Howie comes running down from the bridge.
"What happened? Did he break? Did he break?"
"Yeah," I told him, picking myself off of the ground. "We're gonna have to change his name to 'Headless Joe.'"
Ira, still behind the camera, moved in closer to the body, paused dramatically, and finally stopped filming. "Where'd his head go?"
I shrugged. "I don't know, over there somewhere. So much for unbreakable plastic."
"Arc you looking for this?" I heard another voice say. The voice was scratchy, like a kid who's screamed a little too much. I turned, and I swear to you, the first thing I see is Manny's mannequin head floating in midair. I only see it for a split second, but it's the creepiest thing. Then in that split second my brain does a quick retake and I see that there's a kid holding the head iunder his armpit. I couldn't really see the kid at first on accounta his clothes are kind of a brownish gray, like the rocks around him, and you know how your mind can play tricks on you when the light is just right.
"Excuse me," said Ira, "this is a closed set."
The kid ignored him. "That was pretty cool," he said. "You should have dressed him up, though, so when he fell he looked like a person and not a dummy on film."
Ira pursed his lips and got a little red, annoyed that he didn't think of it.
"Don't I know you?" I asked the kid. I took a good look at him. His hair was kinda ashen blond—real wispy, like if you held a magnetized balloon over his head, all his hair would stand on end. He was about a head shorter than me; a little too thin. Other than that, there was nothing remarkable about him, nothing at all. He wasn't good-looking; he wasn't ugly; he wasn't buff and he wasn't scrawny. He was just, like, average. Like if you looked up "kid" in the dictionary, his face would be there.