The Last Key

By Anushka Devesh

The house had been empty for years. Ivy climbed its walls, windows clouded with dust, and the doors had swollen with silence. People passing by would lower their voices, as if even the air around it demanded respect for secrets it carried.

I returned on an evening when the sky was bruised with rain. In my hand was a small iron key, the last one left from a ring that once held many. I did not remember when I had slipped it into my pocket, only that it had remained with me through years of forgetting.

The lock resisted at first, but metal recognized metal, and the door sighed open. Inside, the house greeted me with stillness. Every room felt like a paused breath. The chairs were covered with white sheets, but beneath them I could still hear faint echoes of conversations. The floor groaned as if recognizing the weight of someone who once belonged.

I moved through the hallway slowly, touching walls that seemed to lean closer, as though eager to confess something. A picture frame hung crooked, glass cracked, yet the eyes in the photograph were unbroken. They followed me down the corridor.

At the end was a door I had never opened. It had remained locked all my life, a mystery grown into myth. Perhaps that was why I had kept the key. My hand trembled as it slid into the lock. The sound it made as it turned was not of opening but of awakening.

The room smelled of old wood and rain. A desk sat against the wall, its drawers swollen with time. I opened one and found letters, folded and sealed, but never sent. The ink had bled into the paper, yet the words still breathed of longing and unfinished love. A diary lay beside them, its pages half filled and abruptly abandoned.

On the desk lay another key, smaller than the one I held. I lifted it carefully, and for a moment it felt warm, as though someone had placed it there not long ago. But there was no one. Only shadows that clung to corners like memories unwilling to leave.

I understood then: keys are never for doors alone. They are for hearts, for truths, for wounds we lock away and pretend to forget. This last key had waited, not to open the room, but to open me.

I wandered back through the house. The mirrors in the hallway showed my reflection, yet in each one I seemed older, stranger, as if the house was showing me every version of myself I had tried to abandon. By the time I reached the door, I was trembling.

As I stepped out, the storm had quieted. I placed both keys on the table by the door and left them behind. The house could keep its silence. I had already heard enough.

And as the door closed, I knew the house had locked itself again but this time without my key. The echo of that lock followed me down the street, and for the first time I wondered if the key had ever been mine at all.

By Anushka Devesh