Home As A Door That Won't Close
The street lamps went out four hours ago and my legs ache from climbing the wall of the Howland dan Nester’s third estate house. The back door would probably be an easier entrance, but doors and me aren’t on good terms these days. Instead, I go for windows: high windows, low ones, the sort that swing out, the kind that slide up. Double pane, single, sashed, shuttered, painted, weathered, all types. Windows work. Doors, not so much.
It takes a few tries but I tumble into a dark, empty bedroom, the cool breeze on my sweaty neck. It reminds me of the house I grew up in, a house I haven’t seen in nearly ten years. A house I’d like to burn to the ground. The big merchant furnishes his rooms in lots of lucky red and expensive green, and the walls are covered in fancy paintings. I listen in the house for a few racing heartbeats before sneaking into the hall. The door sits open behind me, even after I closed it. The latch clicked, the portal silent. Now it’s still a gaping wound. Fine, whatever, doors are stubborn and don’t want to listen. I head down the hall and find the master’s office, the big merchant’s little lair, and make sure the door’s shut behind me. Except it’s not: when I look over my shoulder, I see the hallway, I see a door that was shut a second ago but sits wide open now. Bad terms, me and doors.
Doesn’t matter. Focus on the job. I rifle the desk, pulling out trinkets and shoving them into the pouch at my hip as I go. Coins and cash, a gold letter opener, silver clips, and letters. Dozens of letters. I take them all, jamming them deep into my pouch as I go, until I’ve got too much.
In the hallway, there’s a sound. I’m not sure who, but someone’s awake. The creak of feet on loose boards, someone pacing in the night. I skip my beautiful window, take the back stairs, and reach another door. It opens into the garden and I make sure to shut it behind me. But as soon as I start to cross toward the fence, I look over my shoulder, and there’s the kitchens again, and the door hanging on its pins, an ugly, vicious hole. I want to go back, slam it, nail it closed, but that won’t help. Trust me, I’ve tried. Instead, I jump the fence with my prize and slink off into the night.
***
“Are you sure these are from Maken dan Shay?” Broan the fence stares at me over his skinny eyeglasses, jowly face frowning. His shop door stands open at my back, the breeze blowing in over countless pawned items. Vases, cups, plates and dishes, statues of dubious origin, an entire wall of rusty knives and ancient swords.
“Positive. If they’re fake, come find me.” I throw Broan my friendliest smile. “You know where I am.”
He grunts and puts the letter down on his counter. “Ten silver. No more.”
“That’s Maken dan Shay’s private correspondence,” I say and reach out to take it back. “Fifty is a bargain.”
“Twenty. And I won’t do this dance all night.”
“I’ll do thirty and you’re lucky.”
Broan counts the coins and shakes my hand. The letters disappear and I walk back out onto the street, pausing on the corner to let my eyes adjust. Behind me, the door to his shop hangs open, gaping out at Amterram. The city’s a slow bustle today despite the heat, and now that I’ve got some money in my pocket it feels like the entire world’s at my disposal. Except it won’t last much longer than a few nights, and then I’ll be looking for some other nice window in the merchant quarter, one which doesn’t latch all the way.
For now, breakfast. I stick to outdoor carts. No reason to upset the restaurants. Down near the canals, where the marshy stink is overwhelming, I eat and watch the boaters push toward the big river. Doors in the boats, doors in all the houses behind me. Only place that isn’t a door is anywhere without a roof. And that’s my preference, always has been. That and a good window.
***
The money never lasts. Between food and drink and sometimes a visit to the skin houses down in the fabrication districts, my pockets grow lighter and lighter. It’s only a week before a rip in my tent springs a leak and I wake up on the damp floor. Home is the corner of an abandoned slaughter house, the walls still stinking of old blood and animal fear, but not a single door in sight, none at all. I pay to get the roof stitched and patched properly, which is how I find myself stalking through the merchant district once again.
A crowd had formed outside of Howland dan Nester’s home and there are men carrying heavy furniture and loading it onto large, padded carts. The big merchant isn’t anywhere in sight, but I recognize his desk, jammed into a corner.
“What’s going on here?” I ask a wrinkled old lady wearing a bonnet as a sunshade.
“The dan Nesters are moving out. Pity too, it was a nice house.”
“Something wrong with it now?”
“Doors are all cursed. A few of them won’t close.” She shakes her head and touches her fingers to her chest. A little warding spell. I don’t bother telling her it won’t make much of a difference. “They had the magickers from the temples and the philosophs from the academy and nothing worked. The doors just won’t close.”
“Sounds terrible.” I don’t bother telling her that it’s only a couple doors and really it’s not that big of a deal. They could hang curtains. Instead, there are other buildings to case, other merchant houses fat with coin and studded with windows. I’ll have to be more careful this time: me and doors, we just don’t mix, not even a little bit, but sometimes I can’t avoid them. It’s how we built our world. It’s how we move from what we think is outside and into what we think is inside, but people like me, the pathetic cursed souls wandering around this pathetic cursed city, we know there’s no real difference. It’s just a way to keep others out.
***
“You better not be back here.” Broan the fence slams a ledger down on his front desk and comes around brandishing an old pistol.
“I’ve got trade.” I hold up my hands, a big sack dangling from one, and back toward the door. It’s standing open and the heat from outside’s washing in through the meager tarp he hung up to act as a barrier. “It’s good this time.”
“You thought I wouldn’t figure it out?” Broan holds the pistol out, hands shaking, face red with rage. “Cursed, they’re telling me. Cursed and won’t fucking close.” He kicks an old armoire and it rattles. “I swapped in another and that didn’t help. It’s just like the dan Nester house, and the old armory before that, and a scattering of tenement buildings all across the fabrication district. Rumors always point back to a squirrelly, thieving little shit.”
I keep on backing up right through the cloth and into the light of day. “You try holding down a job when you can’t open doors,” I snap at Broan the fence. “Imagine what that’s like for a minute. There’s nothing else I can do.”
“I don’t care!” He follows, waving the gun, and kicks at me. I scramble backward. Squirrelly? Thieving? Well, I’m a thief, but I’m not a little animal. I have my dignity, cursed as it may be. “If I ever see you near here again, I swear, I’ll put a bullet in your head just to see if your death cancels out the damn magic. You hear me?”
I walk away and keep my chin up. Broan doesn’t understand. I’ve been kicked out of too many homes, tossed from too many jobs, spit on and screamed at and beaten senseless, but nothing stops the curse once I’ve touched the door. They just don’t close. Break them down, build them up, and still, nothing. Only solution is to demolish the whole structure and start anew, and even that might not work. I really can’t say.
Doors and me don’t mix.
***
Twilight in my tent. The patch holds, barely. Rain patters on the canvas and rolls down in rivers onto the concrete floor.
Broan was the last fence willing to take my trade. Which leaves me in a bad spot. The merchers are getting smarter about leaving stray coin and cash lying around, and I can’t sell their trinkets myself, not without considerable risk. If I get caught, the city watch won’t bother locking me up—they’ll drown me in the canal once they realize what my relationship with doors does to their expensive prison.
Where there’s a curse, there’s always a way to break it. But I opened that door a long time ago and I haven’t been back through it, and I swore I never would. Except I’m staring down a sharpened steel length held to my throat and there’s not much on the other end.
I agonize for days. At one point, I break into the house of a wealthy brewer, but my heart’s not in it. All I leave with are a few nice mugs and a scrape along my shin from the window frame. I don’t touch his doors.
Food doesn’t last forever. Coin never does either. I could beg in the streets, but I’d be just one of thousands, and I’m not particularly sympathetic. Please sir, I’m cursed, doesn’t really play all that well.
Which is why I end up walking out of Amterram-proper early one morning, my stomach rumbling and my head light from not having eaten for a couple days, and wander into the outlying suburbs. Each home I pass is another opportunity, but I keep going, pausing only to pick a single apple from a grove of trees. I remember coming to this exact spot when I was younger and getting shouted at by the owners. I doubt they’re still around.
Ten years since I left. Ten long, hard years for the Amterram people. Half the buildings are empty and the other half are falling apart. The fields are worked, but by strangers from the city. These used to be family farms, up until the drought bankrupted too many old hands, and now they’re owned by massive conglomerates. It’s the same all across the world, and it’s the same when I wander down a too-familiar lane in the shade of massive oaks and stop outside of a structure I swore I’d never visit again.
The sun’s dipping behind the house. I remember those shutters, that door, the porch steps, but it’s all worn and unkempt. Weeds claw at the walls. I go toward it, heart like a stinging bee, jabbing me over and over. I should turn away and go back to my tent. There’s always another mark, another way. Except the city’s on to me, and it’s either move on or eventually get caught.
The porch steps creak under my weight. It smells like mildew and old wood. This place hasn’t been occupied in years, and I don’t know what happened to my father sitting on that rocking chair, the one turned on its side, smoking a pipe and telling the same old stories, or to my mother, laughing from the kitchen and calling out my name when it was time for evening meal.
I lay my hand on the knob. I can hear my parents begging me not to leave. Don’t you dare walk out that door. Don’t you dare close it behind you. I can hear my mother’s sobs as I turned my back on her and said I’d find my own way from here. I feel my father’s fist, his belt, the way he loomed. I turn the knob and step inside, and the memories hit me harder than I expected. This house used to be immaculate, it used to be home. Now it’s crumbling to dust and black mold is growing in dotted whirls on the walls, and I don’t know why I came out here. My parents died six years ago. I’m all that’s left.
There’s a groan from the attic. The building creaks and moans under a slight wind. There are a dozen, a hundred, a thousand doors still open back in Amterran, doors that won’t ever close. Too many to count, and it’s a long walk back to my tent, and even if this place is a wreck, at least it’s got four walls. I find the cleanest room, what was once the parlor, and I curl up in a corner as night comes down hard. There’s always a way to break a curse. Memory’s like all those doors that won’t close.
I’m thinking about audience today. About who I’m writing for and why I’m writing for them. There’s this idea floating around in the author world that writing to market is sometimes bad—but that’s another way of saying writing to an audience. Everyone’s writing for someone, sometimes there are a lot of someones and sometimes it’s only one or two, but there’s no reason to make a story if it’ll never be read. So: why not think about who’s going to do the reading?
Thinking about audience matters. What I’d write for “fans of young adult fiction” would be very different from “fans of adult romance.” Genre conventions matter too. Knowing how they work, knowing when to follow them and when to break them. Genre is just another constraint, and good stories can come out of constraints. We’re in an age that’s starting to really get it. Science fiction and fantasy are mainstream, and that’s a good thing. But it also means the audiences are bigger, and more demanding.
How much does audience matter? There needs to be a balance. When I sit down to write a romance novel, the shape of that book is influenced by the people that will read it. Same goes for these stories. That doesn’t mean those books and these shorts are somehow less because I have an audience in mind—only that I want to make something that my readers will actually enjoy. Whether I’m successful in that or not—who knows.
Maybe I’m biased. I make my living writing commercial, mainstream romance fiction, and I think my books are pretty good. I don’t think writing to market is inherently bad, and it doesn’t automatically result in bad writing.
If you read this far: thanks for being my audience. Please, click the heart button so I know these words are reaching actual wet human brain tissue instead of juddering around in the void.