Jonah lounged on the couch with his feet up on the armrest, nose buried in a comic book, trying to ignore the fatigue building in his arms as they grappled with this unaccustomed angle relative to gravity. It was ten o’clock in the morning on a Friday, and heavy snow the night before meant that he and his sister, April, were enjoying an unexpected three-day weekend. Their parents, both able to work from home and now locked away in their respective offices upstairs, were not so lucky.
On the sagging page, fifteen-year-old Peter Parker crept across the shadowed ceiling of his English classroom after hours. He’d come to make covert delivery of an essay that extra-curricular activities in a certain red suit had prevented him from finishing on time. Out in the hall, the janitor in his coveralls mopped and whistled, none the wiser. Peter watched him warily through the Windex-scented glass of the window occupying the upper half of the classroom door.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Jonah said.
“What doesn’t?” Seated at the kitchen table in her pink pajamas, April did not look up from her phone. A year older and obsessed with the slim black rectangle since she’d gotten it six months prior as a gift for starting high school, she rarely made eye contact anymore unless it was with a camera lens. He thumbs danced across the screen.
“Crawling on the ceiling.” Jonah thumbed the page. “These writers always seem to forget that ceiling tiles are made of cork board or something. It doesn’t matter how strong or sticky his hands are, they’d never support his weight.”
“Uh huh.” April wasn’t listening. She never listened anymore unless it was to some influencer. One of the girls at school had managed to break ten thousand followers on TikTok a few weeks ago. April listened to her.
“On top of that,” Jonah continued, undeterred by her clear lack of interest, “he’s wearing sneakers. I’ll give them wall climbing. That’s just upper-body strength. But upside down? He should be hanging by his fingertips, swinging like a… What was that monkey we saw at the zoo?”
“Gibbon. Will you be quiet? I’m trying to have a conversation over here.”
“Like a gibbon,” Jonah nodded and went back to his reading.
Upside down, head dangling back over the armrest of the couch, Jonah squinted, trying to ignore the sun shining through the tall casement window that his parents had recently installed beside the fireplace. For all that the temperatures outside were in the single digits, the day was bright and the sun in the cloudless sky was blinding.
Peter Parker was still similarly inverted, though a lot less comfortable. The janitor, whistling as vigorously as ever, had decided to mop the classroom Peter was in. The artists had flipped the frame though, so it looked like Peter clung to the floor while the janitor bustled about on the ceiling. The window behind him—his only avenue of escape—looked oddly like a door. Jonah had a thought.
“Hey April.”
“What?”
“What’s the difference between doors and windows?”
“What?” Her tone made it clear that she found the question offensive.
“Doors and windows,” Jonah repeated. “What’s the difference?” His eyes drifted to the popcorn ceiling overhead. Cobwebs traced drooping arcs across the dim white. Peter could have stuck to that.
“That’s a stupid question,” April said. “Shouldn’t you be reading?”
“If it’s stupid, what’s the answer?”
April growled, unwillingly drawn from her world of words and moving images. “Doors are for going through and windows are for looking through. Obviously. What’s wrong with you?”
“Are they though?”
“What?” It was impressive, the way she could cram so much exasperation into one word. Like fitting an elephant in the microwave.
Jonah crossed his legs and set the comic down on his chest. “I was just thinking. I feel like we have these strict definitions of doors and windows in our heads, but there’s crossover, isn’t there?”
At last April managed to pry her eyes away from her screen, but only to fix her brother with a withering glare. It was wasted, however, for Jonah’s attention was on their new front door—a minimalistic glass and steel affair that looked from this angle a great deal like their new windows.
“Aren’t your friends home? Can’t you go bother them with these questions?”
“No. Mark’s house is too far away and Sam’s mom took him for an eye exam.”
“How do you know that?” She asked in a tone suggesting that she didn’t want to believe it.
“I called. They were on their way out the door. Speaking of doors, if you make a door out of glass, is it still a door? Or is it a window you can walk through?” Out on the porch, the snow was luminous. Above it—beneath it, from Jonah’s point of view—the leaves of the old sycamore in the yard wafted in the breeze.
“No,” said April, more out of stubborn refusal to agree than any real conviction. “It’s glass a door.”
“So a door you can see through isn’t a window?”
“No."
“But why?” asked Jonah, who was not yet so firm in his definitions.
“I don’t know!” April half-shouted. “Because words matter! If you tell someone to meet you at the front window, they’re going to A, think you’re a lunatic, and B, be waiting in the bushes.”
“Not if we agree on our terms ahead of time.”
“Which is what everyone did,” April growled, “when they decided that that was a door, and those were windows.”
“Yeah, I get that,” Jonah said. “But what I want to know is how they decided where the line was. Like I used to think it was the material. Doors were wood—I guess we had an iron door, so there are metal doors as well—but, you know, hard, solid, safe, and windows were glass. But then mom and dad went and got all these steel doors and steel windows—”
“Steel windows?” April was incredulous. “Did you hit your head? There’s no such thing as steel windows. That’s like…shutters or whatever.”
Jonah wagged his finger. “Nope. I was talking to one of the guys who came to install them while you were on Instagram. They’re called steel windows because the frame is made of steel. Obviously the part you see through is going to be made of glass, so there’s no point in saying that. And those are steel casement windows,” he pointed to the windows flanking the fireplace, “and those are steel dual casement windows with a fixed panel.” He pointed to the big picture window on the other side of the room. “Because the middle doesn’t open.”
April rolled her eyes. “When did you become such an expert?”
Jonah shrugged, to the extent that his position allowed it. “I have a curious mind. Unlike you. Which is why I’m trying to figure out what the difference is between a steel window and a steel door. Since you can see through both of them—”
“Oh my god, this conversation is a circle.”
“—and really, if you took the front door and stuck it in the wall there, it would look pretty much the same…”
“Maybe it has to do with distance from the ground,” suggested April, then scowled as she realized she’d been roped into her brother’s speculation.
Jonah considered it. “I do like that idea,” he said. “Except what about floor-to-ceiling windows, like the ones they have at Starbucks?”
April grunted.
“I think it’s a construct,” Jonah said, and April sighed.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t think there is a difference, except the one in our heads. I think you could put a window where the front door is, and as long as it opened and it was big enough, we would call it a front door.”
At that moment the phone rang, and Jonah jumped up off the couch, tossing his comic book onto the coffee table. “I’ll get it.”
April went back to her screen and soon forgot about her brother and his ideas about doors and windows. When she looked up several minutes later, he was dressed, with his backpack and his jacket on, fiddling with the latch of one of the new casement windows.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
He looked back at her, face split by a grin. “That was Sam. He’s back from his eye exam. I’m going to go hang out.”
“Not that. That!” She thrust her finger at the window he was now opening, letting in a frigid draught of wintry air.
“Oh, this?” He clambered up the wall, leaving black sneaker marks on the white plaster before he paused, crouching in the window. “Just breaking down arbitrary constructs. Close it behind me, would you?” And with that he vanished from view, landing with an audible crunch in the snow outside.
“See you later!” he called, footsteps fading.
April muttered and went to close the latch.
