Ayanna as an adult always paused here, certain that the previous paragraph had been written solely by her grandmother. The tell for her was the word reverie, her grandma’s favorite. It was absurd to her that these were things she had grown up believing. It was a gift to her to see these things and see the hands of so many people she loved in the work of it.

Eventually, though, a door became another kind of measurement. Every time one appeared, species disappeared. They appeared again when the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were in the midst of their great maelstrom of fucking and fighting. In some parts of the world, the appearance heralded in an age of prosperity. Hammers and shivs and slingshots were set down, the time instead spent exchanging information from the best animal blood and powders to use for healing and art to ideas of weather and migration. They showed their open palms to the doors, let their royalty and elders go through to either devastating or lovely effect, and for them, what were cities accumulated.

If Ayanna had lived a richer life with parents who didn’t believe in traditional schooling, she could have gone to Spain and seen some of the art from this time. Where other people saw a series of ladders and dots, Ayanna would have seen doors. She would have seen trails that her peers in the church had sketched into their journals rendered as the complex dots. There wouldn’t have been the queasy storytelling thrill of being “the first,” but there would have been the very human comfort of legacy.

In contemporary times, the Michigan door was the easiest to get permission to traverse because the current administration felt they had bigger things to care about. Scientists and members of the armed forces went on a variety of expeditions and found the following: