Creative Writing Collection

A Thousand Doors Ago

Kaleb Derro/Male/17 years-old

Nicolas Iya/Canceled/17 years-old

       A thousand doors ago, I wouldn’t have felt all this pain. I wouldn’t have come face to face with my worst fears; the truth, reality. I wouldn’t have failed my mission.

       A thousand doors ago — from the 1st to the 250th — were rooms filled with people. One room for each. Many of the rooms held corpses within, the backs of their heads gouged out. The smell was awful enough that I never got used to its stench. Some had living people, their misshapen heads shaved off, and decorated with staples and stitches. I remember room 116 had a kid my age named Nicolas, and I brought him with me.

       This place is called the Canceled, and exactly 1009 doors, 3 weeks, and 5 days ago, I would’ve ended up right here just like poor Nicolas. He tells me off topic stories of stars and how he thinks they look like, an obvious confusion in his face even though he had such a confident tone. The on topic conversation that I kept turning him to, was the experiments going on in this awful place. And he would tell me, ever so casually, that this was where our souls were taken away. It wasn’t necessarily true since they were only removing parts of the brain that specialized in creativity, but it was relatively the same thing as losing your soul — according to him.

       It was at door 260, that both Nicolas and I found rooms of what we believed to be toys. Toys, books, instruments, electronic devices I’ve never seen, food I never knew existed, colors I’ve never heard of, and even pictures of the past. There was so many things to go through, it took us hours to reach the last door (which was, by the way, door 660) of these special items.

       Nicolas happily munched on a hardened sweet on a stick. It was a tight, multicolored spiral that was shaped into a circle. The following 20 doors were empty.

       I looked at the handle of door 681 and checked my watch. 8:32 am, August 2nd. My eyes widened. Two days. We’ve been going through this place for two days. Why hunger didn’t gnaw at either of us, or how we hadn’t been caught—I didn’t know. But we still had 319 doors to go.

[ this story will be continued and hopefully finished by tomorrow /)3(\ ]