Gabrielle Griffis
I found a door in the back of a Goodwill, inside a framed poster of the muscular system. The poster was next to a mirror, but I avoided my reflection on account of my face feeling like a loose tooth. Sometimes we find doors where we least expect them, sometimes when we’re not even looking.
I’m always looking, but I’m dumb about where I look.
“Where does this lead? Does that open? What will this do?”
These are the questions I ask myself, pulling on handles, wandering through streets, kicking rocks over in the woods. I once found an opening in the chain of a cowboy-shaped lamp in my uncle’s living room. Every time I turned the light off I was somewhere else.
“How am I supposed to open these doors if I don’t know where they are? Never mind the keys,” I said, as I entered the poster.
It was a gruesome event, like being born. I felt constricted, suffocated.
When a mammal dies there’s usually a lot of blood, and guts, like when you find a deer in a meadow with their eyes eaten out. On the inside of an animal everything is pulsing, buzzing, breathing. We do everything to keep our bodies from ending up like the porpoises we find washed up on the beach, all the insides spilled out.
Everything was red when I emerged. I came out an infant under the blinding lights of the hospital room. My mother was calm for two seconds before she started yelling at my father. My infant ears were shredded to pieces, and I began to understand my lifelong noise sensitivity. Being an infant is not pleasant, less so when a caregiver is screaming all the time.
I felt the muscles of my infant body tighten as the nerves were worn raw, day after day, year after year, in some kind of hypnotized, larval state of being. My body was always growing, and I just couldn’t stop crying until eventually the tears dried and I felt my face stiffen. I became older and went outside.
“Some poster,” I thought, wondering what’s so great about going backwards. I took a solid ten minutes just to stare at my hands before I remembered to look inward for another door. Took a while to get there, as I dropped into my lungs, through the diaphragm, until I found the handle at the bottom of my abdomen.
It was quiet in there. Just blackness and space. No one could give me a hard time. I didn’t have to feel anything I didn’t want to.
I laid under the trees and closed my eyes. The world was far away. Cars passed in the distance, birds chirped, and plants rustled. Through the silence I could hear insect wings. I was calm, and then, I heard my mother.
Her shriek was like a bomb.
There was nothing else.
“No wonder I’m so messed up,” I said, opening my eyes and standing.
The sound penetrated my chest. The muscles tightened, shallow breathing like the ragged breaths of a stranger behind me. I felt the lawn underfoot, each blade of grass, each dirt particle until a door in the ground gave out.
I sank under water.
I held my breath. I held my breath through math tests, concerts, first dates, breakups, graduation ceremonies, job interviews, and resignations. I held my breath for over thirty years until everything red about me was blue, until the bottom of the ocean gave out and I was back at Goodwill sopping wet.
“Are you okay?” The store clerk asked.
“Oh yeah, just great,” I said, water pooling around my feet. “Look,” I said, turning to face the clerk. “Unrestrained adult emotion is like giving a baby coffee, their little bodies just aren’t ready.”
“Uh, yeah, don’t give babies coffee,” the clerk replied, handing me a towel.
“Thanks,” I said, drying my face, which slipped off and fell on the floor in a puddle of other faces. “Not sure what to do without those,” I said, as the clerk scooped them up.
“It’s okay, we’ve got lots of them. They’re pretty interchangeable, but sometimes they get stuck,” the clerk replied, dumping the loose visages
in a bin full of faces, “You can pick whichever ones you want.”
Gabrielle Griffis is a musician, writer, and multimedia artist. Her fiction has been published in The Rumpus, Wigleaf, Split Lip, Matchbook, Monkeybicycle, CHEAP POP, XRAY, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. Her work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2022 and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize. Read more at http://gabriellegriffis.com or follow at @ggriffiss.
Photo by Alex Hockett on Unsplash
