Through the Brass Keyhole

Rowan pressed her eye to the brass keyhole and saw her mother alive. Not a ghost, not a trick of light, alive, moving, her hair pinned up the way she wore it to keep it out of the stew, her sleeves pushed to the elbow, her mouth forming the familiar, half-sung hum of some song Rowan could almost remember. On the other side of the cheap white basement door, in a city block poured and paved five years ago, was her childhood kitchen.

The old yellowed tiles, the dented fridge with the magnet in the shape of a cow, the calendar that always hung crooked above the radiator. A radio on the counter flickered with static and then resolved into an announcer’s voice: “And that’s the weather for Tuesday, March fifteenth, 2005…”

Rowan jerked back from the door so fast she cracked her head on the stone wall behind her. The hallway of the apartment building’s basement rushed in—cinder block walls sweating with damp, a humming fluorescent light, the rumble of someone’s dryer further down. The smell was detergent and dust. Her heart was going too fast. She put her hand flat over it, like that might convince it to behave.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay.”

She looked at the door again. It was nothing special. Off-white, paint chipping at the bottom, brass knob, brass keyhole. A printed label above the frame: Maintenance Storage – No Tenant Access. She had come down for the laundry. That was all. Her headphones were still hanging around her neck, a podcast she couldn’t remember pausing halfway through. The basket of damp clothes rested on the machine behind her.

You’re tired, she told herself. Four night shifts in a row. Too much coffee. The brain coughed up weird things in fluorescent light. But the brain did not usually cough up radio announcements from fifteen years ago. Ridiculous, she thought, and yet her knees were shaking. She stepped closer to the door again, slower this time. It hadn’t been locked from this side, but when she’d impulsively tried the handle an hour ago—because Maintenance Storage – No Tenant Access had annoyed her and because some curious, bored part of her always wanted to know what was behind forbidden doors—it hadn’t budged. Old building, swollen frame, she’d shrugged, and then, stupidly, she’d leaned down to peer through the keyhole.

That was when she’d seen the blur of yellow tile. That was when she’d thought, impossibly, that she smelled onions softening in butter. Now, her fingers were cold against the brass as she braced against the door and lowered her eye again. The world shifted.

Same kitchen. The timing had changed. It was brighter, the sunlight through the window thick and evening-gold. Her younger self—ten, maybe eleven—sat at the table, a cereal bowl in front of her, laptop open, tongue caught in the corner of her mouth in concentration. She had the same slope of shoulders, the same cowlick in her dark hair.

Ten-year-old Rowan didn’t look at the door. She was too focused on whatever was on the screen. Rowan’s mother walked into view, unseen by the girl, carrying a basket of laundry tucked against her hip the way she used to carry Rowan as a toddler. She paused, adjusted a towel that threatened to slide, and watched her daughter for a moment. Rowan had never seen that look on her face before: an exhausted kind of tenderness, there and gone in a blink, like a match struck in a dark room.

“Ro-bear,” her mother said. “Bedtime in ten.”

The girl mumbled something without looking up. Her mother sighed, smiled, and moved out of frame. The keyhole darkened. Rowan staggered back. The laundry basket tipped, shirts slumping onto the concrete like something boneless. Her first instinct was to run—back up the stairs, out into the sharper, truer air of the street. Her second was to call someone. But who did you call about a haunted keyhole that opened onto a kitchen which no longer existed?

The building sat where her childhood house had once been, that much she knew. She had looked it up before signing the lease, masochistically checking old satellite images, pinching to zoom, tracing the outline of the roof that had been hers. The fire had taken the inside; the developers had taken the rest.

Fire.

The word pinched something inside her chest. She wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could hold it in. The official story was electrical. Faulty old wiring. A spark in the wall of the sitting room while they slept. The smoke alarm had wailed; her mother had burst into her bedroom like a storm, scooped her up, and the rest was noise and heat and the taste of ash in her teeth. Her father had already been gone by then, months before. That absence had its own gravity. Her mother had not made it out. That was the core of it. A neat, charred ball of fact, lodged so deep that Rowan could feel it pulsing when everything else went quiet.

She looked at the door again. Her throat felt dry. This is impossible, she thought, and then again, as if the repetition might build a wall: This is impossible. The fluorescent above her buzzed louder, then flickered. In the momentary dim, the brass keyhole gleamed like a small, waiting eye.

She lasted almost twelve hours.

She went back upstairs, forced herself to make coffee, stared at her laptop until emails resolved into meaningless shapes. She answered three of them anyway, because rent and student loans did not care about supernatural architecture.

When she did sleep, it was brief and panicked. She dreamed she was small again, her face pressed to a different keyhole, smoke curling through the cracks of the door, her mother’s voice calling from the other side. She woke on the sofa with her heart galloping and the taste of ash back on her tongue.

By late afternoon, the sunlight had tilted across the living room floor in a way that matched the memory of that kitchen. Her resolve gave out. She told herself it was research. Investigation. She would go downstairs, she would look one more time, she would prove to herself that the night shift had fried her brain and that the door opened onto a collection of mops and rusted tools. She would get a grip.

The basement was empty when she pushed the heavy door open. The hum of the machines sounded like far-off bees. The Maintenance Storage door waited, unchanged. Her hands shook as she turned the knob, just in case. It didn’t budge, just as before. One more look, she bargained with herself. Then I walk away. Eye to keyhole. Breath held. The kitchen again. Later. The light outside had gone. The overheads were on, that particular sickly yellow Rowan remembered hating as a child. Her mother stood at the counter, shoulders stiff, reading something. A bill, judging by the tightness around her mouth.

On the table, the laptop had been pushed aside. There was a science project laid out—a shoe box, construction paper, and three badly drawn planets in marker. Ten-year-old Rowan fidgeted in her chair, kicking the rung, chewing on her thumbnail.

“Can’t you ask Dad?” the girl said.

Her mother didn’t look up from the paper. “We’ve been over this,” she said. Her voice was flat. “Dad is working things out. It’s just us for a while.”

The girl shrank, shoulders curling. “But he promised he’d be there for the volcano.”

Her mother put the bill down. Her eyes were tired in a way that made Rowan’s chest ache.

“I’ll be there,” she said. “We’ll make the best volcano that school has ever seen. Deal?”

The girl nodded, slow and unconvinced.

“And in the meantime,” her mother added, forcing cheer into her tone, “you can help me with the lasagna before I burn it. Again.”

Rowan wanted to knock. To shout. To warn. She pressed her palm against the real door, feeling only cold paint and wood. On the other side, her mother moved past the keyhole, so close Rowan could see the fraying cuff of her sleeve.

“Mom,” she whispered.

The version of her mother in the kitchen froze. For a heartbeat, it looked like she had heard. Her head tipped, just slightly, as if listening. Her gaze shifted toward the door—toward Rowan. Their eyes did not meet; the keyhole’s frame was too narrow, the angle too wrong. But Rowan suddenly had the sense that if she breathed too loudly, if she moved, something would break.

Instead, the radio on the counter crackled, swallowing the moment. An upbeat song burst out, cheap pop. Her mother snorted. “Not today,” she muttered, and reached to twist the knob.

Static, then silence.

The scene went gray and blurred, as if water had been poured over the film. Rowan jerked back, dizzy. Impossible, she thought again, but the word had lost some of its weight. Because if this was impossible, so was the fact that she had known, even before the radio announcement, what the date would be on that old calendar. So was the tug of déjà vu that had started as soon as she’d signed the lease, something in her insisting she had come home, even though nothing about the beige walls and thin carpet of this apartment resembled the rooms where she’d grown up.

The building had been built over the bones of her house. She knew that. But maybe there were layers you could not demolish with a bulldozer. Maybe time itself left residue.

For three days, she made excuses not to go to work. A virus, she typed into the scheduling app. Migraine. Family emergency.

She did laundry she didn’t need to wash, just to have a reason to be in the basement. She timed it so she wouldn’t run into other tenants. She brought a notebook the second day, half ashamed of herself as she scribbled down what she saw:

Tile pattern: same. Blue cracked ones by the sink.

Calendar—red border, photo of cliffs.

Radio announcement definitely says 2005. March 14. March 15. March 17.

Each time she looked, the date had moved forward by a day, by two. Morning, afternoon, night. Her mother washing dishes. Her mother sitting at the table, head in her hands. Her younger self doing homework, arguing, laughing at something on the laptop. Once, she saw the girl furious, standing on a chair, waving a piece of paper.

“It’s not fair,” ten-year-old Rowan shouted. “You said he’d call.”

Her mother took the paper, crumpled it with shaking fingers.

“He’s busy,” she said. “Grown-ups… We don’t always… Look, Ro-bear, he’ll come around. It’s complicated.”

“He doesn’t want me,” the girl said. Her voice cracked.

Rowan had forgotten that conversation entirely. Or maybe she’d tucked it somewhere far behind the brighter stories she preferred to tell herself. Now, forced to watch, she felt like an intruder on her own life. And all the while, the dates crept toward March twenty-eighth. The night of the fire.

On the third day, she went upstairs only long enough to shower, wrap herself in a towel, and search the building’s address on her phone with shaking hands. A few clicks brought up a local news archive. Grainy photos of flames, of smoke billowing out of a familiar roof. Her house. The caption: Electrical blaze claims one, leaves one injured. She’d read the article before. She knew every word. But this time, she scrolled to the bottom, to the comments she’d never bothered with.

I live down the street. We heard shouting before we smelled smoke. Thought it was another couple fighting, someone had written. By the time the sirens came, it was all orange. Poor woman.

Another comment right below, from a username she didn’t recognize: The landlord skimped on wiring. Everyone knew. My brother did the electrics there, said it wasn’t safe.

Her breath caught. The story she had built for herself—that she was responsible, somehow, for leaving a lamp on; that her teenage sulk, her refusal to come to the kitchen when her mother called, had set off a chain of events that led to smoke and sirens and grief—that story wobbled.

She hadn’t remembered shouting. She had remembered her mother’s arms around her, the way they had been when she’d carried her as a toddler, that furious, determined strength. But memory was a murky thing.

The keyhole felt cleaner. Colder. A more objective eye. You’re losing it, she thought, staring down at her phone. Or you’re getting it back. The thought came in her mother’s voice. She went back downstairs.

The date on the calendar above the radiator read March twenty-seventh. Her mother’s handwriting circled it: Bill due!! with two exclamation points and a sad face. It was evening again. Rain blew in against the window, making the glass shine. Ten-year-old Rowan paced in and out of frame, too restless to sit.

“Go to bed, love,” her mother said, without looking up from the table. Papers were spread in front of her: bills, opened envelopes, a letter Rowan couldn’t read from this angle.

“Can’t sleep.” The girl hopped from foot to foot. “What if the fire alarm goes off again? You said they fixed it but it still beeped yesterday.”

“That was just a test.” Her mother’s jaw tightened. “They fixed the wiring in the hall, the man said so.”

The man had lied, apparently.

“Come on,” her mother said. “Brush your teeth. Two minutes, properly, and I’ll come up and tell you the stupidest story I know.”

“You already told me all your stupid stories.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised what’s still in here.” Her mother tapped her temple. “Off with you.”

The girl ran out of frame, up the imagined stairs. Rowan pressed her forehead against the basement door, as if she could feel the warmth of that night seeping through. She didn’t remember being afraid of the fire alarm before the fire. She didn’t remember the rain. She didn’t remember the big man in the boiler room saying the wiring was fine, her mother’s brow furrowing. The scene wavered.

“Wait,” Rowan whispered. “Don’t—please, don’t go to bed.”

Her mother, alone now in the kitchen, sat very still. The radio was off; the house hummed with its own noises. She lifted her head slowly, like someone listening to a sound just beyond the range of normal hearing.

“Who’s there?” she said clearly.

Rowan stopped breathing. Her mother got up. Walked toward the door. Each step carried her closer, until her face filled the smear of vision the keyhole allowed. For a terrible, electric second, Rowan thought their eyes met through fifteen years and layers of wood. Then her mother’s palm hit the other side of the door with a flat, hollow sound.

She exhaled, half-laugh, half-scoff. “Draft,” she said to herself. “This bloody old house.”

She turned away. The overhead light flickered. The image blurred to gray.

On March twenty-eighth, Rowan didn’t go to work. She didn’t answer her phone. She made coffee she did not drink. At seven in the evening, the time the fire report said the 911 call had come in, she was in the basement, sweat cooling on the back of her neck despite the chill. The first glance showed her only darkness.

“Come on,” she whispered, throat tight.

On the second, the kitchen swam into being. It was night. Too dark for details, but she knew the shapes by heart: the outline of the table, the fridge, the window. A small lamp glowed dimly on the counter. Her mother sat at the table with a mug between her hands, staring into nothing. Ten-year-old Rowan’s bedroom door must have been closed upstairs. The clock on the wall read 6:42. Seventeen minutes.

Rowan had always believed she had caused the fire. She’d had candles then—cheap ones from the grocery store, vanilla-scented, the closest thing she could find to magic. She’d liked to light them when she was meant to be asleep, watching the flame dance until her eyes grew heavy. In the official narrative in her head, she had left one burning. Her mother had been too busy, too exhausted, and had not checked. Flame to curtain to smoke alarm to sirens. It made sense in the cruel way guilt liked to make sense.

Her therapist in college had tried to pry that story loose. The blame might not be accurate, she’d said gently. Survivors often—Rowan had stopped listening. Now, she held herself absolutely still. Her mother got up. She moved out of frame, toward the hallway that led to the sitting room. There was a pause. Silence thickened. Then a faint pop, audible even through the tiny, warped tunnel of the keyhole. The lights flickered. Her mother’s shadow jerked back into view on the kitchen wall, thrown askew by a sudden burst of brightness. Another pop. A shower of sparks.

“My God,” her mother said, voice high and thin, as if she’d been expecting this and dreading it and was still surprised. “No, no, no—”

Smoke curled into the top of Rowan’s limited view.

“Ro-bear!” her mother shouted. “Rowan, wake up!”

The house alarm began to scream. Rowan flinched, the remembered sound crashing into the basement’s humming quiet. She saw her mother dash across the kitchen, barely a blur, and vanish toward the stairs. The keyhole filled with smoke.

“Mom!” Rowan cried, hand slamming against the door. The paint bit into her skin. “Mom, don’t—”

Something hot surged under her ribs; for a second, she could smell it again, sharp plastic and wood and the peculiar sweetness of burning drywall. Her eyes stung. The vision fragmented. In one shard, her mother’s arm wrapped tight around her, blanket dragged off the bed to cover her head as they pushed through a wall of heat. In another, her mother shoving her into the arms of a neighbor on the porch, shouting something about inhalation, about going back. In another, the ceiling in the sitting room bowing, orange light grabbing at the wallpaper, a crackle and then—

Rowan jerked back as if she’d been shoved. The hallway of the basement reassembled around her, cinder block and detergent and humming lights. The Maintenance Storage door stood blank and still. She slid down it, back against the wood, and put her face in her hands. She did not cry at first. Her body shook and shook, but the tears sat like stones behind her eyes.

She had not caused the fire. The faulty wiring had. The landlord had. The man in the boiler room who had said, It’s fine, miss, no worry. Her mother had gotten her out. Her mother had gone back in. The story in her head, the one where her secret candle, her childish carelessness, had poisoned everything, crumpled like paper.

In its place was something messier, more painful because it did not hinge on her. She was not the hinge. She never had been. She was just a child whose mother had made a terrible, brave decision and never came back. The keyhole had not changed what had happened. It had only taken away her excuse to hate herself for surviving it.

Eventually, the tears came. Quiet, endless, soaking the front of her shirt. When they slowed, she wiped her face on her sleeve and, in an impulsive fit of anger, scrambled to her feet and grabbed the doorknob.

“Open,” she said hoarsely. “Just open.”

She yanked. She kicked the base. The door rattled but held. Part of her wanted to see more. To push into whatever impossible space lay on the other side. To walk into that kitchen and tell her mother not to go back. To stand between her and the burning doorway and say, It’s not your job to fix everything. It’s not your fault. But that was the oldest wish in the world: to go back. To change the scene. To rewrite. The door stayed shut.

The keyhole was just a hole again, a bit of brass and shadow. She was suddenly, brutally sure that if she looked now, she would see only a closet with mops and paint cans. The aperture had done what it came to do. One glimpse, the prompt of the universe had said. Use it wisely. She pressed her palm flat against the wood, feeling only its indifferent firmness.

“Thank you,” she whispered, surprising herself.

For the truth, maybe. Or for the dismantling of a lie. For the way the world had unraveled and, underneath the tangle, something bare and real waited. When she finally went back upstairs, the street outside had gone full dark. Windows burned with ordinary, domestic light. Someone down the hall was cooking garlic; the smell slipped under her door. Her phone buzzed on the table. A message from a coworker, a question about her shift tomorrow. She picked it up. For the first time in a long time, the weight of it did not feel like a burden. On the way to bed, she paused at her own front door, hand on the knob, and turned back.

There, at eye height, the deadbolt gleamed. A small circle of metal, of not-looking. Rowan smiled, just slightly. Then she flipped it open, left the door unlocked for the first time since she’d moved in, and walked into the apartment, leaving the world on the other side to rearrange itself around the new shape of what she knew.

-End-