The Pale Yellow House

Everything in the surrounding neighbourhood had changed. What used to be rural country ranchers had morphed into show-room ready townhouses. All of them lined up in tidy rows, announcing that yes, indeed, this was a respectable place to live.

That’s why, when Sam rounded the familiar corner onto 76th Street, the sight of the pale yellow house sucked the air out of her lungs. It wasn’t a gasp so much as the air being vacuumed from her lungs faster than you could snap your fingers.

On the forty-four-minute drive there, she’d managed to convince herself her childhood memory was faulty. That’s what kids do. Everyone does it. There’s a reason people spend a small fortune in therapy trying to heal their inner child. If you try to explain how you were mortally wounded by a minor incident in fourth grade, your adult brain belittles you for even suggesting it. When we’re shamed or scared or otherwise traumatized as children, it latches onto a space in the subconscious mind that can’t be swept away with the rational brain. For this reason, she had expected to return to a building nothing like the one that had haunted her for twenty years.

And yet, here it was. Not a detail had changed. Even the peeling yellow paint looked exactly the same. How was that possible? The yard, overgrown and suffocating in spirals of weeds, was an unbelievable eyesore compared to the houses on the next street over. Despite it being mid-October, the purple chrysanthemums bloomed assertively amid the chaos. Those flowers did not sway in the breeze, but rather stood defiantly upright.

Everything about the small plot of land screamed untouchable.

Sam inched the car into the gravel driveway, just far enough that her rear wheels were off the pavement of the road. As soon as she heard the gritty sound of the tires on the small stones below, the snake in her stomach coiled tighter. An unwelcome barrage of memories filtered through her agitated mind. Getting her first bee sting only a few yards from the spot she was now. Drinking sweetened iced tea and daydreaming about the characters in her novels. Sitting on the end of the driveway, arms linked with her brother, waiting for a stranger to spot them and whisk them away.

Turning the key in the ignition to OFF, Sam listened to the engine quietly die. Once it had wheezed its last breath, there was only a thick, uncomfortable absence of sound. It was the kind of sheer silence that begged for something to scare it away. Even something as simple as a crow landing on the fence would be enough to shatter it, enough to flood her rigid body with adrenaline.

Forcefully returning her gaze to the house, Sam allowed herself to drink in the details. Of course, she didn’t need to physically look at the house to do this. She had seen every nook and cranny in her nightmares ever since the day she left. The windows had no curtains, yet all you could see was black. Pitch black. It was as if the house were a patient mouth, waiting for you to fall into its belly.

It was a small home, much more modest than the nearby townhouses. Even before the neighbourhood changed, it was still the most embarrassing home on the block. Children always crossed the street when walking by, as if they could sense the lifelessness in the air.

None of this made sense. There was no realm in which this disaster of a house would be allowed to sit, untouched, for two decades. With the surrounding area’s upgrades, the property had to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And wouldn’t the other homes complain about the travesty of this place? It had to lower their property value just to be in the vicinity.

But even as Sam debated the logistics of the situation, she could feel the sick, agonizing truth lurking in her mind. It was trying to push through as she busied and comforted herself with these reasonable questions, when the reality was that none of that mattered. What truly meant something was the condition of the house.

Not a fucking thing had changed since the night she crawled to the end of the driveway on her bloody hands and knees, too exhausted to scream.

Sam clutched her knees, suddenly feeling the remembered sensation of the gravel burning her skin there. Despite the pain, she had kept putting one knee in front of the other, running on the fumes of some deep, biological instinct to survive.

Just survive. Keep going.

Years of sitting across from a trauma therapist meant she had repeated her description of this house more than she had said the word hello. She had patiently undergone every treatment, because what else was there to do?

And now, here she was. Completing yet another homework assignment. Linda, her shrink, had a compassionate voice and a habit of leaning forward almost imperceptibly whenever Sam teared up. Sam trusted Linda. So, when the warm woman with the doctorate degree told her to come back to this house, to see for herself that it wasn’t the monster Sam recalled it to be, she agreed.

They had spent six sessions going over what the experience would be like. With painstaking gentleness, Linda predicted the emotions Sam would face on the drive there. On the passenger seat, the disposable camera mocked her. She had bought it intending to take a picture and return the image to Linda, to show her what Sam’s childhood horror house looked like today.

The key was still in the ignition. No visible force could stop her from turning the car back on, reversing out of the gravel driveway, and hightailing it to anywhere else. She could go back home, get into bed, and wake up pretending this whole ordeal was just another one of her wickedly vivid nightmares. Ignore Linda’s calls.

Just survive. Keep going.

But one look in the rearview mirror would confirm the impossibility of that path. Sam had permanent shadows under her sunken eyes, ones that meant daily cover-up and well-meaning friends asking if she was okay that day.

No, she wasn’t. She hadn’t been okay since she dragged her way out of the hell that was this house as a seven-year-old girl. When she had made it to the end of the driveway that day, she refused to look over her shoulder, fearing one glance would yank her back in.

As a result, she lived her days wondering. What would she have seen if she looked back?

What was the final message the house wanted to give her?

What had it been whispering to the hairs on the back of her neck every time she closed her eyes at night?

Sam yanked open the car door.