The scene opens with a striking contrast. A ten-year-old girl speaks to her mother from a point of shade, as if to remind both of them that there is still light to be found. The girl wears a uniform that marks the end of classes and the start of a careful, quiet afternoon. They walk together while the sun is bright enough to make every detail vivid, and the narrator slips closer to overhear a conversation that feels almost cinematic in its ordinary truth. They settle at a terrace where one table basks in sun and the other is tucked into the shade, a deliberate choice their mother explains with a small laugh that the sun is for making up. The observer, curious, takes the next seat along the row, drawn in by the insistence of the moment rather than the plot. A glass of sparkling water arrives, the girl orders Cola Cao for herself, and a perfectly ordinary grilled croissant arrives like a prop in a larger, stranger scene. The drink beside them is a rooibos tea, decaffeinated, something new the observer has recently discovered and notes with interest.
Without hesitation, the girl smears butter and jam across the croissant, her mouth still busy with crumbs as she shifts into a storytelling mode that feels both playful and unnervingly precise. She begins to recount a troubling event that happened on the way to a haircut, a memory she seems to hold with an unusual calm and control. The mother listens, eyebrows raised in a mixture of curiosity and concern, and there is a quiet question in the air that asks whether this tale should be taken at face value or as something larger.
-What do you say? the mother asks with a touch of irony in her smile, inviting the girl to explain the need for such a confession.
The girl continues, describing a hairdresser who instructed her to bow the head and slide a razor from behind, a moment that becomes a pivot in the story. She claims to have seen a hole in the head of a classmate, something that could be blood or nothing at all, and yet the implication of what was felt seems undeniable. The words trail off as she insists that something has been wedged or implanted, an idea that unsettles the observer even as it intrigues.
“This child has too many fantasies,” the mother responds, her tone half amused, half weary. The word choices hover in the air, turning the moment into a meditation on imagination and fear. The girl counters with a speed and certainty that suggests more than pretend. She says fantasies do not explain what is happening now, especially when a phone becomes a conduit for unseen connections.
And then the twist lands with a soft, almost casual certainty. The girl reveals that the classmate has a cell phone, unlike herself, and that the device seems to share a moment of telepathic contact with a chip she imagines is lodged in the classmate’s neck. She lays the phone on the table and proclaims that it will ring, a prediction that unfolds exactly as she says when a call vibrates through the table the moment she mentions it.
The mother and daughter continue their dialogue with an astonishing ease, a rhythm that makes the scene feel almost inevitable. The observer feels a similar sense of certainty as a subtle tingling spreads along the back of their own neck, and the phone in the pocket begins to buzz with a routine call that suddenly takes on a larger significance. It is not the call itself that matters but the anticipation it creates, the way a simple ring becomes a marker of an invisible current running between people and devices.
Later, another visit to the hairdresser brings a fresh memory of discomfort. When the hairdresser asks the observer to lower the head, a small sense of chaos erupts, not through loud words but through a messy, unspoken unease attributed to the operator’s perhaps careless use of the machinery. It leaves a lingering impression, a reminder that appearances can hide unexpected tensions, and that ordinary tasks can unfold into moments of uneasy awareness. Yet the observer notes that the response is not one of overt complaint. It is accepted, analyzed, and then quietly put aside, as if the event will be revisited only in memory or perhaps never at all except as a sign of something imminent.