White Doors, by Garth Ferrante

White Doors, by Vilhelm Hammershoi (Denmark). 1905.

White Doors
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​no, no, this was around the time he'd told me that certain places disturbed him even if they weren't really haunted, and then launched into story where he was in a forest and it was the way the trees refused to move in the wind, the way the hill sloped downward as though it were trying to give him a nudge toward the way back where he came that had made him feel like there was a presence watching him, taking note of his movements...this all synced perfectly with the story i'd already shared with him, the one when i must've been like four because my parents were sleeping in the room next door when, on returning to bed after going to the bathroom, the window flew open on its own in the dead of night and the curtains, just like those trees, had refused to move...one or two people said it must've been the alley between the two houses that funneled the wind which opened my window, but then why did the curtains remain still?...the only answers are the ones that are rejected because they don't make sense, because it is popular to say in broad daylight that one has rubbed elbows with the supernatural, but just you wait for the sunset, then you'll see a different kind of logic, the logic of fear...and it won't be like him telling you his story and you saying "hmm..." to something so interesting, nor will it be like mine where physics and what is possible don't seem to mix very well...no, it will be more like you lying there waiting for a visit from some fiend who might be a creep from the apartment downstairs, a moaning of the wind against your house, the rattling of your mind going all the way back in time to show you that here, right here, is the reptilian brain, here is why you jump and shake and scream your little scream of death that is too confused with everything you let play in the soup of all you know and heard and cannot now un-hear and un-know in the small hours when you are the plaything...
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Garth Ferrante

This poem was written as part of the surprise ekphrastic I See a Darkness challenge.
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Garth Ferrante is a complete unknown who teaches, writes, and makes games out of challenging his own creativity.  He writes because he loves to, because he finds meaning and purpose in it, because if he didn’t, life would be lifeless.