Leopold’s alarm clock rang at 6:30, same as every morning. He awoke slowly, blinking the sleep from his eyes just as he always did. However, once his vision cleared, Leopold saw that he was in rather unfamiliar territory. He was staring at his own ankle.
He surmised that his body was not contorted into some freakish position; rather his head had become separated from his neck in the night and was now lying at the foot of the bed.
     He wondered how this peculiar event could have occurred. He wondered how he was still thinking and seeing while being decapitated. He had a lot of questions, but knew he didn’t have time to answer any of them. He had to get to work. In a panic, he reached over and grabbed his head, attaching it to his neck with a scarf. Good thing it’s cold out, he thought.
     Racing out of his flat, Leopold rushed to the train station. He could hear the subway doors open just as he went through the turnstile. Leopold dashed down the stairs to the platform and into the train car as the doors closed, just barely making it inside. Leaning backwards to catch his breath, Leopold began to worry about his situation. How would he explain this to his boss? He should really be seeing a doctor instead of going to his job at the downtown construction site, but he figured he would just have to handle that at the end of the day.
      As the train pulled into his stop, Leopold began to move towards the opposite side of the train to get off, until he felt a slight tugging at his throat. What a day. First his head falls off, and then he gets his scarf caught in the subway doors. Leopold began to cry for help, but none of the other passengers heard him, as they were all pumping music directly into their eardrums via headphones. Unable to move without detaching his head, Leopold just had to wait until the train arrived at a stop that opened on his side of the train.
     Running into the Elm Place construction site forty-five minutes late, Leopold had to track down the foreman, Clarence Pierce, who had quit waiting for him twenty minutes earlier. Clarence was busy supervising the operation of a forklift, and made a very big show of disregarding Leopold’s throat-clearings and utterances of “excuse me” until the forklift was operating smoothly. Turning slowly and deliberately, Clarence faced Leopold and glared at him. 
    “What do you want?” he said brusquely.
     “I’m deeply sorry I am late, but I had some train troubles,” Leopold explained. “I wanted to know what my assignment is for today.”
     “Since you’re late, you have been transferred to riveting duty,” Clarence replied with noticeable satisfaction.
     Determined to hide his dismay, Leopold nodded and headed towards the lift to take him to the top of the soon-to-be Puck Building. Reaching the peak of the metal skeleton, he saw that his two least favorite colleagues, Ernest and Lawrence, were also riveters for the day and had already gotten comfortable, talking loudly over the pop music blaring from Ernest’s boom box.  

       Attempting to be friendly, Leopold waved to them and got busy pounding rivets into the I-beams next to him. By this time, he had practically forgotten that his head was completely severed, and was rudely awakened to this truth when a steel lunchbox fell from the floor above and hit him directly in the skull, knocking his cranium five stories into a trough on the ground. He felt a hand reach down and pluck his head from the dusty water, toweling it off. As the mysterious hand turned Leopold’s detached skull around, he saw that it was part of an arm, which was attached to the body of Clarence.
    In a last-ditch effort to keep his job and prevent his coworkers from screaming in fear at the sight of an animated scalp, Leopold began to describe the predicament he was in. As he began explaining how his scarf had gotten stuck in the train doors, nearly pulling his head off, Leopold burst into tears.
    “Is that why you were late this morning?” Clarence asked, and Leopold attempted to nod, a difficult feat for a disconnected head.
“In that case, your position here is safe,” Clarence assured him. Bewildered, Leopold asked how that could be and how no one was shocked at the sight of him. “Oh, we are used to this kind of thing,” Clarence responded. “In fact, everyone is.” With a quick turning of his skull and a squishing sound, Clarence grasped his own head in his other hand.
     “Don’t worry, Leopold,” he said with a knowing smile. “You’re not all that different from everybody else.”