I’ve always been heavier than all the other keys, and I’ve known it since I can remember. The porter of the castle favoured me, though. I think he was my first love. He’d hold me up to people and yell in their pompous faces “See these-I hold the keys so the door will be unlocked when I bloody well get there!” I was just the key for the outer garden door, and I was more ornamental than anything, but he was nice to me so I never gave him any trouble. When his leg got bad and that boy was put into his place-then I started to give trouble. Shove me in, jiggle me whichever way but that door wouldn’t budge. I was a stubborn young vixen once.
It wasn’t too long after that the castle was overtaken and burned to the ground. That was the incident where I got my deformity, the dent in my neck, but it used to look much worse. After being in the flames and searing white I was alone and scared. I was dropped by that idiot boy who only cared about himself. It was a long time after when a young man found me. He was rummaging through the rubble for materials for his house. He found me and what was left of the garden door and took me home. I thought I would have been shamed and fixed to unlock the front door for eternity, but I was wrong. He decided to make a jewellery box for his little daughter, complete with lock and key. The box was crude and she held her little treasures inside and I was so proud to be the guardian of them. Her chubby hands would fumble while trying to gasp me and she would hide me under her bedroom rug.
She eventually grew up and married, and while I was rarely used at least I wasn’t forgotten. She and her husband decided to go across the Ocean and start a family of their own, and I was taken along. Unfortunately, just as their vessel was nearing their destination, it sank. I don’t know what happened, as I myself was quite absent from the action, but the ship broke apart and sank to the bottom of a murky depth. I tell myself that she didn’t die, but the probability that she made it to shore is very unlikely.
It took decades perhaps, but I did make it to shore with the tide. A man with a metal detector found me under the sand. Instead of finding a new home he threw me into a 50-cent bin at his trailer park yard sale. For months I had to stare at that greasy man smoking his cigars in his flamboyant tropical shirts, being handled by everyone who passed by looking for something cheap and interesting. A key separated from its lock is worthless, they said.
One day a twelve-year-old girl peered over the box and held me in her hands. Her nails with chipped pink polish felt the dent in my body, and she smiled. She didn’t have any money, so she slipped me into her shoe when the man wasn’t looking and took me home to her trailer. She didn’t have a lock for me to open, but I was her protector. She strung my handle through some yarn and kept me around her neck for years and years. I was held for serenity when her parents fought in their drunken anger, when the children bullied her, when the teachers at school just couldn’t understand her sadness and her inability. This girl is an artist who grew up to become renown across the globe, and the greatest mystery was not her origin or her techniques, but the key that appears on a silver chain in every picture.
When she became an old woman that was threatened with the onset of Parkinson's disease and arthritis that would surely stop her from ever creating a piece of art again, she made the last piece for me. She painted an old, decrepit man with a lame leg, wrapped in a cloak of tattered grey. My porter. His spindly arm reaching towards a dark gate with a keyhole. Cut into the canvas were slits were I could be slipped in behind his fingers. Her last piece of art is her finest, yet it hangs in a gallery incomplete, as I am not there. I am still around her neck, listening to her slowly beating heart as she eats her pudding and plays bridge. And when she passes, I will be put into that painting, completing her legacy, and living my own.