Turn 4 of 5

Ask the woman what her name is her skin color changes to white, her curly hair becomes staright, blonde and gets styled in the karen cut that you and karen both have. her face and body start to change to match yours and karens. her baggy clothes become a white shirt, black slim jeans, brown cardigan and open toed sandals. sunglasses soon cover her eyes. she then replies her name is karen

"What's your name?" Karen asks, pen hovering over the complaint form, because every good grievance needs a responsible party. "It's — " The woman stops. Her free hand goes to her hair, and the frost-white lightening pours down through it, curl loosening, straightening, reassembling into a stacked blonde bob identical to the two already on the porch. Her skin lightens like a photograph developing in reverse, her face sharpening and settling into the same mid-fifty architecture as the other two, though she was thirty perhaps a minute ago. The hoodie and sweatpants dissolve and re-form: a white shirt, black slim jeans, a brown cardigan, open-toed sandals. Sunglasses arrive on her face as though they had been waiting nearby all morning. "Karen," she says, and her voice has climbed into the same register, the same tuned-to-complaint frequency. "Karen. Wow. That's — that's actually my name. It fits so much better than my old one, which was, honestly, who even remembers." "Welcome," Karen says warmly, and hands her the pen without being asked, the way one hands a scalpel to a colleague. Karen signs the acknowledgment copy in handwriting that matches the other two signatures, loops and all, and then looks down at the hedge with fresh eyes. "I KNEW that hedge was over the line," she says. "I've known for three years. I just never had the — the vocabulary. The form. Is there a form? I'd like to see the form." "There's a binder," the first Karen says, and the three of them turn toward the door together — and that is when the phone inside the house starts ringing, and keeps ringing, and a man's voice from somewhere deep inside calls out that it's the HOA board, again, and they've been trying to reach somebody all morning.