Typewriter

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2004 and onwards. It was written on Friday, March 23rd, 2004. Do not take this story. It is obviously not autobiographical - in fact, the entirety is a work of fiction, written partially as an exercise in details. I originally called it "Dusting"; I don't know which is the more fitting title.

I entered this story into the short short story category of the 2004-5 Scholastic Writing Awards, having submitted it nowhere else. It won a gold key, which was a pleasant surprise.

Having won a gold key in regionals, it proceeded onto nationals, where it won a silver.

This story was published in the 2004-2005 copy of Pandora's Box, my school's literary magazine.

Typewriter

Eyes warily cast ahead, I dip the old and thinning cloth into the already-murky water, making another attempt to clear the countless ages of dust from the typewriter.
When had I started cleaning off the items on my wife’s desk, I hadn’t realized just how long I had let the chore sit on the back burner. Ten months isn’t really that long, when you’re stumbling to right the imbalance of death. Ten months and a week, it was now, since the squealing car running off the corner of 8th and 10th avenues had sealed her fate. I had dusted countless pens and bottles of ink that she used in her calligraphy, volumes of the encyclopedias she’d sworn by, out of order. I’d worked around the mess of the typewriter, even to the extent of dumping out the drawers before finally resigning myself to face it.
I don’t know what made me so wary of the typewriter. It was extremely old, with wobbly keys and numbers one through nine in a row at the top (as zero was easily enough represented by an ‘O’), and patches of dust and grime so thick that it made the sleek black machine appear dull and tan-grey.
Now there were obvious attempts at scrubbing this dirt off, although the more obvious sign was how my previously clear bucket of water had gone murky green-brown.
I pressed something at the top and the typewriter chimed, making me nearly jump out of my skin. I hadn’t been aware something so aged could still work.
It was only then I noticed the paper still trapped inside it, and pulling it from the tangled mess, was able to read the date. It had been keyed ten months and a week ago.
My eyebrows knit together. Now that I thought about it, I did recall, pulled from the depths of my memory, my wife clunking away on the keys of the typewriter that day. She’d told me it was her shopping list.
It wasn’t.
Catherine knew that I never combed through her things while she was away. I left her to her privacy, just as she left me to mine. I was a sensible man and knew how to treat a woman. The rule of thumb was, “don’t bother them.”
It was a letter.
I brushed cobwebs from the edges, thumbed a corner back, only to have it spring right back into its former position when I shifted my hand. My knees gave in, and I missed the chair by only centimeters, cursing before I’d even hit the speckled linoleum. Cradling the wrist I’d landed on, I plucked the paper from its spot next to me and began reading, still in the same spot I’d landed.
It was addressed to George Ruth. He was our neighbor at the time. He’d moved shortly after Catherine’s funeral and I hadn’t seem or heard of him since. George had never been a trustworthy man, I recalled. Snuck around with the wrong kind of people, stayed in alleys smoking with gangs at night. He towered over the rest of our fair neighborhood, standing at six feet and nine inches, long hair only making him appear longer. Was the shrimpiest thing, though, skinny as the bones under his skin. Our landlord said he’d grown up poor.
Catherine had never really seemed to approve of him. But according to this letter, they were apparently thick as thieves. I blanched like I’d been stung by something I knew wasn’t there, because the wife I’d truly loved, if maybe not always paid the most attention to, had found that attention in another man. I’d been deceived.
And after I gingerly picked myself up off the floor with my good wrist and swooping down again to retrieve the bucket, I locked the letter, the typewriter, and the desk away as I threw the key away, knowing I wasn’t strong enough to finish dusting.