MY FATHER HAS A PROBLEM WITH KEYS PRINT

At first, he had two keys. House. Car. Then he locked himself out of the car, so he had a duplicate key made and put the duplicate in his wallet. He kept his wallet in his back pocket, and the key made a key shaped pattern. Then he locked himself out of the house, so he made a duplicate and left that key under the mat. A week later, the key was gone. My father had the locks changed and hid his spare under a rock in the yard. He was looking for a battery for the garage door opener when he found the key he had thought he had put under the mat in a drawer in the kitchen, still in the cardboard holder from the hardware store, wrapped in a receipt. He had been overcharged for the copy by fifty cents and meant to take the key and receipt to claim his refund. Out of habit, he tried the key in the new lock, and it worked. He called his locksmith, who explained that it sometimes happened. That there were only a few locks, and what did he think, that each lock on the whole earth was different? So my father gathered all of the keys and put them on rings. He purchased red and green and yellow rubber key cozies with the intention of assigning each key a color, but he could never develop a system and so the cozies went into the drawer and the keys stayed on the rings, anonymous, sharp-edged. He made more copies, one for each of us, then locked himself out again, had new ones made. Then we moved out. For love. For money. For education. We left our keys. My father added these to his rings. After a few years, he, too, moved out. For money. For love. He discovered that his new house opened with his old keys. While cleaning a cupboard, he found rubber key cozies in purple, orange, and blue, and under the mat outside, a set of keys on their ring. Each key had a different head. Different teeth. Different slots. Every one opened his door. He looked at his house. When he put his hands in his pockets, he found the rings and the keys, bound through their heads like a collection of pierced ears. He ran his fingertips over the hard-edged ridges, knowing he could cut his fingers on these, that their very presence, their numerous number, were his scars. His life.

Patrick Scott Vickers is a technologist and instructor for Virginia Commonwealth University’s English Department and a PhD student in the Media, Art, and Text program. He graduated in 2006 with an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama. His stories and poems have appeared in Strange Horizons, Mid-American Review, and Touchstone. Most recently, his Flash art has appeared in the online journal failbetter.