The Lung and Haircut
by Zachary Schomburg
Originally published in CutBank 63/64
At a Halloween party, a lung went as a haircut, and a haircut
went as a lung. They became inseparable. They got along famously.
The haircut had a shit brown Silverado and he often
let the lung drive it. The lung played the piano while eating
pancakes, a feat unmatched by any other lung, and the haircut
could make the best pancakes. Once, when the lung got
sick and couldn't go to work, the haircut stayed home too
and they watched a half dozen movies. They discussed their
biggest fears one quiet night beneath a golden moon, black
clouds shifting and giving chase, a plane landing carefully in
the distance, one right after the other, in perfect intervals.
The haircut's fear was to be eaten by a shark, but he was lying.
The lung knew it. He remembered seeing death on the
mirrored surface of the haircut's coffee one morning, then
watched him pick it up and swirl it around in circles. The
lung said timidly, losing you. They let the words float a while,
heavy in the moonlight, and the lung went home to write a
poem about it that goes:
Death is falling gently onto all our collars
and it is spreading out on the floor.
It is one thing and then a million things.