The Door

I awoke one afternoon to find a new door in my house. I was scrubbing the white off the kitchen tiles when I noticed it. I didn’t know how it got there. It wasn’t there the day before, so it shouldn’t have been there at all. I tried staring at it until my eyes watered, but it didn’t go away. So I craned my neck out like a flamingo and batted my eyelashes at the door, hoping it might wash away in the bleary ocean of tears now swimming around in my eyes. But that didn’t work either. I tried walking away into the other room - the only other room - and burying my head under a pillow until I could taste the stale air in my mouth.

It’s comfortable here, in the dark.

But the door even made its way into the darkness, a ghoulish white. It was strikingly plain. Four symmetrical square panels, perfectly aligned, a faded silver knob in the shape of a neat sphere, two ridged silver hinges. But when I peeped my head back into the kitchen, the door was still there, smiling at me through white paneled teeth.

The kitchen tiles were the only thing that could distract me.  Someone had spilled a blinding sheen of pristine white on them - a shocking change from their original crimson. The sheen was hard to remove, but I found that if I pressed hard enough, I could clean one tile for each hour of scrubbing. I had already carved out an irregular group of crimson tiles in the center of the floor, but there were 6 groups of 8 tiles remaining: a total of 48 tiles and 48 hours of work.I picked a particularly stubborn white patch, far from the door, and returned to scrubbing, losing myself in conquering the slated sea of white, for a time. But then I felt the door watching me. Every 15 minutes I snuck a sidelong glance in its direction, hoping it may not notice. But it always noticed.

At hour 12, a new wetness slipped into my eyes, this time sweat. I scrubbed harder, but my muscles faltered and the defined, broad strokes relapsed to a seismic shuffling of the brush. The shaking was subtle at first; it began with just my arms, a slight tremor, and spread into my shoulders and my toes, a varied strong pulse that jerked my various limbs to and fro in an unpredictable manner. The brush fell from my hands, just as a haze fell over the room. The floor swayed and tilted away from me, a deck on a sinking ship. I stood, my sea legs teetering in vehement disagreement as I careened into the bathroom, colliding with the wall and slumping down to fumble with the toilet seat. My knees jumped off the floor as I vomited. The type of violent, throat-scarring vomiting that only opiate withdrawal can cause.

I took a pill then. An angry, crimson little pill monogrammed with some stocky letters that I didn’t care to read. The door didn’t like that. As I reentered the kitchen, the house began to shake like some colossal beast was imprisoned beneath its floorboards, knocking me off balance and sending me tumbling backwards. The door swelled towards the ceiling, a purple, twisted hightower of warped wood and dangling splinters, and swayed over my head, following me wherever I went. I crab crawled into the nearest corner and watched, trembling, as the door expanded into the air, threatening to consume the room and everything in it, blotting out all light save a single sliver that had made its way into my corner. I fished for the pill bottle in my pocket and held it up to the light: an even mixture of white and crimson pills.

Which did I take? Which was I supposed to take? White? Crimson?

The door roared a modulated static that crackled against my eardrums. I covered my ears, afraid they might burst, but the roar crescendoed. My fear roared with the door as it closed in on me, a splintered net. I sent the pill bottle soaring through the air. It collided with the door, emitting a shower of crimson and white pills. I watched them hang there for a moment, pale lights in the fading darkness. The door seemed to retreat into itself, away from the suspended pills, and the room quieted. If I had uttered a sound the silence would have smothered it. Then the pills fell from the air, streaming over the kitchen counter like a pink, restless waterfall, tapping on metal and ceramic. Soon, the white kitchen floor was a swarming bee hive of medicine.

I scrambled after them, snatching at them as they bounced around, but some had already found their way into the kitchen’s many hidden nooks. My eyes locked onto one pill, so clinically white that it almost disappeared. It lazily made its way towards the other end of the room, hopping to and fro and following the grooves between the tiles. I crawled after it, but it teased me, stopping for a moment every now and then, only to duck out of the way as I grew closer. I worked it into a corner, sure that I had it trapped. I hesitated a second too long. The pill struck a groove in the floor and propelled sideways out of my reach. I lunged for it, but it disappeared into some thin, dark space just above the floor. I plunged my fingers deep into the space, longing to feel the pill at the end of my fingertips. With my face pressed up against the crack, I peered into the darkness, hoping to see a glint of white. My eyes found the pill, just beyond the reach of my fingertips. Wood pressed into my skin as I pushed my hand deeper into the crack, deep enough to place a finger on the pill’s flat face and pull it towards me. I began to slide the pill out of the crack.

Then the sound in the room changed and my hand froze. My ear, pressed flat to the floor, grew cold, as if an icy vine had bloomed across the ceramic. Then I realized. My hand is under the door. I felt a faint puff of air on my fingers. The skin tore away as I wrenched my hand from the crack and ran to the other side of the kitchen, grabbing the brush and thrusting it forward like a shield. Huddled on the other side of the shrinking expanse of floor, my chest heaved and I began to sweat again. The door shook, or I shook. In my panicked retreat, I had managed to grab the pill. I ran my fingers over its face, over the depressed lettering and the raised edges.

White, not crimson.

I smiled and held the pill out in front of me next to the door so that I could see them both at the same time. A drop of blood slipped from my fingertips onto the pill, and I watched as a thin red line made its way down the face of the door as well. The pill tasted of iron; it carried me away.