An Annotated Ontogeny of Sex & Shame

by Namah

from Issue 2

Age Six

You are in a car with your parents—it is small
and red and forces you all to crouch close
together. You are driving somewhere sunny and
green and endless. It's a great day. You cannot
think of a better day. What a perfect day! you
keep saying over and over again. When you
arrive at the green pasture, your parents cradle
each hand, occasionally lifting you so that your
feet dangle above the ground, surrounded by
other children whose parents are cradling them
the same way. Everyone is happy and your smile
reaches higher than you ever have on the swing
set. You don’t think you can ever go  higher. The
green pasture is mottled with blue— baby birds
that scurry around everywhere, on their own
little walks with their own parents in their own
little concentric circles. You see the other
children kiss them, hold them, claim them as
their own and decide upon the same for yourself.
You grab two that are especially small and soft
and blue and bury them into your chest. You
cannot wait to surprise your parents when you
get home, show them how good you did, show
them how you picked the two bluest birds.

In the car, on the way home, your parents are
bubbling over with praise—What a good girl!
Our perfect baby girl! Our good girl who never
brings us any trouble!, unlike the other children
who begged and pleaded and wore down their
poor, tired parents into taking a bird home. You
feel the smaller of the two flutter against your
chest. This tiny flutter makes your tummy drop
the way it drops when you swing down.

The cramped car, once filled with love, begins to
percolate inch by inch with dread. You grow
catatonic as your parents drone on with praise,
knowing that soon you will be found out,
knowing that soon that which has just been
given to you will be taken away. As your heart
thuds, the bigger of the two buries his beak into
it. Like you, they are growing restless.

You know what needs to be done.

You grab a blue bird, soft and warm and
fluttering still and swallow it whole. You want to
cry as you feel your teeth snap and grind its tiny
bones down but your mouth is too full of
feathers to scream. You leave nothing behind.
Your parents drone on lovingly, stingingly, as
your throat grows so hoarse you are afraid you
will choke. Still, you quiet your breath,
preparing yourself once again to do what needs
to be done. You grab the smaller, softer one that
now looks you in the eye.

You wake up screaming

Despite their best efforts, you still shared a bed with them.

They worked long hours and so, a lacuna like this was a magical rarity.

These units of three remained independently whole, never intersecting.

You now know that there is a natural, predestined way in which one must slowly and cautiously untie themselves from this primordial knot. For a while it struck you to be the most violent severance. 

Your impatience developed early and stuck to the roof of your mouth.

You had not yet known the taste of meat. 

Shame still feels like feathers in your throat and guilt feelings chewing down bones. 

You didn’t talk for days and no one can get you to say why.

Ages Fifteen through Twenty

You’re late. You woke up late and the list of
errands you have to complete mounts and
collapses in your head like a sand dune. You
stuff a flimsy plastic bag full of everything you
think you need and it begins to sag under its own
weight. Big and unwieldy, it collides with every
wall in your way, announcing your arrival,
announcing your disarray. The whole world is a
market, whose anodyne wares you begrudgingly
accept as your own. As the day goes on, more
bags are ladled onto your arms, now long and
thin like a curtain rod, stretching endlessly to
make space for the nameless goods. The bags all
sag under their own weight, and you begin to
sag under theirs. When you get home, you
collapse with the bags that have 
begun to feel like overripe fruit leeching off your
rakish arm. You all coalesce into one big rag
pile, a garbage heap in need of disentanglement,
of order, of liberation

So you begin picking apart this dune as swiftly and fruitlessly as a gust of wind—undoing the
disarray only to recast it in a different spot, in a
different shape, in a different shade. And then
you begin again.

From underneath this heap, something
whimpers. At first, you cannot tell what it is or
where it is coming from, muffled under this
cascade of cloth and limb and styrene you call a
home. But you keep digging, and it emerges:
small and shrivelled and afraid like a burdock
burr. Your dog. You forgot you had a dog. You
can’t remember the last time you fed it and now,
in your palms, grey and panting, it looks like it
could crumble like chalk. Hurried, you grab its
neck and force it under the faucet that carves a
stream in your home, hoping that water will
undo what you have done. But its tongue proves
to be too brittle and its limbs are as solid as the
water you beckon it towards. You shake its body
with grief. You scream in your dream.

The heaps in your mind begin to form and
collapse again, like the paltry sighs of the dog's 
chest, like the paltry sighs of your own. How
could you have let this happen again?

Or did not sleep

You have no time to stop and think.

These transactions, robbed of any qualia, remind you that excess was never besides the point. 

You pledged the world your fealty. 

Or pendulous breasts

You still wonder about the difference between the three. 

but never distant 

This gave your straightening a purpose you did not even realize it needed.

Not the faintest memory.

How long has it been? How long should it have been? You have never actually owned a pet and so, you don’t possess the answers to the questions that keep emerging in your dreams.

But only whimper in your sleep, half turning in your bed.

You dream this dream so often that you begin to startle every time you open your closet.

What kind of beast forgets?

You have no time to stop and think.

Age Twenty Two 

You are trapped in a Norman Rockwell painting,
only half erased. You are wearing a full circle
skirt and a half apron, in prints like gingham or
tattersall. You are stirring away in a bakelite
kitchen embellished with every appliance in the
catalog, but something feels wrong. The lights
are too bright and the floor is slanted and so you
are in a battle with the ground that seems to keep
slipping underneath the stem of your heels. The
kettle on the electric stove is roaring, weeping,
sweating and you are afraid it is going to burst.

Instead, the doorbell rings like thunderclap, and
you tremble like a rain cloud. On your doorstep,
on the muddy Welcome mat, is a wrought iron perambulator hiding something cold and wet and
shivering in a swath of cloth. In a flash, you
know somehow that He was Yours. 

Under the sheets, he is ugly and mangled like an
intestine. Aborted and deformed. He does not
look like your husband, or really any man you
know, but you cannot be certain because you
cannot bring yourself to look at him for too long.
He emits a low, punctured wail and does not
stop and this makes your stomach ache in a way
that causes the rest of your body to contract,
pushing all your organs into your throat. You go
on stirring in a state of terror as his wail
embalms the kitchen in something waxy and
unmistakable.

The doorbell rings again—it is your husband
home from work, wearing his suit and face like 
a wrinkled paper bag. You tremble like a rain
cloud all over again. He sits down on the
kitchen table and you scoop some peas onto the
plate along with the bleeding meat. Your mouth
is full of organs so you do not eat, or talk. You
try to swallow them but you do not have the
stomach for it. You mean to say something, but
you cannot find the words to explain that which
is inexplicable to even you. Instead, your mouth
opens and closes like you are kissing, or gasping
for air. 

The kettle still roars. Your husband drags his
polished fork over the pyrex plate, puncturing
his peas one by one, over and over again. The
creature goes on wailing in that same low,
indelible way that makes you want to blow your
brains and does not stop. It is only then that you
realize then that He is yours alone, that He was
always yours alone. You take Him to bed. 

Maybe Freedom From Want or Sunday Morning.

The anachronistic nature of this image only adds to your shame.

Something was wrong.

Outside your window, the homeless man screams in agony.

This is how you know He is Yours.

Maybe you are terrified of him. 
Maybe you wish not to know his face.

You did not know how to make him stop.

You still cannot bring yourself to murmur the words ‘My baby’ so you just mouth it over and over and over again.

You are unsure if your husband does not see him or simply does not care. You don’t know which is worse.

You think of that wail every time something enters you.

You spend the day alone, soaking and turning in your own sweat.

“Suddenly you will become aware that you are in rags, naked and dusty. You will be seized with a nameless shame and dread, you will seek to find covering and to hide yourself, and you will awake bathed in sweat. This, so long as men breathe, is the plight of the unhappy wanderer.”


Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams