The Blue Door

Ariella stood at the foot of her father’s driveway. She’d been walking for 47 minutes. The bus had dropped her off this morning at 9:05 on the corner of 28th and Central, three minutes behind schedule, not that she’d been in a rush. She had pulled out her phone, there on the corner, to double check the route from where she stood at the edge of The City to her father’s house. She knew the route, but she’d never walked it before and that made her doubt herself. The app told her the walk would take 50 minutes. Ariella had sighed, putting her phone back in her pocket, before going to sit on a familiar and strangely placed bench that sat slightly outside The City’s limits, secured in the dry, sandy ground, and faced out into the desert wasteland. That was the bench where Ariella had waited for her father many times, ever since he moved out of The City and Ariella stayed. That morning, she had wondered what might be different if she had gone too, like he’d asked.

There on the bench, she’d paused her journey to eat some breakfast before her very long walk. Her backpack was packed meticulously with food, each item a necessary piece in the puzzle. Her breakfast rested on the top, a vanilla yogurt accompanied by chocolate and granola pieces and a slightly green banana. She’d also packed a small plastic spoon. It was the blue one she’d kept from her most recent trip to the frozen yogurt shop that stood around the corner from her apartment. Ariella and her father used to hate the frozen yogurt shops. They’d put their favorite local ice cream shop out of business, the one they’d gone to for hot fudge sundaes ever since she was small. They used to order sundaes to-go every Friday after school and take them back home to watch movies or play board games. It didn’t matter what they were doing. The sundaes were the constant. When the local ice cream shop closed, they didn’t know what to do with their Fridays. They replaced their sundaes with other local food items. Street tacos or loaded french fries or chicken and rice from the halal cart in Center Square. They continued on like that for almost a year, walking the city and trying local restaurants and food carts. Ariella never understood why they didn’t just buy the sundae ingredients instead and make them at home, but she didn’t ask because she enjoyed the adventures. 

Eventually though, they ran out of places to try, and nothing had quite filled the sundae-shaped holes in their hearts and stomachs. So their Friday night wanderings took them to the one place they had never been. The frozen yogurt shop. It had towered before them, a behemoth whose evil they’d built up in their heads and who had stomped their local ice cream hero into dust. But when they stepped inside, they saw the sundae-making station of their dreams. There were different flavors of cookie crumbles and cookie doughs, fresh pieces of kiwi and melon and berry, mint and chocolate and vanilla flavored yogurt chips, gummy worms and gummy bears and clear, colorful balls full of liquid you’re supposed to pop in your mouth. They had hot fudge, caramel sauce, marshmallow creme and peanut butter. Ariella and her father couldn't believe their eyes... and then they saw the yogurt flavors. There were the classics like chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, but they also had coffee and cake batter and cotton candy. They had butter pecan and cinnamon bun and chocolate hazelnut, and they even had a bunch of dairy-free flavors which were perfect for Ariella's dad because he was lactose intolerant. He smiled the entire way through the store that night, and the next few Fridays, and Ariella thought she’d seen him wipe his eyes a couple times.

Ariella had wiped her eyes looking at the yogurt spoon in her hand. She’d gotten it the last Friday they spent together, the night before he disappeared. He had been missing for six months now, and everyone she knew was telling her she needed to go through his house and figure out what she wanted to keep. That she needed to find his will and bring it to a lawyer and get the process going. Everyone she knew was telling her he was dead, not always with their words, not always very clearly, but it was always implied. She could see what they were saying with their eyes. Ariella didn’t agree with them, but the cops didn’t find anything. She had reported him missing Saturday night, 24 hours after she had seen him last. When she called they told her to call again in 48 hours if he still hadn’t turned up. They didn’t care that she and her dad spoke almost every day. They didn’t care that he returned every message and every phone call she had ever sent him for as long as she’d had a phone. They told her that he’s a fully capable, adult man and people like that don’t disappear. He probably just didn’t feel the need to tell her where he was going. They looked around his house for signs of a struggle, but that was the last time Ariella saw them. She called every Friday for the first month and they never had anything new to say.

So now she stood at the bottom of his driveway, six months older than the last time she’d seen it. His car was dormant in the driveway. She could almost pretend he was in there, waiting for her, except all of the lights were off. The walk had flown by despite the arid heat. Ariella barely remembered it as she stared up the steep, sandy hill at her father’s house. The house was larger than he needed, two floors, a basement, and an attic. But it was the house he grew up in. His mother had left it to him when she died ten years ago, but he let his sister live there with her husband and their three kids after their apartment building burned down. Ariella wasn’t sure where they were now. They’d moved pretty far away after they got their money together to buy a nice house. They wanted to live in a good school district, for the kids of course. When Ariella called her aunt to tell her he was missing, she didn’t have much to say. She and Ariella had sat silently on the phone together for a few minutes, and then her aunt just told her she was so sorry and hung up. Ariella hadn’t heard from her again. She thought maybe her aunt couldn’t handle the news and wasn’t ready to accept his disappearance. Ariella didn’t think that was fair because if she had the choice she wouldn’t choose to face it, but she didn’t have the energy to be angry about it either.

Ariella took the last steps of her walk up the long, dusty driveway to the brown wooden steps at the front of her father’s house. She took slow, heavy steps up the creaking stairs and put her hand on the tarnished, silver doorknob. She turned it slowly, her fingers aching from an involuntary death grip. The door unlatched and she let it fall open, the house only slightly cooler than the temperature outside. She saw dust swirl in the rays of sun from the open doorway, and the house smelled almost musty. It smelled old and forgotten and stale, closer to a memory of her father than the real thing. Ariella felt like she was floating above her head and trailing ten feet behind herself, looking at her dad’s home and all of his belongings with faraway eyes. She scanned his kitchen, exactly the same as the last time she saw it. She’d left a box of tea out on the counter then, and it was still sitting there. Untouched and open and dusty. Her cup was still in the sink. She wasn’t sure why she had left those things there, like someone else was going to put them away after she left.

She walked through the dark house in a daze. She didn’t think to turn any of the lights on. She didn’t think at all as she floated from room to room. Ariella could feel her father’s absence here. This home was nothing more than a skeleton without him. Brittle and dry and lifeless, ready to crumble at the slightest brush of your finger tips. She stopped at a cord dangling from the ceiling. It was the kind of cord you pull to bring down the stairs to the attic. She didn’t think as she pulled it. She only felt a humming in her hands as she wrapped them around the cord. By the time she regained awareness, she was at the top of the stairs in the darkened attic. She felt the wall around her for a light switch, desperate to finally see something. The light switch wasn’t on the wall though, it was another cord coming from the ceiling. She pulled it. The light that came on was dim, and Ariella had to stand for a moment to let her eyes adjust. When they did, she saw the room was full of boxes and bins. She peered closer at the clutter around her and saw some of the boxes had writing on them, describing what was inside. There were dishes and broken electronics and photo albums. There were baby clothes and outdated furniture and dust-caked instrument cases. Most of the things she suspected were older than her.

She went deeper into the attic, unsure about what she was doing or why she was doing it. It was like there was a cord attached to her stomach, pulling her through the house and deeper into the attic, pulling her toward something she didn’t understand. She came across another cord in the ceiling and pulled it. This light was much brighter, and it lit the room up in a warm yellow. She noticed a doorway to her left, and something about it looked fresher and newer than everything she had seen so far. She moved toward the doorway and leaned through, peering into the room. The temperature here was actually comfortable. It was strangely cool, and it made the air in the room feel lighter than the rest of the house. She realized there were metallic purple and slate colored fixtures and apparatuses along the wall of the room that was directly in front of her. They were shiny and clean as if someone had been here to polish them every day. There were empty glass vials and beakers sitting in these strange, swirling fixtures. On the wall to her right there was a wooden bookcase. It looked like someone had made it by hand, and it had unfamiliar characters carved wildly into every visible surface. The walls were covered in fantastic pictures of things Ariella had never seen. There were unknown places with lavender grass and iridescent skies with stars visible even while the sun is shining. There was a massive white bird with eight golden eyes and a crown made of flowering cactuses. There were humanoid creatures with dark waist length hair and four arms.

Ariella stepped fully into the room, turning to look to her left at the rest of the unexpected space. The room had no lights that she could see, but Ariella had no difficulty looking around. Everything in the room seemed to glow, but when her eyes focused on something specific there was no light coming from it. There was an ornate wooden desk facing the wall at the other end of the room. She was drawn toward the desk, and moved toward it easily. Above the desk there was a mirror. Its frame was a shiny, dark gray metal that looked soft enough to be dented by a touch of someone’s thumb, but after testing that, Ariella learned it was extremely hard. She’d never noticed whether or not a metal was particularly hard, but somehow this one was. The glass of the mirror was also dark. It wasn’t quite black, and she could see herself reflected in it, but the background was indiscernible. It seemed to pulse and move behind her, but every time she turned to look, the room behind her was still. There were a few half melted candles scattered at one end of the desk, and leather bound books stacked at the other. In the middle of the desk sat a familiar shape. It was small enough that she didn’t see it at first, but when she noticed it she let out a soft gasp of surprise.

It was a door. A small, blue, plastic door. Her favorite toy door that she played with all the time as a kid. When Ariella was little, she was obsessed with building blocks. Her very favorite kind were the ones that have the little nubs so you can connect them to each other. This door came from a set of those building blocks, and for some reason it was her favorite thing. It started with her building different buildings and using that door in every one. Ariella would take her time building the perfect toy building, thinking especially hard about every single block and where it should go. The final piece was always the blue door. She imagined the door was a portal to other worlds, and all that mattered was where you put it. Every spot, every building, had a different, secret world hiding inside and that little blue door was the key. She would imagine incredible places. Worlds where elephants walked on two legs and spoke in British accents, worlds where the preferred form of travel was bouncing, and every road was a bounce house floor. There were worlds made of candy and worlds made of ice, worlds where the people lived underground, worlds where the people were lizards. Her imagination was limitless, and the key to all of it was this door. Her hands were humming again, or maybe it was the door. She didn’t realize she’d started to hold it, but she was now and she had something itching in the back of her head, begging her to open it. Pleading and yelling and jumping up and down at her to hold it up to her face and peer through. She laid her left hand flat out in front of her and placed the door on top. Her heart was beating so fast and she didn’t know why, she didn’t know what she thought would happen or why she was so excited and terrified to open this tiny blue door. Ariella grabbed the small round doorknob between her thumb and pointer finger, and pushed the door open.

Ariella woke up surrounded by soft, mint-colored grass, clutching the toy door in her hand. She blinked her eyes open to a cloudless, pink sky and an orange sun burning above her head. The air smelled sweet, like fruit and flowers, and she sat up with a start. She was surrounded by unrecognizable wildflowers in colors she couldn’t name or comprehend, and there were chubby little bugs buzzing around her. They reminded her of bumblebees as they floated lazily from flower to flower, but the stripes that should be yellow were dark blue. In the distance Ariella saw a shining silver city, and she was glad to see she still had her backpack full of food and water. She pulled her water bottle from the bag and drank deeply, finding herself to

be extremely thirsty. When her thirst was satisfied, Ariella stood and walked swiftly through the tall grass, trying to move quickly while taking in everything she saw. There were fox-like creatures with fuzzy antlers sunbathing on wide, flat stones and giant, croaking toads hanging from tree branches by their tongues. The walk to the city was long, but thankfully the day in this unknown place was much more agreeable than the one she had left back home. What she was doing before waited patiently in the back of her mind as she allowed a mix of excitement and anxiety to fuel the second long walk she had taken that day.

When she came upon the city, Ariella noticed something that made her stop to think twice. There was a bench there, slightly outside the limits of this glittering city. It was facing the way she had just come, and as she turned to look at the landscape behind her, she thought it was familiar. She turned back toward the city and began to walk again, this time much slower than before. She came upon the bench, sat there in the lush, light grass, and saw a piece of paper resting on its seat. She picked it up, her hands quivering. Somehow she already knew what it was. Tears splashed onto the paper as Ariella unfolded it, eager to read whatever was written there. There wasn’t much to see, but it was enough. It was more than enough. It could have been two words and she would have fallen to her knees to thank whatever god ruled over this world, because they were more merciful than any she had known back home. The letter was simple.

Ariella,

I don’t know where I’m going yet, 

but I know that when I get there,

You will find me. I will wait for You.

Love, Dad

So for the second time today, Ariella stood before a daunting mystery. But this one she faced with hope, more hope than she had felt in months. Her father was somewhere in this alien city, and finally she accepted what she had always known. She was the only person who could find him.