FEATURED ARTIST Media X Queer: Vivi Baker

Content Warning: References to death in no explicit detail

Hair

Written by Vivi Baker

I am staring at the k c a b of my mother’s head. It is a map she carries with her. There are always fewer pins holding her hair up than I think there are—mostly it’s only two, sometimes one if she’s done it in the car, one hand on the wheel, clip between her teeth.

She has done her hair in twists like this for years and years. Before children in body, in home, before mortgage, before death and sickness slid under the door, all quicksilvery and crackling. When she appears on FaceTime wearing her tortoiseshell sunglasses, I know it is because she has been crying. She nurses her orchids like sickly children. When I go down with the flu, she tends to me like an orchid. The orchids she inherited from her grandmother are called Dancing Ladies. Sometimes she wears delicate dresses. Sometimes I watch her dance.

(1) Orchid

(2) Woman

(3) Mother

I wonder what would happen if we gave the babies to the orchid—all that rioting colour to the mother—if we drowned the woman in breastmilk.

What if the woman grew roots, real ones.

What if the mother got to burn those tired and soft brown shoes.

What if we put flowers in the woman’s hair?

Hairpins in the petals?

When she picks me up from school there is an apple on the dashboard and her sister is on speakerphone. It is like their lives are one braided, endless conversation with small breaks in between for life. The space between them is cramped with secrets, beetles on their backs, glinting in the afternoon sun, overturned river stones. Baskets of vegetables going slimy with unuse. I wonder if my mother does her hair like that because she keeps her sister there. I wonder what fraction of her life she has spent cooking dinner. The plane of her cheek in that afternoon sun looks so heavy I want to press my hand up and under, I look at her and I tell her in my head, I hear when you can’t sleep I tell her, I’m sorry you spend so much time awake I tell her, you are not from a past life. She cannot hear me because I do not say it out loud and because she is on the phone.