Lynn’s Key
As she pulled the key out of the box that housed all of her old art supplies, Lynn tried to remember the name of the woman who had given it to her. It had been decades ago, when she was still attending high school.
“You’ll find a use for it some day,” she remembered the woman saying.The key had hung on the wall of her bedroom for some time. When asked, she would say that it was to make people wonder. It made them look twice, and ask questions.
On the floor of her attic, surrounded by the relics of her youth, she stared at the key. It was a yellowish metal, cold and unremarkable by sight. A house key, perhaps, or a key to a shed or an office. She must have had fifty other keys like it since she’d started carrying them, but those were different. Those had a purpose; they had things to unlock. This key was just an idea.
Lynn had lived by that idea in her youth. She thought that every once in awhile, it’s good for something to be odd. Not bizarre or grotesque, just apart enough from the norm to make a person look twice. That idea had faded with the stacks of ideas scribbled on the pages that filled the boxes by her sides.
“I don’t know what it unlocks,” the woman had said. “Maybe you’ll find out someday.”
Lynn never saw her after that. She might have even thought she was simply someone she imagined had it not been for the key she rolled over in her hands.
The teeth and the grooves along the key’s length protected something. Perhaps a safe full of treasures, she thought. Perhaps a a boy’s bicycle now bound for eternity. Maybe someone, even so many years after losing it, was still looking for it. She was inspired, motivated by the unlimited possibilities, like for the first time in years her imagination had been set free.