The Handle

The door had been sticking for a month. Not badly - the way things stick when you live with them. He had meant to plane it. He had meant to do a lot of things.

It was the handle that told him. He turned it, and the door moved, and the handle came away in his hand, the spindle still turning in the air like a key in a lock that had forgotten it was locked. He stood there with the handle. The door stood there with its hole.

He put the handle on the draining board. He went back and looked at the hole, and through the hole, at the wall behind it. The plaster had a crack in it. Not a new crack. A crack that had been there, he understood suddenly, for years - the whole time he had lived here, the whole time she had lived here, the crack had been in the wall behind the door, and the door had been holding it shut.

He put his finger in the crack. It went in further than a crack should go. He took his finger out. He did not look at it. He looked at the door, at the hole where the handle had been, and he understood that the door had not been keeping the room in. The door had been keeping the wall up.

He could have called someone. He could have gone to the phone. He could have done any of the things a person does when a wall is one failure away from being not a wall.

He didn't.

He sat on the floor with his back to the wall. The wall that was not the wall. The wall that had been holding the door up, or the door that had been holding the wall up, or the house that had been holding them both up, or him, holding the house, holding the wall, holding the door, holding the handle, holding -

He put the handle back. Not in the door. In his lap. He held it the way you hold a thing you are going to have to give back.

The house did not know he was gone. He was not gone. He was right there, on the floor, with his back to the crack, and the crack was in the wall, and the wall was in the house, and the house was on the road, and the road went on past the launderette and the charity shop and the Texaco, past everything he had ever known, and the sentence went on, and he let it, because stopping it would have meant standing up, and standing up would have meant crossing the room, and crossing the room would have meant the door, and the door was the threshold, and he did not cross it, and the sentence did not end, and the house did not know, and the wall did not fall, and the crack did not close, and he sat there with the handle in his lap, and the handle was the shape of the gap, and the gap was shaped like a doorway, and the doorway was open, and he did not go through it, and the sentence is still going, and he is still sitting there, and the wall is still one failure away, and the door is still a door, and the stairs are still stairs, and nothing here has learned to miss him, and the full stop is waiting, and he will not give it the satisfaction