Anthology - A Thousand Doors

by Various

  Obviously he can’t hear me. He never moves. Just continues to stand like a statue underneath his umbrella in the pouring rain.

  The sound of my cell phone ringing from inside my purse startles me. Reaching inside, I fumble through the clutter until I feel its leather case. After a quick glance at the screen my heart dips. Mom.

  Instead of answering, I send her to voice mail, then slam the gearshift back into park. My wipers are no match for the rain pounding against the windshield. I should get out right now and tell him while I still have the chance. I glance over my shoulder for an umbrella. But I remember leaving it propped up against the wall inside my front door.

  Despite the downpour I get out of the car. With hands on either side of my mouth, I form a megaphone. “Carol,” I shout over the top of my hood, feel the rain drenching like I’m underneath a waterfall. He doesn’t turn around. “Carol!” I shout again, even louder.

  This time he looks over his shoulder. When he sees me he stops, turns around. His smile has morphed into a grimace. “Get out of the rain, Mia. You’ll get sick.”

  My heart is pounding. I duck back inside and pull straight up to his car, pinning him in. I press the button to roll down my passenger window. He leans in while the umbrella protects the rest of his body.

  “Please get in,” I say with pleading eyes. “There is something I need to tell you.”

  The Seeker

  Paige Crutcher

  ekam (one)

  The world is made up of patterns. It’s an intricate system of grooved lines that intersect or don’t, colors that blend or bleed, and paths that fork and leave you stalling or those which force you forward. My world is no longer made up of any recognizable pattern. Two months after my husband was accused of sexually assaulting my childhood friend, and the path isn’t forked, it’s fucked.

  For the past two weeks I’ve been staring at the same sliver of Bahamian ocean, trying to think my way out of the present.

  Swami Sivananda once said, “Eat sparingly. Breathe deeply. Talk kindly. Work energetically.” The quote is engraved on the raised yoga dock outside my hut. So far, the eat sparingly and work energetically parts of the aphorism come easy. My stomach hasn’t unknotted itself since the news showed up on my door, and work is what we do here at the Sivananda Ashram. From the moment I stepped off the boat onto the wooden dock, it’s been hours of meditation in the Garden Hut followed by chanting, singing, and lectures. Not to mention the two-hour-long yoga classes.

  There isn’t much time to talk except during meals, and my thoughts are so busy being engulfed in flames my mouth can’t seem to find anything to say to my yoga brunch-mates.

  When it comes to breathing, it doesn’t matter how much pranayama the yogis with the reassuring eyes, who perform handstands the way most of us put one foot in front of the other, encourage. No matter how diligently I try to “inhale blessings,” the best I do is suck at air like I’m trying to drink fudge through a straw.

  It’s 8 p.m. and I’m settled onto my corner of cold concrete floor for the second satsang of the day. The wind is whirling through the palm leaves, and I know I should be clearing my mind, but I can’t stop sniffing myself. My karma yoga assignment is cleaning toilets and scrubbing floors, and after the second two-hour yoga session of the day, my pores are now emanating pure Pine-Sol.

  There’s rustling nearby, likely from one of the many fine-feathered friends residing on the island, and my thoughts shift to forcing my hands to stay on my knees instead of going to my hair to protect my scalp from being the latest target of wayward bird poop.

  The pocket of hysteria bubbles up in my throat, and I think of her. If she were with me, she’d have the same thought. If she were here, one of us would giggle, the other would snort, and we’d end up crying from trying to bottle up our carbonated laughter. Then we’d throw in the towel on this god-forsaken palace of peace and swim back to Nassau for crab cakes and a barrel of wine.

  I don’t think of him, or wish he were here. My lizard brain points this out as a warm scream forms in my throat.

  Bells chime, softly, and I relax my jaw. They chime again, and I wonder if someone forgot to silence their phone.

  Twenty-five minutes. That’s the length of time we have before the traditional chanting, singing, or dancing. Surely it’s been fifteen minutes. Though yesterday I thought that, and then I spent another nine years in this spine-straightening, butt-numbing meditation posture.

  Nine years. I was married to him for nine years. Am. Was. Will have been.

  I should have known. Should have seen who he was. This is my fault. If I’d paid more attention, I could have prevented it from happening.

  My stomach growls around the knots, and I shift back, trying to listen to my breathing. Every exhale sounds like his name, every inhale sounds like hers.

  Three weeks ago, my new doctor was convincing me to take a vacation, get away, in hopes the daily panic attacks would lesson. It was fortuitous timing. That same day I received an email from a college friend who turned her life over to the practice of yoga and moved to Nassau.

  Come to the island, it will help you clear your mind and find your true self. You are not what’s happening to [redacted] or [redacted]. You are more than these circumstances.

  My friend was waiting for me when I departed the plane. “You need a yoga session with the dolphins,” she said after scanning me head to toe, and tugged me down a long pier toward a large square dock. She led me through a yoga practice that started with twists and angles and ended in my unraveled tears. There were dolphins, I suppose, somewhere in the ocean, but I never saw one.

  The next day, she put me on the boat for the ashram, and I’m no closer to finding my true self now than I was then.

  I want to believe what he did wasn’t my fault, but isn’t that what everyone wishes when faced with tragedy? It happened to them because they do bad things, but it will never happen to me because I don’t (do those exact same bad things). You think he had a heart attack because he couldn’t give up fried chicken, or she got sick because she carried all those secrets and microwaved plastic food containers, ignoring all warning about toxic BPA. We justify tragedy when tragedy doesn’t need a reason.

  He hated that I didn’t like to have sex on all fours.

  I blow out a breath, try to re-center myself, but the thought won’t go away.

  Being on all fours makes me claustrophobic. I can never see what’s happening behind me when my chin is dug into the silky damask blue of my pillowcase. The position is rough in an angry Discovery Channel way, never tender and delicious in the ways described in bodice-ripping romance novels.

  Is that why? Was he so unfulfilled he took from someone I loved what I, the person who should have loved him enough to give him what he needed, wouldn’t give him?

  “Talk kindly,” Swami Sivananda says, but the oceanic breeze only ushers in ugly thoughts and possibilities of why it all went wrong.

  He called my nipples lazy. They’ve never responded like he expected, and over the last year he’s bypassed them completely. I’ve seen her nipples before; they’re hard to look away from when they’re always at attention, like a porn star’s or stripper’s would be. If my nipples weren’t genetically predisposed to indolence, would it have saved her?

  What if she did it on purpose? She knows how he feels about my lack of good nipple gene. Maybe she thought she’d flash her perfect areolas his way at the neighborhood pool, flirt a little because he should be safe and she was feeling Gucci in her suit, and he flipped his switch.

  The sweet whine of the singing bowl hovers in the air above us, and I squeeze my eyes tighter together. Shut. Shut. Shut up, Mia. It wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t your nipples. It was his predisposition to being an asshole.

  But he buys me peonies every third month on the same day, the third, because he knows how much I love the number three. When
I was sick last May he took off from work for two days to lie in bed and watch scripted Bravo dramas with me on TV, make me scalding-hot miso soup, and rub my back until I fell asleep. He didn’t complain once.

  We were planning to try for children next month.

  The call of the singing bowl grows louder. It reverberates through the air and sifts down into the marrow of my bones. The thoughts are harder to hear when its song is filling me up.

  My breath comes easy now.

  In. Out.

  In. Out.

  I press the tip of my tongue to the roof of my mouth as the tears leak their way down my cheeks. They are tracks of pain and betrayal, rivulets of loss. They are the wet pattern of a shattered heart.

  I won’t think the one thought an awful piece of me wishes were true.

  What if it’s not…

  What if she’s making…

  No, I won’t go there. Any form of doubt is betrayal of the worst kind.

  There’s a crackle, clink, crunch in the distance, followed by a clattering clang, and my eyes blink open.

  The eyes of the red-headed woman to my left are closed, a serene smile pressing the edges of her lips up. Across the way a blond woman lifts her chin like she’s sunbathing in the starlight. Everyone in the small stone enclosure is deep in meditation, including the lead swami. Even his laugh lines look at peace, his eyes crinkled enough to let me know he’s awake, but not so much that I believe he’s bothered by any of the sounds around him.

  I unfold myself from my lotus position, my knees popping and my psoas muscle aching in protest. Standing, I’m careful to walk as if I had cat paws instead of feet made for stomping.

  Winding my way through the moonlit path, I try to stay present and take in the encouraging signs posted along the trail. Rumi admonishes me for acting so small, telling me I am the universe in ecstatic motion. Fuck you, Rumi. I am a crumpling galaxy in anxious orbit, and I’ve never felt more of a spotlight on my existence.

  There’s a smaller crash, and I stop at the entrance to the communal kitchen. A girl with beautifully browned skin stands in front of a long table. At her feet are two stainless steel pans and a bushel’s worth of broken eggs. She glares at them like she can fry them with her mind.

  “Need a hand?” My voice comes out sounding as broken as the scattered shells on the floor. I clear my throat, but the hoarse pinch only worsens.

  “I need a maid, room service, and a hot Jacuzzi bath, but I’ll settle for what I can get.” She smiles as she says this, and it reaches her eyes.

  We clean side by side, yolk covering us from knuckle to forearm, and she hums softly as we work. The song makes me ache. My throat tries to open so I can let loose the mourning deep down in my chest, but I clamp my teeth together. I don’t deserve the release. I can’t let it escape. I won’t have anything left if I do.

  When we finish she gives me another flash of a smile, her brown eyes holding gratitude. I bow my head in response, and she returns the gesture. She hums as she walks away, and I carry her tune with me back to my hut.

  In the morning, I wake and take my turn in the shower, change the linens, and by 6 a.m., I am back on the cold concrete floor for the morning satsang. The girl from last night walks in and takes the seat to my right. There are bags under her eyes, and her hair looks like she slept with a bird nesting there, but she gives me a small smile and rolls her shoulders out with purpose.

  I bet her nipples are youthful and exuberant. I look down at my chest, the swami rings the gong, and my eyes close. Today, I vow, I will not spend the next thirty minutes thinking about him or her or anyone’s areolas.

  Today’s lecture is on the Bhagavad Gita and the four well-known paths to yoga. The message is on how external forces govern us, but the self is free. The girl from last night sniffs loudly. With a start, I realize everyone, including me, is in various states of crying…or beaming like the first ray of a rainbow. My cheeks are wet, and I wait to feel tired—because that’s the only state I know—but the weight never comes.

  We move on to our two-hour asana practice, and afterward I practically race to brunch. It doesn’t matter that before coming here I hated sweet potatoes and chased down most of my vegetables with wine so I didn’t have to taste them. Here, the food satisfies in a way I only knew as a child. The apples taste like summer, the potatoes fill me up like a fresh spring rain.

  “How long have you been here?”

  I didn’t hear the girl sit down, and brush crumbs from my mouth as I reply. “Three weeks, give or take.”

  She nods. Up close she has freckles sprinkled across her nose. Her eyes are somewhere between brown and hazel, and there’s a stray freckle above her left eyebrow. She looks nothing like her, and yet, I can’t help but think of her.

  “It’s my third day. I knew they were disciplined, but this schedule is next level,” she says.

  “I’ve heard it gets easier.”

  “When? Next May?”

  My laugh is silent, but she grins at the response. Suddenly, like a summer storm arriving without any warning, the grin vanishes and her eyes fill. She pushes back from the table and races out of the room.

  A lanky man two seats down watches her go, and looks over at me. “The first days are the hardest.”

  He holds my gaze too long, and heat creeps up onto my shoulders, skittering down to my chest. When he finally breaks the connection, I turn my eyes to my plate and don’t look up for the rest of the meal.

  I move like a misplaced snail after the final satsang, inching my way forward, desperate for a home to rest my exoskeleton. My room is dark when I enter, and when I flip on the lamp by the door my inhalation catches in my throat. Breathe deeply, Swami Sivananda said.

  It’s impossible to prana-anything when a stranger’s in your bed.

  Dve (two)

  She wakes as I’m watching her, stretching like taffy being pulled in two directions. Her toes curl before she springs up from the bed like a dancing marionette being pulled upright. My own limbs are weighted with enough worries to fill an emptied ocean.

  “Sorry,” she says, rocking back on her heels. “I have vicious anxiety attacks, and I’d been wanting to talk to you, and then it got bad, and I thought I’d wait for you here, but I fell asleep because this schedule is like a Marine’s on bad acid.”

  I lower myself into the wicker chair by the door, not bothering to move the fresh towels to the side. “Is there good acid?”

  “Depends on your definition,” she says, scrunching her forehead. “I’m Kayleigh, by the way.”

  “Mia,” I say, unsure how to proceed, grateful her tear ducts are dry.

  “I know.” She picks up the white porcelain singing bowl beside my bed, gingerly touching the leaves of the white-and-yellow elderflowers I filled it with two days ago. She takes a deep breath. “When I first arrived, the yogi told me I had more to give, and receive, and that I would be led to find my way.”

  Outside the waves crash, perfunctory, against the beach, and two people pass by, their shadows peeking in the door. I catch snippets of the words inside their conversation as they go.

  Kayleigh studies the white-and-yellow flowers like they contain worlds instead of pollen.

  “I’ve been trying to manifest a reason to live,” she says, setting the bowl down with a thunk. “For two days I’ve watched you, and after last night I realized you’re the person who can help.”

  A hard knot coils tighter in my belly, and I try to breathe around the irony. “Kayleigh, I’m flattered—”

  She holds up a hand, her long graceful fingers tapping at the air. “I’m hanging by a thread, Mia. Please don’t cut me down.”

  Shit. I have nothing to give. There is nothing for me to receive.

  And yet. Her face is a rough but detailed sketch of earnest. Maybe this girl, this young and lovely and lost girl, is my penance. />
  “It’s late,” I say.

  She nods. “You’re right. We can talk more in the morning.” Her hand reaches out, grasps mine. “Thank you, Mia.”

  After she’s gone I stay seated in the chair, watching shadows of the leaves from the palm trees and oaks mingle and shake from my view beside the door. Like Plato before me, I am living in my own allegory, my own cave—or cage. Now, it seems, someone else wants to enter.

  In the morning, as I approach the Garden Hut, I hear soft footsteps from a secondary path and pause, expecting Kayleigh to magically appear. Instead I come face-to-face with the man from brunch. His hair is the kind of black they teach you about in school. It’s not the absence of color, but the combination of all the colors come together to form something different. His eyes are a deep blue, and they’re submarine serious in comparison to the tune he whistles.

  “’Yellow Submarine’?” I ask, a twinge of delighted surprise unrooting from the base of my spine.

  He gives me a nod, and a hint of a smile tugs on a corner of his full lips. He enters the stone enclosure, and my delight turns to shame before it shifts to something darker.

  I smiled at him. I can’t be smiling. I’m married. I’m a martyr.

  My feet stumble over the last thought. I’m a martyr?

  My legs are broken rubber bands, and I crumple into the seated position on the floor. My spine sags like a deflated paper bag. My heart races. My thoughts whirl.

  The slow call of the gong rises, and my eyes close. Like Pavlov’s pup, my jaw relaxes on command.

  Outside, the sun is peeking hello, testing out the world, deciding if it will rise on us for another day. The waves crest against the sand, stealing pebbles from the shore, carrying them away from where they’ve nestled. Where do they go? Are they secreted by the tide to a hidden realm where underwater beings grow them from grains into pearls and lodge them into oysters in hopes of luring us out further to sea?

  I’m drowning in my thoughts.