MonoMay 4

A Bunch of Keys

Here we are, bouncing around in his pocket, leading a quite boring existence, when suddenly there’s a flash of light, just brief, but it showed us the way. We waited, and bounced, and waited. I am the key to our owners house, and I knew that the opportunity was there for us to escape to the light. The rest of the keys are a pretty quiet lot, and listen to what I say - well, mostly. When the light comes again, we are ready. One mighty bounce and we are through the gap, and falling through the air. We fall onto something hard. We think they call it con crete. That’s what we hear quite often, so we think this must be con crete. We bounce again. Something we have become very good at is bouncing, after all we have had a lot of practice in his pocket.

Who is ‘he’? He is the fore man of the gang working on this demolition site. He’s not a nice person, always shouting at someone or other, we hear his language, we understand the words, but we hear the tone of voice he uses most. Another bounce lets us take cover under a loose slab of the con crete. It seems quite a good place to be.
“I think that we’ll be safe here guys.”
There isn’t much light, like the place we came from, but unlike there we can still see out. The vibrations from the machine breaking up the con crete bounces us even further out of sight. He is still walking across the site, probably to shout at someone.

He puts his hand in his pocket, and stops suddenly, he starts patting all over himself. I think he has realised that we are missing. The other keys are laughing, but I think it is a bad omen, he’s going to be looking for us. I try to calm them down. He starts jumping up and down waving his arms a lot, trying to attract the attention of the other workers. This takes him several minutes, as they really are not paying him that much attention, they are concentrating on their work. Eventually they notice that something is obviously wrong and stop their machines, all goes very quiet. Well, except for the foreman shouting. We assume that he is shouting about losing us.

There seems to be a lot of talking, he is frequently using words like con crete, and stu pid. The talking stops and the workmen start walking around looking at the ground, they walk right over us several times, no one has thought of looking under this lump of con crete, at least not yet. I try to reassure the other keys that we won’t be found, but I am not confident. We see the fore man go into their hut, we assume he is going to search for us there. After a while he comes back out and starts searching the machines, looking all over, inside and underneath them. All the while he is shouting about losing his f uck ing keys, that’s us he’s shouting about. This is the finest moment in our long history of being carried about, poked into holes and constantly twisted to un lock a door, or st art a car.

They all disappear into their hut. We assume that this is for their usual lunch time, we are safe for a while yet, this usually lasts a long time. We can’t see what is happening, but we can hear the fore man still shouting, he seems to be much louder than he usually is. We are used to his loud voice, but it doesn’t usually go on as long as this. Usually he goes quiet quite quickly. We know that he is upset because we have got away from him, and that he probably can’t understand how it happened. It is not long before they are back out of the hut and searching again. We are sort of hoping that we will not be found, but we think that this is just wish ful thinking on our part, and that they will eventually discover us. We can hear the crunch of their boots on the ground as they look, and look, and look for us. Then the crunching starts to get closer, and a head appears looking under the con crete, we know we have been found when he shouts to the fore man, as a hand comes towards us and pulls us out.

Soon we are back in his pocket being bounced around, there is no chance of us escaping now, he has put us in a pocket that has a z ip, so no matter how we bounce there is no way out of his pocket for us. We have to be resigned to that fact that one day he might just forget to put us in the pocket with the z ip, and that we may again have a chance of freedom.