The Third Drawer
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The key was small, brass, with a triangular head and no markings. She found it in her grandmother's sewing box, wrapped in a scrap of silk that smelled of cedar and something else, something she couldn't name. The box had come to her after the funeral, along with instructions she hadn't followed: Do not open the third drawer. Do not use the key. Do not go into the garden after midnight, though the garden was long gone, paved over decades before she was born. The third drawer still contained her grandmother's 1930s-era lingerie, in pale pastels, satins and little bows that looked as delicate as butterflies' wings. It also contained, snugged against the red silk of the corset stays and the lacy black panties, the tiny key in a gold envelope emblazoned with the initials LL. As small as her own had been, as soon as she had seen it she had known that the key was her grandmother's and she had opened the drawer.
Allowing the key to slide loosely from her hand, she brought it close to her face to examine it again in the light. It was almost too small to see; she held it up, twisted it slightly for a different angle of light. Her eyes adjusted. It was bronze, the color of gold, but hard with age. Riveted and engraved and made without the machining modern metals allowed. It didn't appear to be from an ordinary lock, though it would undoubtedly fit one, and a straightforward Diesel lock it wasn't. The oval head of the key was too small to use much of the tool to turn it. The brass appeared to be solid, with no grooved keyway.
She sat in the comfortable slipper chair close by the set of French doors at ninety-degree angles to the window, and the key sat in her lap. The maxi chair opposite, with its rich, textured upholstery, was ostentatious, and she didn't care for it, but her grandmother had always insisted her granddaughter use it whenever she was in the house. It was overdone, but the room had belonged to her grandmother: Leontine Lenoir, nee Bloomer. So had the key, and if the key was anything, it was ostentatious. She ignored the reading lamp, which one of the union manufacturing guys had hung in a hurry before he left. Light itself could distract her, and the brief, angry flash it made across the dusty surface of the key canceled out the gloom it deepened when she turned her back. Illumination, for her, was mitigated, obscured, partial. She would have to keep this key somewhere where it wouldn't touch anything else, just as she had been taught to treat the air read as a solid object, something dangerous.
Long past midnight, the only light in the room came from two small candles with brass holders scattered on the writing bureau. The pictures surrounding her grandmother's oil portrait were dials, gauges, diagrams representing every imaginable human invention: ships, machine parts, musical instruments, trains, tools. Every measurement– gauges, clocks, compasses– made melody as it indicated. Before her grandmother's death, the oil portrait and rows of square, plywood pins stuck in a corkboard beside it were all that was needed to set her in the time in which she began her work. It was useless now. Vital and wanting.
Her fingers moved. She turned the key in her hand, a quarter turn to the left and back.
On the oil portrait above the Victorian cherubs singing in pink glow of easel light blowing brown curls, the grandmother’s face was open, expectant, as though the painting were a doorway leading to a small room. That would not be possible, she tried to tell herself, and the grandmother's face blurred in the flickering candlelight. She could push the oil portrait aside, but then she would have to admit that she was alone, and she could not do that, ever, not where she could remember.
Her fingers twitched. The key felt warm. She closed her eyes, let her head fall forward so a lock of thick brown hair shrouded her face. Then she tightened her teeth together and opened her eyes. The key in her hands was warm, and in the last space behind her closed lids, a spiral was palpitating, widening, outsized, swell-ing the black pupil of her left eye to a limpid black orb ringed with a faint blue starlight. Who? Do I want to know, who? came the inevitable question in a dry voice, and she let herself ask it. If she let herself ask, she thought, maybe the answer would tell her something.
Can I know, she asked.
Who◆ About the ending
❧ About the title