Transom

Above the storeroom door, set into the wall, was a small window no taller than a hand, and the girl could not see the use of it. “Why glass over a door,” she asked, “when it opens on nothing but the next room, and the door below is shut all day?” Nyra looked up at the little pane and smiled, for she had wondered the same thing once.

“It is called a transom,” Nyra said, and she reached up and pressed it so that it tilted open on a pin along its lower edge. At once the warm light of the lit kitchen spilled over the top of the shut door and fell in a soft band across the dim storeroom floor. The door stayed closed and latched as it had been, yet the small room was no longer wholly dark, for it borrowed what the bright room next to it could spare.

“A shut door need not make a dark room,” Nyra went on. “The near room has light to lend, and the transom only lets it pass over the top where the door will not. You keep the one room private and the other one bright, and still the two are not sealed away from each other.” The girl stood in the lent light and felt how a closed thing could stay open at its crown.

A book is full of shut doors, Nyra told her, for a page sets a matter down and finishes it, latched and done, so the reader may move on. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. But over each closed matter you may leave a transom, a small opening above the finished account, so that the light of what was settled still passes forward into the pages that come after and falls across them.

They left the little window tilted open for the evening, and the storeroom held a warmth it drew from elsewhere. The book keeps the door, and you keep the lifting of it.