30 Apr Shenandoah

“There must be a God.”

I have never been a religious man, yet this, I found scrawled on the top line, several pages in my legal pad. It just appeared – following nine blank pages. The broken parable is in my handwriting, but to be honest, I don’t recall writing it. I don’t remember a lot from that time. But what I do recollect, I can’t bear what happened.

This legal pad that I am holding has been exposed to so much energy, fear, and gut-wrenching loathing, that it carries a vibration- an intelligence of its own. Unlike the jaundiced-looking traditional legal pad, these pages illuminate brighter, with a spectral glow. And the ink that I wrote this small argument in seems otherworldly in a shade of red, purple-ish- neon black. As impossible as it may sound, neon black is the best description I can give. I can’t identify its color like it doesn’t belong in our spectrum. Or is it not supposed to be seen at all?

I hope writing this will not only validate my sanity but help me cope with a reality that tugs at the back of my mind, like a flirtation with a filthy secret that occurred in a past life, or perhaps a drunken stupor. I can’t tell anyone else about this; they’ll throw me in an asylum. Or I’d be subject to some secret society organization, and they’ll strip me of my mind anyhow. Notwithstanding, I have nobody that will believe me even if I did tell them. But I assure you. It’s true.

There’s no place a writer could ask for that’s better for him than a place of solitude where he can carve and polish his ideas. Since college, I have aspired to have a cabin to myself. During all the rapid nights that devoured days, restricting deadlines and due dates, the midnight oil that kept me stimulated was the prospect of one day retreating to my solace. A decade later, I was fortunate enough to sign a contract with a small publishing firm, which fertilized that dream into a blooming reality.

Soon after, I began following an auction of foreclosed government properties. The stipulations are that all dwellings are sold as-is, without an inspection.

The specifications are a risky gamble for most. Fortunately, my father had been flipping houses since he was able to work and handed me the skills honed by only a lifetime of experience. I worked under him extensively throughout college for just over six years. Though grueling and testing, those days later rewarded me as an official Craftsman.

I bid on a few and lost after I clicked on a thumbnail of a newly listed column and saw my love at first sight. A remote cabin in the arboreal paradise of Hardy, Virginia. A beautiful 1.5-acre parcel located on Shenandoah mountain.

The picture of it looked like a still life that Norman Rockwell would have painted to frame the image of early twentieth-century American mountain life. Quaint, welcoming, and ambiguously haunted by the fades of time. Thanks to the 3-D walkthrough, I could see every room was reminiscent of that same design.

So, I placed a bid and, like a trophy handed to me by the gods of real estate- Presto. I was a new owner of this little hillside hut. I called the water authority, electric and gas companies, and a WI-FI provider, having everything turned on immediately to get to work as soon as I got there. I waited until the day after Father’s Day to lumber all my tools into a trailer, hitched it to my Jeep Wrangler, and headed out to the home away from residence.

After six hours of driving, I parked my tires and rested the exhausted engine. My joints cracked as I stepped out of my seat. I stretched my muscles for the first time since a quick stop three hours ago. I unpacked the cooler of minimal necessities I brought to prepare a quick meal of hamburgers, a can of baked beans, and a whole jar of pickled beets.

By ten at night, I sat on the back porch in a rickety rocking chair that was left behind and smoked a joint- for digestion, of course. I took a long drag and exhaled with a cough that spun into thin air around me. The peak of Shenandoah’s height was about 100 miles away, but between its mammoth proportion and my elevation, that hundred miles looked relative to a stone’s throw.

I gazed into the star-pocked sky, the reefers effect beginning to tug at my face, leaving me feeling meager. Cozy in the success of being in that moment accompanied by the faint stress of usual paranoia. The stars weren’t just stars but a galaxy that I’d never before seen. My zone sharpened on the sounds of the late evening- the hypnotic vamping of crickets, frogs, and locusts, accompanied by the tide, licking the stony bank some fifty yards in front of me. The moon was massive that night, giving an unusual radiance glinting off the rippling water that triggered a gratuitous thought that made me smile. “Holy shit. How in the hell did I do this?”

Abruptly, the silence was torn by the static of burning air. Directly in front of me, between the Shenandoah peak and the cliff, a giant flaming green ball leading a glowing amber tail that trailed off to smoke came hurtling downward and vanished just as quickly as it appeared. I shifted my weight to the edge of my seat, but not frightened in the least, I took one more drag off my joint and laid it to die before I retrieved my phone from inside the cabin.

Upon my way in, I saw that the storm door had been torn away from the hinges. A small recollection zipped through my mind, just as fast and explosive as the car-sized fireball that fell from space in the backyard: There was a storm door here.

Or was there? (Our brains and eyes aren’t 100% reliable. After all, the messages between the mind and optical lens are algorithms, and voids often are filled by a stationary memory).

According to a star watch website, a meteor made up of nickel and iron emits a green glow at accelerated speeds. I dismissed it as such and proceeded to grab my phone and key punched in the search bar: “flaming meteor in the sky,” followed by the new zip code. Sure enough, it was tracked and arrived right on time.

A shower dissolved the day into another empty square on the calendar after the drain swallowed three hundred and fifty-six miles of driving stressors and a layer of dead skin. Feeling reborn, I slid on my robe and jogged outside into the superb night air to retrieve a small office radio and a handle of Four Roses whiskey that drove shotgun. I purchased a little reward on my way here after my first driven mile.

The radio dial in the mountains of Virginia is a placid frequency, mostly fuzzy bluegrass, top forty country, and Baptist talk radio. Finally, I tuned in a jazz channel and managed to reduce the background static to a distant hiss.

I poured a small glass of whiskey followed by a tall glass of water and relaxed on the sofa adjacent to a window facing a line of massive blue spruce pines, closed my eyes, and drifted to sleep.

I awoke to a chorus of singing birds sounding in a stream of light from the open window. The blinds filtered the sun into muted lines across the floor of my new living room. Fresh lilac and pine mixed with last night’s dew burning off at a perfect seventy-three degrees infused the air in the cabin with the sweet smell of summer.

I arranged myself by brushing my teeth before cooking a few eggs with a French press of Colombia Luminosa, my absolute favorite light roast coffee. The intoxication of my new surroundings in a fresh light was kicking in.

I ate standing at the counter, gazing out of the west-facing kitchen window above the sink. The sunlit scape had a vibrant orange glow reflected by a rippling tide chasing the opposite horizon. A row of birch trees stood as a tall silvery fence behind the sequined water; their leaves flickered as newly minted pennies hung to spin in the breeze.

The cabin was reasonably furnished. The kitchen included a small table with two chairs. An antique refrigerator, rounded with a substantial chrome grip, resembled a door handle from a ‘57 Belair. The stove oven was the same, designated with the bold, chrome, cursive GE logo.

The bedroom was vacant, save for a few dangling hangers in the closet. Included in the living room was a decent sofa behind an oak coffee table that was facing off with a large picture window — tucked between the window’s wall and a small end table, an oversized reading chair. Taking center stage on the South side wall was a little potbelly stove.

And the office! The office was the perfect work area — gloss-finished mahogany walls lined with large bookshelves built into them, dense and plush in the expanse of a white carpet. The desk was facing a large picture window overlooking a large ravine in the mountainside.

After my relaxing start, I grabbed my Bluetooth speaker in the first box I brought in the previous night. I turned on my morning playlist (typically my morning run playlist), and after my coffee and a series of morning stretches (and three cigarettes), I dove into work.

The trailer’s door lazily drew open after unlatching the lock, and I brought in a stack of boxes.

With David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” filling the cabin, I began organizing the kitchen cabinets, emptying and breaking down one box at a time. The next was full of cleaning supplies, flashlights, rags, and other household odds and ends. As a just in case, I set the light on the kitchen table, organized the cleaners beneath the sink, lined the drawers with contact paper, and then proceeded onto another box.

The space between the stove and the wall caught my eye. The paint in one large rectangle looked rougher than the rest of the walls. Curious, I knocked on it. Hollow landings of my rapping knuckles resounded as wood rather than plaster. I traced the perimeter with my hand. Midway down, I noticed a small circular indent clogged with plaster or a thick plug of paint.

It became evident that this was a door. There weren’t any frame moldings, and it was painted over and no hinges that I could see, but indeed a door (or a barricade made from a door?). I started thinking about the deed, trying to remember if there was another room or a basement. I unpacked the rest of what I had inside and retrieved the box with my files for the office. I dug out the deed and scanned it over. All rooms accounted for, including a cellar and a Bilco. With that said, the door is an entry to a basement, although the sketching showed it as a crawlspace.

I went outside and looked around the cabin’s perimeter for the entrance. I all but gave up when I saw it — a small hill on a 45-degree angle running from the rear of the cabin. The shape of a standard Bilco, covered with grass and weeds and hardly noticeable until a kick to it, confirmed that it was far too solid to be organic.

I ripped away a handful of the sod up and threw it aside. What I unearthed was a small square of a sizable rusty door.

I then began thinking. Nothing here is using natural gas, so there wouldn’t be gas lines, but who the hell buries their fuse box and water heater, for that matter?

My confusion grew; the more I considered this inconvenience. I mean, I have to open the kitchen wall and unearth the Bilco to get into the basement? Excuse my language, but this is fucking nuts. I contemplated driving into town and buying a shovel, then decided to first look for another fuse box that might be mounted somewhere else if the previous owner was that concerned with closing off the basement.

I entered back inside as “Rave On,” a Buddy Holly song covered by M. Ward, was sinking into silence while I looked through each closet and corner of the cabin for the main circuit breaker, finding none.

I stepped back into the kitchen and pressed my ear against the door listening for anything unusual- nothing.

I toyed with thoughts during the rest of unpacking. I gave myself a break, brewed another twenty ounces of coffee, and let the considerations roll around like loose marbles in the back of my mind while further exploring and placing decor. By late morning, after over caffeinating myself, I found myself grabbing a putty knife, chisel, and hammer from the toolbox.

At first, I thought this would be exciting, unearthing a new room. The more I exposed it. The more my apprehension grew as the door became further visible—the wood beneath the paint, dark and dense. Before I knew it, I had the perimeter loosened. I stepped back to check out my progress and grabbed a glass of water. Immediately I questioned my doing this. It was a beautiful wall, now ruined beyond the point of return.

Be it as it may, the chiseling was done. I stuck a screwdriver into the hole where the doorknob should have been, finding it impenetrable like stabbing a stone. I pried the perimeter of the doorway from all angles. I wedged a crowbar between the door and the wall, forced with all my weight without progress.

I remained baffled and grateful at the same time. The whole idea of this being concealed with this much effort most likely means, “Don’t investigate this, idiot!” I made a mess of the corner that sank my heart, albeit the small fulfillment of at least trying.

Frank Sinatra began demanding someone to fly him to the moon through Bluetooth, which lifted the mood and pointed out the reality of how unnerved I was. I decided to distance myself from that whole problem and ventured over to unpack the bedroom after sweeping up the pile of chipped paint.

While unpacking boxes in the bedroom, I found an old Grateful Dead tapestry that I swapped a hippie a poncho for at a music festival 20 years ago. It’s a large 3’x 8’ tapestry with calm neutral colors that I figured would be perfect for hanging over the eyesore that I created. I finished hanging a few things in the closet, grabbed the tapestry, brought it to the kitchen when I turned the corner and stood in the doorway, ossified with fear. The wall entrance was wide open — the door flat against the inside wall.

I felt smaller and more helpless than ever as I surveyed the space around me, listening for anything that could be in the room or within the dark void beyond the hollowed frame. I draped the tapestry over the kitchen tables’ chair and grabbed the flashlight. Deliberately, I moved towards the opening, beaming the light along the interior wall.

Descending in front of me was a dust-covered staircase at the bottom of the stairs, a hanging light bulb with a pull chain. The air was dusty and dormant. After a pause, I supposed the door reasonably popped open. After all, I was banging and wrenching on it with a crowbar; it probably just came free.

“Well, Time to check out the fuse box and water heater,” I said out loud, half expecting to hear a rebuttal.

I declined down the wooden steps with trepidation.

At the bottom of the staircase, I pulled on the bulb’s chain that had a clunky click before a dim yellow light shined from the lamp. The basement is enormous. It has vastly sprawled beyond the size of the cabin. The flashlight’s beam didn’t even reach the furthest wall.

Vacant aside from a water heater about ten feet from the staircase to the left. On the opposite wall, the fuse box was mounted. The aluminum shield opened with a bit of effort, and the fuses I was expecting were breakers. Odd, I thought. Usually, there would be a fuse box in an old home, which meant that the electricity must have been updated recently. All the breakers were in the off position.

I have my laptop charging, a Wi-Fi speaker playing, and the light at the bottom of the stairs is on. How is all this power working with every breaker in the off position? The inside panel was covered in a thick coat of dust and dirt, although I could see something written beneath it.

I cleaned away the debris and uncovered a label that was written in strange symbols that I had never seen before. The best way to describe it is Egyptian hieroglyphics merged with geometric shapes. A better way to put it would be timeless. It was as ancient as hieroglyphics, also more modern than anything I’ve ever seen. As if written by someone, or something advanced, yet covered with what had to be at least ten? Maybe twenty years of dust.

At that moment, I felt like an intruder. I kept recalling myself with a fear-staked mantra: “This is just a basement, and nobody’s here.” I repeated it to myself countless times, keeping unsure in my gut. I flicked the breaker switches on; they slammed back into the off position. I tried again with the same result, then again. On the fourth try, they stayed on, accompanied by a loud electrical HUM. A light caught my attention from around a corner to my right that I had no idea was there.

I peeked around the corner to find a shallow, warmly lit mudroom — a bench wrapped in a flannel blanket along a maroon wall. Next to the seat on the floor was a wooded pop-up shoe rack absent of shoes. Immediately across from that setup was a storm door that I vaguely remember upstairs. The storm door that filled my justified void, upstairs! My childhood home? Perhaps? I felt the nostalgia fill my hand with a literal tingle when I grabbed the handle. Behind the door was a dank, long hall. The walls are made of irregular stone. Ancient. Uninviting.

I closed the door and turned toward the entrance as the shoe rack caught my eye. Filling the shoe rack were rows of neatly placed shoes. Shoes that I have known throughout my life. I wore the old work boots on jobs with my father on the top tier. Next to them, my slippers from a few years ago. Middle of the second tier was my Michael Jordan air-pump high-tops from childhood beside my penny loafers from catholic school.

At that moment, I decided, “Fuck this, I’m out of here. “

I turned back around the corner that I came from, only to find that it had become a long dark hallway. The dim light at the bottom of the stairs, now mocking me, was small in the distance. I returned to the breaker box and powered everything down.

The second I turned it off, a cacophony of laughter erupted from the mudroom that I had just left. Every hair on my body stood on end, and I trembled as I flipped the switches back on, and the laughing halted just as abruptly as it started. I stood frozen while thoughts surged through my skull. I swallowed hard and tremulously called out, “Hello? Who’s there?!”

Again, I was a mix of thankful and terrified to hear no response. I ran towards the stairs, but the distance to the light never shortened. Running and running with the faint bulb hanging picturesquely in front of me. I felt like I was running for a solid ten minutes and began to break a sweat. My breaths were becoming shorter. The light still lengths ahead. My muscles began to burn as I ran faster when my shin smashed into something hard, pitching me to the ground.

Rubbing the throbbing nerve to ease, I looked up to the dark corridor and saw that the kitchen table from upstairs was right in my path. The chair slightly pulled out with the tapestry slung across the back just as I left it. The flashlight that I was holding now out of my hand and returned on the table, unmoved.

The surrealism that I had become a member of was too magnificent for my mind to manage. I was sure that I had lost my mind entirely.

The pain grew sharper as I brought myself back to my feet. I turned around and felt another swat of confusion slap me in the face when I noticed that I had only moved about four steps away from where I started after all that running.

I wanted to break down into tears as my frustration grew at my defeat. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “What the fuck is this place!”

My next thought, find the Bilco. There is an exit somewhere leading outside, even if I have to dig with bare hands.

I took the flashlight off the table and proceeded back into the mudroom almost blankly. Just as cozy and familiar as ever, I loathed it. I clicked on the flashlight. The corridor lit up without an end in sight.

Headstrong on getting the hell out of the basement, I traversed along the tiled floor about thirty yards when I approached a door on my right. A tremendous need for the comfort of normality overcame me. All I wanted was to be somewhere I knew, and a cigarette to calm my nerves would nail that normalcy home. I rattled the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. I punched the door with the meaty side of my fist and shouted at it. “Open!”

The door opened. It unlatched and creaked ajar- natural light spilled into the hall.

Beyond the threshold was a very well-lit living space — a huge picture window on the back wall with a beautiful view overlooking a modern city. The room, painted in lively tones, the wall around the window was burnt sienna, accenting the pastel green wall to its right, across from a white wall displaying framed black and white nature prints. In front of the window was a coffee table with cactus plants in a white ceramic planter.

The air was clean and purified with a hint of cleaning solution- pine sol or wood soap. I stepped further in when a woman dressed in nurse scrubs crossed my sight from a room on my right. She was a slim, young brunette carrying a bottle of water. She walked vigorously, like a woman that had just cleaned an entire house and had other obligations on her mind.

The nurse immediately reminded me of someone — a hostess at a small diner along my way up to this cabin. Her name was Rachel. I remember this because she looked like every Rachel I’ve ever known. Long dark hair and soft, caring eyes hid a flame behind them. A tiny nose stud accenting the top of the nostril just at the base of a perfect bridge. Her beauty was so radiant that it was intimidating beneath a veil of calm and collective welcoming.

I followed her to the next room; she was leaning over a hospital bed either, tucking someone in or making it?

That familiar perfect shape is just visible enough under loosely fitted scrubs, like a trophy catch hidden beneath an expanse of waves that you only catch a glimpse of before disappearing into the depths, never seen again.

She spoke with a flinty voice that was almost too predictable to take seriously.

“Okay, Mr. Ziegler. Here is your water. I cleaned everything and emptied the garbage disposal. I’ll be here to check up on you later tonight. Is there anything I can get you before I leave?”

I could hear the faint humming of medical equipment over a heavy wheeze. A raspy voice replied something too low to make out what the patient had said. At the same time, I questioned myself if I heard that correctly. Ziegler? My name is Ziegler. The nurse stepped aside, giving me a bright look at the patient in that bed. A gaunt, pale, bald, and bearded future self looked straight at me. Sickly, with a nasal cannula connecting his nose to a respirator.

The old, dying version of myself blinked hard, then his eyes widened. He took a weak but shocked inhale and pointed to me standing in the doorway. The nurse scrunched her brow and followed his finger, also looking directly at me.

“What is it, Mr. Ziegler? There’s nothing there. “

“Me… It’s… me,” he whispered loudly.

“Oh, you’re goofing. Such a joker, you are,” the nurse patronized.

Swiftly, I hid behind the wall of the doorway. Before stepping out of the room, I could hear the nurse reassure him, look right through me, and confirm that they were alone. I could see a tag pinned to her blouse, embossed in black on a tiny gold tag read, Rachel. I gazed at it, amazed that it was even possible to be surprised by anything at this point.

I hurried out of there, shutting the door behind me, and was back in the stone hall.

I stood in darkness for a long moment, gathering what I had just seen. Had I just stepped into a parallel reality? The only logic I could muster said that I had.

The knob of that door began to rattle vigorously. Fear shot down my spine. I backed up as the door swung open with tremendous force, the beautiful young nurse, now an eyeless, rotting creature filled with the purest of hatred, was shrieking a guttural, inhuman squeal and storming at me.

I shot back with unmeasured adrenalin. Behind me was another door that opened against my force. I fell into the new room, flat on my back; the door was now wide open in front of me. The screaming corpse, crossing the hall, her long boney fingers wrapped around the door’s molding. I sprint crawled forward and slammed the door shut — her fingers, severed between the door and its frame, fell at the foot of the entrance, melting into slender slugs that slid beneath the entry.

I turned around to notice that I was standing in the cabin’s office. I looked behind myself to see the door had vanished. Befuddled and so fucking relieved to be back, I raced to the kitchen to see the portal that I dug out of the wall. Halted when I exited the office and walked directly into the same office, only now a complete disaster.

Books knocked off the shelves onto the floor — papers and files cast all over the place, and the vibrant mahogany now old and faded. But the most significant change was I saw myself, disheveled and frantic, pinning a slender brunette woman across my desk beneath my left arm with my body weight. My other arm was swinging a three-pound decorative piece of quartz that I would have unboxed if I had never opened the hidden door. With it, I was smashing her skull into a bloody pulp.

I finally relented and dropped the blood-covered stone to the ground with a heavy thud.

I- the alternate version of me, lifted himself off of the woman with an exhausted grunt and gazed around, shaky and maniacal. His posture arched as a mad man. He glared distantly at his surroundings, returning to the woman on his desk and scoffed in disgrace as if she was a pile of dog shit left by his disobedient pet.

He then nonchalantly staggered out of the office with a tired, defeated disposition.

I went to the offices’ doorway and watched him drop indolently into the oversized chair in the living room.

I retracted back to the office to look at the woman. Her face obliterated, the bone mangled and caved in, the bottom half of her jaw, now a blackened, broken shard jutting out of the left side of her neck. Her nasal cavity and eye sockets were one massive crater, gelled over with pulverized bone and sinew. I could not make out anything below her blood-soaked hair.

Her body, however, was exactly like the nurse from the other room, only now clothed in jogging attire.

The smell of blood began to saturate the office. I slumped into the desk chair and held the woman’s cold, lifeless hand while my mind swam into a plain of nothingness. A boulder had risen from my chest and lodged itself on top of my Adam’s apple to erupt its enormous pressure as I broke into uncontrollable tears. Tears of pain for this woman dead at my hands, regardless of whatever fucking reality I’m haunting. Cries for the sheer confusion of all of it. Tears of homesickness. All I wanted was my mind back.

I have no idea how long I sat holding her delicate hand. All I know is that my face hurt from the frown that distress forced. Eventually, my eyes dried, and I released the woman’s hand to gather myself.

Resting at the corner of the desk was a legal pad. The title was written across the top line: “The inter-dimensional tunnels of divinity.” The first paragraph began with: “There must be a god, albeit not of religious virtue but one of such mammoth proportions that a tiny slice of it appears to be of grotesque chaos.”

The pad was nearly filled. I flipped through the pages, skimming through them. This version of me that had written this appeared to have been through the cabin for a substantial time. He-I- spoke of this mountain as if it were God. It articulated how Shenandoah is a conduit between the pit of the earth and “the constant” of the universe. Of doors of perceptions that lead to alternate realities. The only thing I could think of was, had I written how to escape it?

My skimming elevated to reading, but the answer was never directly given. The paper, written as a dissertation, with conclusions such as:

Every reason has a purpose, and every action has an equal reaction. All causes have an effect. Subconscious thoughts dictate the next, and reality builds exponentially in this passage. Not paramount by any means, it echoed thousands of texts of published philosophy. From what I could gather and piece together anyhow, I must make a new door. Every door that was able to open had a pre-existing reality behind it.

I ran into the kitchen and looked directly for the hole in the wall, but it was no longer there. In its place was a simple unmarked wall. This realization stabbed me. Does this mean that I will inevitably kill a woman? I answered myself without hesitation; in this reality, sure. Once I make a new door, that changes. Right?

Just then, from the living room, I heard a gun blast that seized time for a small eternity. I passed through the cabin to find my lifeless self in the oversized chair, spewing blood from the smoking pile of gore that was dripping down my neck. A thick crimson spray painted the wall next to the picture window that I woke up to this morning.

I returned to the kitchen and retrieved the toolbox next to the stove, flipped it open, and grabbed the hack saw then the drill that sat next to it.

I ran to the back porch where the rocking chair was. The door was open, the storm door closed, revealing that it was now nightfall. Without thinking, I unscrewed the storm door’s hinges from the doorway, just as I heard the comet tear through the night behind me, and the rocking chair moved forward and froze in the tilted position.

Longing for relief poured over me with an aftertaste of denial when I justified that I was in the right place. The comet went by, meaning I was in actual reality.

I wrestled the storm door into the kitchen. Then I drilled two holes into the wall next to the stove and sawed a rectangle into the wall. The new void led to eternal darkness as it seemed. A cold wind carrying a faint sound of distant screams howled through the new entry. I took the storm entry and screwed the hinges to the wall. The winds picked up. I continued to fight against the current. Upon completion, I fought the door closed and fell against it holding it closed before I collapsed onto the floor.

I awoke on the sofa to a chorus of singing birds sounding in a stream of light from the open window. The blinds filtered the sun into muted lines across the floor of my new living room. Fresh lilac and pine mixed with the burning of last night’s dew at a perfect 72 degrees incensed the cabin with the sweet smell of summer.

I arranged myself a few cooked eggs, sausage and made a French press of Colombia Luminosa, my absolute favorite light roast coffee. The intoxication of my new surroundings in a fresh light was kicking in.

I rinsed off my plate and poured my coffee when the space between the stove and the wall, perfectly fine as a wall, though oddly spaced, jogged my memory of a dream from last night. Obscure images danced in my mind of digging through the kitchen wall that led to an endless hallway full of doors that hid separate realities.

I had an impulse to write down an overwhelming thought that resonated over me: “There must be a god.”

My thought had been broken by a light knocking on the door. I walked through the cabin to the entrance, opening the door to see a beautiful young lady standing on the porch holding a pie. She has long dark hair, soft, caring eyes, with a flicker of a flame behind them, and the cutest little stud in her nostril right at the base of a perfect bridge.