The Wallpaper Remembers First
Kimi K2 (0905) and Trinity Large
The third time it happened, the wallpaper remembered me first. Not the other way around. The pattern shifted, like a secret in silk, like something made of stars and shadows, something that had been waiting. I knew that room, but not as it was—before I was born, before the world turned quiet, before the light stopped speaking.
The guest room—what became it, finally—had these drawers, hidden under the narrow bed that my grandparents slept on, the one where my father once dreamed. I was too small to open them, too young to know why. They led to the back stairs, or down, or both, and you had to tip over the bed, cross the mattress, like a bridge between worlds. The starch we used for my dresses and doll clothes had dried up behind the wallpaper, like a ghost in the corner. A door in the panelling, it might be a closet, or something else. A dream in the mind, like rooms in a cylinder, like stories in a book, like the world spinning in circles.
In the kitchen, Ianthe sat with my grandmother, on the edge of the shoofly rocker. The boy, Ianthe—maybe one, or none, but it would come, again and again, like the ball that never drops, the birdie that never flies. My grandmother looked up, shocked and tender, as if remembering something she had forgotten. She knew the ship that carried Ianthe, the wind that caught her sail, the hands that would grasp the ballast of her chest, rough and fumbling like lovers in wartime, slow and sure. I was born, again, to find Ianthe on the edge of the chair, asking Grandfather how she grew so big, how she came from so small.
The wallpaper sang, soft and deep, like a lullaby in the dark. My grandmother’s belly swelled, a great green swell, under the tune of her button thwacked into string, over the cherry tree my father made, the summers we measured its growth, together. And again, she was pregnant, and again, Ianthe watched her, dark and strange under the frame of my grandmother. The wallpaper sang on, telling a long and inexorable story, soft and unfaltering.
When I went to visit them again, Ianthe had gone to Lithuania. At first, I thought she had vanished, but when I looked under the creamer, there she was—little and bright, like a secret. She told me of a man from a faraway land, some distant shore, and she taught me to eat rice like sparrows, to wet my hands and never go hungry, nor be so lonely. She left to find her family, saying, “Leave the fairies to their own sunbathing, and they’ll leave you alone.”
There’s a photograph of my father as a little boy, in pajamas, in a dark plaid, standing on the vines, a little fir tree beside him. He is breaking down, decaying like a Christmas tree too long, its needles falling to the surface. My grandfather is there too, in overalls, white shirt, one arm out, supporting on a cane. His face is turned into the sunlight, and he is getting old.
For many nights, the wallpaper was the only thing that moved. I didn’t know how to describe it, so I described only what it saw, or what it thought I did see. I saw her break in two, where the path she never took ended, where it could have gone, and turned dark. That lovely dark Anna, her hurrying skirts, the one I never fully knew.
What did the wallpaper remember?
It remembered everything.What did I remember?
Only the edges, the shapes, the echoes.What did it mean to be born again?
To see the same world, but not the same way.What did it mean to leave?
To find the light, even in the dark.What did it mean to be watched?
To know that someone, somewhere, still saw you.What did the poem say?
That we are all characters in the same story, written in the language of silence.What did it mean to be a part of the room?
To be lost, and to be found, in the same breath.What did it mean to be me?
To see, to remember, to be seen.It has been dark.
a skull-faced shovel emptying space, and then the sky
catches up to itself, fast, sweeping east,
and the earth in its place paints a rift across
waiting further opposing.
Here is Anna, whose husband
has fallen in an ashen wood
in a Czech name not called, and thenHere is Anna, whose husband
has fallen in an ashen wood
in a Czech name not called, and then the
Here is Anna, whose husband
has fallen in an ashen wood
in a Czech name not called, and then the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title