KEYS — a fiction

Heat can kill

I have taken the keys from your windows, placed them in a little wooden box with a picture of a stag on its lid. The hinge grinds when I open it and my neck hairs raise themselves to the sound, but I drop them in and close it up.

I wonder if you will find it, hidden as it is behind the books on the shelf. You never read them anyway. Probably the last place you will look, if you ever notice. There’s a part of me that wishes you won’t. I imagine you searching for the key for a few moments before giving up and never trying again — accepting that this particular window will not open, the list of little portals gradually growing beneath your level of attention.

I imagine the temperature of the place gradually increasing as the sun beats in. There will be relief, of course, when you open the front door — you’ll receive a flood of cool air from the outside world and notice how warm you had been — but you rarely go out, stuck inside with your computers and screens; little heaters fanning your hard work into the sealed air of the flat.

They say a frog will jump out of hot water if you just drop it in. Hip, hop, and out it goes to live another day. But if you rest it in cool water and turn up the heat notch by notch you will boil it alive.

I want your processors to make you perspire; your browsers to bake you; your renderings to roast you. Degree by degree, increasing the inefficiency of your cooling systems until that final blue screen cuts you off from it all.

And there, as your books burn, you’ll see that box with its keys spilling out across the shelf and you’ll know it was me. And you’ll know that I know. And your face will be red with the heat of that knowledge.

I’ve read the forecast for today. It’s going to be a hot one.

Originally published on Tumblr

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