Rapunzel Has Insomnia

7 September 2025

Mary Buchanan

We feed our children archetypes for breakfast. Expect their tenuous knowledge of the world to be bucked into shape by sublimity: the curse, the piles of hair—long as entrails—wound around a beautiful woman’s head like hospital bandage, the gauzy gold of the psyche spreading before her on the floor (either sunlight or blood, though Disney prefers the former), but she has no mind or option of perception to read its warning: there, spelled out for her as clear as spaghetti letters in child’s soup; there, running the gamut of the room, the length of dark matter. Her DNA smells of roses and lavender and her days are spent searching mirrors for keys to the future her author has already denied her. The static confines of her character prevent her from doing so; the witch denies her prince entrance to the long-protected womb of her ivory tower. Girlhood as bubble, resplendent in swarms of suitors agitating, goatish, intent on popping. Sweat and metal, queasy exterior polish of manhood. Death, like dragon’s breath, reigns erotic outside, and the prince is blinded by phallic metaphors bluffing—in this fairy tale instance—as simple black thorns. We ask our children to understand the complexities of parentage by providing them stories of the wicked stepmother, the widowed king, the orphaned child forced into domestic servitude, so lonely she talks to vermin, so lonely floor polish and a bubble will do, too lonely to recognize the hallucination of godmother for what her sympathetic nervous system craves: the familial, legitimized birthright, the rightful, girlish chance at dreams. She speaks to the bubble, bestowing its impermanence with her trauma, makes meaning of the minor in ways only the truly mad or secret princesses are allowed to do. Sparkle, mote, or the cruel glint of C-PTSD caught with consistency in her eye, despite her careful rubbings at ego erasure. Then, the trade: archetypal, easily tracked throughout canon, little goings-ons that hold the weight of life-ruining in their crooked mouths. Voice for mobility, apple for a lovely smile, cow for beans that bring about bloodthirst—the British are coming, they’re giants, and they lack the conscience to distinguish between child and narrative spectator. Read that fable carefully, light on, blade by the pillow. These transactions’ lack of agency is anointed by desire and something further: great cataclysms of heritable lacking under the gluey gaze of scenic circumstance. Push lack further and find a physician behind it. It’s disability, we don’t say, disability, we hide from our children, in ornate inscriptions meant for lonely anecdotal evidencing of lives gone to spoil. Reality’s rot deletes itself in the presence of the princess; the prince grins to encourage you to politely look away from the matter between him and the maid servant, while the witch sucks her fingers wet with Cheetos as she watches—from Yaga hut—the crow kill the worm for its innocence, and in her witnessing, she glimpses the divine, says nothing about it, prepares a spell she offers for emulation’s sake. The common, neurotic knowledge of what the princess’s pea means is lost in the intentional misunderstanding between generations: insomnia, one scholar may say, but the child thinks only of the grandiosity of bed cushions and the way a delicate diorama might rest on their forehead. The princess can’t sleep because of what her father did to her, how her mother watched and never forgave her for it, how the stuffed animals in her room offer little in the way of protection, seem to mock her pudge of privilege, giving the moon outside that tall castle window fuzzy middle fingers of distaste. Humanity, they tell her at bedtime, is a harmful waste. In summary: below the sea, suicide, by all means, is justly deserved and encouraged after a marriage jilt with a prince so clean and keen with laughter; the stepmother nearly wins in the suicides of her wards, takes to bed with laudanum, bent on afternoon binge; the confused king takes his girl for bride on looks and likeness alone and the kingdom praises him for this decision, on looks and likes and law alone. As for the witches: straw huts, with chips on their shoulders the size and mass of Outsider status; they bother the foolish and cook with what the craven states of their lives affords them, justifying the ugly and taboo as survival. We weaponize enchantment as if it were a toddler’s toy, safe to handle, no swallowable pieces, while in sober daylight it’s shot through with the chaos of our primordial misunderstandings, represents the badly broken psyches of hard ancestor, histories of lack, winter fields in place of mercy, no taskmaster or God except the unforgiving land. No hoes in the field today, they’ll say. Why don’t we tell a story instead?

This essay is part of Cerebral Weather, Mary’s new collection out from Alien Buddha Press.

Mary Buchanan is an editor and writer from Mississippi. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Louisiana State University. Her fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in 3 AM Magazine, ergot, Inner Worlds, Serotonin, Bending Genres, The Hooghly Review, Trampoline Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Hobart, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. She edits Libre Magazine.