The woman who cuts my hair says she’s been hearing noises in her apartment by Leslie Walker Trahan
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus short: Trahan’s succinct sentences take unexpected, peculiar, and nimble turns, pulling the reader into the parallel worlds that exist in between and underneath the sentence, the story, and our strange, day-to-day lives.
The woman who cuts my hair says she’s been hearing noises in her apartment
What kind of noises? I ask. Regular noises, she says, like the sound of someone living. Coffee brewing, water running, a cat purring. There are many explanations for what might be happening, but the woman who cuts my hair believes the door to another universe has cracked open in her apartment. She believes the noises she is hearing are sounds from a different life. Her life. A life where she drinks coffee and has a cat. She unhooks the frock covering my body and dusts it off while I look in the mirror. I think about telling her that when I was twelve I followed a set of footprints in the fresh snow outside our house until they disappeared in the middle of the street, and I wondered then if it wasn’t something like that. But I don’t. I slide my credit card into the little white square, and she gives me a slip of paper with a date three months into the future. I drive home. For dinner, there is frozen lasagna, red wine. I turn on the TV while I eat, and a show I used to watch when I was a child is on. It’s the episode where the family dog disappears. The parents go to the pound and get a new dog that looks like the old one, but the old one has already found his way home. The kids are inside the house with their lost dog, and the parents are walking up to the front door with the new dog, the fake dog, and they open the door.
Leslie Walker Trahan is a writer from Austin, Texas. Her stories and prose poems have been featured in Quarterly West, New Delta Review, Gone Lawn, Cheap Pop, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other publications. You can find her online at lesliewtrahan.com.
