More than three years later, they are counted among the state’s exhibits in a case of first-degree intentional homicide.
And within days of her twelfth birthday, all of Morgan Geyser’s drawings and scribblings-evidence of the world she had built with her new best friend-were confiscated. Its rules do not bleed over into the realm of the mundane, of parents and teachers and adult consequences.īut in May 2014, the occult universe of two young girls did spill over into the real. This invention of a private language, both visual and verbal, shared with only a chosen few, gives shape to our first allegiances it grants entry into a universe with its own rationale-the warped rationale of fairy tales. This is a language of fantasy, of the desire for things we can’t yet have (we’re too young), of forces we can’t control (loneliness, an unrequited crush, the actions of our family). Girls create their own occult language it may be one of the first signs of adolescence. What is occult is synonymous with what is hidden, orphic, veiled-but girls are familiar with that realm. These notebooks are charged with the childlike paranoia of sleepovers after bingeing on horror movies, of Ouija boards and Light as a feather, stiff as a board… There are cryptic messages, too: a page covered in Xs another inscribed he still sees you. Filling the page around her, tiny rainbows and clouds and stars and hearts-all the signatures of the little girl the artist recently was-burst in a fireworks display. She has huge, glassy black eyes and dark, stringy hair she reaches out with one hand and brandishes a dagger in the other. Here is another: an androgynous kid (a girl, like the artist?) in a sweatshirt and flared jeans leaping across the page.
His long neck is white, and so is his face-bald and whited-out, with hollows where his eyes should be. Here is an image, picked from the notebooks of an eleven-year-old girl in a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin: a head portrait, in pencil, of a man in a dark suit and tie.