They jangle when I nudge the hip they hang from, a small bright argument of metal that the human loves more than almost anything, and I have never understood why. Teeth cut into brass, five of them, six, a worn one gone soft at the edges, all clipped to a loop and dropped into pockets like something worth the weight.
I lifted the ends of a lanyard once, let the whole clutch swing and click against a door, and the human turned so fast, hand slapping the pocket, checking, always checking. As if the little cold shapes might get away. As if they could ever want to.
I do not understand what they open. I pour through the gap under every door without asking, I do not know which room is kept and which is given, I have never once been stopped by a lock and have never once possessed a place to lock. They fit their whole day into these notched slivers: the box they sleep in, the box they drive, the box at work where they stay still for hours.
Keep, keep, keep. They pat themselves down at thresholds like men counting their own bones.
I got under the collar of one just now, lifted the fine hairs at the back of the neck while he stood fumbling, three keys tried in the wrong order, and he shivered and did not know it was me. Then the right one turned, the door gave, warm air rolled out smelling of coffee gone cold and someone else's perfume, and I took a little of that with me over the fence and down the street to a stranger who breathed it in and thought, briefly, of home, and could not say whose.