The midnight cup of coffee stared up at him steaming and he swore, breaking the quiet. 

            "All these years and you'd think I could manage a cup of coffee."

           But there it was. 

           The school hallway was void of children's voices now, echoing its loneliness until the lack of sound burned his ears like the coffee had burned his lips. 

            Howard liked the night-shift.  No screaming students.  No running hooligans.  No noise...no noise...no noise.  The reverberation smacked of tardy kids, wooden rulers, shouts of first and last days—abuse.  He had seen it all, but from the tail end, as he said, from the scraps, the discards, the leftovers.  Garbage, trash, thrown away truths, castoff realities, secrets only Howard could decipher from the snippets. Once in the bin, no one read it—did they?

            He set the paper cup on his desk—a discarded door with abandoned teacher's table legs (scraps, discards, leftovers).  It looked as lopsided and unbefitting as he did.  Tall, tall, lanky, slim, droopy eyed, wrinkle upon wrinkle. Old.  That's the word.  Old.

           The zzzzip of the worn cable holding the keys and the jingle of a handful of metal bouncing against the silence were accompanied by the thump, thump, thump of his long footsteps, his distant heartbeat, and the teakettle air coming from his lips attempting to whistle a feeble tune.  Feeble. 

            Howard turned the corner, the galvanized new rubber of his shoes sending a high-pitched squeak against the high-pitched ceilings, the truncated door after door, the silver rows of water fountains, neatly lined, gleaming, waiting patiently for the randomity of children to give them life, purpose.

           Ahead of him was Mecca, the Holy Land, the teacher's lounge. 

           If he were lucky, there would still be coffee in the pot.  But luck had drained away, swirling like dirty water against the whiteness of actuality. 

            It was endless now, that long, long, long hallway.  Each step took him farther away.  Echo.   Echo.  Echo.  He gripped the keys like a life preserver—then like an anchor. They became as foreign to his familiar hands as ice to the desert. 

           It was hard to say who disappeared first, Howard or the keys.  Maybe together.  Scraps.  Discards.  Leftovers.

            He never reached the door—not for years now.  Even if he had, the keys wouldn't open it.  The locks had been changed a hundred years before, had rusted fifty years after that.  The world was gone.  Howard stayed.  He liked the night shift. Every midnight, he tried again. 

           The school had been abandoned almost as long as he had. 

            All he had was the keys.

            ~End~