Losing His Head

Losing His Head

Cecil Rhodes had never been very good at first impressions but this must certainly have been his worst attempt yet. To be fair it wasn’t entirely his own fault, poor Cecil had been cursed with the truly terrible dark affliction of complete and total mediocrity. His hair was a sandy brown colour that managed to blend in with the landscape but not to any remarkable extent and nobody could say for certain what colour his eyes were since it was impossible to look at Cecil’s face without growing bored. He wasn’t tall nor was he short and even his own mother was incapable of calling him handsome. Now of course this would have been totally acceptable if he wasn’t armed with an equally bland personality, but unfortunately, he was. Any idiosyncrasies he might have once possessed had been slowly leached out by his thirty years of life. Cecil was quite sadly the kind of man you could forget even while you were speaking with him.

However, during a warm spring afternoon it became painfully obvious to Cecil that, in one way at least, he was most definitely out of the ordinary. Cecil had been enjoying a marvellous stroll through the sunlit forests outside his village when to his surprise a well-meaning hello to a large man, with an equally large sword, who had been passing by led to his swift and vicious decapitation. He was even more surprised when he noticed that he didn’t appear to be dead. Cecil was fairly certain that the separation of a man from his head should be painful as opposed to slightly uncomfortable. His murderer on the other hand was quite frankly astonished when the man he’d just killed asked him politely to stop rifling through his belongings. This large man then began to gibber in shock before his knees promptly gave way beneath him. Cecil decided to take this time to experiment and found out to his delight that his limbs were still quite mobile. While it was odd to watch his body move from a distance he quickly got the hang of it and proceeded to relieve the large and unconscious man from the burden of the coins in his pockets.

Now that he was richer and headless, Cecil thought it prudent to visit a doctor and discuss his predicament. He rather cautiously lifted his head and after a few attempts managed to balance it atop his neck. He then began to follow the meandering path home when his head immediately fell off of its perch. While this may seem silly enough it was really quite frightening for poor Cecil since decapitated heads have a tendency to roll quite far and as he could no longer see his body he was unable to guide it. Luckily after an hour of desperately and blindly sending his body around the area he managed to find himself face to the ground on the side of the path. This time when Cecil positioned his head he made sure to keep one hard firmly on top to keep it in place. Unfortunately this method caused his head to jiggle a bit too much for comfort and thoroughly disoriented the poor man. He then tried to use both hands to keep his head firmly attached to his neck but quickly decided that this made him look quite ridiculous. Cecil then tried lifting his head by the hair and carrying it in one hand which almost immediately nauseated him; since every step caused his head to swing in a pendulum like motion.

Finally, after a few minutes of quiet contemplation Cecil decided to carry his head under his left arm. This kept one hand free and his head in place although it took Cecil a few minutes to adjust to the fact that he was looking at everything from half a meter below his normal height, and just a bit to the left. Then accompanied by the whistling of some curious birds darting through the treetops above, he set forth to find a doctor who could sew his head back on.