Chapter 1: Tags and Thorns

Zara Okafor painted walls the way other people breathed, without thinking too hard about it and with the vague understanding that stopping would kill her. She worked at night, after her shift at the copy shop ended and the streets emptied enough that she could set up without an audience. Her medium was spray paint, her canvas was concrete, and her subject matter was whatever her subconscious threw at her when the rattle of the can hit the right frequency. Last Tuesday, it was a fox with antlers standing in a field of neon wildflowers. She finished it on the side of an abandoned laundromat on Halsey Street and stepped back to admire the effect. The fox looked alive. Not in the flattering way people describe good art, but literally alive. Its painted eye seemed to follow her as she capped her cans, and the flowers around it swayed slightly, though there was no wind. Zara chalked it up to exhaustion and went home. The next morning, she walked past the laundromat on her way to work and stopped dead. The mural was different. The fox had moved. It was now facing the opposite direction, and the wildflower field had expanded to cover an additional six feet of wall. More importantly, there was a door in the center of the painting that she had definitely not put there. It was arched, made of dark wood laced with ivy, and it was slightly ajar. Through the crack, she could see light that did not match the overcast morning around her. It was golden, warm, the kind of light that belongs to places where seasons do not follow calendars. A woman walking her dog passed by without noticing anything unusual. Zara reached out and touched the painted door. Her fingers went through the wall. Not through the brick, but through some membrane that felt like pushing through a soap bubble. She yanked her hand back and stared at her paint-stained fingertips, now dusted with real pollen from a place that should not exist.