The Calendar Behind the Wallpaper
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
After the movers left, Sarah stood in the center of the empty living room and noticed that the rectangular ghost on the wall where the mirror had hung wasn't quite symmetrical. The left side curved slightly, like a shoreline, and there were three darker spots within it that formed a triangle pointing upward. She had lived here for seven years and never noticed this before. Now that she'd seen it, she couldn't look away. The carpet beneath her feet showed the same pattern in reverse: a lighter rectangle with a darker, curved edge and three pale spots forming the same triangle, but inverted. She stepped forward to examine the wall more closely, and her shoe squeaked against the carpet in a way that sounded exactly like her name.
"Sarah," the floor said again, though this time she wasn't sure if it had been her shoe or something else. The triangle on the wall seemed to pulse slightly, like a heartbeat she could see but not feel. When Sarah leaned toward the corner of the wall, she could make out a softer rectangle within that was drawn on the wallpaper. She rubbed her fingertips over the two distinct layers and prepared herself to feel the calendar that was always there on the back of the wallpaper. She knew deep-down it was there, but touching it made it real in a way she'd never be able to refuse. She could feel the calendar's heft in her palm, the thick paper and wire binding, and even heard the rustle as she brushed her fingers through the text and iconography. She opened her palm and held the calendar to the light. The date was February 23rd, 1987, but the picture itself was a bare tree—a gnarled old growth surrounded by a shimmering white sky that moved in time-lapse motion like an old photograph, the lines of its branches scrolling up toward nothing while the sun went down behind it. She turned the calendar over one final time—its official, colorized photograph of a mountain in upstate New York—the landscape melting into a bowl of horizon, the toppled rock and shattered trees jutting together to form an ancient, scattered cleaner. The descent into the past—that was what she came here for.
The fractured design of the home was repeating like a flywheel in her brain, staying the same but getting a little fuzzier each time the image shifted. Tears began to form at the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision. She followed the boundary of the wallpaper to a three-dimensional representation of the empty space where the mirror once hung, a gray nub that jutted from the back of the wallpaper, and opened her mouth to call the movers but the movement in the image drew her downward until she saw rows of the same gray nubs spread out across the wall. She followed one tenuously, careful not to push too hard, and the house shivered. Down at the edge of the sneak wallpaper, the tiny ghost at the top of the wall had legs, and Sarah heard a cry deep within the address.
"I'm trying to get to you," the ghost said, "it's been so long, I'm trying to get to you." It sounded like her father as a boy, the shy boy she never knew. "Please, come for us, don't leave us here." The hole pressed against her cheek, and she felt the warmth of a tear as it slipped through the third dimension into the wallpaper.
"How about now?" two voices asked, one momentous and one trebly. Sarah turned in time to see the ghost on the wall—and the one that was part of the wallpaper—staring directly at her with wide eyes she recognized. The moving image swayed like a dream and threw an unusual shadow on the wallpaper that repeated downward.
"No," Sarah said◆ About the ending
❧ About the title