there had been some outliers—one immediate (that guy was close to brain-dead even when alive), an occasional six seconds—but he felt increasingly confident in this number the more data he collected. And he collected a lot.

McGarthy had passionately committed himself to this research for years; he was a proper scientist, after all. He’d left his Boston home by boat to study in the best place possible to learn about criminology and forensic science—London. He wanted to know how the different places around the body spilt blood, wanted to know the density in different cuts. His professors were of little help—most seemed scandalized by the questions, some even ducked their office hours—and soon he became disillusioned with purely academic study; some questions, he realized, he would have to answer for himself.

First, though: he had to have bodies.

He found a little barber shop on the edge of Fleet Street, studying off a real pro, Todd. The unfortunate thing was, Todd didn’t like learning his cuts off the already-dead; he was more for the act itself, and furthermore he seemed to learn nothing from the experience, nor wanted to. He lacked McGarthy's vision, of wanting to understand expiration. Parts of the human body die at different speeds—science has confirmed as much—which is why you hear screaming as a body bleeds out; the mouth lives longer. Occasional grave robbing was a fun side quest, seeing various rates of decay, but McGarthy realized that Todd the barber was right: to fully understand death, he had to observe it from the start. Thus, his life’s research, as well as his favorite game, made their way into his new self-employed job, with the occasional barber coin on the side and free lodging.

The garden behind the shop was where the experiments took place. Hidden by tree bark and foliage, nature breeding the toxic smell of death, the rolling, ghostly heads labeled as research were planted like rows of cabbages until a neighborhood bulldog, still in game-mode of the latest bull tiff, started sniffing around; it ran down Fleet Street with one of the heads bobbing in its mouth. This landed McGarthy his own fate, which his masochistic brain actually enjoyed: McGarthy was sentenced to death by guillotine.

At last! he thought. No more scientific method! No more secondhand observations! I can prove my hypothesis!

On the morning of his execution he rested his head in the cradle of the machine almost gently, a faint smile on his lips. The blade found its way home, and so he counted, One, tw-.

About the Author

Elizabeth Tankersley is a rising senior creative writing student at Miami University with a minor in history. While studying abroad in London, she focused on absorbing as much of the past and literature as possible and taking note of the plethora of ways they intertwined.