#sh_ar

Brain Curds are barely-edited fiction, poetry, or just about anything else - drafted in a day or less. Let me out. Please.

Part 61 of an experiment in progress. Refer to case logs.

The buzz of hair clippers grazed my skull. Yet again, I was in the middle of the monthly routine of shearing my head. It felt like the last time had just happened, but clumps of inch-long hair were scattered on the kitchen floor.

“Don’t move.” Dad held my head still with his hands. “Okay, look down.”

I tilted my head.

“Not that far down!” He moved my head to the position he wanted it in and drew a line on the back of my neck with the clippers.

I struggled to keep still. Maybe I was shaking.

“Do you want to be bald or are you just bad at listening? Hold still!”

It’s a good thing Dad isn’t a real barber, I thought to myself. Though at least if he was, he’d have a job. Lately, money was tight, so he insisted on not paying other people to do what he could do for free. I just wish he knew how to do something other than this.

The whirring stopped and he shoved a mirror in my face. “Pretty good, huh?”

“… Yeah…” It was the same as it was last month, and the month before that. I looked like a fuzzy bowling ball. I got up to go shower and get the itchy hair off, but unfortunately someone was already in there.

“Yikes! Occupied!” A high pitched voice escaped the cracked-open door before it shut. That was Genevieve, merely the latest of many roommates we’d been forced to take on. Dad moved into my room and she got the living room. I had no privacy anymore, so it was just as well that I got rid of the clothes I kept under my bed.

Through some sort of covert accounting, Dad managed to pay our rent with what Genevieve paid for the living room, and usually there was some left over. I figured that was adequate payment, given how much she stunk up the place - not just with her decaying rose perfume, but her wilted lily personality. She was the human equivalent of a large wine glass screen printed to read, ‘I’ll Just Have ONE Drink.’ The walls were covered in her spray-tan handprints, left behind in the course of maintaining her balance.

At least she had a job, though. Dad didn’t seem especially interested in trying to get one anymore. He decided he was fed up with the ‘rat race’ and would rather find some other way to make his money. He split his time between making YouTube videos and selling cheap crap on eBay. Neither looked especially lucrative. I managed to avoid getting pulled into his vortex until summer, when he finally came clean to me that if we didn’t find a way to make money, we were going to be evicted from the apartment I grew up in.

“I’ve tried everything, Trevor. You’re my only hope. I know if we work together, we can do this.”

So, that was how I spent my summer vacation: learning how to drop-ship counterfeit merchandise from a Chinese website. In other words, scamming and up-charging. In his words, ‘running a business.’

By the nature of drop-shipping, we never had our hands on the product unless we were sampling it or got it back as a return. Everything was shipped directly from a warehouse in China. But by the second month, we had a lot more inventory than we could handle. It turned out nobody wanted fake earbuds, or knock-off iPhones, or cheap jewelry made out of rust. We had to hold a yard sale, in the end. And with these ‘goods’ right in front of them, our customers decided they weren’t interested. All we managed to sell was a lamp.

“I’m sure you two will think of something, Michael.” Genevieve nursed a cosmopolitan. “You’ve always scraped by.”

He crossed his arms. “It might help if you paid your rent.”

She disagreed and they got into a fight. She decided to leave and we recaptured the living room for ourselves, though the whole place was such a mess that Dad kept sleeping in my room anyway. Home felt empty and crowded at the same time, and there was no place else to go.

Penned 2025.06.26