Hello! We are almost halfway through spooky season and I’m already having so much fun.
This next story–much like “Rings”–was inspired by two main events: postpartum with my sons, and the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of the first depictions of what we would come to know as postpartum depression. In the story, a woman is locked away after having a baby, and without any company, she hallucinates that the wallpaper in the room is talking to her (amongst other things). Her husband and child remain on the other side of the room, perfectly healthy and thriving, as she fades away into madness.
A horrifying story without a ghost at all!
I had a great amount of respect for Perkins-Gilman before I would walk into my own postpartum hellscape, but she became a lifeline once I was able to recognize what was going on. It’s partly because I was able to recognize it that my story has a more-or-less happy ending. Instead of being institutionalized, or made to feel incurably crazy, I got help and medication (and a divorce, too, if I’m being honest).
And then I decided to write about my own experiences.
In my own version of The Yellow Wallpaper, I follow a lesbian couple as they try to decide what colour to paint their nursery. Then the chaos unfolds, and instead of isolation and misery, these two parents get something else altogether.
You’ll have to read to find out!
Or listen, since this story was adapted into a podcast by the Creepy Podcast, and can be found on their patreon here.
The Yellow Painted Room
by Eve Morton
Of course, Sasha knew that having a new baby would mean exhaustion. She’d been told by a handful of her friends–at least, those who had kids–that she should stock up on sleep, as if it were onesies in the 0-3 months range or newborn diapers. She’d done her best to nap whenever she could while pregnant, but Sebastian insisted on kicking her bladder or ribs whenever she lay down. Then in the last trimester, perinatal insomnia plus a nesting instinct took over, and she spent most of the time when she should have been sleeping painting the nursery a yellow color that had compelled her from the moment she regarded the hardware store samples.
“It looks like mustard,” her partner, Dayna, said when she brought home the paint cans and cracked them open at eleven at night. She curled her nose and then gestured to one of the many Our Body, Ourselves type of brochures the midwives had given them on their soon-to-be-son’s nursery shelf. “It looks like the color his poop will be at day four.”
“Then it won’t matter if he has explosive diarrhea across the wall.” Sasha remembered a story her college roommate Jenny had told her about her baby doing just that; Sasha told Dayna, who only yawned and combed a hand through her curly black hair. “You sure you don’t want to come to bed?”
“I’m fine.”
Dayna lingered, her gaze piercing. It wasn’t until Dayna finally left, and Sasha finished painting the rest of the room into the early morning, that she felt the first contraction. She hadn’t slept that night. She didn’t want to sleep now.
By the time Sebastian arrived, thirty-six hours later, she hadn’t slept in over two days.
“Rest,” the nurse said after she’d cleaned both her and Sebastian up. “You will need it.”
But the midwife, a crunchy woman named Jenny yet again, insisted she breastfeed. Then again in another two hours. It wasn’t long before the departure slip from the hospital came with Sebastian’s clean bill of health, and Sasha was shuffled out the revolving doors and into the yellow room she’d painted only days before.
And if Sasha was honest, that’s when the visions started too.
The first one was a snake, so plain and simple that she didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about. On entering the room to feed Sebastian, she watched as it bent itself off the wall the moment she crossed the threshold. It then slithered against the carpet, danced between her legs as if she was a charmer, and darted back into the wall on the other side of the room.
Sasha picked up Sebastian, cooed to him, and placed him down once his cries ceased. The room was dark, the only light from the white noise machine plugged into the wall outlet. But the snakes were still visible: the walls split into ribbons of yellow and black scales, yellow and gold, yellow and brown. The snakes were always some kind of yellow, the same shade as the hardware store sample. They all slithered and danced across the room, coming and going as if this was a station stop.
Sasha remained immobile, not in fear, but in a perplexing delight.
“I saw a snake the day you arrived.” She told Sebastian in a stilted whisper about the hike that she and Dayna had taken to distract themselves from the reality of the date and the treatments they were both undergoing for fertility. A cat had darted out in their path, followed by a garter snake, and the two creatures fought in the low grass without leaving wounds. They seemed to dance around one another. Like a sperm and egg, Sasha had said aloud. “Then I knew. I was pregnant. With you. And you were a boy.”
She sat on the floor of her boy’s room and let the snakes come to her. One wrapped around her wrist, then turned to stone. A bracelet. Another, around her neck. Three became rings on her left hand, two on the right. She was covered in yellow, just like the wall, and it lasted until morning when Dayna turned on the light.
“Have you been sitting in his room alone all night?”
“He’s here.” Sebastian cried out. “And he needs me.”
Dayna said nothing as Sasha rose and fed her child. He cooed, even as more snakes came down from the wall, and slithered up both of their bodies. He was impervious to any fear, unlike Dayna. Her face was pale as she watched her wife and son, and all those damn snakes that were made of yellow and nothing but now.
“Jenny’s coming today,” Dayna said. “Maybe you should talk to her.”
Sasha did, and the midwife told her all the same things that the brochures said, like she needed to sleep and eat, and make sure she asked for help. “Self-care is important as much as baby care,” Jenny said, just before her face melted into a pot of boiling water before Sasha’s eyes, leaving nothing but a skeleton hollowed out by bones.
Then Jenny was gone, and Dayna slipped her shoes on by the front door so she could get them both dinner. “I’d like to bring Sebastian with me,” she said. “So you can nap while I’m gone.”
“I don’t need a nap.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I don’t lie,” Sasha said defensively.
Dayna became transparent. Her skin was like rice paper, like the kind they had on their first date. Through thin lips which revealed every single blood vessel in her body, Dayna insisted again. “Nap, please.”
Sebastian cried and the sound turned into ants flying into the air. Ants had always scared Sasha, ever since her aunt’s house had been invaded by them as a child, and so she finally relented. “Okay. Take him with you.”
“Good.” Dayna kissed her forehead. She held Sebastian close, his diaper bag at her side, along with her purse. There was more inside her purse than simple errand gear. There was an entire story there, an entire mission kept secret but given away through Dayna’s transparent skin as it flushed red.
“You’re jealous, yeah?” Sasha said. “I could have the babies, and you couldn’t. That’s what the doctor said. You’ve wanted this whole motherhood trip since you were little. And now you can’t have it, only me. Is that why you’re so mad?”
Dayna didn’t answer. She’d turned into a statue before Sasha. She reached out to touch the cold stone. Cracks appeared. She sighed and Dayna’s stone facade blew away. She was gone.
So was Sebastian.
There really was nothing left for Sasha to do but sleep.
Her body felt hollowed out, scooped like the ends of an ice cream carton. She grasped her stomach and folded over onto the front hallway floor. The floor became lava, became fire, became hot against her skin.
But the snakes soon came and brought her, as if she was the patron saint of postpartum psychosis, into her child’s room. Yellow bathed her. It surrounded her. And when the walls parted, revealing a life without children, a life without a wife, a life without anything serious on the other side, Sasha stepped forward and through the yellow paint. She left her life, her body a husk on the floor, and she entered another world of sleep. Dreaming. Relief.
Finally.
Then a baby cried.
Dayna had returned.
The world righted itself. Waves of confusion and irrational anger receded. The snakes were gone, along with stones and the sharp thoughts inside her head.
But they would come back, Sasha knew. They would always come back.
“Hey,” Dayna said from the doorway. “Are you okay? Did you sleep on the floor?”
“Yes. And yes, I’m fine now. For now.”
Sasha wobbled on her feet as she stood. Pain rioted in her body, but so did a tight feeling of healing and regeneration. Her womb contracted. Her baby cried in front of her, and with a smile that Dayna shared, they took care of his dirty diaper and his hunger together.
“I think you’re right, though,” Sasha added once they’d put him back into his bassinet, happy and content, their son their son all the way through. “I think we need to repaint.”
END
Eve Morton 