The Cartographer of Lost Keys

In the drawer beside the stove, a congregation of small brass saints — each one a door I cannot name, a lock that has forgotten the shape of my hand.

I lay them on the kitchen table like evidence, their teeth still sharp with some other house, some hallway where a light was left on for a boy who never came back, or who came back different.

My grandmother kept hers in a tin that once held butter cookies from a country that no longer exists on maps. She said: *every key is a promise the world made before it knew better.*

Outside, the wind is learning a new language by pressing itself against the window. I hold one key up to the lamp — the oldest, the one with a ribbon faded to the color of a letter read too many times.

It fits nothing. It fits everything I have lost. I put it back with the others, close the drawer, and for a moment I hear — or almost hear — a door in some distant room beginning, at last, to open.