The Door

The door was usually shut.

It was a plain brown color, with a blockish silver handle and a single deadbolt. The gentle grain of the wood could barely be seen, tiny stripes of chocolate brown lacing together and winding up and down and around the surface. Like all the other doors in the library, that door was several years old, leaving the finish slightly faded. Despite that, the janitor had managed to keep it free of scuff marks and the like.

Tanner knew doors were for going places. Doors let you walk through walls. A sort of portal, he supppsed. Where did the portal go? Well, the metal plaque next to it said conference room 2, and nobody ever felt the need to disagree, or question, or doubt. Most doors led to other rooms; why should this one be any different?

A perfectly logical conclusion.

The difference, though, was that this door was usually shut, and by usually, Tanner meant that he had never seen it open. He had heard it mentioned, and there was a picture in the break room of an old staff party inside conference room 2, so the door had to open sometimes. Just not usually. Kind of never.

Now, some other doors were also rarely opened, such as the elevator tech room, full of metal boxes and switches and warning signs about voltage and handling directions. There was also a closet full of old legos, from back when the homeschool kids would come to play with them, but the closet had been locked for two years now. So what was the difference?

The size.

Closets and wire rooms are small, and single-purposed, whereas a conference room can be many, many things. Crafts, book clubs, quilting seminars, zentangle classes, business trainings and board meetings can all take place in a conference room. Especially an upstairs one in the north-east corner of the building, hidden behind the eleven rows of non-fiction.

The library had currents. Most buildings did. For example, when a person walked through the main entrance, the invisible current encouraged them to go left towards the front desk. Next, they would circle around past the fish tank and take a hard right, past the discards and up the stairs to the young adult section. From there, the current went straight across the second floor, crashing gently into the new audiobook display, pooling for a while around the legs of the study tables and chairs. Before picking up speed and swirling straight past the nonfiction, avoiding the atlas bookstand, curving past the spanish section and down the second flight of stairs, leading back to the main entrance, help desk and elevator. There were more currents besides the main one, of course, like the whirlpool between the board books and children's nonfiction, and the chaotic rapids between Patterson and Tolkien in the fiction section, but those were easier to avoid, and less noticeable.

Author Notes: I want to sleep, so I'll come back to this in the morning

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