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mad woman

if walls could talk

By maisie Published about a year ago Updated about a year ago 14 min read
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If walls could talk, maybe she could have been saved. As it was, the house burned with her.

The child came into the world screaming, as most children do. But later the wall would note that she screamed far more than her sister did, when she was born. It was an old house, and sound carried well, so the walls heard everything.

They were an old family, of old money and old morals, and because of this they wanted a child not for the reasons one should generally bring a life into this world, but for the sole purpose of carrying on the family line. It was a high-risk pregnancy, and a high-risk home birth, and it left them without a son and with a little girl, and the woman with severe postpartum depression. Thus, while most parents would refer to their children as a bundle of joy, the firstborn daughter of Thomas and Marguerite Sloane was all spitfire. They named her Andromeda; the chained woman.

The first time the wall glimpses her, she is six months old, with a head of curly black hair and obsidian eyes in the spitting image of her father. She looks nothing like her mother who holds her with a dull expression and sunken cheeks. They have made this room hers, even though she is young for a child to be left all alone. She cries all night long.

The second night, she cries too. The wall hums to her. It likes the child— it doesn’t know why, it’s never felt anything in particular for any of the previous occupants of this room, but little Andromeda Sloane makes it wish it could grow arms and rock her to sleep. For now, it keeps humming. By the end of the first week, the child falls asleep to the sound.

When Andromeda is ten months old, she starts walking. It’s a night when she’s particularly fussy, and the wall begins to hum again. This time, though, the girl stands up and stares curiously over the bars of her cribs. She has doll eyes. Glossy and dark with thick lashes and just a little bit haunting. The wall keeps humming. Andromeda watches. Then she clumsily swings a leg over the side of the crib, and then the other, and she balances precariously there for a moment before seeming to make up her mind and landing on the floor with a soft oof. She picks herself up, toddling unsteadily over to the wall, and presses a tiny hand to the patterned paper.

It's alright, the wall whispers.

The girl gasps, stumbling backwards and falling on her butt. She gazes up at the wall.

It’s alright, it says again.

When her parents come to check on her the next morning, they find Andromeda curled up at the base of the wall, fast asleep.

“Where did you learn that song, darling?” her mother asks, on one rare sunny morning that they sit on the floor, playing with dolls.

Andromeda learned to hum before she learned to talk, and the wall takes a bit of pride in that, as she points at it. Her mother frowns, pursing her lips.

The second child is born two years later. Andromeda dances around in circles, squealing with joy, when she hears the news. It’s a good sound. There isn’t a lot of laughter in this house.

“Do you think I’ll be a good big sister?” she asks quietly, sitting cross legged on the floor with her chin in her hands, gazing up at the wall.

The best, it answers. She beams.

Hermione Sloane is as fair as Andromeda is dark, with her mother’s silky blonde hair and blue eyes. She will grow up quiet and determined, with a softness her sister can never quite find. They put her in the room down the hall. And even though she doesn’t cry, Andromeda does. When her parents yells echo through the house late at night, she sneaks out of her room, steals baby Hermione from the crib and curls up with her on the floor against the wall. The wall hums them both to sleep.

As Andromeda learned to hum, Hermione learns to dance before she really learns to walk. She learns by her sister taking her little hands and swinging her wildly about her bedroom, humming giddily along with the wall. When she stumbles she picks her up and carries her the rest of the dance, her feet tracing well-worn patterns in the floorboards.

“Listen,” Andromeda says, aglow with pride, as she holds little Hermione on her hip. “Can you hear it?”

Hermione’s rosy pink lips pucker, tilting her head.

Like most of the men who have lived in this house, their father works too much and drinks too much, and like most of the women, their mother cares too much about the wrong things and too little about the right. The doctor says she can’t have another baby even if she wanted to, and the father resents them all for that. The mother is determined to make the best of them.

So as Andromeda gets older, her room becomes littered with books and pamphlets on etiquette, personal grooming and fad diets. Sometimes she hurls them at the wall in anger before they find their inevitable place at the bottom of the waste bin. She always apologizes. As she gets older, too, her skin becomes littered with bruises. The wall listens to Hermione enter her room down the hall after dinner, and Andromeda runs in far too long after, sobbing, the stain of a fist on her cheek. She crumples in a heap on the floor, her back pressed against the wall, and it can feel her shoulders shaking.

It is not the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last.

When Andromeda is fifteen, they pull her out of school. A woman comes to the house every day and sits with her at her desk while she does math and writes papers. Sometimes she lets her play the piano. Sometimes Andromeda screams at her and throws things till she leaves.

The wall doesn’t quite remember at what point Andromeda Sloane stops crying and running and starts fighting. But she does. Her father drags her into her room by a fistful of curls, and Andromeda is yelling just as loud as he is. Hermione clings to his arm, wailing, begging him to stop.

“It was my fault! Please, it was my fault! She didn’t do anything! Father, please!”

“Mia, go to your room!” Andromeda chokes, as her father slams the door in her face. She stares at it for a moment, her eyes a burning mess of tears and fury, then she flings herself forward like some kind of feral animal, and she screams until no more sound comes from her throat and her fists are bloody.

It is not the first time this has happened, but unlike the other times, no one comes to unlock the door in the morning.

“He says you can come out when you behave,” Hermione whispers from the other side on the third day.

“He can go fuck himself.” says Andromeda hoarsely. She sits against the wall with her knees pulled tightly to her chest to stop the ache in her stomach. She’s been picking at the scabs on her knuckles.

“Please, Andy…”

When Andromeda is eighteen, she drags her mattress off her bed and puts it on the floor next to the wall. When her father sees the empty bed frame he pulls her hair and orders her to put it back. She doesn’t. Once again the soft hum of the wall lulls her to sleep.

“Listen,” Andromeda says, late one night with Hermione curled up beside her. She presses her hand to the worn wallpaper. “Can’t you hear it?”

Hermione frowns, watching her sister with worried eyes. “I don’t hear anything, Andy. It’s just a wall.”

Andromeda will ask her sister this question many more times over the years, and Hermione will repeat the same answer over and over, the uncertainty in her voice growing deeper, and Andromeda’s agitation grew too with each admission that her sister could not, in fact, hear the comforting murmurs of the walls that had been her safety net since birth.

“Enough,” their mother said sternly one day, when raised voices had drawn her to Andromeda’s bedroom. “Don’t encourage this nonsense.”

Andromeda stamps her foot childishly, making her mother and Hermione flinch. “It’s not nonsense!”

Later, as she lies in bed, fingers tracing familiar patterns on the linens, she stares up at the stars through the skylight and asks if there is something wrong with her.

No, darling, the wall murmurs. You’re just special.

She plays the songs the wall sings to her on the piano, humming along while Hermione skips and runs with her school-friends in the fields outside. She always comes home with half a dozen shiny, happy little girls, and their parents send them outside because they don’t like to listen to the squealing and the clatter of feet down old hallways. When their joyful laughter through the windows becomes too much to bear, Andromeda plays her piano louder.

“I miss you,” Hermione whispers when she sneaks into her room at night, resting her head on her sister’s chest.

“I’m right here.” says Andromeda. “You’re the one who’s never around.”

Hermione sits up, her eyes wide and far too troubled for a fifteen-year-old. “You spend so much time in this room.”

“You used to like this room,” she accuses, sitting up too. In the pale moonlight, finger-shaped bruises wrap around her bicep.

“I hear you talking to yourself all the time, Andy.”

As if it's second nature, now, Andromeda presses her palm to the wall. “I’m not talking to myself.”

“Mother wishes I spend less time with you, she thinks you’re a poor influence.”

Andromeda’s jaw clenches, the wall feels her body tremble. “And you’re going to listen to her?”

“I said I missed you.”

The day of her twentieth birthday, they try to move her into the room across from Hermione. The wall only knows this because of the ensuing tantrum, where Andromeda screams that she wants her room, and even though her cries are distressing to listen to, the wall can’t help but feel the same pride it feels when she plays its songs.

But Andromeda doesn’t come back to her room. Hermione does, though. She curls up on the mattress by the wall and sobs, while her sister’s ragged wails can still be heard through every closed door and the pounding sounds can only be her throwing herself at the door to the room down the hall over and over again, and the wall can't hum loud enough to soothe her.

“She needs help!” Hermione exclaims, with crossed arms and blazing eyes, glaring her parents down. “She needs help, not to be locked up like an animal!”

That day is the second time her father ever hits her. Andromeda has always made sure of that. Hermione, to her credit, for all her softness, does not cry. She glares at him and bares bloody teeth in a near perfect imitation of her sister, and she spits at his feet.

“You can’t keep her in there forever,” their mother says, in a hushed voice from the hall. It has been some five days. Andromeda stopped screaming on the third.

Their father’s voice is gruff as ever. “She needs to learn to behave herself.”

“That may be,” she says, cold as ice. “But she’s sick, Thomas.”

On the seventh day, Andromeda comes back, the remnants of a broken nose staining her face and red swollen eyes.

“Am I mad?” she whispers, in a voice like shattered glass, staring at the wall.

No, darling, the wall says sadly. You’re special.

“But why?” she asks. “Are you even really talking to me? Or is it all just in my head?”

A little of both, I think, it replies. I talk because you listen. Few people are very good at that.

A tiny smile cracks her lips, “People often say I’m an awful listener.”

People don’t understand us. Perhaps that’s why we understand each other.

And even if it’s just for a moment, the wall is glad to have made her smile.

The next night, Hermione stands in her doorway, looking like a kicked puppy, and she tells her she’s leaving.

She is seventeen, with a ring on her finger and she says she’s going to leave and marry the girl their parents would kill her if they knew about, and she’ll never have to live in this awful, awful house again.

“I thought you wanted me to be happy?” she whispers, when Andromeda says nothing, just looks at her, betrayal in her eyes, and spits,

“You’re a traitor!”

Hermione’s face breaks. “You don’t mean that.”

Andromeda answers with a scream and a shove at Hermione’s chest, like it’s the only language she knows. These days, maybe it is. “Traitor!”

“I love you.”

“Liar!”

When Hermione leaves, Andromeda breaks everything she can in her room, even the windows, even though it’s December and the wind is brutal, and again the wall finds itself wishing it could grow arms, even just for this moment, and hold her.

I’m sorry, is all it can whisper. I’m sorry.

But it isn’t enough then, and it isn’t enough when her mother sits with her the next morning, uncommonly gentle as she coaxes her grown daughter through a bowl of honeyed porridge, and tells her to pack a bag. They’re going somewhere.

“To find Hermione?” Andromeda demands.

“Hermione chose to desert this family,” her mother says. “She’s no use to us, now.”

The wall can’t discern if Andromeda looks relieved or devastated. Perhaps Andromeda doesn’t know, either.

She narrows her eyes, full of distrust. “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to get you some help, darling.”

“What?”

“Don’t you want to feel better?”

Andromeda looks to the wall, her lips moving in a silent plea. She looks back at her mother. “I’m not sick!”

“You are sick, darling. And this… this madness has been let go on long enough. You are going to get help, before you wreck us completely.”

She keeps staring, full of disbelief. Her lips tremble with the recognition that though she’s always known her parents to be cruel, she did not expect this. The wall did not expect it, either. Andromeda blinks slowly, leans forward as if to stand, then her eyes roll back and she keels over on her side. Her mother gently removes the bowl from her limp hand and wipes a fleck of porridge from the corner of her mouth. She sighs.

Her father appears in the doorway, his arms crossed. He gives a short nod to his wife, scoops Andromeda up like a ragdoll, and walks out. She follows him. If the wall could grow arms, now, it would choke them both.

Andromeda does not come back for five months. The wall can hear the parents moving about the house, but the door remains firmly shut, and so the room stands empty. December turns to January turns to February turns to spring, and April showers do not bring May flowers, but more showers, as if the world outside can sense the cold grayness that permeates every wall of the house.

And then, one day, the door opens.

Andromeda Sloane is even paler than normal and thinner, too. Her once silky soft curls are frizzy and tangled, deep purple-blue shadows tattooed under her eyes. But when she opens the door she smiles, throws down her bag and flings herself onto the mattress, pressing her side and cheek to the wall and running her hand over its faded paper. Her breath is warm and her teeth are yellow.

“Hi.”

Hello, it says.

She sighs with relief. “I still hear you.”

Were you afraid?

“They had me committed.” she whispers. “They gave me pills. I had to take them.”

Little orange bottles come out of her bag, filled with little white pills and stamped with her name. Andromeda Sloane. Sertraline. Take two daily. Clozapine. Take 3 twice daily. “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to hear you.”

You are not mad, darling.

Andromeda looks at it, eyes wide and wondering, very reminiscent of that first night she stood as a child and listened to it hum. “Perhaps I am,” she says. “Perhaps I just don’t care.”

supernaturalpsychologicalfiction
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About the Creator

maisie

prose, short stories, and occasional poetry of the mystery, crime, and psychological horror variety

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