the blueshift journal

next: the dictator's dreams

Khadi puts it on at night. The bleaching cream that smells of roses, raw chicken, lemon zest, calamine lotion, and steel wool. She squeezes the tube and applies its contents onto the sample area, a plot of skin. Khadi works the cream deep into the back of her palms with her index and middle fingers. She rubs the swirls of white cream until they spread softly across her evening skin like thinning Asperitas clouds. If the results make her feel as free as daybreak, she will continue with the treatment.

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An unusually scorching climate holds this April afternoon captive. There is no air conditioning in the eighty-year-old bungalow on 43rd Street in North Oakland. A thin line of nude, sapphire, sky peaks through the top of the living room window. The grass on the front lawn has been zapped so hard by the sun that it surrenders all of the green from each of its blades. It is now the color of Tina Turner’s hair from the What’s Love Got to Do with It album cover. Heat often changes color.

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*

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The skin around Khadi’s fingers are both dark coffee and cream, as if one color battles for dominion over the other. She asks if my mother approves of the foolishness of choosing blonde braiding hair. I say yes, lying through my 16-year-old teeth. Khadi adjusts my height by pumping her foot on the beauty chair pedal. She positions me in the direction of the sun, removes the kanekalon hair from the package and sighs. As if to admit that even with payment for this service, it still hurts. That honestly, there is no hairstyle fee that satisfies what she is being made to do my hair. She exhales like she is trying to blow out a fire in me. Or like is she trying to extinguish the blaze that crowns each of her cuticles. As if something in me reminds her of something in her. As if to say this is where her own hunger started. With a strand, a braid, then a whole head.

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Today, her fingers will be buried in my rebirth. She begins to spindle the straw hair into gold.

*

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She blocks the sun by placing the mirror in front of me. I watch her fingers speedily work down each braid. Hair between thumb and index and middle. Push. Up. Over. Twist. Under. Twist. And then the next. The speed makes her joints pop like tiny firecrackers in my ears. At each pause between braids, we blur into each other. Her obsidian hue pulls itself from her wrists. Splashes of beige paint onto her skin. I am staring into her reflection. Which is my own.

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*

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Together, we are golden tresses, jute skin, white pampas grass hands, burlap tinted everything, a million goodbyes from the trap of dark skin. Forever daylight. We search for a sun to ravage us through and through. From head to toe. A sizzle. A burn that chars and lifts us from our old lives. New colors scrape the lines on the map that threaten to lead us back to the homes we do not want.

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*

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I return to Khadi every three months to make me feel beautiful, which is to say, a bit farther from myself. Her skin burns from itself like a lit stick of incense.

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*

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Look at her hands and my hair—watch us braided into the other’s dream. We are nothing when not staring into the same mirror. Nothing without the other’s eyes. Nothing without the other’s hunger. We are an endless wish to run away.