When I was a little girl, I thought doors had feelings. The ones with peeling paint and duct-taped mail slots felt bad about themselves. The doors painted red, wearing golden handles were snobbish. I liked the door across the street from mine best. It had dark brown wood with patterned window panes, the kind through which you could only make out light and blurry figures. My door was kind of a d---. It had a knocker shaped like a pineapple, and its paint looked nice from far away, but up close it was peeling around the edges. My door thought it was all that, but it was scarred. No pineapple knocker could hide that.

Now I don’t have a front door. Well, I guess my apartment has a door, but that doesn’t really count. All twelve doors on my floor look exactly the same, apart from a dent here and a scrape there. My first Christmas living alone, I pinned tinsel along my door frame. The landlord, Pete, told me to take it down. It’s a fire hazard, he told me through a mouthful of chocolate croissant. Pete loved chocolate croissants. On Halloween, I hung a tiny ghost from my doorknob. I found it stuffed into my mailbox the next morning.

In fourth grade, I was a ghost for Halloween. I didn’t do the typical sheet-over-head thing though. I dressed up as the only dead person I knew, which happened to be our school’s — obviously — former librarian, Mrs. Moseley. I borrowed an oversized sweater from my mom and bought a pair of reading glasses from the drugstore. Then I covered myself in cornstarch from head to toe. I got sent to the principal’s office. My mom picked me up, and we went out for pancakes.

Mom came to visit last month. She brought muffins, but they got squished in her suitcase. I thought about telling her she should’ve kept the muffins in her carry-on, but I decided against it. Mom sent me an article about how to respond to acts of kindness after I called my aunt a whore on my birthday last year. The article said it’s not about the gift itself but actually about the labor that went into the gift. In other words, it’s the thought that counts. This particular thought was going to get crumbs in the cracks between my couch cushions, but I decided that was okay.

“You’ve lost weight,” is the first thing she said to me, followed by “I love you” and it’s “so good to see you,” of course, but when she hugged me I felt small. When she pulled back and looked at me, I felt like the ghost of Mrs. Moseley. She walked around my apartment, picking things up and putting them down.

“I’m so proud of you,” she told me, while looking through the kaleidoscope I keep on the window sill. “You’re all grown up. This place feels like you.”

I was glad she was there. Having someone else see the apartment made it real. I hadn’t imagined the space. Someone else was noticing the way the hardwood sags beneath the dishwasher. Someone else could smell the eucalyptus I sprayed in the curtains.

We ordered takeout Chinese food and ate it on the floor, mingling duck sauce packets with BananaGram tiles, fortune cookies with Uno cards. She made me read my fortune aloud.

“​The door is unlocked. Reach for the handle. ​”

“I like that,” she said.

“I don’t even have a handle. I have a knob.”

“I think this is a sign.”

“A lot of doors are automatic these days,” I said.

“I think you need to put yourself out there.”

“The automatic door at Costco was broken yesterday.”

“You need to start making friends,” she responded.

I continued, “It almost caused a riot, honest to God, I saw a lady try to ram the thing with a shopping cart.” Mom threw a chopstick at my face. It bounced off my forehead with a thump.

“You could’ve hit me in the eye!”

“I’ve got good aim,” she said. I started closing takeout boxes and stacking tiles. “Hey. I love you, honey.”

“I know.”

“But all you do is go to work and come home.”

“I just told you I went to Costco yesterday.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said. She kissed my forehead.

We went out for pancakes in the morning, and then she left. I ate a squished muffin for lunch and two for dinner. I liked how they tasted. The blueberries had burst and their juice stained the mushy center and turned my fingers blue.

My second encounter with death came in eighth grade. Our neighbor Jeanette died of a heart failure in her sleep. She had just bought a 500-pound pig named Jonathan on Craigslist. Her husband was moving to a retirement home and insisted my family adopt Jonathan. After hours of my begging, Mom gave in. Two months later, Jonathan gave birth to ten piglets. Even I agreed something had to be done. I knocked on every door on our street until there were no more piglets. A girl my age lived in the house with the enchanted windows. A family who ran an ice cream truck lived two blocks down behind a door with a Christmas wreath in May. In a single afternoon, ten piglets had homes, and I knew people. I didn’t feel strange. I had friends.

I felt lonely the Monday after my mother left. I thought of Jonathan’s piglets on the way home from work. I stopped at a bakery. I didn’t think about it, I just found myself walking through the door. It had a handle, not a knob, and a tiny bell jingled when I pulled it open.

I bought eleven cupcakes and a chocolate croissant.

Submit your own fiction, nonfiction or poetry pieces to the Flat Hat Magazine at submissions@magazine.flathatnews.com.