The following email arrived anonymously in my inbox a couple of days after I posted about my recent Maytag saga. It is a literary masterpiece, one filled with a bit of questionable language (BEWARE! meaning, Dad, you’re not going to want to read this one), and I could not in good conscience keep this to myself. Behold:
Regarding Your Most Recent Post
Dear Mrs. Armstrong,
I am a Germanic headless anti-vaccination pioneer. I am deeply offended by your having opinions and complaining about your sub-par washing machine service.
My parents died when I was four years old. They were security guards at the city zoo that came upon a massive kudu heist in progress and halted the progress of the criminals long enough to be fatally stabbed seventy-three times in total. I spent many years on the stoop of a slumlord’s crapshack, exposing myself to gang violence as bullets whistled by daily like sideways-going pigeon poop, listening to he and his portly halfbreed banshee-bull terrier wife rail against each other like two krumpers in a street circle.
I chose this loud locale for my home solely to learn to separate my w’s and my v’s properly amidst the screams of “piss-guzzling ass minstrel,” “shit-swilling crap-belching vagina,” “pithy rust-encrusted testicle envelope,” and “burgeoning harlot, omni-wight-fucking chasm-cockpit, moss-growing volcanically throwing-up dick splitter, Blubberface McButtshit Taintlicker Esquire.”
It is deeply hurtful to me that you stereotype my people by implying that we are too stupid and worthless to not mix up our v’s and w’s, like we lolloped out of some old anti-German cartoon. You Americans still haven’t forgiven us for World War II and your old prejudices stand in the way of you actually growing any brains, and we already apologized for it, and it pisses me off that you still demean us in this way.
I also want you to know that I lived in this horrible wretched (NOT VRETCHED) God-beshatted place until my head was shot off at the age of eleven by a seven-year-old crack dealer with an AK-47. I suffered much pain and suffering and playground tormenting because of this. “Headless Whorewoman” they called me, “Hessian Poopeater,” they taunted me, “No-Face McButt,” they screamed and pointed.
“Why don’t you go find Ichabod and fuck him with a pumpkin,” was the response that I got the first time I asked a boy out on a date.
You cannot possibly know the pain of not having a head and the social ostracization I have fought to overcome, how my life spiraled into a black angry pit full of snakes of despair and spiders of wrath and black roses of zombie sex and skulls of vampire fetish and the blackness of waking torpid undead death; and I do not find it funny at all that you make light of this suffering.
I left the city life after a Korean man who sold intricately-carved animal bacula gave me a pamphlet on the Church of Latter-Day Saints. After he discovered I couldn’t read (not because I was German and couldn’t understand English because of all the w’s and v’s, but because I DIDN’T HAVE A HEAD, IF YOU RECALL) he gave me a verbal summary, and it was like a golden shower of divine inspiration had rained down on me directly from the deepest depths of the angelic hosts’ very being. I decided to move to Utah.
Having no money, however, I struck out on foot, with only a few dozen squirrels I had harnessed in the city to guide me in my horrible blindness and to carry the few possessions I had: a few quarters for laundry, a toothbrush with a shaved end that doubled as a shiv, a raccoon baculum that doubled as either a smaller shiv or a fishhook, and a few masks full of styrofoam to prevent people thinking I was coming from beyond the grave to destroy them (Bill Clinton, werewolf, and Stormtrooper).
It took years of difficult struggle for me to make it, and not a few squirrels gave their lives to distract the coyotes from my sleeping form which looked to them for all the world like carrion. I was shot several more times (apparently this was many strangers’ first response to my alarming appearance) and nearly bled to death on several occasions, but the divinity of my quest kept me alive by the grace of God and the inspiration of Joseph Smith the Prophet.
Your washing machine doesn’t seem so effing important now, does it. Oh, your house is covered in poop? I was covered in blood for a solid year. And poop, as well, as it’s hard to find motivation to find a suitable place to shit when you don’t have enough blood to raise your hand and slap a coyote away. When I was feeling well enough to walk, I found beating my clothes with a rock in a stream suited me just fine.
Eventually, one night in total darkness, I arrived at the temple in Salt Lake City. I felt its facade and it was like a lightning bolt ran through my fingers, up and down my spine to my brain and my anus, filling me with the electricity of hope, something I’d never felt before. I sat on the steps until dawn came, and a man of the cloth arrived.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I’m a fucking believer, my bitch,” I said. Having grown up on the block, this was the only way I had ever heard people talk. I had no idea it was offensive. In a surge of faith that this man would not judge me, I took off my Stormtrooper mask to reveal my lack of a face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, scrunching his face in disgust. “I don’t think we can accomodate you.”
I was plunged into darkness once again. I contemplated killing myself there on the steps, but despite the church’s rejection, I still felt a spark of the faith in me. Perhaps the human followers of the church were not prepared for a headless Germanic woman from the block, but I was sure that Jesus and the Latter-Day Saints themselves were.
So I have worshipped in secret. Full of pain, and torment, and the ever-constant sting of rejection by every person I have ever met, I live in a sewer. The closest I have come to a washing machine is getting caught up in little whirlpools during rainstorms. But I have been coming to the public library, once a week, to read your blog, which previously was like a beacon of light and life into my dreary, half-dead days.
But no longer.
UNFOLLOW.
Sincerely,
“Headless Reader”