Wendy Elizabeth Wallace
Rules of the Door
After the thing that happened to Kevin, we make rules for The Door. We’ve decided it’s our duty to go back. Not because we want to re-enter this world, we say, but for Kevin. We must use the buddy system. We must not leave this buddy at any time, even if we see something marvelous, like a squirrel the size of a semi-truck wearing mittens or a waterfall made of molten cheese or a dining room table that compliments our wardrobe choices in a sultry whisper. Or we will go see those things, but only quickly, just a glimpse. We will go armed – we have some very sharp kitchen knives, and Chloe has a croquet mallet. We will not eat the treats that appear on the trees. Or we will avoid the ones Kevin has ever baked for us in the normal world – lime tarts, gingerbread cookies, macarons. We will not swim in the purple lake. We will not go into the cave with the welcome mat that asks us to remove our shoes before entering, even though it sounds like there is a very good band inside playing bluegrass covers of our favorite songs. We all love bluegrass covers, though none of us as much as Kevin. We will not go to the little stand with the sign that reads FREE WINGS, and we will not put on the wings and flap around, hovering first, and then testing higher and higher swoops until we’re doing magnificent dives above the trees and we can see all the way to the emerald ocean that lashes against the pearly cliffs. Or we will try the wings, because some of us still think we should search for the rest of Kevin. It has been a few days, but maybe it’s not too late? We know we shouldn’t have waited so long to try, but we’ve been afraid. A very reasonable fear. Certainly Kevin would have to agree. Probably it wasn’t the flying that caused just his legs to walk back through the door, a clean slice exposing his pinky innards and a wink of white spine. We shouldn’t have let his legs disappear the way we did – we’ve argued over this, the implications of them being discovered. This would not be good for us. We are not sure how we could explain. We keep expecting them to just turn up, the way Kevin always had. He’d begun following us at the beginning of college, loping around campus in our wake, trying to catch up, always finding us at the cafeteria or common room or library and squeezing his way in, his backpack bulging with offerings – card games with complex rules he would babble at us, cookies he’d baked in the dorm oven, books that he thought we’d like. We did like the cookies and books, but not the sad-eager way he asked whether we had. He was always listening, always remembering things we didn’t even remember about each other or ourselves – the names of all of our professors, due dates for our assignments, our mothers’ birthdays. It unsettled us. We believed it would be easier to shed Kevin when we moved off-campus for our senior year, but he’d popped up at the apartment we couldn’t quite afford, pie in one hand and fat checkbook in the other, and so we’d let him set up the tent he’d brought in the corner of the living room. His own weird little Kevin house. We could be excused, then, for not following him at first when he found The Door, the shiny handle that had suddenly appeared at the back of the hall closet. We’d had no way of knowing what fabulous things waited inside for us. And it was understandable, too, that when he’d said, that last time, Come on, guys, we had waved him off. We’d made a plan to go just us later that day, when we knew he had class. There was something exhausting about his enthusiasm, even in this most magical of places, the way he kept saying, Did you see that? And that? Isn’t that cool? It’s cool, right? Of course we saw. Of course it was cool. But we’d given him enough already, and we deserved some time beyond The Door, exploring the gift that our apartment – it was our apartment – had provided, without him tagging along. We thought Kevin would be fine on his own. But now Kevin is just legs and those legs are missing. We think about when the legs appeared, the way they only paused for a moment when we screamed, then crossed to the normal door to the balcony, opening it with a delicate kick. Kevin had always wanted us to jump together down the one story – something about a scene from The Princess Bride, maybe? – but we’d shaken our heads and he’d given up, turned and followed. But the legs – they’d made a neat little leap, clearing the railing, for a moment soaring, before they hit the ground, turned a corner and were gone. We think, too, about the last time we’d seen him whole. The look on his face as he’d reached for the handle, the hunch in his shoulders as he peered back at us, we huddled together and pretending not to see him leave. As if he was discovering, for the first time, that nothing he could offer would be enough to make him one of us.
Wendy Elizabeth Wallace (she/they) is a queer disabled writer. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and has landed in Connecticut by way of Pennsylvania, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Indiana. They are the editor-in-chief of Peatsmoke Journal and the co-manager of social media and marketing for Split Lip Magazine. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Pithead Chapel, SmokeLong Quarterly, Brevity, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Bluesky @WendyEWallace1or at www.wendywallacewriter.com.
