‘Blonde’

Victoria Maldonado is a multidisciplinary visual artist and storyteller whose work blends the personal with the mythic. Drawing from her lived experience as a woman of color navigating identity, memory, and transformation, her pieces often explore emotional duality through layered textures, bold symbolism, and haunting atmosphere. Maldonado has exhibited at the University of North Texas and participated in creative workshops with organizations like the Dallas Cowboys’ Minority Creative Program.

Blonde

Something is wrong here. I’m in the shower, rinsing the bleach from my curls, when I find locks twisted around my fingers. I yank my hair. Maybe I just need to rid myself of the excess—the deadweight strands that couldn’t make the cut. Besides, we humans shed about 80 hairs a day. Maybe I didn’t brush my hair enough this morning and all the weak hairs are all tangled up in the strong. But my hair’s elasticity now mirrors a rubber band’s, and I produce clumps in my palm. I can’t stop pulling the hair out. I need to find the strong. I need to find the hairs that made it out of this bleach job alive.

Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I shouldn’t be bleaching my hair with Clorox in the kitchen sink. But then again, Mom thinks anything I suggest is a bad idea.

The drain wears a hairmade cap. It spurts and burps at me. I bark at it, pulling more strands loose from my scalp. I release them and allow them to swim to the drain, not thinking they’ll build a fortress up and out. Shower water, mingling with the weak hairs, reaches my ankles. The hairs stick to my skin like a bronze, vintage sweater.

Mom knocks at the door.

“You okay? Need some help in there?”

“I’m good,” I say. “Leave me to it.”

The doorknob rattles.

“I said leave me to it,” I yell over the bathroom fan.

“You’ve been in there a while, honey,” she says. 

It’s probably only been ten minutes. She’s always exaggerating and concerning herself with things she shouldn’t.

So anyway, I pull. The doorknob continues to rattle over the hum of the fan. I pull and pull, hoping I pull my hair so hard that I pull my eardrums out. Fried strands prick my fingers and lift from my skin under the stream of shower water.

“Let me in,” Mom says. She’s twisting the doorknob, no doubt fiddling with the lock. She used to keep a locksmith’s kit next to her bed. After I stole it, she shifted its home, and now I don’t know what to do when she strips me of my privacy.

“I told you I got it,” I yell.

I smooth my palm over my head. Splotches of bald spots litter its landscape. I panic and pick up the clumps on the shower floor. Although I successfully gathered those hairs, the hair in the drain won’t come loose. I tug at it and it tugs back. Then, I lose my footing, slipping and hitting my hip on the shower floor. The bathroom door shakes. My mom is screaming, banging her fists against the door as if she doesn’t know exactly how to unlock it.

I’m ashamed. I didn’t “have” it. I never had it. Mom will be in the bathroom soon. Once she’s done with the dramatic staging of her most popular play, Concern, she’ll tell me she “told me so.” That I shouldn’t “do things” she “wouldn’t do.” That I shouldn’t be unsupervised. That I make a poor seventeen year old. That I’m lucky she’s kind enough to put up with me.

I arrange the clumps of hair on my head, as if they were never loosened from their roots. I piece them together, guessing where the puzzle pieces may fit. I lie in the water, surrounded by frayed ends and the smell of Clorox. My bleached hands burn. I brace for Mom’s arrival and cover my face with singed palms.

She bursts through the bathroom.

“Sweetie…” Her tone travels from concern and lands in disdain. I can feel her gawking at my body, the hair floating past me. I peer through my fingers and realize my attempt at rearranging my hair has not fooled her. She pinches her nostrils to shield from the stench. 

Fine, I think. I don’t want this hair on my head anyway. I move it from my scalp to my face. I place it on my cheeks, then my nose bridge, then I place some on my lids.

“Jasmine,” she says, “you’re being ridiculous.”

I continue. She asks me to stop—begs me to stop. I have created a mask to shield me from her wrath. Her pleads sound indifferent now, bored of my mistakes. But a beautiful thing has been created from me and she cannot have it. She cannot claim this messy thing to be hers anymore. This thin veil of blonde protects me. Then, I see, through the hazy hair, my mother is grimacing at me, all of me.

Brianna Genoble is a writer and recent MFA graduate from Spartanburg, South Carolina. Her work ranges from literary to speculative fiction. She loves the taboo, the surreal, and the human condition.