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The Apple Green Key
Posted on July 8, 2003 in Book of Days Prose Arcana
Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.
Today’s topic: Write about a gate.
Chris had a key which he didn’t know the use for.
Someone had leaned an overnight delivery envelope against his door. The paperwork wasn’t in the plastic pouch. The envelope was sealed. When he felt how heavy it was, he worried that it might be a bomb. He hesitated for a moment, reassured himself that no one had a reason to terrorize him, then pulled the jagged strip, and looked inside.
The key that came to him by this means wasn’t one of the modern ones light enough for a keychain; it was a thick-bodied thing that weighed four or five ounces. The color was the green of the light shining through conservatory palm trees, not painted on, but in the metal. Chris bounced it in his hand and tried to guess what it was made of. Dropping it to the floor caused it to ring in the bell-like ding of an old silver coin. Clues eluded him, so he took it to a friend who happened to be a metallurgist. The friend examined the object, then tried to cut a piece from the grip but couldn’t even scratch it. He proposed to Chris that he might be able to melt it down whole, separate the component metals, and determine the alloy. Chris said “no”. Keys went to things and he wanted to know what lock this one turned.
The envelope lay on the table when he returned from the visit to the metallurgist. After searching the empty cardboard pocket for the sixteenth time and after finding nothing for the fifteenth time, Chris laid the envelope on the table and set the key beside it. He took a chair, put the his elbows on the oaken plane, and gazed at the toothed metal bolt. What did it open? It came from an era before automobiles and didn’t fit any house lock that he remembered. While working as a docent at a historical society, he’d seen a similar key for a gigantic padlock that was now in the display case. Chris tried to remember what that key had looked like and compared the memory to the object at hand. The handle was different, he recalled: where the relic’s grip had been a flat, florid ear, his key possessed a simple open loop. The number and crenallation of the teeth were different for another thing. This key could not open that lock. So where did it go?
Chris scratched at his thin, amber-flecked dark beard and imagined all the locks this could possibly fit. He saw hunkering padlocks hooked to latches protecting forbidden areas. He imagined tall gray doors that impeded access to gaunt Victorian houses. He settled — for no reason other than it gave him peace — on the idea of a garden gate. The same metal as the key composed the substance of the gate. Otherwise, it resembled the old iron structures that people used to throw up around their cemeteries, linked smoothed bars spiked at the top as a deterrent to grave robbers. Chris could see through the gate and the fence, but without the key he could not enter. The builders of the fence constructed it with cunning: they knew their craft and spaced the bars so close that not even a cat could slip through in pursuit of a squirrel….
And hence to my notebooks for further development and revision.
Want to participate? First either get yourself a copy of A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves or read these guidelines. Then either check in to see what the prompt for the day is or read along in the book.
Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about what you wanted to do.
