Into the Yellow
Short Story (or something more) | 7 minute read
A door in the woods. I’m fascinated by the idea. I shared the fascination on my YouTube channel when I took on the challenge of sharing 52 writing prompts in 52 weeks in the video Writing Prompt #34: The Door, but this is a story I started before creating the video, so you might want to read it first before watching the video.
The story is about a 7 minute read, but I am looking for some feedback for anyone willing to invest some more time.
The one great thing about having no one around is that there’s no one left to institutionalize me.
I step in my front door as the sun rises. On the kitchen table is a spine-cracked copy of Yolanda Yellow’s memoir on grief Walk, Listen, Remember lying next to a half-drunk cup of time-cooled coffee. I don’t know how long I was gone this time. I don’t know where I was. I’m going to guess that I was inspired to go for a walk and listen, but I sure as hell don’t remember any of it. And I doubt Yolanda Yellow meant that I should go out in my pajamas.
I have zero desire to step any further into this house, this building that has a soul that hurts as much as mine. This house has too many rooms now and there’s nothing I can do to fill them.
I sit down in front of the book, turn it over and see an underlined passage.
The walking was always a help, but the listening only truly started making sense when I started walking in the woods. That’s when I could remember without hurting. That’s when sorrow turned to celebration. Dr. Seuss famously wrote,“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” I am thoroughly convinced he wrote this after a walk in the woods.
Complete and utter bullshit. Why did I underline this so many times? The phrase “in the woods” was circled maniacally. I had drawn asterisks in the margins surrounding the passage. Looks like I thought this was incredibly important. Why couldn’t I remember a thing about it?
I smell the coffee to see if I had spiked it with something. Maybe I was an easy touch when I got to this page. It smells fine. I taste it. Nothing but old.
The phone rings. The phone in the master bedroom. A wave of nausea sweeps over me knowing what has to come next.
To get to the bedroom I have to walk across the kitchen where Emma and I made pancakes together every Saturday morning. Next, the living room where James proposed to me and where Emma took her first steps. The hallway, where I sprained my ankle slipping on one of Emma’s rogue bath toys, dripped in guilt over the fear I saw when I screamed at her uncomprehending eyes. Finally, in the bedroom, I have to traverse the empty king size bed to reach the phone charger on James’s nightstand. The journey to the phone is the ultimate horror of solitude.
It rings again and the caller ID announces it is Dr. Beshel’s office. At this hour?
I shut my eyes and run through the house, around the behemoth bed, and pick up just as the answering machine triggers its greeting.
“Hello!” I shout over the soul crushing sound of me and James singing our own silly rendition of Call Me Maybe where we sang, “Hey! You just called us, and this is crazy, but we’ve got a kid now: don’t wake our baby!” Emma made it to three — not much of a baby any more — but we hadn’t had the heart to change it.
And now?
Dr. Beshel’s voice comes through with the beep, “Elizabeth!”
“Yes, Dr. Beshel?” her voice exhausts me as soon as it makes contact with my ear drums.
“Elizabeth,” her voice less urgent now, more clinical. “How are you?”
“A bit tired, honestly,” I say. “It’s kind of early for a call, don’t you think?” My eyes find their way to James’ alarm clock. I try hard not to think of anything but the numbers it displays, 5:47am.
“That’s a very good point, were you sleeping?” she asks. Her speech is slow, like she’s choosing each word carefully.
“No, I was ou—“ I stop myself short of telling my psychiatrist that I’d been out for a walk I had no recollection of. I clear my throat. “I was up.”
“Mm,” she says, and I might as well have been in her office watching her jot down notes as she “mm-ed” her way through some of the most painful parts of my life. I never questioned whether Dr. Beshel heard me, but I had no idea what she was thinking about what she heard. “Elizabeth?” Here we go, she’s got a question and it’s going to be a doozy. I hope she doesn’t think I’m paying for this session. “Can you tell me about the woods?”
“The woods?” the words are out of my mouth in a question before I could control them. When she says those two words it is like the book from the kitchen is flipped open before me again. I could see those two words underlined and circled over and over again. I can’t tell her anything about the woods, but could she tell me? Should I ask?
“Yes, Elizabeth, were you in the woods again?” she’s all business now and I am all confused. Again? I don’t remember being in the woods since hiking with my dad. He used to love taking all of us — me, my brother, my cousins — all before the ticks and Lyme disease had turned into a real problem.
“Dr. Beshel?” I ask. “Why would I be in the —“ my slippers are covered in mud. “I have to go.” I hang up the phone and throw off my slippers. I need to get out of these pajamas. The pile of ignored laundry has grown to the height of my hip, the only comfort in it is that it is getting harder and harder to accidentally grab clothes that aren’t my own. I grab the jeans on top and shake out a t-shirt from somewhere in the middle. I consider showering when a thought springs to mind, Showers don’t matter there. I don’t know what that means, but I move forward anyway, grabbing a pair of socks from my drawer and settling on a pair of Nikes that were meant to be the first steps to my marathon-by-forty bucket list item. They had been worn once.
As I pass Yolanda Yellow’s book on the kitchen table again, a memory of feeling passed over me. An understanding, a certainty that Yellow had been onto something. The woods held the answer. Dr. Beshel seemed to think I was in the woods, so why not go to see if there were any clues? Plus… I feel as though I need to be there.
It isn’t a long walk. I had always lived tangentially to nature. Our yard was cemented over and we had hired a landscaper to handle the front yard, but I liked being close to nature. Admittedly, I was a bit of a chicken at the first sight of some rogue forest creature like a raccoon or opossum venturing too close to my home, but Emma and I loved feeding the birds. Her unopened Easter basket has a birdhouse making kit in it. I knew she was too young to complete it, but I planned on doing it with her, because I once loved being surrounded by all of the artifacts of our time together.
Now the leaves are coloring and the birds are plotting their escape. I wish one of them would take me with them. I reach the woods edge and take my first steps onto the path premade by the local rangers. Everything about these first steps feels magical, like I just stepped through the wardrobe and into Narnia, except instead of feeling trees and snow show up behind clothing, I’m feeling a gentle touch right beyond the reach of this harsh world. The ground feels soft and comforting beneath my feet. I never thought that sidewalks and asphalt were assaulting my feet before, but feeling the gentle give of the dirt and leaves, I wonder why I hadn’t done this more often.
There are at least three paths in this part of the woods local hikers like to put all over their instagram. My brother joined the Instagramming hikers every time he visited us. He desperately tried to convince me to join him on the pink path, what he considered the easiest of the three. I see a pink dot on a tree to my right and decide to follow the worn route nearest to it. The path is wide and quickly turns away from the local street that led back to my home. Only a minute into the walk, I already begin to feel I am in a far away place, drifting away from local traffic, harsh concrete, and lonely empty houses. The smells are calming, like I stepped into an aromatherapy treatment designed just for me. I could see why Yolanda Yellow recommended a walk in the woods for therapeutic effects, but very quickly it is becoming clear that this walk is not going to do anything to help me forget the loss of my husband and daughter.
Those Fall leaves that were all changing colors and sending the birds away slice at my heart with their color choice. I was so used to seeing Autumn landscapes with trees of varying oranges, reds, and even deep maroons, but this patch of woods -- that I somehow never noticed before -- is filled with an entire spectrum of yellows. I didn’t know there were that many shades. It is painfully beautiful. Emma’s color. How had I never seen this before? She would have loved it.
A memory:
I are your sunshine, Mama?
Yes, Baby, you are my sunshine.
I are yellow.
Not a question, a statement. Emma was yellow. She never got around to saying yellow was her favorite, only that she was yellow. And here I am, in an impossible patch of nature surrounded by her. I twist inside, feeling at once with her and unable to ignore her absence.
I keep walking, feeling no longer aware of my steps, slipping into a sort of muscle memory type of rhythm reserved for athletes I could never pretend to be in company with.
And then I begin to sing.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You’ll never know, dear,
How much I love you,
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
The tears are salty, hot, and all too familiar. This god-damned stupid song. I started singing it to Emma while she was still inside me — had I ever listened to the words? Why did I constantly sing about her being taken from me? Did I know that day was coming?
I sing it over and over again, and as I do so the yellow leaves begin to fall from the trees all around in a brilliant storm of gold. I keep singing and walking, and watching the leaves create a path in front of me that defies all laws of physics. While the leaves fill the sky around me, on the ground the only yellow to be found was in one very clear “we aren’t in Kansas anymore” type of path turning even deeper into the forest. I follow the path. I followed the yellow. I followed my Emma. And I sing.
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Specific Feedback Queries
If you read the intro, you may be asking yourself, “Where is the door?” Well, we didn’t get there yet! This story turned out to be much longer than I initially intended, so this is more of a Chapter 1. Some questions I have for anyone willing to engage:
Does this work as a standalone story for you?
Knowing there is more, are you even curious to read it?
From the get-go this particular story has been riddled with tensing atrocities. How did this draft read to you? Was the verb tense problematic to you at any point, or did I screw up royally at any point in my attempt to “fix” things?