The House with Blue Doors

Ben walked home along Oak Street almost every afternoon, yet he had never really looked at the white house on the corner. One day, perhaps because he was in no hurry, he noticed something that had surely always been there: the house had two bright blue doors. One was an ordinary front door. The other was far wider, which was odd, since there was no garage anywhere near it.

He stopped to take a closer look. The wide door was scratched near the bottom, as though heavy objects had been dragged through it for years. Ben began to wonder whether the building had once been two separate houses, or perhaps something else altogether. While he was still frowning at the paintwork, Mrs Stone, who lived next door, came out to water her plants.

“Do you know why this house has two doors?” he asked. Mrs Stone had lived on the street for more than thirty years, and she looked delighted that anyone should want to know. The building, she explained, used to be a bicycle repair shop. Customers wheeled their bikes in through the wide door, while the owner used the smaller one to reach the rooms upstairs where his family lived.

“The shop closed a long time ago,” she went on, “but the family were fond of the blue paint, so they kept both doors.” She could even remember the sound of the tools on Saturday mornings, a steady tapping that had been, for decades, the soundtrack of the street. Ben listened without interrupting, picturing the customers and the children running up and down the stairs.

On the way home, he found himself looking at the other buildings with new curiosity. A window above the bakery still bore a faded painted sign, and one wall showed the outline of a doorway that had been bricked up long ago. Ben realised that a street he thought he knew by heart was full of stories he had simply never been in the habit of noticing.