Key

Content warning: implied gore

The key could have been there for months. I’ve always been a bit of a packrat with small things – my purse, you know, my attache, my keychain. My apartment might be tidy and free of clutter – at 100 feet square, it’s kind of got to be – but you could find a door to Narnia in my purse and not be all that surprised.

And my keychain? Keys from every place I’ve ever lived or worked or even crashed. I’m a compulsive key-copier, not because I want to break in anywhere, just… I like having them.

This one was pink. It looked like some sort of office key, thick and official and Do Not Duplicate… and pink.

And it was new.

I found it Saturday, while looking for the key to my mother’s place – feeding her dogs while she’s out of town, crashing there ’cause the guest room is three times the size of my apartment. And now that I have it, I’ve been trying it in every door I can get away with trying it in.

Today I found the door it opens.

And I’m feeling like Bluebeard’s wife, except nobody warned me.

The question is, if I call the cops – and I really ought to, I really, really ought to – how do I explain how I just happened to have the key? When I don’t even remember, myself, how it got here?


Written to the prompt here: https://promptuarium.wordpress.com/2015/12/23/new-key/

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0 thoughts on “Key

  1. Oh dear. Finding a (I’m guessing) room like that alone has to be traumatic… I’m now speculating about a clever modern or future equivalent of Bluebeard’s wife[1] stashing her key in a pocket dimension and leaving the room alone. A pocket dimension (not only of sight and sound, but of mind </rodserling>) that happens to have found the biggest handy keyring available — our narrator’s — and added the key to it. [1] See, as one example of a clever — or at least incurious — version of Bluebeard’s wife, Ursula Vernon’s retelling of Bluebeard.

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