Growing Doors
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Growing Doors.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A field holds rooted doors. Stairs rise from some of them into rooms that have no houses, open to weather at the back. Grass grows through the lower treads and does not pull the wood down. Cloud moves over the missing roofs and does not enter the rooms as rain. A path ends at the meadow. One door stands alone on the path, rooted, with no house behind it. The grain is plain. A hinge ticks in the breeze and the door does not swing. Bees cross the threshold and do not stay.
A hand finds the wood. The grain warms under the palm and stays warm after the first second. At the touch, a stair grows from that threshold, step by step, into a new room of plain walls and a missing roof. Each tread arrives pale and then darkens as it takes the light. The walls rise only as high as a person could touch, and then they stop. Sky occupies the place a roof would keep. Three other doors stand in the open weather nearby, each holding a different dark: one blue, one warm, one with no light at all. The blue dark deepens by a shade after the new room finishes and then holds. The warm dark cools at its edges and does not go out. Planks settle across the grass toward the touched door, a path appearing without anyone laying it. The planks knock once against each other and lie flat. A beetle crosses one plank and drops into the grass.
Hooded figures gather at a row of doors and none of them enter together. Their hems stop at the thresholds. One hood turns toward the new stair and turns back. Another figure remains at the edge of the trees and does not come into the meadow. Leaves move behind that figure. The figure does not. The hand leaves the wood. The print of the palm fades off the grain, a damp oval that thins and is gone. The new stair does not sink back. A last tread, half-formed at the side, finishes itself, and then no more wood arrives. The finished tread takes a scatter of pollen and keeps it.
The rooted doors remain upright. The new room stands over the grass with its roof open to the day. Wind crosses the missing roof and does not take the walls. A scrap of dry grass blows in and lodges at the base of the new stair and stays. No one is in any threshold. The three darks stay in their doorways, unentered, each still its own color of nothing. The planks stop at the door the hand already left, and the figure at the trees stays at the trees while the new stair holds every step it grew.
Cloud passes the open top of the new room and leaves a darker minute on the plain walls, then the light returns to what it was. The blue dark in the nearest unentered door does not take that returning light. A plank nearest the threshold lifts at one end, settles, and shows a pale underside that the grass has not stained. The hand does not come back to the wood. Hoods at the row of doors remain a row. The stair's lowest tread, rooted among stems, takes the weight of nothing and does not sink by a hair.