Yellow Room

“Day Walk in Malta” by Lucie Ware

We buy the salamander for Georgia after Mrs. Katz finds her digging in the dirt, alone, on the school playground.

“Where are your friends?” Mrs. Katz asks her.

“The bugs are my friends,” Georgia answers.

Mrs. Katz relays this to us in an email during lunch. New students all have a hard time, she writes. But I’m worried about Georgia. It’s almost December. Yesterday she cried when she accidentally crushed a weevil on her desk. She’s sensitive.

We think, that isn’t the worst problem in the world for a kid to have. But at Mrs. Katz’s request, we call the guidance counselor for advice anyway. We listen to it anyway and we take Georgia to Petco anyway. We buy the mealworms and water distiller and calcium supplements and terrarium and dampened sphagnum moss and UV light bulb and blackout shades and coconut fiber mulch anyway. Georgia picks out a name (Samuel) and a name tag (yellow) and we make her a card to put over her light switch (Do Not Leave On!), which she covers in small lizard stickers. We ask Georgia if she’s sure she wants to keep Samuel in her room, and she beams and nods and closes her curtains.

Yes, Georgia seems happy now, we think. But she seemed happy before, too.

Mrs. Katz emails us again the following week.

Georgia has done alright, she says. She is getting along well with her reading workshop partner. But this afternoon, one of her classmates informed her that some salamanders are blind, and she started to cry. It took a little longer than usual to calm her down. A salamander isn’t the kind of pet we had in mind. Most families choose puppies.

So much for happy, we think, but we’re reluctant to add more change. San Marcos is new enough. After school, we go into Georgia’s room and find her talking to Samuel in the blue glow of the UV light. “Red is like if you’re mad, or maybe hot inside,” she says. “Green is like when you touch your moss.”

Georgia’s room is dark now, even during the day, the whiteish walls grey-beige in the deep shadows of the blackout curtains. We stand at the doorway, listening to her small voice. Her face tilts towards Samuel’s terrarium.

“Yellow—” she says, pausing. “I don’t know how to tell you about yellow. I think yellow is just happy.” She’s silent for a minute, and then she sniffs, a quiet, wet little sniff. “I wish I knew if you could see it.”

After dinner, we read Georgia a book called The Salamander Room and promise to help her make pin-up trees out of construction paper the following afternoon, to make Samuel feel more at home. We read the brochures that Petco gave us when we bought Samuel, but none of them tell us exactly what kind of salamander he is, or whether or not he is blind.

The next day, Mrs. Katz emails us when Georgia is home from school. Perhaps you should watch her closely at home, she says. She isn’t playing with the other little girls. What kinds of toys do you let her have?

We close the email without finishing it. Georgia clips away at her construction paper, humming a made-up tune. We think, maybe we are not sure what makes five-year-olds happy. But we promise ourselves we will learn.

Georgia finishes her trees that evening. They are yellow. She smiles at Samuel’s terrarium while we stick the trees to the bookshelf, the bed, the doorframe.

“Why yellow?” we ask as we tuck her into bed.

“Just in case,” she says.

Kyra Kondis is an MFA candidate in fiction at George Mason University, where she is also the assistant editor-in-chief of So to Speak Journal. Some more of her work can be found in Wigleaf, Necessary Fiction, Pithead Chapel, the Best Microfiction 2020 anthology, and on her website at kyrakondis.com.