Excerpt from FIVE DOORS

…It might appear to outsiders that Marilyn is beginning to lose her mind. When she isn’t singing, she spends all her time in dusty libraries looking up her ancestors and taking notes. Finding any book she can find about bad luck, about the devil, or Ireland’s version of him.

You know, anything remotely related to her life.

What is she attempting to accomplish here? Is she looking for answers?

Will she ever be victorious over Asael?

What does she expect to accomplish looking for legalities and loopholes, trying to get ahead of one who is omniscient?

Impossibilities, again, little Mimi. And still she will try. 

She has been documenting her life up until this point, some of it is gorgeous narrative of where she has been and what she has done, but now the writing has slipped. It’s starting to look like angry or defeated chicken-scratch. 

Lists. 

She is logging copious lists of every wrongdoing. She is connecting the dots. She is making the connections.

 This happened and then that happened. 

Trying to make sense of random patterns. Her ancestors did this as well, but the full record of the lists has been lost.

Mimi found only scraps of paper.

But how much of their fates could they control?

If only they had gone this way and not that way she might never have been born. She knows now how easy it is to prevent a birth, not even prevent but to have one stolen from her. How easy it could have been for her not to exist. For her parents to have made that choice.

She slams a dusty book shut with these thoughts and coughs waving the air in front of her. Someone makes a shushing sound. She ignores them.

“So you’ve decided to stop running, then?” Asael slinks toward her, appearing from behind a bookshelf.

Startled, Mimi attempts to respond, but he doesn’t let her, “I-”

“-Is it because you have nowhere left to go?-Is it because you’ve learned that running takes you nowhere, accomplishes nothing, especially when your end is fated-“

“-The thing is-” Mimi, defeated, simple concedes, “Yes, Asael, I have learned my lesson. There is no escaping you.”

“What finally did it, huh?” He rests his head on his hand, “Just curious. What was the very thing that pushed you to this point, my dear?”

“You were with me through all of it, you should know the answer to that.”

“Oh, surely, but-” he snickers between words, “I want to hear you say it.”

“That would give you the utmost pleasure, I’m certain.”

“Oh, it would,” he gushes.

“The very moment?”

“Yes, the absolute split half of a second.”

Mimi nods and takes another defeated breath out. She takes a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket, and lights one considering her thoughts.

Asael stares at her with excitement and wonder at this development.

“You can’t smoke in here, little one. How blasphemous!”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“You lit it, darling.” Asael watches her, knowingly.

Gasping, Mimi puts out the cigarette between her fingers. She doesn’t wince, her fingers numb. She waves the air hoping no one noticed her gaff. She hides the cigarette butt in her pocket and starts collecting books from the table in front of her…