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Agency Hat
"What are you supposed to be?" His friend asks.
"It's my dad's hat," Mono whispers, trying to shrug his hat brim upwards by wiggling his brows. His friend tips his safari hat up and grins.
"Cool. I'm Stiff Irvin, the alligator guy,"
"Class," Miss Yeh calls, "I know you're excited for Occupation Day, but I have someone I want you to meet."
She waves someone in at the open door as every child the class cranes to see who it is. For a while, all out the door is the sound of movement in the hallway.
"Come on, sweetheart, come meet your new friends," Miss Yeh coaxes.
A small figure rounds the corner of the door frame, and a girl, just noticeably smaller than the rest of them, inches her way in.
She makes her way to the front of class, shoulders purposefully squared like a showdown, and says nothing.
"What are you supposed to be?" Mono calls, when the silence goes a beat too long. It’s the late of Spring and the sun was nipping their cheeks red with heat, but the girl kept her thick raincoat on, hood and all.
"I'm Six," she says, and nothing else.
"But we're in third grade," someone else calls.
"No," she says, not lowering the hood of her yellow raincoat, "my name. It's Six."
Another child raises her hand, and without waiting to be called, asks "Why?"
"Now," Miss Yeh says, "why don't we let her settle in before-"
"That's how many times dad tried to kill me before I was born," she replies.
Silence consumes the class.
"Cool!" Mono says, "I'm Mono, an’ my friend is Stiff Irvin the alligator man. Come sit with us?”
Mokujin mask
"Got a partner?" Mono says instead of hello, and Six punches him in the left shin.
"You know, this is why the answer to that question is always 'no'," Mono says, his pained expression hidden behind his papier mâché helmet.
Six only rolls up her script in her fist and sulks harder into her knees. With foam daisy petals around her face, she wilts into the drab walls outside the auditorium. Mono pulls her shoulders back before her sulk evolved into an escaping act.
"C'mon," he says decisively, "let's go rehearse."
Six channels her entire body weight into her ankles, dragging across the tiles.
"Yeah, your dad isn't coming, neither is mine. Who cares? We practiced all month, and when everyone's taking family photos after we can scramble for the pizza buffet--"
“T’mny’pl” Six mutters, more to the felt leaves on her sleeve than to Mono.
“Too many people?” Mono translates as he swings the door open, loudly so the worried flowers lined up on the stage could hear.
Six jumps to her feet and stomps on his rolled-up newspaper roots. Such indelicacy! With what was clearly information meant just for him too!
“You can say your lines behind me,” Mono offers, looking sideways at Miss Yeh. She nods her head encouragingly.
Six casts her surly glare and the rest of the flowers on stage nod like a breeze in the field. Her stormy temper’s reputation spread like the flu in a kindergarten after a few months; along came the growing recognition of Mono as her revetment.
She stomps to the stage, looking over her cold shoulder to glower at Mono, asking him to lead the way, since he had the bright idea of daring to include her in this obviously awful idea.
Mono grabs her hand, ignoring all her frostiness, and pulls her up to stage, where she promptly ducked her flowery head behind his boxy, cardboard, tree trunk.
She sings beautifully, and Mono sways so well to her rhythm that they both get compliments from all the teachers on the way to the cold pizza waiting backstage.
Football hat
Home team lost again, which isn’t much skin off their nose (except for Rick from Class C) – Pale City Middle School lost so regularly that they have ice cream delivered to the first aid tent every game with extra ice packs.
But this year was special – The Bullies of PCMS played a team with a quarterback that brought a hoard of talent scouts with him. Their match was televised for the first time in years, and they sent the star player himself offscreen in a stretcher.
All because of Six, but Mono’s game-plan earned him a spot under the victory Gatorade shower.
“They didn’t notice,” Rick wheezes through his empty gap where his front teeth were, “I can’t believe they didn’t know they were playing a girl,”
“You gotta eat more, man,” someone in the crowd says, shoving Mono more ice-cream, “or puberty’s gonna ditch you like your dad,”
“Shut up,” Mono barks, elbowing his rowdy teammates after grabbing his ice-cream, “I’m eating fine,”
“Yeah, yeah, we know who you're eating,” another team mate says, sending Mono stumbling a foot forward with a friendly jostle. Mono meets his eyes only to roll his own.
“We’re not like that.” Mono repeats.
He’s laughed out the victory circle with ice cream for his “girlfriend”.
Six, for her part, sat out the spotlight, comfortably planted on a concrete chock block, stretching out her sore feet in the empty parking lot.
“Good game, Six,” Mono says, holding out the two ice cream cups.
“Strawberry,” she replies, shifting so Mono could sit by her. Then they sit in silence.
Their conversations start and end with Mono making stories from her body language and not much more. Tonight he sits, the floodlights at the stadium too bright to see stars, and wonders if she liked strawberry at all, or if she thought boys like him didn't like strawberries.
Well, then again, strawberries were gender neutral, kind of like the size XS football uniform. Anyway, Six never seemed the sort to care about this sort of thing – what suited who and the reasons why. She liked what she liked, she does what she likes.
She likes Mono. Just not like that. Or maybe she did, but not that much?
Not like Mono likes her.
(Or maybe she did?)
Mono makes stories out of nothing, a habit from childhood as a latchkey kid. With books and toys and not much else – he played house with himself as parent and child. He dressed the barbies in what he thought looked best, and built the most elaborate tracks for his toy cars.
Then when he figures out the television remote, Mono finds out his father is the most popular late night TV host in the state. He talks with politicians, celebrities, the old lady selling flowers down the lane, the men who fix holes in the streets.
Anyone. He makes a story out of anyone, stories that invented new colours for his viewers. His viewers that would never know Mono existed, if his father could help it.
When he’s back from his thoughts, Six is asleep on his shoulder.
Strawberry, sweat and this summer heat. Mono wonders if his father had muses, and if they kept him up at night with stories untold.
Newsie Hat
So this is where she lives, Mono thinks, heart thumping at the asscrack of dawn when he finishes his paper route down the dingiest street in the neighbourhood. Six is there, barefooted in the shining grass, the streetlamp catching glimmers off empty beer bottles.
In the air wafts the seductive stench of cigarette butts, and Six approaches him, staring at the rolled-up newspaper in his clammy hands.
“No one here can afford that. This is Maw Lane,” she says, “Maw Boulevard is down the street and left.”
“So it is,” Mono replies, not looking at his map once. He nods his head at the lit windows behind Six and asks, “late night?”
“They didn’t sleep,” Six replies, looking down at what was certainly a shattered meth pipe by her dented mailbox.
Mono finds his mouth dry at the implications. So much for inheriting any of his father’s famed charm.
“You, uh,” Mono squeaks, “You smoke?”
Six looks at him like he’s the one with a shady source of sleep deprivation. Mono kicks himself mentally.
“Your bike?” Six asks instead.
“Company provided,” Mono replies, not once exhaling.
“Can I?” Six asks.
“I-Sure, of course, for a bit, sure,” Mono stammers, “Heck, finish my route, I’ll run after you-”
“I can’t ride a bike,” Six interjects, “never learnt how.”
Mono looks far away, down the lane he was meant to be one conversation ago. His heart is making up stories, chapters on chapters of fantasies.
“Well,” Mono replies, “hold on tight, I’ve got a route to complete.”
Teddy Bear Hat
“Free balloon for the lovely lady?” Mono tries, chivalrously handing Six the red balloon. She just smiles, arms folded, and tilts her head to the sticky child pulling at his leg instead.
Mono bends, a difficult feat in the bulky mascot costume he’s in, and hands the boy the balloon instead. The child leans in to grab it from him – an action that leaves his large, face-sized lollipop stuck on the fur of Fazzy Bear’s left leg.
Oh, determination. The child’s rotund face twists and reddens with exertion, before a terrifying, running zip! is heard as he frees his lollipop. Along with a large patch of brown, synthetic fur.
Six is still smiling, getting her money’s worth of amusement from the cheap, annual Valentines’ theme park. None from the rides, sadly, all from Mono.
It makes no difference to Mono, halfway into a heatstroke and terminally lovesick – a smile is a smile. It’s rare and hard-earned from Six, he only wishes he could see it better past the ratty old costume head.
“We get…free rides for an hour after closing…” Mono wheezes, straightening from giving another child a balloon, “You can stick around…maybe?”
Six shrugs. Nothing better to do, not in the heat of June when even that cranky old Headmistress wants them out the school. Something in Mono soars even if his furry boots are cemented to the pavement with wads of chewed gum.
The ferris wheel past closing has a night view of a city that bests even the cloud-sniffing signal tower in the middle of town.
Six would like it.
Mono notices the fascination she has, with small lights in the darkness. She likes playing with the silver zippo, conjuring fire back and forth with a flick. Her soft smile worth the smarting fingers Mono earned from trying to restore the flimsy thing they salvaged off a rainy floor. Back at the hospital when he had night shifts as a security guard too, she’d handle his torch, swirling round to shine it at all the medical mannequins.
She’d scared the hell out of him, and giggled after. Back then he’d explain away his pounding heart as shock.
Back then was a month ago. Look at him now.
Starstruck behaviour - Mono rewatches all the episodes of his life with her in it. He swore he wouldn’t have a celebrity in his life – all lights and camera angles like his father. Yet he notices Six in the crowd, notices what annoys her and what makes her smile.
It sounds like a diagnosis when he realizes he notices everything. He’s got a stethoscope to his own heart and it’s thundering so hard he thinks he’ll be ill.
“Knock knock,” Six whispers, rapping against his large, furry exo-skull. He can’t turn, and only sees Six when she gently lifts the large mascot head, letting cold air seep in.
She pokes a long, swirling, swooping straw, pink and striped, into the deathly heat of his suit.
“Drink,” She orders.
“What is it?” Mono asks instead.
“It’s safe,” Six answers.
He’s known her long enough to doubt that. She rolls her eyes, swaying the straw to herself and taking a deep sip, the pink liquid swirling from the paper cup, up, around, and round and round the straw, and finally past her lips.
Mono gulps.
“Safe,” she repeats, pointing the straw at him again.
Mono stretches his neck for the straw, and Six holds his gaze for a long, drawn moment as the drink makes its way to him.
“Mm!”
“Good right? I dumped strawberry ice cream into every drink they had at the fountain,” Six says.
Mono bounces, feigning attention at his job for once, buying time as he records the memory of sharing a straw into his hard drive, and duplicates it for safety. Maybe she…well maybe not, but maybe…
“We always drink straight out the chocolate fountain at the end of the day,” Mono says, hands clenching into furry fists and forcing his voice into nonchalance, “can I get the lovely lady some Valentines’ chocolate after?”
“I don’t like chocolate,” Six replies flatly. She leans on him to get some shade, and they can’t see each other’s faces.
“But you knew that, didn’t you, Mono?” She says, in a tone that’s hard to not notice. In a tone that means something, especially to her biggest fan.
Mono nearly lets the balloons go.
Rain Hat
Mono leaves the apartment door unlocked every night ever since Six and he exchanged addresses. The door was a human sized dog-flap for all he cared – duplicating keys cost half a week’s pay.
Another reason is that when it was storming in the middle of the night, and Six ended up on his doorstep with soaked pyjama pants under a too-small raincoat, she didn’t ask to be let in, and Mono never invited. It’s their kennel, and home is where you lick your wounds.
Tonight, she’s here with a bruise on her face where her dad’s usually sober enough to avoid, and a huge bag.
If there was an umbrella of service, Mono couldn’t find it in his mad dash from door to stairs to gate, flopping on an old, yellow rain hat and running out. Six stands, hood down, cradling her bagpack with torn straps to her chest. Mono meets her, plants the hat on her wet hair, and they wade their ankles up the rain-clogged path to the building.
Six works on undoing the stubborn zip of her bag before drying herself, and the flimsy lever snaps off with the last of her patience. Her thumb and index fly to the jagged piece of leftbehind metal as Mono pulls her hand away.
He takes the bag from her, and swaddles her in towels. Quietly, she watches as he turns and flips the back, like a child playing with a globe. He finds the thinnest patch of fabric at the base, forces his thumbs in by the nails and rips the bag apart in one motion.
A thick, folded square of fabric falls out, untouched by the rain – it’s old, probably once red and beautiful. Mono unfolds it, finding the white, continuous loop of a collar.
“A robe?”
“Kimono,” Six replies.
“Beautiful,” Mono nods, placing the kimono on a cushion, just so Six could see that it was dry and safe, and perhaps be more open to the idea of dressing her wounds.
“My mum’s” Six says, as Mono towels off her hair. The carpet below his knees is soaked and the hairdryer cord isn’t long enough.
“Yours now?” Mono asks, because she’s never brought her up before.
“Fucker tried to pawn it,” Six says.
“Don’t go back,” Mono replies.
Racoon Hat
Self-defence was a nuanced subject. For most of his life, it was humour, or the way his lips naturally fell in a barely-smile. Then in school it quickly became friends – with the lonely janitor, or the strict teacher, or everyone from Six to the captain of the football team.
At home, against the violent knocking at his door, it was either the couch as a barricade, or the police.
“Open up! I know that damn bitch is with you!”
In his stories it was always a hoard of cannibals, or a demented hunter on an island, seeking the most dangerous game. Never a man so blitzed that he tried to knock down an unlocked door instead of just trying the knob.
He was calm. It was something about the rain falling in sheets outside, dousing the morning in a grey, cool light. Something about water out the window being louder than boiling blood behind his door.
Mono stands a few feet away, his hand on the telephone receiver, before he turns and walks into his father’s bedroom. It’s pristinely caked in a layer of dust; protected against neglect, under the mattress, is the double-barrelled hunting rifle from his grandfather.
Loaded like the night his grandfather stuffed the long barrel in his mouth and put his toe on the trigger.
Mono pads past his bedroom, iodine-scented from disinfectants, where Six lay unconscious, dead to the world. A bottle of cough syrup stood guard on the nightstand, a lamp was still switched on for her.
He watches her breathe quietly for a moment, before he turns with steel in his step. In his stories she was always strong, always fiercer and faster. Like unblinking panthers, rather than Sleeping Beauty. In his stories, the ones he tells himself, he was the hunter, cutting Little Yellow Riding Hood from the wolf’s belly.
“It’s- ahem” Mono rehearses, forcing his voice an octave up and levelling the shotgun at the door, “It was self-defence, sir, I was so scared—”
Bandage hat
The policemen believe his story. The lawyer believes his story. The judge. The public. Six.
Only his father comes home, one night before the world knows about Mono, and constructively critiques his tale with his fists.
“-Ruin everything I worked for, everything I stand for—” Mono hears, between meaty percussions of fists. In his blurry vision is the same thin, tall silhouette Mono’s learnt to hate quietly in throngs of adoring fans.
“Me?” Mono chokes, “Do all that?”
“—knew at the hospital I couldn’t deny it, damn it all, my eyes, my nose, my fucking voice—”
His tired figure lets up within minutes, strained from violence a sedentary man like himself was stranger to.
“That’s all folks,” Mono recites through a bloody grin, his voice makes his father twitch, “goodnight, from us at the Signal Tower,”
“Shut up,” his father seethes.
“Grow up,” Mono gasps, “You know why you can’t make a story out of this?”
The Thin Man turns, his furious expression lit in the dark office from the reflections of the polished marble. The apartment was compromised, and the police soon found the boy – and his legal guardian.
“Because you don’t want a sequel,” Mono says, “you don’t want a legacy. You don’t want to be replaced—”
“By who? A mistake I made and regretted twenty years ago?”
“Bullshit,” Mono laughs, “bullshit,” he repeats.
“You keep her ring in your desk drawer,” Mono teases, like the boys in their football club used to.
The Thin Man walks over and kicks him in his jaw.
“You come on next month,” he seethes into Mono's ear like a bedtime story, “I cry because you’re the lost son I’ve been looking for all these years.”
“And I smile like I won the lottery,” Mono replies through a mouth full of blood, “because I just met the best dad in the world.”
Paper Bag
“What are you doing?” Six asks, amused at the front door of their home.
A pot is on the stove, dinner half-made on the counter, and her husband is wearing a paper bag with eye-holes, hunched over the sofa.
“Shh!!!” Comes a poor attempt of a whisper by the shoe rack, “The TV man’s gonna get you!”
“The TV man?” Six says, bravely toeing off her shoes and striding to the bashful looking cryptid in her living room, “I could eat him for breakfast,”
“He’w eat you if y’watch too much cartoons!” Her daughter warns.
“Will he?” Six smiles, turning to confirm with the man in question, who seemed to shrink more and more under her amused gaze.
“Roar,” Mono says, holding up two hands weakly, curled like claws.
“Roar,” Six replies, showing off her manicured nails, admittedly longer and sharper than Mono’s.
The evil defeated, their daughter finally emerges from hiding, tackling Mono at his knees in a hug. Six peers at the stove for a moment before Mono blocks her view, and all further attempts towards the kitchen.
“Baby, why don’t you show mummy your new story?” Mono calls, when Six tries to swipe at the cheese and cracker board Mono was trying to keep a surprise.
“It’s about mermaids!” Comes the shrill reply, right before a persistent, small hand grabs onto Six and pulls her away to the playroom.
“-an’ there’s a prince and he gets the mermaid, and they run away and get a…a…”
“A castle?” Six supplies, undoing her hair from its neat bun.
“A maw…mawgage,” her daughter completes, brow furrowed in concentration.
Honestly, what did she expect, leaving Mono with her for days on end?
“A mortgage?” Six smiles.
“To buy a house in the acorn-army” their daughter nods.
“Economy.”
“The End.” Their daughter replies.
“What a lovely story,” Six replies, keeping her customer service smile. Managing a luxury cruise and being a mother had more in common than it seemed.
“Mummy, do you wanna hear a secret?” she says suddenly.
Six pauses, watching as her daughter keeps her gaze and slow blink.
“You have to eat a lot of vegetables later,” she continues, without waiting for a reply.
“Why?” Six replies, mirroring her daughter’s conspirational tone, “Is the poison in the soup, and the antidote in the vegetables?”
“No, silly,” comes the laughing reply, still soft, “it’s so you can stay on land.”
Now it’s Six’s turn to blink and stare, silent as the sounds of cooking fill the hallway. Her daughter keeps her stare, eyes as dark as her own.
“Cos’ mermaids need to eat land veggies, and not seaweed,” her daughter explains, “so they can grow legs.”
“I…” Six begins, “I do have legs, dear,”
“Yeah, but not all the time,” her daughter giggles, tumbling into her lap and clinging to her, “your tail comes back and you gotta go back to sea for a few days right?”
Oh, Mono.
She falls silent even as their daughter fusses and prattles for her attention. He’s been making up stories so she didn’t seem like the absent mother she was.
All through dinner Six smiles politely, and watches Mono count the agreed ten bites of veggie rolls their daughter needed to redeem tv time for the week. She smiles at the bedside, as Mono tells bedtime stories without a book, his hands waving as he goes on about princesses, or fairies, or magical pets.
Six smiles until it’s just them in the bedroom.
He holds her, her head to his chest because he ended up catching that growth spurt after all. From where she rests she can see the curving scar, from his jaw to his Adam’s apple.
“How many bites?” Six asks.
“Hm?”
“How many bites till I get my land legs forever?” Six asks.
Mono freezes, but sighs a moment later, never letting her go.
“She’ll know eventually,” Six says, “that I’m away by choice,”
Mono doesn’t reply, only moving an arm from the small of her back to where her neck sloped into shoulder.
“I get to love my job,” he says, “you should too.”
A job was who they were now, up there with “Mother” and “Wife” was “Proprietress of the Maw”. Six couldn’t muster the guilt she owed her young child, and Mono didn’t expect her to.
“I’m like him, aren’t I?” Six whispers, “Father,”
Father, not ‘that bastard’. She means the retired founder of the Signal Tower. Her father-in-law, begrudgingly.
Mono laughs, and it sounds like his old man.
“You’re here right now, so no,”
“All I do is read her stories,” Six says, “they’re not as good as yours.”
“You can sing to her,” Mono says, “or just talk to her,”
I don’t know how, Six says without a word, reverting to the silence of her youth and shrugging.
“You’ve got lots in common,” Mono says, starting his story, “she doesn’t like chocolate, she’s stronger than half the boys in school…”
Six hides her laugh in his shoulder.
“She can ride a bike, though.”
Six steps on his toes, half for his jab at her, and half to better reach his lips. They kiss and pull away like it’s mundane, and they stare at each other’s tired eyes. This is the peace they survived the sleepless nights for, keeping their heads high with the weight of a thousand invisible hats.
They were parents now, their own childhood monsters. Tonight, Six will dream of her daughter wrecking her ship in anger, resenting her masks and absence. Mono holds her by her hand and leads her to bed.
In the morning, after her little nightmare, he’ll be there, right by her.