Opening

A story for TiF Secret Santa

This story is part of the TiF Team Secret Santa event where we participants all anonymously contributed the bare bones of a plot with the theme “What’s Inside the Box.” The wonderful Erica Drayton then did a blind exchange so that we ended up with a plot that was not our own around which we got to build a story. The Secret Santa plot I received was:

Inside the box: a doorknob with a note claiming that when placed, it can open any surface and lead to anywhere and anytime.

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In the mornings, before I even open my eyes, there’s a moment when everything seems okay. When I am happy. When I remember what it’s like to live.

It used to last until I stretched my hand across the bed and met only empty sheets. It used to last until I registered the quiet, remembering the soft rhythm of easy breaths. It used to last until I tried to lift my lids and they scraped against dry eyes, all the moisture given over to knife-point tears. It used to last.

But now, even in my dreams, I miss you.

I get up. Empty my bladder—bodily processes don’t stop until they stop for good, it seems—shuffle to the sink. As the water runs and the soap slips between my fingers, I look at myself in the mirror. I am gray. My hair, my skin, my eyes, my lips. The walls behind me are pale, the ceiling a shade of nothing.

I wasn’t prepared for a lot of things about losing you, but I think this grayscale world is the hardest to bear. You were a kinetic kaleidoscope. I’d look at you, see through you, and the world was moving, bright. Not always happy. Not always fair. But it was alive; it breathed in color.

I’ve tried finding your spark again in other things: Drink and drugs, deep sleep, deeper belief, the deepest dives into memory.

That last is maybe the closest I get. Long plunges into recollection where I slip below the surface of the present and let the long-ago wrap its warm, traitorous arms around me, pulling me down so far I’m sure I never could resurface. Sure I’d never want to. Because at least in the folds of memory I am whole.

This half-life with its broken edges, hard and sharp along the seam where I cracked, it’s really no life at all, you see. But I go on. More out of habit than any real sense of survival.

I wrap myself in a gray bathrobe, nestle into gray sheets, the smell of sadness caked into their threads. I watch the dust waft through the watery light that seeps through the blinds. I try to watch one particle, to follow it down, to see where it lands. But it only floats and floats, one mote among a million. So I close my eyes.

The knock sounds in my head at first. A dream of once-upon-a-time visitors when I and the house were whole. When you were here.

In my waking sleep I laugh, turn the corner, and open the door to cold air and the warmth of people that loved us. I sigh, ready to slip into that world, but the knock sounds again. I ignore it. After all, our guests are already here. But it sounds again and again. Insistent.

I allow one eye to open. Just a crack. Just enough so that I could still slip back into that dreamwalk sleep. The dust motes still swirl but the light slants steeper now. A breath. A knock.

I will the person away, close my eye, walk back to that edge of sleep and dreams. But the knocking comes again and holds me back. Pulls me back from that well-worn precipice.

As I wait, the pauses between the knocks grow shorter, the sound becoming one long roll of knuckles on wood, impossible to ignore.

Both eyes open now, I feel like I should be afraid. What normal person knocks like that? But my heart refuses to match the intensity of the pounding on my door. When the worst has happened to you, the rest of it holds little to fear.

I swing my legs over the bed and pad on unsteady feet to the bedroom door and the landing beyond. On the stairs I totter down, stiff, legs somehow rickety and heavy at once. The knocking is loud, steady, fast. I want to shout at them to stop, but my voice, like my heart, is contained, constrained to a register somewhere between a whisper and a murmur.

At the last step the knocking stops.

I stop too. Wait. Hand outstretched, halfway to the doorknob.

I could turn back.

My fingers wrap around the cool gray metal.

I could turn back.

But what is there left to turn back to?

I open the door.

On the mat is a present swathed in deep purple paper, an aubergine bow tied round it. There is no tag.

I glance out to the rain-slicked street, flick my gaze left and right. Empty. As the December air licks at my toes, my unshaved ankles, I think about closing the door, climbing the stairs, sinking back into the dust of our life.

But curiosity seems to be a bodily process too, hard to kill. So with creaking back and popping elbows, I reach down and grab the strange thing, the paper smooth against my fingers, the box heavy in my hands.

In the house, I sit on the couch, studiously ignore the you-shaped dent in the cushions. On the grimy coffee table and against the backdrop of my carbon-colored walls, the box seems to have its own glow, soft and subtle.

I reach for the lid. Stop. Reach for it again. I open it a crack. Stop.

The dim light from the kitchen brightens the shadows inside the box just a bit, enough that the gleam of something burnished catches my eye. I pull off the lid and let it fall to the floor, its purple a square bruise on the bloodless floor.

I reach in, lift the thing to the light. A silver doorknob.

It’s cold, tarnished. But the weight of it is pleasant enough in my palm. It has a diamond-shaped backplate, a rosette with four points emblazoned on the knob itself.

Everything about this is strange but my brain, sluggish from disuse, doesn’t want to know why it’s here or who left it. There is only room for one question inside my grief-clogged folds of gray matter: what’s it for?

My finger traces the pattern on the knob in lazy loops, as if the intricate scrollwork carries an answer, until my eye catches on a bit of white in the bottom of the box. A note.

On plain cardstock are the words: Anything is a door, if you let it. Any place, any time. Simply decide.

The words sink, feather-like, through my consciousness. Back and forth in lazy arcs. Anything is a door. Anything. Any place. Any time. Decide. The knob grows warm in my hand.

Where should I go?

It’s not the question of a sensible person, only someone with no questions left to ask. I stand, old floorboards snapping and popping beneath my weight, walk through the mess we left behind, the fossils of our life together.

I open the kitchen cabinet with the mugs, find the one with a chip in it. I lift it out and set it on the counter. It’s not always rainy in Seattle is written in cursive on the side.

Anything is a door. I lift the knob, place it against the white porcelain—a gentle ting ringing out—and with the strange logic of a dream, it’s as though it’s always been there, no longer a doorknob and mug but a mug with a doorknob and my brain doesn’t skip a beat.

I simply decide. I turn the knob and step through. The physics don’t make sense, but I’m out of questions. And my brain is slow and sleep-steeped, so the going seems like nothing at all. Natural. Easy. The same as losing you.

I step into the souvenir shop where I met you. Twenty-five years ago. In the summer. The place is dim, close, hot, full of tourists fresh off the pier, salt-tang air still clinging to their clothes.

I know how it’s supposed to happen. Me looking at you through shelves of snow globes and spoons. You tall and lanky and gorgeous at the register. I know how it’s supposed to play out, but I can’t wait.

So I make my way down the center aisle of the store in the quick-slow way of dreams. And after the t-shirts and caps, I pull up short, because there you are, and for the first time in a year my heart jumps and stutters out of its slow, sad plod.

It’s a testament to how much I want you back that it takes me a tick to notice your metallic skin, your clockwork eyes, your wire hair. It’s odd, incorrect. But I don’t question it. This version of you is better than the version of you that’s gone.

I come close, grab the mug from the shelf in front of the counter, just where it’s supposed to be. I run my finger over the rim. There’s no chip yet; that comes years later in a fight neither of us wins. I set it down. Wait for your voice, that voice I only hear now in saved voicemails and old videos on my phone.

But clockwork-you just stares at me, tiny gears in your eyes turning, expanding the apertures of your pupils. The only sounds are the tick-tock of some internal mechanism, the hiss and purr of steam levers shifting. I try to read something in your copper gaze, but you’re only a clever machine. Nothing more.

“I miss you,” I say. It’s not what I said all those years ago, but it’s truer than the words I had when we were young and there was time for complications.

I turn back the way I came, understanding now that there was only one version of you I want. When I reach the door, I don’t look back, only twist the knob and the shop by the pier is our kitchen once again. Knob and mug separate and distinct.

The knob is in my hands again before I really understand what I’m doing, my feet carrying me through the back of the house and into the garden beyond. The rain has soaked the ground here so that the soil no longer swallows it and the water squishes up between my toes as I walk.

I think I’ll throw the knob into the tangle of weeds at the back by the fence. Go back inside. Back to bed. My last question answered. But a rock rears out of the ground and I trip over it and come down hard, shin bloody. If my voice worked right I would shout, swear, but as it is, I only gather into myself, rain washing the dust from my bathrobe into the dirt, gray meeting beige in my monochrome world.

But, slow and steady, the rock sinks into my memory, hits bottom, and sends out ripples of recollection. You put it here. And I take the knob in my hand. I set it on the rock. And I decide.

Water’s between my toes again but this time it’s warm, kissing my skin with the gentle ebb and flow of the lake. This is our place. The grassy shore of an island locked within a tarn in the Cascades. It’s a long hike out and is probably on private land, but we’ve never seen another soul here so it’s ours.

We swim out, claim it over and over again with our bodies and our words, every summer of our butterfly youth. Until the last one, when we twist dandelion stems around our fingers, the future ours.

I splash along the shore and you come into view, just where I knew you’d be, prying the rock out of the sand. We’ll carry it back slung between us in a hammock made of your shirt, relying on our strong kicks and thick skulls to keep us from drowning. A little piece of our island with us always.

But you’re not you. Not really. You’re dandelion stems woven into legs, dandelion flowers for eyes, dandelion puffs for hair.

I come closer to you this time and reach out. I want your touch, the lake-cradle feel of your hands on me. But there’s only the tautness of summer green.

“I miss you.”

You stare at me with dandelion eyes, rotating sunshine pinwheels. But you’re just a wish on the breeze, dancing seeds of a dream.

The rock with the knob drips lake water, setting your green stems glistening. I let my fingers slip from yours. They find hard metal, the filigree of a rosette. I press the pattern into my palm and turn. The lake slips away and I’m in the garden again, goosebumps on my gray skin as I huddle in the December rain, the doorknob clutched in my fingers.

I float back inside, peel off my wet clothes, wrap myself in a blanket that still smells like you. And maybe it’s the scent, or the way I can still feel the summer breeze off the lake or hear the clatter of tourists in the shop, but I go from room to room, upstairs and down. I decide over and over again to take those memory journeys.

The knob on a pasta pot takes me back to our kitchen when it shone with polished countertops, your handmade fettuccini bubbling on the stove. But here you stir the pot with tentacle fingers, deep-sea scales rippling up your arm, fish eyes goggling.

The knob on a book, and we’re at the cafe, lattes steaming, typing side by side, paper and ink dreams moving our fingers. But you’re ribbons and lace, whalebone spine, crinoline ribs, and button eyes.

The knob on your pillow and you’re next to me in bed, silver moonlight glossing the floor, stars freckling the sky. I hold you, even though you’re ash and dust, char and cinders for arms, brittle sticks of chalk for legs. Each breath I take you blow away, every slightest movement I make you fall to pieces. But I hold you and hold you and hold you until you crumble to nothing but dust on the air. And then I watch the motes dance and remember when we lived.

But the knob never takes me to you. Not the real you. Flesh and blood. Eyes kaleidoscopes, making me see in color.

Still wrapped in the blanket, useless knob in my hand, I fall to the floor. I’m at the front door and if I had the energy, I would leave this house of faded memories and never come back. But there’s nothing left in me so I sit and stare at myself in the hallway mirror.

I am gray. My hair, my skin, my eyes, my lips. And after everything I just want color, a little piece of the way you saw the world. I don’t decide it with my mind; it’s not a thought or a memory. It’s a desire, a longing, a wish. A decision made with the heart.

I let the blanket fall away, I lift the knob to my left breast, and I press it against my skin. And then it’s a part of me, as natural as you and me.

With colorless fingers I twist the knob, and a door opens. Inside there is a deep purple chamber divided into tiny rooms, each the color of blood longing for oxygen. I wait, pull myself closer to the mirror, breathe, wish.

And there you are.

Behind the counter at the souvenir shop, on the grass by the lake, in the kitchen, at the cafe, in our bed, moonshine anointing you. In each tiny room in my heart, you are there.

And you are not clockwork or cloth. You aren’t made of scales or dandelion puffs, or ash and dust.

You are real. Flesh and blood. And you are mine.

I sit and I watch you, a million versions of the you that made us. I sit and watch for a long, long time. And then I close the door, the knob coming away in my hand. I look around with my kaleidoscope eyes at the home we made and the color comes back. Deep purples melting into bright reds and greens and blues and yellows.

I stand, go to the window. Snow falls, drifting like dust motes. But in between the clouds, I can still see the stars.

“I love you.”

I say the words and my heart beats a little faster.

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I hope you enjoyed unwrapping Opening! If you did, let me know with a like, comment, or share. Want more of my weird love stories? Try Render Us Rotten or Stars on Our Skin.

And if you’re all in, I’d love to have you at my witch’s table, where I write dark fairy tales, atmospheric folklore, unsettling horror, and haunting romance. My words are sometimes strange, sometimes scary, but always served up with heart. 🫀