Broken Head – Short Fiction by Karen Pierce Gonzalez
A vacation discovery stirs up fractures that run far deeper than stone.
In Broken Head by Karen Pierce Gonzalez, a shattered artifact found on holiday becomes a mirror for loss and change. Read it now on Written Tales, and submit your own stories that unearth what lies beneath the surface.
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“Look, Ingrid, the head is broken. Geez, who did that? Looks like it got knocked off and then tumbled onto the steps right there. See?”
Ingrid listened to her husband before looking to see what he had pointed at. A stone head of some kind, about the size of a bowling ball, lay near the edge of the step between them. Leave it to him, she thought, to find whatever was broken during this vacation. Why wasn’t he excited like that at home anymore when the water pipes burst, or electricity went out?
Well, maybe this was how it was, Ingrid sighed. Since Andrew’s death, things hadn’t been the same.
“Oh Ernie,” She decided this time not to snip at him. He, too, had been through hell in the last year. At 26, Andrew had been their only child.
“Must be an act of Providence, or maybe vandalism.” Ingrid pushed her attention to the present, forcing herself to think only of what now lay on the ancient staircase. Suspicious, she looked around for angry young men lurking somewhere in the shadows who may have knocked the head off the huge statue of Jupiter that ruled over the staircase. “Let’s get out of here before the rest of the body falls.” Ingrid tugged on her husband’s huge, sweaty arm.
The guide hadn’t mentioned anything about the statue being damaged. In fact, the guide hadn’t even led the group to that spot yet. Impatient with the shuffling feet of their fellow travelers, Ernie and Ingrid had taken off on their own. Now nervous, Ingrid wanted to get back to the tour bus before anything happened, before the fallen head became an omen of some kind.
It could happen. She’d heard of such things before. One of her bridge partners came across a severed toe lying alongside the stuffed monkey foot it belonged to at a natural history museum. Within days the woman had tripped and broken her a toe.
Imagine, Ingrid, thought as she lightly touched her head, shielding it momentarily from the hot Mediterranean sun, imagine what could come from finding something as important as a god’s body part out of place.
She shook her head to dispel the sudden train of memories. The ambulance, nurses rushing around, and a pale blue hospital gown that barely covered her son’s broken body.
A sensible woman, she assured herself nothing serious could occur now. It had already happened. This was just a vacation and finding such a fallen skull had been unexpected, that’s all.
Just like the travel brochure had said: expect the unexpected. At the time Ingrid thought the phrase was just a marketing tool meant to touch an unlived corner of someone’s life as it had done hers the day she read the magazine advertisement.
Ernie broke her reverie. “Ingrid, get closer to it. Let me get a shot of you standing next to that thing.” He checked the camera lens to be sure it was set to record the right amount of light. God knows he’d been out of focus on another vacation – years ago to Nova Scotia where all he captured on film was his thumb in below freezing temperatures. “C’mon,” he urged his thin wife, saying he had to get at least one good roll of shots to show the boys back home.
“No, Ernie,” Ingrid said after finding the tail of her voice somewhere near the bottom of her throat where it was trying to hide. “No.” This wasn’t right, and she knew it. The cranium of this Roman god of gods was supposed to be on broad strong shoulders where it would be admired by all, not there on the step just ahead of the one she was standing on, not the focus of color photographs her husband would pass around like poker chips to his friends.
“Ingrid, hurry up.” Ernie’s tight grasp on the camera was causing his hands to turn red. “I gotta get this shot. No one back home will believe it.”
Ingrid took a step back and tried to relocate the corner of her heart, the part that had come forward earlier, just in time to make the flight reservations for this mid-summer trip. That brief, unannounced bubble of hope that had surfaced back home in Nebraska had slid out of sight. This was not what she had told her bridge club she would be doing on her visit to ancient Roman sites.
Then, without knowing why, Ingrid leaned forward to get a closer look. Catching her breath, she squeezed her hands together to keep herself from reaching out for it. She worried that might cause it to roll down more steps, perhaps chip its finely-honed nose and nick both cheeks. She held her breath at the thought of this god’s future in her hands. One wrong move and she could be the one to cause its utter destruction.
“Ingrid, stand straight and look this way,” Ernie’s plump forefinger found its way to the camera’s shutter button, but before he could push it down, Ingrid spread her birdlike hands out like wings; they fluttered between the camera lens and the skull.
She imagined strands of her heart lightly brushing the deity’s boldly chiseled face and circling the eyeless sockets that now stared through the translucent walls of Ingrid’s face. In their empty reflection, Ingrid saw the mythic man no one could control, the one all mortal emperors tried to emulate but couldn’t. With one step up and a small flick of her sandaled foot, she could send the dome of this god to its death.
The care of this immortal being’s fate was now up to her. Never before had she been in such a spot. Not even when Ernie had told the doctor to take their son off life support after being in a coma, on a ventilator, for months. They’d talked about what might happen, but Ingrid was unable to speak when the doctor asked what they would like to do. She hadn’t wanted Ernie he’d need to decide for both of them. He was less able than she, the mother who spoon-fed Andrew through countless childhood illnesses, to bear their son’s condition. But she wasn’t able to choose between her son’s life and his death. Instead, she had disappeared into the steady up and down red and green lines of the monitor behind the hospital bed. Ernie had been the one to clear his throat and say it was time.
Ingrid, now again on the threshold of an important decision, felt a surge in her body. Her skin tingled.
With the end of this god, the rest of the thunderous, wine-loving gods could also come crashing down into small, sculpted pieces of stone that in time would turn to dust. She made an unexpected decision.
Sensing a delicate need to protect the hand-carved face, she walked away. Filled with an ease of being she would later describe to her friends as mercy, she headed back to the tour group, leaving her husband alone with the head that would not look his way no matter how many times he circled it, hoping to discover in its silence a perfect picture moment.
As she neared the others, Ingrid stopped to tuck back loose strands of hair. Beneath the hot Roman sun that had bleached the countryside around her, she resisted turning around for one last look. She filled her lungs with sunbaked air and, as she slowly exhaled, swore she could feel the grateful gaze of this once powerful face breathe its own sigh of relief.
✍️ About the Authors
After publishing several poetry chapbooks, Karen Pierce Gonzalez is returning to submitting fiction. Drawn to the eclectic mix of themes at Written Tales, she looks forward to sharing new work among a diverse range of voices.
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