Kathy’s had this key on her ring for twenty years now.  It hasn’t unlocked anything in a very long time.  Very occasionally, she will cull the set, when it gets too heavy, too jangly, or makes an ugly bulge in her clutch bag or her pocket.  Picking through, she’ll remove the key from her bike lock, the one that didn’t keep her bike from being stolen.  Another time she’ll sacrifice to the trash her parent’s house key, since they fled Buffalo, New York,  for the horrors of south Florida.  Other openers take their places.  One for the padlock on her storage space in the basement of building.  Another for the mailbox in the lobby.  The lock for the new bike.  Her rotating cast of facilitators. 

This particular key once unlocked a door to a young woman’s dorm room.  The woman’s name was Kim.  They’d met at freshman orientation and very quickly became a couple, complete with testaments of love, rumpled sheets and the promise of future cohabitation.  Their keys were promissory notes.  They wore each other’s clothes, loaned their ATM cards, woke up smelling like the other.  It felt like marriage, without the mortgage, repetition, and fatigue.  Such bliss feels like it will go on forever. 

And then one day it stopped. 

Kathy didn’t have a say in the matter, which changed over a weekend.  She visited her parents at home and, when she came back, Kim had a new love and they hadn’t actually been that close at all.  Revisionist history, the world turning under her foot while she stayed still.  She studied hard, graduated, moved out into the world.  So why did the key stay on her ring?  Why did she hold a lifeline to nothing? 

– Robert L. Penick

Author’s Note: “Ring” was inspired my keys on my own ring, entrances to rooms that no longer exist. Sometimes we cull those rings, sometimes we need the souvenir.