Today’s
Prompt:
You are at the neighborhood garage sale,
looking for nothing in particular. Something inside an old, wooden box catches
your eye. The old woman who is running the sale comes over to say something
about the object. What is it? What did she say and why?
Broadus
had never been to a garage sale before that day.
Standing
there among comparatively familiar people, it was a rather new experience for
him. Broadus spotted an object that stirred up his curiosity, an ancient-looking
wooden box. What nature of art could be
stored inside an old box to grant it such arresting power? He wondered.
“What do you know? It’s a bunch
of keys.”
Broadus
had raised the lid off the old wooden box and was gazing into its dust-rid, mold-ravished
belly. The box set in front of him with mouth gaping came across every bit,
like the prototype artifact to be chanced on in such a place. The voice that
made the comment wasn’t his, it belonged to someone situated on his left who
was surely encroaching on him. Broadus whirled and caught sight of Ms. Deville,
the old woman running the show. She always sported a grim expression and she
had one plastered across her face then; it was set like dry concrete. Broadus
wondered if any degree of massage could erase the wrinkle etched on her brow.
“What did you say?” Broadus was
a bit flustered. He couldn’t understand why but his self-control took a leave
of absence and he felt stripped and naked.
The
old woman drew near, bent over the box and picked up the ancient-looking set of
keys. “This bunch of keys,” she said. “Once belonged to somebody… peculiar.”
“That certainly explains why it’s
the sole content of a box of vast dimensions.”
“They’re a special set of keys,
see. They open doors.” The old woman
articulated the word doors with a
measure of dignified seriousness as if it wasn’t a specialty of keys to open
doors.
“Figures,” Broadus said and
rolled his eyes. His fascination with the yard sale had waned like wax inside a
microwave oven. He was done here time to run along. “That would be it for me;
I’ll be leaving now.”
“Wait. Ain’t you forgetting
something?” Ms. Deville gave a toothless grimace, which was likely her winning
smile. She jingled the keys in Broadus’ face. “The keys, Mr. Broadus. It comes
cheap. All you gatto do is say the magic word.”
His
house was part of a block of flats right around the corner from the garage sale
point. A distance, which back in the day, was called a stone’s throw. Broadus parked his car, walked around his house to
the back porch and fumbled in his pockets for the key to the house. He grabbed
it by the hole in the ring and pulled it out. He inserted in the keyhole and
turned, pushed the door open only a crack before he noticed the enormity of the
bunch of keys in his hands. It was a strange set because it wasn’t his bunch
yet, it bore a certain ring of familiarity. It was the bunch of keys from the
yard sale.
When Ms. Deville offered him the
keys just before he made his exit from the yard sale, Broadus had given it only
a moment’s thought and given his head a vigorous shake. “Naw, I’ll probably
dump in the first garbage can I spot.” He trotted off mad at himself for stopping
by to begin with and pretended not to notice the sad look the old woman gave
him. She’ll find another buyer, he
thought. Besides, it’s cheap. If it had any mysterious abilities like
she alleged, why is she trying to give it away? She needs it more than I do.
And with these thoughts playing on the rim of his mind, Broadus practically
leaped into the driver’s side of his Honda Accord and drove off into the sunset.
Broadus
couldn’t remember accepting the keys from the old woman and he was startled by
the fact that it was now in his hands. “How the heck did this happen?” He muttered
to himself. He made himself a promise to return the keys to Ms. Deville, the
old woman running the yard sale, first thing in the morning.
Later
that night in bed, Broadus was turning over in his mind the mystery of the
bunch of keys when a thought hit him. Just
maybe, there’s a pair of identical bunch and the old woman, Ms. Deville in one
desperate attempt at making a sale had slipped this bunch into my pocket when
she sneaked up behind me and then perfected her act by telling the dumbest
story yet about a bunch of keys. “Bingo!” Broadus said aloud. “That’s exactly
the way it went down. She was just desperate to make a sale.”
Broadus
fell asleep with a smile of victory splayed across his face. He dreamed of a
faraway empire where the emperor was a keeper of keys that could open any door; powerful abstract doors. One could open the door of Fate, another the door
of death, and yet another key could open the door of dreams and make wishes come true.
He
awoke to the shrill of the alarm at precisely, 0600AM. The sun’s early rays
pierced the slit in the curtain and fell on the rug but the tinted windowpane
subdued its force. The first thought, strange as it seemed, to cross his mind
was the bunch of keys he promised himself he’d return to the old woman at the
garage sale.
A
writer once noted that we live in the fast-food
age. Everything done nimbly and half-cooked. Broadus couldn’t help
wondering how right on target the statement was as he took a quick bath;
grabbed a quick breakfast cereal and was set to dash out into the morning
light. But not quite. He got as far as the threshold and then cut movement with
the tail of his eye, as something ducked into his kitchen.
“Rats? In my house, in broad day
light? Now, that’s a new one.” He decided he’d deal with it as soon as he got
back and turned to go out. Someone was in his kitchen. He could tell by the the
sound of plates skidding off the sink and smashing on the tiled kitchen floor.
“I’ll be damned,” Broadus
muttered under his breath. He seethed with rage. “That’s one plate too many,
vermin.” He spun around and darted for the kitchen and at the same instant, had
an overwhelming sense of foreboding. Something was trying to warn him against
going in there.
Ms.
Deville’s bunch of keys, which he’d safely tucked into his pants’ pocket, came
to mind just then. He pushed the thought far back into his mind’s backburner mixing
up the recall for a reminder.
“Some things can wait,” Broadus
said. “Even returning a bunch of god-forsaken keys.” He hissed, stomped into the kitchen then, froze as he
crossed the threshold.
His
dining table was split in half. Where the other half should have been, in the
center of his kitchen, a portal hung down several inches above the tiles.
What
happened next; what Broadus did was more like a reflex action than a deliberate
act of will. He put the fingers of both hands to his eyes and scrubbed his
eyeballs until they turned red. Then, he allowed
his eyelids to fall open while waggling his head to clear it of any hallucinations
brought on by vertigo.
The
setback was the procedure this young man, who before this moment, was cynical
of any process that could not be proved with the five senses, had subjected
himself to did not exactly improve his situation. The portal simply will not go
away.
The
entrée stood perhaps, seven feet from floor to ceiling and came attached
with a keyhole. When Broadus’ laid eyes on the keyhole, the old woman’s keys
produced a certain degree of heat in his pocket so Broadus had to wring it out
and hold it, instead. The key wasn’t out of his pocket one second and Broadus felt
a urge to insert it in the keyhole. A kind of weird magnetism existed between
the portal and the keys; one seemed to call out to the other. The hypnotic
power of an otherworldly-other held Broadus transfixed in that spot, he would
have bolted for the door but his legs were concrete blocks.
He
moved forward like someone walking in his sleep. The bunch of keys seemed to
have assumed consciousness; it moved the fingers grasping it toward the
portal’s keyhole.
“Someone or something is waiting
for me on the other side of that door. The encounter is bound to alter life,
the way I know it, for good. I’m almost sure of it. Be it for good or for ill,
I cannot tell. I cannot stop myself from moving towards it and it’s impossible
for me to scream. It’s that old conniving bitch’s fault.” He mumbled to himself
as sweat broke through every pore in his body. He came within the door’s
immediate proximity and heard the sound of waves breaking on the shore. “I’m coming
out on a beach on the other side; I expect to stand on the shores of some
strange sea,” Broadus said as a wellspring of tears blurred his vision.
The reality of his kitchen was
fading out in his mind and Broadus was becoming gradually aware of another
existence beneath the fabric of this temporal sphere.
His fingers went up
automatically, selecting a key and inserted it in the keyhole. He turned the
lock. Broadus was no longer standing in the warmth of his well-lit kitchen
anymore. He’d been swept off his feet into unknown territory-universe.
A
strong gust of wind howled and moaned but there was no beach in sight. His
surrounding was familiar yet, Broadus couldn’t say for sure where he was. He
was still pondering why he felt the way he felt when a little girl scurried
past him, yelling her lungs off. She didn’t pay him notice, not even a quick
look over the shoulder and Broadus couldn’t help wondering if she had the
slightest whiff of his presence.
Shortly,
a man, within Broadus’ age-belt, bolted past him, hard on the little girl’s trail.
Broadus and the fellow were identical and Broadus registered it. They may have
been identical twins in another lifetime. He wondered if the man was the girl’s father
or uncle. Somehow, he knew neither of this was true. He just knew. A few
minutes whisked by. It was more like hours, days and Broadus bumped into the
little girl lying dead covered-hidden beneath the fronds of an oil palm tree.
She’d been violated and
murdered.
Broadus
doubted if she would be missed since nobody had come for her cadaver.
The
dead girl bore a strong semblance to somebody Broadus had met somewhere outside
that perplexing world of mysteries but he couldn’t tell who.
He
trudged on through what was unfolding as a plantation rather than the forest
he’d thought it was. He was beginning to question why he’d been flung into that
world when he chanced on the man who had shot past him after the little girl.
The one he had confused for her father and probably, the one who had raped her.
He
was dead. His privates looked like something had yanked them off.
He
wasn’t Broadus’ look-alike anymore. It was Broadus and there was no doubt in
his mind.
“What is this? I would never go
so low. This is a dream and I need to
wake up.”
Broadus
walked up to the carcass and said, “You are me. I can’t believe how this is
possible, but you are me,” Broadus said in a voice that didn’t sound like his.
The
dead, disgraced Broadus who wasn’t Broadus raised his eyelids and said to the real Broadus, “Yes, and you are next.”
Broadus
awoke on his bed with a terrible headache and couldn’t tell if any of the
horror he’d just been through was a dream or if it actually happened. He rushed
to his kitchen and everything was back the way it had always been. The split in
the dining table was gone it was like it had never been there.
He
checked the clock over the sink and it said 01:32AM.
“It’s crazy that damn keys
pushing me over the bend. First thing tomorrow morning and you are so out of
this house.”
Broadus
got back to his bedroom, took Ms. Deville’s bunch of keys off the bedside table
where he’d dropped it, went to the sitting room and flung them on the couch. He
went back to his bedroom and the keys were back on the bedside table.
He
pointed a finger at the set of keys and said, “First thing tomorrow morning.”
He slumped into his bed and dreamed of a world made entirely of doors.
Eneh Akpan
June
8, 2013
