#Yellow wallpapery monkey skin#
#Yellow wallpapery monkey full#

It was what she thought of-wings pinned down and open. She once saw wings pinned to a corkboard behind glass-a set of butterfly display cases stacked in a box in her grandparents’ basement. This was the spot where her mom’s boyfriend used his knee to pin her down and open. You want to lose your grandmother’s house and be out on the street?) She told her they were from her mom’s boyfriend. It’d been dark purple then blue, now yellow. She knew this spot there was still a bruise there.

#Yellow wallpapery monkey skin#

It started as a spot of new skin on her inner thigh. It’s the story of how we came to be.ĭella was the first to find the yellow wallpaper. Maybe the toughest parts of all.īut this isn’t about who we are or what we wear. What superhero hasn’t wanted to claw their way out of their own skin? Still and all, those scars are strong. Little bleeds and gouges, too, that go past the paste. It’s not here to make us look sexy either-it’s not like Spanx or something. Too many to count, they rise and fall and stretch and cry out… The wallpaper is definitely powered by women.Īnd yeah, the wallpaper isn’t perfect. Her face rises like she’s trying to take a breath from the surface of a lake.

Sometimes the pattern is a woman who takes on a shape, bubbling up from the wallpaper on our backs or stomachs, flashing across a thigh. And both patterns are always moving, changing. It has a pattern and a sub-pattern-like everything, if you look closely enough. We’re pretty sure that before it was wallpaper it was something else.

This yellow wallpaper is alive but ancient. It was once brighter, maybe even orange, but that was centuries ago. But look again and it’s ornate with designs that go on and on until, like suicidal lemmings (or suicidal teenagers), the patterns fall off of cliffs (or cut their wrists).

#Yellow wallpapery monkey full#

The capes came last we willed them into being.Īt first glance, the wallpaper looks old, brittle like it was used in a Victorian orphanage-all sad and full of shame and abuse. They’re also made out of yellow wallpaper, except thin and gauzy. In fact the yellow wallpaper is a kind of second skin. Two teenaged girls who are superheroes-or something like that-wearing costumes made of yellow wallpaper. The kind of thing that, once you hear it, is completely unexpected and also inevitable.