The Boy Twin

He was about four years old when he noticed how fun it was.

Every morning, sometime between breakfast finished and the neighbour’s kid left for school, he quietly slipped away from the mother toward the front door of their two bedroom flat. Approaching the old wooden door, his eyes gravitated upward to two rectangle panels of green textured rolled glass at the top of the door. The patterned glass obscured would-be visitors from peering in, but somehow the morning light had the audacity to enter the hallway. He tried to catch the speckles of dancing dust that swirled and pirouetted in the spotlight of morning light, enjoying the limelight. Through the panels he could sometimes see shapes like when the father returned home from work, or when other family came to visit. But he could never see through to the outside world. For that, he needed assistance.

Under the green bumpy glass, was an impossibly high door knob that looked down upon the boy — daring him to try and reach it. Despite towering above the offending small human, it didn’t pose much threat as it drooped down weirdly from years of being pulled and turned this way and that — allowing this one in and that one out. Gate keeper for nearly one hundred years, it was slammed more times than it cared to remember. It hung wearily not caring that much anymore whether he reached it or not.