You’ll have to find the door.”

Then he walked past me and was gone. The floor unhinged beneath me and I fell through…

Down through a vast expanse, brilliant white surrounding me still. I drifted slowly, peacefully, like a solitary snowflake falling through a clear, crisp winter morning. Looking back up along my path, I could see a white door hovering in darker space, the hinges popping and squeaking as it closed and latched. For some reason I found the closed door distressing, like I knew it should have been open. It clattered shut in a way that sparked a feeling a familiarity before I left the battered, whitewashed portal far above me. Then I was home.

I could smell the butter, the flour, the eggs, and, most of all, the chocolate, all swirled together and baking away in the oven. Our kitchen was small, with barely enough room to cook or to eat, but never both at the same time. The television hummed quietly in the next room, and I heard my father’s leather recliner groan in protest through the voice of Peter Jennings as he repositioned. Somewhere in the kitchen, the black cat hanging on the wall clicked away the seconds, its tail a pendulum that never stopped. It was snowing outside, the big flakes that float to the ground with an audible plop.

And then, stepping into the kitchen, I saw her, wearing the same blue terrycloth robe she always wore on Saturday mornings and snow day afternoons when she made us cookies. Her hair as long as it had ever been, halfway down her back, and only then did my situation set in. Not with a feeling of bewilderment or confusion, but with pure joy.

“Mommy!” I was surprised when my voice came out in a shrill alto, but I didn’t stop running towards her as fast as my tiny legs could carry me. I knew with certainty that she could save me from this night out to the bar, and deep down I wanted to do the same for her.

The red gaze fully stopped me in my tracks. The stranger had no hat now, and the blonde hair cascaded down his shoulders to my mother’s terrycloth robe, the one which still held stains around the cuffs from countless kitchen mishaps. The eyes were the same though, burning like two pockets of fire set deep into his face and casting a hellish glow onto the room.

But she—he smiled reassuringly and crossed the room to me holding a tray. The eyes burned, but I could meet their gaze without feeling uncomfortable now. His voice came from her mouth, still calm and cordial: “Wouldn’t you like a cookie?”

The tray came down to my eye level, just low enough for me to peer over the edge of the battered, cast-iron edge. Its black surface was impossible to see through the pool of red liquid that sloshed around pan, carrying tiny shards of glass from one edge to the other. Interspersed through the mix were red and yellow chunks of plastic, tiny shards of metal, and a shred of dark blue upholstery. I somehow knew the liquid was blood just from looking at it.

The cat clock swiveled its eyes to and fro as it surveyed the scene, the macabre tray presented to me like the perfect chocolate chip cookies I loved. The stranger looked at me as if contemplating my distress, cocking his head to the side like a puzzled housecat. Then a glance to the tray. “If you don’t like this I guess I could run to the store…”

I stole a glance out the window, where the snow was still drifting down but with increased urgency. A storm would not be long in coming. Memories triggered: flowers and relatives; eyes of peers jerking towards the floor at school; lines of black sedans inching through the remnants of a blizzard. The kitchen was suddenly even smaller, too small for me to stay.

Panic caused me to flee, no longer interested in vague questions, biting eyes, or matches tossed into pools of vodka. The living room was dark save the glow of the television and the two crimson pricks of light sitting in my father’s armchair, watching me as I entered. The television flickered, went to snow, refocused on a breaking news report. The screen showed blackness, cut only by the snowflakes that streaked by the lens. Until the camera tipped to view the wreckage below, settled in the highway median.

The mangled steel, shattered glass, and rotating emergency lighting were too much for me. It was a scene which had been viewed once and then pushed to the darkest recesses of the mind, where the memory was powerless to find it. I flew up the stairs to the dull monotone of the reporter’s voice: “The victim is survived by her husband and son…”

Upstairs the door hung in front of me, set at the end of the hall. I knew then why the door rushing into the darkness above had seemed familiar—it was the door to my bedroom, the door I used every day for years. At that moment I looked upon it with the forgotten eyes I had used years ago; it was my sanctuary, where the rest of life would stay safely at bay.

Only I couldn’t get to it. I was held back from the hallway like a ball bearing trying to fall through a row of magnets. I dug my toes into the hall rug and pressed forward.

My muscles burned first, then my skin. I thought of a PBS special on salmon migration we had watched as a family, and I suddenly knew how the fish had felt, fighting against a seemingly impossible current. The hallway was broiling; my vision rippled with the heat, the wallpaper peeled, and when I finally reached out for the doorknob an eternity later, I could smell the singed flesh. But I didn’t dare fail to turn the knob…

Blinding white light filled my vision and my eyes were forced shut, as if I had opened my door only to be peering directly into the sun. The heat covering my body was almost unbearable, and I jerked up my arms to survey the damage. That’s when I realized I couldn’t move; I felt strapped down. Then a sharp pain on the inside of my elbow, and my skin stopped burning.

I could sense that I was moving once the pain stopped, and it reminded me of falling like a snowflake back to my childhood home. For some reason I felt happy at the prospect of falling somewhere new, and I smiled.

There were voices around me, beeps, metal clanging against metal, a terrible whine in the background. My vision came back, first around the edges, then the white circle in the center faded. Two men were on either side of me; one spoke into a box on a cord as he was jostled by the motion of the room.

“Send all the buses in the county, and get the burn unit ready…Yeah, place called, hold on, ‘Mickey’s.’”

I tried to tell him it was Mikies, pronounced “Mike-ees,” but there was something over my mouth, and the words wouldn’t come out. My efforts alarmed the men, however. Another prick in the arm (I could see that it was a needle), and the world drifted away another time. It didn’t fade white this time, though; I fell like a stone through darkness.