Not a Dream Wall

Coming up and over the shamrock-colored hill I find this iron-red sandstone object. 

There’s nothing else on any point of the horizon except me and it. 

It’s free on both sides, too.

Yet it is in my way. 

I stand quietly in front of it, a body’s length away, slightly to its left. 

It is high, about eight feet or so, and wide, about six feet or so. A filigree of lime-colored moss pats its flat face.

It seems deeply fixed in the soil. 

Maybe it’s a modern stela or monument. But there are no inscriptions or symbols. 

No, it’s just a continuous square block of crumbly granules fused by time. 

So, a wall. 

I don’t feel that I can walk around it on either side to continue my journey. I feel blocked.

Standing, I begin to feel an energy, maybe from an entity, the way you feel a presence when your eyes are closed. 

This energy pulses. 

It is from the wall. 

It feels me. 

There is something I need to do with the wall, some exchange of intention or want. 

Maybe it isn’t here to block me but to halt my motion. To make me choose something at this point in my journey.

Yes, that feels right. So I expect a signal to inform me when to change this… statis. 

I don’t know the ‘how’ of this but I believe it will be apparent to me.

There is no sound save for the pulse of the wall: rhythmic and understated, like a baby’s soft breath. 

I don’t feel anxious or tense. More… attentive. 

Words come up from inside me. You can keep this simple if you want to. 

I decide to get behind the wall by moving on the left. I pivot in that direction— then pause. 

Maybe, instead, I should find a toehold and pull myself up and over the wall’s face. Somehow that doesn’t feel more complicated than going around. 

Maybe by moving off the ground rather than staying on the ground, I will get a better view of something. Something beyond the wall. Something I need to see from high up.

I don’t feel in a hurry to decide. There seems to be a natural moment attached to this.

The wall waits for me. 

It knows.

I lift my foot….

The Keyhole

Something brushes by and briefly blocks my line of sight as I peer through the keyhole in the thick wood door. 

For just a fraction of a second my view is obscured. 

But that’s long enough to interfere with my understanding of what I was seeing.

The motion of this figure, or object, or shadow is as subtle as the ripple in a silk robe. 

It covers the empty space of the key slot only for the duration of an eyeblink.

Then it’s gone. 

I don’t feel obliged to find the key that opens the door.

I refocus and peer again, rolling my eyeball. 

There’s a suggestion of lush carpet in shades of pink, black, and white; the grain of old waxed wood, perhaps a mantel; the hint of rich, green papered walls above boiserie panels. 

A woman dressed in silk would suit this luxe place. 

Before crouching at the keyhole I did feel I would see a woman: Mother. 

But she wouldn’t suit this place. Not in any possible way.

Yet… I have the sense she was that shadow brushing past the thin slot I am peering through. And with her motion came a feeling of revelation.

Some truth, about her. 

The sensation and the movement are both gone. What remains is a visual tease about a space of elegance and class. 

Again, not Mother. 

In fact, before dying she had entered a new space in her life. Small but private, with a window that looked onto the street. 

Mother said to me, If someone drove by and looked in through the window at me, what would they see? 

She didn’t say who would they see. But her tone said that’s what she meant.

I believe she was trying to reconcile that her inner space had changed. Who she had become and what she believed herself to be versus the person who had lived long, lived big. At least in her own mind. 

Mother was a woman who never really inhabited a physical space. 

Her inner door was not flung open to me; her rooms were not entered by me. And then her space became smaller and then there was no door.

I realize this judgement is the same as if I were someone walking by and staring boldly through her windowpane.

Perhaps mother’s actual visibility and accessibility testify to a space I would not recognize at all. A greater space even. 

Greater than what’s on the other side of the door I’m kneeling in front of now. But smaller than the keyhole shaped like a round head atop an armless torso I’m peering through.

Not mother.

I don’t want to investigate beyond this circle-and-triangle aperture.

Yet I reach for the door knob.

There isn’t one.

Karin Doucette is a published writer of short fiction and memoir, and a playwright. She has ranked in international story and stage play competitions and was a Finalist in UK’s 2023 Page Turner Awards. Karin also reads for top story competitions, most recently, Scottish Arts Trust. She has travelled and/or worked on every continent and lives in Canada.