The door had always been in the garden. It was made of wood and painted green. Nobody tried to hide that there was a door. It was just that no one had seen it in years, as it was covered in ivy. It was so unused that everyone living in the house had forgotten that it existed at all.
Nadine was the granddaughter of the old Gardener. He had taken a moment to walk some tools back to his storage shed. She had been in the garden with Grandfather all morning, digging, planting and talking with the flowers. Now, she was playing a game of skip with a small stone thrown on the brick walk. She stopped for a moment to watch a pretty little bird scramble up through the ivy and then it popped through the little hole in the door to the other side.
Nadine drug a bucket over to the wall to stand on. As she tried to peer through the little grate the doorknob rattled. She tentatively reached out and opened it, slowly turning it down until the latch clicked in the mechanism. As she pushed the door open it was like a new world lay on the other side. It was not the garden, not the yard, but an entirely other dimension entirely.
She wondered who lived in this otherworldly forest. The sunlight coming in was so strange. She could see the birds flitting in vines and bushes that were unlike anything she had seen before, even in the best of gardens. Her curiosity overflowed as to what kind of flowers and fruits might exist in such a garden. Her feet had not taken a single step, but her mind was racing down the pathways as she looked this way and that. Just then a single drop of water fell from the top of the doorway and landed on her forehead. A great force of wind came up, and she was pulled into the shimmering garden like gravity ushering a single drop of water into a pool.
"Hello Nadine", the Wind said. "We've been waiting for you for a long time.", the Trees answered in chorus. The world was gold and green and fuzzy all around the edges. And Nadine knew that what they said was true.
The door clicked shut, as it always had before. It was nothing out of the ordinary, really. It was just a door. It had been the girl that was special.
Original story "The Garden Door" c Oct 2020 by Marie Lamb
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