Flash Fiction: The Key

The Key

I have a key and I see it every day and it has hung on whatever has passed for a key-rack in every house, flat, shared room and way-station that I have occupied since I was seventeen.

It is so familiar that I hardly see it at all.

The key’s barrel is exactly the length of my forefinger and ends in two blades of offset square-cornered lattice work. The rectangular end of the key is stamped with the letters PHX Safes and what looks like an indented rose. However, if you examine it with a magnifying glass, and I have, what leaps out at you is the roaring head of a leopard. It’s pretty intricate for a key to a safe.

You can nearly see your face in it. I’m not sure if the steel surface was always that polished. Maybe I’ve worn it smooth over the decades that I’ve carried it in pocket after pocket, holding it with one concealed hand like a totem. I rely on it to trigger the memory that gets me through another of life’s challenges. For example, today was asking my cantankerous neighbour to move his car as it was blocking my drive.

There’s a thin, cheap, pale green oval of plastic attached to the key on a steel ring. The kind of ring that would stick painfully under your thumbnail if you had to split it to change one of the keys on it. Inset into the plastic rectangle, behind a little perspex window is a piece of once-white card.

In faded dusty pencil on the card are neat capitals spelling the name “Nigel Onions”. Underneath his name Nigel Onions has also written the words “Store Manager” and underlined them. What a prat.

Also on the ring is a small, squidgy, naked troll of indeterminate gender. It has a few remaining tufts of shocking pink hair spiking up above its bulging cartoon eyeballs. The troll has a tiny potbelly on which is tattooed what looks like a strawberry. If you’re the kind of person who picks things up and smells them then that, frankly peculiar habit, would confirm faintly that that’s what it is, a strawberry.

The smell of the little troll always takes me back to a time and a place. I’d be studying and I’d find myself tapping the key against my teeth or absent-mindedly running my tongue along it’s pointed edges, tasting its unforgiving metallic hardness. Perhaps you being the sort of person who smells a random troll isn’t so peculiar anymore.

You’re wondering who Nigel Onions is. He was my manager (& a bit of a bully) when I was a Saturday boy at Tesco’s. He inadvertently taught me to stand up to authority and not to be scared of grown-ups. He’s also a man who probably got into trouble for losing his store’s safe key after he sacked me and I told him to get stuffed. Serve him bloody right.