You Do Not Need to Open the Door
You do not need to open the door.
It calls to everyone. You’re nothing special. They pop up frequently, these things. They’re like pitcher plants: inviting, but once inside, you’ll have a hard time getting home. You may not want to go home—after all, unlike a pitcher plant they won’t devour you, simply transport you to another realm—but the choice won’t be yours. You can’t trust them. Once you’re past the threshold, there’s no telling what you’ll find, and there’s no telling what’ll happen if you find another door.
It might take you home. It might take you somewhere else.
This one’s blue. Someone has painted upon it a scene—they weren’t talented, but the art’s intricate. There’s a mountain, complete with a palace perched atop its peak. It’s covered in snow and narrative. A troll menaces from a cave—an adventurer hangs onto a cliff by a single ice pick—a wizard casts a flurrying, blizzarding spell. The palace is nondescript and white, with a nondescript princess waving from its highest window.
You cannot tell if it is day or night in the painting, as the moon and sun are both present. The sky is dotted with stars and brooming witches, both laden with cats. Below, in the valley, there are enticing villages, dotted with gardens full of fruit and hearths warm with fire. The paint is cheap, the style simple, and yet you swear you can smell the baking of bread from someone else’s chimney. You can taste the crunch of a fresh apple, still warm from the sun.
You do not need to open the door.
The next door is also wooden. It has not been painted, or even treated properly. It appears to be made of cedar. It smells like cedar, like the forgotten corners of a closet you haven’t seen in years. On the frame, someone has notched markings: perhaps keeping count of something unknown, but given the varied heights it seems more likely that a child used this frame to record their growth over the years.
There’s light coming out from underneath it. Perhaps the faint echo of music, though you can’t be sure. The world beyond must be populated: there are shadows casting through the light, moving with the aimless sway of what could—perhaps—be a party.
You have been here a long time. It’s not home, but it has been good to you. You do not need to open the door.
The third door is cold to the touch. So much time has passed since you felt anything other than heat that you press your hands against it. It’s the color of silver. You almost missed it against the firelight, which reflects so perfectly in the metal’s polish that the flames camouflaged it from view.
You don’t know how the door could possibly be cold. The heat is sweltering. The light is burning. The other side must be cooler—colder—and you imagine lemonade, oceanfront, even snow.
You do not need to open the door.
You cannot see the fourth. You haven’t seen anything in quite some time. Color is a memory, sung in associations from the darkness. There is yellow, the color of fruit that hangs in unseeable trees, of campfires which emit no light but still warm you, of a long-lost sun. There is blue, the color of what you hope is water, found rushing in invisible brooks. There is red, the color of the things which move unseen but not unheard. And black, the color you imagine the darkness to be, the color of the chill which dug into your bones years ago and lives there.
This door feels green.
What number is it, now? It feels like fresh wood, like living wood, wood still wet with sap. When you press your face against it you can feel the lightest breeze slipping between the cracks, a smell like summer and fresh-cut grass, like quenched thirst and the absence of hunger. If you look—if you peer, if you strain your eyes—you can see a sliver of light. It’s faint. Perhaps it’s only your imagination.
You do not need to open the door.
***
The sixth comes eventually. Of all of them, this is the first that’s made you hesitate. You remember the flames and the darkness—in contrast, the loneliness of this world is nothing. Here there’s water and food and light. Here you have no company, no other people, not even other animals, but you are safe.
This is your front door.
You have long since lost your keys, but you know it’s unlocked. Decades have passed. Maybe centuries. It is remarkable how the paint’s unchanged, how the mat’s as you left it. You place your hands against its frame and imagine the home beyond. The place you left. The people you left. Memories you’ve locked away come back to you: the way the light comes through your windows, the smell of your kitchen, how it feels to lie in your bed.
Maybe everything you’ve lost is a decision away—you just have to reach out and grasp it. This door may be the one to take you home.
But it might take you somewhere else.
Orion’s Belt has the honor and pleasure of presenting “You Do Not Need to Open the Door,” a poetic, contemplative piece from the talented and ultra-insightful Scottish writer Alex Penland.
Alex Penland was a museum kid: a childhood of running rampant through the Smithsonian kicked off a lifelong inspiration for science fiction and science-inspired fantasy. Growing up underwater didn’t help—Alex has been a certified diver since the age of twelve. They have worked in the field with NASA scientists, linguists, and acclaimed photographers.
They currently live in Scotland while studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh (and hold an MSc from the same, with Distinction), but prior adventures include founding a writing organization in Iowa, freelance editing, and various volunteer enterprises in the literary world. Their work has been internationally published in The Midwest Review, Story Cities, and the Strange Lands Short Stories anthology by Flame Tree Press. More of their work can be found on their website, www.AlexPenland.com, and on Twitter and Instagram @AlexPenname.