Close the door

The inside of a bedroom door is a strange place to grow a second spine. Mine started with a blue pen cap. You came home from school, your backpack was still hanging from one shoulder. The smell of dust and cigarettes and heat stuck to your clothes. You closed me. The house exhaled. You pressed the cap into my skin, hard, harder, until the wood inflated. A tiny blister.

You stared at it the way people stare at gravestones; the way sailors stare at lighthouses; the way starving dogs stare through bakery windows. Then, you left. The next day, another appeared. Then another. Then another.

The wood developed a rash, a contagious disease. Little swollen islands spread across my body. Outside, reality was molting. Skin was hanging from classroom ceilings. Skin was hanging from school fences. Skin was hanging from teenage creatures. Skin was hanging from adults who knew exactly where to look and somehow missed everything. You kept bringing the pieces home. You kept stapling them to me.

The chalk came next. White veins crawling through me. You dragged them so hard the sticks snapped in your fingers. Clouds of powder. Ghost dust. Bone dust. You stood there covered in it. The chalk never lasted... A few days. A few weeks. Then, gone. The world already specialized in disappearance. People disappeared. Truth disappeared. Certainty disappeared. You weren't interested in helping. You were interested in capture.

So the blade arrived shortly after. A pencil sharpener opened like a tiny metal flower. The screw was removed with a butter knife. The blade was hidden between tissues. A new species entered the ecosystem… I remember the first cut. A thin mouth. Then another. Another. Another. A whole colony of mouths. You arms followed.

By the time you reached puberty, you were running a butcher shop. Every afternoon another carcass arrived. A laugh. A hand. A sentence. A rumor. A look. A pair of eyes lingering too long. The inventory piled up; you were very serious about inventory. I respected that. The world was behaving like a thief. Every morning it broke into your memories and rearranged the furniture. By evening you were hammering things into me before they could escape.

Once day, there was a secret. A small one. The size of two girls sitting cross-legged on a bedroom floor pretending to be witches. The kind of secret children carry in their palms like baby birds. Look. It still hasn't happened. Everybody else's body seems to have received a letter. Mine keeps checking the mailbox. You handed it over carefully. Children still believe secrets behave like pets. Stay where you leave them. Sleep where you put them. Come back when called. The secret left sometime after that. Nobody saw it go. By lunchtime it had learned how to run. By the end of the week it had teeth.

The boys arrived in pieces. Your schoolmates. The friends you should be having fun with in between classes. They had fun. An eye one day, a laugh the next. A sentence stuck to the bottom of your shoe. A rumor breeding in the dark somewhere behind you. There was always something canine about them. A pack discovering blood, quite literally. A flock discovering a field. Sharks discovering a wound they cannot even see yet. You'd walk through the school carrying a body and they'd smell it through the walls. The boys wore weather systems with sneakers. Entire climates of hunger moving through the rooms.

Somewhere between hopscotch and biology, a door opened. Nobody remembers who opened it. One minute there were two girls discussing bodies the way children discuss magic spells. The next minute the hallways were full of amateur scientists. Every one of them was fascinated. Every one of them was carrying hypotheses. Every one of them was eager to conduct research. Children are terrifying when they discover a mystery. Especially when the mystery is another child's body.

By the time you reached me, they were already nesting. One had built a nest in your shoulders. Another in your stomach. Another behind your eyes. You became public property before you became a person; like a building under construction, like a city square. The boys wandered through you with muddy boots, leaving graffiti, leaving chewing gum beneath the tables, leaving cigarette burns in the curtains, leaving themselves everywhere. Then going home clean.

You came back carrying them. You'd close me and stand there looking like somebody who had walked through a field of burrs. Covered. Every thought snagged on something. Every movement was dragging another hook. The boys had a talent for multiplication.

One became three.

Three became eight.

Eight became a species.

They circled like flies around fruit. The moon around the earth. Predictable. Carve out their laughter. Laughter is camouflage. Laughter lets predators travel in daylight. Laughter turns a knife into a joke. Laughter turns a crowd into an alibi. You carried a lot of laughter home. A line appeared and suddenly an entire school was buried beneath it.

At some point, there were enough of them buried in my skin to populate a city. And still, they kept coming. The remarkable thing is how ordinary they looked. That's what infestations do, you know? They wear normal faces. Normal names. Normal shoes. They sit in classrooms. Raise their hands. Do homework. Eat dinner. Then, they spend their afternoons breeding inside somebody else's reality. You spent years hunting the offspring, catching them one by one, pinning them into me before they could reproduce. And still, the hallway remained full. There was no way you could be a virgin.

I looked diseased. Termites would have shown more restraint. You fed me every version of yourself: the terrified one, the angry one, the numb one, the one who couldn't stop laughing, the one who couldn't stop crying, the one already halfway gone,... The cuts spread across my skin like migration routes on a map. A population was growing; a country built entirely from evidence. Your parents walked past it every day. I often wondered if they saw. For a while, I was hoping they wouldn't. Maybe they did... Adults are remarkable creatures. They can look directly at a burning building and spend twenty years debating the definition of smoke. Their footsteps carried a particular weight: storm weight that made the room shrink before the body arrived. You always knew they were coming. The house knew too. The stairs announced them.

Wood has excellent hearing. Masonry has an excellent memory. The whole structure learned the rhythm. The approach. The explosion. The aftermath. Then your forehead against me. Another line. Your environment was its own ecosystem. Family. Friends. Predators. Scavengers. Parasites. A whole food chain.

An adult who you thought could be a savior appeared briefly. One of those people who notice smoke. He saw enough. The scars. The panic. The way your eyes kept checking exits. He offered an ear to listen and a conversation with those who brought you to life. Then reality performed one of its favorite tricks. It swallowed the evidence and vomited consequences.

The staircase learned new sounds after that. Heavier sounds. Faster sounds. The sound of weather arriving indoors. The room got smaller. The walls moved closer together. The air developed teeth. You stopped bringing your arms home shortly after. Bodies adapt. Prisons create architects. The blade started learning new routes.

You returned carrying fresh cuts. Deeper ones. More careful ones. The kind made by somebody who had stopped expecting rescue, and who was terrified of being punished for their pain. The adults then brought you to another adult. Degrees on the wall. Books on the shelves. The smell of paper and certainty. You entered carrying a burning house. You left carrying a word. The word entered every room before you did. It sat at the dinner table. It slept at the foot of the bed. It waited outside classrooms. It rode home with you. You checked it in the dictionary. Then checked it again. Then stared at the ceiling for a while.

Eventually, you brought it upstairs. You carried it into the room like a dead bird. Set it down. Stared at it. The thing was ugly. Bloated. Already beginning to rot. Covered in fingerprints. Every adult who touched it had left something behind. You looked at me. You looked at the blade. You were told you were manipulative.

Outside, the adults were busy explaining you. Inside, you were busy collecting evidence. The cut started near the handle. Long. Clean. Precise. The kind of line surveyors draw through disputed territory. The kind of line archaeologists uncover with brushes. The kind of line that says somebody was here before the story changed.

The room filled with ghosts after that. Future versions of you. One hanging from the ceiling. One smoking by the window. One already on a plane. One sleeping in a train station. One standing in a foreign country trying to remember her own face. One buried beneath all the others. You kept feeding them to me… One scratch at a time.

Every haunted house gets a new ghost. A partner entered one day. He crossed the room carrying tragedies in his pockets… enough tragedies to wallpaper a cathedral. You listened, collected broken things the way oceans collect plastic. You knew what it was like to drown, and let him cling to you. You wanted to be the healer. The room changed. The bed changed. The air changed. He, too, had smelled the blood. You didn’t have a choice but to offer the last bits of your dignity, already convinced that that is your duty. I grew another forest that year, dark, dense, impossible to navigate. A forest where sunlight entered and never returned.

One day, you left.

Plane.

Ocean.

The room remained.

The house folded itself around the absence.

Dust arrived.

Time accumulates exactly like scratches. Slowly. Then all at once. Sometimes, you returned. The handle turned. The door opened. There you were. Older. Taller. Further away… You'd close me, stand there, and count. Your eyes moved across the cuts like fingers turning pages. One. Two. Three. A hundred. A thousand. Checking inventory, always inventory. You were the butcher returning to inspect the freezer... Then you'd leave again. More years. More oceans. More forgetting. One day when you came back, you looked at me, but didn't count. You always counted. This time, you didn't. You walked away.

The house swallowed you again, then spit you back out into another continent. Now you have grown. Reality is shedding skin again. You spent whole years peeling off in translucent sheets. Rooms melted. Memories changed shape. The furniture moved while your back was turned. If only you could see the guilt that you left behind.

The old thief is back, still rummaging through drawers, stealing evidence, dragging entire decades into dark alleys. And suddenly you remember me. The cheap wooden door upstairs... The one pinned full of escaped realities. The one carrying enough skeletons to qualify as a catacomb. You want me now. Funny. I spent half my life wishing you'd stop feeding me. You arrived every afternoon dragging another corpse. Another piece of the world with its throat cut open. Another certainty nailed through the chest. You buried many lives in my wood. The oceans got bigger but the cuts stayed exactly where you left them. Just like the cuts in your own skin. Too deep to soften.

The kid stayed too. She is still pressing a pen cap into wood. Still carrying school corridors home in her backpack. Still hunting reality through the underbrush with a pencil sharpener blade. You keep imagining you took her away to protect her, thinking she had left. She lives inside me. An insect trapped in amber. Perfectly preserved. Forever collecting evidence against a universe determined to tamper with the crime scene.

You're now standing on the other side of the planet wishing you had stolen the door, dragged me onto the airplane, carried the archive. The graveyard. The courthouse. The fossil bed. The taxidermy museum. The forest. The spine. You wanted proof, so you grew it. Line by line. Cut by cut. Year by year. Then you abandoned it upstairs and lost touch with reality. You doubt every single one of your memory. Without me, you don't know. Without me, you are a liar.

I don't hate you for leaving. Leaving was the smartest thing either of us ever did. I hate that after all these years you still think I was preserving the evidence for you. The evidence was preserving you. And now the wood is old. The house is old. The ghosts are old. The forests are old. The harpoons are rusting inside the whale. The cemetery is sinking into the earth. The archive is yellowing at the edges. The little kid is still standing there with a blade in her hand, waiting for the next piece of reality to die so she can bury it somewhere safe.