temple. A thimble becomes a trash can. Used matchsticks create a fence. Loose buttons transform into wheels or apples or stars.
They add houses made from broken books or rainstorms conjured from glass glitter. They move a figure or a landmark. They escort the tiny sheep from one pasture to another. They reorient the mountains.
Some visitors play in the room for hours, creating stories and narratives. Others look around, adjust a crooked tree or door, and depart. Or they simply move the ducks around the lake and are satisfied with that.
Anyone who enters the room affects it. Leaves an impression upon it even if it is unintentional. Quietly opening the door lets a soft draft rustle over the objects inside. A tree might topple. A doll might lose its hat. An entire building might crumble.
An ill-placed step might crush the hardware store. A sleeve could catch on the top of a castle, sending a princess tumbling to the ground below. It is a fragile place.
Any damage is usually temporary. Someone will come along and provide repairs. Restore a fallen princess to her battlement. Rebuild the hardware store with sticks and cardboard. Create new stories upon the old ones.
The original house in the center changes in subtler ways. The furniture moves from room to room. The walls are painted or papered over. The mother and father dolls spend time separately in other structures with other dolls. The daughter and son leave and return and leave again. The dog chases cars and sheep and dares to bark at the dragon.
Around them, the world grows ever larger.
It sometimes takes the dolls quite a while to adapt.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits on the floor of his closet with the door closed, surrounded by a forest of hanging shirts and coats, his back up against where the door to Narnia would be if his closet were a wardrobe, having something of an existential crisis.
He has read Sweet Sorrows in its entirety and read it again and thought perhaps he should not read it a third time but read it a third time anyway because he could not sleep.
He still cannot sleep.
Now it is three a.m. and Zachary is in the back of his closet, a version of his favorite reading spot when he was a child. A comfort he has not returned to in years and never in this closet, which is ill-suited for such sitting.
He sat in his childhood closet after he found the door, he remembers that now. It was a better closet for sitting. A deeper one, with pillows he had dragged in to make it more comfortable. That one didn’t have a door to Narnia, either, he knows because he checked.
Only the singular section of Sweet Sorrows is about him, though there are pages missing. The text comes back to the pirate and the girl again but the rest is disjointed, it feels incomplete. Much of it revolves around an underground library. No, not a library, a book-centric fantasia that Zachary missed his invitation to because he didn’t open a painted door when he was eleven.
Apparently he went around looking for the wrong imaginary entryways.
The wine-colored book rests at the foot of the bed. Zachary will not admit to himself that he is hiding from it, in the closet where it cannot see him.
A whole book and he has no idea even after reading it three times how he should proceed.
The rest of the book doesn’t feel as tangible as those few pages near the beginning. Zachary has always had a complicated view of magic because of his mother, but while he can grasp herbalism and divination the things in the book are very much beyond his definition of real. Magic magic.
But if those few pages about him are real, the rest could be…
Zachary puts his head between his knees and tries to keep his breathing steady.
He keeps wondering who wrote it. Who saw him in that alleyway with the door and why they wrote it down. The opening pages imply that the first stories are nested: the pirate telling the story about the acolyte, the acolyte seeing the story about the boy. Him.
But if he’s in a story within a story who is telling it? Someone must have typeset it and bound it in a book.
Someone somewhere knows this story.
He wonders if someone somewhere knows he’s sitting on the floor of his closet.
Zachary crawls out into his room, his legs stiff. It is near dawn, the light