One looks like the top of a wig.  Another resembles a brain out of its skull, closely embraced by the fibrous green arms in prayer to a God who craved to create all beings, including this array of half unfurled … things? 

Jock winced.  They did not look like wigs or brains, these things, but growths similar to the one he imagined inhabiting his own seat of headaches he called a head.  He turned to his wife – the woman who was responsible for covering the kitchen trestle with these ranks of dead quiet creatures with curdled carapaces.  They simply squatted there like a periwigged army of Crown Court Judges. 

If Jock and his wife were not such ordinary folk – the salt of the earth – any onlooker would have given credit to this array of gnarled, faintly green-dyed skullcaps as a work of art fit for any modern gallery. 

Jock felt his own head.  He worried how long he had left to live.

"Why dear?  Why so many? There are only two of us here."  His voice piped like he imagined the things piping at him when given the gift of voice.

His wife smiled.  She had not been the same since she had lost her mind soon after her last birthday.  At least, she was able to smile now.  Before, she had only grimaced.  Losing one's mind sometimes helped with the sanity.

Jock humoured her.  He wondered how many Sunday roasts the many crumpled, porous, soft-boned heads on the trestle would provide to accompany the rare beef like corrupt and engorged sweetbreads.

"Don't worry, my dear, I understand," he whined plaintively.

He just knew that, however much kindness he showed her during his life, she would place his own head among them, once he died ... with its top trepanned.

Just one more Weapon of Mass Destruction – or simply another cauliflower among cauliflowers.  All of them beforehand had been judges within their own bony homes.

(unpublished)