The Door That Was Never Heavy

A village had a door in its wall that had stood open for a hundred years, and nobody thought about it, because open was simply what the door was.

Then one hard winter, wolves came, and the village shut the door. Sensible. The wolves left in spring — wolves do — but the door stayed shut, because the shutting had changed more than the door. It had changed the hinges, which rusted in the closed position. It had changed the villagers, who now taught their children that the door was a shut thing. It had changed the path outside, which grew over, so that even travelers stopped arriving to knock, so that the villagers concluded there was nothing out there worth opening for — the shut door manufacturing its own evidence, year after year.

A child asked the elder, "Why is the door shut?"

"Wolves," said the elder, who had never seen one.

"Are there wolves now?"

The elder went to check, and found he could not check, because checking required opening the door, and the door was the shut thing. "The door is shut," he explained, "because it is shut." And this was, in fact, the truest thing anyone had said about it in eighty years.

The door did not open by argument — the child grew up and made every argument, and the hinges heard none of them. It opened the year the wall itself cracked in an earthquake, two streets down, and people walked through the crack out of simple curiosity, and found the grown-over path, and the world, and no wolves — and once enough of them had stood outside, someone oiled the hinges in an afternoon. It took eighty years of shut and one afternoon of open.

The elder, who was very old by then, stood in the doorway and wept, and when the child-now-grown asked why, he said: "It was never heavy. All those years, I thought it must be heavy."