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Kathryn Silver-Hajo
Zelda's Lost It Again
Her head is somewhere else, having drifted away from her body. In her past, this has been helpful in intolerable situations, but even now on occasion she’ll find her head hovering in the ether like a UFO with eyelashes and a pixie nose when she’s supposed to be paying attention. Her well-meaning but clueless friends tease her by saying, Where’s your head at today, Zel? or sing-songing, Earth to Zelda. Her therapist recently recommended embodiment therapy during which Zelda was guided to reattach her head to her core with cozy, mauve-colored yarn. Zelda’s “homework” was to practice daily meditation to reinforce the head-body connection, preferably with sitar music playing in the background.
To help Zelda start feeling more comfortable in her own skin, Dr. Willoughby suggested she try wearing soft, loose-fitting clothes and Birkenstocks, lie on her back on a cool granite ledge with one foot resting on the opposite knee, and gazing up into the tranquil blue sky. Let all the debris swirling in your brain drain down into the ancient stone, she’d said. For a while, it seemed to be working until unwanted thoughts and memories started to intrude and the yarn began fraying and unravelling.
Today, on her morning walk, Zelda is wearing her favorite blue halter top (the one that keeps slipping down with nothing to anchor it). She pauses to readjust and is shocked to find her very own head resting on a wooden plank on a porch landing next to a greasy barbecue grill. Someone, it seems, made off with it and displayed it like some ghastly trophy, even cropping her lovely brown hair short and tying it into two ridiculous pigtails the way she’d worn it as a nine-year-old. Now it’s propped up facing the street as if she’s a doll or a mannequin and not a human being with feelings.
Enraged, she grabs her head, pulls the hair ties off and tenderly cradles the warm heft of it in her arms. She wipes the tears that spill over, sings Love Will Keep Us Together, her favorite Captain and Tenille song when she was in fourth grade. Zelda takes a deep breath, promises she’ll never let them be separated again, not ever. A promise she hopes she can keep.
Kathryn Silver-Hajo writes, worries about the world, wonders how it will all work out, and writes some more. Her work has been published in many lovely journals and anthologies, selected for the 2023—2026 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlists and nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s books include novel, "Roots of The Banyan Tree” (FlowerSong Press, 2023), flash collection, “Wolfsong” (ELJ Editions, 2023) and "Spinning: Love, Family, and Other Strange Entanglements" (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2026). More at: www.kathrynsilverhajo.com; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo; kathrynsilverhajo.bsky.social; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo.
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