Note: Last night was prompt night at Write On. The items above
were presented as prompts for a story of our choosing. Here’s what I came up
with.
A square nail, the kind pulled from some old barn with a
million years of rust on it and the jagged crooks and bends of a witch’s back,
was driven into the side of door frame, very near the top. A silver ring circled
where the nail met the pine board stained dark when the house was built in the
early 1900s and now almost black a hundred years later as the original varnish aged.
From the ring dangled a single silver key and next to it a white plastic square
with some sort of green sticker on it.
Mary Beth squinted to make out more, maybe there were words
on the sticker and maybe even numbers on the plastic square, but she couldn’t
read them. If Mama were gone, she would drag a chair over to look closer, but
Mama was at the oven, striking a match and lighting a candle that smelled like
cinnamon rolls.
“Your face will stick like that,” Charlotte said from the
table. Charlotte was two years older and two years wiser, as she liked to say.
As if being ten was a rite of passage where little girls cease to be silly and
become great sages of the world.
“I hope it sticks like this,” Mary Beth answered, directing
her tongue at her sister.
“Girls, stop it,” Mama said, flicking her wrist at them like
they were pesky flies. She was always doing that these days, as if the girls
were nothing more than annoying pulses of light at the edge her vision.
Charlotte pretended not to notice, saying that Mama had always been like this,
and that Mary Beth just had to accept it and grow up. But Mary Beth knew the
truth. Mama changed the same time that Daddy changed, and both of them changed
the same night that Daddy drove that nail into the door frame and put that key
on it.
“Don’t either of you ever touch that key,” Daddy had said,
his face red like he’d just ran up the hill to the barn a dozen times rather
than drive one nail into a board. “You touch it, and I”ll know it, and believe
me, you won’t be able to sit for a month.”
Mama fluttered from the room, arms jerking about like a
marionette and Mary Beth settled into the chair next to Charlotte.
“What’s it for?” Mary Beth asked.
Charlotte rolled her eyes, grabbed a tube of lip gloss and
spread it on her lips, pursing them like she was some harlot in the movies.
Mary Beth wanted to grab the brown tube, throw it across the room, and remind
her oh-so-wise older sister that it wasn’t lipstick she was smearing on her
lips. Charlotte could have greased a turkey through a pinhole with the amount
of times she grabbed the lip gloss and pouted her lips in an hour.
“You gotta be wondering,” Mary Beth said.
“I”ll have you know, I’m not.” Charlotte flipped a page in
her chapter book that she carried everywhere. Another illusion. The girl
thought she could convince everyone that she was some Brainiac by carrying the
book around, but Mary Beth was pretty sure her sister had never read more than
two pages in a sitting in her life.
“You’re a liar.”
“Am not. I’m not curious because I know what it does.”
“Oh yeah, smarty pants, tell me.”
“It opens a lock.”
“Well, duh, I know that, but what lock?”
“The one on the door at the back of the shed.”
Mary Beth thought a minute. She avoided the shed because it
had a putrid musty smell, and if she looked hard enough, she could make out the
skeletal remains of critters in the dirt floor. The shed was old, just as old
as the house if not older, and, at first, she couldn’t remember there being a
door in the shed. Then she remembered, it was a giant oak door with hundreds of
engravings on the back wall. A door that was entirely too nice to be hanging in
a derelict shed. It had been buried behind decades of rubble when their family
moved into the place three years earlier. Her daddy had started cleaning in
that shed in October, hauling old lumber and tools and bags of garbage out for
days. At some point, he must have cleared a path all the way to the door.
“What’s that door need a lock for?” Mary Beth finally asked.
“Because there’s something behind that door,” Charlotte
said, “And Mama and Papa don’t want us to see it.”
“Wha…”
A chill air blew into the house as daddy rushed in from doing
chores. His face was long and his eyes drooped. He was only thirty-five, but he
looked like he was in his sixties. When did daddy start looking so old and
tired?
“Susan, isn’t it time for these girls to get to bed?” he
called, stomping to the fridge, opening it, and pulling from it a red beer can.
He barreled from the kitchen without even acknowledging the two girls.
Mary Beth wanted to protest. It wasn’t even seven thirty.
Their bed time wasn’t until eight, sometimes they could even stay up to
eight-thirty, but Charlotte elbowed her in the ribs.
“They go out there after we go to sleep,” Charlotte said.
“I’m going to follow them tonight.”
Mary Beth eyed the key again at the top of the door frame.
This mystery that had nagged for a better part of a month, and the answer as
simple as a lock out in the shed. She wondered how long that Charlotte knew.
Probably only a day or two, but Charlotte probably would claim she’d known all
along. Well, she wasn’t going to pull anything over on Mary Beth here. She
might be eight, but she was plenty smart, too.
“I’m coming with you,” Mary Beth said, thinking she could
bring her little blue flashlight to guide the way.
