Mom said she was sorry, she didn’t want to tell me to stop since it seemed so important, but she kept finding them in her closet.
I said I’d never put them there, but she didn’t believe me.
“We can’t go there again,” Mom said, “no one ever gets to go back!” and she stomped out of the kitchen and into the rain.
Has my mom been there? Why didn’t she ever tell me? Why did you banish her too?
What did we do so wrong we can’t come back?
—Ellie
Zera’s knees feel about to shatter.
“Why are you doing this?” Zera grips an old, warped rocking chair. “You’ve blacked out the Land of Doors, haven’t you?”
YES, says the Book. ALL WHO GO THERE WILL SLEEP, UNDREAMING, UNTIL THE END.
Zera blinks hard, her head dizzy from the pressure in the air. “You can’t take away everyone’s happiness like this.”
NO? says the Book. WHY NOT? NO ONE EVER REMEMBERS US THERE. THEY FORGET AND GROW OLD AND ABANDON US.
“That’s not true,” Zera says. “Ellie remembers. There are others.”
Misu nods.
Zera pushes through the heavy air, reaching out a hand to the Book. “They tell stories of us there,” Zera says, because Ellie used to bring stacks of novels with her instead of PBJ sandwiches in her backpack. “There are people who believe. But there won’t be if we close all the doors. Stories in their world will dry up. We’ll start to forget them, too.”
WE MEAN NOTHING TO THEM.
Zera shakes her head. “That’s not true. I don’t want my best friend to disappear forever.”
Gatekeeper,
I don’t know why I bother anymore. You’re not listening. I don’t even know if you exist.
It’s been awhile, huh? Life got busy for me. High school, mostly. Mom got a better job and now we won’t have to move again. Also I met this awesome girl named LaShawna and we’ve been dating for a month. God, I’m so in love with her. She’s funny and smart and tough and kind—and she really gets me.
Sometimes she reminds me of Zera.
I asked Mom why she kept my letters.
She didn’t avoid me this time. “I had a door when I was younger,” she said, and she looked so awfully sad. “I was your age. I met the person I wanted to stay with forever.” She let out her breath in a whoosh. “But then the door just… it broke, or something. I tried dating here. Met your father, but it just wasn’t the same. Then he ran off and it was like losing it all again.”
I told LaShawna about Zera’s world. She said she didn’t want to talk about it. I think maybe she had a door, too.
I was so angry growing up, feeling trapped. You know the best thing about Zera? She got me. I could be a girl, I could be a boy, and I could be neither—because that’s how I feel a lot of the time. Shifting around between genders. I want that to be OK, but here? I don’t know.
The thing is, I don’t want to live in Zera’s world forever. I love things here, too. I want to be able to go back and forth and have friends everywhere, and date LaShawna and get my degree and just live.
This will be my last letter to you, Gatekeeper.
If there was one thing Zera and I learned, it’s that you have to build your own doors sometimes.
So I’m going to make my own. I’ll construct it out of salvaged lumber; I’ll take a metalworking class and forge my own hinges. I’ll paper it with all my letters and all my memories. I’ll set it up somewhere safe, and here’s the thing—I’ll make sure it never locks.
My door will be open for anyone who needs it: my mom, LaShawna, myself.
—Ell
The Book is silent.
“Please,” Zera says. “Remove the curse. Let us all try again.”
And she lays her hand gently on the Forgotten Book and lets the Book see all the happy memories she shared with Ellie, once, and how Ellie’s mom Loraine once came here and met Vasha, who has waited by the door since the curse fell, and Misu, who befriended the lonely girl LaShawna and longs to see her again—and so many, many others that Zera has collected, her heart overfilled with joy and loss and grief and hope.
In return, she sees through space and time, right into Ell’s world, where Ell has built a door and has her hand on the knob.
“Ell,” Zera calls.
Ell looks up, eyes wide. “Zera?”
“Yes,” Zera says, and knows her voice will sound dull behind the door. “I’m here.”
Ell grins. “I can see your reflection in the door! Is that the Book with you?”
The Book trembles. SHE REMEMBERS.
Zera nods. The air is thinning, easing in her lungs. “I told you. Not everyone forgets.”
I would like to see LaShawna again, says Misu.
VERY WELL, says the book. THE CURSE WILL BE REMOVED.
Ell turns the handle.
Bright lights beams into the Island of Stars, and Ell stands there in a doorway, arms spread wide. Zera leaps forward and hugs her best friend.
“You came back,” Zera says.
“I brought some people with me, too,” Ell says, and waves behind her, where two other women wait.
Loraine steps through the light with tears in her eyes. “I never thought I could come back…”
Misu squeaks in delight and flies to LaShawna.
Zera smiles at her friends. Things will be all right.
“We have a lot of work to do to repair this place,” Zera says. She clasps Ell’s hands. “The curse is gone, but we have to fix the doors and wake the sleepers. Are you ready?”
Ell grins and waves her mom and girlfriend to join her. “Yes. Let’s do this.”
OUR TALONS CAN CRUSH GALAXIES
BROOKE BOLANDER
Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily toward fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut book, The Only Harmless Great Thing, was published in 2018 by Tor.com.
This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.
You want that kind of horseshit, you don’t have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their names get printed ten feet high on movie marquees and subway ads, the dead convenient narrative rungs for villains to climb. Heroes get names; killers get names; victims get close-ups of their opened ribcages mid-autopsy, the bloodied stumps where their wings once attached, baffled coroners making baffled phone calls to even more baffled curators at local museums. They get dissected, they get discussed, but they don’t get names or stories the audience remembers.
So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no-one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion-brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.