Of Locks and Keys

1. I find the key under the doormat, just like you texted, so I pass the time perusing your kitchen. The cupboards are bare but for three types of granola: two generic bags, boring and oat-heavy, and one chunky with Oreo bits. Sour milk hides in your refrigerator’s door. No yogurt is in sight. I sprinkle out dry handfuls, sampling each crunch until your appointment ends and you return, wondering how you’ve still not grown up.

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2. Your dorm nestled below mine, though we met weeks post-move-in at a mutual’s happy hour. Licking our salty wrists and sucking on limes. Our bedroom walls throbbed from the neighbor’s dubstep like sound torture, so we transmuted insomnia into movie drinking games and forties duct-taped into fists. You’d leave your door unlocked, open to whatever the universe gifted, you’d always say. Mostly Sophomore year fizzled in a bum wine haze.

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3. When I look, the air surrounding you isn’t right. Your frame shimmers, a heatwave on distant pavement, so I imagine I have magical glasses with bottlecap lenses. Should my stare pierce your body, a potato sack on my couch after each infusion, what might I see? A jabbing poltergeist, a trickster fairy, a scientific explanation? I wish I had enough pretend cereal labels for the fancier imaginary lenses to x-ray the feelings you lock away.

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4. Our year as roommates lives in my mind in sepia tones. Degrees stuffed under our beds and two entry-level jobs apiece, Facebook loves reminding me we’d dance to Beyoncé videos and flirt with the trivia-night bartender down the block. Seventy-hour workweeks had cured my sleeplessness, but yours morphed into some other beast. We fought only once. For weeks you lost your phone and keys and, since you refused to pay the landlord’s fine, you’d buzz our apartment until the moon sunk. Often the doorbell wouldn’t wake me. Where would you go? You never shared.

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5. I wait under the duvet for my husband’s coffee delivery. Syrupy with sleep, the snow against the window screen and the slamming front door edge into dreams. The staircase creaks, but with no caffeine appearing, I sit up. Pajamas dripping like you trekked unshoveled city blocks, you slump on the doorframe. Our pattern resumes. You wink into my life unannounced, and, always, I invite you back. So I lift the covers until we’re back in our twenties, gossiping like sleepover girls. I cradle your baby bird shoulders, massage your ropey neck muscles. Your cracked lips graze my ear. When will my hair grow back? Why won’t insurance cover anything? Two mugs my husband sets on the nightstand. All I can do is open my arms to wish you closer.

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6. Underground. Your eyes swivel toward my den’s mustard curtains, and I can barely hear you add, the sunshine will be simulated. Future accommodations, you say, will have green glass windows and brutal corners. I once imagined we’d be the type of friends with matching tattoos, ones who’d pencil weekly brunch dates into matching planners. Not one who ushers your body toward closing time, Googling death doulas as you doze. You trail off, so I lean over the hospice bed. There’s that glimmer around your sunken eyes. Before I can grab for my x-ray glasses, you continue. It’s no tunnel, you whisper, but there’s a keyhole, and the key  —

 

 

Lauren KardosLauren Kardos (she/her) writes from Washington, DC, but she’s still breaking up with her hometown in Western Pennsylvania. The Molotov Cocktail, Rejection Letters, hex literary, Best Microfiction 2022, and The Lumiere Review are just a few of the fine publications where her work lives. You can find her on Twitter @lkardos.