It's why your head broke open when you were inside. It's why all the King's men couldn't put it back together again but the brigands who stormed the papal palace could. After I had lived in the convent a year, I'd look at the nuns around the refectory table and see each of them with a miniature convent stuck on their wimple-bound necks. Under the veils their faces sat like cuckoo clocks with sloping chateau-style roofs. Broken cuckoo clocks that never revealed their birds.
Convent faces with sealed windows and indented smiles.
When I entered the convent we novices had to perform a symbolic key-throwing ceremony. It was a kind of initiation into the life of the veil. We'd go into the garden and fling a key over one of the walls, into the sacristy orchard, as far as we could throw. We were given keys that no-one wanted. Old keys that opened no doors, or none that could be found or remembered.