#AnotherWorldOctober Day 4: Door / Dwelling / Portal

Evening, Family. This one comes a bit late and is just a little snippet of something I've been working on that fits today's theme. - Cam

There was a door in the cellar of Merrilee Cook’s mamaw’s house that none of the cousins — or, so far as Merrilee knew, even any of their parents — were ever allowed to open. It was painted a blue that had once been bright, now cracked and peeling and covered in dust, but stout as an oak all the same, and anytime Mamaw sent one of the children down to bring up a jar of canned beans, or pickled beets, or strawberry jam for biscuits, she always warned them: “And you stay away from that blue door down there, hear me?” And they always did. 

Growing up, Merrilee never saw that door open, never saw Mamaw or anyone else turn the knob, much less pass through it, and she was endlessly fascinated by it. Where did it go? What was in there? Mamaw never would answer her questions — beyond a curt “Never you mind, sissy” — and no one else in the Cook family seemed to know. Or care, for that matter. 

Merrilee’s mother told her that was private, and she’d better not catch Merrilee snooping through Mamaw’s things or she’d bust her butt. Her daddy just shrugged and said it was “Just Mama’s storage room, I guess, Merrilee. She’s probably got rat poison in there, stuff like that — dangerous stuff, and you kids better mind your Mamaw.” 

Once when she was around ten, Mamaw asked Merrilee to go down to the cellar and fetch a jar of chow chow, and Merrilee had gotten brave enough to sneak over to that blue door and give the knob a try. She glanced over her shoulder — just in case Mamaw was watching from the top of the stairs (she wasn’t)— and wiped her damp hands on her jeans, then stretched her right hand out and grasped the knob. It felt ice cold against her fingers, even through a thin layer of dust, and it did not turn. Not even the slight back-and-forth jiggle that Merrilee usually associated with locked doorknobs. The lock held tight.

So Merrilee had given up, plucked a jar of chow chow from the shelves at the bottom of the stairs as her Mamaw had asked her to, and climbed the stairs back up to the kitchen. When she held out the jar in her grimy, blue door-dusty hands, Mamaw had given her a long, hard look. She didn’t ask if Merrilee had tried to open the door. She didn’t say anything about it at all. But she never sent Merrilee down to the cellar again, not once.