The "Jo Mhama" Case - Entry 8

Staring into the cold, painted-white brick of the Lawson Detective Agency’s bland interior that was now flush with the earthy-brown wash of 38 fedoras, all tilted forward to reveal their varying topside creases, filled me with the kind of excitement usually reserved for acrobats who have managed to escape another night under the big top with nary a scratch. Were those, in all actuality, letters folded into the tops of said hats? Or was I just fictionalizing a connection between these appendix-fedoras and the fool’s gold of communication? Could I be trying too hard?

Knowing full well that the latter was an absolute impossibility, I concentrated on this giant-sized headwear anagram, sipping my Nevada Nucleon coffee, as that was the brain-teaser blend, with a fervor not seen since Martin Heinrich Klaproth discovered uranium; I was sweating like a refrigerated can of peaches in the afternoon sun, and my hands felt like a rookie snake-handler’s on his first full day of practice. The hard part was discerning what were letters and what were attempts at such; to be sure, I had found the word "hat", but so what? It was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack and finding that some of the stalks formed the word "hay".

After the type of consternation that would make a beetle faced with a ball-peen hammer look like a pig-tailed schoolgirl deciding between Tang and Kool Aid, it all came together:

I’m a HaT.

There was most distinctly an apostrophe, what with the curled top of the punctuation and everything, and I knew now for certain what I had suspected all along: Joquain Andreas Mhama was, indeed, a hat. His slowly escaping shape was actually a reversal; his body was returning to its original form, and it became absurdly clear at that moment why his stories took so long to gestate, and the understanding itself made me want to both laugh at the lunacy and cry at the effort: He was a hat learning how to talk like a human.

How? In what kind of world does a fedora just up and decide to become a sentient being? What of this "twin cousin" he had referred to all those weeks ago when he stepped into the Lawson Detective Agency? The questions were many, the answers few, but more of the former cropped up when Randy emerged wearing what looked to a brand-new fedora; why he would choose that exact headwear after being subjected to the horror of growing one out of his appendix was beyond me...unless the one on his head was one of his "own". I heaved a gigantic sigh of relief when he dutifully informed me that no, his current headpiece was not of his mysterious lump’s production. My happiness was short-lived, however, once Randy smiled and told me that he was, in fact, wearing Jo Mhama.

The immoral madness of wearing our client on his head must have short-circuited my brain, for when I awoke I found myself at home, surrounded again by hats, and the awful, repugnant sound of Randy giving birth in the bathroom. It was then, at what I hoped to be the tail end of the case, that I decided never again to cover my head...unless I was burying it in the sand.

Entry 9