Above the key is a bee.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins stares at the miniature versions of the same symbols he once contemplated in an alleyway behind his mother’s store and wonders how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn’t know he was in.
It began as a dollhouse.
A miniature habitat carefully constructed from wood and glue and paint. Meticulously crafted to re-create a full-size dwelling in the most exquisite level of detail. When it was built it was gifted to and played with by children, illustrating daily happenings in simplified exaggerations.
There are dolls. A family with a mother and father and son and daughter and small dog. They wear delicate cloth replicas of suits and dresses. The dog has real fur.
There is a kitchen and a parlor and a sunroom. Bedrooms and stairs and an attic. Each room is filled with furniture and decorated with miniature paintings and minuscule vases of flowers. The wallpaper is printed with intricate patterns. The tiny books can be removed from the shelves.
It has a roof with wooden shingles each no bigger than a fingernail. Diminutive doors that close and latch. The house opens with a lock and key and expands, though most often it is kept closed. The doll life inside visible only through the windows.
The dollhouse sits in a room in this Harbor on the Starless Sea. The history of it is missing. The children who once played with it long grown and gone. The tale of how it came to be placed in an obscure room in an obscure place is forgotten.
It is not remarkable.
What is remarkable is what has evolved around it.
What is a single house, after all, with nothing surrounding it? Without a yard for the dog. Without a complaining neighbor across the street, without a street to have neighbors on at all? Without trees and horses and stores. Without a harbor. A boat. A city across the sea.
All this has built up around it. One child’s invented world has become another’s, and another’s, and so on until it is everyone’s world. Embellished and expanded with metal and paper and glue. Gears and found objects and clay. More houses have been constructed. More dolls have been added. Stacks of books arranged by color serve as landscape. Folded-paper birds fly overhead. Hot air balloons descend from above.
There are mountains and villages and cities, castles and dragons and floating ballrooms. Farms with barns and fluffy cotton sheep. A working clock of a reincarnated watch keeps time atop a tower. There is a park with a lake and ducks. A beach with a lighthouse.
The world cascades around the room. There are paths for visitors to walk on, to access the corners. There is the outline of what was once a desk beneath the buildings. There are shelves on the walls that are now distant countries across an ocean with carefully rippled blue paper waves.
It began as a dollhouse. Over time, it has become more than that.
A dolltown. A dollworld. A dolluniverse.
Constantly expanding.
Almost everyone who finds the room feels compelled to add to it. To leave the contents of their pockets repurposed as a wall or tree or temple. A thimble becomes a trash can. Used matchsticks create a fence. Loose buttons transform into wheels or apples or stars.
They add houses made from broken books or rainstorms conjured from glass glitter. They move a figure or a landmark. They escort the tiny sheep from one pasture to another. They reorient the mountains.
Some visitors play in the room for hours, creating stories and narratives. Others look around, adjust a crooked tree or door, and depart. Or they simply move the ducks around the lake and are satisfied with that.
Anyone who enters the room affects it. Leaves an impression upon it even if it is unintentional. Quietly opening the door lets a soft draft rustle over the objects inside. A tree might topple. A doll might lose its hat. An entire building might crumble.
An ill-placed step might crush the hardware store. A sleeve could catch on the top of a castle, sending a princess tumbling to the ground below. It is a fragile place.
Any damage is usually temporary. Someone will come along and provide repairs. Restore a fallen princess to her battlement. Rebuild the hardware store with sticks and cardboard. Create new stories upon the old ones.
The original house in the center changes in subtler ways. The furniture moves from room to room. The walls are painted or papered over. The mother and father dolls spend time separately in other structures with other dolls. The daughter and son leave and return and leave again. The dog chases cars and sheep and dares to bark at the dragon.
Around them, the world grows ever larger.
It sometimes takes the dolls quite a while to adapt.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits on the floor of his closet with the door closed, surrounded by a forest of hanging shirts and coats, his back up against where the door to Narnia would be if his closet were a wardrobe, having something of an existential crisis.
He has read Sweet Sorrows in its entirety and read it again and thought perhaps he should not read it a third time but read it a third time anyway because he could not sleep.
He still cannot sleep.
Now it is three a.m. and Zachary is in the back of his closet, a version of his favorite reading spot when he was a child. A comfort he has not returned to in years and never in this closet, which is ill-suited for such sitting.