A piece I've been working on for about a year... Started with my best friend, Dorothy Albertini, writing the first stanza of 100 words, followed by all the rest, written by me.

(And yep, each stanza is made up of 100 words)

It's a work in progress. There are still some other stanzas I'm playing with. But I read this at the Cin City Writers reading last week at ROC Cinema, so decided to share it here as well.

100 Words for Headache

Dorothy:

One hundred tiny men with jackhammers and their idiotic friends take a lunch break on the inside of the bridge of her nose. Or next to an eyeball. They like their tools. They always forget to pack lunch, so back to the hammers. They’re small enough your thumb should do the trick, but--. This is what you call bottom of the barrel, and they scrape and scrape and scrape.  When they don’t use jackhammers, they pull out their spoons. Volume or precision, but anyway duration, and none of them know how to count to five and back the eff off.

Tate:

She doesn’t know what the little men are working on. A skyrise? Or an underground tunnel? Definitely something so tall she can’t see the top, so deep she can’t see the bottom. It’s so hot they wear thick gloves, which hampers accuracy. The pounding echoes in a sinus canyon, but her words and wishes fall dead, like a bird against a window. Shake it off. Get up. Start over. Have we decided what this tiny horde is working on? They’re weak-kneed but they have powerful arms, and a callus for every finger. They’re deliberate about where they put their strength.

It’s contradictory, the way they poke around but are not curious. They don’t ask questions. Questions leave too much space for her. Statements expand to fill. “We work here.” “Her attendance is compulsory.” “Our tools are shaped like weapons.” She hears them like reverberation - not the words, but their shape and significance, how they thump against each other on their way to an eardrum, rushing for the exit. Someone asks her, “headache?” and she marvels at how something so loud could conceal itself so completely. The men are not known for their stealth, but in this way they are meticulous.

Today they’re not so much hammering as they are pressing. Pushing against the optic nerve, exerting their energies one shove at a time. You’d think they were trying to get out - but it’s too much fun, all this fierce compression. So they knock against the walls - shave and a haircut, two bits - til they know they have her attention, til they know she’s thinking about the weight of an eyeball in a socket, the weight of a nose on a face. According to the architectural plans, this is where they build the scaffolding, just to throw things off of it.

They do the wash, swaying back and forth on suspended platforms. Precariously, they scrub and scour, then fill the cavities of her skull with thick, mucusy water, pouring bucket-fulls down the back of her throat. The work is distasteful, but imperative, as they see it. She throws hot tea and oranges at them, cries, takes a hot shower. She drowns them with a neti pot, then exiles them to some unknown border. “We know the way back to where you live,” they coo. Diabolical bastards. The men will continue on to her shoulders next, ready to practice their knot-tying.

Interlude: There are many kinds of headache.

Mall = Yankee Candle Company, perfumed clothing, new leather, old cement.

Car = Dry eyes, bright sunlight off of pavement, rest stops with too much fried chicken, not enough bathrooms, and tiny, waxy donuts.

Social = Loud laughter, the sweat of a crowd, flavored potato chips, answering the same questions over and over.

Hospital = Stress, people who haven’t been home in many days, mashed potatoes and gravy from the basement, fresh paint, stress, squeaky wheelchairs, an absence of air in the elevators, wilted lilies, a ticking clock, someone threw up, someone is yelling, stress, coffee, stress.

Occasionally they wear suits (with sweat stains) and ties (brightly patterned, like houndstooth), and they march (a passionate drudgery) across collarbone and scapula. There aren’t enough metaphors to describe the way they dig their heals in. They pound the pavement, intent and laser-focused. What are they without their helmets, tools, and wolf-whistles? They still know how to knock a girl over. She wonders if they’ve ever been on death’s door, ever drawn on her own strength to claw back from the brink. She wonders - a pipe dream - if she’ll ever be able to see them as anything but open wounds.

Some days they are, amazingly, not there. But still. They’re there. A “men at work” sign sways in perpetuity, rusted and squeaking. Nothing could go through so many storms and not be weathered. She knows they’re only resting. Her jaw pulsates with the echo of their daily grind. A solitary smell can awaken them. As if she needs more triggers that incite internal violence. Perfume lingers in the air, and their little heads pop up like whack-a-mole. She doesn’t even try to knock them down. Just swallows pills, bites her lip, notices that the sun has moved behind a cloud.

They can, just like that, occasionally sneak up on her. Count the number of times she’s been blindsided, multiply it by how many nights she’s woken up whimpering, divide that by the yawns of the doctors who’ve told her nothing is wrong - and you get a blind spot, she supposes, that is quiet like tiptoes til it’s right on top of her face, bringing with it small spaces stuffed with extra-ordinary gravity. By the time she recognizes the signs, it’s too late to swerve. She’s already spun out - an errant, out-of-control race car… and the crowd goes wild.

Now here they come ready to play paleontologist - with magnifying glasses, and the excitement of discovery. It’s time for excavations of the jaw bone. They chip away at hard surfaces to expose the root, where pain lives rent-free. The problem is no one knows when the job is done. They signed on for the long haul. They never clock out. How old was she when this project started? (How old does that make them?) They should be exhausted, world-weary, with bad knees, and arthritis in their toes. But no, they still pick up their mallets, self-congratulatory in their infinite resolve.

Keep your eyes open. Drop your tongue from the roof of your mouth. Unclench your jaw. Don’t look so angry (eyebrows UP!). Sit up straight. Stretch your neck. Not like that, like this. Have you seen a chiropractor? Do you need a mouth guard? Don’t sit on the grass. Or carpet. Don’t touch the dog. Don’t eat dairy or gluten. Stay away from smelly things. Throw away your hair ties. Don’t touch your face. Use sunscreen. No not that kind, this kind. Get blue-light glasses. Close your laptop. Wipe down the windowsills. Wash your sheets. Stop crying. Aren’t you tired?

She knows all the rules of engagement. Except the ones they keep making up. It’s not a new game, this monstrosity of lavishness, the way she’s showered with suggestions, how she’s held and hammered down, inside and out. No, it’s not new. It’s not even rare. It’s just that it’s also not visible. Not a single person will glimpse this wreaking of havoc. But men don’t need to prove themselves to anyone, do they? That’s what being men is for. They bury her silently, with complete immunity. Then, with easy smiles, they smack hands, slap backs, and walk off arm-in-arm.

© Tate DeCaro, 2025