on the topmost rank of keys, an asterisk (she hadn't known the machine carried one) and added it to her last sentence, so it read:
no two doors to them are the same
And beneath that she wrote:
but the house is a door
This filled up her little notepaper, and she drew it out and read over what she had written. She saw that what she had was a sort of precis of several chapters of the last edition of the Architecture, deprived of the billowing draperies of explanation and abstraction, nude and frail but no more help than ever. She crushed it slowly in her hands, thinking she knew nothing at all and yet knew this: that the fate that awaited her and all of them awaited them here (why was she dumb to say why she knew it?), and so they must cling to this place, and not stray far from it, she supposed that she herself wouldn't ever leave it again. It was the door, the greatest of doors, it stood Somehow, by chance or design, on the very edge or border of Elsewhere, and it would in the end he the last door that led that way. For a long time it would stand open; then for a time after that it would at least be able to be opened, or unlocked, if you had the key; but there would come a time when it would he closed for good, not be a door at all any more; and she wanted none of those whom she loved to be standing outside then.
What You Most Want
The south wind blows the fly in the fish's mouth, says the Angler, but it didn't seem to blow August's well-tied and tempting examples into any. Ezra Meadows was sure that fish bite before rain; old MacDonald had always been sure they never do, and August saw that they do and don't: they bite at the gnats and mosquitoes settling like dust-motes over the water, driven down by altering pressure (Change, said John's ambivalent barometer) but not at the Jack Scotts and Alexandras August played over them.
Perhaps he wasn't thinking hard eno,ugh about angling. He was trying, without exactly trying to try, to see or notice something, without exactly noticing or seeing it, that would he a clue or a message; trying to remember, at the same time as he tried to forget he had ever forgotten, how such clues or messages had used to appear, and how he had used to interpret them. He must also try not to think This is madness; nor to think that he did this only for his mother's sake. Either thought would spoil whatever might happen. Over the water a kingfisher shot, laughing, iridescent in the sun, just above the evening which had already obscured the stream. I'm not mad, August thought.
A similarity between fishing and this other enterprise was that no matter where along the stream you stood, there seemed to be, just down there, where the stream spilled through a narrow race around stones, or just beyond the tresses of the willows, the perfect spot, the spot you had all along intended to go to. The feeling wouldn't diminish even when, after some thought, you realized that the perfect spot was one where, a few minutes ago, you had been standing, standing and looking longingly at the spot you now stood in and wanting to be amid the long maculations of its leaf shadows, as you now were, and yet; and just as August did realize this, as his desires were so to speak in transit between There and Here, something seized his line and nearly snatched the pole from his abstracted hand.
As startled as the fish itself must be, August played him clumsily, but had him after a struggle; netted him; the leaf-shadows were absorbed into evening vagueness; the fish looked up at him with the dull astonishment of all caught fish; August removed the hook, inserted his thumb in the bony mouth, and neatly broke the fish's neck. His thumb, when he withdrew it, was coated with slime and cold fish-blood. Without thinking, he thrust the thumb into his own mouth and sucked it. The kingfisher, making another laughing sortie just then, eyed him as he arrowed over the water and then up into a dead tree.
August, fish in his creel, went to the bank and sat, waiting. The kingfisher had laughed at him, not at the world in general, he was sure of