Returning The Lost Key

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Returning the Lost Key

Maja found the key inside a loaf of bread. The baker refunded her nothing.

“People used to find saints,” he said. “Consider yourself fortunate.”

It was a small gold key with the worn appearance of something frequently forgiven.

That night she carried it to the palace above the sea, where every staircase led to a different version of the same regret. She wore red because the invitation had requested a colour the machinery could recognize.

At the entrance, a thin man with a face like yesterday’s candle inspected her hands.

“Have you brought what was lost?”

“I think so.”

“Thinking costs extra.”

He stepped aside.

Inside, moons travelled through brass channels. Flowers grew from the teeth of enormous gears. A butterfly waited beneath the floor with its wings spread, apparently holding the building together.

The keeper lowered his great green head. Behind his goggles, stars moved about like people looking for their seats in a dark theatre.

“I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

“Since when?”

He consulted a mechanism behind his ear.

“Thursday. Also the twelfth century. There’s been a fault.”

Maja held up the key.

“What does it open?”

The keeper looked embarrassed. Somewhere in his neck a little wheel stopped turning.

“I was hoping you remembered.”

They tried the doors.

One opened onto a kitchen where her mother was still young. A kettle trembled on the stove. Maja closed it before anyone turned around.

Another contained all the words she had swallowed. They crowded toward the light, pale and furious.

A third opened onto the sea.

“That one always does,” said the keeper.

By dawn they had tried everything except a narrow door beneath his left eye.

“That’s a cupboard,” he said quickly.

Maja climbed the golden staircase beside his cheek. The key fitted.

Inside sat a boy repairing a wooden boat. He had been there so long that dust had grown a small garden on his shoulders.

The keeper’s machinery fell silent.

“Did you finish it?” he asked.

The boy shook his head.

“I couldn’t find the door.”

Maja helped him down. He carried the boat carefully through the palace and out toward the water.

The keeper watched him go. His goggles filled with ordinary tears, which caused considerable trouble among the stars.

“Was that yours?” Maja asked.

“Yes.”

“Your childhood?”

“My brother.”

Outside, the boy knelt at the edge of the sea. The boat floated.

The keeper made a sound that had been waiting several hundred years for a mouth.

Maja put the key in his hand.

“Keep it somewhere sensible.”

He opened a little compartment in his chest.

There was a piece of bread inside.