DECEMBER 2025, FLASH, 1200 WORDS
He told you he didn’t like your hair. That matted mass coiled around your neck, snaking down your back until it hugged your left thigh. Dry, interwoven with golden threads, impervious to combs, its only purpose seemed to be resisting any sun or storm without yellowing at the tips. He ordered you, in secret, to cleanse your skin with potions made by witches skilled in erasing what others deemed undesirable. (But how? You liked yourself.) He demanded you straighten your hair, so no one in the capital where you had just moved together would look at you with disdain. He wanted it fine as thread, lax to the wind. Let it move, he commanded, because he didn’t like it stiff, curly, or defiant. He didn’t like what was within you and demanded to change it.
You explained to him that it was impossible. Through your hair, your memories were transmitted, all that you were, all you would become, all that those before you had been. It was the legacy of your tribe, the symbol of the unbroken line of matriarchs who once ruled the shadowy lands of the south. They spoke the truth, worked miracles, and wielded the magic of words. Your hair was the vessel for all the knowledge you needed to weave. When your time came, you would cut it off and place it on your daughter’s shaven head, where it would take root, intertwining with her new hair and creating fresh memories. In this way, you would live on forever, alongside those who came before.
He didn’t understand. He swore he loved you and wanted to protect you. If no one recognized you as a matriarch, he argued, you wouldn’t suffer the fate of your predecessors. He knew of the hunts that had scattered the matriarchs to the winds, and had seen what remained of them. Once, he stood before tapestries woven by artisans who had cut out their tongues to guard their secrets. Through the language of their hands, they swore their works contained the truths of the matriarchs. Perhaps it was true, for anyone who touched the fibers heard whispers and shuddered at the ancient spells murmured in an unknown tongue.
You never revealed the truth to him. Those tapestries were not imbued with magic rituals or woven from ordinary threads. They were made from the hair of your ancestors, each strand holding the voices that now whispered wisdom in your mind. Those masterpieces, hung in noble palaces and worth more than a handful of diamonds, carried hundreds of lost lives that could never be replaced.
Still, he insisted. It was absurd, he said, that you clung to your curls. How could a mass of dead fibers define your identity? How could strands of hair contain the knowledge of countless dead matriarchs and pass it to a little girl with large, dark eyes and a shaved head? He didn’t ask you to cut it, not yet, but to transform it, for your own good. To convince you, he even promised to take you to the castles of nobles so you could mourn your sisters.
He spoke with such conviction that you wavered. What if he was right? What if you could save them? You wanted to believe him. You didn’t want him to leave. He had threatened as much. If you don’t change, I’ll leave you. Do you know what I risked saving you from the hunts? I could have any other woman I want. But I chose you. I pulled you out of the hole you were hiding in and brought you here. Do you know how many matriarchs would kill to be with me, to inherit my genes? Change, or I’ll change you.
Terrified, you agreed. You wanted him. He was right about one thing: you had escaped the cave where you once hid, where even your word magic couldn’t save you if the hunters came. And it was true, he had excellent genes. A thousand times you imagined your daughter: strong, a warrior, powerful.
But he smiled in public and scowled at home. He scrutinized your reflection in the mirror, sour-faced, watching your weight, your stretch marks, your breasts. He hated your hair. If you didn’t bend to his will, he might sell you to the artisans, to the nobles, to anyone who coveted the power of a matriarch. You would have to flee again, hiding who you were in some temporary shelter.
So, you underwent the treatments. Slow. Corrosive. Your hair was dragged through bristles, sprayed with potions that reeked of death to strip away the gold threads. It was pulled until tears welled in your eyes, and you bit your lip as the hot iron seared through the strands. Piece by piece, those small parts of you—of everyone else—came off your scalp. At first, the loss was controlled. Then, as the taming continued, the pain tore the memories from your head. You could hear them scream, all of them, begging you to stop.
The witches he hired didn’t understand. They were cheap, ignorant witches. They didn’t hear the voices that haunted you, didn’t sense the lives unraveling with every tug and tear. They laughed at your tears, mocking you for crying over hair. It’s just hair; it will grow back, they said.
But one day, you didn’t let them touch a small, rebellious curl at the nape of your neck. You braided it tightly and felt it pulse with life, grateful. That defiant strand fluttered in the wind as you walked through the city where no one recognized you. It was a piece of yourself reclaimed. Emboldened, you began to weave small, rebellious braids—curly, black, and unyielding—hidden among the straightened strands.
When he discovered the revolution hidden in the straight hair, he yelled: What the fuck is this? Why didn’t the witches tame this hair? You answered by drawing a dagger and slicing off the rest of your hair, tears streaming as you severed thousands of memories forever.
He abandoned you in the desert. Selling you would have destroyed his reputation. He couldn’t risk being seen as the fool who let a treasure slip through his fingers. In the end, you told yourself he was a man of his word. You’d expected this. Perhaps even wanted it.
Over time, through the passage of the creatures that left their trail in the burning sand, through many shelters and your magic of words, what seemed lost was reborn from the depths of your mind. Your hair stood up. It began to recover. It encoded what you worked hard to keep, renewed all of them; they smiled, grateful, from the echo of the memories that you strived to save so that your race would not perish due to your mistakes. The strands, free, found its spiral twist, it sun-defying brilliance, found its identity. You found yourself again.
He hated the matriarchs within you. But you loved them above all else.
Fantasy and science fiction writer Malena Salazar Maciá is the author of the novels La ira de los sobrevivientes, Aliento de Dragón, and Los errantes, among others. Her texts have been collected in both national and foreign anthologies. English translations of her stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Dark Matter Magazine. Her work has been translated into Croatian, German, Italian and Japanese.
Behind the Scenes with Malena Salazar Maciá
What was the initial inspiration for this story, and were there any significant changes from that inspiration through edits and revisions?
The main inspiration for this story was an invitation from a publishing house that decided to do an anthology in Spanish about violence against women. The conditions: the story had to be realistic and it had to be a short story. Since I’m more of a novelist than a short story writer, inclined and adapted more to speculative fiction, it seemed like a good challenge, and I started thinking about how to approach a story that didn’t show explicit physical violence, because I knew most of the invited authors would opt for that theme (as happened), but rather a more subtle form of violence: emotional manipulation, colonization, gaslighting, toxic relationships, finding the symbolic elements that would represent each element and the courage of women to escape this cycle. In the end, violence has many faces, like the facets of a rough gem.
And I shared a bit of personal experience: I have very curly hair. As a teenager and in my twenties, I hated it because it was trendy for boys to notice you if you didn’t have a swallow’s nest on your head. I straightened my hair a lot just to fit in and be liked, which ended up causing damage to my scalp (traction alopecia in some areas) and to my own hair, because I couldn’t access curly hair products in Cuba. Until I decided to embrace my curly, unruly hair and gradually find products that would help me, because, in the end, it was a part of me.
So, the origin of “The matriarchs” was a short story titled “Liberation,” a realist one. So, I wanted to play with the idea a bit. What would happen if I took this plot and applied it to other literary genres, such as science fiction and fantasy, over which I had complete mastery? I loved the results. It was like putting on glasses with different colored lenses and adjusting them to see the same situation from different angles. The versions that emerged were fascinating.
The image and idea of “The matriarchs” also extended to the point where I developed what would become the plot for a retro-Afro-fantasy story. A tale about the African slave trade and Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, from which a fantasy story titled “The Journey of the Seeds” emerged. The original Spanish version of the story won the El Dinosaurio micro-story contest during the 2025 Havana International Book Fair. For the moment, the story in English hasn’t found its home, but I hope to find one soon.
And “The matriarchs” stretched their horizons a bit further, combining with some elements of “The Journey of the Seeds” until the science fiction story “Children Aren’t Born in Winter” emerged, in the vein of Afrofuturism. This story hasn’t found a home in the English-speaking world either, but I will persevere.
How does this story fit into your body of work? Is it similar in some ways to what you usually write, or is it very different?
My discovery of Afrofuturism was, like all discoveries, by chance. My first novel in Spanish, Nade, was a cyberpunk novel…and Afrofuturist. The work of a novice, but like any first work, I have a lot of affection for it. I’m a fan of Egyptian mythology, and in this novel, I blended it with cyberpunk and thriller, given that it took place on the African continent in a dystopian future. Later, I was asked to write an Afrofuturistic short story, which is where “Eyes of the Crocodile” emerged. It was translated by Toshiya Kamei and published in Clarkesworld issue 161, and later selected as part of a Best of World SF collection by Lavie Tidhar.
From that moment on, I began to pay more attention to my Caribbean roots. We are an absolutely fascinating blend of cultures. What best defines us is our mestizaje. There is a popular saying here: “El que no tiene de congo tiene de carabalí.” And as the poet Nicolás Guillén rightly expresses in his song[1] No. 6: “Yoruba soy/ soy lucumí/mandinga, congo, carabalí./Atiendan, amigos, mi son, que acaba así:/Salga el mulato,/suelte el zapato,/díganle al blanco que no se va/De aquí no hay nadie que se separe”; referring to the unique treatment of Afro-descendants in the Caribbean. Now, with some knowledge, I’m surprised that with Nade, I had already written Afrofuturism without realizing it, and I was one of the first to write about it in Cuba as speculative fiction. This led me to delve deeper into the roots of the Caribbean, reaching the Arawak myths, the Afro-Arawak-Mesoamerican connection, and to begin writing about these mythologies, bringing them to various literary genres. I’m also very interested in the mythology of the rest of the world and have written about it, but my main focus is on this triad of my deepest roots, with a special focus on the Arawak-Taíno culture, given that, during colonization, they were driven to the brink of extinction, leaving only the Arawak oral tradition mixed with Afro-descendants. So, in some stories, I try to rescue these Taíno fragments so they don’t get lost in the silence of time.
[1] I apologize in advance to the professional translators for this clumsy and approximate English translation of Nicolás Guillén’s wit:
Yoruba I am, / Lucumí my name, / Mandinga, Congo, Carabalí flame. / Hear me, my friends, my song takes wing: / Mulatto rising, /shoes untied, / tell the white man he stays inside / no soul from here will break the tide.