Pace swung his wedge and took a chunk out of the fairway. The ball dropped well short of the pin, which was about seventy yards away.

“Golf’s supposed to be nonviolent,” Phillips said.

Pace shook his white-gloved hand near his crotch, bent down to retrieve the patch of turf to tamp it into the gash he’d created, noticed a pale flash in the dirt.

“Some clown buried his ball,” he said. He crouched down and dug at the moist Florida earth. “Jesus fuck.”

Phillips came over and looked down at what Pace had found.

“A dang burial ground,” Phillips said. He took off his U of F visor and wiped his brow.

“What you think it is?”

“Some bad juju, that’s what it is.”

“Naw, it’s not like that,” Pace said. He scooped dirt away from the skull and lifted it free. It was starch white with fine fissures spidering the cranium. It fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. The bottom jaw was missing.

“Bro, you better ditch that,” Phillips said.

“You think it’s an iguana?” Pace said, turning the skull in his hands. He was struck by how light it was, the gaping eye holes. A tiny dinosaur.

“Telling you, you’re inviting malevolence. Saw it on a show.”

“Bet it’s an iguana,” Pace said. He held it up to his ear.

“You losing it?” Phillips’ voice waivered. “Can’t have you losing it."

Hell, maybe he was losing it. But there was something soothing about the soft and dense pocket of air created by the rigid cavity of the skull against his own.

He stood up and brought the skull to his golf bag where it leaned on its kick stand in the rough. He unclipped his towel and wrapped the skull in it, zipped it away in a side pouch.

“You’re keeping that shit?” Phillips said. He looked at Pace with alarm.

“Could be lucky.”

“Or the flip.”

“You believe in that?”

“More than I believe in luck.”

And Phillips was right. Pace shot like shit the rest of the round; sprayed balls all over the course, lost a full sleeve in the water on sixteen. But he chalked it up to being distracted, pulled by a desire to hold the skull, study it, for what he didn’t know.

In the parking lot after the round, Pace handed Phillips the fifty bucks they’d put on the game and didn’t even bother changing out of his spikes.

“Guess that means no chicken poppers,” Phillips said.

“Not this time,” Pace said, closing his clubs in the trunk. “Got something I gotta take care of.”

Phillips sucked his teeth. Pace could tell that Phillips, in his own way, was concerned about him. When Pace’s fiancée left him for her thesis advisor, the closest they came to discussing matters of the heart was when Phillips took him out to get loaded and put his card down when the bill came.

“My advice?” he’d said, clamping a hand on Pace’s shoulder, the edges of his words blurry with drink. “Get laid. Helps the confidence.”

But that was nine months ago, and Pace still hadn’t gotten laid. Not because he didn’t want to, but because he still felt it would betray Cassie somehow, even though she had been the one to betray him.

He could tell none of this to Phillips, of course. So, as he started up his car, he rolled down the window and raised a middle finger.

“Next time I’m going to smoke your ass,” he said.



He needed a place to put it. His place had no mantle. There was only one bookshelf. Someplace central, so he could spot it easily. He had the impulse to collect, to preserve stories. Records and books cluttered his bungalow, stacks on the floor, toppled over in corners. The compulsion had grown stronger since he’d been on his own. It was easy to say he was trying to fill a hole, something fundamentally absent within himself. But it was bigger than that. Pace knew, that on some level, surrounding himself with objects was a way of fending off death, a fortress of preservation. In the end, the objects would outlast him, but, he figured, it couldn’t hurt to layer himself in impermanence.

He placed the skull atop his microwave beside a shaker of red pepper flakes and a bear-shaped bottle of honey. He marveled at how aerodynamic it was: the tapering snout, the delicate lattice of bones that made up the eye sockets. The row of little teeth, almost entirely intact, save for a few gaps along the left jaw.

Iguanas were considered invasive in the area. Friends of his that owned homes bragged about picking them out of their trees with high-powered BB guns. They would send him photos of brilliant green lizards laid out dead on a deck chair. The images made him feel vaguely ill. You guys are fucking with the ecosystem, he would tell them. Well those bastards are fucking with my pH balance, they would say. My pool is practically green with their shit. Then, with a rubbery accent like Scarface, I left one dead on the diving board as a warning to his fam-i-ly.



Pace began speaking to it. At first, he hardly noticed he was doing it at all. He would be in the kitchen, dicing a sweet potato, when he would suddenly realize he’d been having a full-on conversation with three-quarters of an iguana skull. The kinds of things he’d say to Cassie if he ran into her at Ikea. He’d been a good catch? What the fuck did that mean? And how did it feel, really, to be so selfish? The answers came to him not in Cassie’s reedy tang, but in a voice altogether smokier, sexier, one that seemed to insinuate he would always and forever be alone. The one question he could never work up the nerve to ask the skull was how long ago she’d stopped loving him.

Getting rid of it never occurred to him, even after he’d turned down several invitations to win his money back from Phillips, double or nothing.

“The fuck you doing inside all day?” Phillips said to him after one such exchange on the phone.

“Sorting things out,” Pace said. He looked at the skull as he spoke, winked at it.

“You got me worried, bub,” Phillips said. There it was. “Stories like this end with colorless fumes in a garage.”

“The only thing you need to worry about is your short game,” Pace replied.

“Just trash the fucking thing,” Phillips said, and hung up.



There was a difference between solitude and loneliness, Pace knew. The tricky part was treading the line. Cassie always gave him a hard time for not going out more with her and her friends from grad school.

“You’re turning into a hermit,” she’d told him once, touching up her eyelashes in her dresser mirror. By then she hardly looked at him.

What he never let onto was the depths of his anxiety. The hum that seemed to course beneath the surface of his skin.



One day, a month or so after he’d found the skull, he came home from the office to find it missing. Gone. It was no use searching his bungalow; he’d never once moved it from its place atop the microwave. He nearly had a panic attack, clutched his chest and slid to the kitchen floor. When he caught his breath, he went into his bathroom. Sure enough: Phillips had forgotten to close the window.

He sped right over, parked in the driveway behind Phillips’ yellow jeep. He popped his trunk, retrieved his three-wood, the lightest club he owned. He marched up the walkway, pressed the button, heard the hollow chime within. Everyone seemed to think they knew what was best for him. All he wanted now was to be left alone. Was that so fucking hard?

He was startled when Angela answered the door cradling their newborn. She grinned at him wide-eyed, as if he was holding a giant check, and he felt like a fool.

“So good to see you!” she said, and leaned in. He had no choice but to kiss her cheek. She clocked the club in his hand and whispered conspiratorially: “I’ll go get him. He won’t shut up about how much he misses playing with you.”

She disappeared inside and Pace had to swallow the lump in his throat. He retreated down the walkway and got into his car without looking back. He reversed down the driveway and, without much in conscious thought, found himself on the way to the driving range. It was time to get back into playing shape.

Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His work appears in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, HAD, X-R-A-Y, South Carolina Review and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, I’ve Given This a Lot of Thought, is available now via Bottlecap Press. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July ’24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen