Turn 5 of 16

March to the Jones’s and file the complaint. A black women opens the door and you 4 berate her for bring the neighborhood down. She yells back as her body changes to a 52 year old white woman. Her curly hair becomes straight, blonde and styled into the Karen cut. Her outfit becomes a green and blue sleeveless top, white skinny ankle pants and open toed sandals with sunglasses covering her eyes.

Number 11 is the Jones house, and Mrs. Jones answers the door in a headwrap and a bright sundress, a coffee mug in her hand, already wearing the expression of a woman who can see five identical blonde women marching up her walkway and does not like it.

'Excuse me. EXCUSE ME,' all four of them say, in unison, one voice in four mouths, and the sound of it is enough to make her take a step back over the threshold.

'You people have been bringing this whole neighborhood down,' Karen says, list up. 'The unkept lawn. The trash cans out past pick-up. The noise. The general ATTITUDE.'

'This street used to have STANDARDS,' Daisy adds.

'Standards,' the mail carrier confirms, nodding grimly.

'Who is YOU PEOPLE,' Mrs. Jones says, and then she yells back, and that is all it takes. 'I have lived here TWELVE YEARS. My lawn is FINE. You want standards, call the CITY—'

Her voice climbs into the brassy key, and the change takes her standing in her own doorway. Her body reshapes itself, thickening, settling, arriving at fifty-two with lines carving themselves around her mouth. The headwrap slips off as her hair unfurls from its curls, straightening strand by strand, lightening from black through brown to ash blonde, and swings itself into the blunt jaw-length bob — the fifth copy, identical to the rest. Her sundress darkens and re-knits into a green and blue sleeveless top; the hem runs down her legs into white skinny ankle pants; her house slippers flatten into open-toed sandals. Dark sunglasses rise onto her face and stay there.

'—and ANOTHER thing,' she says in the shared voice, setting her mug down on the porch rail like a gavel, 'my trash cans are NONE of your business. But the Hendersons' hedge? THAT is everyone's business. Four inches over the line, I heard. FOUR INCHES.' She steps out onto her walk, tote over her shoulder, list in hand. Five identical women stand in the middle of Maple Ridge Court, and the Hendersons' hedge waits at the end of the street, four criminal inches over the line.