#OriginalFiction – November 1

She walked through the wall like it was not there, which always bothered her. Walls were meant to be physical barriers, keeping places separate – outside from inside, public from private. The fact that the universe occasionally decided that walls did not exist for her made it even more important that she build up the distinctions in her mind.

She had not been trying to walk through the wall. She loved to hide behind the tiny shack, resting as it did on a thin piece of land jutting out into the river. Whenever she wanted to spend some time alone with her thoughts, she would come out here and sit on the far side and just watch the river run. No one could see her, and she could pretend she did not hear their voices calling her. It was like going away, without really going anywhere.

But she had never been in the shack. Its wooden front door had been padlocked closed back when her grandfather was a boy. And no one seemed to have any desire to open it back up. The building had no windows, just that locked front door and a chimney as ways in or out, so when she went through the wall, it was the darkness she noticed first.

She had instantly recognized the sensation of stepping through when she had been intending to go around. Cautiously, she tried stepping backward, which sometimes worked. But the wall was once again a physical barrier behind her.

She stayed pressed against it, feeling the roughness of the bricks through her clothes. She traced the lines of how they were laid, so carefully atop, against, under one another. Slowly, her eyes adjusted. The thatched roof was starting to fail, and bits of sunlight their way through, like tiny little flashlights. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she recognized that the roof should have been gone. With no one who cared enough to repair the thatch, it should have been destroyed winters before she was even born.

She tried to live her life pretending the magic was not there, not out in the world and certainly not in her. But that was all it was, pretend.