Ali A. Ünal

I caught the kid staring at me. He raised his hand timidly and waved, not looking quite sure if I would recognize him. I smiled without showing any teeth and turned back to my dinner. The production crew, of which I was a member, had already been served. The set workers were now getting their food from the caterers. The assistant director, the cameraman, the gaffer and sound guys were eating at the table behind me. I chose to sit and dine alone. They didn’t invite me to join them anyway and why should they?

It was not them but the kid who had welcomed me when I arrived at the set two days ago. Even though he wasn’t even working for our production, he showed me around, took me to the other studios within the complex where two other shows were being filmed, and introduced me to the other set workers. He must have felt the awkward stranger in me on my first day. I was grateful to him for his acceptance and willing to be friends, but I wanted to eat alone. There was an important kitchen scene I had to prepare after the break. I had been dreading it since morning. As a guy who was hired only because I was the close friend of the producer, I thought this was my chance to prove my credentials.

Ten minutes later, though, when the kid came up to my table and asked if he could join me, I nodded and pointed to the chair across me. He wore a filthy painter’s overalls he didn’t bother to change for dinner. I watched him put his food tray on the table, unfold a paper tissue, spread it on his lap and take a large chunk off of his bread.

“Smoke coming out of your brain, Sir Galip,” he said, dipping a piece of bread into his broth. “You thinking a lot.”

The meat balls were floating freely in the broth. He kept the bread in until it was fully soaked. Then he brought it up to his mouth without dripping one single drop. He had a large nose that almost touched the bread.

“Are you from the Black Sea?” I asked.

“True, Sir,” he said, stroking the bridge of his nose. “It always sticks out. Like Pa’s. I got his nose and temper, I did. Mom says the two walks hand in hand up north.”

He grabbed the spoon to scoop as many meat balls as possible in one motion. As I watched him eat, my fork stayed submerged in my spaghetti. I didn’t have it in me to twirl the fork. He ate as if he enjoyed more than food. That was encouraging not for him, but for everyone around him, I thought.

Someone touched my shoulder. The young assistant director from the table behind us had turned sideways in her chair. She handed me the finalized shooting schedule. She said I would have to set up the kitchen scene on my own because the set workers had other jobs to do.

“Don’t be late,” she said, tapping the sheet with her index finger twice. I stared at the exact spot she’d tapped. She was marginally older than my daughter. The kid was trying to catch a glimpse of the schedule. He gave me an anxious smile when our eyes met.

“I got my orders,” I said.

“You did,” he said with a smile. I put the fork down and leaned back. I couldn’t remember the kid’s name. I was sure he’d told me when we met.

“When did you come to İstanbul?” I asked.

“Last year, Sir. Mom and I took the bus from Trabzon.”

“So your parents are here, too?”

“No, Sir. Ma went back home, Allah willing. They can never leave Trabzon… Stubborn as a pair of mules. I’m staying at my uncle’s in Dudullu. Do you know Dudullu? … A shithole of a neighborhood, if you ask me … The power cuts off all the time. Roads are bumpy as hell, too… People say we’ll be better off when the government transfers better houses and roads.”

He never stopped eating as he spoke. His enthusiasm for survival was riveting. A friend of his came and handed the kid his hammer he’d left on the second floor. The kid thanked his friend, propped the hammer against the table, and went back to eating his pasta, twirling the strings majestically.

“Were you a painter back in Trabzon, too?”

“Me? No, Sir. My uncle is a painter himself, so he learned me how to do it… I’m his pupil, you see. May Allah bless him… Or I’d haul cement bags on construction sites for peanuts.”

“You didn’t go to a college, then?”

He smiled an embarrassed smile. There was a hidden joy in his eyes as if he was also proud. “I’ve got lots of friends who been to school, but they ain’t better than me. Some of them doesn’t even have a job.”

If it were another time and if I were the man I had been, I would have embarrassed him in front of everyone for coming to the cafeteria without changing his overalls. I would have called him out as yet another misguided “country man” who came to İstanbul to pursue his dreams, but ended up destroying it. I would have reminded him that İstanbul wasn’t his little town anymore; this was the metropolis he’d decided to migrate to, so he had to follow its rules like everybody else.

I kept my mouth shut. I let him be and eat peacefully. The production crew was now smoking in the special area designated for smokers, throwing glances at me and talking among themselves. I wanted to go there and yell at them that it was okay not to go to college for Allah’s sake; stop being a douchebag for once.

“How old are you, Sir?” the kid asked. He was done with the main course. He pulled the dessert bowl in front of him.

“I’m a lot of years, kid.” I gave a beat and added. “Sorry. I’m 40. Married, or about to get unmarried. Whatever. I have a daughter. I’m 5 foot 5. A mechanical engineer from İstanbul, but here I am, being an assistant to the art director for reason I don’t even know.”

“Did you quit being an engineer because the money wasn’t good?” he asked.

“I quit being me,” I said. Because I wasn’t any good. He nodded. I wondered if he really got it. If he did, I could have asked him to explain it to me.

“You’re like my Pa. He is 39, and I’ll turn 18 this summer, Allah willing. Then they’ll start paying me 20 liras a day. Now I make 15.” He shrugged. “Better than nothing, Sir. The job has lots of benefits. Social security, pension plan, catering, shuttle, and all. Thank Allah, ain’t complaining. İstanbul gives, always gives.”

He ate his rice pudding while throwing furtive glances towards the schedule. I was sure he would have done a better job than me. I could simply grab his hammer and hand him the schedule. I could quit being an assistant just as easily. I was cheap, I had turned cheap. Perhaps, we’d both be better off. After all, I was always a better destroyer than I was a builder. Nobody could now say I was the product of rampant nepotism in the TV industry, either. It would be a fair exchange.

“İstanbul takes too,” I said. “There’s going to be an earthquake in İstanbul, the big one. Almost half the buildings will be demolished. We all might die.”

“It ain’t gonna happen in another fifty years. So science people say.”

“They say that, don’t they? Hope we won’t have to wait that long.”

He looked bewildered for a second, then let out a cheerful and loud laughter. A few people glanced at us. I didn’t care. I joined him to laugh as loudly. I wasn’t going to eat my pudding, so I gave him mine. He beamed.

“You’re like me, Sir,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I help people, too. Allah sees helpers. We’re blood brothers, eh?”

I was not like him, I was not. I was not even like me. I went to college to become a mechanical engineer and had other people paint my houses. I was once happily married. I didn’t migrate to İstanbul, but was born in it. Alas, we were not alike. The kid was just about to start being a man whereas I had to destroy this lump of meat.

When he went quiet, I took the pen, turned the schedule paper over and explained to him what an engineer did even though he hadn’t asked. An engineer designed systems and tolerances so that people like him could drive by bus from Trabzon to İstanbul safely to look for something larger than themselves. Thanks to engineers like me, I told him, he’d stay warm inside his uncle’s apartment in winters, or cool in summers. I demonstrated with arrows and speech bubbles that mechanical engineers built things in a world that was being destroyed constantly by itself. We were walking paradoxes.

He was nodding, but I sensed he was not there yet.

I took the time to explain how our universe moved towards chaos since its conception and there was no way to stop the decay. It was called entropy and found in lakes, craters, marriages. Earthquakes were a part of that, too. TV shows. Breaking hearts, cheatings, many departures. When a wine glass was shattered into pieces, the kid couldn’t have it back; when he cheated his wife and broke her heart one day, and he would because he was becoming a man, there would be no way to mend it; when she kicked him out of her life, and she should, he’d never be able to return to his original life where everything made sense. Even for the engineers, things were irreversible, earthquakes were destructive, film studios were fraudulent. There would be nothing new. The old would be recycled, I told him. It was called entropy, not a mistake, and it was out loud. Fraudulent men was inevitable.

My arrows, words, schematics on the paper looked like a comedy. I folded the filming schedule and put it in my pocket.

“You know Ma digs your dating show,” he said as he finished the second helping of pudding and leaned back with a sigh. “I tell her it’s a ruse, those couples are just actors and all, but she won’t listen to me. She texts votes all the time.” He started picking his teeth. “This work, I’m telling you, Sir, is tough. Real or not, ruse or not, it’s rough, that’s for sure. Cracks even the best man. Be prepared. You work day and night, sometimes two days without seeing your wife and kids and your people. Family goes first.”

Such a graduate of the manhood, such a bright young man. I wanted to shake his hand and welcome him to his bitter world.

The assistant director came back. She was marginally taller than my daughter, but I still couldn’t warm up to her. She said that I should probably head back to the studio and start setting up the kitchen scene, or we’d all fall behind the schedule. Nobody would want that, didn’t they?

“I gotta go back to work,” I said to the kid. “It was great talking to you.”

“Me too, Sir Galip,” he said. “I’ll be upstairs after midnight. I already talked to Yakup. The albino kid, remember? You won’t miss him. Red eyes, snow white, like a vampire. I carry garlic in my pocket, haha. Anyway, find him if you need anything. He’ll fix it for you.” I thanked him. “Of course, Sir. Don’t even mention it. And just don’t fret on things too much. You’ll beat it.”

He went out to the smoking area, walked up to the handrails, and lighted up a cigarette. He propped himself on his elbows and smoked there, all alone. He’d again forgotten his hammer.

Our studio was empty when I got back. I sat at the kitchen table and went over the schedule. Seven couples had already been eliminated on our date show, leaving the final two couples to fight for the ultimate prize of marrying for 500,000 liras. This would be the episode where the vote count would determine the winning couple. The assistant director had written “the kitchen and the dinner have to look impeccable.”

All the windows in our studio were covered by thick black tarps to prevent the outside light from seeping in. The fake windows around the kitchen table had cardboards of the Bosporus Bridge behind them. They showed a bright İstanbul and the morning traffic. I made a mental note to change them to the evening Bosporus traffic for dinner.

The studio was not only empty, but eerily quiet. Even the boom mics dangling from the ceiling like puppets couldn’t record this silence. That was fine. I always liked those unruly mics. They always did their work well and behind the curtain. A bit like engineers. But sometimes, especially with wide lenses, they could get in the shot and ruin the fiction. A director worth his salt would never stop the camera roll, though, because post-production editors could get rid of those mics later by a technique called drawing an eyebrow — one black strip along the upper edge and one black strip along the lower edge, and puff… Mics would become invisible in the frame.

Apart from ours, two other TV shows were being filmed on this side of the complex — one was a historical series on the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the other was a True Blood rip-off. Through the open door, I caught the sight of the cast and crew members of those shows, running back and forth; 17^th century janissaries and post-modern vampires, sometimes joking with each other, sometimes furious or confused, ready to rule or bite. I also saw the kid several times as he walked past in his messy overalls, always carrying a ladder on his shoulder like a memory he couldn’t shake off.

I hadn’t told him that “transferring houses and roads” probably meant urban transformation, which would ultimately destroy his uncle’s apartment and all the others in that dingy, poor Dudullu. It would be done ostensibly as part of the preparation for the big İstanbul earthquake. The aim was actually to force the poor migrant families to go back to their hometowns or at least push them out to the fringes of İstanbul so that luxury apartments could be built for the rich. The kid didn’t need to hear that. He was so kind, cheerful as he ate the second helping of the pudding. Besides, he was going to turn 18 soon. He was going to be a man. He didn’t need to be destroyed just yet.

Fewer and fewer vampires ran the corridor. There was also less war. I hadn’t seen the kid in a while now. The evening shift must have started. Our crew was still nowhere to be seen. There were three cameras set up around the dinner table for parallel shooting and reaction close-ups. The main camera was facing me.

The whole floor was devoid of any sound or movement. Not even time would pass, it seemed. I checked the Bosporus Bridge and yes, it was still morning, and yes, the cars still weren’t moving. I should start arranging the plates, forks and spoons according to my impeccable entropy sketch. I should start building the chaotic kitchen scene. I should change the Bosporus Bridge cardboard soon and made the cars move. I should start building something.

The hammer was sitting on the table. It was a beautiful piece of tool with a nice heft to it and a red handle where the kid had chiseled his name: Hasan. I turned it in my hand — the tool of chaos. I felt home. I was part of it. I was it. I was Hasan, the youthful agent of entropy.

I walked to the door and checked the corridor. All empty. I closed the door and locked it. When I turned to my back, I saw an old man from İstanbul, sitting at the kitchen table, his back hunched over a piece of paper. I was sorry for him. I pitied him. The cars were moving on the cardboard, the Bosporus Bridge was bringing the city’s two sides together, the main camera was rolling, and the mics were recording. The fraud was on.

I tightened my grab around the hammer’s handle and started towards the old man. He would not hear coming. I would surely get in the shot, but didn’t mind. The editors would know what to do. I hoped Hasan’s mother would appreciate the scene and vote for me.

ALI A. ÜNAL is a writer from Turkey. He received his MFA in creative writing from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has several publications in his native language. His first publication in English, “Everybody Needs Some Saving,” has appeared in the Quarterly West. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

K. Noel Moore

After Nellie started working at the Wisteria Street Preschool, they gave her a grace period of two months before they sent Remy home with her. That was a long time, Greer told her. Most new hires didn’t get that long. If she wasn’t used to the idea of Remy by then, it might be best for her to find a different place of work.

She wasn’t used to the idea. In fact, it creeped her out more than it had at the start. But there was nowhere else willing to hire her, so she played along. She agreed to be the little ghost’s mother, just for one night.

The Twos class at Wisteria Street had eleven children in it, but no teacher other than Nellie would acknowledge that fact. Twelve seats were put out for snacks, twelve cots for naps. Twelve heads were counted at recess. Twelve names were called out as parents arrived — ”Look who’s come to see you!” Sarah, Alexei, Natalie, Emi, Grace, Tanner, Oliver, Roman, Tavien, Luke, Jonathan. Remy. On her lunch break her second day there, Nellie Googled mass hysteria on her phone. She Googled communal grieving rituals and death rituals worldwide to see if there was any place where this practice of pretending the dead were yet alive was normal. (There was; there were several, in fact. In certain parts of Indonesia, for example, families might keep treating their dead as living for twenty years. Giving food or clothes to ancestor spirits was the norm in the Eastern world; in the Western world, one only saw it a few times a year, on Day of the Dead or Samhain, but one might see it.) She decided her coworkers were crazy, but she was willing to play along. She had nowhere else to go.

It took about three weeks before she started to go crazy along with them.

Nellie had never believed in ghosts, but this twelfth child wasn’t a ghost, exactly. He couldn’t be. Even an apparition had presence, it took up space; little Remy was an absence. He was a hollowed-out space in the air where a child should have been. If you looked closely, maybe you could detect light bending, a shimmer like movement. Otherwise, he was only felt, as a nagging sensation that something was missing from the room.

The day she was to take him home, Nellie Googled tulpa effect. She Googled explaining hauntings and found plenty of examples.

She felt him as she bleached every surface twice and rearranged shelves of toys. Emi was the last to go that Thursday. Emi’s mother was German, and she spoke with a thick accent that sometimes made her incomprehensible, but Nellie liked her best out of all the parents. She was calm; she was kind. She didn’t ask too many questions or set too many rules for her daughter’s caretakers.

“How are you, Nellie?” she asked. “You look tired.”

“Ich bin ein bisschen müde, Frau Kellerman,” she replied. Nellie had taken German in high school. She didn’t remember much, but the Kellerman parents appreciated her efforts at small talk anyway. They appreciated that Nellie was teaching Emi’s little friends to count in German. Eins, zwei, drei, fier, fünf….

Elf Kinder. Zwölf Kinder. Eleven children and Remy.

“More than a little bit, I think. Have the children been giving you much trouble?”

“The usual. You know what that feels like, I’m sure.”

Frau Kellerman laughed. “Yes, I do. Believe me, I do.”

Nellie wanted to ask her about Remy. Had she ever taken him home? Did she know when the custom had started? Did she believe in ghosts, or did she think it was insanity, or did she accept it as a legitimate communal ritual? But these were personal questions, and far beyond what Nellie had the vocabulary in any language to ask.

She waved goodbye to Frau Kellerman and Emi, then crossed over to the corner where she felt Remy’s presence. Thought she felt it. She took a deep breath and reminded herself to go with it. What you think you feel, you feel. What you think you see, you see. You can hypothesize about tulpas in the morning. Tonight, if you want to keep your job and your sanity, everything is real.

“Ready to go, sweetie?” she chirruped. “You’re going to stay with Miss Nellie tonight. I think we’ll have fun together, won’t we?” Nellie extended her hand.

She gathered his bag and his car seat (who had they originally belonged to?), and walked out with a closed empty fist hanging at her side. The seat barely fit in her tiny Spark.

“You’ll be okay, Remy,” she cooed as she wrestled it into the backseat. “It’s only a short drive. You’ll be just fine.”

She drew the seatbelt tight, and she drove him home.

Nellie had no trouble cooking dinner for a child; her diet was already the rough equivalent of a ten-year-old’s. She cooked up buttered noodles and carrots — Remy’s she steamed and mashed, but hers she ate raw. She wondered what to do with his food. Eat it? Or leave it untouched, like an offering to the gods? (Come to think of it, what exactly did people do with offerings to the gods?)

In the end she left it. She didn’t even clean it up; she decided to do it in the morning, when Remy was gone. In case he wants it later. When he was gone — when someone else had him — she’d throw the food away.

There was nowhere in her tiny home for him to sleep. She made up a cot for him out of blankets, and decided she’d sleep on the floor next to him. Nellie couldn’t bear the thought of laying a child down in such an uncomfortable bed, while she slept on a mattress herself. At least on the floor he couldn’t roll around and hurt himself — could he? Maybe he could. Remy had once died from SIDS. (No, he hadn’t. That was a fact unspoken, and a fact unspoken was no fact at all.)

Nellie knew she wouldn’t be sleeping much that night.

For a preschool teacher, Nellie’s knowledge of lullabies was sorry. The simple nursery songs didn’t stick in her head the way other teachers complained they did. They washed right over her. When the time came to rock the baby to sleep, then — after playing blocks with him after dinner — she turned to the classics her father had sung to her. “Bye Bye Blackbird.” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Hummed half-remembered versions of Sinatra and Dean Martin. Nellie’s father had never known many nursery songs, either. (The man could sing, though. He sang like he should have been on Broadway.)

Nellie sat with him, rocking him in her arms and swaying. They fell asleep like that, with Nellie lying on her back, Remy on her chest. Her fears were assuaged, in the end: when she woke, the weight that wasn’t quite a child remained, unreal and alive as anything, on her chest.

K. NOEL MOORE is an Atlanta-based genre writer and poet. They have two historical fantasy novellas, ‘Undertown’ (July 2018) and ‘Incendiary Devices,’ (December 2019) up to buy on Kindle, and work available to read 100% free all around the journal-sphere. You can find them on twitter @mysterioustales; feel free to ask about their weird and wild experiences with ghosts, children, or any combination thereof.

Chris Stanton

Ellen’s husband Pete died in February. He owned and operated his own plant nursery, and there were still pots of ivy and succulents all over the house that were a constant reminder of him. Ellen was having trouble keeping them alive, but she didn’t want to throw them away, because she thought that would be disrespectful to his memory. So her grieving process had been traumatic and never ending.

On top of that, Barb — her stylist of thirty-one years — retired just before Thanksgiving and moved to Boca Raton. So Ellen, who had gotten her hair done every Saturday morning at 9:30 for as long as she could remember, had to find a new place to get spruced up each week. This was a distressing dilemma.

Denise, Ellen’s grown daughter who lived on the other side of town, wasn’t sympathetic. “Why do you need a perm so often?” she asked. “You’re destroying your hair! Just let me do it. I’ll come by and trim your bangs when you really need it.”

Ellen’s gray hair was awfully thin, but it did have a gentle curl that gave her bright hazel eyes an extra spark, so she knew it would be tough to find someone who did it justice, like Barb had. She also wanted to remind her daughter that Barb had been a trusting confidant and shoulder to cry on during her many years of marriage to Pete, and she had been particularly supportive during his illness. But Denise had always been stubborn and it wasn’t worth trying to explain it to her. She kept her hair in a perpetual Dorothy Hamill bob that required little to no maintenance, and she had a loyal husband to lean on. So Ellen changed the subject and tried to focus on having a nice Thanksgiving with her family, even though Denise burned the stuffing.

That night, she had trouble getting to sleep, and it wasn’t because she missed Pete lying next to her, snoring gently. It was because she had decided what she was going to do next.

Dandelion Crossing was opening the next morning, and it was incredibly close to her house; it would take less than ten minutes to walk there. Ellen still remembered when the spot had been a vast field full of clover and wildflowers. A woman at the Bingo had told her that there was a salon inside the mall that would be a completely viable option for her hairdressing needs, so Ellen decided she would go there to scope out the situation. She was a retired nurse and felt it was important to get a full picture before making any decision.

Ellen considered driving there, but she felt nervous maneuvering her 1974 Chevy Impala around crowds of excited shoppers in the parking lot. So she put on a pair of comfortable shoes and left the house right before Press Your Luck started.

She had written down the name of the salon — New Attitude — on a sticky note, and she went right to the first security guard’s desk she saw to ask where it was. It turned out to be across the way from an arcade where throngs of teenagers milled about like ants around an ice cream cone melting on the ground.

The place was brightly lit and the receptionist had teased hair that lifted off her forehead like she’d just stuck her fingers in an electric socket. She looked like a spokesmodel from Star Search.

“Hi there,” she said. “Come on in. What can we do for you?”

Ellen looked past her with considerable trepidation. She saw four stations where stylists were at work, as well as a row of hair dryers and sinks. Television monitors played a music video from a cheerful androgynous man who was singing about a church of the poison mind. Ellen wasn’t sure what that meant.

“I need a perm,” she said quietly. “Do you do those here?”

The receptionist looked at her as if she’d said a word in Russian.

“A permanent,” Ellen clarified.

The receptionist grinned. “Our policy here at New Attitude is to give our clients a one-on-one consultation to determine your needs and subsequently recommend a course of action before we move forward.”

“Am I in court?” Ellen asked.

“No, ma’am. But after your appointment, you’ll definitely have a new attitude!”

Before Ellen could counter, the receptionist called to the back. “Timothy! You have a guest!”

Ellen was seventy-five years old and even though she was used to high-pressure medical situations, she still felt slightly uncomfortable when things moved too fast. Before she knew it, an extremely tall person entered the reception area. His hair was dyed blackish-purple and pointed in several hundred different directions at once, like a porcupine. He wore heavy dark eyeliner and his t-shirt had an image of a screaming zombie on it. It read: THE DEAD LOVE BRAINS.

“I — ” Ellen began.

“Come on back,” Timothy said. And before she knew it, Ellen was following the Gothic scarecrow to his station.

Truth be told, Barb had always done Ellen’s hair in the front room of her house, giving Ellen an excellent view out the wide bay window of her front yard and the cars driving by in their quiet suburban neighborhood. She wasn’t used to a proliferation of mirrors and bright lights magnifying each wrinkle and liver spot, or the intense smell of hairspray. But that was the situation as the person named Timothy escorted her to her styling chair.

Ellen sat down and took a deep breath. She had spent her life dealing with patients of all kinds at the hospital, but men and women who dressed like they had just risen from their coffins were a relatively new thing, as Phil Donahue had discussed in a recent episode. New Wave Punks — if she was getting the name right — didn’t frighten her, but she had no idea how to connect with them, or if they even wanted to exist in the same world as the people around them.

“My name’s Timothy,” he said, leaning against the counter and smiling a tentative smile. He wore tight black jeans and a studded leather belt, along with combat boots that he had probably stolen off a dead person in an alley.

“Ellen,” she replied. His station was in the corner and there were no personal touches anywhere — no coffee mugs or photos of his family taped onto the corner of the mirror. It looked sterile and lonely.

“You seem scared,” Timothy said. “I want you to know that I graduated second in my class in cosmetology school, and I worked at Astor Place Hairstylists for just over a year.”

Ellen didn’t know what that was. “Why did you leave?” she asked.

“I ran out of money,” he replied. “New York is really expensive, even when you’re living in a basement with six roommates.”

Ellen shivered at that thought. “Are you originally from here?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m living with my parents until I can get back on my feet,” he said. “I’m real grateful to be getting another shot.”

Ellen felt herself sweating under her bra straps. The television behind her started playing a music video featuring men singing about a union of the snake. “Do you have photos of past clients of yours?” she asked.

“No ma’am,” he replied. “I guess I should start doing that.”

Ellen told herself then that there were other salons around the city. She didn’t mind driving, if there was plenty of daylight. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” she ventured.

Timothy smiled again. “Your hair is really nice,” he said. “Can I touch it?”

After a moment of debate, Ellen nodded. His fingers were surprisingly gentle as he lifted her hair, then let it settle back. “Daphne mentioned you’d like a permanent,” he said. “I’m fully qualified to do them.”

“My last stylist knew how to give really delicate ones,” Ellen told him. “I don’t want it to come out looking frizzy.”

“Agreed,” Timothy said. “Frizzy is for Nina Blackwood only.”

Ellen had no idea who that was. She thought about Pete, how he would patiently sit in his living room chair after work as she tried out new recipes for dinner. How he never complained, even when they both knew she’d screwed up.

“All right,” she finally said. “Let’s get to it.”

Timothy did a horrifying job on her permanent. Ellen looked like a grandma version of Little Orphan Annie.

“What do you think?” he asked proudly, standing behind her chair as they looked at the finished product in the mirror.

“I — ” Ellen began. She reached up and tried to tuck some of the Medusa-like curls behind her ears. Timothy waited with expectant eyes that were heavy with dark liner.

“I guess it’ll take some getting used to,” she ventured.

There was a flash of disappointment on his face. “Sure,” Timothy replied. “It’s a change. But I really think you’re going to turn some heads.”

Ellen wanted to say that she would, but for the wrong reasons. But she decided that would be too cruel. “How much do I owe you?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

“You don’t like it, do you?” he asked. “You can be honest.”

Ellen took a look at him standing there behind him, the dejection causing his shoulders to slump, his dark clothes magnifying his pale skin. Even the zombie on his t-shirt suddenly looked disappointed.

“I love it,” she told him.

Ellen got home in time to have a late lunch and watch a bit of As the World Turns. She had stopped watching the show regularly years ago, so she didn’t recognize much of the cast.

The rest of the afternoon she did her vacuuming and dusting, but she kept going into the bathroom to check her hair, hoping that her opinion of it would change. It didn’t.

But on her fourth visit, she noticed the potted cactus on the windowsill. That particular part of the house only received sun for a brief time early in the morning, so the plant just wasn’t doing well. She remembered a similar one that Pete had kept in his office at the nursery that bloomed beautifully in shades of purple and pink.

There seemed to be even more shoppers at the mall the following day. Ellen resisted the urge to wear a hat during her walk over. She tried to walk proudly and without regard for how people looked at her as they went past.

Daphne looked up from her desk as Ellen approached. “Well hello,” she said. “It looks like somebody’s got a new attitude.”

Ellen was momentarily distracted by the receptionist’s enormous geometric earrings, but she held fast. She held her plastic bag carefully. “Is Timothy in?” she asked. “I’ve got a gift for him.”

Daphne raised one eyebrow, almost imperceptibly. “Oh?” she asked. “Let me check for you, sweetie.”

Ellen resisted an urge to trip her as she swooshed past in a swirl of pastels. Instead, she waited until she heard Timothy calling her name.

“Hey,” he said as she walked over to him. His client was sitting under a hair dryer nearby. “Is everything okay?” he asked.

“This is for you,” she told him, and handed him the bag. “Be careful. It’s sharp.”

Timothy carefully pulled the cactus plant out of the bag. “Righteous!” he said. “I’ve never owned a plant before!”

“I’ve had trouble getting it to bloom,” Ellen told him. “There’s so much light in here that I think it might do well. And you need a little personal touch on your station. I’m a grandma, so it’s okay for me to say things like that,” she added.

Timothy smiled his genuine, crooked smile. “Yes ma’am,” he told her. “I’m going to take excellent care of it. And maybe you’ll give me another chance.”

“That was never a question in my mind,” Ellen replied. She smiled back, because she realized it was the truth.

CHRIS STANTON is a creative writer and artist in Los Angeles. His first novel Kings of the Earth was recently published and has been nominated for the 2020 TopShelf Book Award. He also created the graphic novel Nick Pope with the late Christopher Darling, and his short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, most recently Orson’s Review. You can check out more of his work at christopher-stanton.com.