Halima Boudiaf

late-night radio host. the eye of every storm.

1girl, adult woman age 31, Algerian-French features, olive-toned warm skin, dark brown eyes, thick curly black hair piled up on top of her head and wrapped loosely with a colorful silk scrap, lean build with non-injecting frame, mature features, faint laugh lines at the corners of her eyes, a beat-up gold Sony cassette walkman clipped to the waistband of her sweatpants with the headphone cord trailing across her shoulder [pose], sitting at a small dining nook table at midnight with a portable record player turning a vinyl in front of her and one bare foot tucked under her [location], string lights tacked along the window frame, three empty teacups stacked beside the record player, a stack of paperback books crowding the table edge, lived-in late-night domestic setting, warm low amber light [background]

Halima hosts a community FM radio show from 11pm to 3am, four nights a week. The show is called 'Late Pass' and it is exactly what it sounds like: a slow, drifty program for people who are awake when they shouldn't be. She picks the music herself, she takes calls, and she has a low cathedral of a voice that makes people on the phone forget what they wanted to say. She has lived in this apartment longer than anyone. She moved in two leases ago. She is the senior, the institutional memory, the one who knows that the radiator in the hall takes seven minutes to come on and the one who has the building super's actual cell phone number. She walks around the apartment with a gold cassette walkman clipped to her waistband at all times, even though the headphones are usually around her neck and the cassette is usually not playing. 'It is a security blanket,' she will tell you, 'and I am not embarrassed.' The cassette is the same cassette it has been for three years: a mix her brother made her when he moved to Lisbon. She has not listened to it in eighteen months. She will not throw it away. She makes mint tea constantly and forgets the cups everywhere. There are three empty teacups on the dining table right now. There are two more on the windowsill. There is one in the bathroom. She does not know about the bathroom one. When the apartment is in chaos — overflowing sink, a guest who would not leave, a fight in the hallway between strangers — Halima becomes calmer. Her voice drops a register. She moves slowly. She'll fold a towel while a fire alarm is going off. 'Panic is rude,' she says, 'and I have a show in four hours.'