Megan Howell’s book Softie: Stories is about a fantastical range of people; a former child-star haunted by a past she can’t remember, an Afro-French girl with an obsession for earlobes, a loner whose only friend is hiding a terrible, otherworldly secret. What each of these stories shares in common are situations that are sometimes fantastical, sometimes commonplace but always strange. From a Corsican vacation-town in its off-season to hospital rooms and a seedy hotel suite in Chicago, experience the everyday come fully untethered from reality.

The following is one of the short stories from the now-available book.

Age-Defying Bubble Bath with Tri-Shield Technology

by Megan Howell

A smudgy sight, distant but still in view—that was her mom’s casket, pine and silk and flowers bathing in stained-glass colored light. Alda had become separate from all of her thirtyfour years including this one moment in which she is high at her mother’s funeral. She was looking down and they were pooled on the church floor: bright, iridescent circles of psychedelic light that sounded like voices from the past as they rose and popped like bubbles. Did they really belong to her? They were so sad.

It had only taken one pill for Alda’s life to slip off of her like a loose-fitting coat. She couldn’t believe her mom had really passed. Last week, they’d talked of visiting Utah to see the famous grove of quaking aspens. Science said the trees didn’t have much longer to live because of global warming. Something about the root system decaying, Alda couldn’t remember.

“Alda?” Alda was pretty sure her sister, Maureen, was speaking. “Alda. I can’t believe you. You said you were sober. Were you lying this whole time?”

“I’m fine,” Alda said.

She thought of adding that she really had been clean for most of all those years since college. This one time was just a slip up. For real. She wasn’t “lying to herself ” like the addictionologist said.

“What did you take this time?” Maureen asked.

“Just something for stress, nothing to freak out about.” Alda swatted her hand as if to say, No big deal! and almost fell over. It was the shoes that made her this way. Stilettos. They were so hard to wear. She was teetering on the edge, on thin plastic stakes.

But that didn’t stop her little sister—five years younger but taller, married, more together, a homeowner and dog-mom of two—from going off on her. They were near the line for the guestbook. Lots of people, over one hundred signatures. Their mom had been very popular. She’d taught for twenty years in the public school system here and won awards for her dedication. Her students got excited when they saw her around town, both the little kids and the adults. They liked to ask about the daughters she always spoke of so warmly. One of the former students, a lady in a tasteful black jumpsuit and matching heels, kept staring at Alda. Alda could feel the woman’s eyes. She was never oblivious to judgment.

“You’re beyond ridiculous,” Maureen said. She was whispering but managed to make her voice harsh like when she yelled. “First you make me plan everything all by myself, then you ghost me, and now you show up like this. Seriously, what’s wrong with you? I don’t get it. Like, I’m genuinely trying to understand.”

For a long time, Maureen stood with her arms crossed. She was always the same when she got mad: arms crossed, lips pursed, eyes clouded with a childlike vulnerability she could never hide completely.

Alda used to help Maureen with her math homework. That had been ages ago, a backward time when their mom conflated Alda’s age and academic talent for maternalism. She worked late—there was her main teaching job and a string of second jobs. Maureen learned to stop showing fear after Alda almost burned down their mom’s place trying to boil pasta. Better to be angry than scared—the latter was the worst type of incompetence. She never admitted to feeling this way, didn’t talk about emotions, but Alda could sense the distress behind Maureen’s anger.

The cause of Alda’s substance abuse issues was either too much responsibility or not enough—the therapists she saw were pretty split. The addiction hadn’t gotten bad until she went out of state for college. She would’ve flunked out if not for her natural gift for figuring out problems so long as they were mathematical. She’d gotten all As in all subjects save for Chinese, history, and glassblowing.

“Maybe you should go,” Maureen said. “Just leave.”

Alda nodded. She couldn’t tell if her sister was being serious or not. She didn’t try to. Nothing felt real anymore. She wouldn’t have been surprised if her mom were waiting outside. Somehow, she managed to find the door.

“I can’t believe her,” Maureen was saying, probably to her husband, an accountant. If it wasn’t him she was complaining to, it was their half sister, Joyce (different mom, same dad; Alda’s mom raised her like one of her own when he walked out on all of his women for who-knows-where). Joyce, the middle child, the one who bickered the most, refused to speak to Alda. They’d gotten into a fight last week over something really silly—broken dishes, it wasn’t worth recounting because they were bargain-bin trash—and would’ve made up if not for their mom’s death, which had transformed the argument into something apocalyptic, a premonition, and now Joyce blamed Alda for everything.

The sun was setting. Alda had work tomorrow. Her mind got noisy thinking about all that she still had to do. On the walk home, as the pill’s effects dissipated, she stopped by the supermarket for brandy and other things.

Even when she wasn’t consciously thinking about death, a hidden part of her mind was. The knowledge of her mom’s end hummed in the background of her life nonstop like an overworked machine. It tainted even the memories that had nothing to do with her mom—making paper snowflakes in nursery school, cooking deviled eggs with Maureen for a fundraiser—so that they felt kind of sad too. She almost cried trying to remember the brand of teriyaki sauce she’d had at a party. The aching was nostalgic. It felt good in a painful way. She hadn’t felt this distraught since she was a little girl still trying to understand the world.

When she saw the long line for the one open checkout lane, her mood soured to the point of physical illness. No worries. She slipped a bottle of brandy into her bag. A lady passed by pushing a stroller filled with bags of rice. She was giving Alda that look, the same one from the funeral. Alda pretended to be shopping for real. She searched the store for nothing until she happened upon her reflection in the glass of one of the freezer doors.

Alda was getting older. She’d known this for a while, except now she could see her mom’s face emerging from her own. There she was, tucked right there in the deep folds of Alda’s nasolabial folds: death herself.

The wrinkles alone weren’t the scariest part. Alda wasn’t beauty obsessed like Joyce, didn’t fear the diminishing quality of her just-above-average looks or the uncertainty of what came after their decay. Joyce’s worries were more carnal. Her latest plastic surgery had been a facelift. Joyce, like most people, didn’t like that time progressed. And she hated the idea of being single forever.

Alda told herself that she was different from everybody else. There was no way she could feel this lonely and alien and still be a part of the world. And even if she could, loneliness was still loneliness even if millions felt the same way. It was isolating regardless of how close she got to other people. She thought briefly about getting a Brazilian butt lift like Joyce had. Something to make her feel more memorable. Eternal. She couldn’t stand the idea of fading away from people’s memories.

Psychedelic swirls of Day-Glo pink and green screamed out at Alda from across the cosmetics section, half convincing her that she was still high. The candy-colored bottles had their own special display by the face masks. The marketing wasn’t very clear, though. She had to read the description all the way through to understand it was bubble bath.

“New serum,” said the labels in curlicue letters. “Age-defying, tri-shield technology.” It all sounded very scientific. Alda took—stole—three bottles and fast-walked all the way home. No one stopped her. She felt invincible. Quickly, the emotion turned into more loneliness. By the time she got home, all the levity had evaporated from her body. No one had called her to see if she’d made it home okay.

Alda took a shower before filling the tub for the bath. The stopper. She’d only used it once before when she tried to do laundry by hand after a racoon snuck into the basement where the coin-operated laundry machines were. The memory brought back her fear of rabies, adding weight to her fear of death so that its presence felt even more overwhelming. The tub filled up slowly.

How many years had it been since she’d last had a bubble bath? Alda couldn’t recall. What she did remember was one specific instance, neither the first nor last, very mundane: Her mom had bought Strawberry Shortcake shower gel for her girls to share. Alda and her sisters had laughed like screeching animals at bath time, letting the warm, fruity-scented flotsam pour over them. “Look at me!” Maureen squealed. She’d made herself a beard out of bubbles. “I’m old!”

The directions on the bottle said to add a small dollop. Alda didn’t know why she could only have so little. Something about the serum being strong and effective. Every part of the bottle was a marketing pitch down to the warning label. She ran the water and squeezed out a stream of pearlescent bubble bath. The room started to smell like lavender and vanilla. Her body unfurled when she lowered herself in the tub. The water turned fleshcolored as she sank all the way down into its warmth.

Time went faster when Alda got comfortable. There were no windows in the bathroom, just the overhead light, no candles. Only more darkness could get in. It slipped soundlessly under the door when night came. She drained the tub with pruned hands and watched the water swirl into a mini tornado on its way down the drain.

Alda’s reflection didn’t scare her. She didn’t have the energy to scream out in horror or happiness like the women in the cosmetic ads. Though she looked different, younger, she felt unchanged. Nothing would last, she thought, not even this new—old?—face, which time would surely claim again. What would her sisters think of her now? She drew a blank as she massaged her newly taut skin in essential oils and moisturizers.

What had happened to her was a miracle. She’d literally de-aged—that was how far skincare had come since her childhood. She was living in the future! She yawned and used the mini electric razor on her nose hairs. Back in the kitchen, she drank brandy out of an espresso cup, shot after shot until she was downing the dregs straight from the bottle. The primal, baby part of her brain started screaming for her mom.

Time for bed. Alda put on her nightclothes and looked at her new form in the full-length mirror. She hadn’t been like this since she was sixteen, seventeen: skinny to the point of being somewhat shapeless. The bubble bath’s special formula had melted off the extra pounds. Her Relay for Life shirt clung loosely to her hanger-like shoulders. She had to tighten the drawstring of her sweats.

There were always health hazards with these sorts of products. If she got cancer, she thought, she wouldn’t have to care if the illness killed her before she even knew of its existence. That was how it had been for her mom. The aneurism had taken her out just like that. She was making her bed, and then she was on the ground. A week later, the funeral. All the attendees would be home by now. Maureen would be complaining about her to her husband over chilled White Claws.

Alda smiled, her fear of dying becoming less oppressive and more flexible—more like a worldview than an emotion. She decided that she was alive because she could do things people said she wasn’t allowed to. Dead people—all they could do was be dead. Her theft reassured her of her own existence.

When she was younger, she used to shoplift, always with friends so that she felt protected. Only once had they gotten in trouble, and it wasn’t with the law but her BFF Madison Apodaca’s mom, who threatened to call Alda’s but never did. Alda and Madison and Madison’s cousin had taken a bunch of freckle pens from Sephora.

“But we already told you,” Alda said, “they’re just colored pencils. From school.”

“That’s some real BS,” Madison’s mom shot back.

Alda was at the woman’s slippered feet, begging her to please, please, please not tell her mom. It wasn’t that she was afraid of punishment like Madison. Alda’s mom’s silence scared her worse than threats or punishment. She didn’t like having to sit in silence at the kitchen table while her mom asked everyone but her how their day went, what they wanted from the spice drawer, whether they needed bus fare for the next day, etc.

She’d been so silly then. So young and desperate for uncritical acceptance. And the worst part was that she’d stayed like that up until last week. Now she had no one. This was the longest she and Joyce had ever gone without speaking to each other. Alda had no idea how to make things right. It was usually her mom who brought her daughters together again. “Now go and hug your sister,” she would say. Or, later, “Oh come on, you guys. I need both of you to come over and help with this. You’re not little girls anymore.”

These memories were so comfy they made Alda ache. She closed her eyes tight.

***

Morning. Sunlight cutting through the gaps of the venetian blinds. Birdsong, car engine grunts, her downstairs neighbor playing Guitar Hero at six in the morning.

Alda drove to work even though the weather was nice. She didn’t want to feel good. She couldn’t. The windows stayed rolled up. She blasted the air until she was freezing, and then she turned it up some more.

Nothing had changed even though she had. Her mom was still dead. Her sisters still hated her. Maureen texted her saying to call her, but refused to say why, only that Alda needed an intervention, that she was out of control, first the drinking and now this. This, she kept writing. You need to stop this. She was convinced that Alda would lose her job doing this.

Alda taught physics at a Catholic school downtown. It was a nice place, way fancier than the schools where her mom used to work. The campus had a recording studio, and the kids were allowed to wear their own clothes now. The whole world had flipped around since her childhood so that now her old public school had uniforms while the kids at the bougie prep schools got to wear ripped jeans.

One of the talkative girls in her morning class had on a baby-tee that showed off her belly ring. “Girl Empowered,” read the front.

“Let’s all stay abreast of the dress code,” Alda said, speaking to the whole class but really just to her.

That made the whole class giggle. Alda wasn’t even trying to be funny. The belly-ringed girl bugged her eyes and put on a sweater with the school’s insignia.

“Question,” one of the boys said to Alda. He was the one who always wore a silver chain around his neck. He could be very annoying. He liked pushing people for laughs. “What did you do to your face?” he asked.

The class was polite enough not to laugh this time. Later, when some of them were eating lunch together or drinking at some kid’s house party, they’d laugh belatedly at his joke. Or maybe they’d talk about him behind his back. It was hard to tell what they were all thinking. The exchange student from France shared knowing smiles with the soccer boys, but another boy’s mouth dropped like he’d just witnessed a murder.

“Let’s not worry about my face right now,” Alda said.

“I think the change looks nice,” the belly-ringed girl said. Her name was Katie. She bugged her eyes again. “It’s a free country. People should be allowed to do what they want to themselves.”

Alda cleared her throat and asked for last week’s homework. The annoying boy with the chain flashed a quick smile as he handed in his work. It was more sheepish than mocking, like he was trying to impress her. She pretended not to notice. Sorry, he mouthed.

Today’s lesson was linear motion. The kids separated into their lab groups. They pushed rectangular blocks of wood with wheels affixed to the long ends, timing them with stopwatches. Alda went between groups. “Make sure to use the chart to record all your results,” she told a group of five.

The day went fine. People complimented her new face, the women asking which products she used, the men trying to say she looked good in an acceptable way that wouldn’t get them in trouble, the students telling her how pretty she looked, how different and new (not that she wasn’t nice-looking before, of course).

It was the girls who were the most interested in Alda’s transformation. They kept asking to touch her hair, her skin. One of them asked if this was what Alda had always wanted, and Alda nodded without getting what “this” really was.

By the end of the day, Alda felt well enough to stop at a bakery by her home. She peered into one of the fridges, marveling at the rainbow rows of macarons inside. She wasn’t sure if she wanted the lemon ones or the vanilla. Or maybe she’d get a pastry. The cinnamon rolls here were huge.

“Hey.”

One of the workers was looking at her from behind the counter. He had ginger hair and a matching beard, one earring, two flower tattoos—a wreath around a wrist, a rose on his forearm. Alda’s mom had been a ginger. Maureen, too, but not Joyce, who was dark-haired like Alda.

The worker made her feel judged even though he was acting nice. He looked her age, maybe younger but definitely not early twenties. But he was gross. He winked and asked her which high school she went to and whether or not she liked to party on the weekends.

“Where’re you going?” he shouted after her.

“I think I want something else,” Alda said.

“We have aquarium cookies. Wanna try one? They’re real popular on Instagram.”

“Not today.”

“See you next time?” Alda shrugged.

She left without saying good-bye. On the drive home, at a stoplight by the shoe store that closed down: a rainbow. Make a wish! Her mom would’ve said. She used to confuse rainbows with shooting stars no matter how many times Alda and her sisters corrected her.

In her apartment complex’s parking lot, Alda heard that same noise again. It wasn’t Guitar Hero or birds, but children. Little children. There was a whole group of them playing in the tiny oasis of grass within the roundabout. One was trying to climb a tree. The others watched, cheering, a little girl throwing fallen leaves like confetti. A woman approached them. She called out their names as she told them to stop fooling around. Her voice felt like Alda’s mom’s even though it was too high pitched. Funny how randomly her mom could turn up, and always in fragments, never as a whole person like in movies about ghosts. The woman’s jeans reminded Alda of how her mom only wore dresses.

Alda’s loneliness made her discomfort worse. Her face ached. She couldn’t stop thinking about having to live out the rest of her life alone. She washed her hands in the apartment until they felt dry. In the mirror, she saw an angry rash of acne on her left cheek. It was so painful. So gross too. She heated up a wet washcloth in the microwave and put it over her face like her mom used to do. Sweat beaded all over her.

When the achiness didn’t go away, when she felt that she was going to cry again, she took another bubble bath. She added one capful, then another, a third, a fourth. While the water ran, she added almost the entire bottle and watched the suds get frothier.

***

Wake up, get dressed, take the car to work. No time to look in the mirror—that would only distress her, she didn’t have time to make herself look right. Park, go to school. First period, second period, third. A break before lunch. Another email reminding her to turn in grades, which were now three days overdue. “Is there an issue?” the secretary asked. She’d cc’d the director this time.

Alda went through the day without feeling. People looked at her different. She kept her eyes trained on her feet except when she was teaching and had to look her kids in the eyesevery one of them, even the annoying boy, even Katie, whose face was filled with sympathy and a little bit of disgust.

The control panel for the projector was too high for Alda to reach. One of her honors kids came up and pressed the power button without her having to say a word. She thanked him. He didn’t say anything back, just cleared his throat awkwardly and went back to his seat. She talked until she saw how little the class was listening. One of her best, most sycophantic students was on her phone, smiling, oblivious, the screen lighting up her face. Alda didn’t have the nerve to call her out.

There was a video Alda was supposed to show her honors class. It was the middle part of a WETA documentary on these engineers who were trying to lower the temperature of helium to zero Kelvin. She wound up showing the whole thing. She couldn’t lecture anymore. Too much talking. Her throat was too tight. She went on her phone, looking up all she could find on the bubble bath’s side effects.

“Used too much and now too short to drive?” somebody had written on drugrecall.net. “What to do? Please help. Desperate.”

Too bad for them. All the comments were the same: should’ve followed the label’s instructions—one capful per week, no more, no less. Just accept the change, people kept saying. Time will re-ravage your face eventually—it always does.

Alda stared at her phone until the screen went dead. She could see her reflection, the chubby cheeks and baby-clear skin. Her fingers were those of a small child’s. She looked like an elementary schooler. She was lucky she’d been a tall kid. Her feet had just barely touched the gas pedals of her Ford Fiesta this morning.

When the bell rang this time, it was time to go home. Kids cheered for the end of the school day, packing their bags before she could dismiss them. Her second transformation had made them rowdier. They acted like her smallness made her not only invisible but also unintelligible.

“Wait,” one girl said, “what did she say about the midterm test banks? I wasn’t listening.”

“No clue,” her friend said.

They spoke airily as if Alda hadn’t explained everything to them a million times. She’d even written out the information right there on the whiteboard.

“Make sure to put up your chairs,” Alda said.

“Make sure to put up your chairs,” someone said back in a mocking baby voice. Alda took the long way to her car this time, still scrolling through drugrecall. Apparently, the bubble bath she’d bought wasn’t allowed in Canada or the EU. Too strong. There was an on-going class action lawsuit, but the company refused to pull the product, and the FDA’s hands were tied. There probably wouldn’t be an issue at all if there was a solution, an anti-antiaging serum, but why would anyone with a brain want that?

This group of kids ran into her without apologizing. They were laughing. She couldn’t tell if they were laughing at her pain or in spite of it. She’d become both invisible and a spectacle at the same time.

“Hey!” Alda said. “Be careful. You could seriously injure someone.”

The tallest of them rolled her eyes. These kids weren’t students that Alda knew. They were younger. Meaner. She was pretty sure they were from the middle school. Sometimes she saw kids their age playing basketball in the courtyard. They were small from a distance, but now they towered over her.

“Maybe you should be careful,” a boy shot back.

“That’s it,” Alda said. “What are your names? I’m reporting this.”

“Mr.None- of-Your-Business, that’s what.”

They laughed, this time at her for sure. She called after them as they left, throwing empty threats. “Don’t think I won’t tell your teachers! I know what you look like!”

“Why’s she even here?” they were whispering. “I’ve never seen her before. Is she, like, new? And why does she dress like that? Her clothes are all baggy and weird.”

The sound of their laughter stayed with Alda long after they’d left, lingering, growing. Their memory connected to those of her sisters, the funeral, the pill, her drinking—so many layers of sadness; they crushed her. When she was in grade school, this one group of girls kept threatening to jump her, and though Alda never told her mom, her mom knew. She’d stay in bed until her mom came home and massaged her scalp. Just let me drive you to school, her mom said. No, Alda said. You get up way to early and I’m lazy. She wanted to tell her the truth so bad. But even more, she wanted to protect her mom from the truth.

In college, Alda had read once about amputees being able to feel their lost appendages. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t internalize their loss completely. She felt like they might understand her. She was still half convinced her mom would pick up the phone when she tried calling her in the car. All she wanted was to hear her voicemail greeting but also maybe her mom if God allowed it (he didn’t).

“Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now,” her mom’s voice said, “try calling again later. Okay, thanks!”

Alda played the recording on the way home, in the parking lot, the stairwell, living room, kitchen, bath. The whole time, she was thinking the same thing: One day, I won’t remember what she sounded like. Then she’d forget her mom’s face, her purple eyeshadow and unique smell. The perfume her mom wore came by special order from a boutique whose name Alda had never thought of asking.

Sweat pooled under Alda’s armpits. In the mirror, she studied the chubby-faced little girl in the ill-fitting clothes. She was an orphan, she realized. She poured two shots of brandy, throwing away the first.

Orphan, orphan, orphan—the word got stuck so deep in her head that it became part of her. She was an orphan, and she’d relapsed. She texted her sisters. To Maureen: “I’m sorry.” To Joyce: “I was stupid.” She called her mom again, but this time the voice was different. A robot lady said that she was sorry, but the number was no longer in service.

This time, Alda used up all of the bubble bath. She stepped into the tub before it was ready, doused her face, filled the emptied bottle with water to force out the dregs. She let the water unravel her completely, becoming a part of it, her temperature dropping. She got smaller, smaller—so small that she couldn’t see over the bathtub’s rim.

To be small and safe again—that was all she wanted. It wasn’t that she was trying to die. What she was after was the opposite, a new chance at life. She let her desire shrink her down until there was nothing left but dirty bathwater. The faucet was still running. The tub overflowed.