“HALLO!” A small and very tanned head bellowed right next to the emptiness where The Collector’s head had been. While she didn’t have eardrums that could ring, The Collector could still be startled by loud noises, and this surprise greeting sent The Collector stumbling back a few steps in surprise. “O, surry.” The head whispered, smiling nervously as The Collector regained her composure.
The Collector paused for a moment, then responded “Hello, Orchid, how are you?” in slow and robotic American Sign Language.
Despite regularly having no mouth, The Collector had never really been interested in learning any form of sign language. She could hear perfectly fine despite her lack of ears, and if she wanted to say something to someone she’d learned to both type and write extremely fast, could put on a head to talk, or she could just take the head of whoever she wanted to converse with and attach it to herself so she could communicate telepathically with them. Very few people spoke sign language, and as a result she’d never put much effort into learning it.
That is, until, she Collected Orchid, a deaf and dyslexic Hawaiian college student who’d been touring in The Collector’s woods many years ago. While Orchid could read and (formerly) write, it was extremely slow and tedious for The Collector to converse with her through text. The Collector could attach a head and have Orchid lip read when she wanted to speak with her, but for some reason when The Collector spoke through a head the words were, according to Orchid, “muddy”. She could lip read any head talking to her with zero issues, and The Collector had taken the liberty of mounting Orchid’s head to the wall like a trophy opposite a head shelf so she could see and talk to a lot of heads rather than putting Orchid on a shelf where she couldn’t see their lips well, but when the Collector took control of another head’s lips it was for some reason hard for Orchid to read them. Orchid theorized that because The Collector was only borrowing the head, and wore a lot of different heads with different musculature, its movements weren’t fully natural or consistent with the face and fell into a sort of lip reading uncanny valley, the equivalent of a normal person hearing a computer synthesized voice. She could understand it if she concentrated, but it was a bit jarring and unsettling according to her.
Whatever the case, Orchid couldn’t follow The Collector’s lips well, couldn’t generally read well, couldn’t hear at all, so The Collector had started putting in the work learning ASL. “That wus pretty gud.” Orchid said, her voice rising to a level slightly above a normal person’s speaking level. “And Iam doing all right, thaenks.” She said, her tone less enthusiastic.
“Alright? What’s wrong?” The Collector signed.
“Well, Iam still a prisoner in a crasy witches dun-g-on, I don’t know howe my family is coping, and I miss avin’ my own arms an legs.” She said, very curtly but not maliciously. Orchid had once been a very problematic head for The Collector, her deafness and the fact that she could scream indefinitely once detached from her body allowing her to scream for literal days on end. While she had certainly calmed down over the years, she still resented her kidnapper. Orchid had wanted to be a great artist, studying photography at a prestigious university and profitably selling her own paintings (both watercolor and oils) since she was twelve. She’d actually been photographing the headless bodies that sometimes surfaced in the nearby towns and snapping pictures of the woods they’d lost their heads in for a school project when The Collector found her. Of course, now that she was stuck in this “dun-g-on”, as her deaf accent pronounced it, she had very little artistic inspiration. She had no means of taking photos, and even if she could her subject matter was rather limited. As well, while the Collector tried to make her happy every few days by putting a brush in her mouth, setting up a paint palette below her chin, and putting a canvas in front of her, Orchid had lost her passion over the years. She had developed amazing an amazing skill in painting with only her mouth, but her once happy paintings of flowers, mountains, and landscapes, had all become paintings of bare branches, foggy windows, and half buried coffins. Often, she’d just let the brush fall out of her mouth and refuse to paint.
The Collector did feel bad, but she knew she’d come around. All the heads did. And even if they didn’t, they eventually learned to find their own happiness here. She just had to keep trying. For now, The Collector decided to take Orchid off of her mounting and try cheering her up by giving her a nice grooming. She’d gone a long time without a proper wash, and dried paint was all over her face and hair. After washing her up, if Orchid was still feeling down, The Collector would…
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