Amore Door

Issue 51 • Spring 2025 • Fiction

This short story won third place in the Spring 2025 Contest judged by Fernando Flores, who wrote, “A strange story with a unique setting. Fun use of technology. Pynchon vibes.”

After the doorman checked our IDs, he took pictures of our left arms and uploaded them to a computer. By the time we sat down, sipping our beers, we saw them floating on the televisions crowding the walls: my arm was a bend of black wires that, at the midpoint, was draped in a rolled-up oxford sleeve; James’s arm was hairless, naked, and tanned to perfection, except where his skin matched the color of his wrinkled white t-shirt. Our arms were bouncing off the four sides of the screens over a white background, ricocheting off other arms just like ours—arms attached to other bodies in this bar that had once been a library.

“Is that it?” James asked.

“Just wait,” I replied.

It took us drinking half of our beers silently to see what had been rumored about this place. Two arms linked at the inner elbows, causing the screens to freeze and a text on each of them to declare: “CONNECTION!” A timer then appeared at the bottom of the screens, counting down thirty minutes. Everyone looked around, waiting to see the two arms in person. A man and a woman emerged from opposite sides of the room, walking to the front, where the doorman confirmed that their arms matched the ones on the screens. He then ushered them through a door next to his desk. The two were never seen again.

“See?” I said.

“There are like a hundred arms on the TVs,” James noted.

“So?”

“And what if our arms link?”

“Then I guess you’ll have to go with me to the room,” I said, grinning.

“I should have just stayed home.”

We watched the timer hit zero. Then the arms started moving again. The linked ones were gone. I bought us another round of beer.

“How did you meet your girlfriend again?” James asked.

“At a party,” I said.

“Lucky,” he replied. “Nobody throws parties anymore.”

“That could be fixed.”

“No,” James said. “There are no more parties. There are only parties where people recall previous parties. And if you say one new thing, everyone else mumbles about work and the sports announcers scream.”

I had a good reply to this, but the screens froze, and on them I saw what I had never imagined: my arm was linked with someone else’s.

“There’s that luck again,” James said humorlessly.

“Oh hush,” I said. “I’ll just tell whoever it is that I’m here for you. Maybe we can switch places.”

A woman wearing a blue flannel shirt appeared from a booth. I explained to her the situation and proposed that she go with James.

She shook her head.

“You can’t do that,” she said. “Only the linked arms can go through the door. Do you want to go with me or not? We have to tell the doorman either way.”

I looked at James, who said, “Do whatever, man.”

“Don’t leave,” I told him.

James nodded, pulling out his phone and starting up Block, Block, Block – a Tetris knockoff.

As the woman and I walked to the front, we introduced ourselves.

“I’m Jenny.”

“I’m Mitch.”

The room beyond the door next to the doorman’s desk reminded me of a wine cellar I’d visited in Italy, except instead of wine, the shelves held books. There was another door opposite to the one Jenny and I had entered through that said in a pink, squiggly script of light, “Amore.” We sat across from each other at a small table crammed into the middle of the room.

Immediately I told her, “I already have a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, I figured,” said Jenny. “And I have a boyfriend, although it’s a bit complicated.”

“How so?”

“How did you meet your girlfriend?” Jenny asked, ignoring my question.

“I was dressed as the Headless Horseman and bobbing for apples,” I explained. “The joke was that the Headless Horseman couldn’t bob for apples, so I dunked my neck into the water and flailed my arms around like something terrible was happening, like the apples were biting me like baby piranhas. She dragged me away from the basin. We’ve been together ever since.”

“How many years?”

“Five.”

“And no problems?”

“Not that I can think of.”

Jenny paused, thinking.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like my boyfriend and I loved each other so hard in the beginning that it was only a matter of time before we pulled away. Now we’re talking about hall passes and ethical polyamory. We’ve even watched videos of group sex and discussed the pros and cons. A con, for me, is that each video is like a live-action Gustave Doré painting of Hell.”

“It’s funny you put it that way,” I said. “I tell my friend James that dating is like painting. I say to him, ‘Imagine yourself as a painter. What you’re trying to do is seek out the one patron who will purchase your painting and take it home, but you haven’t even let the first coat dry. In fact, you haven’t even sketched the figures, much less detailed the outlines or colored in the landscape. You’re so fixated on hanging the painting on someone’s wall that you’ve overlooked the art itself. You’ve dismissed beauty for the sake of resolution.’”

“Clever,” Jenny said.

We both sat quietly for a moment. I looked over my shoulder and noticed that the entry door had a timer, which was counting down from five minutes.

“Just so you know,” Jenny said, “there’s a hacker somewhere in the bar, in one of the stacks. If I knew where, I’d tell you. Word is, the hacker can force a connection between two arms of your choosing. Maybe you can help your friend that way.”

Shortly after she told me this, the timer beeped. Jenny squeezed her way back to the entry, and I pressed myself towards the Amore door.

“Shouldn’t we go this way?” I asked, pointing at the glowing door.

“No,” Jenny said.

James was still playing the game when I returned.

“How was it?” he asked. “Fall in love again?”

“No, but I did learn something important that I need to check out,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“Sure,” James said. “But you’re buying another round.”

I chugged my beer and ordered two more pints.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I repeated.

James nodded as he stared at his phone. He was at Level 200, when the blocks rained down like bullets, but the white plane at the bottom was still clear. I had no idea how James kept it so neat.

To find the hacker, I sought out the smallest, most hidden door connected to the main room and went through it. The room on the other side was large enough to fit a few tables where small groups sat. The old bookshelves were embedded with televisions, which broadcast the arms from all sides of the room, creating a white glow that overpowered the shine of the table lamps.

“Are any of you the hacker?” I asked. When nobody replied, I added, “Or do you know where the hacker is?”

“No,” was the consensus.

I scanned everyone’s face to make sure the hacker wasn’t hiding in plain sight, even though I had no idea what they looked like. That’s when I could have sworn that the people whose arms had connected earlier were sitting at the table closest to me, so I asked them, “What’s behind the Amore door?”

They shrugged.

“Nobody ever talks about it,” they said.

I walked through a door on the opposite side of the room. It was much quieter in the next room than it was in the rest of the bar. There were no televisions, which meant that there were no people. And the only way out was the way I had come in.

I noticed a ladder on the left side of the room, which provided access to the upper shelves. I climbed the ladder and pulled out a book at the top, believing that this would reveal a hidden passage. When that wasn’t the case, I tossed the book out of frustration and began pulling and hurling other books over my shoulder until a pile eventually formed on the floor.

When I collected the books and returned them to the shelf, I discovered an arrow lightly etched into a wooden floorboard. It pointed straight to another arrow, which pointed right, which pointed to another arrow, which pointed to a book on a shelf. When I pulled this book out, the shelf slid open to reveal a hidden room, in which a person wearing a Venetian carnival mask sat at a computer terminal.

“Are you the hacker?” I asked.

The hacker nodded.

“What’s the pass code?” they asked.

“Pass code?” I stammered. “Shit. I don’t know.”

“That’s fine. There are other ways to unlock a hack. First, is this for you or someone else?”

“Someone else.”

“Okay. And are you single or in a relationship?”

“In a relationship.”

“Good. Then I want you to do something for me. I want you to pull up the text thread with your significant other and show me the most recent texts.”

Within a few seconds, I handed my phone over to the hacker, who read the exchange out loud:

Mayo.

Where are you?

Where are you?

Aluminum foil.

Where are you?

Fifteen minutes.

The hacker gave my phone back to me.

“Which arms do you want me to link?” they asked, shifting the monitor towards me. The arms were floating on the screen.

I tapped James’s. Then I attempted to attach, in my head, the unknown arms to people I’d seen in the bar. Ultimately, I pointed to an arm clad in a purple sleeve with a white flower pattern, which was justified, in my opinion, because James worked at a plant nursery.

“All right,” the hacker said, turning the monitor back. I watched them type on their keyboard for a while, until they said, “You can go now. Unless there’s something else I can help you with.”

“Actually, now that you mention it,” I said. “Can you tell me what’s behind the Amore door?”

“No,” the hacker replied.

James had reached Level 1,000 of Block, Block, Block by the time I returned to the table. The blocks fell so quickly that his eyes were glued to the screen and his thumbs rose up and down continuously in a mad frenzy. He must have been playing like this for a while because his beer was still half full.

The timer on the screens was counting down from twenty-five. Everyone was looking around to see who had the linked arms. A woman wearing a purple sweatshirt approached our table from another hidden room in the bar. She tapped James’s shoulder, which caused him to flinch but not shift attention away from his phone.

“Hey,” the woman said. “I think we linked arms.”

Since James didn’t move or say anything, I took it upon myself to try to yank the phone out of his hands, but James was freakishly strong, so I gave up.

“What the hell!” he yelled. “I’ve never gotten this far!”

“You’ve linked arms,” I explained.

“What?” he said. Then it dawned on him, once a chunk of blocks vanished. “Oh. Well, I’m gonna pass.”

“Really?”

“It’s fine,” said the woman. “I’ll let the doorman know.”

She walked away before I could respond.

“Are you kidding me?” I said to James. “What was all that crying about luck?”

James concentrated on the game, staying quiet. I peered over his shoulder, attempting to make out the blocks, but the screen was either white or black, depending on how quickly he was eliminating them.

“How can you even tell what they are or where they’re going?”

“Practice,” James managed to say.

“As opposed to luck?”

“Whatever,” James said. “It’s not like I would have met the love of my life. At most, we would have had a slightly awkward conversation and maybe exchanged numbers.”

“That’s not all,” I said. “You could have gone through the Amore door.”

“What the hell is an Amore door?” James asked.

The image flashed in my head.

I thought of all the places I had stepped during the past five years, which, by and large, were no different from the ones I’d visited in years prior. Except I had fallen in love. Now I could see that love had flooded all of these places with an ocean of clear water, which was lit up by the rays of a purple sun. And a second body of mine floated in this water and reported back the wondrous sensations to the primary me—the me who still lived in the regular world. When you went through the Amore door, I imagined, you activated your second self, and the ocean began to flow through all of the known points of your life, and the purple sun began to rise.

That’s why, as I later learned, the Amore door led to an alley behind the bar: it was so you could begin as quickly as possible to feel the double sensations, to look up at the moon and notice a trace of purple glinting in the cloudless night sky.

Issue 50 • Fall 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry