The Never Nursery

(Note from the author: I’d like to preface this story with a TRIGGER WARNING in regards to sexual violence and spousal abuse.) 

I held my paint brush steady as I made what was probably the seventeenth or eighteenth downward stroke. It was Monday night.

I could tell I was getting weaker; each stroke felt like a new mountain to climb… but I was determined to see this through. Under my direction, the paint drew round and round in hypnotizing swirls. Blood red mingled with tangerine orange and hints of black around the edges for definition.

Edward had already finished the other three walls but they were all nothing compared to this wall… my canvas.

It was odd, really. Edward and I argued for hours about what colours the nursery should be. Hours. I almost wished he had shown as much passion during other arguments; I had never seen him get so heated about something… especially with me.

I stood there in silence, watching red paint drip down the midsection of the wall.

You stupid cunt, spat Edward.

My brush was on the floor.

“Shit,” I whispered to myself.

My heart was racing. I took some deep breaths before I picked up the brush up off of the floor and set it on the edge of an empty paint tray nearby.  I left the room to grab a cloth and clean up my mess.

My mind was so foggy I barely remember the walk from the nursery to the kitchen. What I do remember is a deep-seated nausea that wouldn’t go away but it was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I think I focussed on that feeling so much that I just lost touch with my surroundings.

And then my hands were under the tap in the kitchen sink, the sticky redness from the paint taking its dear sweet time to get off my hands despite my best efforts to hurry it along.

After fighting with the paint for five minutes, I returned to the nursery with a wet cloth and some paper towel. I carefully lowered myself to the ground and used the wet cloth first to wipe the paint off of the floor and then the paper towel to dry the spot.

Get on your knees, bitch, I could hear Edward saying as he grabbed a handful of my hair on the back of my head and thrust his way into my mouth. I tried to claw at his legs, push him away – anything to get out of there but I just wasn’t strong enough.

The wet spot on the floor, which I found myself lost in, had dried… but it also stained the floor. I sighed and threw the paper towel and the cloth in a small bucket at the corner of the nursery.

I tried to get up off of the floor but found it harder than I thought to do so. I remained there, on my knees, and just took another few moments to collect my strength and catch my breath.

Yeah, you like it rough. I know you do, bitch.

Finally, I found my footing again.

I left the brush with the red paint on it carefully balanced on the edge of that empty paint tray and went for the orange brush instead this time. The red swirl needed a smaller orange swirl inside of it, I thought.

Let’s get you in a position I can actually work with here. He still had me by my hair but now he had turned me around so he could get inside of me.

I let my brush do most of the work and responded to what it was saying to me. Gentle… gentle… now take the lead…

But then he chimed in again. You fucking pregnant whore. You’re my dirty little whore, aren’t you?

My brush wavered. I wouldn’t let him stop me now. Not here.

I funneled all of my energy into my right arm; I had to finish this wall. If not for myself then, at least, for her – for my baby.

I finished the arch of the swirl and then went back to the base to draw a second arch to connect to the first, completing the outline. Not even tears could bully me out of finishing this wall. I wiped them away with my left arm and kept painting.

But even my temporary defense wasn’t enough. The thoughts were becoming intrusive. I could feel them, like tentacles, wrapping themselves around my brain – tightening their grip.

He was on top of me now. I told him it wasn’t good for the baby but he wouldn’t listen; he just shoved me into the carpet… like I was some bug he was trying to squish under his shoe.

I can feel him losing his erection, like he occasionally does, but this time he’s not stopping. I try to tell him it’s okay… but that makes him angrier. I feel like I’m being ripped open as he shoves his finger inside me and humps me at the same time. I think he tore something but I’ve already lost my voice so I can’t even express the pain but I can feel the blood dripping down my thighs.

Then, I realize the pain isn’t in my vagina… it’s my uterus.

I walked over to the far corner of the nursery and grabbed a clean brush for the black outlines. I had somehow managed to lose the one I used before. My hand began to shake as I raised it to the wall, so I took a moment. I closed my eyes and thought of my baby – of how strong she would be… hopefully stronger than her mama. I could picture her little smile looking up at me, tucking her safely into bed at night.

I love you so much; you don’t even know how much of a miracle you are to me, I’d say to her.

I love you too, mama, she’d respond.

I could feel the tears threatening their way to the surface but I just couldn’t allow it. Not if I was going to get that wall done.

My hand was steady now.

For her, I thought.

These strokes were much more painstaking; they required a much more careful eye than the broader strokes of the red and orange swirls. I always prided myself on attention to detail in my work. Before I met Edward, I worked at a local art studio for many years. It was owned by one of the most fascinating artists I ever had the pleasure to learn from but she passed away shortly before her fifty-ninth birthday and I fell into a terrible depressive state.

Edward and I met a month later. He seemed so sweet, offering me support and doing his best to cheer me up. We laughed and cried together at our misadventures and misfortunes. And I was so in love… so in love.

I can still remember sifting through his long, dark brown hair after we made love for the first time. My friends, when they would divulge their stories, always told me that playing with someone else’s hair can be just as satisfying as having someone play with yours. Of course, I never quite believed them until I met Edward. Seeing how much he loved it when I played with his hair made me feel so warm inside – so much so, that it became my go-to after sex.

We were so happy. I started to worry it was all too good to last.

The wall was really starting to come together, I thought. With the black outlining the red and orange, it gave it a ferocity and boldness that I hadn’t expected. Defying my own expectations was what I loved best about painting – how a work of art can seemingly transform itself and come to life, as if you merely gave birth to it but now it was taking on a life of its own. My baby.

As I turned to lay the paint brush on the edge of the tray beside me, a loud CLANG rang out. I accidentally knocked over one of the old cans of paint! Luckily, it was mostly empty and the paint inside it had started to dry. I just stood there and stared at it, the clang echoing through my mind over and over again.

It became a sort of ringing… like a phone ringing…

Edward rushed to the phone and picked it up. I was about ten feet away from him in the kitchen drying some dishes and could hear everything pretty clearly. It sounded like he was arguing with someone… but the only calls he ever usually got were from his workplace downtown. I swear that was the first time I ever heard him get as loud and angry as he did, cursing and barely taking a moment to breathe.

Suddenly, a THWACK as the phone, which he had ripped out of the wall, hit the edge of the counter near me. It left a large dent in the wooden cabinet beneath the counter. I stood there in shocked silence with my back turned to the whole scene.

Before I could turn around though, he was already behind me. He grabbed me by the neck and pulled me back into the living room.

The paint can, which had been rolling back and forth, finally stopped. I bent over and placed it upright on the floor so it would stop rolling and turned to face my canvas once more.

I had finally finished my masterpiece; the wall which my baby would look at for the rest of her life.

I sighed in relief. It felt like a decade had passed since I started to paint the wall. My throat began to feel dry so I started to make my way out of the room to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. However, when I was just a foot or two away from the doorway, I heard the front door click open and shut.

Someone else was in my house.

I slowly backed away from the doorway and tried, in vain, to find a weapon of some kind that I could use to defend myself. There was nothing.

I began to panic even more as I could hear whoever the intruder was coming down the hallway towards the room.

Suddenly, they spoke.

“Ed! Ed, are you in there?” It was a young woman’s voice, she sounded concerned.

“Babe, I thought you said you were going to be at Rick’s…?”

My mind was racing. What should I do? What should I do?! But there was still no easy way out. I couldn’t use the window because this room was on the second story of the house; a fall like that would have no doubt hurt my baby, let alone me!

The woman outside crept closer to the door. I backed away but clumsily knocked over the red paint can. Red paint slowly oozed its way towards the slit beneath the wooden door.

Now there was nothing I could do to stop the tears.

“Mama, what’s going on?” I heard an even younger sounding voice – the voice of probably a toddler – yell up the stairs inquisitively.

“Just stay down there, okay baby?” The woman upstairs yelled back. “Ed? What the hell are you doing in the storage room?”

Now I was even more confused. Either this woman knew my husband or she was looking for another man named Ed… and I certainly wasn’t standing in any storage room!

Suddenly, I could hear the woman stop dead right outside of the door. She waited there for a brief moment and then placed her hand on the doorknob.

“E-Ed?” She worriedly whispered.

I had almost backed myself into the corner of the room by the time she opened the door. It slowly creaked open.

The young woman and I locked eyes as soon as we were within each other’s sights. And she just stood there, looking as pale as a ghost.

I didn’t quite know what to say, since she didn’t look like she had come to do me any harm. In fact, she looked as though she were right at home until she saw me.

“Can I help you?” I mumbled nervously.

She still just stood there, eyes wide and mouth slightly open and moving as if she were hyperventilating. But then she spoke.

“Who… what are you?” She quietly asked me.

I was beyond confused. I certainly wasn’t a ‘what.’

“I live here,” I said calmly, trying to diffuse the situation, “with my husband, Edward. We have a daughter on the way. We decided her name should be Emily after his grandmother. But we had the hardest time deciding what color to paint the nursery.”

The young woman didn’t seem to like my answer much at all and ran screaming down the stairs. I could hear her yelling for the little one to run with her.

“Emily, we have to go now – no we have to leave your toys behind! Go, go, go!”

I simply stood there and stared at the doorway where she had been standing just seconds before. How strange that encounter was, I thought. Yet, I found myself oddly at peace for the first time in years.

I felt a twinge of pain in my hands and looked down at them. My skin looked cracked and covered in some sort of black substance… it smelled like fire. But I couldn’t concern myself with that.

I looked around the room and realized something: I needed to paint over the other walls. Despite Edward’s argument, I knew that in time he would come to see reason.

I went back over to where I had placed the red paintbrush and grabbed it. Then, I walked over to Edward, who was sitting upright in the corner, and dipped my brush in his open chest.

“Only three more walls to go,” I whispered.