The Ten Year Old Head

ulie died at seventy, but her head was only ten. Her breasts were close to forty, her buttocks fifty-three. Her waist was only thirty, while her hands pushed sixty-five Her head was by far the youngest, although it, too, was fully dead.

Still, had Julie's head somehow managed to disengage in time from its neck, it seemed at least theoretically possible that it might still be alive.

But, alas, it hadn't. So, when Julie's heart went down at seventy, her head got pulled along.

Husband Henry had died in his eighties, just as Julie's main body was passing out of its fifties. Her head was by then only twenty but her waist was a full-on sixty, a tragedy that bothered her nearly as much as her dear hubby's passing.
Until the age of forty, Julie's head and body had coexisted in perfect concordance, after which they began beating to the ticks of different clocks.

	By birthday forty-five, Julie's eyes were twenty-nine. By birthday fifty-two, her face was thirty-eight, a state at which it held rock steady for the next seven years. It was not till fifty-nine that her breasts shed a decade and then almost overnight.
Henry left behind a generous inheritance, a home with no mortgage, and a reliable monthly pension. By the time of Julie's death, however, her bank balance in dollars was only slightly larger than the total circumference of her arms, thighs, and waist in inches.
Daughter Anne, long irritated by her mother's morphing corpus, had ceased all communication a decade earlier, just after Julie's torso passed over the big six-0 and her head nose-dived into its twenties.

Anne's hysterical parting words had to do with Julie one day attaining the chronological age of eighty, at which time her head seemed firmly on course to reach zero, a point from which it could only go negative.

But, of course, no such biological perversion came to pass because Julie's heart gave out at seventy when her head was still a positive ten.

Happily, Julie's mind aged in concert with her head and grew blissfully unaware of both her daughter's callous abandonment and the state of her squandered finances.

After all, by the time of Julie's death, her head of ten was half its way to nine.

Attendance at the funeral was sparse . . .

. . . just three men and a lady, each in starched white, each of whom would miss the deceased far more than she could ever have imagined.

Dressed in pink chiffon and surrounded by frilly satin, Julie looked as darling as a little girl. All that showed of her was her perfect face — eyelids tight, cheeks without jowls, skin like finest porcelain.

Saddened by the news of her impending cremation, each of the mourners secretly fought back the urge to pull the sweet lady free from her coffin, peel away her gown, and pay last respects to their life's finest work.