The Wooden Door

Rebeka walked into the living room and flipped on the TV. She sat on the sofa, an oversized, high-back, comfy couch. It took her a while to find it in 1962, but she did. Black and white material, she called it the Holstein.

Within a few minutes, she became enthralled with the program she was watching. It was about the election of President Trump for the second time. She thought about the year 2024 and realized she was not born yet.

The program ended, and she thought she needed to go to bed. She had work in the morning, but her shift started at 11 and was only midnight. She picked up her portacomm and glanced at her schedule. Tomorrow will be October 1, 2064. She needed a chair to match the couch. She put her glass in the sink and returned to the living room. Pressing a button on her wrist control, the windows polarized, making it impossible to see into her home. A home she purchased a year ago after receiving her doctorate from Ohio Dominican University.

She has lived in Ohio all her life and likes to tell people she attended college out the back gate of Ohio State. Rebeka was originally from Cleveland, the east side, of course. If you know anything about the city of Cleveland, you are either an EAST side or a WEST side. So, being an East sider, she grew up just off St. Clair Avenue, near London Road, in a blue-collar neighborhood, in a blue-collar family, to blue-collar parents.

Being an only child, and her parents gone now for several years, they died in an accident on Dead Nan’s Curve, she kept to herself. She bought this house and fell in love with it fast. It has three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a huge kitchen, and a good-sized living room.

She knows it is noon where she is headed, but to be safe, she sent a message to her boss, telling her that she is not feeling well and will connect once she feels a bit better. A lie? Yes, but nothing sinister. Unless you consider she is lying in the event, she does not return in time to go to work in a few hours. Maybe it will work out.

Rebeka walked over to the wall. It was a mural painted on the wall by the previous owners. The couple disappeared disappeared with no trace. They lived in this house for over 30 years, and the bank took over the house and sold it to her for a song. She paid 25% of what it was worth but asked for the loan to be a couple of times more than the cost of the house. She banked the remainder, and the mortgage paid for itself. One less thing she has to think about.

It is a beautiful mural. She hung a set of red velvet drapes on either side of the mural and tried to keep it covered most of the time, especially when visitors were in the house. Pressing another button on her wrist, the drapes parted, allowing the mural to be fully displayed.

The mural was a door. A wooden door from the 1930s or 40s. Around the door was a beautiful hillside on the right and a small city on the left. It all appeared to be pre-WW II.

She went to the piano and pressed D dominant 7 and B major. There was a vibration starting, but she held the notes. The wooden door vanished a moment later, replaced by a swirling pool of the most beautiful rainbow mist.

A few months after she moved in, she received a letter. It was from the couple who lived here before her. It explained much about the house and the door, which they called their century portal. It allowed you to go back one hundred years in near real-time. One hour there was fifteen minutes here. She started work at nine in the morning, meaning she had roughly 35 hours before she needed to be back home, shower, connect to the office, and start her work day.

Her mission was to locate the companion chair on her couch. Thankfully, the portal on the other side was in the back of a dead-end alley. The hard part was getting the items there, but having big, burly men do her a favor in 1963 was pretty easy.

She headed to her bedroom and put on her 1963 attire. A canary yellow dress that came to her knees was an inch above hers. She had a matching scarf on her head that held her hair back and matching sandals. She carried a bag, excuse me, a pocketbook. It matched her outfit to the tee.

She went to the desk and removed a small stack of currency. A few hundred dollars in 5 and 10-dollar denominations. Enough. She stopped and thought a moment, saying aloud, “I think today my name will be Amber, Amber Rose.”

She looked around the apartment and pressed the button on her write, setting the security system. She covered the wrist control with gloves and headed to the mural. Pausing, she stepped through the now shimmering wooden door, and as her foot hit the ground, she was in 1963.

She headed out, turning to make sure the portal did not appear obvious to anyone. It remained open until she pressed the closing notes. But thankfully, on this side of the portal, there was nothing. She knew exactly where it was located, but no one else did.

Making a beeline for the furniture store, she picked up the chair she sought. They delivered it to her in the alley, and she told them to place it next to the red area. That is where her people will pick it up this evening. The two men agreed and left the store, paying cash.

She liked visiting a few favorite places: a restaurant, bar, and family-run store. She made her way around the neighborhood and said hello to everyone.

Her cash, well, that was stolen. Since she knew cameras, DNA, and most things that can get you arrested in her time did not exist, she took a bus to a town a few hundred miles away dressed as someone from a farm. She wore a red wig in case someone saw her. At three AM, she used a glass cutter from her time and cut a hole in a window, putting reflective tape in case someone noticed.

She discovered they did not put away all the cash at night and noticed the trigger to open the drawers. She got away with almost 3,000 dollars. Hopping on the 6 AM bus, she headed home. When she returned to the portal and walked through, she queried the web about a robbery – the robbery she committed a few hours ago, a hundred years in the past. She found the story. No one was ever charged. They closed the case a few years later, assuming it was someone from the farming community stealing to help their family and those in her rural community.

She went home and picked up the grav cart. Placing it under the chair, she activated it, and it hovered, lifting the chair off the ground. She pushed it through the portal. Walking to the piano, she pressed the keys at either end of the keyboard, holding them until the wooden door reappeared.

“That was fun!” She said.

Glancing at the clock on the wall, it was only 3 in the morning. She put the chair where it belonged and headed to her bedroom. Putting away her clothing from the 60s, she dressed in a set of silk pajamas.

She pressed the wrist control, covering the mural but leaving the windows polarized. She would get a few hours of sleep and then connect to work.

Tomorrow was another day. Possibly, she can take a week’s vacation this weekend, in 1963. She was thinking November 20 or so. She had never been to Dallas, Texas. A few hours ago, she put a Kodak Super 8 movie camera on layaway. She will pick it up and bring it to Dallas to record the events and the trip. The film will need to be developed, but if someone sees it, she will need to cross that bridge when she gets to it.

“Maybe a really good Browning still camera?” She said, just as she fell sound asleep.