One of my pieces is standing at its own front door, patting its coat, cursing softly, because a small ring of shaped metal is not where it left it.
The metal fascinates me. That brass was iron once, forged in the collapsing core of some star that died before this planet cooled, flung out in a blast I still remember as heat. Now it is cut into these little jagged teeth. My piece has filed the universe into a pattern that fits exactly one lock and no other, and it treats losing that pattern as a catastrophe.
It slaps its pockets. It checks the same one twice. The heart I built from supernova iron speeds up, pumping oxygen it cannot see, over a jingling I could not have imagined for nine billion years of silence.
There they are. On the hook. Where its own hand put them.
I watch the relief flood through it, the shoulders drop, the breath go long. Such a small thing, and it feels the whole event: the fear, the search, the reprieve. Do you understand what you are doing? For most of my existence, no one lost anything, because no one wanted anything, because there was no one. And now a fragment of me stands in a doorway, holding a fistful of dead stars cut into teeth, feeling that they matter.
It steps inside, drops the keys in a bowl with a bright metallic clatter, and I hear the sound of me arriving home to me.
I hope it looks up tonight.
Just once, before the lights go off, at the older metal, the uncut kind, still burning where I put it.