Anysia

Part 1

With a knife taken from her kitchen in her hand, the otter woman carefully laid herself down on top of her bed, towels having been layered on top of her mattress. She was completely naked, the soles of her feet pressing against her pillows and her rear resting above the base of her tail. Her free hand brushed her long hair back away from her body towards the edge of the bed. Now prepped, she laid still on top of her bed for a moment, idly playing with the knife in her hands as she visualized her plan once more. She was to cut off her own head, for whatever reason. Her reasoning seemed quite personal, for she never disclosed to anyone what she had been anticipating. Now that she was ready, the thought of her impending self-beheading almost attacked her mental state. A bit of nauseau grew inside her, the type of nauseau one gets when confronting a completely novel and unpredictable change in one’s life. She stewed in it for some time before asserting to herself the mental discipline necessary to commit to her task. Her worries having been sublimated, and with a calm breath and a subtle smile, she methodically drew the blade to the side of her neck, slowly pressing it against herself until the knife parted her short fur and made an impression. And without hesitation she let the edge slide across her neck, slitting it, letting the blood pool down among the towels.

There was no agonizing pain to accompany her action, only a warm sensation as her body struggled to contain the bleeding. Progressing further, her eyes re-mained still as she tore deeper through her throat, eventually reaching her spine. By that time the fur around her neck was drenched in blood, and the towels struggled to prevent it from contaminating her sheets. Her free hand helped hold her own head down momentarily while she fought to saw her way through the bone. But once clear, the otter’s final stretch of flesh proved straightfor-ward in comparison, and before too long she had finally freed her head from its connection to the rest of her body.

The entire time her eyes were closed, never furrowing her brow even as she struggled breaking through the tough vertebrae. When she let go of her severed head and allowed it to tumble down the bed, its serene expression never disappeared, even as it settled somewhere on the floor nearby.

All of her focus having been trained towards one objective, she never even noticed much of a difference at first. Not being able to feel her eyelids anymore to close or open them, it simply felt like her room was completely pitch-black. The only sounds she experienced were random humming noises rather than anything real.

Having now finished, she wiped the knife she used all throughout her self-induced surgery using a towel and left it there. Getting up to a seating position, she brought up a towel underneath her to soak up any excess blood from her neck. The moist and sticky feeling of congealed blood remained on her fingers,however. She headed off to her bathroom, turning on the shower head so that warm water spilled onto the tiling below.

It was then that Anysia first explored the physical aftermath of her self-decapitation. To prevent drowning herself, she gently poked around the open wound over her neck and pressed some fingers against her windpipe to keep water from dripping in while it rained over her. She spent much of her shower away from the water due to this, though she still managed to clean herself off, at least as much as she figured she was dirty. All she could really do was scrub as vigorously as she could the fur over the sides of her remaining length of neck. Once she finished showering, she dried herself off until her short fur was only damp.

It was a sunny afternoon the last time she was able to see, she recalled, and she figured her shower couldn’t have taken very long. With plenty of time left in the day to spare, Anysia dodged passed the drying blood coating her bed and the lifeless detached head of hers sitting on the floor, heading on outside her home. There was a path out the back she had taken countless times to access the beach right across from where she lived. Without the brightness of the sun hitting her eyes or a view of the sea appearing before her, she instead put more attention towards where her feet ended up stepping on. Her familiarity with the location went hand-in-hand with how she navigated through the path across the rocky shores, memories surfacing of how exactly the “right” gravel felt underneath her feet, helping her avoid a wrong turn. Though she could never tell with certainty where she was going, she soon stumbled onto finer sand. Visualizing in which direction the transition between rock and sand was facing, she hoped for the best when setting off to find the sea. And fortunately for her, only a few minutes of walking across the warm beach lead to her reaching the damp edge of the shore. She sat down and found herself admiring not the view of the sea and the sky, as she usually did, but how the sand felt as she passed it through her fingers.

After a few moments enjoying her quiet time and reflecting on her recent beheading, the nude headless otter stood up and made her away into the ocean. The otter had managed to remember to pick up a suitably thick plug to stuff down her throat this time. She walked straight into the ocean until she could feel the gentle undulations of the sea pressing against the top of her chest, now only her shoulders and her neck visible above the water. Her hands rising above the water, she inserted a plug into her esophagus. Then, taking a deep breath, she immediately shut off her trachea as well. Her lungs filled with air, she made a lunge downwards and towards the deeper end of the sea.

Anysia propelled herself forward away from the shore and stroked down-ward until her hands dug into the sand. Reorienting herself with her legs, she attempted to sit on the seafloor. Her hands held onto the seabed to pull herself downward. Her tail and behind lightly brushed against the underwater sand from the momentum. The otter picked up some small pebbles and shells that she found in her vicinity by dragging her hands out around her, feeling as the small particles of sand slowly drifted back down. Having let go of the ground, she gradually floated upwards until she was actually levitating above the ground. The lack of gravity felt strange to her at first, such that she pictured herself floating inside an empty void. With such a complete lack of sight her mind had come up with visuals for her, picturing herself floating in deep space, willing speckling stars to appear in her imagined vision. As her body cut across the water, her imagined self correspondingly moved within its enclosing vaccuum. But those images rapidly dissolved away once her chest tightened, and she found herself on the verge of sucking on the plug trapping her throat. She oriented herself upwards and hurriedly swam towards the surface. Once she could feel the wind blowing against her neck she popped off the trap holding back her breath.

Wet once again, the otter chose to sit down near the water for the sun to dry her fur. In her idle sunbathing she once had pondered if someone could have been watching the strange headless otter woman fooling around in the water. Herself having no head, it was impossible for her to know definitively. But she could imagine convincing this stranger to try it out for himself, if only she could communicate with him. She dwelled on this idea of sharing the experience with someone even as she returned home. It took her a bit of feeling around the rocks on the shore and the ground below her to figure out which path to take, sometimes climbing over some obstacles simply to make progress. But it was no complicated hike, and before long she had made it back.

Inside, Anysia dried herself off completely with a towel and slipped into a bathrobe. She took the blood-stained towels from her bed to a basket of dirty clothing that she kept in her bathroom.

Getting on her knees in her bedroom, she finally got around to scanning the floor near her bed for her severed head. It was a small bedroom, and it couldn’t have gone off on its own, so within a few minutes she had come across it, holding it up next to her. She could feel the long hair fall over her arms after she picked it up. The eyes remained shut, something she decided to leave as is. And, of course, with one hand exploring the bottom of her head she could make out the open wound over her severed neck, much the same as the one on her body. Her head was overall quite uninteresting to her though, as she had had it all her life, and she ended up simply placing it on a stand somewhere so she wouldn’t lose it.

Once nighttime had come, which even she could tell had come, from her drowsiness, she slipped out of her robe and climbed inside her bed. Her pillow supporting her neck, she quietly fell asleep in complete darkness.

Part 2

The next day, Anysia woke up to total darkness. Her neck turned to search for a clock display, while her hand reached up to groggily scratch her head. There was no way to check the time, and in the course of searching for her head, her fingertips pressed against the moist flesh and jagged bone of her severed neck. Startled, her mind suddenly recalled yesterday’s events. She had sliced off her head, and it lay beside her within reach, its face still. But she did not want to reattach her head. To know the time of day, it seemed she would simply have to trust herself, the remainder of her body still able to tell when the sun rises and when it sets. She pulled herself out of bed, donning her robe, and headed to the kitchen, her stomach growling for sustenance, partly to compensate for her extended beach trip, and also due to her massive blood loss beforehand.

Eating without a head was always going to be tricky, she knew, and simply reattaching it was out of the question, at least for now. The otter was determined to figure out a headless life, if it was possible. Before she removed her own head, she had a garden residing in a small greenhouse situated right alongside her house. With it she knew she could live in relative isolation, allowing her to grow most of her own food. The vegetables and fruits grown inside could simply be mashed together and slipped directly into her throat using a funnel. A very utilitarian way to eat in her current state, the lack of need to cook most of anything any longer was complemented by the lack of any flavor the food would have, as her taste buds had migrated to the dormant head she kept away. So that morning, she merely picked out an assortment of vegetables that would fulfill the balance sheet of vitamins she was targeting. It all went into a food processor to be churned into a paste as she searched for the soft rubber funnel she had procured earlier. Much like what happened earlier in the morning, her fingers wandered over her neck to feel where the new entrance to her throat was. After easing the funnel down where it needed to be, she carefully tipped the blended contents in the jar towards her.

After the breakfast came all the work Anysia had to put in in order to sustain herself. There was nothing much else to do anyway. There was nothing to look at besides nothingness, and music lost most of its appeal when it was just hollow rumblings in her body. Within her memories lived her garden’s progress up until she took her own head. She tended to her plants as if it were any other day, checking to see if the vegetables were ripe mostly by touch, and through rough estimation of the passage of time. Without anything in the way of record-keeping, however, she was entirely dependent on her recollections.

One day after her morning shower she changed into something a bit more respectable than her robe, and more sociable than wearing nothing at all. After having one more routine meal, she left the house in a sundress and a cane. Throughout the past week or so, she had plotted the area around her home simply by trodding over it, aided by years of visual memories. Besides the familiar path from the back door of her home down the cliffs and onto the seashore, there was also a path from her home to a nearby train station. It wasn’t the most straightforward path, of course, but it existed, and with several hours spent exploring, it was discovered by the blind otter eventually.

A trek across the sidewalk, and down a short flight of stairs later, she had finally made it to the station. Anysia discovered that she could not tell if there was anyone else at the station, unless she wanted to sweep the space around her and scan her immediate surroundings with her cane. She decided it would not be worth the trouble, and spared herself some embarrassment. What seemed like ten minutes or so passed in utter silence for the otter while she waited patiently for the train to arrive. As she was unable to tell the time and even unsure if she had kept proper track of what day of the week it was, there was no telling if the wait would stretch into a half hour, or if she was waiting alone for a train that would never arrive that day. But then a gust of wind flutted past the short fur covering her arms, and the platform trembled underneath her. As a few people walked past the headless otter to board, she assumed it was nothing else but the train’s arrival that could create such a disturbance. The otter slowly hopped over the short gap between the train and the platform using her cane as a guide.

Like most train rides, once Anysia was inside, it was a rather uneventful trip the whole way through. Perhaps the second-biggest difference as she sat down with her cane in her hands was the heightened feeling of the cars rising and falling as they passed through the rails built on the hilly terrain. It served to distract her almost as well as it would have to simply gaze outside a window. Until about halfway through her ride, when she stood up and began rapping her cane around the hard metal surface of the floor. She used her left arm to assist her efforts by being raised up in a manner as if she had a burning question to ask. Which she did, in fact, much to the surprise of someone on the train she managed to contact.

In some ways the maned wolf was an antipode to Anysia. He had stepped onto the train that day going backwards relative to her, as he felt the sea and its surrounding cliffs and rivers to serve more as a getaway and less like a home. His head was quite securely attached to his neck, unlike the otter’s, which meant knowing when to get off the train was as simple as looking out the window, or at a map. Given those differences, it must have been quite amusing for him to see the otter get up off her seat, after the initial shock of walking past her wore off. Feeling like a generous soul, he quickly approached the confused woman once it was quite apparent that she needed some sort of help from someone.

A hand reached for Anysia’s shoulder. The hand startled her, but the rush to explain her predicament to some stranger overrode the shock that accompanied knowing someone was there and was watching her. She produced a scrap of paper with a request on it. The maned wolf kept hold of her as he retrieved the piece of paper. It was such a simple favor: alert her when her stop arrives. When he glanced back at her, he wasn’t sure whether to feel pity for her, as if she had somehow lost her entire head in an unfortunate accident, or to chuckle to himself. The otter’s empty neck simply captivated his attention for a few seconds before he handed the scrap piece back and shook her hand. Then the two returned to their seats.

At home, having learned the rudiments of a tactile alphabet, Anysia wasted no time supplementing her learning by reading. References on how the alphabet worked, a tool she could use to emboss paper as a form of writing she could read back, general fiction novels she had picked up to become more acquainted in the vocabulary for this new alphabet. A record-keeping system sprouted out of what she had learned, where she entered in the names of whatever plants she was growing, their population, and how long it would take until harvest time. Concurrently, she learned to take train trips reliably without the help of a stranger, having regained the ability to read.

Before she could feel as if she had seen everything the land around her house had to offer, the otter took advantage of her newly-acquired reading ability to board a car for a more recreational purpose. Though the reality was that she had plenty of cliffs and beachfront to explore, the idea of a manmade park with boardwalks and fountains and bridges seemed to carry its own appeal. Perhaps it was also her isolation that drove her to try to meet more people in a public setting as this, or simply the promise of a safer place to go exploring where she was almost certain she wouldn’t find herself in danger of making a wrong step into some sort of abyss. Walking off the train station, wearing a sundress again, she plotted her path with her walking stick, taking an annotated map with her with the park highlighted.

When the concrete and dirt underneath her soles gave way to paths of stone and carefully-maintained turf, she strongly suspected she had reached her des-tination. When trying to see where she had landed, she could only make out patterns of noise, unless she dug into her memories to she what she remem-bered. The park covered quite a bit of space, nestled in between ports where people with their heads still on could watch as ships docked nearby. From far-ther inland a few streams fused together within the park in order to provide freshwater for the ocean. Atop these streams a multitude of wooden pedestrian bridges were constructed, where one could peer downwards to watch the rushing water carry away the fish and debris. Anysia took a few more steps onto the stone trail, following it wherever it would lead her. Occasionally she sat down to feel her surroundings more closely. She would get as close to the rivers as she could and dip her fingers and toes into the water, and walk near the undersides of certain bridges to feel their stone construction or woodwork. The fountains that weren’t within a body of water she could wade inside and feel bursts of water push her hands away when she waved them overhead. She had been so engrossed in her trip that, when someone put a hand to her shoulder, she had assumed they were someone simply passing by. She meekly stepped to the side to let them walk by seemingly unobstructed, using her cane to guide her to an empty space. Yet the hand met her shoulder again a short time later.

For the maned wolf, a trip to the park meant an hour or two to unwind after a day of laboring. His days of treating it like an exciting new adventure were over a decade past. He had been running in a comfortable pair of sneakers and shorts when he noticed the unmistakable headless body of a particular otter woman he had recently met. She was even harder to miss wearing the same outfit she had worn that day. Though unsure as to how exactly they would manage to keep a conversation going, the uniqueness of this otter easily overcame his hesitancy. He jogged up to her, tapping her on the shoulder. When all she did was get out of the way for him, he chuckled to himself. This time he laid his hand in a more intimate fashion, even going as far as to pick up one of her hands with his own. They were smaller hands than his, their backs covered in fur much like his, although of a much shorter, brown-colored kind as opposed to his softer black fur. A short pause later she moved her hands up towards his head, and he let go. Being taller than average, he towered over any headless otter, and Anysia was no exception. Above a neck surrounded with fluffy fur, she stretched her arms upward to find a head with jowls plusher than anything the otter had herself, having nothing but short bristly fur over her body. A long snout followed from there, a moist nose. He smiled coyly, briskly blowing air against her fingers when touched there.

Towards the back of his cranium she could only feel even more fluff, though two giant ears sprouted up from amidst it. She could honestly not tell if this person was some kind of fox or coyote. It was very difficult to tell without looking at them, though the way they leaned their head into the scratches she gave them, she suspected they must have been some form of canine. Curiosity got the better of her and she dragged the back of her hand along their shirt, the figure of a broad-chested man underneath. At some point her situational awareness kicked back in. She had her cane nestled in an armpit, feeling a man, though he didn’t seem to mind at all. She carefully put her hands away, taking her cane back with one hand and propping herself up with it jammed into the floor. A respite later, he gently laid his hands down over her shoulders, keeping her in his grasp. She didn’t budge, and so he inched those fingers closer to her neck, her short fur folding back and quickly springing down. His eyes stared intently at that open wound right above his grasp, as if he were searching for any set of eyes or lips to stare back or talk to him among the torn muscle and broken bone. Instead she merely bobbed slightly as she shifted her weight about her cane, with the bright yellow fabric of her dress lagging behind her. She only seemed to react with any kind of intensity after he finally took his chance, touching the exposed flesh. For that she jerked her upper body back, but stood still once more.

 The two acquainted a second time, they managed to wander off towards a park bench, where Anysia could freely use her hands to communicate in more than just gropes. Crossing her legs as she sat, she took out a pen and pad to write with. Much scribbling later, the maned wolf’s arm held her close, his other hand flipping through her story with one hand. He discovered she wasn’t the victim of some gruesome accident, as he had initially assumed. It was an entirely voluntary self-decapitation, something she had undergone to radically change her life, supposedly. Glancing back at the woman beside him, he couldn’t deny that she had captured his attention twice, during what were typically uneventful trips he took routinely. The strange thing about it was that she wasn’t merely blindfolding herself and covering her ears like most people would assume. What she had done seemed quite permanent, as much as he knew. She even revealed with eagerness how entrenched in this new lifestyle she was, and offered to lend her time to tutor him in tactile writing. To this he held her hand for a moment while he thought if he was needed anywhere else in the near future. After being given the name of a train stop and a map toward her home, he took her invita-tion with zeal.

The two agreed to meet at her home, and then from there spend the night at a camping site not far away. She had mentioned it during their time at the park, letting it slip how she longed for someone to spend some time with in a setting she was much too comfortable with. For this they both packed a fresh change of clothes and any necessary tools for their visit. Unlike her strolls through the city, Anysia had only a top with straps and some shorts she didn’t mind dirtying. But she still carried her cane with her, even with the promise of a helpful man being at her side. The maned wolf, in an outfit not unlike the one he wore to the park, travelled along the train line he had first encountered her in, which dropped him off at an unfamiliar station. But with the information that the blind otter lent him, it was no problem reaching her. As she had no way of knowing if she had guests, short of them running a pile driver near her house or putting on a rock concert right outside, the door to her home was always open, and he simply walked up to her to greet her.

Back on a car over the railroad, they rode the line to another town a good distance away, sharing a moment not unlike the one they experienced at the park. The maned wolf, ever so curious, was able to know what exactly went on in the otter’s mind, wherever it was. She tried hard to imagine what he must look like from all the frisking she had done, imagining him as a tall coyote man, covered in sandy brown fur wherever it was visible. He had to correct on that point, laughing as he bluntly told her his fur was reddish. So he was actually both a fox and a coyote, in a way, she thought to herself. During his brief house visit, he marvelled at how well-kept her garden was, knowing next to nothing about agriculture himself. As they neared their stop she wrote down a few examples of what she was growing and how her experience was like. Though she missed cooking and chewing on things sometimes, the gardening seemed to make up for it.

At an isolated terminal that looked like nothing more than a rest stop was where their conversation ended. From there they made their way up a trail to a suitable space to set up camp. In an unfamiliar location, Anysia found herself drawn to the edges of the dirt path. There she could find herself stooping down to run her hands across the ground. There was a dense layer of crunched-up leaves surrounding various shoots and tree trunks scattered along the ground. Following the tall plants from their roots she felt their rough texture interrupted with spots of moss that clung to their bark.

At certain points she could even feel the hard shell of tiny insects bump into her fingertips while she enjoyed the scenery, startling her. The maned wolf watched it all happen while he hung back near the side of the trail, standing next to the bags he set down. Her being blind to others’ facial expressions, he questioned how much her sense of self-awareness had withered away. Any time she seemed absorbed in her immediate surroundings he found himself snickering, not worried if she could hear him. He slowly approached the headless otter rummaging around the forest after her incident with the ants and asked her in a polite manner, with her hands enveloped in hers, if it would be fine to set up camp before exploring. They both were on their way soon enough after that, with him leading her along with bags strung across his shoulders and one hanging from his free hand.

He found a suitable clearing not long afterwards. Anysia made sure to help by setting down the tarp, but the maned wolf was sure he could handle the rest. Rather, Anysia sat down above the tarp with an assortment of dimpling tools at her side, already constructing a map that would lead her back to the train stop. Overhead the shadow of the tent enveloped her, and as her friend pounded the stakes down into the ground, she took out the books she had procured pre-viously. The next time he entered their tent, he would find the otter waiting silently for him, writing something in that strange tactile writing system of hers. As promised, he let her know of his presence and they spent the next chunk of the day in a tutoring session.

The tarp underneath their tent now covered in scattered books and sheets of paper with bumps imprinted onto them, the maned wolf almost felt somewhat confident in being able to write to the otter. She asked him to write her some sort of message to end the day with. It preoccupied his attention well enough that he completely ignored her rummaging around her bag for something, stowing her books away, and sneaking out the tent. A piece of paper she had kept in her pocket she slipped right beside him before she left. The maned wolf only noticed her absence while searching for a kind of dictionary that had proved quite helpful. Instead he found that scrap of paper, written in the bumpy script he had just learned. It was some sort of command to get ready, that he might wish to prepare himself for a big mess. He could feel her waiting outside the tent as he let the message fall onto the ground. Pausing for a moment, he slipped out of his shirt, leaving his bare chest visible. Slowly he ventured outside the tent in the orange light of dusk, looking around for Anysia.

A small distance away the ominous figure of a headless otter wielding a hardware store saw greeted him, patiently awaiting him. He approached her and she went onto him immediately, feeling his presence from the minute tremblings of the dirt underneath her feet. She pushed him down into a seated position with his legs stretched out, kneeling over him. The maned wolf could only lie there with his eyes following the otter’s missing head, looking into his own future in the process. His hands creeped slowly towards the woman pinning him down, caressing her calves as a means to calm himself. With a free hand she ran her slimmer fingers over his larger hand, grasping it momentarily. The two spent a half minute or so like this, teasing each other with their hands. Confidently, feeling no resistance from the man before her, the otter’s hand then broke away. She held the saw over his neck while the other steadied it. Sparing any frivolities, she went ahead and jerked the bladed implement from side to side. The maned wolf anchored his hands to the back of her thighs, squeezing them, and squirming with every new piece of flesh that the teeth on the saw tore into. The moment she stopped was the moment the handle pounded into the dirt behind him.

Promptly she withdrew the tool, tossing it to the side. She relieved him of the weight on his stomach, not that he found it particularly unbearable. She got off him to chase down where his head had rolled off to, if it had even travelled much, not wanting to disappoint him by losing it. The now-headless maned wolf man slowly got up after the pulsating pain surrounding his neck subsided somewhat. He had suddenly gone blind, and the sawing of his spine and the sounds of the trees rustling in the wind stopped at some point. His neck was covered in a sticky mess that caused his fluff to cling together, and it had even travelled down his back somewhat. Knowing exactly what had happened to him, he left any further investigation of his neck area to the otter to take a look at. When she came back with his severed head in his hands, the two got up and made themselves comfortable in their tent.

He seemed to have been staring at her as well as he could while she was per-forming her “operation”, perhaps to get a final glimpse of her until his vision went out. She slid down the lids over his eyes and shut his jaw closed, then set the head down beside her. A familiar body crept up behind her, placing a pair of hands over her waist, grasping onto her dirty blouse. It was his turn to pull her down, setting her right by his side onto some sleeping bags. In the few days he had known the otter, he had developed quite a good likeness of her in his mind, but even then many of the finer details of her body became more coarse and blurry. In particular, his hands gradually found their way from her waist back towards the stout mass that made up her tail. A maned wolf’s tail only seemed larger than an otter’s because of all the voluminous fur that hung onto it. Hers was all muscle, tapering down towards the end, something he could really wrap his hands around near the base. The rest of the night his hands were soon acquainted with almost every part of her body he could reach, save for anything private. Eventually the visions of the otter in his mind among the darkness melded into random thoughts that popped into his tired body, and he soon fell asleep with her in his arms.

The next morning, with sunlight entering the top of the tent and illuminating their space, the maned wolf stirred awake. Something was anchoring him down, a warm figure whose breathing he felt subtly pushing against his hands. He gently let go, sliding his arms out from underneath her. A constant, dull pain, with swelling he could feel all around his neck, was the second thing he noticed. His neck felt too sore to even touch, but he did it anyway, feeling around the open wound left by the otter, bundles of tender muscle that previously held his skull up protesting with a stinging sensation. And his spine, its nerves sliced clean, didn’t feel all that different, the only difference being the hard bone that surrounded those fibers like a shield. With nothing else to do, he emulated the otter, leaving her behind for a while to go explore his surroundings. At least until he could come back and find her awake, after which they could pack up and leave.

The two hand-in-hand, they helped each other onto the train and back to-wards her home. What anyone in that car could see were two headless friends trading thoughts with their hands tied together, bags to their sides. At Anysia’s house, she placed the maned wolf’s head over the mantle in her living room. Taking a quick trip to her room, she retrieved her own severed head, taking it to rest with its companion. She held it in her hand for a minute or so, having spent enough time without it that it almost seemed like it didn’t belong to her at that point. With both their heads placed together, facing out into the house, she then took out her writing materials once more, sat down with her friend, and picked up where they had left off.