Nightmare Fuel, Day the 28th. Attick Door

Day the 28th as we count down towards the end.

This one is a skeleton of a real story, and a metaphor. It's another that might be worth revisiting at some point.


"Attick Door"
by L Czhorat Suskin


They say that "Cellar Door" is one of the pretty phrases in the English language. Cellar doors themselves, of course, are some of the loveliest things you humans have made. Warped metal shedding flakes of green paint and rust onto waterstained concrete stairs, battered and warped portals between the aboveworld and the cool living earth below. I can even forgive you the iron, just this once. Just this once. The cellars themselves - not finished basements with wood paneling and shag carpets and air-hokey tables, but honest-to-the-queen cellars with earthen floors, sometimes posts of that damn iron again holding your house up. Not too tall like the building above, but just perfect so you have to stoop a bit while we walk upright. If you see us. Cellar doors are lovely and special. Ask the shade of Poe, ask Drew Barrymore.

I do not live behind a cellar door.

Times, I'm told, change. We change. Oh, there are cellars still, but not so many. The cellars that still exist are old as you measure things, still shinynew to us. They smell of wet earth and history. When I departed home to make my way, I was warned that I would find no cellar door. There'd be no woodpile or coal-bin behind which to hide a passageway to my brothers, away from prying eyes. None of the revels I knew from my youth.

I live above an attic door.

It's treacherous here, beneath the iron roofnails. The prickly pink cotton-candy colored brambles leave tiny itches in my skin. My parents visited once, only once, just after I moved in. My mother caught her wing on a roofnail, still has the scar. Just a little notch, really, but she'll never be back. The nightsky just the other side of thin layers of wood and tar aren't quite enough for her, the nighttime call through a vent across a span of tamed grasses not enough community.

from +Lindsey Clements 

This place has bred mischief in me. No shoes to help mend, no pastries to bake, no craft and no industry. I'll steal the odd sock and curdle some milk and scare some pets. It's been a way of passing time while I wait for word that someone has moved out from behind their cellar door, that I can find a new space beneath.

Then I started hearing the voices in the wires.

They run through my attick aerie, and if you listen closely they positively hum with whispers of love and sex and commerce and gossip from far-off lands. Some nights I've learned to whisper back, learned to steal a packet here or there, to slip one in. My wings have grown thinner, skeletal. My eyes see things they haven't before.

They say that "Cellar Door" is one of the pretty phrases in the English language. But perhaps, if I stay long enough, they might
say the same about the attick door.