Autobiography, Interrupted

Okay, so. Aldo Fontana. My name was still that, anyway. And up until last Tuesday, which now felt like a photograph you keep pulling out looking for something that was never there, life was…well, smooth. Like that 8:14 train I took. The chug-chug punctual? That was the beat to my song. And the library, where I worked —the card catalogues going shhh-click. That was me. A lot. Made things neat.

I was a person who liked things Just So. Really liked it. Maybe a little too much, eh? People probably saw just the quiet library assistant. But it felt bigger. Like I was in charge of keeping things… steady. A Pastor in this little religion of Routine.

Every day was the same steps, done carefully. Like putting together a tiny, invisible machine. Return carts: A to Z, perfect. Dirty looks at bent book corners. Hating cracked spines with a surprising heat. Then home. My place? Small. But everything knew its place. Coasters straight, aligned with the table's edge, little soldiers. Mugs hung, handles out, ready to grab. It just felt… right. Easier. And the books, yeah. Not grouped by genre or author. Mine were in the order I read them. A secret map of my brain, right there on the shelf. My life, told in paperbacks. Tuesday changed something on the map, maybe? Or maybe it just showed me the map was always a little strange.

There was, or maybe is, a kind of quiet sanity in guarding against all the mixing and messing. A kind of armor, fragile maybe, but firm enough, I thought, against the noise and mess that bubbled up from the wild edges of everything.

Last Tuesday started like every other verse. Earl Grey tea, exactly four minutes, steam rising like incense, the amber depth promising calm. Toasted bread, lightly buttered – never margarine – sliced just so, the golden geometry, crusts in place. The walk to the bus stop, timed to the second, to miss the schoolchildren, catching instead the quiet before the office workers, when the city held its breath.

At the library, the comfort of the familiar. The smell of aged paper, glue, floor polish – "history's potpourri," I called it. The hum of the old radiators beneath the windows, casting light across the linoleum. And Mrs. Albright’s request: another large-print romance, a brooding Scottish laird, ideally silhouetted against a misty Highland backdrop, sheesh, a request so worn out I barely noticed it anymore. All was as it should be. Safe. Familiar. Held tight by habit.

The walk home should have been the reverse, a winding down. Elm Street, paved with history, was the familiar path from the library to my place. The sidewalk charted a course beneath my sensible shoes: one crack resembled the boot of Italy, and another always pooled with water. The city trees sighed, their leaves whispering secrets I never understood. My heels clicked, a personal metronome marking time.

Then, beside that Italy crack, almost hidden against the gray, lay the stone.

Nothing special to look at. Dark gray, matte, like a quail’s egg. Utterly normal, but it felt wrong somehow. No glitter, no glow, just a common piece of the city, invisible to everyone else, catching my eye. I nudged it with my shoe.

Instead of grit, it shifted with an oily smoothness, like polished obsidian tumbled for centuries by a river outside of time. It slid away with no friction. And cool. Impossibly cool. Not dangerous, maybe, but out of place. An error in the code. An anomaly.

Curiosity wasn't something I indulged. Messy, inconvenient. Led to tumbled routines, overdue fines, plot twists before they should come. It ruins the clean lines of a solid world. But this time, the feel of that smoothness, the wrongness of that chill. Against all habit, against the internal clock ticking me onward towards Shepherd's Pie at 6:45 PM, I yielded. I bent down, my back complaining. I closed my fingers around that impossible stone. A second, give or take, was all it took.

In my hand, it was even cooler. A deep, cellar-cold. Crypt-cold. Absorbing warmth. Did it vibrate, or was that just my hand? A sense of otherness, eluding my vocabulary.

Without thinking, as if one reflex had been swapped for a new raw thing, I slipped the stone into the right-hand pocket of my corduroy pants. Then, straightening, I carried on. Past that crack, as if nothing had happened. My pulse, just slightly off, but the promise of dinner pulled me back towards normal. The anomaly was contained, pocketed, manageable. I hoped.

Dinner was… mostly normal. The shepherd's pie crust was perfect, a small victory. The plate was cleaned, the fork and knife aligned. A dense biography of a forgotten Victorian inventor – a man whose life was as predictable as mine – lay open on my lap at page 48, promising numbness. The shell of routine resettled, the stone shrinking to a minor curiosity.

But habit's a porous defense once the walls are undermined.

When I emptied my pockets onto the mahogany side table – a near-sacred act –the inventory should have been simple: keys, change, maybe a tissue, and the smooth, cool, now slightly sinister stone.

But there were four objects on the wood.

The stone—heavier than it looked, matte, oddly smooth—the thing I knew I had put there.

And beside it, two impossible things: a thin bus ticket, folded, and a plain, worn brass key.

For a long minute, my breath hitched. Not a gasp, more a faltering, a jolt in the engine. My hand hovered, afraid to touch them, afraid they'd dissolve, or confirm their solidity.

I poked the ticket first. Standard city transit, cheap paper, slightly rough. The ink, faded purple, bled at the edges. Valid for: "Wednesday" - tomorrow night. Route: "17B". Then the key. Ordinary, the kind for any door or padlock. Worn around the teeth and the bow, brass dulled with age. Not my house key, the library key, or any key I had ever known.

They had not been in my pocket when I left the library. I hadn’t interacted with anyone on the walk. I had cooked alone, eaten alone, in my sealed flat. No hidden pockets existed. I turned my pockets inside out, finding them empty. Nothing else. No explanation.

I retraced my day in detail: the walk, Mrs. Albright, sorting the books, locking up, the walk home, the cracks. Picking up the stone – yes, that stood out, vibrating. Unlocking my door, dinner, reading. No interaction, no exchange, no moment where these things could have entered my possession.

The stone sat there, darker now, radiating coolness. The ticket and key, silent accomplices, smuggled into my life via that single breach. Coincidence? A prank? My mind, craving order, reached for cause and effect, but found only blank walls. The smoothness of the stone seemed to have infiltrated reality, smoothing over connections, eroding logic, leaving this residue.

That night, sleep refused me. Usually, my mind shuts off with the bedside lamp. But tonight, the ticket and key pulsed behind my eyelids. Sharp with questions, dull with unease.

Route 17B… vague memories returned. It skirts the industrial wasteland near the old brickworks, winds through neighborhoods I hadn’t seen since a school trip about urban decay. Why that route? Why tomorrow? Whose lock did the key belong to? And why did the thought of simply tossing them – throwing them in the trash with the tea leaves – feel suddenly wrong? Like tearing a page from my own damn life.

I tossed. I turned. The ceiling, alien in the light filtering through the curtains. The fridge, loud. The hours crawled. Only in the gray haze did sleep finally claim me, offering little rest.

Wednesday dawned gray, the sky mirroring the fog in my head.

When I rose, instinct clung to routine. Make the bed, sharp corners. Go to the kitchen and brew the Earl Grey. The familiar bergamot scent, muted, distant, failing to pierce the abstraction that enveloped me.

My gaze kept going to the objects: the stone, the ticket, the key. The ticket’s validity – today – felt like a deadline. The stone, cool and solid, an anchor to the moment everything tilted. Heavy with unknown doors, unopened rooms, unasked questions, the key seemed to call to me.

Everything in my life protested. Wednesday was large-print sorting day. It was also Earl Grey, diagonal toast, the timed walk, the 8:14 AM bus, the same seat (third row, window), familiar faces, and the predictable route.

Yet these objects hummed with a different imperative. Not destiny, not a thunderclap. More like… a dangling clause. An equation left unsolved. Curiosity, gnawed at my resolve, its whispers louder than the rattle of the first bus and the library's 'silence!' call. The question "What if?" echoed in the quiet of my flat, and it was all a bit much.

With a long sigh, I folded the bus ticket, tucked it into my wallet. Pocketing the cool stone and enigmatic brass key, I felt their alien weight. And I left my flat ten minutes late, walking not towards my regular bus stop, but towards a less familiar one served by Route 17B.

The bus itself could not have been more normal. Seats and air held the city blend of damp wool, stale coffee. An old man folded his paper, a teenager texted, and a woman hummed, lost in her own soundtrack.

Nothing cinematic. No figures in raincoats in the shadows, no bursts of light or whispers. Just the mundane lurch and rumble of public transport, carrying me away from the known world.

The journey felt oddly eternal and I watched the streets morph: Victorian terraces giving way to houses and estates, then to brick houses interspersed with shops – newsagents, a hardware store, a dusty antique shop.

My seat, an island of introspection, held the stone pressed against my leg, a reminder. The brass key seemed to pulse faintly – or maybe that was just my heartbeat.

Eventually, the bus stopped near a quiet crossroads marked by 'The Weary Traveller'. This was my stop; the doors sighed open.

Stepping down felt like stepping through a veil, into a slower world, where the air, different, tinged with woodsmoke, and houses huddled together with peeling paint and gardens, manicured and neglected. Not a threat, just… lived-in.

And now? The key felt enormous, conspicuous. What was the prescribed protocol for a spontaneous reality shift? Try locks at random? Knock on doors? "Excuse me, did you lose a small brass key delivered via a peculiarly smooth stone"? Absurdity washed over me as I felt conspicuous and awkward.

I spotted a low brick wall bordering a small garden. It seemed like a pocket of neutrality. Sitting on the cool brick, rough texture grounding me, I laid the key and the stone on the wall. Small and innocuous, yet holding the weight of this bizarre deviation. What was the point? A test? A joke? A glitch?

The garden was a riot of color – mostly roses. An elderly woman tended them, slow, deliberate, snipping deadheads. She wore a faded apron, wisps of gray hair escaped her bun.

I must have been staring, because eventually she straightened up, winced, and looked directly at me across the wall. Her eyes, pale blue, but sharp. She didn't smile or frown, simply observed me, then glanced at the key and the stone. Just an old woman, in her garden, offering neither recognition nor a knowing look.

"Dropped keys," she said finally, her voice soft, yet raspy. "They cause a bother."

"I, uh, I found this one," I felt foolish.

She nodded slowly, her gaze fixed down the street, on a blue door, maybe. "Aye," she murmured, her gaze distant.

"Sometimes," she continued, her voice quiet, "a dropped key just wants to go home. Find its lock." She paused. "Doesn't mean you have to follow it inside, though. Does it?"

And that was it—no pronouncements, just that observation, hanging in the air. She gave a tiny nod. Then, she turned back to her roses, as if our encounter had barely registered.

I sat there, the echo of her words settling around me: Doesn't mean you have to follow it inside. Not an instruction, not a warning, just… a possibility. The key might belong to that blue door, or another door, or no door at all. Perhaps the woman could be a guardian of a hidden threshold, or just an old lady gardening philosophizing. And perhaps the stone was a conduit to fate, or just a rock.

Looking again at the house with the blue door, its curtains closed, I then looked down at the key glinting faintly. The urge to know, to solve the puzzle, remained. But the gardener’s words had shifted the pressure. The key no longer felt like a command. The path wasn't predetermined. Following the ticket had been one choice. Trying the key would be another. And not trying it… that was also a valid choice.

Unexpectedly, the need to solve, to explain, felt less important than being here—sitting on a strange wall in an unfamiliar neighborhood, holding these objects, because of a decision to pick up a smooth stone. The destination suddenly felt secondary to the journey – this deviation from the rails, this brief experience of being untethered.

Slowly, deliberately, I picked up the key, which felt… just like a key now. Then I picked up the stone. It felt just as cool, just as smooth, but less menacing, even companionable. I slid them both back into my pocket—not the pocket of Aldo Fontana, creature of habit, but of the man who had taken the 17B bus simply to see where it went, the pocket of a man who had encountered ambiguity and chosen, for now, to let it remain.

"Thank you," I said quietly, directing the words towards the woman, the roses, the street itself.

She didn't turn around or pause, offering no sign, staying lost in her world. And maybe that was part of the point too—her world, my world, intersecting briefly, but remaining distinct.

Standing up, I brushed dust from my pants, my legs feeling unsteady. I walked away from the house with the blue door, away from the street where keys might find their locks. Walking back towards the main road and the bus stop, I knew another bus would eventually begin the journey back.

But something felt different within me. The routine I was returning to no longer felt like inescapable gravity, but one possibility among others. The weight of the stone and key remained in my pocket. I didn't throw them away, and knew I wouldn't. They weren't answers anymore, but riddles, evidence of the day the rails buckled beneath me, a weight of choice made, and the possibility of choices to come. They were smooth, cool, and inexplicable.