Here's how this works: I asked a question. People answered the question, hopefully. I picked one of the answers and wrote a short story based on it. (Or, in the case of this particular story, I got one answer and spent the entire month trying to come up with anything to write based on it. I ran out of time. This is the first draft of the story. Please don't judge it too harshly.)
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What’s the weirdest gift you’ve ever been given in May?
A key with a number on it that opens a storage locker on a train station. Inside the locker is a box filled with dried peas and without a bottom. (Answer from dad.)
When Lina’s grandmother died, she left her a silver ring and a key. She didn’t remember ever having seen the ring before, but there were a lot of things her grandmother owned that she had never seen. It was thin, and a perfect fit for her forefinger, with engravings that to her looked like unfamiliar letters in a round script. She had tried googling the letters, to see if they were used in somewhere in Asia, maybe, or were the letters of an ancient South American civilization. She didn’t find anything, and eventually came to the conclusion they were probably not actually letters. They were the kind of pretty shapes they could well be there just to be pretty.
The key was the bigger mystery. A ring was a ring, and held value in itself, but the point of a key was to lock something away, so that someone without a key couldn’t get to it. The point of a key was to open something. The problem was, Lina had no idea what this particular key opened. She had asked everyone she thought might know, but no one did. She had thought maybe her grandmother had included this bit of information in the will, but it wasn’t there. The only thing it said after saying the key and the ring were to go to her was “Wear when opening”, and nothing else. She took that to mean her grandmother wanted her to wear the ring when opening whatever the key opened, which didn’t make any sense, just more sense than any other interpretation of the three words. Even if it had made sense, it didn’t help her find the lock the key would open. She had gone through every lock in the house while all of grandmother’s belongings were still there, but it hadn’t fit anything. So she was left with a key that seemingly opened nothing, at least nothing obvious. She was left with a mystery. Her only clue were the faded number 68 engraved on the key.
Almost a year passed. Lina graduated high school, moved to a new city a couple of hours away and started as a biochemistry student in a university. When the mystery of her inheritance had been new, she had started to always wear the ring, to carry the key around her neck in a chain, just in case she happened across whatever the key opened. In the year the urgency she had first felt to solve the mystery had faded, been covered by the new city, the new school, new friends, living alone, pretending to be an adult, but she still wore the ring and the key out of simple habit.
“Hey, Amy,” she said as she caught up with one of her new friends in the hallway, “I hope you know where we’re going, cause I don’t.”
It was the beginning of a new period, which meant new courses. In this case, their first lab course. The labs, of course, were in a whole different building than the one they’d learned to navigate earlier in the year, so now she was hopelessly lost.
“Of course I know where we’re going,” Amy told her as she led her along the corridors. Lina was already not sure she would find her way back out of the building alone. “Did you manage to do all those exercises for this afternoon? I have no idea what the answer is to question four.”
“Yeah. I don’t remember which one that was, I got them all. I can show it to you over lunch,” she promised as they went up some stairs.
“Thanks.”
“Do you know…” Lina trailed off and stopped walking. In the upstairs lobby, against on of the walls, was a set of lockers. There was nothing special about that, as such. There were plenty of public-use lockers like that around the university, where students, or anyone else, could leave some of their stuff for the day, if they didn’t want to carry them around and into the lecture halls.
“Lina?” Amy stopped next to her, confused, looking at her staring at the lockers.
There were lockers around the campus, but these lockers were different. They all were made of wood, painted white, just big enough for a backpack or a canvas bag, but all the other lockers she’d seen had a keypad. You used a code to lock them, then used the same code to unlock them. These lockers had key holes.
Her hand went to the chain on her neck and found nothing. She must have forgotten to put the key on its chain back on after having a shower last night.
It was stupid. Of course the key wouldn’t fit into this locker. There was no way. But she knew her key, and the keyholes she was staring at looked like holes the key would fit into. The keys that were in the doors looked like a match to the one she had. And, for some reason, even though there were only fifteen lockers here, the numbers on them ran from 56 to 70. The one marked 68 was locked.
There was no way. The key was probably for a different set of lockers, somewhere else, somewhere that made sense, made by the same company, and that why the locks and the keys matched the one she had.
She shook her head a bit. She knew the key wouldn’t fit, but she was now itching to try anyway. But she didn’t have the key, so there was nothing she could do today. She’d come back tomorrow with the key, to see it didn’t fit, and then she could move on from this ridiculousness.
“Nothing,” she told Amy, and started moving again.
“Sure,” Amy said, falling in step with her. “Whenever it’s nothing I also always randomly stop in the middle of the hallway to stare at some lockers for a few seconds.”
“Fine. You know the key I usually carry with me on a chain? My grandma died about a year ago and left it for me, but no one knows what it opens. And those lockers look like they it would fit in one of those. Even the number on the key matches the number on one of those locked lockers.”
They entered into the lab and took seats somewhere in the middle.
“So…” Amy paused, and frowned. “You’re thinking what? That your grandma came here, put something in that locker, and left you the key in the hopes that you would happen to one day become a student who would have a reason to come to the teaching labs here?”
“For a moment,” Lina shrugged. “And then I came to the conclusion that that’s ridiculous. That’s why I said ‘nothing’.”
Amy eyed her for a moment.
“You don’t have the key on you today.” she said. Lina shook her head. “You’re going to bring the key tomorrow and see if it opens the locker, aren’t you?”
“Look,” Lina turned to face Any, “I know it’s not going to fit. I’m not stupid. But if I don’t check, there will be a small, yes stupid part of me that will keep wondering if it fits anyway. I might as well spend the two seconds putting those thoughts to rest.”
“Okay.” Amy said, then grinned. “Now I too kinda want to see it not fit.”
***
It took her most of the evening to find the key after getting home. She almost gave up looking a few times. She had some reading to do for the next day, and it wasn’t like she absolutely needed the key tomorrow. But every time she decided she wouldn’t be able to sleep before she found the key. She would just stay up tossing and turning in bed, wondering about where it had gone. Eventually she found it behind the bedside table, where she guessed it had dropped after she’d taken it off the night before. She ended up going to sleep an hour later than she had originally intended, after finding the key and doing the reading. It still took her a long time to fall asleep. Her thoughts kept wandering in circles that she knew were pointless to think about, partly because the key wouldn’t fit the locker, and partly because even if it did, she would find out the next day, and staying up all night wondering about it wouldn’t change that.
She woke up the next morning to her phone telling her she had to. She didn’t want to. She hadn’t slept nearly enough, and it was still dark outside. She took a couple of deep breaths, then left the warmth of her blankets behind.
“Well?” Amy said as they met outside the lecture hall of their first lecture of the day.
“Well what?” Lina asked, sipping the to-go coffee she had gotten from the cafeteria and stepping into the lecture hall.
“You have the key this time?”
Lina dug it out from under her shirt and showed it to Amy. After the two took their seats, she spent a good minute looking at it, turning it around in her hands.
“You’re right. It does look like a key that would fit a locker like the ones next to the labs,” she eventually agreed. Lina nodded as the professor started the lecture.
“Let’s go there after this lecture, ok?” Amy whispered. Lina nodded again, digging out her notebook and pens.
They didn’t go. The lecturer kept them over time, and they didn’t have time to go all the way to a different building before their next lecture started. So they sat through that one too, trying to focus on…. whatever the professor was talking about. Something to do with alcohols.
Finally it was noon, and they had an hour and a half until the next lecture They both agreed to go test the key first, and go get some lunch only after. And so they finally found themselves in the second-story hallway outside the labs.
Lina found her hands slightly shaking as she pulled the chain from around her neck. She pushed the key into the keyhole. It fit enough to go in. So it was the right kind of lock. That didn’t mean that this key would open this lock.
She turned the key. The lock clicked open. She froze. She couldn’t believe it. She heard Amy swearing quietly next to her.
“When did you say your grandma died?” she asked.
“About a year ago.”
“Before you knew you’d been accepted to study here?”
“Before I’d even applied. I had been talking about it, but...” she trailed off. They both stared at the unlocked but closed door for a moment.
Lina took a deep breath and pulled the door open.
She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but this wasn’t it. Inside was an old book, a silver necklace, and, at the back, a squat cylinder-shaped box.
Amy frowned. Lina took out the necklace first. It made her fingers tingle as she touched it. Embedded in a silver background were three small, round… not stones, since one of them seemed to be amber. Another was something that looked like lava stone, black and rough. The third was also some sort of stone, almost pale enough to be white, but that reflected the light in a way that made it seem slightly translucent. There were engravings on the silver part that matched those of the ring on Lina’s finger. She put it around her neck, to leave her hands free.
The old book was titled Magic for beginners.
“Magic?” Amy asked. “Really? I mean, that book looks like you could get a good amount of money for it if you sold it to someone who believes in this kind of thing, but why couldn’t she just give it to you? Why store it in a locker somewhere you might never go?”
Lina handed her a note, written in her grandma’s handwriting, that was carefully attached to the cover of the book.
If you found this, it means you’re ready. Keep the key. When you need something from the locker, you will find a door that the key will fit that will open into it. It will keep anything you put in it safe in the meantime.
“No offense, but I think your grandma might have not been entirely in touch with reality,” Amy said carefully.
“Why would grandma have left this stuff in a locker here?” Lina asked herself, but also Amy. She opened the book on a random page, flipped through a few pages. It was written in English, but she still had trouble understanding what it said.
“You think this thing is for real? That it’s not just a coincidence that you happened to find the locker your grandma left you a key for?”
“I think neither of those explanations make sense,” Lina said.
She closed the book, set it on top of the lockers, and turned for the cylinder box still left in the locker. As soon as she lifted it out of the locker, something started to fall out of it, making a dry noise hitting the floor. Lina reacted instinctively, raising her free hand to try to block what appeared to dried peas from falling out of the hole that should have been the bottom of the box. It was too late to try to hold them in, but still only a few of the peas ever made it to the floor. The rest froze mid-fall, floating in the air at the spot they had been in when Lina had reacted. The metal of the necklace tingled the skin of her chest when it rested, the ring her finger.
Lina and Amy stared at the not-falling peas for a moment, then stared at each other, almost as frozen in place as the peas. Lina finally moved, gathering the floating peas back into the cylinder, and placing it on top of the lockers with the books. She took a few big breaths.
“Lina,” Amy said, quietly. “What just happened? Did you do that?”
“I think…” Lina started. “I think the ring and the necklace did something. Let me stop the peas when I made the move to stop them.”
She turned to look at her friend.
“Amy, I think magic might be real.”
