Victorian Psycho

by Virginia Feito

It’s crushed in paint. It’s papered on the walls. Everywhere, death.

Satisfied that there are no monsters but the ones I carry inside me, I slip into bed in my nightdress

Through a damask pattern in the wallpaper, a woman beckons to me.

the yellow wallpaper mentioned??

They won’t like me. I think, They must like me. I think, They will remember me.

‘What is your name, Governess?’ ‘Winifred Notty.’ ‘Miss Notty . . . May I call you Winnie?’ ‘You may call me Fred.’

(even though she is the eldest, Drusilla tends to come second, her name stammered from her brother’s like Eve from Adam’s rib).

At eight thirty sharp breakfast is removed, as is my will to live.

Human expressions are like hides I’ve peeled throughout life, rolled into a ball, and slipped under my skin.

I have found that, when faced with the inexplicable, humans will find ways of explaining most horrors away.

one can never be too sure of the goings-on inside girls’ heads, so trained are they to hide them

For better or worse, we dine.

There is some good-natured tittering around the table, some good-natured shaking of heads. Women! Theatrical bitches.

The weak sun shouldn’t be producing such a shadow, but my shadows tend to turn up when least expected.

the men proud to arouse admiration in the women, the women thrilled to experience an emotion beyond contempt for the men.

I fail to understand why men think talk of violence will distress women. Women, who bleed all over themselves every month, who rub blood clots between their fingers and burst them like insects, and sometimes can’t because they’re not blood clots, they’re tongue-coloured strings of meat from the womb. Women who burst open in childbirth, vagina splitting and anus sagging, tiny, hardening fingernails clawing inside of them, placentas like thick filet mignon.

and it takes me a moment, a small shake of the head, to understand I am imagining things again.