Nothing but rabbits come out of the hat

At the counter of Raven Used Books, I discovered someone else's keys in my pocket.

This is not a euphemism. (And then he ran into my knife! He ran into my knife ten times!) We had taken nineweaving to 9 Tastes for birthday duck and mussel pancakes with a movie to be collected on rain check; we were post-prandially browsing when I reached into my jacket pocket for my wallet, to pay for Rika Lesser's A Child Is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Gören Sonnevi (1993), and found a surprising handful of metal. I thought somehow I'd underestimated my pocket change. Instead I pulled out first my own keys, all four of them on their Kokopelli key-ring, and then a further eight: four pairs of duplicates, short and silver, on four small rings clipped variously onto a jumbo paperclip. Some of them looked like luggage keys, some like keys to filing cabinets or office drawers. I believe I said cogently, "I have someone else's keys in my pocket. Where did these come from?" The bookstore clerk, who had recently been importuned by Scientologists, gave me a very dubious look.

No one in the store came forward to claim them. I'm dubious it's worth any of my friends' while to gaslight me. When we got back to Eric's, I called and left my name and phone number at both 9 Tastes and Raven, in case anyone comes in looking for a set of lost keys, but I still don't have an explanation how they got into my pocket in the first place. I would have noticed extra keys when we settled the bill at the restaurant. All the time we were in the bookstore, I was wearing my jacket. It's leather. It doesn't have pockets all over the place. So either there was a keychain fumble such as romantic comedies are made on, or someone was practicing their pickpocket skills in reverse, neither of which makes very much sense. I'm left feeling like a character in the first ten minutes of a Hitchcock film—any moment now, shots are going to be fired, mysterious strangers are going to demand information I don't even know where to look for, and by the end of the week I may be halfway across the country and/or handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. Or this is slipstream, and the keys are something faintly magical, mostly inexplicable, possibly metaphoric. Twenty years from now, they will unlock a suitcase or a drawer that didn't exist in 2008. Or I don't want to know. They only look like keys.