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Parsley Girl, Parsley Girl, Let Down Your Trichobezoar

by Natalie Zutter

 

If I were your mother, I would share with you this cautionary tale:

Once there was a couple who yearned for a child. When the woman was finally pregnant, she craved naught but rapunzel. Unfortunately, this plant only grew inside a neighboring garden, walled off from the world. As the expectant mother began to waste away, her desperate husband stole into the garden and snatched as much of the leafy plant as he could. But he could not outsmart the enchantress, who protected the garden as if it were her own offspring. When she caught him, she demanded he trade her their newborn baby. He said yes.

After the birth, the enchantress whisked the baby away to a tower in the woods. Rapunzel knew only the walls of her prison and the daily visits from the enchantress, who climbed up by way of the girl’s impossibly long hair. Until one day a prince climbed up instead; they fell in love; the enchantress found out. She cut Rapunzel’s hair and cast them both out of the tower, the pregnant girl into the woods and the prince into a patch of thorns, blinding him.

But as the enchantress, the best that I can do for you is cast a spell.

---

Parsley, to make the womb more welcoming to new life.

Your father built the stone wall surrounding my garden, but it was your mother who was allowed inside. She needed something to take her mind off the second loss. They understood one another; his hands rough and accustomed to hefting unforgiving stones, hers attuned to the delicacy of plucking roots, but strong enough to wrench weeds out of the earth. And scarred, like mine, from plunging stubbornly through thorns or brambles. He gave her the means to remove herself from him, and I welcomed her in.

She and I worked in tandem, each granting the other much-needed time to rest. The long hours of hard work were a welcome distraction from her body releasing the final hormones of pregnancy too soon, the blood that should not be flowing. I dug into the cool loam, creating space in the earth for her to bury the remains, to feed blood and tissue into the soil. Even if your father had been allowed inside, he would not have known where to look for them, nor would he have wanted to acknowledge their presence. He mourned, of course, but in the abstract. He carried the grief within himself and didn’t know how to plant it, not understanding that it would help it grow something new rather than waste it.

It was working in the garden that revealed the missing piece — parsley. Your mother’s menses came irregularly, disconnected from moons or tides like a proper crop. Instead they resembled a teetering pile of uneven stones. The parsley, ground to a paste, would act as the mortar. But not even this metaphor was enough to convince your father, tailored as it was for his comprehension. How did we not think of this before, he demanded, questioning me even when you were still an idea that simply could not take root no matter how much they believed in you.

That man never properly appreciated my art. He thought that one merely ingested the plant, that grinding it with mortar and pestle was more about attempting a pesto than actually creating an ink. (Your father, always thinking first with his stomach, his brain catching up long after.) Against my better judgment, I explained the process while tattooing your mother’s skin, and when still he pushed back, I reminded him that his flesh would remain unblemished and he was only required for one part. But sex he understood — and lust that had so long been absent when struggling to conceive. My fingers, still smeared with dark green ink, traced over his sun-weathered features so like mine, his lips surprisingly soft. I could see what your mother saw in him. Your father went to bed with the enchantress, but your mother awoke with child.

---

A single rapunzel flower, plucked by moonlight.

Rampion doesn’t look quite as elegant as its prettier name implies, either tall and slender like a tower, or else draping long like a weeping willow. That is the story reaching backwards through time to justify itself. Yet the real thing is still rather lovely — delicate pale purple stars bobbing on pale stalks. And, for some reason I still don’t know, irresistibly delicious.

The pregnancy transformed your mother into someone unrecognizable to herself. Every day working in the garden was torture, as she could not stop craving the rapunzel. We both knew it wasn’t her, that she was subject to the whims of the life inside her who hoarded all of her nutrients and left her with a yawning hunger. She had such discipline, but it came at great cost, as she spent days curled in on herself like a blighted crop, slowly withering in front of your father’s eyes.

I warned him against it. He knew that my garden was sacred, that it was closed off to the likes of him. The wall wasn’t impossible to scale, but high enough that it should leave no question of what it was protecting, or whom from. Still he forced his way through; he simply could not hear no when he knew that there was an herb that could help — women’s work be damned. But women must sleep eventually, and pregnant women even more so. So your father took his chance, and stole into the garden when there were no eyes but the moon to condemn his theft.

He had to force the rapunzel down your mother’s throat. She knew how grave the trespass, even as her body yearned for it, and eventually yielded to the sweet, sharp flavor. It stole her back from starvation, but still she hungered. That same greed emboldened your father to pluck one flower, then another to be safe, then another another another until suddenly his hands were full and the earth was empty. All he could think of was wanting enough blooms to keep her satiated; he didn’t consider off seasons and lost seedlings and broken roots like straggly split ends.

The life within your mother grew, even as I screamed and rent my hair when I beheld the irreversible damage. In my garden, a barren bald patch. In your mother’s belly, my entire crop — my carefully tended garden, reduced to a pregnant woman’s salad. So yes, perhaps I had already begun to wonder if you would be worth the trade.

Your father didn’t understand what I demanded. Give me your firstborn — his eyes darted between the belly and my face, confused, nodding cautiously as if this had been the plan all along.

The birth was blessedly easy; I procured the midwife, and knew enough to step aside and let her do her work. And when you were pulled out and first placed at your mother’s waiting breast, immediately latching with that familiar insistent hunger, you blinked not with the typical dusky blue eyes of a newborn, but a dark, leafy green. Rapunzel was offered as a middle name, much as the repeated utterings made my own stomach turn in an echo of those pregnancy cravings. But the plant that brought you to us was Petrosinella, so you became Petra.

---

A strand of hair, tied in a knot.

Where did you develop this craving for hair? Your mother’s curls brightened and tumbled down her back throughout pregnancy, falling just-so after restless nights of sleep and even after sweating and straining through your delivery. But as you nursed at her breast, your dimpled little hands unerringly found their way to every lock. First an exploratory tug. Then a proprietary yank. Coming away with strands tangled in your fingers like stubborn weeds pulled up from the garden. It didn’t matter, at first; there was so much to go around, your mother laughed — albeit with the slight manic edge of sleep deprivation — offering up gifts for my parsley girl.

Everything poured into our parsley girl to make you grow. Milk, cluster feedings that blurred time into smears of hair stolen and hair safe. Sleep, sacrificed to your wide-eyed awareness of the world in the middle of the night, when you would mewl if she wasn’t close by. Constant attention, no matter the position of the sun or moon in the sky. All demanded solely of her, leaving her no time to do anything else or be anyone else.

At first, you two matched: your delicate strands just as long as the baby hairs sprouting from her hairline. But then you began taking more than your fair share. As she discovered clumps trapped within her own fingers while washing her hair, as she left behind bundles after every bath, she clung more fiercely to what she had. All that her body was doing was returning to normal, but that wasn’t how she felt it. Something special about her was being forcibly yanked out of her scalp. It made it so difficult to be close to you, when you wrenched her neck to one side while greedily gulping milk; when you clenched empty fists and screamed until you were allowed to reclaim your treasure: mama, mama, let down your hair. It was too much to demand of one person, to give all of herself with not enough given back.

Your father was sympathetic but unwilling to see the problem: She’s hungry, isn’t that good? Of course when it came to your bottomless appetite — no matter for milk or hair — he would see only one problem to be solved, and always to your mother’s detriment. It was the rapunzel crop, alluring in the moonlight, and not the glaring bald patch revealed by the sun.

She only felt the earthquake because she was awake with you in the bleary midnight hours. The top of the tower swayed alarmingly for something made of stone, but the true horror was in discovering that the inner staircase had collapsed in on itself like a windpipe crushed by a great fist.

Your father was halfway out the window before she could blink, ready to traverse the area for damage only he could repair. “We were lucky,” he said, as she surveyed my garden in mounting panic, my plant beds overturned as if by a great wave. “I can still get up and down.”

Easy enough to wedge his hands and feet into the cracks, but impossible with a baby clinging to one’s back. “But,” your mother spluttered, as he disappeared over the side, “I need to get down to the garden.”

He didn’t even look at her, focused on his next step below. “But then who will watch Petra? What if she needs you and you can’t climb back up?”

“When will you be back?” she asked, but his feet had touched ground and he was lost to her for the day. For weeks; despite returning every night, he slept off the day’s work and so they were never awake at the same time. When she did sacrifice her own sleep to catch him before he fled out the window, she begged him to trade places with her. He didn’t understand: “You don’t need to leave the tower. Anything you need, I can bring you.”

He rebuilt every damaged home surrounding them, as the stairwell remained buried beneath its own rubble — as thorns emerged from the cracks and wound their way around the base of the tower. And still you fed, and still you took. You were her everything, but she never imagined that she would be the only one expected to give up everything.

Strand by strand, you plucked out your mother, until only the enchantress remained.

It was the same divide that had shielded me through our losses, through my body betraying me in pregnancy — I could be the enchantress, or I could be your mother, and I could switch between the two as much as needed. But I could not be both, not if I wanted either of us to survive it. And so I precariously descended the tower to pick cabbage leaves, which I pressed against my aching breasts as I ignored your cries for milk. Your father glared through bloodshot eyes as he fed you goat’s milk while I sobbed out my heartbreak; there was no getting around that. This was the best that I could do for you; steal you from your mother, who did the best she could, and raise you with an enchantress who could show you the magic of plants, the magic that made you.

---

Charcoal, to expel the trichobezoar.

And then you began eating the hair. Chubby fingers feeding strands past your lips — you explored the world by testing it out with your mouth, no different than any other babe. But when I attempted to wrest the hairs from your fingers, terrified of them wrapping too tightly, you screamed like a banshee and only tightened your grip. Trapped in the tower with you, I gave up on sweeping the corners, on halting your explorations. It was too repetitive trying to stop you, only for you to find a new clump that I’d missed. Perhaps if I simply cast my gaze away, I would not have to think about it until I was changing your swaddling cloths and it had passed through you.

What I could not have predicted was when it all came back up. You were belching all morning, and then suddenly made the unnatural, uncontrollable sounds of a cat hacking up a hairball. What you initially coughed up was coarse and glistening with saliva . . . but it kept streaming out of your mouth, hair and dust and crumbs and moss matted into a horrific textile. More hair than even you had consumed, enchanted by — what? My own body, made fertile from parsley grown in the soil in turn fed by those who could not be carried before you. You gagging and choking until it finally disgorged itself on your terrified sob, the trichobezoar flopping on the stone floor with a demure tail tucked around itself.

And it wasn’t the last one. Even as you begged and pleaded that you weren’t going to eat any more hair, you couldn’t help yourself, any more than your father could have helped plucking those flowers from my garden. I collected each one as it wriggled its way out of you, swallowing my own disgust as I carded the rough hairs, plaiting them into a proper rope.

---

Blood, pricked from a thorn.

But then I dared to go work in my garden while you and your father napped, eager to feel something between my fingers that was not slimy hair. I let down the trichobezoar, careful not to snag it on the sharp thorns, and the sheer freedom of movement made me almost vomit in relief.

When I eventually climbed back up the tower, your father was holding the other end of the rope, face twisted in revulsion. You cowered in the corner, head bent in repentance when it wasn’t even your fault. “This is how you take care of her?” he raged. “Is this truly worth not being her mother? Better that you cut her loose than keep her trapped here.”

“And how will you fix it?” I demanded, even as hot shame flooded my body, for I knew he was right. “Build a higher stone wall and then trespass anyway? Uproot everything you don’t like or that you don’t think deserves to grow? You wanted a child so badly that you would destroy everything about me to have one, but you can’t accept her being less than perfect. A blighted crop, but ours that we grew.”

Your father recoiled, and I saw the same expression cross his face like a flash rainstorm. He said nothing, only ducked down beside you and murmured sweet reassurances, hugging you to him without hesitation. With you curled into his arms, he did not lift his head to ask, “Mother? Or enchantress?” My stony silence made his shoulders slump like an ancient wall finally giving way.

He stole away under the cover of moonlight. He had never truly seen me. Not all of me. Nor you. And how could I let you out of the tower now? So others could see your distended belly, the way you vomited up hairballs like a neglected house cat? But I could not leave you on your own, either, to face this terrifying way in which your body betrayed you.

Now we were truly alone. No one dared bother us — the wicked enchantress and the unfortunate girl with the impossibly long hair. Even if we had wanted to leave the tower, the spines were sharper, as long as knives and with wicked, curved edges. My garden sustained us, as it always had. At least the seasons were predictable, the crop reliable. And so the years passed — not a century, as you might hear in that story someday, but long enough.

---

An acorn, to grant small wishes in abundance.

I almost lunged at you when I caught you playing with dirt in the corner of the tower. We both remembered when there was enough hair to be balled up and lovingly shaped into little dolls; the next week, gone. But instead your stained fingers reverently plucked and piled dirt into an old ceramic jar I thought I’d lost — sneaky of you, to find a new way to hide something — packing the soil and digging a small hole with your fingertips. So focused were you on producing a delicate acorn and gently placing it into the hole.

It was your birthday gift. Every year, I brought you a treasure from the forest, or the garden. A pinecone you painted and displayed proudly in an alcove. A scallion bulb you coaxed into an impossibly long shoot, cutting off the ends over and over and over until you grew bored and one day chomped the onion whole. (No matter that it came up again that night.)

This year was an acorn, its delicate cap belying the massive tree trunk that would spring upward from wherever it was thrown. You cupped it in your hands and ducked your head as if to eat it, only for me to realize that you were whispering to it. “I promise it’s only a tiny wish,” you whispered, and my heart broke. “Why can’t I stop?”

When I caught the silver glint in the mirror, I knew what must be done.

---

Scissors, to cut swift and true.

Your hair was so ugly and matted, nothing like the beautiful curls you had given me in exchange for my body growing you. How had I failed you so? You should have been able to grow long, healthy hair in sun and rain, and instead I had trapped you in here with your own compulsions and my worst self. So I sheared it as close to your scalp as I dared, so careful around the delicate curve of your skull, hoping that I could offer you this small blessing.

Left holding the ugly hank of your hair, I plucked a single strand. Held it taut, letting it catch the light. A life, so delicate; so easy to snip, so long as it wasn’t already wrapped around a finger. You used to always be snarled in strands of hair — first mine, then your own. I will never forget the day that you wouldn’t stop crying, squalling desperately, your voice poking relentlessly into my brain like a hot poker. I didn’t understand what was wrong; you weren’t hungry; for once, miraculously, your stomach was clear of the hairballs; you hadn’t bumped your head. Then I saw the unnaturally bright-red beacon of your pinky toe, swelled like a little cherry tomato by the strand of hair wrapped two, three, four times around.

I feared that it was too tight, that my blades would shear your toe straight off. I couldn’t think straight, nor hold my hand steady enough, with your agonized screams. There was no magic I could use, only my own instincts and the risk of being wrong. I could not hurt you more than you already were.

Your smile in the mirror was so beautiful, but your eyes brimmed with tears same as mine. Not just cutting off dead hair, this was severing a lifeline.

---

Ink, to seal the magic.

I know about the brothers who’ve been visiting you in the tower. The one lured by your singing, foolishly thinking me gone for the day as he listens greedily. The other, cannily mixing those plucked details with the other gossipy fragments he’s collected in town. They practice this patchwork story at the bierhalle, obsessed with this idea of you trapped in a tower, working backwards from the ending they’ve already decided upon. Hair, thorns, a prince, a witch — well, it certainly makes for a soothing bedtime tale.

It’s not your fault; you don’t have the full picture, and you’re trying to make sense of what you do know. When they are satisfied with their version, they will commit it to the page. Which is why you must hold still while I finish, no matter how tender your skin. When they transform your life — my life, our life — into something tidy, I want you to know the messy truth.

Carrying you was the most powerful I have ever felt in my body, but it was also the greatest loss of control. I could not ink myself; or rather, your father would not let me risk anything passing through the blood to you. I was forced to bite my tongue and follow caution, even as I knew my own body and my own magic best.

This is the spell bundle that I have collected for you, my dear special girl. It is yours if you want it: parsley, rapunzel, hair, charcoal, blood, acorn, scissors, ink. Perhaps it will fade in time as your skin takes in the sun of distant lands and the wrinkles of age, the magic hiding in the roots of your being — waiting to be plucked, or not.

It seems that the grim siblings are still workshopping an ending. At the bierhalle, your father is their most enthusiastic listener: The blind prince wandered the woods until he heard a sweet song — Rapunzel, hair shorn, tending to their twin children. The prince was confused, but when she embraced him, it was her tears dripping into his eyes that restored his sight. He nods along to the flowery cadence of their telling as though he understands girlhood and womanhood, mothers and daughters. I wish him something soothing and uncomplicated so that he won’t be tempted to steal into any other gardens.

As your mother, this is my sole incantation: If you wish to return to me, do it not because you are bound. Find your own way back up the tower.

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “Parsley Girl, Parsley Girl, Let Down Your Trichobezoar” by Natalie Zutter, and if you enjoyed that then her first published fiction story was only a few weeks ago, and right now is pinned to the top of her BlueSky profile where she posts @‌zutsuit: should that change, the story is called “My Trust Must Be” at the Icarus Writing Collective. There’s also so very much non-fiction! Easiest path there is simply Google her name then look out for her author pages at Reactor, Den of Geek, Literary Hub and more; or, to follow on the socials, her Instagram handle is the same as her Bluesky: @‌zutsuit

Natalie sent us these notes on “Parsley Girl, Parsley Girl, Let Down Your Trichobezoar”: The seed of this idea came from six months of broken sleep with my daughter (my second child) and her penchant for hair-pulling, but the actual story came together when my son stopped napping around age 3. My guaranteed afternoon work time became more time I needed to entertain him, so one afternoon I pulled up the Brothers Grimm’s “Rapunzel” on Project Gutenberg, which was only available in audio file, while snuggling on the couch with him. I’d update him on the story through drafts and revisions, which led to watching Tangled and discussing other versions of the fairy tale — but he would always say, “Mama, tell me ’bout YOU Rapunzel story.”

Thank you, Natalie, for the story and that context. I will level with you all that I had no idea Rapunzel had its roots in the earlier Italian tale, Petrosinella, as I’ve never made much of a study of the fairy tales. So, to briefly summarise the differences from your ol’ reliable, Wikipedia: in the original it’s the pregnant woman herself who steals parsley from the garden of an ogress, and is forced into an agreement to give up her child. The ogress later takes the child, now named Petrosinella after the contemporary southern Italian word for parsley, and locks her in the expected one-window-tower, but teaches the girl “magic arts”.

After a prince stumbles across Petrosinella and climbs her hair into the tower, declaring his love in that don’t-even-know-you-but-think-you’re-hot cliché of the fairy tales, Petrosinella steals three magic acorns before climbing down a rope ladder to escape. She uses these magic acorns to distract the chasing ogress, with them transforming, in turn, into a dog, to which the ogress feeds a loaf of bread; then a lion, to which the ogress feeds a nearby donkey, keeping the skin as a coat; then lastly a wolf, which swallows the ogress whole, believing her to be a donkey. Petrosinella and her anonymous prince then get married, etc. etc. etc.

Were I a cynical feminist—oh wait, yes I am!—I might look scathingly upon the differences from the original to the better-known Brothers Grimm tale, wherein we go from the girl rescuing herself through cleverness and proactive decisiveness about her own fate and desires, to a version where she is either oblivious to the facts of pregnancy or dull-witted enough to let slip the fact of the prince’s visits; having, to that point, been only a passive party to the prince’s plan to rescue her oh-so-slowly by delivering a single sodding strand of silk every night until she can make a ladder, which would have taken years, and rather leads one to suspect the prince wasn’t all that motivated for his lovely bit on the side to actually make an appearance in public.

The Brothers Grimm version then rather concentrates on the prince and his loss, both of Rapunzel and his sight, as he wanders through the forest before—oh, the devotion, the patience, the resolve!—finally stumbling across her and being healed by her, let me check my notes oh yes, crying a bit. We’ll just skip over the part where Rapunzel, having been sequestered away in a tower her whole life with no opportunity to learn any skills, nevertheless manages to survive alone in the wilderness and raise her twin children successfully.

Even the agency in the inciting incident is taken away from the mother and given to a man. Good grief.

Of course, I can’t definitively ascribe any of this misogynistic recasting of the tale to the Brothers Grimm themselves, but if they didn’t make these changes purposefully, then they’re instead indicative of the general social attitude towards women and their ability to even influence (let alone decide) their own fate as the tale morphed through oral retellings until the Grimms finally heard it and wrote it down.

All that said, I think my favourite version is this one, today. The one that treats the sorceress fairly, and doesn’t settle for a one-dimensional “because she’s evil” explanation for her actions, but gives her understandable motivations instead. Miscarriage is… it is possibly the hardest emotional journey anyone can go through. The loss of a future you want so desperately, the whirlwind turnaround from the greatest love to the depths of grief.

And we understand post-natal depression now, though I fear we don’t often account for it still and give new mothers the empathy and support they need, but how many women suffered through decades and centuries before that understanding? How many men, writing down these tales, sought supernatural explanations for a mother’s odd behaviour as an easier, more obvious route to them than talking to their wife?