It clicks, clicks, clacks.
All day, it clacks.
The typewriter was a housewarming gift from my neighbor. She’d come over to welcome me to the quiet street and was delighted that I was a writer. She’d been one once, too.
I had tried to explain to her that I wasn’t a romantic of old tech. I liked the ease of my laptop. I was fine with my pace. The stories would get done when they got done. I loved writing and wanted it to remain that way.
“Oh, but you haven’t seen a typewriter like this.”
It was an old, heavy hunk of metal. I still don’t know how she’d lugged it over.
“This will help,” she had said.
“I don’t need help.”
“Life is short. Finish the stories.”
I sit here as it clicks.
It clacks away at stories that have been locked in my head for years. I try to drown out the incessant clicking. I play music. I sing to myself. I recite old poems. I muse through old stories out loud.
It clacks, clicks, clicks.
I’ve had enough. I pick up the tarnished typewriter to carry it outside. Careful down the porch steps and through my overgrown lawn, I make it across the street and bang on the door.
“Hi?” a young woman answers.
“Give this to Shirley.” I push the typewriter to her but she doesn’t take it.
“Shirley?”
“Shirley…” I falter, frustrated. “Johnson? I don’t know. This was hers. There’s something wrong with it.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Take the typewriter. Please.”
“This house was vacant for years ‘til I moved in.” The woman stared me down. “If you come back I’ll call the cops.” She shut the door in my face.
So, I sit here again. I have to finish the stories.
Click, clack, click.
Jackson.
That was it.
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House