Admiral Plumbum Alexander of the Mechanical Airship Diabeticus

Jason had a pencil sticking out of his head.

Most days he wore a black silk stovepipe like Abe Lincoln, which covered the pencil. If his colleagues found it strange, they only gossiped in the break room and on a private slack channel, rather than confronting him.

People asked if he was into steampunk, and he said no. Then he met Ruth, a riotous Lovecraftian with a half-shaved head (the other half sprouting a wavy purple and gold mane falling to her hip) who went by the name Professor Delilah Flintlock. Smitten, he read the comics she lent to him, went with her to conventions, and helped install a home beer-brewing kit in her kitchen. He adopted the moniker Plumbum Alexander, First Admiral of the celebrated mechanical airship Diabeticus, who fought bravely for the Imperium and was wounded in The Battle of the Pirate Homunculi.

Ruth made sure Jason knew she thought of him only as a friend. This broke Jason’s heart, but, like the plucky hero Spark Silverdash in the web-comic Gears of Yesteryear, Jason refused to give up.

Jason’s friends from college called him a “simp.” But he persisted. And he stopped being friends with those guys.

Time passed. Jason was happy, even despite the pencil in his head, which was a source of constant fear and anxiety and which, he knew, would eventually destroy his life before killing him outright, at an early age.

And like Spark Silverdash against the one-eyed, black-robed, hook-handed Captain Diesel Pennyfarthing, Jason eventually prevailed, and Ruth allowed him to take her on a proper date. He took her to Chili’s — not very steampunk, she groused — then to a gin bar with steel barstools and chrome typewriters at every table. This put her in a better mood, and they shared a kiss in the Uber back to his apartment to watch Mortal Engines.

On his couch he fumbled with the belts of her trench coat, her ruffle skirts, the brocade corset. She was skinny, far skinnier than he imagined. Like a skeleton propped up by a curtain rod along her spine. She also had sunken cheeks, a brownish, toothy grin and cold, dead eyes. Very steampunk.

Ruth reached for Jason’s hat, but he stopped her hand.

“I can’t — ”

“You must remove thy headpiece, Admiral Plumbum, before entering the nest of spicery,” she whispered. “It’s only polite.”

“Delilah, Delilah.” He didn’t want to let Ruth see the pencil in his skull. “Make me not thy Samson.”

“Pish tosh,” she said, but nevertheless she relented, and he made love to her slowly, and very carefully, to make sure his hat did not accidentally fall off.

The pencil had begun growing out of Jason’s skull late, when he was a senior in college. Juvenile headpencil usually afflicted children, though not always. He didn’t even know anything was amiss until he began waking with terrible migraines. He took Advil and chalked it up to stress.

But his classmates noticed.

“You’ve become a real head case,” his friend Kevin told him.

“I can’t make heads or tails of what’s wrong with you,” Jack quipped.

“Get this guy a pencil sharpener!” Joanne said.

Jason’s headaches grew so bad he couldn’t get out of bed, and one morning his roommate finally brought him to the campus medical center.

“It’s probably the flu,” Jason told the nurse, trying to hide the pencil underneath a wool beanie. “I just need some antibiotics.”

She took one look at his head and called an ambulance. “If we don’t do anything about that pencil right now,” she said, “you’re going to fall into a coma.”

At the hospital, Doctor Ramanujen saved his life and explained the situation with the pencil.

Although nobody knew why a pencil sometimes grew out of someone’s head — something to do with genetics and autoimmune disorders — it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Jason now had a pencil in his head, and if he didn’t take daily precautions to manage it, the pencil would eventually grow into his brain and kill him. The process might take thirty years or sixty, but the pencil would fulfill its mission. At some point in his life it would pierce the part of his brain that controlled his extremities, and they’d have to amputate his feet and legs. His penis would necrotize, his kidneys would fail, and his eyes would, essentially, fill with blood. And that was only if the lead from the pencil, which was slowly leaching into his blood, didn’t kill Jason first.

There was good news, though. As long as Jason worried about the pencil all day and slapped himself in the face, hard, before each meal and before going to bed, then the pencil would kill him a little less quickly. The face-slapping would hurt at first, Doctor Ramanujen cautioned, but eventually he’d get used to it. In the hospital room, Ramanujen demonstrated by slapping his own face. It doesn’t hurt, Doctor Ramanujen said, cracking himself one across the face. See?

CRACK! He took another five across the lip. It doesn’t hurt.

But the man’s cheek was bright red and Jason saw him wincing with each smack.

Now it’s your turn.

Jason didn’t want to smack himself. He wasn’t a violent guy. He hadn’t been in a fight since fifth grade.

You can’t leave the hospital until we see a good slap, Ramanujen said, waiting.

Jason opened his palm, squeezed his eyes shut, pulled back his arm and launched it into his right temple.

Ramanujen smiled. There you go. Not so bad, right?

It fucking hurt, Jason thought, but he just smiled.

There was one more thing, Ramanujen added, as if it were an afterthought. If Jason slapped himself too many times, he might die. So he had to be careful counting his slaps. The only way to know when to stop slapping himself, Ramanujen explained, was to punch himself in the balls. A good wallop in the balls will let you know if you need another slap in the face, Ramanujen said. If it hurts, keep slapping.

Unfortunately, there was no other way to tell. One day they might invent a steam-powered apparatus to test the amount of lead in one’s blood automatically, but those days were far off, so for the time being — slap and punch, slap and punch, until his balls didn’t hurt.

Jason took this regimen with him back to campus and began slapping and punching in order to keep the pencil lead death syndrome at bay. The head-pencil was still there, though, and so Jason went to an old-fashioned haberdasher in town and bought the stovepipe hat. He graduated college and joined the workforce. He covered his head-pencil and tried not to think about it, even though it ran his life. He was a slave to his head-pencil.

Then he met Professor Delilah Flintlock, and she liked his hat. She encouraged him to embrace his hat. She helped him become commander of his doomed airship, the Diabeticus, rather than the other way around.

Note: This story was originally published in Bear Creek Gazette, Vol 6 (November 10, 2021).