“Four-thirty on a Friday afternoon and every chair is filled.” Welcome to a nail salon where everything is about to change. Beth Sherman’s “Something Less Dangerous” brings us four perspectives on a tragedy in less than a thousand words.
-The Editors
The Off-Duty Cop
Donna gets her acrylic nails touched up every two weeks at Lulu Island, the table near the door next to the wooden cat whose tail jerks back and forth like a metronome. Today, the red on the lilies is chipping, the tiny leaves smeared, her cuticles ragged. You staying safe? asks Viv, the usual joke. Whose head you bust this week? And Donna tells her it’s been pretty boring actually – traffic tickets, a court appearance, driving the patrol car, one domestic violence call where the wife refused to press charges. Soothing to have someone pull on her fingers without wanting to nuzzle her breasts, corkscrew her legs. Not that she doesn’t love her husband. But she prefers a gentler touch. Viv’s hands smell like cucumbers. As Viv massages first one palm, then the other, Donna’s knuckles relax. Viv’s knees touching hers like four sparrows in a nest. She feels tension slip from her neck. The cat’s tail ticks off the seconds. Above Viv’s head, a poster of mountains in Korea, lush green, serene.
The Salon Owner
Four-thirty on a Friday afternoon and every chair is filled. The room hums with voices. Snatches of sentences Viv doesn’t pay attention to. She should hire another girl. Not enough staff for the mani-pedis. She should get a bigger place, leave this strip mall where the sandwich shop went under and the laundromat is failing. Maybe put a massage table in the back where the girls eat lunch and re-heat the towels. Her kids will have finished their homework by now and started eating the Pepero biscuits she left for them. Next time we do leopard print, okay, she says to Donna, pointing to a laminated book. This girl’s too pretty to be a cop, thinks Viv. She should have been a lawyer or an architect. Something less dangerous. God forbid Viv’s own kids wear a uniform when they grow up. With her brush she smooths out the imperfections in Donna’s painted lilies, evening out the red. Focused, happy. Outside, a crashing sound, metal colliding with glass and as the car shatters the plate glass window, hurtling through the salon, flattening everything in its path, Viv remembers she never made dinner.
The Driver
The bumble and rush of traffic on Deer Park Avenue, pissant idiots slowing him down, his SUV threading between other cars, passing them like it’s a video game, and he’s winning he’s winning, skiing through red lights as the idiot cars honk and it’s better than the too big silence at home, his broken easy chair, his wife leaving so long ago she doesn’t look like her picture anymore, taking the kids, the three of them fleeing the dead end house with the empty bottles in the kitchen sink, littering the bathtub, piled in the trash, and there are two red lights, four lines of traffic, the double yellow line wobbling, stop honking you wonkerdoodles his heart flibertitipsit, eyeballs blinking, stomach riding the loop de loop and he’s going so fast he’s faster than the wind faster than his poor body alone in this world the car spinning like that time they went to the beach with the kite, clipping a tree skidding across the parking lot, slamming through glass before everything slides to black.
The Clerk
It sounded like a bomb went off. I ducked under a table. Honest to God, I did. And when I went outside to see what happened, the window next door wasn’t there anymore. That guy drove all the way through the salon and crashed into a dumpster in the back parking lot. On TV, they said he was doing 70. Can you believe it? They said he’d had 19 beers, although how they could tell it was 19 and not 18 or 22, I don’t know. He pleaded Not Guilty, the jerk. My God, it was awful. Blood everywhere. People mowed down in the middle of the afternoon when all they were doing was having their nails done. The owner, Viv, she used to say come in anytime, honey, your cuticles need a trim. But I never did. And that cop who was killed? She worked in New York City in a bad neighborhood and here she dies getting fake nails. We closed early. On the news, they showed the body bags being wheeled out, one after another. Four dead, 14 injured. Some poor little girl lost a leg. It could have been me, you know? That’s what I told the TV reporters after. It could have been me sitting there instead of here with the washers and dryers and all the lost socks. Feeling sorry for myself cause I never went to college and I’m in a dead-end job and I don’t have a boyfriend. Well, that part I didn’t say out loud. He could have veered left and crashed into our window.
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Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.