The Scorpio

by Khadijah Abdul Haqq

On the first day of the conference, I tell myself that I don’t believe in zodiac signs and that I must give people a chance based on their personalities and not where the sun was when they were born. I remind myself that not everyone born in January shares my unequivocal thirst for solitude or management. And that I am a Muslim and referring to zodiac signs is against my religion.

I see a woman signing in at the front desk. She’s young. In her thirties or maybe late twenties. Her hair is as dark as her skin. It’s wavy and cut into a bob which falls perfectly at her jawline. I think it’s a curly perm, but I can’t tell. She has a silver choker, a black body suit, and plaid shorts. She looks like an artist. Cool but irritated. I don’t know, but I’m certain she is either a Scorpio or a Cancer. Both emotional. Both angry. Both need the world to see their emotions and be in community with them.

For the most part, I get along with Scorpios. Scorpios are water signs. They’re led by their emotions. Like water, they look calm and in control on the surface. But under the surface they rage with intensity. Upon meeting them, they are gregarious people pleasers. They never want to be seen as mean or unkind, which they naturally are. They tuck their emotions until it is impossible for them to hide them. I know this because my daughter is a Scorpio. And this girl reminds me of her. I can see the list of millennial demands on her face: boundaries, space, and toxic relationships.

“Mom,” my daughter says, after holding her accountable for buying a car just before going off on a yearlong trip to Thailand. “You’re toxic. And a narcissist.”

Narcissist is the newest mental health word of the day. Before it was gaslighting and triggered. I can’t help but wonder when I became a narcissist. Was it before or after she signed my name for forty thousand dollars in student loans? Or maybe it was when I stayed up half the night to motivate her during her last semester of college? Or maybe it was when she hid that she and her lesbian lover lived at my mothers-in-law for nearly a year after she graduated? Or that I only found out that she even had a lover when she and a girl with a buzz cut hair and Cuban linked chain held hands comforting one another while my mother-in-law passed away on her deathbed. I wonder if I had been a narcissist when she was eighteen and she hit me in the mouth when we were wrestling and she swung for the bleachers in my face with her fist. And I stood in the rain to cool off so I would not hit her back because I didn’t want to have a memory of us fighting like the one I have of my mother and I fighting. Maybe I am narcissist because I am a Muslim. And for the most part religion is important to me, and I thought it was important to her until she told me, “Don’t talk to me about Islam. I don’t want your hadiths and Quran verses in my text.”

I don’t know when I became a narcissist—a person who thinks the world revolves around them. But I am one now. I am the villain in my daughter’s story. And I became a narcissist the day she decided I was one. I don’t know. Maybe I am one because I am a Capricorn. And Capricorns think the world revolves around them. Or more correctly, they think that they make the world turn. Or maybe I am a narcissist simply because I am a narcissist. Still figuring that out.

I speak to the Scorpio with the hopes of making her smile because I’m a Capricorn. And we like control, even over strangers who we think are Scorpios that are having a bad day. Even when we say that believing in zodiac signs is against our religion. Even when we should let people just be people but can’t.

So, I say, “Some heat we’re having.”

And because I think she is a Scorpio, I wait for her people-pleasing to follow. And instead, without lifting her head to look in my direction, she replies, “Not in the mood.”

“She’s a Virgo,” I note. “She’s definitely a Virgo.”

Khadijah Abdul Haqq is a Memphis-based writer. She is a 2023 Bread Loaf Katherine Baker-Less Nason contributor, a 2023 and 2025 VONA fellow, and a 2022 Roots. Wounds. Words. fellow. Her work has been published by Torch Literary Arts, The Ponder Review, HerStory, Wellspring Words, and elsewhere. Khadijah currently leads the co-writing workshop First, We Write in collaboration with the Fellowship of the Griots, a nonprofit that supports BIPOC writers. And in 2023, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. When she isn’t writing, Khadijah enjoys eating spicy food and spending time with her family.