a KID called Masked Baller

a KID called Masked Baller was halfway across the Listening Rooms when the cereal box in their pocket gave a long, loud rattle, and every Beast in the place opened their eyes.

The night’s set was over. Beasts were coming out of it slowly, blinking, peeling off headphones, stepping over cushions as if the floor might wake up. a KID called Masked Baller clamped a hand over the box and mouthed sorry to a Deer, who mouthed something back that was probably not “that’s fine.”

Through the doorway, the Middle was getting loud. Last night’s dancers filled the flagstones, still in their sequins and good boots, arms slung round each other’s shoulders. “Three roofs away!” one of them shouted, and the rest shouted it back, and the whole lump of them started off toward the Stairway. Beyond them the Darkroom stood at the centre of everything. Past it, every roof faced inward with its back to the view, as if the far hills, going pale at the edges, weren’t worth the bother.

They wanted to be in that lump more than they had wanted anything yet. Somebody had said the stair buns came out on the landing halfway down. By the buns, they thought, I could be one of them.

They got two steps.

“You. Rabbit. Got hands?”

A Beast in an Original face knelt by the door beside a heap of headphones as tall as a footstool, the cords knotted like a bird’s nest. They were turning the pairs over one at a time, left cup, right cup, muttering.

“Two,” said the Rabbit.

“Every night I ask them to hang them back the right way round. Every single night.” The Beast held up a pair with the cups swapped and looked at it like it had let them down personally. “I’m Nerys. Next sitting’s in an hour. Help me?”

Out on the flagstones the dancers were shouting about a queue. “Cortado’s Downhill, it’ll be round the corner by now!” Their noise was already moving off.

They looked at the door. Then at the heap. Then at Nerys, alone with it, who hadn’t even asked twice.

“Right,” said a KID called Masked Baller, and knelt down.

Nerys showed them once. The little red thread marked the left side, and you hung each pair on its peg with the thread toward the wall. After that they worked without talking. Turn, check, hang. Their knees went stiff. The shouting on the Middle went thin, then thinner, then turned the corner of the Stairway and was gone. They kept their head down and didn’t let themselves listen for it.

Near the bottom of the heap, Nerys sat back.

“Oh, not you again.”

They held up a pair with a chipped band. Backwards. Nerys turned it round with the quick, tired hands of someone who had done exactly this many times before.

“That one,” Nerys said. “Every morning. Never any other pair. Always the wrong way round.”

The Rabbit took it to hang it up, and stopped. The cups smelled sweet, sugary and milky, like the bottom of a cereal bowl. Almost like their own pocket.

“Who sits in this one?”

Nerys frowned at the pegs. “That’s what I’d like to know.”

They hung it up, thread to the wall. Then they took out the box and, very gently, so it hardly rattled at all, tipped a little pile into Nerys’s open hand.

Nerys sniffed it. Then sniffed the chipped headphones on their peg.

“Huh,” they said. “Not this kind, either.”