My wife’s smile was the feeling of running through a cold sprinkler on a hot day in the suburbs. It was the first sip from a lemonade stand; it was dipping your feet at the beach under glistening, warm waves.
Her name was Summer, I loved her, and this was all before the typewriter.
I had bought the machine at the local thrift store the week prior. Nothing was amiss, I asked the cashier a few questions, paid and made a small donation. Before long, someone’s trash was my treasure.
The scrawny kid behind the counter looked at me puzzled from under his greasy mop. “What do you need this thing for anyway, sir?”
He blew a cloud of dust from the keys before sliding it into a cardboard box for me.
“Oh, it’s for my wife.” I handed him some notes. “She’s a busy mom at home, getting a bit stir-crazy, you know how it is.”
“We have some nice laptops if you want to check around the corner over there.”
“No, that’s quite alright. It’s her peculiar mantra.” I explained. “She pulls the mouse out of her computer when she writes, oh, she pries the delete button off, too. She thinks it’ll stop her from losing focus, you know - stop deleting words and getting caught up. And for that reason, this anniversary, I’m going to give her something old school.”
“Ah,” he patted the box before he slid it to me across the counter. “She’ll love it.”
I took the long route home along the bay. I pictured my wife opening the gift; her smile lighting up was in my mind’s eye glowing like hot steel.
Penguin-walking the gigantic box up the driveway and into the study onto her desk, I was careful to not make a noise.
Summer was cooking in the kitchen with a head full of steam. I took her by the waist, and she smiled at me.
“Did you forget about me?”
“Have I ever?”
Billy came stumbling into the room, almost as if carried cartoonishly, levitating in the air, following the smell of spaghetti.
I didn’t think my son could ever ruin the mood. Afterall, it was our anniversary – he was the labor of our love. But by God, it was hard to love him when he was dripping mud through the house.
“I’ll go clean him up.” I smiled in defeat.
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
Evening fell quickly. She found the typewriter, and she loved it. She gave me a giftpack of various no doubt plastic-tasting barbeque sauces and seasonings. I pretended to love them. Wasn’t that the law of a lasting marriage?
It must have been three o’clock in the morning when I rose from the covers and slid my back against the headboard.
Summer was sitting at the end of the bed, muttering again.
“Darling, you’re sleepwalking again – Go back to sleep.”
She snapped her head back at me. Her skin was feverish, her eyes unslept.
“Oh, I’m not. I’m just thinking about the gift you got me. You’re so thoughtful, Adam. I was thinking this morning that you might have got me perfume…”
She crawled into bed, and we fell into a deep slumber with my arms wrapped around her cold shoulders.
I didn’t think much of it that night.
Later I found out that she never slept at all; she had been watching me sleep, painting a picture of words in her mind about how she was going to make me spring to life on the page.
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
A week had passed since our anniversary.
I had warmed to the wake-up call of her early morning ritual of typing away her manuscript. Since then, I had been dropping off Billy to school and cooking every night, and today was no different.
There’s a certain warmth – butterflies, even, to having someone really put something you bought them into action. To really enjoy it. But after a certain point, the butterflies bite. Glee transforms into concern.
Concern was when she stopped turning around from her writing. Her fingers danced on the keys as I told her I was taking Billy to school. She had lost weight, too. Not enough for immediate concern, but enough for me to grate extra parmesan into dinner.
I fastened the navy straps around Billy’s shoulders.
“Are you feeling alright, darling?”
She gave a weak nod towards the wall, towards the typewriter. She had once stopped turning, and then that day she had almost given up speaking.
“Do you need anything?”
A shake of the head.
“Maybe I could get you something? That perfume,”
She stopped.
“Maybe grab dinner out, I’ll get that perfume you were talking about me getting you.”
Summer tucked strands of messy hair behind her ears.
“Sure, honey. Blueberry Passion.” She spoke.
I fixed my tie. “What’s that?”
“The perfume. The one you brought home with you, stinking from your suit about a week ago.”
My stomach sank.
“Honey, no,” I shook my head. “That was,”
Billy was bouncing, ready for school.
She chortled. “Don’t worry about it, Adam.”
We finally locked eyes.
“You got me this typewriter, and I’m happy. You keep your wife happy, see?”
“It wasn’t like tha-“
“Don’t forget to eat all of your lunch, Billy.” She smiled at our son, and her fingers resumed their waltz.
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
“Why doesn’t mommy sleep?” Billy asked me with inquisitive eyes through his magnified spectacles.
“She’s busy right now, son. Have you ever started a good drawing? And it’s so beautiful, you don’t want to stop until it’s done?”
“Yeah.” He said.
“Well, it’s like that. But writing sometimes takes longer.”
“Oh,” He said. “So, are you making dinner again tonight, Dad?”
“You bet.”
Ow. The look on his face of disappointment. It stung. My pasta wasn’t that bad.
I sat in the car a while after I watched Billy disappear into class, my hands tightly fixed around the steering wheel.
My hands ran through my hair.
How could she have known about her?
I reached for my cellphone but stopped. She wouldn’t pick up anyway, she was busy with her manuscript. Metabolizing her heartbreak into ink on page, turning trauma into some tantalizing novel.
My car drove itself to work, I was just a zombie in the front seat lost in his thoughts.
I didn’t mean to cheat, honey, I love you, it was just the once, it was-
Worthless. I’m worthless.
And it was time to reap the betrayals I had sown.
My car kept driving past the office.
I didn’t know it for a while, but I was driving to my father’s place. I needed a few days to recoup; I needed lessons from an old man about how to re-spark love lost.
Before long, I was sitting at his dinner table shedding losers tears. Not long after that, I was getting the scorning of a lifetime.
Dad told me I could stay one night. That’s all I got, and then I was going to be sent home to mend the damage I had done.
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
I made it back to our street the next day when the sun had just left the sky.
“Summer, I’m home.” I announced, clattering my keys as I pulled them out the front door.
The roses in my hand wouldn’t be enough. Nothing would enough to be sorry, to mend, to heal. But it made me feel less guilty.
“Summer?” I called. The lights were off in the house.
Distant clicking echoed down the hallway.
Slow, deliberate, sickening tapping.
I made my way to the study; my legs had turned to jelly.
She was there. As she had always been. Making use of my anniversary present.
“You weren’t here Adam,” She said. Her voice was not her own.
The text on her manuscript was blotchy red.
“I ran out of ink.”
My chest was tight. I was screaming, I wanted to run away again.
“Where’s Billy?”
Click,
“Where’s Billy, Summer?”
Clack,
“He has football practice,”
Click.
“Oh God, I have to take him to football practice, Summer, please,”
I was staring vacantly at the pages that dripped rose petal blotches onto the desk.
She never left.
She was ever clacking away, typing, writing with open blood-encrusted fingers, if you would even call them fingers, they were just bones, bones that had replaced my wife’s digits that had once lovingly stroked my cheek. Her hands were stripped of skin – The hands I used to hold when we would stroll by the pier. It wasn’t real, it was just a nightmare, I would wake up soon – nothing is real, Billy would be asleep in his bed. But the red gunk flicking over the keys and paper from the crushed worms under her knuckles seemed real - I wanted to wake from this bad dream; I wanted everything to go away.
The coarse sticks of her hands stroked my cheek like dry toothbrushes. A nail hanging loose by a thread of nerves cupped my chin.
“What’s the matter, honey?”
She was grinning with pale keys in her lips, never smiling with her eyes.
“Do you want a turn?”
▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁
How loving such thorned beauty was my vice.
I left that evening. I still lament for Summer. I grieve for my wife, for she is not dead, but someone that I once knew.
I like to believe that it was the typewriter that was paranormal.
That’s a more comforting thought.
But I know it to be untrue.
It’s less painful when I believe it wasn’t in her all along – Brewing under the surface of our matrimony, bubbling with each of my missteps.
Maybe it was me that had broken her, maybe I made the monster come to life.
I like to believe she has stopped writing.
But I know once I close my eyes, only the sound of her bones meeting metal awaits me.
Clack,
click
clack.
---
Credits
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