The Room at the End of
the World
by Brian Biswas
here is a door at the end of the hall. You open it and see a second door. You open that and see a third. When you open this door, you are not surprised to see a fourth. You continue stepping inside and opening doors. You do this for a long, long time. At some point in this repetitive process you realize that each door has been painted a different color. You have no idea why this is so, but you find it interesting. A while later you realize that not only is each door a different color, but that the colors are following in order the colors of the spectrum: shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet, and that each color is more brilliant, more radiant, than the one before. It is indeed an interesting phenomenon. It never occurs to you that you might be lost and had better go back, and it is a good thing this does not occur to you, for if you were to turn around you would see that there are no doors behind you, that they are dissolving into nothingness the moment you step through them. At last you reach what you believe must be the final door. It is painted a brilliant white and it is so bright you must cover your eyes to keep from being blinded as you open the door. You expect to see a stately room, for it has been your experience that all doors lead to rooms and if one must pass through many doors to reach a room it must be because it is a very stately room indeed, or if not a room perhaps another door, this being a labyrinth into which you have stumbled and from which you shall never escape, but you see neither a room nor a door. You see nothing. Emptiness. The void. You are at a loss. Taking a deep breath, which you realize may well be your last, you step through the door. Nothing happens (did you really expect something to happen?), only another door appears and you step through this one, too.
Brian Biswas' most recent publications are in Word Riot and Nocturnal Lyric. His short story, "A Betrayal," was published in Issue #11 of The Cafe Irreal. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.
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story copyright by author 2005 all rights reserved
