Turn 5 of 5

He sees them as he panic while you three start yelling at him for being disrespectful. He yells back as his body and face change to female just like you three. His skin color becomes white as his hair becomes blonde and styled in the same Karen cut as the three. Her outfit becomes a blue jean jacket, black slim pants and open toed sandals. Sunglasses cover her face as she becomes another karen.

The phone stops ringing, which is worse than the ringing, because it means somebody answered it. Footsteps come down the hall inside, and the door swings wider, and a man is standing there — the Henderson husband, phone pressed to his ear, mid-sentence into it: 'No, I don't know where my wife is, she's just standing on the — ' He sees them. All three of them. Identical, sunglasses, arms crossed in formation on his porch, and his face does the arithmetic of a man realizing he is outnumbered on his own property.

'Can I help you?' he says, in the voice of a man who desperately does not want help.

'Disrespectful,' Karen says.

'Talking on the phone while your hedge is four inches over the line,' Karen says.

'And that tone,' Karen says. 'That tone is not good for the neighborhood.'

He yells back — something about trespassing, something about his own porch, something about calling the police — and the three Karens absorb the shouting the way a hedge absorbs wind, unmoved, already composing rebuttals. And then the yelling changes key halfway through, climbs, thins, and becomes a woman's voice mid-syllable. His shoulders draw in and reshape. His skin lightens like developing film, his hair pours blonde and stacks itself into the cut, and the flannel work shirt resolves into a blue jean jacket, black slim pants, open-toed sandals. Sunglasses snap into place over eyes that were mid-roll and now hold perfectly still.

The phone is still in her hand. She looks at it, then at the three of them, radiant with discovery.

'Karen,' she says, to the phone and to the porch alike. 'My name is Karen, and you people have been AVOIDING me.'

'Yes,' the first Karen says, hand over her heart. 'Yes. That's exactly it.'

On the phone, a tired male voice is asking, very slowly, whether there is anyone at 114 Maple Ridge Court who is authorized to speak for the association.