The knife swept through my soft flesh and pulled me open. I was young. I was hurting on the inside and now I was bleeding out. I watched the red ruin my old clothes and stayed as still as a dying girl could. I was alone, and then, I was dead.
My mind flashed from my mundane life for it was nothing out of the ordinary, what happened to me. I was dead. But I was more alive than I had ever been. I opened the next door, going backward. I had to relive my time on Earth before I was allowed to enter the next life.
I opened the door to the morning before death had caught me. I was inside the girl’s home and I was preparing to escape.
“Elizabeth, where are you going?” Charity whispered to me.
“I have to leave now. I have no other choice. They’ll be here by noon,” I told her hurriedly as I snuck from the back of the group. I knew getting ready for breakfast would allow me enough time to sneak out before anyone took notice.
“Let me come with you,” Charity insisted as she followed me back into the bedroom where thirty of the girls slept.
“No. They aren’t coming for you. That would be stupid.” I grabbed my spare clothes and stuffed them into my satchel along with my few possessions. I swung the satchel over my shoulder and looked around as I crept towards the door leading back into the hallway.
“I’m not leaving you, Lizzy. Not now, and not ever,” Charity responded sternly. I looked over at my best friend and thought about all we had been through together.
“If you come with me, they will take you too.” We stood in the doorway facing each other.
“I know,” she took my hand in hers. “So we won’t let them find us.”
The shimmering golden door closed and I was back in the space of bright white light. Sighing, I realized the memories were going out of order. Not backward, not forwards, but in a messy sort of way. I proceeded to the next door and hoped the next memory would be short.
“Please! Don’t hurt her!” I yelled hoarsely as I fought against the cloaked individual holding me down.
“Quiet!” The individual, a man, shouted.
“It’s going to be okay, Lizzy.” A gunshot rang out as Charity’s body fell to the ground.
“NO!” I screamed.
The memory was short. The door closed once more. I was the only one supposed to die, she wasn’t supposed to die. But I couldn’t cry in this existence. A memory was merely a memory and I, a rather uninvolved soul. Taking a deep breath I prepared myself for the next door. I turned the handle and opened the door as the next memory unfolded.
“She needs to be removed immediately,” the doctor said sternly, speaking to my parents.
“What? Why?” I sat trembling, looking to my parents for reassurance. Anything to let me know that it was going to be okay. I never saw them or my two sisters again. I was placed in the girl’s home for those like me and for normal orphans like Charity.
After I was moved to the girl’s home, the doctor came to see me.
“When can I see my family again?” I asked him when he arrived.
“You are infected. You will not re-enter society again,” he said with a tinge of disgust.
It took me a long time to understand why I was different. I had a rare ‘disease’ as they called it. It wasn’t contagious or genetic or anything like that. It was simply at random and it caused those of us to be placed away from the normal world.
I realized, with a start, that I was zoning off in front of the next closed door. I reached for its handle but it was locked. I took a closer look around me, shading my eyes with my hand to keep out the bright white light, and realized I was not alone. Who’s memories had I been looking at?
Viewing my surroundings, I gasped aloud. “Who- who are you?” I stuttered into the vast white world. In the distance I could see shadows moving in all directions. Golden doors appeared out of thin air all over the glowing, bright world. A world made up of pure light. “Hello?” I asked aimlessly. I stumbled forward in the backwash of zero gravity.
“You’ll never fit in! Never!” I heard the angry voice echo as the viewer of that memory shut the door.
“Hello?” I asked once more. The viewer of the closest door turned towards me in a daze.
“Hello?” I heard in response. I walked towards the viewer and the brightness surrounding me dimmed. The viewer was a flickering entity the shape of a person.
“Where are we?” I asked. It came towards me and stopped as it looked around itself in awe.
“I don’t know,” its feminine voice whispered back. I thought about what I knew, what I recalled.
“I’m Elizabeth. My name on Earth was Elizabeth. I died,” I said slowly.
“They called me Edith,” she responded. “Are we in Heaven?”
“I don’t know. I think we’re in the space between.”
“Between death and dying?”
“No,” I started. “Between Earth and our next destination.”
“So is this where we get judged?” She asked me.
“I don’t know. I only know as much as you do,” I responded with a tinge of sadness.
Edith stared at me for a long time and then turned slightly to her left. Suddenly, another golden door appeared and she walked towards it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going through my memories,” she said as she gazed at me with concern.
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we are here to do.”
I panicked inside as I took in the rest of the void we were in. The entities were entering and exiting the golden doors, over and over again.
“But what’s the point?” I asked loudly.
She stared at me with that same sense of concern but didn’t respond.
“My next door was locked,” I admitted.
Edith’s concern grew until the entity of Edith fainted.
“Edith!” I yelled. She vanished and I was left alone, standing in front of her golden door. I felt the urge to open the door and walk through it, but I didn’t want to. I was petrified.
“Edith, please come back. Edith,” I whispered. I sank to my knees. I wanted to get out of this place. I wanted to get out more than anything. I felt like the endless void was caving in on me. The doors were not good. I knew that now. The doors only reminded me of the pain people had caused me on Earth. But what other choice did I have? I slowly stood up to reach for the door and I was launched into the next memory with a flash of lighting.
I was standing inside a funeral parlor with an open casket in front of me. I walked towards the body and peered down at the face. A sob escaped me and my entire body shook.
“Luis. Oh, Luis. No,” I mumbled. My dear husband of almost fifty years lay still in his dark blue coffin. I pulled out my handkerchief and cried into its soft floral fabric. “Please, Luis. What am I to do?”
“Edith, dear. Please come outside with me and take a breath of fresh air,” the mortician said. I followed him up the steps and as he opened the door, I was back in front of the golden door once more.
I stared indifferently ahead but my hand wavered as it reached for the door. Using my other hand, I pushed at my elbow to straighten it out so that I could enter the next memory, but my arm refused.
“What’s the point!?” I yelled into the bright void.
“Hello?” A voice whispered. I turned and noticed an entity made of the same bright white light standing near me.
“Hello,” I responded.
“My name’s Jamil. Who are you?” He said.
“My name is–” I started hesitantly. What was my name? “I’m Edith,” I decided, although it didn’t feel quite right.
“I’ve never talked to anyone else here,” Jamil told me. I thought about it and couldn’t remember if I had ever talked to anyone either. “How many memories do you have left?”
“There’s a way to know how many memories are remaining?”
“Yes. You just think of the black door and it will show you. What order did you go in? I mixed up my memories so I would get bad ones surrounded by good ones,” Jamil said happily.
“I’ve only ever had bad memories,” I confessed. Jamil’s smile left his face. I thought of the black door. I didn’t know exactly what to think of but I imagined the golden door before me turning to a shiny jet black. I opened my eyes to the black door.
“Now you just open the door and step inside! It will give you all of your information about your life on Earth!” Jamil, reclaiming his smile, said excitedly.
I took a step closer to the door and reached out my arm. My fingertips brushed the doorknob and I started listing off names.
“Edith, Elizabeth, Kasey, Grant, Hudson, Maverick, Maisy, Lola, Natalie, Brandon, Jason, Kaitlyn…” I kept listing hundreds of thousands of names as a few of their memories flashed before my eyes. I was shaking and sputtering and finally I took my fingertips off the doorknob and fell over.
“I have never seen anything like that happen before,” Jamil said. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think conjuring your black door would do this.” He came towards me to try and help but as he got closer, his entity faded away and Jamil was gone.
I held my head in my hands and tried to catch my breath. Was I absorbing all of these people? Was I living through their bad memories? Who or what was I? I never wanted to touch the black door again. I stayed confined to a fetal position for a long time. Finally, after I regained some courage, I sat up. I looked around myself at the bright white void with the sprinkling of golden doors and the entities passing through them. Then I turned and faced the black door. What was behind it? If what Jamil said was true, I would finally come to understand who I was. All I had to do was open the door. The worst that could happen is death, and I was already dead; so what did I have to be afraid of?
Standing up, I launched my arm forward, grabbed the doorknob, and twisted it open. I was propelled into the void of the black door.
What does this short story symbolize? How can we draw meaning from the title? What do the doors symbolize and what could the black door really be? Could this story be of a similar nature to one’s own mind and memories?
EMILY DICKINSON 