The Spare Key

Ima had cut maybe forty thousand keys, and she could tell a good blank by its weight in the dark. So she knew, the moment she lifted this one out of the bin of odd stock she'd bought at the estate sale, that it was wrong. It was the right shape — a standard six-pin house key — but it was too light, and warm, and the brass had a faint grain to it like wood.

She cut it anyway, on a whim, to a profile she made up out of her head. She had never done that in her life. A key without a lock is a non-thing; you cut to a lock, not to a guess. But her hands moved the wheel and the file bit and out came a key cut to nothing at all, and she put it on her ring beside her own front-door key because the two were almost the same size and she liked things tidy.

That night she came home, tired, and used the wrong one by accident.

The door opened. That was the first impossible thing — her own lock should have rejected a key cut to a guess. But the door swung in onto her own hallway, her own coat hooks, her own smell of old books and ginger tea, and Ima stood blinking on the mat thinking she'd simply misremembered which key.

Then she saw the photographs.

Same wall. Same frames. But in the photographs she was holding a baby she had never had, beside a man she had never met, on a beach she had never stood on. The kettle was hers. The chip in the kettle was hers. The life on the wall was someoneelse's, lived in her rooms, by a woman with her exact face.

She backed out. She shut the door. Her hand was shaking so badly the keys chimed. She tried her own key — the real one — and the door opened onto her own flat, empty, no photographs, the kettle whole because she'd never chipped it.

Two keys. Two flats. One door.

Ima sat on her own floor for a long time, turning the warm brass key over in her fingers, and understood that she had cut a door not to a lock, but to a question: what if.