The smallest key in circulation

A resident of a small building without a mail slot rents box 214 for six dollars a month and is issued, in exchange, a key roughly the length of a thumb, brass plated, stamped with a number that corresponds to nothing else in her life. The key opens a door four inches by five, one of several hundred set into a wall of identical doors inside the lobby, and nothing else; it will not start a car, will not unlock a house, has exactly one function and performs it without variation for as long as the rental holds. Duplicates are issued rarely and grudgingly, the postal service preferring, on balance, that a lost key become the renter's problem rather than a new lock become its own. Small enough to lose in a coat pocket, distinctive enough that most owners can identify it by touch alone in a drawer full of other keys, it occupies a strange middle place between the merely useful and the faintly sentimental, less important than a house key, more irreplaceable than either. The lock mechanism dates, in some branches, to installations decades old, the brass worn smooth at the exact point where a thumb applies pressure. Ask a longtime box holder what happens when the key is lost and watch the expression change, briefly, to something closer to grief than inconvenience.

Marion Vale