We don’t know where she came from. We watched her day and night and yet she gave no signs of her origins. And then one day, quite suddenly, she was dead.

A lot of confusion surrounded her arrival and departure soon thereafter. The building where we stayed, the Colonial, is not a hospital. We begged her to go to one, to the white room, where people could help her; she only shook her head with a funny little smile and then went to her corner to view the world beyond the window. It was only a short time later that she turned from the window to the wall beside. She would lose herself in the twists and curls of the wallpaper for hours, and it was as if she truly read something in them, something we could not see, had not been able to see.

And so we thought her crazy. It was a simply mistake, easily made. We doubt she would blame us for it. She had a harsh word for no one—indeed she had words for few.

We called her Nell. That wasn’t her name and she wouldn’t answer to it, but it was how we referred to her so that we would know of whom we spoke. In the tiny confines of our Colonial building, she was the only unknown. She was an enigma, and it wasn’t often we encountered such as she.

She came in October, just as the leaves were guilt gold and fluttered to the ground. We saw her through the window, and she walked up the path with the gold flashes falling around her. It was very picturesque but ruined by the vacant look in her eyes.

“This is a new resident,” the proctor told us, his thick hand pinching her shoulder. We didn’t like the proctor and so waited for him to leave before we truly greeted our new resident.

“Do you know what this place is?” we asked her. We always asked new residents such. Too few realized what contract they’d entered into and we felt it our duty to tell them. Of course, by such a point in time it was already too late. The papers had been signed. But just the same, we told the new residents what was to come. One had even been able to make his escape—he still lay in a coma on the third floor. He was the only resident on the third floor. He was still he, and we were us.

The woman only twitched the corner of her mouth in response. Her red hair was dull and matted, yet managed to frame her milk-face in a way that seemed it brilliant. Her lids slid too far shut for us to catch the glint of her eyes. We decided they must be gray, for no other color ever met our gaze. Process of elimination.

She settled in front of the television and slid out of focus. We did not know what to make of her; we left her there and ate our mashed potatoes and dry turkey. We hate our food. We decided she had not signed a contract. The proctor had brought her here ignorant of the events that would unfold within the walls.

In that way I…

We were the same. We had come to the Colonial unconscious and ragged with no chance to refuse. Our options were taken from us.

It was autumn but the bees still buzzed.

The woman, Nell, we thought had lost her mind somewhere in the curls of the wallpaper, if it had not been lost already. She was not the first to attempt to decipher the pattern. It could not be deciphered; it never repeated, it only continued to weave sinisterly along the walls, patterns interrupted with new coils, new paths to follow. It was never long before the mind separated to trace the paths.

We learned not to look at the walls, but by then it was too late. And there was a part of us that was more insistent. It led us to commit acts that were right. Only right. We don’t know if, had it been wrong, we would know a difference.

Nell did not go crazy, and curiosity grew within us the longer she sat there, staring, unblinking.

“She is not far from it,” we said.

“If she were to try she would have done so by now,” we disagreed.

“Her eyes dart too much.”

We agreed. She would not be able to follow the path with those nervous eyes. When they were not blurred with far-sight they were twitching along the curls, never settling in one place. Had she even reached a fork in those paths? We weren’t sure and thought she probably hadn’t. The paths did not fulfill their purpose when the watcher could not follow them. Perhaps Nell was indeed lost in the curls, unable to find a path to follow. Perhaps she chose the wrong paths again and again. Many of the paths ended abruptly, without joining another or splitting into two.

“Do we wish her to concentrate?” we asked. We were worried for Nell. We did not want her to suffer as we had.

“We wish to know her thoughts,” we replied. A selfish desire grew in us to quicken her insanity, to discover what we could of this mystery woman. Insistence grew. Mystery was foreign to us. We were too used to understanding everything. We were too used to going insane with knowledge to comprehend the reticence of her being.

Nell did not find a path. She remained at the wallpaper for days that turned to weeks, until the bees were buzzing languidly and dying one by one. Those were sad days for us, painful in the way of loss. She remained in the same chair, which soon depressed under her weight, until each time she was taken to bed by the proctor’s men, the imprint remained deep and permanent.

It was not long before her ritual began to annoy us. We wanted something to happen; someone so curious in construct and behavior should have shown us something. Something different. Perhaps even something to save us from a little of the death we suffered. In the Colonial, the true crazy people were to be valued—they had clarity of thought that we did not. They thought well alone; we could not think without the sounds drowning out the meaning. They had thoughts that were self-contained.

Too much noise interrupted our vigilant watch on Nell. Nell was always silent but we were loud.

“Be quiet, be quiet,” we muttered. We held our heads with our hands. We tried to kill us in small ways. We had outbursts and we were taken from the room.

Nell never focused on our face. Her eyes slid from side to side. I…

We hated her. After awhile we despised her calm, her resistance to the paths.

The bees were all dead by then, stinking the air with their corpses. It was enough to pull us further from sanity. Now our minds were louder. Now there were more insistent commands to accompany the dull, incessant everyday.

One day the proctor came and took Nell from the room, somewhere else that we had never visited. There had been no reason to take us there. We had not resisted. We had suffered as Nell would not. Or could not.

When she was returned, her limbs were limp on the arms of the chair. We had not sat there in her absence. And it had been a long absence. We had not stopped looking at the chair, though, not even empty as it was. Once she was again between the rough-hewn arms, we looked away frequently. It was hard to look at her. Her eyes no longer darted. They slid like water from a faucet from end to end of those paths.

And yet she did not become a part of us. Her mind remained as one, even though it was likely well dulled by the proctor. It was frustrating to us. Why had she come with such a strong mind? And why had ours been so weak? Why had she been chosen at all if she refused to follow the fork in the path?

We put our hands around her throat. We were a being, while she a mere woman. It was a very simple, but we were confused by it. We did not know who had killed her when her corpse was found in the garden, among the bees, atop the frost. Nell did not die from strangulation. Nell killed herself. The proctor told us this, his face mottled, his hands clenched. We did not understand his fury.

“It was working,” he told us.

We did not ask him what he meant, for he never would speak the truth to us. We were drawn to the Colonial with lies, and the proctor would not keep us there with truth. The outside world is deadly, he told us. And you are too dependent. You need me too much.

“We want it,” we said. We were stubborn.

The proctor did not want us in the Colonial anymore, anyway. His bees were dead and our contracts no longer held. He sent us away without money.

“I pledge to partake in this valuable scientific research insofar as the results prove applicable and necessary to science and the good of the world.”

Signature

We think Nell found the true path, the one that did not split. We think the proctor did not like this; we think the proctor killed her. Perhaps he meant to discover if his pattern was indiscernible, if there was indeed a common link or only patches of distinct coils. All we know for certain is that our minds were not as one anymore. They were disjointed. They were shared between us, and there were no individuals anymore.

We have died. We cannot think without the insistence or the nearness. There is no leader and Life is purposeless. The bees sting us, here in the cold, away from the Colonial. And I…

I have never liked bees.

A/N: For anyone who reads my other stories, I’m not dead. I am, however, bogged down by schoolwork, college applications and writer’s block. This is actually an assignment of sorts. It was a weird idea that I had. If you need it explained at all, I’ll answer any questions.