The story is never complete.
There are items carried through countless hellos goodbyes and shuttling back and forth. Everyone now has keys, but it is the small and purposeless in the end, the worn piece of wood, the smooth pebble thrown almost as an afterthought into the scales, which say whose latent magic secretly brimmed.
They could be left over from idols. They could be lucky. Things so familiar as to be exotic, sometimes without thought slipping under your tongue - and it's all right because they've been exactly and only where you have yourself. Anything soft is rubbed away, the grain stands out or a hollow fits only your thumb. Except on occasion nightstands or coffeelines with a handful of change and lint, these talismans are rarely produced. They are confidantes of the unconcious, the nervous fingers, they are trivial. They are in size one human life to a nation, but they compulsively choose not to die and our fingertips return to them, lift them unthinking to our lips.
What could they say; though they urge, they still are mute.