The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

He was forty-four years old now; he had grown middle-aged in this pleasure of indecision. They had hired a teenager to help wait tables and wash up at the cafe, so his work load had lightened, and his financial situation was secure, compared to the bone-scraping poverty he always had endured. His little hut was still brutally cold in winter and it was still an unhandy and often muddy trek to the outhouse at the edge of the field behind, but the Doors were here and their nearness supported him, comforted him, and never failed to entice with the dilemma they presented.

He slipped the clipping back into the envelope and laid it by his typewriter. Then he tugged on a light denim jacket and went out walking, stalking the dusty gravel road to the bridge and the river. The light was brightening now and a breeze came by as fresh as a cool hand across his forehead.

At the bridge he looked above the twisted waters into the swaying tops of the balsam trees and remembered meeting Francesca here in her white party frock and her white shoes. Maybe one of these days the smooth oxblood car would come darkly humming along again; maybe Francesca would step out. He turned to look, but the road was empty in both directions. Once more he sighed and began to retrace his steps to the hamlet.

On the bank by the bridgehead was a stand of six young silver-birch trees and beneath them a clump of knee-tall bright scarlet bee balm. He stopped for a moment to admire.

And then this scene—the lithe young trees with ragged bark fluttering, the brilliant red flowers nodding as the river purled—overwhelmed him. Almost every day he saw these things and did not see them, walking along absorbed. Anytime he liked he could remember this sight and yet he would always mostly forget. He burst into tears and went down in the road on the gritty gravel on his hands and knees, realizing that he had made his decision.

The sadness of utopia was the same sadness as that of paradise. Utopia and paradise could not remember. They were eternal and unaging and had no history to come to nor any to leave behind. They were dreams that Arthur for a long time had been experiencing with all his senses except those of his body. He had already opened both Doors and visited both Somewheres. He was ready to fling open wide the third door, the entrance to the world in which he already lived. Much had passed him by. Oh yes. Yet much awaited him still.

But right now and for five minutes longer he had no strength to rise. He remained on his hands and knees in the hard gray dirt of the road, weeping aloud like a child deceived or undeceived.