THE HALLWAY DOOR by Greg Lammers
The door stood a few inches open in the hallway, directly across from the room he’d slept in as a child, midway between his parents’ bedroom and the entrance to the living room. He hadn’t seen it since he was young, not outside his dreams anyway. It’d always been in his head, he’d wondered if it’d been real. Now it was there in the hallway, just like it was then.
He remembered the first time he’d dreamed it, or lived it. He’d dreamed it hundreds, thousands of times since. The door was painted white, it had wood panels. It didn’t match the rest of the doors or trim in the house. This door came from a time before his parents’ house. This was a door that had blown with the dustbowl toward California, it was the door that young women sat behind waiting for letters from lovers, lovers in a sense of the word that hasn’t been used in a long time.
The door stood open, just a few inches, as it had the first time he saw it decades earlier, at the same angle it stood now, beckoning, taunting, “come in or close me, you know you’ll come in.”
It was right. He’d entered it that night decades ago, wearing his cattle brands patterned pajamas and carrying a painted plastic six-shooter and a rat-eared teddy bear for protection. He hadn’t shut it behind him.
The night was full of stars and the sounds of insects and night animals. Upon his crossing the threshold the light changed from dark night to twilight gray, purple and yellow, the sounds evened out to a low hum.
He’d gotten up the next morning and eaten cereal his Mom poured for him, like every day. Not long after, the six-shooter landed in a toy box never to be played with again, the bear passed to a younger cousin.
Moments turned into months and years. There were countless hours of twilight study, a series of magenta and indigo women. Each job glowed more golden than the last, and then returned to the same gray that had led him to look for a new position last time and the time before. There was work and fun, fulfillment and emptiness, and memories that slipped away, careful not to wake him, while he slept.
Now there was the job of cleaning out his parents’ house, the one he’d grown up in, so they could move somewhere smaller, easier to look after. Now there was the door in the hallway, one of the memories that hadn’t snuck off when he wasn’t looking.
He crossed the hall. He had no pistol, no bear. He opened the door and heard the night sounds and saw the black sky filled with stars.