The Key to Everything by Alex Kimmell

wants to be read. Read by you. Everything inside of you is telling you to get away. But you can’t move. Your breath comes in shudders. Your body is exhausted from being pushed so hard emotionally over the past few days. You don’t think you can fight it. 
    You drop your bottle and scream “No!” as you flip the table over, knocking everything to the floor. You pick up a chair and send it flying across the room, breaking flowerpots and crashing through the window. You grab the refrigerator and, using more strength than you knew you had, rip off the door and send it crashing into the hallway. You are a hurricane. You are wild, unrestrained madness. You are a whirlwind destroying everything that you touch.
    You are sitting at the table, calmly and slowly opening the cover of the book. You freeze. “What the fuck just happened?” you say to the room. When no one answers back, you actually feel relieved. The flowerpots are neatly lined up under the unbroken window. The table and chairs are all centered in the room, with the placemats and fruit bowl peacefully laid out in place. The refrigerator door is closed, and you can hear the motor of the ice machine cycling hypnotically. 
    Your chest tightens, and you shove the book away from you again. As it slides across the table, it hangs onto the far edge for the briefest of seconds, and then gravity takes over and draws it down the floor. You sit still for a moment. The decision is made. Just throw the damn thing away and be done with it. You walk to the other side of the table and kneel down to pick it up. You can see something sticking out from under the front cover. It’s just a half an inch or so, but enough that you can tell it was stuffed into the book hoping to be found. You pull a little on the corner, and it does not appear to be yellowed and old like the other pages in the book. Someone put this in here relatively recently.
    Gingerly, you slide the page out and let it fall. Kneeling there on the kitchen floor, sweat building up on the back of your neck, you can’t wrap your head around it. None of this makes sense. Your hands tremble, and you rub them up and down on your thighs to try to get the feeling back in your fingers. 
    Should you pick it up? Do you really want to know what it is? You have the sickening feeling that you know whatever is on that paper is going to make you wish you hadn’t. But you see your hand reaching down and taking up the corner. It’s almost like you are watching yourself from another room in another house, like a voyeur peeping in through a window.
    You sit back down in your chair and look at the folded piece of paper right in front of you. Your stomach hurts with a dull pain right underneath your ribcage. You hear a high-pitched ringing in your ears. There is definitely something else in the ringing. It sounds like words. Barely there, but you can hear them speaking. “You turn the key.”
    You open up the page slowly, closing your eyes to protect yourself from seeing what’s really there. The paper tries to lift up at the crease on the table, and you smooth it out so it stays unfolded. You almost laugh. It’s written in red. Much too smooth to be a crayon. The letters are thick and smudged, like they were finger-painted. It’s very sloppy and hard to make out. Some of the letters were written backward. So many misspellings that whoever wrote this was probably about the same age as Jason. You take a big swig from your beer and read…

     

    You see stars and feel queasy, before it dawns on you that you stopped breathing. The kitchen spins, so you grab the edge of the table to stop from falling out of the chair. Each time your eyes look up to where the letter is resting on the placemat, they quickly dart away into space. A vain attempt to focus on anything but the child’s dust-covered warning. 
    You stand to grab another beer out of the fridge, if for no other reason than to face away from the table. With head tilted back, it