The Yolo Wallpaper
Witch Craft Magazine
Reminder! Author Chat: for paid subscribers, 2nd June, 8pm GMT / 12pm PST.
This Sunday for Goth Book Club subscribers, author of BACKMASK, O F Cieri, will join us for an informal group chat over Zoom hosted by myself. There will be a discussion lead by me and a chance to ask questions at the end – whatever’s on your mind. I hope you can join us Sunday by subscribing today. I’ll put the Zoom link in Sunday’s email ahead of the meeting.
Thanks for reading — on to this week’s story.
One night my wife came home and went to bed without saying anything. I figured she was tired or drunk or both, so I filled her water bottle and set our alarm for half an hour later than usual. She didn’t get up at 9:30, though. She didn’t get up at all.
‘I’m not being funny but you need to stop with those void girlie books from TikTok,’ I finally told her after I’d prepared and eaten dinner alone. She stared past me, blinking slowly.
Maybe it’s burnout, I thought. I had recently listened to a podcast about this. Probably she needed a break. I joined her under the duvet, putting on highly rated Netflix shows she wouldn’t pay attention to and ordering curries she wouldn’t eat.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, over and over. ‘What can I do?’
My wife refused to answer these questions, though occasionally she squeezed my hand. Three squeezes in quick succession — like a stranger knocking on your door. On Monday I rang our GP and read him a list of concerns I’d written on the back of a Deliveroo receipt.
‘Sounds like burnout,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep, drink some water, and make an appointment for blood work if there’s no improvement.’
‘How much sleep?’ I asked. ‘Precisely how much water?’
A month later, the blood work came back normal.
‘There’s nothing physically wrong here,’ the GP said decisively. ‘It could be depression. Is there a family history of mental illness?’
‘I don’t think so.’ My wife’s family didn’t believe in mental illness, and they weren’t the sort of people who experienced things in which they didn’t believe.
‘Are you depressed?’ I asked her. My wife had a sleep mask over her eyes but I knew she was awake from the way she was breathing. She reached a pale hand out from under the duvet and scratched at her nose, then snatched the hand back. The gesture was vaguely reptilian. I picked the antidepressants up the next day.
‘I’ll get these too,’ I told the pharmacist, setting down an assortment of supplements I had read about in a Facebook group dedicated to undiagnosed illnesses. A wild desperation bloomed through the knots in my stomach. I was open to anything and everything, so long as it kept my wife from continuing her metamorphosis.
Over the next weeks I tried herbs, crystals, a salt lamp, a SAD lamp, and a white noise machine that sounded like dying whales attempting covers of industrial albums from 1980s Berlin. I rubbed perfumed oils into every inch of my wife’s body with every possible amount of pressure and begged her to drink things that were, even to me, increasingly questionable. I made spreadsheets. I applied for an increase to my credit limit. I took on extra bar shifts and a persistent odour of sour beer and grease.
The leeches arrived in an empty Vimto bottle, sickly thin and covered in gel. I didn’t remember ordering them but the proof was in my email: two medium leeches, £28. I rinsed them in the sink and placed them onto my wife’s left arm with a pair of blue plastic tongs. I waited. Google said that removing leeches before they were satiated meant one of their three jaws, each of which had a hundred teeth, could tear off and get stuck in the skin. When at last they detached from my wife and dropped onto the duvet like fat, milkdrunk babies, I scooped them into an ashtray and flushed them down the toilet.
‘And how are we doing on the antidepressants?’ the GP asked.
’She’s still in bed,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they’re helping. I don’t think she’s depressed.’
‘I’ll increase the dose. Let’s add some gabapentin for anxiety.’
I ended the call and screamed.
Next I tried reading horror novels like they were how-to manuals. I learned all the ways wives routinely became vampires, werewolves, birds, and fish; how their bodies regularly housed fungi, aliens, viruses, and demons. I reread fairytales about spells and curses where women, albeit generally virgins rather than wives, slept too deeply or too long.
I went to the library and made photocopies of passages describing not just a) survival but b) life in a modern metropolitan city, taping them around the bedroom for inspiration. I was willing to give up our Manchester apartment if the issue was mould or demons — though I hoped it wasn’t demons because I was an atheist — but I didn’t want to release a rabbit-wife into the forest. I didn’t want to be married to a wasp. Facebook groups popped up in my feed like mushrooms once the algorithm figured out who it was dealing with. I joined them all, just in case.
My hair fell out from stress, clogging the drains and forming dreadful nests on the floor, while my wife’s grew with abandon from new, surprising places she must have kept tweezed and waxed through our years together: long, dark fur along her upper lip, inside the creases of her elbows, around her six nipples. In time it was so thick she resembled a panther, her irises a cloudy yellow. This would have frightened me if I hadn’t done my research — instead, I moved with precision, sliding a striped oven mitt over each paw so she couldn’t scratch her face.
‘I love you,’ I told her. I went to the kitchen and cut open a bag of thawed rabbit meat, emptying it into an old yellow mixing bowl patterned with red flowers. I added four tablespoons of a raw food completer for cats and stirred everything with a long spoon. My wife sniffed at the bowl suspiciously, then buried her face inside.
A hot, wet stench spread throughout the bedroom. Trying not to gag, I nibbled at a half-eaten hamburger I’d rescued from the bin at work, imagining we were seated outside in Stevenson Square and having poached eggs on toasted sourdough. I fished my phone from my trouser pocket and took a photo.
Loving her rabbit! I posted to LYCANTHROPE FRIENDS AND FAMILY SUPPORT. Your wife’s coat is gorgeous, someone commented. u ever feed biscuits or only raw? I typed No biscuits!!!, then deleted the exclamation marks and added a smiley face. Cats are obligate carnivores, another person had already added. A chunk of rabbit flew out of my wife’s mouth and onto the carpet. Stretching out my foot, I pushed it towards the wellness graveyard under our bed: an unopened air purifier, two bottles of psyllium husk powder, a jade gua sha.
I liked Facebook because it gave me a sense of stability through observing people with even less of it. My feed was filled with desperate introductions. Please tell me I’m not the only one going crazy about their wolf, someone would write. I am crying every day trying to figure out what’s best for her. Nothing seems to help!! I am losing my mind.
There would be dozens of replies. U not the only one I am the same.i recommend holy water helps lot my daughter no shifts since May 2018. Others would hijack the post with their own questions — can u elaborate a bit on the supplement you are referring to?? I’m in Chorley PR6 Thanks — and eventually the comments would get turned off.
ATTENTION #admin here kindly reminding members ‘demonic possession’ is NOT a Diagnosis but an UNSCIENTIFIC umbrella term for MANY different presentations of Lycanthropy or OTHER DISEASES!!! If you are new to the moon dance PLEASE read the Guides before posting or commenting.
My wife’s parents, meanwhile, weren’t concerned at all. They treated their daughter’s condition like a new hobby she had picked up: something requiring a minor financial commitment and the pretence of caring about her progress. I called them every other weekend and thanked them for the money they were depositing into our bank account.
‘Lymphatic massage?’ I’d say. ‘Yes, I’ll definitely try that. Good shout.’
‘Have you considered hiring a professional carer?’ her father asked one week. They had just returned from a spa holiday in Karlovy Vary where they’d witnessed the restorative powers of old foreign women, specifically ones who pummelled you with alternating hot and cold water from a distance of three metres.
Impossible, I thought. I couldn’t imagine anyone else looking after her the way I did. Would a professional carer go to the shops every morning to buy fresh crickets and mealworms? No. What I really needed was a professional me, someone to come in and live my life so I could focus on trimming the claws of my wife’s eight legs with garden shears.
Instead I changed into my work clothes each afternoon and walked across town to The Wailing Monkey. The floors there stuck to the soles of my shoes no matter how much I mopped and the faucets and drains were all ringed with a greyish pink mould. I sold cheap beer and prawn cocktail crisps and tried to keep my head down. One night the loneliness was insurmountable and I told a customer about my wife. He was waiting outside when my shift ended and waved a fistful of five-pound notes in my face. ‘To watch you fuck her,’ he said. I kept my socialising to Facebook after that.
Has anyone successfully used kiss me over the garden gate extract (persicaria orientale) to force a shift?
Hi everyone - just want to share my experience burning sage from Aldi
Werewolf_Nutrition_-_Feed_Werewolves_Like_Wolves.pdf
BOTH MY DAUGHTERS ARE WORMS URGENT #ADMIN
Anyone else misdiagnosed with depression/anxiety before lycanthropy???
u need holy water NOT SAGE if ur sister is a demon ffs
Can someone please add Caz Copperpot to the September Memorial Post
DO NOT share food lists from other groups to this group YOU WILL BE BANNED
Pic of my mum Lucy the Lion for the algorithm
But we weren’t unhappy, for the most part. My wife enjoyed old Soviet cartoons with singing animals: The Musicians of Bremen, Cheburashka, Vinni Pux. I played prog-rock records, put on silly outfits, and danced for her. Sometimes we shared a bowl of freeze-dried chicken treats and her claws scraped against my fingers as we reached for the chalky cubes at the same time. On her fortieth birthday I spent hours blowing up multi-coloured balloons and let her pop them all, the velvet bows in her fur bouncing as she roared with pleasure.
The end of my wife’s illness confuses me as much as the beginning. There is no reason, no one thing I can point to and go, ‘ah, well, that explains it.’ I was on the toilet when a series of sounds came from the bedroom: soft moans, rustling fabric, a grotesque squelch like a hand thrust into a jar of mayonnaise. I opened the door and stumbled out without wiping.
Our bed had been stripped, the pillows and linens thrown across the room. In the centre of the mattress was a speckled brown egg the size of a large grapefruit. I carried it to the kitchen and placed it gently in the fridge, rearranging two pickle jars and a pot of expired yoghurt so that it wouldn't roll out. My wife I discovered on the floor, ripping a packet of biscuits open with her very human teeth.
‘I missed you,’ I said, helping her up. ‘I missed you so much.’
‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ she laughed. Her face was covered in crumbs. ‘Did you go somewhere, Katya?’
2023 was a hard year. That’s what I tell friends when they corner me at dinner parties.
‘For us too,’ they say. They’re not having sex anymore or they’re having it with the wrong person or they’re working too much or not enough. ‘What happened to you?’ they ask.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Something like that.’
We keep the egg as a memento, packing it carefully in an old shoebox when we move to a bigger apartment and then, much later, to a terraced house outside the city where we have a garden and a little black cat. After my wife dies I put the egg in a pot and boil it but it tastes strange — almost like nothing at all.
about the author
Sonya Vatomsky is the author of SALT IS FOR CURING (Sator Press/Two Dollar Radio) and the chapbooks MY HEART IN ASPIC (Porkbelly Press) and AND THE WHALE (Paper Nautilus), which won the 2019 Vella Chapbook Contest. Their short fiction has appeared in ANMLY, Nocturne Magazine, and Idle Ink, and their bylines as a journalist include The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian Magazine. Sonya was born in the former USSR, lives in Northern England, and haunts at @coolniceghost.
Amazing story. I simultaneously gasped and laughed!