Seven Beautiful Dutch Words for Bald

by Jay McKenzie

Volle maan (Translation: full moon)

You stopped investing in the idea of romance when you quietly tipped into your thirties, or so you thought. But a black velvet sky presenting a white-disk moon, innocent and holy as a communion wafer, can tilt a world sideways, and you tumble fast and hard. He is beautiful and you laugh about the light refracting off his head. He asks if you can see your own reflection and you surprise yourself with the face looking back: it’s you, but better.

Vleespet (Translation: meat cap)

There’s touching, touching, always touching. A finger straying across an inseam, a cheek rubbing arm hairs into static rising, a lip searching for flesh to kiss, to suck, to nibble. A tongue traced across the still unexpected landscape of a head stripped bare. There’s sighing, moaning one another’s names into the caverns of each other’s mouth and the urgent, hungry need to fuse together the flesh of your bodies. You press your forehead against the smooth stone of his and will him to love you as hard as you’ve started loving him.

Duimhoofd (Translation: thumb head)

He never did handle jibing well, he said. His friends are the sport type, the confirmed bachelor type, the rip-off-a-woman’s-bikini-top-in-a-pool type and though they’re polite to your face, the side eyes, the nudges, just beyond your eyeline, grate. When he complains in their voices about the Sunday market with you and how he’s missing some brunch at some cafe with some beer and some sports, you snap and throw his cap to the dirt. I hope your head burns, you yell pettily, and their sniggers and woahs! that live only in your head linger long after he’s presented you with an apology and a bar of Verkade.

Biljartbal (Translation: billiard ball)

It’s an unanswered message, an unreturned call. It’s a weekend away with the boys and no contact. It’s that ex who comments on his pictures with a heart and a cryptic in-joke that he tells you not to worry about. It’s that other life going on inside his skull that you have no access to. It’s the I don’t know what I want. It’s the maybe we should have time apart. You thought games were for romantic nomads: the teens, the twentysomethings with a globe full of options and skin that glimmers with potential, not for people with pension plans and mortgages. I’m too tired for games, you tell him when he returns from camping one weekend.

Open dak (Translation: open roof)

We could move away, he says. Anywhere you like. He tips his head to you like it is a globe and you trace equators and tropics with your fingertips. Pick a place, he says and you’re laughing but your finger is drawn to the little nub where the stalk of his spine protrudes into his skull. Here, you say. Let’s go here. You stack things in boxes, your life and his tessellating into the solid bricks of a future together. For your leaving party, you paint his head like an atlas with two pink hearts connecting where you are and where you are going.

Slijpsteen (Translation: grindstone)

Here, everything is the same, but different. The hours are long but the weather is better. The meat is cheap but the vegetables burn through your salaries. You ask the questions again and again: did we do the right thing? You cry at documentaries streamed from home, make love under alien constellations and marvel that this is the same moon that you first saw shining on him like he was a beacon guiding you home. You talk of going back, of going forward until you have talked yourselves right back to where you are, the circumference of all things. Something else, you decide. Time for something else.

Eierdooer (Translation: egg yolk)

For years you have thought only in circles. Eggs, cycles, rounds. But circles are infinite and this is not. Last chance, he sighs and runs a hand across his head. You are trembling when they administer the final embryo transfer and you fear that you will crack open, that there is nothing more than the most fragile shell holding you together. He takes your hand and you trail the other across his scalp like it’s a lucky talisman, and pray, pray that by the end of the year your palms will be finally cradling a tiny hairless head.

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The author of this story has requested that the story not be published,
as publication might compromise its eligibility in another competition
for which it was shortlisted.

I polish the good spoons and lay them in pairs. The table is the big oak one with the notch where my brother carved his initials and swore blind he hadn’t. I run my thumb over the groove—carved with a butter knife while Dad carved the joint, both of them cutting something permanent. My brother did six weeks below for that notch. He was nine. I place the cloth so the notch sits under my plate. Reclaimed.

No flowers; heat kills them. Centre stage goes to the cut-glass salt, heavy and cloudy. Dad kept it by his right hand. Above the salt meant carving knife, best potatoes, extra gravy. Below meant the draught and the fetching. Cold food because you served first and ate last. The chair with the uneven leg. Christmas where your stocking held an orange and socks while your brother—above—opened a bicycle. It meant knowing your father had decided you weren’t quite good enough, without saying a word.

I’ve waited forty years to host Christmas. Forty years to sit here, to hold the knife, to move the salt. Tonight.

Napkins folded to annoy my sister. Crackers on every plate. Sprouts heaped so they look deliberate. Place mats: snowman for Mum, robin for my eldest brother, church for the other, holly for my sister, plain corks for partners. For Dad, the stag. He liked spotting things first—and deciding who’d seen them last.

I reach for the head and stop. Of course I sit there. Still, the wood remembers.

Turkey under foil. I taste the gravy, add a pinch. The cut-glass is for theatre.

Doorbell: coats, damp wool. My sister with a trifle. “Not near the kitchen—I refuse to be your serf.”

“Never,” I say, and put her under the clock where the draught nips ankles. Not yet.

My eldest brother takes the chair beside the head. “Looks grand,” he says. The other slides into the escape seat by the garden door. I put his partner next to him.

Mum sets down Tupperware she promised not to bring. Her hand rests on my neck. “Where do you want Dad?”

By the radiator. Cushion ready, stag mat laid. He’s smaller this year, shoulders folded in.

“Down there,” I say. “More room.”

She repeats it. No one looks at the salt.

My brothers bring Dad in between them. He looks round like he’s in a house he once liked in a book. “Grand,” he says, and lowers himself, a long way from the knife.

We mill. The roasting tin goes on the trivet. Steam fogs and clears. Everyone doing their old jobs: my sister steals a potato; one brother loosens his belt; the eldest counts heads.

I start placing forks like signposts. It happens without thinking: sister under the clock, escape brother by the door, eldest near me, Mum left of centre with bread sauce reach, partners and children in the gaps. The table settles.

I pick up the cut-glass salt. Cold as a small stone. Halfway down I glance at Mum. She meets my eyes; her hand twitches and folds back. I set it by my plate, lift it, move it one place, then one more. Three inches by my brother’s hand. He doesn’t touch it. I move it again—past Mum, past the holly, past where Dad once reached without looking. I carry it to the radiator end, to the stag, and put it just beyond his fingers.

Below the salt.

A tiny scrape in my chest. No one speaks.

Dad looks to the head. His hand lifts, stops. He looks at the salt by his plate. Then his eyes find mine—sharp, the old blue that could measure you to the inch.

“About time,” he says, clear as forty years ago. “I always wondered which of you’d have the stones.”

A nod, approving. Then the fog drops. “Grand,” he murmurs, studying his sprout.

My hand goes slack on the knife. I wanted him confused. Instead he’s blessed it—blessed me.

Mum sets down her fork. The sound is precise. “Put it back,” she says.

“Mum—”

“I sat below that salt for forty-three years.” Her hands press flat on the table. “I watched him decide who got the extra potato. I watched you arrange yourselves in his pattern, even when he forgot it. You keep building his map because you think if you master it, it won’t hurt. It will always hurt. Put the salt back.”

I lift the cut-glass, heavy and cold. I think of my brother at nine, six weeks in exile for a groove in wood. I think of Mum setting two mugs every morning. I think of Dad’s clear eyes, proud of me for becoming him.

I carry the salt to the kitchen, wrap it in newspaper, put it in the bin.

When I return, everyone’s staring at the space where the salt was.

“Pepper?” I offer, holding up the grinder. “We’ve got pepper.”

My sister straightens her napkin. The eldest unclenches his hands. Someone passes bread. Someone refills water. The table finds new rituals. I take up the knife and fork. They feel lighter.

The first slice goes clean—crackle, white breast, a blush by the bone. Gravy finds every plate. Paper crowns wobble. Laughter starts.

Dad sips water, sets it down slightly off. “Grand,” he says.

We begin. Under my plate, the notch finds my thumb. Next year I’ll sand it smooth. Or buy a new table. Or maybe just fill it with flowers—let something grow there instead. Mum salts her potatoes from a tiny porcelain hen. “This was my mother’s,” she says. “Never had a name for where you sat. Just had a table.”

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