The expedition was in three days. Ayanna’s ceremony was also in three. The twins slept in sleeping bags on their mother’s living room floor. Both dreamed of a blue door opening. For Olivia, it was a mix of image and sound. Someone walking in high heels on a hardwood floor, a screech of water in an old pipe, and the sound of an ice cream truck playing a song about birds. There was an empty room.

Ayanna’s: knee-length grass with a texture like velvet; four hands with yellow nails slapping and scratching their way across a golden path; a man she didn’t recognize telling her once he had been the most famous cellist in the world and that had mattered more than being in love, but now he was dead and he understood maybe he had been wrong about sentimentality; her mother handing her a rosebush made of marble and telling her to please keep it alive; and an itchy feeling like she had forgotten something vastly important and would be scolded for her carelessness.

Ayanna woke up. Her sister’s breathing was gentle, even. She listened carefully, let the rhythm of her sister’s life as it moved in and out of her nose and mouth ease her back to rest.

6

“The first time the doors appeared was in dinosaur times, approximately eighty-seven million years ago, give or take ten mil. It was a great time to be a velociraptor, running among the tall grass and stones, chasing prey, speaking to one another through chirps and snarls and tail whips and wags. Dinosaur languages are almost impossible to translate into English because of their complications. Their bodies were certain, and they spoke in direct gestures but their conversations were nihilistic and circular. The first appearance of the door in their territory was treated as if it were just another part of the world, one without merit because it could not be eaten, it refused to be broken into parts, it could not be used as shelter, and its color was ominous. When it opened on occasion, only a few were willing to run inside. It smelled like freshly cracked eggs, raw meat, blood, feathers pecked clean and rolled lightly in desert dust, and glistening ponds on a too-hot day, but inside there were trees, bright soil, and stillness.

Remember, people have evolved to the point where we need brief, planned stagnancies. We call them ‘vacations’ and the average among us can barely afford them. A chance for a person to hear her own thoughts, for reverie, and a deep, dreamless nap in a very cool room on a hot day. For the velociraptors, and this should be obvious, stillness was death. Their religion was momentum and feasts.”