Malaika was fairly certain that the third eye on her forehead only itched when she was about to make a terrible financial decision. Today, it was screaming.
She stood in Aisle 4 of the supermarket, the fluorescent lights humming, and low music was playing in the background; chai ya saa kumi. In her previous life, the one involving marble altars and the smell of frankincense. The music would have been that of the spheres circling her altar. Now, it was a guy comparing love to 4 o’clock tea.
“Excuse me,” a man muttered, reaching past her for a tin of premium coffee.
Malaika shifted her weight, her sandals slapping against the linoleum. She could see the threads of his life trailing behind him like frayed silk: he would spill that coffee on his shirt at 10:15 AM tomorrow; he would meet his second wife in a bank queue in three years; he currently had a hole in his left sock.
It was exhausting being a goddess on a Tuesday. The omniscience never turned off, even when you just wanted to find the breakfast essentials. She turned her attention to the dairy fridge, where a thousand plastic eyes stared back at her. In the old days, she could part the seas with a single command, but today, she was paralyzed by the probiotic yogurt. She stood there, frozen by the sheer, aggressive variety of “gut health.”
Greek, low-fat, strawberry-bottom, goats-milk, double-creamed.
Her divine intuition, usually reserved for predicting the fall of empires, was currently over-indexing on the tiny live cultures. If she chose the peach, she’d have a mild afternoon headache. If she chose the plain, she’d feel virtuous but deeply unsatisfied.
“I just want a snack, not a revelation,” Malaika hissed at a row of vanilla tubs. She finally grabbed a wild berry blend with a “New & Improved” sticker that she knew, for a fact, was a lie.
At the self-checkout, the machine turned a judgmental shade of red. “Unexpected item in the bagging area,” it commanded in a voice that sounded suspiciously like her mother’s.
Malaika closed her eyes. She could hear the prayers of everyone in the store. The cashier was praying for her shift to end; the security guard was praying his knees would stop aching; the woman behind her was praying her card wouldn’t decline.
Malaika reached out, not with her hands, but with a golden ripple of intent. She didn’t end world hunger or stop time. Instead, she whispered a tiny, silver truth into the bagging scale.
The machine beeped. “Item accepted.”
She stepped out of the sliding doors and into the thick, humid air. The sky was bruising purple with the promise of rain, and the street was a chaos of hooting matatus and the smell of roasting maize.
Suddenly, the itch on her forehead stopped. She looked at the plastic bag in her hand, the cheap yogurt, the slightly bruised passion fruits, the light bill she’d eventually pay. This was the miracle, she realized. Not the altars or the eternal flames, but the fact that she could be hungry. That she could feel the grit of the pavement under her sandals and the anticipation of a rainstorm that would ruin her hair but cool the dust.
She peeled back the foil lid of the yogurt right there on the sidewalk, licking the creamy underside with a shameless, holy silver spoon. It wasn’t nectar, and it wasn’t ambrosia. It was slightly too tart and wonderfully cold.
Malaika smiled, a small, stubborn thing. The world was loud, expensive, and profoundly confusing, and she wouldn’t trade a single boring Tuesday of it for a seat back on the clouds.
AUTHOR BIO
Kadzo is a creative writer and facilitator living in Kenya. Her work centers on humanizing the magnificent and finding the holy in the everyday. She is currently exploring the ways speculative fiction can hold space for the lived experiences of women globally.
