THE DOORKNOB

G. ROBERT SCOTT

It started with the slamming of a door.

Yes, I did it.

Of course, you're now making judgments - you think I deserve whatever consequence resulted from that slam. After all, slamming doors is childish. Barbarian. An unwarranted violation of mother's dictums.

In my defense, I would like to point out that the slam was due not to anger, but to haste.

If I hadn't flung the door shut that very instant, the dog would have eaten my dinner. I swear it. Rosie - whose year-old black tongue is like a meat-seeking missile - had loped into my bedroom in pursuit of the spaghetti I'd just reheated by microwave.

I didn't even see her coming.

Rosie darted in and came up like a porpoise - her damp nose ramming my plate hand and nearly toppling the entire meal to the floor. But I was dexterous. Caught all but a single meatball.

For a moment - a brief moment - the Chow wasn't sure whether to go for the unbalanced plate or the meatball on the floor.

So, you see, I had to move. And quickly. I kicked the meatball through the bedroom entry and slammed the door shut a split second after Rosie zipped through it. Otherwise she'd have snapped up the errant beef and raced back for another shot at the whole plate.

And that's how the door got slammed. On the surface, a perfectly mundane, everyday kind of slam.

I dined in relative peace. Enjoyed a chapter in my detective novel, only occasionally bothered by the yipping on the other side of the door.

Then I noticed the spaghetti stain on the carpet and realized I probably ought to do something before it set in.

(Now you get judgmental again. You, of course, thought about this paragraphs ago. I'm a guy. I live alone. Give it a rest.)

So I tried to open the door. The knob wouldn't turn.

I yanked hard. The door didn't even shift in its frame.

I kicked the door. Barefoot. Half-an-hour later - after the tears had dried - I put on hiking boots and tried again. Two kicks put a small hole in the door. I had to halt the third kick in mid-strike - the dog's nose was poking through, sniffing. "Go get help, Rosie," I said.

No relative of Lassie, Rosie jammed her nose even farther through the door. So I spent an hour widening the hole, splinter by splinter, chunk by chunk. Once I could slip through, I fetched a screwdriver from downstairs and came back to tackle the hinges.

You'd think this would do the trick. Without hinges, the door should come loose completely.

No such luck.

The next day, I attacked the door with a saw, cut it to bits, and chucked the pieces into a Glad bag.

That left the doorknob, which still wouldn't move.

It was just hanging there in space, the proverbial unmovable object. A pretty strange sight, even in California.

I attempted to knock it out of place with a hammer, to no avail. Whatever I tried, the doorknob sat dumbly in mid-air.

Eventually, one grows to accept even the very, very odd. I started using the doorknob as a hat rack. I draped towels on it. And it made for a great conversation piece at my New Year's Eve party. Sure I walked into it once or twice, but otherwise I had a nice relationship with it for at least two weeks.

Then one morning, the earthquake hit.

The skylight above the door shattered. The book case toppled. The stairway collapsed like an accordion folder. Knick-knacks flew from the mantle. The ceiling started fragmenting and the entire foundation tilted.

As the floor started to tumble away beneath my feet, I grabbed that doorknob.

The damn thing came loose.

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