When Gabriel rested his head on the platen, his nose probed the cavity where the steel letters snapped and spread their ink. The aged typewriter reeked of must and grease and Gabriel wondered, if the ancient machine could sniff through its shift key, would it have been as revolted as he at his aroma of peppermint and tobacco and despair?
He spit out his gum and lit another cigarette.
This wasn’t how he remembered.
As a child, Gabriel used to marvel at his grandfather’s mastery of the keys. Grandpa typically surrendered himself to the machine after supper each evening. Once the dialogue between his searching, supple mind and dexterous digits was open, Grandpa was unlikely to dignify any attempts to engage him with more than a grunt of acknowledgement or sideward glance. He was devoted to ensuring that the hammered ink relayed his sentiments to the paper.
Gabriel was awed by his grandfather’s ability to become absorbed in his typing. He relished the thought of being within Grandpa’s presence during these times, simply existing within the field of his creativity. He would straddle the ottoman next to the desk, entranced by the fluidity of his grandfather’s fingers on the keys, intrigued by the implied focus exhibited by Grandpa’s furrowed brow, adding wrinkles to a face already laden with crevasses. When he felt his lids sagging closed, Gabriel would flop face-first over the ottoman so that his head hung down by the old man’s knees. In this position, the rhythm of the Tika-Tika-DING-Zhhhwoop partnered with that of Grandpa’s breathing and occasional sighs. The melded sounds cascaded over the lip of the desk like a waterfall, washing over the base of Gabriel’s neck and into his ears the sweet lullaby of a man deep in his work.
Gabriel would awaken upstairs in his bed, at first disoriented by the disconnect from his last rousing moment, but then proud to have been the punctuative activity in his grandfather’s evening.
When his grandfather sat down to type, Gabriel religiously assumed his saddled-up position at his side. Occasionally, the old man would address him.
“Mosey on out to the garage and grab me some of that 3-in-1 oil, cowboy,” Grandpa would delegate when the mechanics of the machine weren’t keeping up with the mechanics of his mind.
“Hi-ho!” Gabriel would gleefully reply as he scampered out of sight.
When no words made their way through him, Grandpa would often break the monotony with a joke.
“What kind of blood do mistake-prone writers have?”
Although he had heard this same joke close to a hundred times, Gabriel always obliged with a “I don’t know, what?”
“Type O!”
Gabriel would giggle and roll off his ottohorse onto the floor, where his grandfather’s bare feet would dig into his sides and elicit a more pronounced response.
The typed words flowed freely after that, and Gabriel believed he had a part in helping them along, as if they rode his chuckles like bucking broncos, tumbling just into place within his grandfather.
Now, in the search for his own words of purpose that eluded him, Gabriel had resurrected the instrument he’d honored only as a sacred relic in the time following his grandfather’s death.
With his mind buried and blank, the memory of his grandfather’s favorite joke flooded the empty space.
He typed it out.
For the first time in a long while, the words closely conveyed the way that Gabriel felt, and the next ones that he wrote were meandering further down that path.
His tears suggested an ellipsis.
Author's Note:
This is a reprint of a story that I submitted to NPR's Three Minute Fiction Contest four or five years ago. I don't ever remember being able to find it on the contest entry page, so I don't know if many people ever got to read it. I hope you enjoy.
-AL