Side Door   (Streetlight Magazine, December 2017)

“Why not sense that, incarnated in the door, there is a little threshold god?”  (Gaston Bachelard)

I’m a man now and I can’t help but feel grateful to Deanie. She was fighting for our corner of time and place, our unprepossessing box house on the edge of Detroit. I recall her kindergarten enrollment for which Dad had to drag her across the door sill. I can still see my sister in her little girl party dress for first day, one spindly leg fighting to remain inside the house, the other leg on the porch. She turned sideways and pressed herself tightly against the door frame, her right arm outstretched along the wall inside the door, left arm along the exterior wall. When Dad removed her, finger by finger, from the brick facade, I saw that her left hand had razor-fine scratches, each one a sliver oozing bright red. It took weeks and a few sessions with the kindly school psychologist before Deanie stopped hugging the house and battling each morning.