Their Mouths Form Strange Shapes

Josepha Natzke

I am somewhere between the ages of five and eight. I am sitting most likely on the gnarled beige carpet in our living room. Before me is a red painted hutch that holds my books. I have pulled them all out onto the floor, hauling them out like a little animal, my sweaty fingers sticking to the glossy hardback covers.
          Perhaps I am reading the children’s history book with watercolor illustrations. Before my mother cut out the page with scissors, I read about ancient human sacrifices. I saw the image of dozens of people in ceremonial dress gathered around an altar; saw the small, faceless child. Now the page is gone, but the little nub of paper close to the spine reminds me of what it held.
          Two of my favorite books are children’s versions of Greek myths and Grimms’ Fairy Tales. I read the stories so often that I come to learn them by heart. Persephone is captured against her will by Hades because he wants her as his wife, and he tricks her by feeding her pomegranate seeds that will keep her in the Underworld. Hansel is kept in a cage. Gretel turns the lock on the stove door. And there are Bible stories: the birth of Jesus and Noah’s ark. Their full-spread illustrations show Mary, three wise men, animals lined up two by two. She gives birth to God in the straw. There are gifts and dust kicked up by hooves.
          The stories intoxicate me with their power. After reading a book about the Mayflower, I pull a quilt over my shoulders and ask my mother for a piece of bread. I eat it underneath the coffee table in the living room to reenact what it would be like to eat in a cramped berth below deck during a storm. Something I can’t explain moves me to hunch down on the living room floor and imagine the seasickness that the pilgrims felt. I rock myself back and forth and picture nausea and fear.



Behind my friend’s backyard is a forest. A pack of us go and play together, boys and girls, an assortment of warriors, dragons, witches, and talking wolves, running wild through fir trees and underbrush. It is spring. We’re outfitted in our raincoats, and the soles of our shoes slide in the mud. We’ve each found ourselves a stick for a sword. We describe to each other our imaginary capes and jewels. The natural pockets in the trees form rooms of the castle: the dungeon, the throne room, the armory where we stack our sticks against a sturdy bush.
          Here we defy mortality. We can fly, heal wounds, transform into inexplicably huge hairy beasts. Conflicts and alliances evolve and dissipate between us. We find ourselves the most free when we are just running, we don’t know why or away from whom, clacking our swords up against the trees.



There are words I am not supposed to know yet; words like “sex” and “rape.” These are adult words, with meanings I do not understand.
          In my children’s versions of Greek myths, they are softened and de-sexed. Hades falls in love with Persephone. Demeter is not angry because her daughter has been married and bedded by force; it is because of her maternal possessiveness; because, as my book tells me, she can’t “bear to part with her.” Persephone is not violated; she is only carried off. She is kidnapped and “led in” by her lover to the Underworld.
          But these words and their meanings are too deeply embedded in these narratives. When I read the Bible story of the events leading up to Jesus’ birth, I cannot get a satisfying answer from my mother as to why Joseph is so angry when Mary, his betrothed, becomes pregnant with the Son of God. Why is he disappointed when she tells him that she is with child, that child who is the one they all have been waiting for for so long? What does he think she has done?
          Words like these only become bigger. Unnamed, they grow cavernous. We still feel their presence; we come to know what they hold. Why do you think Demeter looked so desperately for her daughter when she learned of her “kidnapping” by Hades? In her anger, she made the entire earth barren and starved humans to the brink of extinction until Zeus demanded Persephone’s return from Hades’ Underworld. When Demeter saw her daughter again, her early words were a warning and a question:
          “Don’t eat anything they give you.
          You haven’t, have you?”



The girls in our fourth grade class gather together and decide to go to war on the boys. We have recess in the tennis courts in the public park behind our school. While they stand by unsuspecting, we draw the battle lines and designate corners. We form some loose rules and gather red rubber balls and jump ropes. Then we attack.
          Without a plan of their own, they are easily divided. We chase the ones we can into our corner, where we keep them prisoner. A few of us stand guard, red balls by our feet, ready to kick at them if they try to escape. The boys not in prison regroup; we send delegates to them, and then spies. Both are ineffective.
          The prisoners can easily run past us out of the corner. They begin to steal our red rubber balls. In an effort to stop this, we string a jump rope at waist height across the corner and forbid them to cross over it. Then how are we ever supposed to escape? they argue. This game is unfair. We are trying to reach an agreement with them when an adult, a recess aid, walks to our corner. “You need to take that jump rope down,” she says.
          “Why?” we say.
          “You can’t use that to trap them in there.”
          “But they’re not actually trapped. It’s just part of the game.”
          “Take it down.”
          “But it’s not actually hurting them,” we say. “It’s not even touching them.”
          She removes the jump rope. “This is not what jump ropes are for.”
          The boys who have escaped imprisonment are gathered at a safe distance, watching us and whispering. We growl and hiss at them.
          “What game are you playing?” the aid asks.
          “We’re playing War,” we say.
          In the art history textbooks at our Christian school, some adult has gone through and scotch-taped large yellow Post-its over every piece of genitalia. Before class, we gather and snicker at the yellow flags, which splash across the pages like highlighter. We tease the edges of the Scotch tape with our fingernails from around David’s taut lower torso; from Laocoön’s penis. Even when our teacher tells everyone to go back to their desks and start class, we are thumbing through, leaning forward to catch each other’s attention and point at what we can’t see.



A bear comes and knocks on the cottage door where two girls, Snow White and Rose Red, live with their mother. He asks to warm himself in front of their fire. Snow White and Rose Red invite him in. He’s friendly, so friendly that they play with him, and they’re not gentle: they tug at his matted brown fur and poke him with a broomstick. The bear puts up with it good-naturedly. That night, he sleeps in front of their hearth.
          When he leaves, Snow White sees some of his thick fur catch on the doorframe. Where it tore away from the bear, she thinks she sees gold flashing underneath. But before she can ask about it, he runs away into the woods.
          The bear, it turns out, is actually a prince, enchanted by a dwarf. The bear kills the dwarf in front of Snow White and Rose Red with a blow to the head. The spell is lifted, and the bear is a prince again. Snow White becomes his bride. Rose Red marries his brother.



At home there are violent images and stories that my mother either did not see or did not deem worthy of censoring. Kronos eats his children. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off pieces of their feet so that the glass slipper will fit. The prince realizes they are not the same princess he met at the ball when, as he carries them away on horseback, he sees blood leaking from their skirts. In an art book on the red hutch, I find Nicolas Poussin’s painting, “The Abduction of the Sabine Women,” which depicts the myth in which male Roman soldiers murdered the men of the Sabine tribe and captured their wives to have as their own. The painting is a whirl of color and figures. Women, seized by men whose faces are cast into shadow, raise their fleshy white arms towards the blue sky, their faces filled with surprise and despair. Their mouths form strange oblong shapes. I try to form that shape with my own lips, but it doesn’t look the same. When I study this painting, I understand the Sabine women like I understood the Mayflower voyage: that something terrible is being inflicted upon them, even if it’s something I can’t comprehend.
          Sometimes, as a child, I cannot stop thinking about violence. The world is covered in white snow. My white bedroom carpet. Model horses perch on the bedsheet cliffs, drawing battle lines. Dolls’ and animals’ bodies slam into each other. They scratch each other’s coats and break each other’s plastic limbs. One is imprisoned in a shoebox, starved of food, waiting for her prince. I will keep him from coming to her rescue until she is at the very brink of death. Here there is sickness, orphanhood, hunger, battle. Trouble. I play God; I cause all of it. I have seen Gretel tell Hansel to stick a bone out of the cage instead of his finger. I have seen Moses part the Red Sea. I have crouched in the corner, pretending to tremble.



A princess is playing with a golden ball in the garden, but by accident it falls into the pond. It sinks out of sight. She thinks it is lost, but a talking frog offers to fetch it for her. In return, he asks that she let him share her food and drink and sleep in her bed.
          The princess wants her ball back so badly that she promises the slimy frog these things, but as soon as he retrieves it for her, she runs away and leaves him behind. That night, he comes knocking on the castle doors, demanding that she make good on his promise. Her father, upon hearing the story, orders the princess to let the frog in and insists that if she has promised something, she should grant it.
          The princess shares her food and drink with the frog. She finds him so disgusting that she nearly pukes. Grudgingly, she brings him up to her bedroom but makes him sleep in the corner. But he creeps over to the bed and demands he be allowed to sleep with her. The princess is so disgusted that she scoops up the frog and throws him against the wall. When he falls, he transforms into a beautiful prince.
          The story has changed over time. In the earliest versions—those closest to its folklore roots—the frog transforms and lands in the princess’s bed, where she happily joins him for the night. But when it became clear that the biggest appeal of their volume of German folklore was as a book to read to children, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm edited out most inferences of sexual encounters in these fairy tales. After several rounds of Wilhelm’s edits, the frog’s exact landing place is unspecified—the troubling connotations of them together in bed are gone—and the couple instantly marries. And marriage itself, which entails sex and childbirth, is an act that occurs most often at the very end of the fairy tales where it appears: an ending, of sorts, with unclear implications.
          The fairy tales I read in my living room often end in marriage. Most of the Disney movies my friends and I watch together do as well. The wedding is always so brief: church bells, the princess and the prince descending a grand staircase, maybe sharing a chaste kiss. Credits roll. What marriage itself entails isn’t clear beyond true love, a white dress, and happiness. Whatever it involves is hidden; a next chapter.



Once, while our mothers are downstairs, my childhood friend leads me into her parents’ bedroom and we lie down in the shadows between the bed and the wall. One at a time, we pull down our cotton pants and open our legs to each other. We examine each other’s bodies. I feel the strangeness of her finger and the scratch of unfamiliar carpeting against my bare skin.
          I am perplexed; suspended between her touch and the knowledge that we are doing something we shouldn’t; between my discomfort at being vulnerable and the interest in discovery. Our mothers’ voices murmur through the floorboards. This is something forbidden, but I don’t know why. When we hear their footsteps in the stairwell we scramble and run back out into the hallway.
          We invoke diseases on each other, most often a broken limb or some kind of fever. We are usually orphans. I cover her in a crocheted blanket. While she shivers and lets me know every few minutes that she is growing colder, that her vision is fading, I pour dried beans into a little metal pot. I place it over the fire. The beans I will return later to the kitchen downstairs. The fire we have created by placing my bedside lamp on the carpet and draping it in a brown and orange cloth from my costume box. It casts mottled light on my bedroom walls.
          We are always afflicted by something particularly terrible, and over the course of our story, our conditions worsen. Our fevers cause us to hallucinate. Infections spread. Our play is subject to constant revision of backstory, of secret powers, of lineage, of fate.
          We cast our characters in that precarious state between the freedom of childhood and the question of whatever comes after it. There might be an occasional prince, but he’s just a paltry shadow; someone who never arrives until the very end. As with Snow White, Rose Red, and Cinderella, marriage is something that will happen in our stories, but it’s always in the future, out of view. We never get to marriage in our play because we know, even if we don’t know why, that it means that the story is ending.



I am finally learning more about the word “sex.” It is a word tangled with weddings and marriage. I learn about sex concurrently with its many relationships with sins and danger: disease, damnation, early parenthood. At youth group and school, adults begin to talk to girls about the importance of protecting ourselves. We become familiar with phrases like “sexual purity” and “modesty.” Sex, still mostly a mystery and something we whisper is “gross,” is all around us in the adult world, it seems, as if through a veil: lurking and ready to catch us.
          At the age of eleven or twelve, I pose with my class for a photo at a historical site where actors wear period dress and show us how to spin thread and dip candles. I’m tall for my age, so I stand in the back row next to one of the actors, a middle-aged man wearing flannel. When everyone is completely still, posing and smiling, I feel the pressure of his hand reaching around my waist and resting on the curve of my bottom. Frozen in fear as the shutter clicks, I hold my breath and smile at the camera as if nothing is happening. As soon as the photo is taken I scoot away from him. My face burns. Without knowing whether it was intentional or accidental, without knowing what groping is, I know something has occurred that is wrong.



Before she was Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld was named Kore, a female form of the Greek word kouros. Kouros referred to a youth, a boy about to be initiated into adulthood, inferring that Kore herself was, by definition, on the brink of initiation into womanhood. Kore was bewitched not by Hades himself, but by Gaia, who at Zeus’ command grew narcissus in the meadow where Kore and her friends picked flowers. The narcissus was so beautiful that heaven, the earth, and the sea laughed with joy. When Kore picked the narcissus, the earth opened and Hades appeared to carry her, kicking and screaming, in his arms to the Underworld.
          This myth became a symbol of transition from girl to woman—not a transition Kore asked for or wanted, but one that was sexually forced upon her. It was this violence inflicted on her by an adult that transitioned her into not only a woman, but Persephone: wife, queen, bringer of destruction. Kore could not leave childhood on her own terms, and it was on this premise that a girl’s initiation into adulthood hinged: that a boundary existed around her, one over which she had no control.



My imaginative powers have shifted from envisioning adventure to picturing boys. At night I lie in bed and images come to me, unbidden and strange. What is it like to kiss someone? What does it feel like to hold someone else’s hand? I think about the crushes on boys in my class and the actors my friends say are attractive. What does it mean for someone else to touch my skin?
          But there are blank spaces in my mind. There are things I don’t know; things that have been kept from me. I can picture what it means for skin to touch skin and for mouth to touch mouth, warmth and wetness, but then it ends and I’m left alone in the darkness of my room.
          Whatever comes next takes shapes from what I know. The sensuality of paintings like Poussin’s, the eventuality of sex, dynamics of power, potential for violence. The participation in what I can only see as darkness. Something dangerous and inevitable; something my changing body wants to welcome.
          I think about these things at night. The old toys up on my dresser and bookshelf are silhouetted in shadow: the battling horses, the tangled dolls.



I decide one day that I want things to be different.
          The earth does not open up for me. I am not seized or taken. But one day after school, I go into the bathroom I share with my siblings and look in the mirror.
          There is an unknown world; there are things I am afraid of. Whatever it holds, I want to bring myself closer to it. Like a god, I will slip through the membrane into the next world. Let me know everything. Let nothing be hidden from my sight. The afternoon light in the bathroom is gray, filtered through the curtains. I examine my reflection and assess the hair I never brush: its puff of frizz, the strange angle at which my cropped bangs flip out at the edges.
          I open the cabinet doors of the vanity and pull out a plastic tub that holds some of my mother’s old hair accessories. She keeps her hair short and doesn’t wear makeup, so there isn’t much to work with, but I find a bottle of glittering gold nail polish and two hair clips. I push the clips into my hair, one on each side of my head. They’re different colors, but with them my hair looks a little less wild and more well-kept.
          The next day at school, I wear the clips. Their teeth press gently against each side of my head. I glance down during class to see how the light reflects off the gold flecks in my nail polish. At recess, I walk up to two of my friends. Usually we create some kind of story to play out during recess: wizards, horses, or pirates. Not today. “I don’t want to play pretend any more,” I tell them.
          They both regard me with suspicion. “Why not?”
          “It just isn’t interesting anymore.” I’m aware that my words sound harsh, and that I am saying that to play pretend is silly and childish. I like sounding this way. Even if it’s only for a few seconds, my words hold a kind of power. “I can’t play pretend without knowing that it’s pretend. I think we look silly when we do it.”
          “Okay,” they say, deflated. But instead of agreeing with me or asking what we should do instead, they turn and continue to decide on a story to play out together. Now I am alone on the tennis courts, my fingers dug into the chain link fence, shivering under my raincoat. I look around at all the other kids at recess grouped together: some older girls talking, the boys playing four square. What have I done? I hear my friends begin their game, discussing their characters. I don’t leave their side that day, even while they play without me. I stand close to them because I don’t know, quite yet, where else to go.

Josepha Natzke is a writer and artist currently based in Chicago. Her art writing and poetry has appeared in publications including Sixty Inches from Center and Newcity, and she is the editor of the zine series phenomena.

Next Up: Fractures by Alexandra Clemente Perez