Niila has known from the start that his stay was temporary…and now—as expected—he is gone: back home, to Magór’ö...to the city of Edír. There is silence in the room, and the waver of lantern-light. The night is heavy. Something ponderous and sullen has made a nest in the hollow of her chest. It is soft around the edges: an animal of some sort. It makes her think of the shadows that blacken the feet of a vast, primeval forest. An animal lives there, the one at home—as well—within the cage of her ribs. It has gone there, she thinks, to die… Horóz has always been good with animals; Horóz would know what to do about the ponderous and sullen thing in her chest, but Horóz is gone now: as foretold on the day of his arrival. He does not know that she has stolen one of his notebooks so that she may remind herself of him. She does not love him, but his smell is intoxicating. He smells like ink and cheap paper. He smells like words. He is gone now… —She remembers the last full day, spent with Horóz. She remembers stooping with him, in the garden: pulling weeds, and checking for signs of blight, of smut, and of lurid, red chafers. A storm blew in from the west, weakened—it seemed—at the end of a long jorney over the steppes. There were lackluster flashes of lightening, and the dull thud of thunder, like beets rolling across a hardwood floor: thumping as they plunged from a torn sack. The wind—almost indistinguishable from the tepid rain—was nothing more than an asthmatic sigh. It had been Horóz’s idea to help her with weeding that day. He’d taken some comfort—she knew—in working in the vegetable patch. He’d taken some pleasure—she also knew—in setting to his monk-calm labors with naked feet. He’d carried his sketchpad and pencils with him, and during the last flare of sunlight, paused, to sketch the pale, jarring corpulence of a digger-grub he’d uncovered. It was as long as her thumb and as wide, and she knew (right then and right there) that her turnips were in trouble. But for as long as Horóz held the little monster in his gaze, she’d allow it to live. It troubled her—though only a little—to see it gaining a sort of immortality in his sketchbook. The sun faded behind a dark, clotted veil of clouds, and sudden sheets of tepid rain fell. She turned to escape the downpour, as Horóz tucked the sketchbook under his arm. She scampered ahead of him, seeking shelter, but his voice halted her: “Niila,” he said. “We’re already wet.” He paused, as if trying to shape a skittish thought into steady words. “Stay,” he said, at last. “In the mud?” she asked. “In the rain.” He smiled, and something playful—but without guile—flashed in the depths of his hazy, hazel gaze. And they walked—slowly—toward the house, though they didn’t enter. They sat, instead, on the stone bench just beside the kitchen door. There was some shelter from the rain, and Niila sat beside Horóz, listening to the plunge of raindrops through the dark canopy of chestnut leaves. The tree—and old one, and perhaps older than the house—stood just some distance away. The longest and lowest branches touched the eaves of the house. Horóz looked down, wiggling his toes in a mud-colored puddle. “The whores along Yetl Street sound like me when they talk. The same accent.” “Why are you telling me this?” “I didn’t notice it until yesterday. The Magór’ö accent is hard to miss, but I’ve missed it every day until yesterday. Magór’ö whores. Half of them are men.” “I don’t care. I have no need for whores, not even the male ones.” He shrugged. He wiggled his bare toes in the muddy puddle. “They sound like me.” And there were layers of hidden meaning in that statement that she didn’t want to consider, and so she simply stepped to her feet and made for the kitchen door. It was unlocked. It opened easily, with only a faint, faint creak. She stepped inside and peeled out of her garden boots and her sun-shawl. She wrung it out, just beyond the kitchen-door threshold, and felt her heart skip a beat and catch the rebound, as her gaze settled onto Horóz, hunched forward on the bench. With his elbows on his knees, he seemed to be considering something in the mud-addled water pooling at his feet. He was pale: almost ghostly so, and his hair hung limp and sodden like a veil around his face. He was whispering, she saw, but she couldn’t make out what he said. They sound like me. She had no idea what he meant in his mention of Magór’ö whores, nor could she understand his need to sit in the rain, while beside him, his sketchbook fell into water-sodden ruin.— …and now, she picks up the old and battered notebook (the one she has stolen, and not the rain-sodden wreck, still in its place on the stone bench out back). This one is heavy with words, with maps, with the meticulous anatomies of insects, and the obscure viscera of fish: Horóz has drawn them and numbered each drawing with the obsessive care of an autistic savant. She flips pages at random, inhaling the heady, sweet redolence of ink and paper. She touches a single page and begins to read his compact, jagged handwriting. There are doors in Magór’ö, through which no virgin may walk without the aid of a knife: they are the green doors that open two ways, and once opened, never close. There are doors that open all the way into sunset on The Last Day: these doors—called asiin—so terrifying to the Sages, are torn from their hinges, when found, and buried in places that only the Sages know. Such doors, when torn from their thresholds and their hinges, forever block the way, but there will always remain one such door, unfound, undiscovered, and so the fear of the Sages is futile stupidity. There are doors with no thresholds embedded in the Great Wall of Edír: no one knows where they go. The Door of the Mouth is said to mark the place where the gorgon-muses live, and Théónús writes that only the blind ever use them. When a child is born in Magór’ö, a door is made, and painted black. There are three million people in Magór’ö, and so there are three million black doors. They never open. They never close. And once—Théónús writes—there were two red doors. The oldest doors in existence. It is said—Théónús writes—that they open into each other, and that they are Eternity. They are red doors. There are many red doors in Magór’ö. She stops reading and closes the notebook. She closes her eyes, and wonders—for an instant—if Horóz will ever walk through the most familiar and intimate of doors again. She does not love him, nor does she want to, but she wants to smell him again, and hear the sonorous, glutinous weight of his Magór’ö accent. She wants to watch him, just one more time, immortalizing some monstrosity at home in her vegetable patch. end * A portion of this story has appeared in an earlier post, as the text-accompaniment of an image. I was satisfied with it in that form, and yet I felt that there was still something more to say within that short fragment of a tale. There is still more to say, either about Horóz or about Niila: maybe about both of them, or at least the imaginary/other-worldly countries in which they live. I don’t know. There is something to say, I suspect, about the people of Magór’ö, and their cosmology centered on doors. I have to admit that I’m particularly enamored with the exploration of doors…thresholds…liminal places between there and there. There may be more of this world. Later. But until then, I hope you’ve enjoyed this still-short peek into another world. As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting; and I hope you’re all having a great week/end.