The typewriter

Samuel couldn't write. For half an hour, the blank piece of paper had sat in front of him, mounted on the typewriter. The urgency seemed to increase by the moment. Samuel fondled over the keyboard of the typewriter, then started to press a key. A. That was a good start. He pressed it down. It was a start. Then another letter appeared on the paper. But his fingers weren't moving. The typewriter was doing the work. He was astounded. He read what the typewriter had produced. It was an essay in his style. He checked the facts against his notes. It was correct. He pulled out the piece of paper and faxed it to the office. Thirty minutes later, he received a call from his editor saying it was a nice piece of work.

Soon, he let the typewriter do more of the work. He had more time to himself. He took long walks. Drove out of town. Went to movies in the afternoon. The typewriter just wrote. He just had to have the idea, sit in front of it, and it would frantically type away, occasionally waiting for the change in sheets.

But as time went, he noticed small things. The typewriter seemed fond of censoring, or obscuring certain issues. He shouted at it as though it were a disobedient pet, but it never retyped the material. Samuel submitted it anyway, as his efforts to write by himself were still futile.

As time went by, and he just fed the typewriter sheet and sheet of paper, he realised that the writing was increasingly dull and safe. The editor still accepted it, but never praised him. Samuel could not take it anymore; one day, after returning from a walk, he took a hammer and swung it at the typewriter. The metal keys flew apart, the ribbon unwound. He smashed it again.

The keys lay everywhere on the floor. Samuel sobbed. He went to sleep on the couch, still clutching the hammer.

He was woken up by the sound of typing. He opened his eyes. On the floor were not just one keyboard, but several. Each separate part of the original typewriter had grown into a duplicate of the original, but with modifications. They could feed their own paper now, and they had leg-like appendages that allowed them to move around. They were arranged in a row in front of him, typing away, mocking him. He already knew the words that were emerging from the papers, even as they flew up into the air.