The key-cutting machine

Clamp the original in the left jaw and a blank in the right, and the machine goes to work at a ratio of one to one, a stylus tracing every notch of the original while a spinning cutter repeats the pattern a few inches over, tooth for tooth, valley for valley. No memory is kept between customers. Whatever passed through an hour ago, a house key, a mailbox key, the flat brass tongue of a filing cabinet no one has opened since a previous administration, is gone the moment the chuck releases it. The stylus does not compare this key to the last one, does not notice repetition, does not care that the same ring of four keys has come through eleven times this year because someone keeps losing the spare by spring. It reads only what is in front of it. Brass shavings collect in a tray at the base and are swept out weekly, a small harvest of other people's redundancy. The machine hums at a pitch just under conversation, loud enough to be present, quiet enough to be ignored, and produces, in under two minutes, an object indistinguishable from one cut sixty years ago by hand and a file. Somewhere in the shop a bell rings when the door opens. The machine does not look up. It has never had a reason to.

R. Quist