Isaiah pushed the barbershop door open with a nervous, almost hesitant grip. The jingle of the small bell above the door caught everyone’s attention, including his own. For a moment, the bustling conversation inside paused as eyes turned to the unfamiliar face in the doorway. But just as quickly, the chatter resumed, filling the space with lively banter and laughter. Isaiah stepped inside, clutching a crumpled ten-dollar bill his mother had given him for the cut.

This was his first time coming to a barbershop without his father.

The shop was nothing like the clean, clinical places he had been to before. The floor was scattered with clippings of hair in various shades, the air thick with the scent of aftershave, cocoa butter, and the faintest whiff of Jamaican jerk spices. Posters of famous boxers and faded photos of men with sharp, intricate fades lined the walls. Each station had its own personality—worn leather seats that looked like they had stories to tell, framed mirrors with cracks around the edges, and tools laid out like a surgeon’s instruments, ready for the next head of hair.

Isaiah’s eyes were drawn to the far corner where an old Jamaican man sat. His skin was dark like polished mahogany, and his face was marked with deep, thoughtful lines. He was eating a plate of yams and chicken feet, his slow, deliberate movements a stark contrast to the lively conversations around him. He didn’t seem like a barber, nor did he look like he was there for a haircut. His presence was just another piece of the shop’s peculiar charm, one Isaiah was struggling to understand.

“You good, youngblood?” A voice boomed from the chair closest to the door.

Isaiah looked up to see his barber—Dre, as his father had called him—standing with clippers in hand. Dre had a smile that was too easy, and a silver chain that reflected the sunlight streaming in through the window. He was lean, with arms covered in tattoos that told a story Isaiah hadn’t yet learned. Dre nodded toward an empty chair, and Isaiah made his way over, taking a seat that felt too big, too adult.

“You new in town, huh?” Dre asked, snapping the barber’s cape around Isaiah’s neck.

“Yeah,” Isaiah mumbled, unsure of how loud his voice should be in a place like this.

“Don’t be shy, lil’ man,” Dre said, adjusting the clippers. “We don’t bite… well, most of us don’t.”

A chorus of laughter erupted from the other barbers and their clients. Isaiah grinned awkwardly, trying to fit into the rhythm of the shop. The conversations flowed around him—talk of basketball, politics, and life in the neighborhood. It was all new to him, like stepping into a world he had only glimpsed from a distance.

“Yo, what’s your take, lil’ man?” Dre’s voice pulled him back to the moment.

Isaiah blinked. “On what?”

“The world, man! You gotta be aware of what’s going on out here,” Dre said, his voice dipping with seriousness. “They got us all caught up in the system, you feel me? They make it hard for us to rise. Ain’t that right, Ras?”

The old Jamaican man in the corner, Ras, looked up from his plate of yams and chicken feet. His eyes, sharp despite his years, focused on Isaiah. “De youth dem don’t know nuttin’ about de world yet. But dey will. Dey will see, same as we did.” His thick accent rolled over the words, giving them weight.

Isaiah didn’t know what to say, so he just nodded, feeling like he was suddenly part of a conversation he didn’t understand. Dre chuckled, sensing the boy’s discomfort, and slapped a hand on his shoulder.

“It’s cool, you gon’ learn,” Dre said with a wink, turning back to the clippers. “First, let’s get you right.”

Isaiah felt the hum of the clippers near his scalp, the vibration grounding him in the present. As the clippers buzzed over his head, Dre kept talking, but now his voice was softer, as if he was giving Isaiah a lesson in more than just cutting hair.

“See, a barbershop ain’t just where you get a cut,” Dre said, his tone almost fatherly now. “It’s where you hear about the world. Where you hear about yourself. You start comin’ here enough, you’ll see. This place, it’ll teach you things.”

Isaiah felt the weight of those words as Dre expertly shaped his fade. He could hear the easy flow of conversation all around him, clients sharing stories about their families, their jobs, their frustrations. It was a place where men could speak freely, laugh loudly, and think deeply.

After a while, Dre stopped and turned to a small mini-fridge next to his station. It was crammed with hair products on the top shelf, and the bottom shelf held protein drinks and water bottles. Dre grabbed a cold drink and held it out to Isaiah.

“Here, take one. Helps keep your muscles right,” Dre joked, though Isaiah noticed the care in his eyes as he passed the drink.

Isaiah took the bottle, the coolness of it refreshing against his palms. He sipped, not caring what it tasted like, only that it felt like a small, silent welcome into this new world.

As Dre finished up, he spun the chair around, showing Isaiah his new cut in the mirror. The boy barely recognized himself. His fresh fade was sharp, and for the first time, he felt like he belonged in this place.

“You lookin’ good, youngblood,” Dre said, brushing off the last few stray hairs. “Next time you come in, you’ll be one of us.”

Isaiah nodded, a small smile creeping onto his face. He slipped the ten-dollar bill into Dre’s hand, feeling a sense of pride in doing something on his own.

As he walked toward the door, the conversations continued behind him, the barbershop’s energy wrapping around him like a second skin. He wasn’t just a boy getting a haircut anymore. He was part of something bigger now.

And it felt good.

Author’s Note: When it comes to writing experimentation, you know me (well, you don’t know me know me, which is why I explain myself ad nauseam): can’t stop, won’t stop. This time I’m dipping my tootsies into bizarro fiction, and if you don’t happen to run in those circles, it’s a genre that embraces the absurd, surreal, and strange, often combining dark humor, satire, and bizarre elements to create stories that are unpredictable and sometimes unsettling. I haven’t quite cracked it yet, but this story is a start. Lemme know what you think.

Samantha Lancaster’s heart felt like a two-headed hamster sprinting on dual wheels inside her chest, a frenetic pace urging her legs to pump faster. As her bicycle rolled down the street, thick, glowing clouds of pink smoke puffed from her mouth with every breath. They formed shapes—a 1934 Lionel standard gauge train set with 400E locomotive, a 1969 Hot Wheels Beach Bomb prototype with rear loading surfboards, and once, a 1953 French Resistance Gumby—but Samantha ignored them. Her focus was the flickering green light ahead, attached to the spectral figure on a bicycle. The ghost biker. The thing that had hijacked her life since everything went sideways.

It all started when her best friend Carolina, who once believed she could speak the ancient mystic tongue of vegetables, got mashed into a human latke by an out-of-control ice cream truck desperately seeking shade to avoid melting in the hot summer sun. Now, Carolina lived in a world of beeps and bandages, hooked up to medical machines that hummed along to an upbeat disco rhythm. One night, as the machines bleeped out the Bee Gees, Samantha swore a vow between sobs: she’d figure out the meaning behind the ghost biker’s appearances—if it killed her.

Urban myths were a worthless currency to Samantha, but she stumbled onto a myth demanding to be spent. Her suspicions went full throttle after meeting Sarah, a cyclist who had been run over by a runaway genetically modified bus-sized avocado. Shaking like a Jenga tower one block away from disaster, Sarah offered up a Polaroid of the ghost biker: an empty bike, floating two inches off the ground, surrounded by a glowing aura of sentient Tigeroos, the 1965 Ideal Toy Company’s Roaring Tiger Bike Horn.

Driven by grief and the need to stop the insanity, Samantha went headfirst into the city’s records—though the records were more like a concentric circle of talking filing cabinets that only spoke in flawed logic riddles. With help from Alexus, a militant cycling advocate who thought helmets were just a government conspiracy to control minds, Samantha realized the truth: the ghost biker wasn’t just a ghost. He was a revenge spirit, fueled by the injustices of the city’s labyrinthine streets, which seemed to shift positions like a living Rubik’s cube designed by a sadistic metropolitan deity.

The ghost biker’s appearances were like bizarre performance art pieces. Once, Samantha saw him deliver a silent soliloquy while balancing on his bike’s handlebars, juggling oversized forensic evidence identification markers as he rode through an intersection where ten cyclists had mysteriously vanished into thin air. Another time, the ghost used his bicycle to spell out cryptic messages in the sky—messages like “Slow Down or Eat Derailleur!” It was a warning. But from who? And why?

More through happenstance than investigation, Samantha found Frank, Michael’s brother (for the sake of brevity, Michael was the original ghost biker before his transcendence, which is a story for another time), he was selling haunted bicycle chains on the black market. Frank explained, between bites of a hot dog with an advanced healing factor that regrew every time he took a bite, that his brother had once been a safety advocate—until a sidewalk went Vesuvius and launched Michael into the sky like a meat confetti cannon.

“I’ve seen him,” Samantha said. “He’s riding the streets.”

Frank nodded. “He’s not just riding. He’s marking places. The city’s fighting back.”

In the weeks that followed, Samantha and Frank noticed strange things: bike lanes that turned into rivers of molten licorice, crosswalks that led to underground sea foam parties filled with clones of city council members, each one whispering “Safety is overrated.”

But Samantha wouldn’t stop. She joined Alexus at rallies where people chanted in unison: “We Want Bike Lanes, Not Lanes of Pain!” while dressed in inflatable banana seat costumes. They handed out cursed pamphlets—flyers that, when read, caused the reader’s nose to bleed Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid for three days.

Every night, the ghost biker appeared, floating just ahead of Samantha, guiding her to the city’s hidden weak spots. And every time he passed through, the streets warped—fire hydrants turned into Cthulhian water wigglers, and lamp posts transformed into screaming anorexic lighthouses. It wasn’t just a battle for cycling reform. It was a battle for the city’s soul. The roads had become sentient, and they were angry.

In the final showdown, Samantha pedaled at breakneck speed toward City Hall, where the ghost biker led her to the Mayor—who was revealed to be a sentient bicycle disguised as a human this whole time. The ghost biker performed an ethereal backflip and merged with Samantha’s bike, transforming it into a glowing two-wheeled spirit of vengeance.

“Let’s ride,” Samantha whispered as her bike began to hum with otherworldly power.

And together, they rode—through streets that twisted into impossible shapes, past floating pyramids and sentient skyscrapers that tried to block their path. Samantha’s heart raced, no longer from grief, but from the thrill of a fight that wasn’t just about safer streets—it was about survival in a world that had lost its butterfingered grip on the fringes of sanity.

In the end, the roads bent to their will, reimagined not by bureaucracy but by the force of the ghost biker’s relentless spirit. And as Samantha pedaled into the horizon, a new dawn broke—a city rebuilt by preposterous whim and ruled by cyclists who could now gear shift into the sky.