Window Exit.

Saturday, July 17, 2o1o
Midnight

I’ve finished my homework for the evening and the kids are asleep in front of the tv, so I begin to draw myself a bath, go into my room to get undressed and close the door behind me. When I go to open it a few moments later, it’s stuck. The knob will turn, but apparently not the mechanism inside it. This door has no lock, so it can’t be locked, and it opens in toward me so kicking it will do me no good. Thus begins my late-night argument with an inanimate object that appears to hate me.

There’s a butter knife stashed in a candle holder with a bunch of my pens. (Don’t ask, because I don’t know.) I begin slashing, hacking, poking, prodding, cleaving, slicing and stabbing the knob and the door around it, all to no avail. I curse this old house. I curse myself for thinking I could install a doorknob myself and think it would function properly. All the while, the bath water is still running.

Fortunately for me, the elder child hears me accosting my bedroom door and comes to investigate the commotion. She asks me if I’d like her to call anyone, since I left my phone charging in the living room. I could not think of a single soul to call for help at midnight on a weekend, so I asked her just to turn off the bath water and go back to bed. I would figure it out.

What I figured out was this: the door was stuck. Very stuck. A new kind of stuck that is so persistent that if I could patent this special kind of stuck I would be a very rich woman. I don’t want to do this, but it looks like I’m going to have to.
I move all items from my windowsill and the bookcase directly below it, throw open the window as far as it will go, push the screen out, climb up onto the sill and jump two stories, through a holly tree, out the window into the darkness. The only thing I can make out in the shadows is the screen, which I think I landed on. Fortunately for me, the neighbor left her axe at my place on Fourth of July. I grab it and go knock on my own back door. The elder child lets me in, sees the axe, looks at me with an expression of horror and backs away.

Do I really have to explain to this child that I’m not here to dismember her??
Nevermind.

I take the axe to my doorknob, missing the first time and making my bedroom door even more unsightly than it was to begin with. Have you ever tried swinging an axe in a very small, confined space?? It’s not an easy feat to accomplish and hit your target. Sure, I’d had drinks, but not enough to sully my freefall into darkness, or any other part of this disaster for that matter. Attempt number two connects and the plastic knob is sent to the floor. Two more hits and the base of the knob is loose enough to unscrew using a screwdriver.

One. Two. Three. Ding ding ding.

I win.

Even after completely uninstalling the rest of the knob by any means necessary, the piece that fits into the hole in the doorframe (like I know what that’s called) still hasn’t budged. See?? Really stuck. Crazy stuck. At last, I pistol-whip the piece with the handle of the screwdriver and the little stuck thing is liberated at last. And since this is the house where old shit goes to die, and once something is no longer functional it sits for many years to come, I no longer have a doorknob and am no longer willing to put one in anywhere, anytime ever again.

So, at around 12:3o this morning, after an unexpectedly dramatic and harrowing exit from my own bedroom, my new doorknob is a rag tied to a bandana.

And my hands hurt.

The end.