“Ladies Prefer Blonds: Fragments of an Undoing” by Ali McKenzie-Murdoch is a prose poem that fixates on one deceptive word: rubio, which means blond but with bloodred roots. But it’s also a flash fiction that tells the story of a woman enmeshed in an obsessive love: “Red says danger.” Readers must parse blond from blood, light from dark. —Court Harler
Rubio, they call him. It makes her skin burn. Clio mouths it like a secret, as if saying it will bleach her tongue. Golden, honey, caramel, strawberry. Blond as seduction, as light, as warmth.
Rubio comes from rubeus, red—not golden. Bloody. Not the chill flaxen tresses of northern fairy tales, but the burn of the south, the sun, his gaze.
In German fairy tales, gold is the reward. The endless braid. Escape, spun from strands.
Real or from a bottle?
In Renaissance Venice, women bleached their hair with horse urine and lemon juice, lying on sun-soaked roofs. Blonde, they believed, was closer to the divine. The sting, the smell, the heat.
The first boy Clio ever kissed had hair tousled with salt and sand. She remembers his cool blue sun-cream scent but forgets his name.
Blond is not a colour. It’s an obsession.
Toria once told her, “You like blonds because you think they’ll be softer.”
Later, Clio will learn that blondness cuts.
When did she start seeing only fair-haired men in every room? Not the albinos—all sunburnt necks and white lashes—but sand-coloured men, sculpted from the beach. The ones who fall between the dark and the light.
She thinks she’s chasing illumination. Or is she chasing erasure?
Ru-bi-o. Almost Rubicon. The river Caesar crossed—a point of no return.
He calls her morena. Dark. Sometimes it feels like a compliment. Sometimes it presses against her skin.
In Rome, ruber meant red like rust, wine, wounds. The raw underside of things.
His comrades call out Rubio across the parade yard, across the beach, their voices laced with soft mockery. His hair clipped close, but not sharp. More like a dull-edged sword.
Blondness is recessive. Like power, it must be fed.
Clio kept her childhood hair in a box, wrapped in tissue paper. Her mother burned it when she turned twelve, leaving the room smelling like melted sugar and loss.
She once wrote his name in lipstick on her inner thigh. Not a blond mark, but rubeus. A red closer to violence than romance.
The light in Ceuta bores into Clio, hard and brilliant as peroxide.
Sometimes she catches herself staring at the backs of fair-haired men in cafés, in airports. Not desire, but recognition of blanched hope.
In Marrakesh, she saw girls selling blonde hair extensions. Gold packaged in plastic. Dreams plastered over darker scalps.
With age, his hair has darkened—like bruised fruit, like lead white in an old painting. Blackening.
Later, she will see his name as a warning. Rubio. Rubious.
Red says stop.
Red says danger.
Red spills when skin breaks.
In the end, it won’t be his blondness that undoes her, but his distance.
Ash. Platinum. Dishwater.
These are the shades Clio will paint herself in shame.
Naming the lightness won’t keep him from slipping into shadow.
To know him will leave her marked with a darker hue.
She thought she was chasing light.
Now she knows it was only heat.
And heat leaves ash.
ALI McKENZIE-MURDOCH’s work appears in X-R-A-Y, Fractured, Your Impossible Voice, Litro, Bending Genres, and more. Her work was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award 2025. She’s working on a novella-in-flash about liminal spaces—theatre stages, no-man’s-land, the foreshore—places where boundaries blur.
Featured image by Paolo Gregotti, courtesy of Unsplash.
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