Blue Magic by Tamera Sternberger

BLUE MAGIC

My head is full of fire. I burn each of my fingertips like tea candles the first time I straighten my hair by myself. I grip my grandmother’s hot comb, a metal demon rusted with love, that sizzles sweet words into my red tipped ears.

I run it over each strand, Watching Blue Magic, the greasy salve I plucked from its perch on auntie’s nightstand, coat each strand in an attempt to tame what cannot be.

I let its teeth rip fire along my brown skin. Branding me in the dead language of beauty supply stores, gnarled hairdressers and castor oil. I am marked by war, the battle waging between I and each curl my ancestors sought to sew unto me.

My hair, a cotton seed that has bloomed against my will. I harvest each lock into the baskets of my mother’s hands and when she reaches for the comb and runs it through, each stubborn coil ignites, leaving me smoldering until I am nothing but ash and no amount of blue or even black magic can revive me.

But I am not completely gone. Only a cinder on the scalp of the black women who have come before me. A follicle in the roots they oiled before bed decades ago, still ever growing like wildfire.