'S'a fucking tragedy,' she muttered, handling my hair, before speaking up. I put it on, blinking a lot and not thinking about. A nametag with 'Samantha / Sammy / Sam' in sharpie hung precariously from a clip. A little out of high school, with straight brown hair to her shoulders and plain black work clothes.

She was young maybe three or five years older than me. The barber came back around, a black plastic gown in one hand and a comb, spray bottle, and scissors in the other. I sat at one of the stations the one missing its mirror. '– take a seat while I get some things we'll see what we can do.' She hopped away, heading to what was probably a laptop tucked behind the counter, and tapped away for a moment. Glue! Who did this? That's gotta be a whole bottle of, what –' Oh no.' She strode around the counter, and came up to grab my hair herself – I flinched – running her fingers over some of the clumps. It came as a horrible, clumpy sheet, stuck to my soaked shirt in places. In lieu of explanation, I pulled some of my wet hair off to the side. Five out of eight fluorescent lights worked, illuminating a chequered tile floor and cracking wall-paint. Two stations to the left, a counter at the back and a door behind it, a couple rough chairs by the front with a coffee table of old magazines. I took a few hesitant steps into the cramped barbershop. 'How can I help?' The barber deftly dog-eared the page, snapped her book closed, and slid it aside on the counter. In any other city, the shopfront would be glass, not clouded polycarbonate with a constellation of cracks in the bottom of the door.

A cultist simulator rites