Heed the Headless

I want to write a story about the decapitation of glorious women. A story about the mighty falling. A story about heads tumbling in baskets. A story about the mouths that posthumously moved and eyes that blinked even after the head was severed. A story about the wigs that flew. A story about the heads that rolled.

*

I think often of Medusa and how Perseus beheaded her. He used her head as a weapon to protect himself. Because even the head of a dead woman is more powerful than the body of a Greek hero. 

*

I want to write a story about the decapitation of glorious women, so I research famous beheadings until consumed in headless horror. I research until I am there. I am in the banquet hall of Fotheringhay Castle, watching Mary Queen of Scots die. I watch her disrobe, pale skin meeting sunlight streaming in through windows. I watch her mutter her last words in Latin, in manus tuas, in manus tuas, in manus tuas. I watch the executioner miss her neck the first time, his axe indenting her skull. I watch the executioner sever her neck with the next. I watch the executioner finish his job with a final swing, slicing the last of the gristle. He holds up her head, but is left holding only a red wig as Mary’s head falls to the floor, severed and bloodied. She is smiling. 

*

The sexualization of color emerges somewhere along the gradient of white to red. White is the color of innocence while red is the color of passion, which means pink is the in between. Girls, a shade of first-breath pink themselves, are born into baby pink blankets. They grow into hot pink and cat calls. 

*

I want to write a story about the decapitation of glorious women. I am there in 1719 with Mary Hamilton as she dresses in pure white. She has been accused of abortion, infanticide, and theft. I see the executioner opt for a sword rather than an axe. I see her head hit the floor, only to be picked up and examined by the Tsar. I listen as he gives a lecture on the anatomy of the severed head and then kisses it, his lips lingering on lifeless flesh.

*

If the sexualization of color appears along the pink gradient, where does sexualization of a woman first appear in her life? Is it the first time lips linger? Is it the first time blood-red nail polish is against the dress code? Is it in shaved legs and waxed eyebrows at age ten? Is it in baby pictures with hands covering month-old nipples in the name of modesty? 

*

I haven’t been able to find my pocket Constitution in two weeks. It normally lives in my nightstand, hiding in the back of the drawer, marinated in Vaseline.
My pocket Constitution is fully annotated and fully memorized.
It is a form of protection. And it’s missing.

*

Perhaps sexualization is always there. Sewn into the soft cotton of my baby blanket. Welded into the set of hot pink power tools I was given for my eighteenth birthday. Floating in the bottle of separated red nail polish buried at the bottom of my sock drawer. 

*

I want to write a story about the decapitation of glorious women because, as centuries crawl by, I have found death doesn’t devastate. It fascinates.  

*

Blue progresses, while pink remains hot and only hot.

Blue progresses in terms of government. A Baby Blue grows up to become a Royal Blue. He is regal and distinguished and bold. Little Baby Blue transcends his role as Royal Blue and continues to serve until he becomes Navy Blue. Growing closer and closer and closer towards darkness.

Pink is born pale and becomes hot. There is rarely an in between because pink is an in between of purity and passion herself. It is all she is told she can be. 

*

I want to write a story about the decapitation of glorious women because if I cannot write about the lives of forgotten women, I should write about the deaths of remembered women. My soul aches to know the forgotten women of history—the nameless sisters, the elapsed mothers, the disremembered daughters, the lost lovers. My soul aches to know the way they took their tea, the way they took each other’s hands, the way they loved and laughed and spoke and cried and wrote and lived and died.

*

I find my pocket Constitution stuck between the last page and the back cover of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. The cover of the Constitution has torn, the pages bent at an obscure angle, but I am relieved hold my security blanket of individual liberties in my hands again. I am relieved it has been in such good company. As I look over the palm-sized pages of the Bill of Rights, I think of Mercy Otis Warren and her life in colonial America. She would stay up late, writing poems on parchment in her parlor and drafting essays about the importance of freedom of speech by candlelight. Upon visiting her home for a Constitutional draft meeting, George Washington found her words shoved in between her husband’s books. The Bill of Rights, a revised version of Warren’s midnight makings, was passed less than a year and a half later. 
I can’t help but think that Warren and Woolf would’ve been friends. 

*

When I take a class on the 2020 election, my professor asks me what aspect of the election interests me the most. 

“Reproductive Rights.”

“Oh, so women’s issues?”

I cannot find the words in the moment to explain that using the phrase “women’s issues” only adds to the idea that women are separated into groups to “deal with.” It enhances a binary. It implies we are a burden on the white man’s political agenda. We are a problem in need of solving. We are the afterthoughts, footnotes, and addendums of history. We are the hindrances of the present. We are the heads that must roll.

*

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

– Virginia Woolf

*

I walk through Central Park on my way to see the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument erected in August of 2020. It is the first statue added since 1965, the first statue in the park to feature a woman. The statue lives amongst men on Literacy Walk. It stands between figures of William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and Christopher Columbus. Circles of security barriers and a half-dozen police officers guard Columbus’ statue. 

There is no Virginia Woolf statue. 
There is no Mercy Otis Warren statue. 
This is the absolute minimum disguised as salvation.

*

I’ve been reading political poetry like scripture. 
I’ve been rewriting the Bill of Rights instead of going to therapy.
I’ve been using a black sharpie to turn Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony into an apology.

*

When I find the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, children climb on the bronze laps of Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They stroke Susan B. Anthony’s metal petticoat, laughing at the feel of cold metal on their cold hands. There are no security barriers and no police officers. I can’t help but think that women’s rights pioneers would’ve liked it this way—full of joy. 
But, I also can’t help but wonder why these women must share a pedestal when they each deserve their own.

*

There is something about crossing over into Brooklyn or back into Manhattan that always feels like a new beginning.

The sky is a Sunday blue. 

And I am tired of being an afterthought.

Kylie Lynch is a New York City based writer, logophile, and introvert. Kylie is currently the Managing Editor of 12th Street Literary Magazine and enjoys uncovering the stories of forgotten women in history, bad reality TV, writing poems in the Notes app on her phone, and lukewarm earl grey tea.