A Little Something Stuck in Your Head

“Oh, my God, you guys,” Jenny said, her syllables long and slurred as she spoke directly into her latest mimosa. “We don’t do this enough!”

It was the third time she’d said it in half an hour. Her friends had all been matching her on mimosas – they were bottomless, after all, and they were going to get their money’s worth, damn it – and so none of them noticed or cared. They all just cooed back the same responses of ‘of course’ and ‘ohmygod yes’ and ‘totally.’

This was part of the ritual. They only ever managed to get all four of them together for something roughly once every three months. Seeing each other more frequently was not for lack of trying, but for a profound excess of other things they had to do. Work travel. Home maintenance. Out of their nine collective children there were eight different sports, and at the moment not a single one of them could remember which ones their kids participated in.

“Mmm, okay, so, like, here’s another one,” Angie said, waving at the waiter for another pitcher. Thirty minutes earlier they had gotten onto the topic of weird conversation starters and had since been trying to think of all the ones they had ever heard before and then answer them. So far the fan favorite was, ‘Out of all your past lives, which one do you regret the most?”

Once the waiter had dropped the pitcher in the middle of the table like a zookeeper tossing enrichment into a pen and fled for his life, Angie continued.

“Everybody gets songs stuck in their heads, right? Well, have you ever gotten just, like, a word or a phrase stuck in your head?”

The ladies were all blissfully quiet for a few seconds as they forced their champers-soaked neurons to spark. The other unfortunate customers who had elected to sit out on the patio, not knowing what they were in for, all breathed a tentative sigh of a relief.

“Oh!” Kayleigh said with a clap of her hands, causing the grandmother one table over to jump in surprise and fling the butter she’d been trying to spread onto her granddaughter’s face. “I’ve got one.”

She looked around conspiratorially, her head swinging from side to side, and then leaned into the table. The others leaned in to, Deborah unaware of dropping some of her hair directly into the remaining hollandaise sauce on her plate.

“When I was a teenager, after I learned the word…” Here her voice dropped to a barely audible whisper because no matter how drunk she was she was still a mother and vaguely aware of the children sitting nearby. “…cunnilingus…oh, my god, I couldn’t get my brain to stop thinking it! I’d be in the middle of a calculus test and every time I couldn’t think of an answer my brain would just start chanting it!”

The others were all already laughing, barely hearing the rest of her story.

“But why?” Jenny wailed.

“I don’t know! It just got jammed in there! I wasn’t even thinking of, like, the concept. The act. Just the word. All day long.”

Angie snapped her fingers. “Oh, yeah, I know mine! It’s ‘baby shark!’”

“That doesn’t count, that’s a song!” Kayleigh just about screamed. She realized other tables were staring and brought herself back down a few pegs. “That’s a song, you said no songs.”

“No, but, like, when it gets in my head it isn’t the song. It’s just, I don’t know, the other day I walked into the boys’ room after I asked them to clean and instead of it being, you know, clean, they had instead decided to have a clothes fight and had flung all of their clothes in their dresser and closet literally everywhere, and while I went to go find them to tell them they were about to be introduced to Marie Kondo my brain just kept chanting baby shark baby shark baby shark baby shark. No singing. Just like that.”

All of the women spent the next few minutes talking over each other, trying to decide if the boys’ room or a mutinous brain chanting baby shark on repeat was worse.

“Okay, wait, me next, me next,” Deborah said, waving her hand around. “It’s this weird phrase that’s popped into my head all my life, I don’t know why! It goes-”

Deborah’s normally soft, breathy voice was replaced by something too gravelly, too deep, too inhuman to be coming from the five-two dental hygienist.

“ THE END IS FAST COMING, THE TIME OF DARKNESS IS NIGH, REPENT YOUR SINS BEFORE THE WORLD IS CONSUMED IN FIRE.”

Then Deborah giggled and downed her mimosa. “Isn’t that the funniest?” she asked in her normal voice.

The rest of the women stared at her, immediately sober. The rest of the patio was staring at her, too, unable to ignore the voice that had issued out of her. Even a few of the tables inside were peering through the window.

Deborah looked around, embarrassed. “Is that one too weird?”

Jenny made a face. “Girl, what the fuck?”

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