Front Door copyCC

My Front Door
by Clive Collins

          The opening and closing of the front door at my childhood home ushered us through our lives. Our house was small, the last one in a nineteenth-century jerry-built terrace – two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, two rooms and a box room up. There was no hallway; the front door in the front room opened directly on the street.
          We seldom used that room or its door. The post came through its letterbox three times a day when I was young, the envelopes falling onto the doormat like heavy leaves in a repetitive autumn. Late in the afternoon, later than the day’s last post, the local newspaper arrived, half its rolled-up bulk pushing sinisterly against the door curtain like the barrel of an assassin’s pistol. When people passed in and out of the door there was always a sense of occasion. My father opened it for his eldest daughter to go from the house to her wedding. He was the one to close it each August when we set off for our fortnight by the sea. It was the door for high days, holidays – and funerals. When my father died he was taken out through that door, returned through it in his coffin, a parcel in a wooden box instead of brown paper, and taken out through it again for burying.
          My mother then was the door’s custodian. She opened it to let me go a-wandering. And opened it to let me back in when I came home, but not at my last returning. On the day of her funeral she was not brought home. Times change. The door stood open, but she lay in the purring hearse outside, seemingly impatient for her final ride. I shut the front door then, and never opened it again.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Doors, especially front doors, have always fascinated me.  They open to the future; they close upon the past.  The Romans were right to leave the care of them in the hands of a god.  They deserve no less.

Collins

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Leicester, England, Clive Collins has spent the greater part of his life working as a teacher in Ireland, Sierra Leone, and Japan. He is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/ Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994. More recently his work has appeared in online journals such as Penny, Cecile’s Writers, The Story Shack and terrain.org. He was a short-listed finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.  Carried Away and Other Stories is available from Red Bird Chap Books.