The Locksmith's Daughter

She learned the tongues of tumblers before she learned to read, how brass remembers fingerprints, how steel keeps the small biographies of every hand it knew.

In the back room, drawers held the orphaned keys— each one a question without its door, each one a house her father could not enter.

She kept the one he made the year her mother left: a thin tooth of nickel, cut to fit a lock he never told her where to find.

Now, decades on, she walks unfamiliar streets and tries the key in every gate she passes, listening for the click that means: arrive.

Somewhere a door is waiting, patient as a vow, its mechanism oiled by absence, its hinges singing in a language only loss can read.