Doorknobs: I never installed them. What doors could they have opened?

Katie Kitamura in The Yale Review:

I found the doorknobs at a street market in one of the less fashionable parts of Paris. They were inside a box amid a jumble of other doorknobs, all in many ways indistinguishable. The vendor said they were going for five euros each, which seemed to me an excellent price, about the same as a cappuccino. The doorknobs were technically bric-a-brac, but with their brass stems and crackled glaze, they looked ostentatious to me. I picked them up and felt their pleasing weight in the palms of my hands. I coveted them, and was also a little ashamed of coveting them. I knew they had no real place in my life. I couldn’t imagine them in my actual home. They were objects that had nothing to do with me.

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