“I forgot how hard I tried to make this one artsy until just now”
Here’s a story that I wrote at one of the NIU teen writing camps that I got to go to. I don’t remember what the premise was for the writing exercise, but I came up with this at about the same time as I wrote “Turn and Turn,” that shitty poem from a few weeks ago. I think I wrote most of this while watching The Breakfast Club, so take that as you will.
“The Golden Gilded Glass Doorknob,” by Andy Sima (2015)
The cruelest month of April came to town without a backwards glance. She settled in, softly placing blankets and frills of wind and rain around those she embraced. The lady of April gracefully and adroitly transitioned the world into new life, giving birth to the world’s young, and making way for the new year. Gentle beams of diamond sun eased their way around trees and into the eyes of those seeing the world for the first time, and some fell as crystals to the ground, unseen but not unloved.
These lights flowed through the window panes of the home of George Franklin and brushed him gently on the face, like a forgotten lover’s tender kiss. His eyes were closed, and he was fast asleep in his favorite seat, deaf to the symphony of sun around him. Those golden doors, the windows, pale, lace, bleached, floral curtains uplifted and removed, sung the song of the sun joyously. That sun danced around the room, playing amongst the golden candlesticks and eighty-eight ivory keys that lived inside George’s parlor. Plastic-coated floral couches and chairs, from a time long ago, nestled around the sleeping George as the sun children played their games. A blank television gaped before George, unwatched for many hours. A brick fireplace squatted across from George, jealously eyeing the warmth of the sun rays around it. No coals burned within its maw.
George snorted loudly, catching some of the sun’s rays in his mouth, and his face twitched and drooped, eyes still closed. His left arm tensed momentarily, and then was still. Somewhere from down the oak-lined hall of George’s abode, an ancient grandfather clock kept time.
Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick…
George awoke suddenly in his plastic-gilded armchair. His eyes opened to the life-giving rays of the sun, and his old, rheumy eyes blinked away spontaneous tears. His voluminous stomach heaved slightly as he took a long, deep breath, and attempted to chase away his desire to continue sleeping. The whitened ring of hair around the dome he called his head swayed back and forth, as if moved by an unfelt breeze. His large and seemingly endless forehead made for the most prominent feature of his face, followed closely by a bulbous nose. George wondered if perhaps he had broken it at some point and it had never healed properly. It did not matter now.
The first thing George noticed upon awakening, besides the fact that the sun was far too bright for his liking, was that he was sweaty. He determined that, in fact, he was so sweaty that he very nearly slid off his plasticized armchair. Stumbling upward and cracking his arthritis-ridden knees, George looked around the familiar space of his lounge. He felt a sudden flash of nausea, most likely caused by dehydration, he figured, and then moved sluggishly towards his kitchen. His leather slippers glided stubbornly through the progeny of the sun and across the equally stubborn oaken planks that made up the stately floor of George Franklin’s house.
It was a slow and painful walk to the kitchen, as George was hindered by his throbbing knees. However, he made it to his kitchen in one piece, much to his satisfaction, filled a glass of water, and downed it in one motion. It did not immediately help the sweating or nausea, but as he stood in his marble-tiled kitchen and glanced around at the antique marble countertops, he felt the pain subside. He checked the wall clock for the time, and although it read 11:07, it occurred to him that the clock had stopped ticking.
“Batteries must be out again,” he muttered to himself, under his breath. He knew where to find some replacements. And, to that end, he ambled out of his kitchen and into the hallway between the galley and the lounge, a hallway that ran lengthwise down his house, effectively dividing it in two. At the end farthest from him stood a lofty, ornately-carved grandfather clock, one that George’s father had gifted to him on his wedding day. George had kept it all these years.
At the opposite end of the wall was a dense, equally ornate wooden door, inset with frosted glass windows. George glanced briefly at both clock and door before moving down the hall to the study, where he kept extra batteries. George did not particularly like using batteries, or electronic devices in general. He preferred to keep his life simple, and so his house often followed suit. The wall clocks, however, were one of the few exceptions.
George shuffled his feet around the drafty floor, doing his best not to disturb the aches deep in his joints. Upon reaching the study, he creakily moved his hand to the golden doorknob, turned, and- found it to be locked. George removed his hand and took a closer look at the doorknob. The plain, gold bulb contrasted gorgeously with the dusky oak door behind it, with an empty keyhole set just below the knob. George never locked any of the doors in his house, save the front entrance. He wasn’t even sure if he had the keys to any of the doors in his house anymore.
He grasped the doorknob again, this time turning more forcefully, but to no avail. The knob refused to budge, but when George removed his hand, he was shocked to find that the golden color of the doorknob had been removed, revealing a glass doorknob underneath. George had never seen such a doorknob anywhere in his household. He peered at his hand, and finding it to be covered in what he supposed was gold shavings, turned again to the doorknob. Placing his spectacles over his eyes, he checked both his hand and his doorknob once again. There was no denying it; he had removed some sort of golden gilding from the glass doorknob. His one primary question, however, was how it had never happened before.
George did not give himself an opportunity to ponder this, as he leaned in close to the doorknob to discover more of its secrets. His eyes were nearly at the level of the handle when he saw a glint of an orange hue, like fire, within the doorknob.
“That can’t be right,” he murmured, and looked closer at the doorknob. When he was but inches from the glass fixture, lights streamed from it, as if beamed from some unearthly source. Images flashed before George eyes, hues of orange, yellow, and red. George feared that there was some sort of fire, perhaps on the other side of the door, but as the image came into focus, he saw it was not a fire, but instead a scene of an autumn forest. Strange, he thought to himself, as he was almost positive it was still spring. Stranger then, he continued, that he was seeing these images inside a doorknob within his suburban home.
But there was no denying what he was seeing. A forest, complete with trees lit afire by time and ground coated in fallen foliage of similar color. Gusts of wind moved among the crowns and battered individual leaves to the earth, and George distinctly heard the sound of moving air. Ge was put at peace by these sights and sounds, but just for a moment, as suddenly, before his very eyes, snow began to fall. It fell in heaps and covered the land, and the wind began to speed up and produced increasingly barred trees. Within seconds, where an autumn forest stood was only a cemetery of dead forest giants and drifts of snow, laid to waste by the brutalities of time.
George quickly pulled back, away from the doorknob, and gasped for breath, astounded and terrified by what he had seen. He huffed, and decided he needed to take a seat and rest his knees. Bending over to peer at a waist-height doorknob had not been pleasant for his joints.
Over the span of the next few minutes, George retrieved a chair from his kitchen and dragged it, step by prickly step, to the glass doorknob. He sat, his head a few feet away from the doorknob, and contemplated what he should do next. He noticed that he could not shake a feeling of tightness and anxiety from his chest, as though he were waiting for something to happen. The unexpected nature of the doorknob had put him on edge.
The old man waited until he felt that he had taken a long enough rest. Then, without thinking about what he might see, George leaned forward in his chair and stared at the doorknob. He hoped beyond hope he would see nothing, but something within him told him there would be something there. George did not know what, he only knew that there would be something.
And there was. Lights again blazed from the doorknob, creating images of worlds beyond the realm of imagining. When they finally settled to one image, George tried to comprehend what he was seeing. The doorknob showed a hospital room, deadly white in its sterility, and a baby was being born. There was something wrong, however, and it took George a minute to determine what. There was no sound. Not because the doorknob could not produce sound; he was sure he had heard the wind in the autumn forest, but because no one in the scene was making any sound. The doctor, standing with a medical mask at the side of the bed, held a clipboard and spoke not a word. The nurse did not utter encouraging notes or messages. Even the mother, legs akimbo and facing away from George, did not even move her lips. And when, after another moment, the nurse retrieved the baby, the baby did not cry. The creature (for George did not want to call it a baby) looked human enough, but was surprisingly developed and, George noticed, muscular for a newborn baby.
Its icy blue gaze swept the room in an almost patronizing way, and then stopped abruptly on George. Their stares met, and George’s heart tightened. The baby knew he was there. Then, as one unit, the doctor, nurse, and mother, all turned to look at George as well. They moved towards George, stares unchanging and postures unnerving. George scrambled back as swiftly as his arthritic bones would allow him. He pressed against the wall, heart thumping in his chest to the beat of an arrhythmic drum cadence. There was a sudden knock on the study door, and the doorknob rattled. Then silence. George shuddered and gawked at the door, unsure of what he was experiencing. His rising anxiety threatened to overtake him and his legs quivered under his generous bulk. He still felt as if he were waiting for something to happen, and that premonition was joined by a new feeling; a new feeling of terrible dread. He knew he could not open the door, no matter what. Something was on the other side.
Despite his qualms and terrors, thought, George eventually took a seat back in the chair ere the doorknob. He was drawn back to the doorknob’s promises of other realms of existence. He would see what it had to offer him, grotesque as it might be. Something told him he had no choice.
Putting his eye once more to the doorknob, the scene had now changed to reflect something else entirely. It appeared to be a playground, such as one George might have played on as a child, many years ago. In fact, it looked almost familiar to him. His eyelashes jittered as he glanced around the act portrayed before him. On the playground, among jungle gyms and rope swings, were hundreds of children, all staring at George. He felt as if he had intruded, on what he was not sure. The children, then, all as one, began to raise their arms to the sky, like distorted flowers stretching to the stars. Their tiny hands wave back and forth gently, and began to elongate, elongate, elongate… until George could no longer see them. Their appendages had gone from view, though the children remained. George blinked, and then they were gone, replaced by what appeared to be a human eye, staring directly at him. George sprang back in surprise, chair crashing behind him, and he fell to the floor, oaken boards welcoming him home.
He very nearly shattered his glasses, but prevented them from falling off of his face just before hit the ground. Pushing them back up onto his nose as he righted himself on the floor, his eyes skipped around the hallway, scanning for large eyes that might be seeking him out. Seeing nothing but his empty wooden hallway, he credulously sat the chair back on its legs and slowly, ever so slowly, placed himself upon the carved seat.
His anxiety had nearly been replaced by a thumping terror in his chest, desperate to be let out in a scream or some sort of other awful expression. However, he remained calm and collected, his intrigue outweighing his fear. He could not, could not, open the door, but he was still waiting for some great revelation that he knew, knew, was fast approaching. And there was something else as well, something George could not, as yet, name. Something at the edge of his perception, perhaps. Something from behind the door.
Seated in his chair, George once again placed his eye to the doorknob and was immediately treated by a new scene. Piles of bricks, arranged professionally into the shape of buildings, stood among spiraling trees and sprawling flowers. A strange breed of college campus spread out before him, as if he were looking from the eye of God. This particular campus, however, fell somewhere within the uncanny valley of George’s mind, as there was an inherently off nature that he was slowly getting used to. George considered the options. Was it the way the bricks seemed so random, yet intentionally placed in some abominable way so as to make a dream-like reflection of a very real college campus? Was it the way the plants seemed to move and change with each new perspective so as to reveal some new facet of an object outside of our reality? Was it the way the people milling about campus all stared up at George, even as they walked, so as to meet George’s eyes for the first and last time?
None of these puzzle pieces immediately registered with George, as his main attention was drawn to the fact that the image was moving, moving fast towards a small, white chapel set in the middle of the campus of brick buildings, an inlaid jewel among chaos. As the image moved, zooming in like the scope of a camera or a sniper’s lens, the eyes of the people followed George, as if he himself were flying through the campus. He wondered what it was these people were seeing, though if it were anything like the rest of the visions, it would be mostly unfathomable.
The sight moved into the chapel and up an aisle, floored with velveteen carpeting and approached on either side by clustered church pews. The walls were lattices and trellises, growing in between slats of vines and leaves and flowers. George noticed absently that the leaves had faces and the vines seemed to be supporting the roof. The roof, too, was strange to George, as it was octagonal, like the chapel itself, and peaked in the middle, and seemed to have a large crystal hanging from the top. None of this, thought, really concerned George, as he was staring at the people about to be wed by no one in particular.
The woman wore a white wedding dress in typical American fashion, with lace and floral designs bleached by the sun. However, this woman was almost entirely bald, save for a ring of hazel hair around the top of her head. She also had a bulbous nose, large by anyone’s standards, and eyes that looked tired and sad, as well as a high, masculine forehead. Besides all this, she was incredibly heavyset, with a generous stomach that looked like the work of years of eating. The distorted woman glared directly at George, as everyone else had done previously.
The man, however, was the opposite. He, unlike the woman, had a decidedly feminine face, with a slim chin and slight jawline. He had high cheekbones and bright, shining eyes, eyes belonging to one excited by the proposition of a future with another human being. This man had a clothing hanger frame and fingers like bone. He wore his hair shoulder-length, and it was perfectly trimmed and tailored, much like his suit. What startled George the most, however, was the fact that this man was smiling, and looking not at George, but the woman across from him. No one else in the visions had not looked at George, at one point or another. He wondered if the man would turn suddenly and look out into George’s world, or if he would charge the door, but neither of these possibilities happened, as simply moments later, right before George’s very eyes, the man began to melt, like a wax candle.
It all started at the top, with smoke rising from the man’s luxurious hair, all of which quickly began to sweat and drip down the back of the man’s suit. Next came the face, falling inward like a collapsed balloon, and twisting and turning in mock agony. The smile never left his lips, and never once did his eyes meet George’s.
The melting continued quickly after that, with the man becoming simply a liquid of his former self, pooling inside of himself until all that was left was a pair of shadow shoes. And then, without any warning to George whatsoever, the chapel went up in flames. There was a bang, a crack, a poof, an explosion of some indeterminate nature, and the carpet, pews, trellises, and roof were engorged with flames, swollen by the smoke and red glow of the flames. Cinder and planks fell, and the plants wilted and died, screaming all the way. The woman’s skin began to char, but her tired eyes never left George. She became soot black, and then ash, and then nothing but wind, and George could not look away. The chapel soon followed, and George saw that the entire campus was ablaze with awful, awful flames. It was rather familiar to him, all things told.
And George felt a strong wind blow through the keyhole below the doorknob, a hot flame from another world, and the fire was out. It left nothing behind, nothing but ashes. All had been lost in mere minutes. The screams of the plants clung to George’s ears. As he was attempting to block them out, the wind blew once more and the ash formed one more shape. George knew it to be a coffin. It solidified into its black visage, and then opened, revealing a smaller coffin within. And as the smaller coffin opened, George was suddenly made sick by the anticipation of what may be in the smaller coffin. He removed his sight from the doorknob, depriving it of its reward, and gasped back into his real world.
A grisly singing rose up from somewhere in the house, an unearthly operatic overture of hellish chords and styles and voices, flinging its way into the world from somewhere, somewhere, somewhere. It took George a moment before he realized it was only in his own head, and it quieted down. He gripped the chair and his knuckles, despite his arthritis, whitened and nearly popped out of this skin. He shut his eyes, holding back tears, and leaned back until his head rested against the opposite wall. He couldn’t take it anymore. He no longer had doubts something was on the other side of the door. He no longer had doubts he could not open the door, not because he was unable but because he wouldn’t bring himself to. He no longer had doubts that the terror within him was very really. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with George Franklin. And he knew he had to look again.
There was no escaping it. Among the absolute horror gripping his chest and psyche, a calm and determined voice spoke to him. Look. Look again. Look to the doorknob. It seemed to be driving him forward, far beyond any normal rational thought. And so he obeyed.
Placing his dripping eye to the doorknob, George saw a new scene; an image of himself, staring into a glass doorknob. He had no doubts that George within was seeing another George there, too, and that George saw a further George, and so on and so forth… George blinked, and it was replaced for a split second by an enormous eye, once again. No, George realized, not an eye. A glass doorknob, floating in a never-ending expanse of blackness, like an overlooking monolith or a greater being.
The doorknob then faded into a scene of a single tree sitting atop a hill. No, George realized, not a tree, a person. The tree slowly faded into a man, rooted to the spot, legs long ago buried, hair turned green, and face frozen in torment. And then it was a close up of the man-tree’s mouth, spurting what appeared to be cockroaches and beetles, clicking in a abominable harmony, smelling of rot and decay, and crawled down and – and then there was a glass doorknob again, floating in emptiness – and was replaced by a large clock sat in a flat gray landscape, an endless reality of nothingness. It stood, arms apparently missing from its face so only numbers remained. And then those numbers began to dance and twirl and sing and – a glass doorknob – a massive ice cube, larger than any human establishment, sitting on a wooden table, being picked up by a red-gloved hand with a terribly sigh and – a glass doorknob – there was a field of orange grass, and beasts began to exit the grass, surreal, frantic things with faces on their stomachs and torment in their eyes and screams on their lips. And the grass revealed itself not to be grass, but – a glass doorknob – a flash of light, from an overhead beam, and there was a doctor leaning over George, holding a scalpel right to George’s eye in a terrible theatric show of power and destruction, which got closer and closer and – a glass doorknob – a plane, falling from the sky, shot down, suddenly twisting and turning into a bird, losing its feathers one by one as maggots crawled from its – a glass doorknob – a man, laughing absurdly and then falling down, drunk, breaking a prized family vase and photos of monster children, knocking over matches and candles almost deliberately, and dropping his cup of – a glass doorknob – a flash of images both horrific and horrendous, abysmal and appalling, creations of a fevered imagination or a tortured nightmare, fed into George’s mind at such a ferocious rate that he could not keep up with it and began to foam from his mouth. His eyes twitched and rolled back into his head, but still the images kept coming, flowing, leaping into him from the golden gilded glass doorknob, assaulting him with pictures to haunt even the hardiest of souls. And then, with as little as warning as when it had started, it was over. George stopped shaking just enough to regain his focus, and he saw that there was now nothing being shown to him. It was a flat black pane, as if a television had abruptly been shut off. And there was a slight clack of tumblers moving, as if a door had been unlocked.
George felt nothing, although he knew he had been changed. He now lacked the terror and anxiety he had felt before. He was no longer against the idea of opening the door. In fact, he even went so far as to think that he might enjoy opening the door. Without emotion, he stood up and moved the chair to his left, placing it lovingly against the wall. He gripped the glass doorknob, and turned it without thinking. It twisted easily, without a sound, and the door glided inward, silent as the grave, or silent as an empty room, or silent as a world without sound at all. George, standing before the doorway, saw now that behind it was not his study, but an empty black vastness, cold as cold could be, and breathing with the breath of something hidden within. George smiled vaguely and stepped inside.
The door shut with a definitive click behind him.
…tock, tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock.
Sunlight streamed, dancing and dreamy, into the parlor of George Franklin. The flashes of solar rays jumped from object to object, skimming through the air like hummingbirds or kites, flown by children long forgotten. Particles of dust drifted peacefully and settled around the room, intertwined with the diamond rays of the sun. Some settled on the face of the man sitting in the plastic-coated armchair. And after a few hours, the sun set on the house of George Franklin.
Was it a dream? Or was it real? Very vivid. 🙂