The Keyholder

If Mimosa is your strain, this is your sign: the Keyholder. The square above the harbor steps at seven in the morning, the shutters down the row still closed and a yellow awning just rolled out over your head, and you with the long crank in your hand and forty keys on one iron ring.

If Mimosa is your strain

You are the first key in the lock. While the rest of the town is still deciding whether to get up, you are crossing the square in the blue half-light with forty keys on one iron ring, and you know without looking which one comes next. You like the hour before anyone needs anything, when the only sounds are the sea and your own keys. It is the only time a whole town is yours to open.

You move in a circuit, brisk and clockwise, and you talk to the doors. Every lock has a temper and you know them all: the one that needs a lift, the one that needs patience, the one that only turns if you hum. You are cheerful about it, not because the work is easy but because something shut is a question, and you like being the answer.

At your best you are the reason a place feels awake before anyone arrives. One shutter folds back, then another, the awnings roll out yellow over the flagstones, and when the first sun clears the harbor wall it finds everything ready for it. People walk into the morning you made and think it was always like that. You let them.

Your flaw is the keys. You never give one back. There are keys on your ring for doors that were painted over years ago and for a shop that closed before you started, and the ring gets heavier every spring, and you would rather carry it than decide which ones are finished. The people who love you have stopped asking. They just admire your arm.

What you need is a square that faces the sunrise, a crank that turns without complaint, and five quiet minutes on the harbor steps once the last awning is out. Give you that, and the whole town gets its seven o’clock.

Your hour: Seven o’clock
Your place: The square above the harbor steps
Your object: A ring of forty keys
Your tempo: Brisk and clockwise
Your weather: First sun over the harbor wall
Your flaw: You never give a key back

Your people

The Night Courier (Sour Diesel)The Night Courier is never late, and neither are you. His last run crosses the square as your first shutter folds back; you have never spoken, but you nod, and that is the handover.
The Funky Gourmet (Blue Cheese)The Funky Gourmet never goes home at six, so his are the shutters you open gently. Every Sunday he asks you to leave them down till noon. You give him a hand’s width of morning anyway.
Cindy at Midnight (Cinderella 99)Cindy leaves at midnight and never goes back for the shoe; you open at seven and never leave a shutter shut. Between the two of you, the town sleeps exactly as long as it should.

Things you say

Every lock has a temper. Learn it and it lets you in.
Seven means seven.
If it’s shut, somebody forgot it could open.
Lift at the left, then turn.
The sun shouldn’t have to knock.

A scene from your world

Thirty-nine keys

The Keyholder comes up the harbor steps at twenty to seven, when the square is still blue and every shop along its four sides is shut tight. Forty keys ride on the iron ring at her hip, each with a painted tag, and they knock together softly as she walks. The sea behind her is flat and pale. The sun is somewhere under the harbor wall, getting ready.

She starts where she always starts, at the two doors on the north side, the ones where people once queued down the steps before seven on a morning nobody here has forgotten. Yellow tag, green tag. The bookshop’s shutter needs a lift at the left corner before the key will turn; the bakery’s turns at once and then sticks, and she leans on it like an old friend until it gives. She folds the shutters back against the walls, latches them, and moves on, clockwise.

Then the awnings. She fits the brass hook of the long crank into the eye above each window and turns, and the canvas rolls out yellow, scalloped at the edge, one after another along the row: the barber’s, the hardware shop’s, the café’s, where the chairs are still stacked and the tables bare. It is not quite light yet, but the yellow is already brighter than anything else in the square, as if the awnings remember yesterday’s sun.

The corner shop is last. It has been shut since autumn, and every morning she opens it anyway, shutter and awning both, because a square with one closed window looks like a smile with a tooth missing. Its key is brass, with an orange tag. This morning someone is sitting on its step: a woman with paint on her sleeves, and behind her a new name, still tacky, lettered on the inside of the glass. She stands up when she sees the ring. “They said you’d have the key.”

The Keyholder looks at the brass key for a long moment. She has carried it through a whole winter of opening a shop for nobody. Then she works it off the ring, which takes some doing, and puts it in the woman’s hand, and shows her the trick: lift at the left, then turn. The shutter folds back. Inside, the empty shop is full of pale light and smells of new paint.

At seven exactly the sun clears the harbor wall. The light comes across the square in one long line, and every awning catches it at once, yellow going gold, the flagstones warming underneath, the first shopkeepers coming round the corner rubbing their eyes into a morning that is already open. The Keyholder sits down on the harbor steps for her five minutes. The ring at her hip is lighter by one key. She notices, and finds that she doesn’t mind.

The square

The square: Four sides of shops above the harbor, paved in pale flagstones and facing the sunrise. At seven the first sun comes over the harbor wall and crosses it in one long line.
The harbor steps: Worn stone steps from the water up to the square. The Keyholder comes up them at twenty to seven and sits on them at five past, and in between the town gets opened.
The ring: An iron ring of keys, each with a tag painted in its shop’s color. Some open doors that no longer exist. For years there were forty; there are thirty-nine now.
The crank: A long wooden pole with a brass hook at the end. It fits the eye above every window on the square, and it turns more easily for her than for anyone else, which nobody can explain.
The yellow awnings: Every awning on the square is the same yellow, by a custom older than anyone remembers. Rolled up, they look like nothing. Rolled out, they catch the first sun before the windows do.
The two north doors: Always opened first. Once, on a morning the town still talks about, people queued from these two doors all the way down the harbor steps before seven, and the custom stuck.