Canary

I don't know why they left her eyes open. My mother claims it’s that so we may never forget her eyes, so we can remember her eyes finally at peace. Looking down at her in this casket she almost feels like she was never really a person. She’s so still and so quiet. I feel like I can barely remember her anymore. I don’t think I can look at her like this any longer. I turn to see my mother sitting in a chair in the corner of the living room staring straight ahead, her eyes just as lost as my grandmother’s was. Her hair seems more unruly than normal, her clothes are wrinkled and her massacre has smudged under her eyes. She's been like that for a while. She slowly watched my grandmother fall deeper and deeper into psychosis as she spent most of her life putting her in and out of different mental institutions trying to find some peace for her. I can see her hands shaking as she tries to contain herself for our family and I so badly wanted to go over and touch her, comfort her somehow, but I can’t. She’ll just give me that same watery smile, tell me she’s fine, give me a sweet moist kiss on my cheek, and become lost once again. I try to spot my father, but not surprisingly he’s not around. He’s most likely chatting up every single person in this house to try to keep the spirits up and the hope alive. I don’t know what hope there is for this family, but he certainly tries his best to keep it.

I move through the mourning bodies that clutter my grandmother’s house and head up towards the old creaky stairs. I watch as they move throughout the house dripping in sorrow and pity. I tip-toed up the stairs and I noticed the door at the end of the hall was slightly agar. This room is never opened, it is always locked and my mother has forbidden me from ever entering this room. I crept slowly down the hall and towards the door making sure my footsteps didn’t alarm anyone of presence. I rested my hand against the door and it creaks ever so lightly. I push just enough so I can slip through without making any more noise and shut the door. I turned and faced a room filled with a mountain of boxes of black little books. They’re pouring outside of the boxes as if they have crawled right out. The wallpaper seems as if it was ripped right off the walls. The canary yellow faded and browned throughout time. I can feel my throat closing up and my breath begins to quicken. I don’t think I’m supposed to be here. I don’t think I was supposed to see this. I run my quivering finger down the wall, feeling the scratch marks engraved into the walls and the dried blood that paints them. The sea of boxes overpowers the room and it feels like I am trapped in it.

I reach down towards the first box that stands before me and grab the first small black book. I open the first page and I see a scribbled face with two’s and zeros written all over the page. I go through page after page of scribbled, inked faces. Their faces contort into grotesque poses, their eyes bugging out their heads, teeth falling from the pages. Their eyes penetrate me, begging me to look deeper into them. Each page is scribbled with the number, “20,000.” The numbers become one with the pictures pulling me in deep and deep into the void. It’s as if the ink had sunk into the pages, bleeding over every single page, and running down my hands. She always used to say the money was in the walls, that “they” put in there for our family. We never found any money in the walls despite her desperate pleas for us to continue searching for it. I go through book after book, box after box, and see the same number written on each page, some seeming to be written in haste, some in terror, some not even finished. The faces grow more and more detailed as I go through each page of the books. It feels as if they’re leaping out the page ready to pull me into their world hidden in these books. I can't look at another page.

I throw the book back into the boxes and look across the room into the sea of unread books. I feel the air around me tighten and I feel as if the world is spinning around me. I stumble towards the door and suddenly I hear a small squeak. I turn towards the sound and I see a tiny mouse in the corner of the room. It seems it has chewed a hole in the wall. I crept towards the small mouse, trying not to alarm it. In its tiny hands, I see it holding onto something green, something torn. I tried to get closer to see what it was holding, but it ran off before I got the chance. I bent down and looked into the hole trying to see if I could get a glimpse of the small mouse. I looked deeper and I saw something in the corner of my eye. I backed up and reached my hand inside to try to gently pull whatever it is out. As I pulled, something slowly slid out and my breath hitched in my throat. It was a crisp hundred dollar bill. My hands began to shake as I stared at it, not believing what I’m actually seeing. I drop the bill and reach back inside the hole and see if there was another one I could pull out. I pulled another hundred dollar bill out of the hole and I couldn't believe what was happening. Has the money been here this whole time? In a fury, I began pulling more and more money out the wall. I started ripping away at the walls trying to get all the money out, my hands ripping away at it, blood trickling out of my nails and staining the money as I dug my nails into the wall trying to get more of the bills. They keep telling me to grab more and more. They're begging me to reach my arms deeper into the hole, ripping back pieces of the wallpaper. I can’t stop, I can’t stop! I must get every single one of them out. It's $20,000! She was right, it was all here! I found it, I found it, I found it! They scream at me to keep going. Then there’s a creak at the door and my body freezes. I hear my mother gasped and I turn to see absolute fear in her eyes as tears swell in her eyes.“I found it, Mom! We finally found it,” I yelled to her with a maniacal grin on my face as I held onto blooded scrapes of the canary yellow wallpaper.