54. Lana Gould

Lana is a mermaid, she just needs to get the surgery. She’s already dyed her hair and stopped wearing clothes most of the time. And every day she takes the bus out to Santa Monica to walk the beach, even though it’s two hours each way and she can’t stay past 6:30. It’s better than nothing, until she gets the money together.
Lana lifeguards at a public pool in Pasadena, and even when she didn’t dye her hair, it was always half green. Chlorine does that to blonds. She never raced, and she doesn’t swim laps. She dives deep down and glides in lazy circles beneath the kicking feet, until her lungs feel bruised and the water digs its thumbs into her eardrums. She gets a lot of ear infections.
She doesn’t much like fish – to eat or to look at – but she figures that won’t be a problem. Mermaids keep their own company. She knows she’s a mermaid because of the quiet familiarity of deep water, and the well-known fact that mermaids have no souls. So she walks the beach each afternoon til six fifteen and waits, for her bank account to fill up, and for someone to invent the surgery.

[Face by Soren Melville]

53. Sheila Spacey

[Today’s face brought to you by guest artist Soren Melville!]

Sheila Spacey is an architect. Her hair reflects this. She practically shellacs it, and trims the results like topiary. The hard angles and geometric protrusions bespeak her personal design philosophy, as do the bright colors. She doesn’t dye her hair. She uses wood stain.

Architecture is a recent thing for Shiela. Before this, she made her living as an artisinal gift-wrapper. She was renowned for her deft fingers and audacious design strategies. Some of her creations were so flamboyant that they were impossible to lift or move without damaging – the clients had to open the gifts in her studio. At her clients’ request, she occasionally gift-wrapped the wrappings of gifts she had wrapped. Sometimes the boxes she wrapped were empty. All in all, it was a bit of a disappointment when she decided to go into architecture.

She’d fallen in love with the craft via the interior design magazines she sometimes cannibalized for her wrapping. Enough with wrapping things, she wanted to wrap people. Her clients pled with her, implored her to consider the fates of their future holidays, but she ceased to take commissions and poured her earnings into design school.

Now she answers phones at a rather prestigious firm. Occasionally she will be called in to draw something someone else has designed, or to cut out a stencil. She is not very well liked. But each month she bathes her hair in mineral spirits and constructs a new labyrinth inside it, to show them the wonders she is capable of.

[Face by Soren Melville]

52. Grizzle Belroy

The going rate for prophetic vision these days is one eye. Grizzle Belroy was clever, though. He gave half the sight in each his eyes, and then bought a pair of glasses. This sort of vision (if the pun can be excused) is Belroy’s hallmark. He reads between the lines of his own prophecies, and deduces the twists and turns his hearer’s road must take to create the final condition. No prophet has ever wrung so much value from the gift. Nor has any prophet ever been so miserable.

The trouble with foregoing the standard fee for prophecy is that there is nothing to mark Belroy as a member of his profession. An eye patch, it turns out, does wonders for the credibility of its wearer. This, coupled with the fact that Grizzle shrewdly refuses to wear clothes unless his weather predictions demand it, means that Belroy himself is rarely in demand. He splits his abundant free time between the nude beach and Shinbone Alley, the cobblestoned byway where superstitious butchers discard their most auspicious bones. Shinbone alley is where his one customer finds him.

The man who calls on him refuses to give a name. Belroy has seen enough of the young man’s future to understand why. He comes every week now, always wanting to know the outcome of his next robbery. The visions Belroy relates to the man are awash with blood, but never the young man’s own. And Grizzle has watched the robberies become extortion, become racketeering, bribery, and assassination. And the young man keeps him fed.

It is not the most glamorous of arrangements, but the prophet of Shinbone Alley has never been much for glamour. He knows what the young man doesn’t – that in sixty-six more months the prophet will be alone again. For the man only asks “will I die tonight?” Never “will I die?”

51. Arnold Teacup

Arnold Teacup is that rarest of things: A man who is what he wanted to be when he grew up. Since he first heard the muffled roar of a plane overhead, since he first watched one crawl across the sky, since a mustachioed man first pinned a pair of wings to his smudged t-shirt, down and to the left of his bony bobblehead chin. The flight attendants had been so nice to him then, had come down to his level and cooed over him in a way he’d known was fake, but which foreshadowed to him the real cooing to come.

No one looks scrawny or malformed in a pilot’s uniform – not if it’s fitted right. And Arnold’s is. He’s the youngest co-pilot American has ever hired, and he does good. His partners can’t stand him for the way he insists on every minor point of protocol, all the checkboxes you learn to safely ignore over a long career.

But Arnold doesn’t want to ignore anything. His huge watery eyes take in tundra after tundra of cloud cover, playing the same kind of make-believe with them that he used to play when he was looking from the other side. He chases and flees susnsets six days a week, and sees in the little geometric farm plots the dioramas that his train sets used to run through, before he discovered air travel. And he can make people fall in love with him, too, for as long as he wears the uniform.