Three hundred thousand likes. That's how many humans had not only seen, but approved of the new, lighter Mars. Mars Lite, Joe had joked, lightly, in his light voice, about her now bluish-grey hued skin. Three hundred thousand likes.
Mars clicked on the tweet, originated by a fan account that had recently gone rancid at the prospect of not knowing who or what they'd been rabidly supporting for all these years. She scrolled. Tabloid quality photos of her from Friday, two nights ago, sweating at a nightclub, the image brightened up to make her increasingly translucent skin whiter; further down a close-up of where she'd wiped the sweat and some of her black face away, an accident caught on camera. It hadn't seemed risky, hiding the problem, but she hadn't considered what sudden exposure would mean.
The spray tanner she'd hired to airbrush her beloved tawny black-brown back had, when pressed with the obvious evidence, talked.
A notification popped up, her phone vibrated, shaking, shaking, another buzz, another human with something to say about Mars Lite, candy bar babe gone lighter, whiter, no longer dark chocolate but approaching milky.
It was Joe, calling, again, as he had for the last three days, doing his own personal version of a sentiment analysis, a personalized algorithm run real-time, old school. That's what he had called his check-ins the last time they spoke, the time after she had hung up on him and smashed the phone into her vanity top, marble with butterflied edges, synthetic yet cool to touch, shattering the screen, screaming, wanting to cut her fingers and watch her own dark blood bleed out through lightening, lighter skin on the backs of her fingers but instead just asking her d'assistant to buy her a new phone.
A lighter one, one that wouldn't smash so easily on fire-red marble, mixed with streaks of aqua-blue.
The vibrations went on. It was Joe, a phoned in daily sentiment analysis of Mars Ibiza, for the twenty-sixth of January of the year two thousand and twenty.
"Joe. I'm still here, hey."
"Mars. Hey. Listen, I've got some news. It's not great, but I think it'll be good for us now. Are you ready to hear it?"
"News and no analysis? That's new Joe." They shared a laugh. "Go ahead."
"I just got off the phone with the festival organizers, about your Coachella spot in April. They, uh, they want to move our set to the second stage. They, and I too, think it'd be good to get you out of the limelight a bit; good news is they agreed to a better timeslot. I mean, I get it, they need to sideline any and all politics this year, especially, what with the election and all."
An exasperated sigh from Mars cut Joe short. "Fuck that Joe. I'm not politics. I'm *not*."
"Mars, I know that. And I know you've told me that you don't understand why this is happening, it's as much of a mystery to you as anyone, but I need you to get on level with me about how the optics of this are playing out. You're a beautiful, successful black, dark black, woman who's suddenly and inexplicably gone light. Worse, you tried to cover it up with blackface. It's not unreasonable for people to want to know that it hasn't all been a hoax, the blackness, that you haven't suddenly gotten ashamed or pulled down by society and done a Jackson. You see this, I know I don't need to explain it to you. Frankly, I'm surprised we haven't had our asses canceled yet."
Mars was angry. "Joe, I can't fucking help it, I don't know what's wrong, I don't know when it's going to end. Of course I didn't fucking fake it, just look at my parents, my sister."
The sudden tears surprised her, hot raging tears of anger and sadness and bewilderment and as she sobbed, pools of dark pigment washed from her skin, her cheeks, staining the fire-red with brilliant blue granite countertop vanity custom made from a synthetic stone mason, that made stones, hard and cold to touch, stones that could absorb the heat of a human hand or stand unstained by the black tears of an angry, bewildered heart, stones that came not from nature but forged purposefully instead by men for woman and their vanities.
Joe made his goodbyes and hung up.
Later, much later, the phone face lit up, white light turning red in reflection from the vanity's stone top. A message had arrived, from Lilith.
"Call me, when you can. I found something."
to be continued
Source: NASA