by Karen Pullen
I work on my stories for a long time. This 3500-word story, “Make Me Beautiful”, was no exception. I wrote the first draft in 2006, for a contest that required a story around this prompt: She slapped him hard. I tried to think of an original reason for a woman to slap a man and came up with: a really bad haircut. That’s the pivotal event in this story: Duman, a hair stylist, butchers Payton’s hair.