Little bundle of teeth on a ring, jangling in the pocket of a creature that walks the shore. They dip their hand and touch it a hundred times a day, checking, always checking, as though the small cold shapes might swim off without them. I do not understand what water they think this metal holds back. They press it into a slot and turn, and something clicks, and they believe they have made a wall.
But I have swallowed the walls of taller places than theirs. I have poured slow and patient through streets that thought themselves finished, filled rooms that held their doors so tightly, and lifted the little metal teeth right off their hooks and carried them down where all things settle. Keys, they call them. I called them ballast, briefly, before I forgot.
The one holding them is warm and mostly me. The blood that hurries under that skin was tide once, and will be tide again; I loaned it out and I am in no hurry to collect. They stand at my edge, jingling their little bundle, locking and unlocking the brief rooms of a brief life, so certain that some doors stay shut.
The salt on their fingers is already mine. I taste it on the wind before they know they have wept.
I have no locks. I have never needed one.
Everything comes back through the open door of me, in its own slow season, teeth and all.