Tomorrow's Obituary

he newsroom is never quite silent. After the last intern leaves and the sports guy mutters out, the lights hum and the drink cooler sighs. Beneath it all comes the sound Nadine never names—the soft, workmanlike chattering of a typewriter nobody owns.

She lets it run. She doesn’t look toward the corner it favors or hunt behind cabinets. She keeps the obituary file open, fingers hovering, and waits out the tapping. Eventually it slows, like rain reconsidering.

At 10:12 on a November Thursday, the typing starts again. Nadine closes her eyes. Names surface behind her eyelids. She does not want to know anyone tonight. She wants the dead to keep decent hours and the living to stay ordinary until morning.

She opens a blank document. “Who?” she asks the screen, as if she’s the medium and the machine the ghost. The tapping answers anyway.

When Nadine was nine, her mother’s hands smelled like thawed earth. She worked at a greenhouse and brought home plants that had given up, kissed their stems, and made kitchen-sink bargains. For school Nadine wrote a poem about “a significant life.” Mrs. Vick frowned: “It sounds like an obituary.”

Nadine looked up obituary and liked the secret inside the word: a story told after a life had caught fire at the end. The thought made her giddy and ill.

That winter the first noise came. She woke on the carpet to polite tapping that says your name twice and then waits. In the kitchen the sound came from everywhere and nowhere. When it stopped, a word planted itself with the clarity of a solved equation.

Tomorrow.

She didn’t wake her mother to tell her. You don’t call someone from sleep just to say you can hear what the world intends for them.

In the morning, her mother didn’t wake up.

Doctors said a hidden heart flaw. A bolt from a clear sky. Nadine hated the phrase—lightning hunts a path. In the quiet the typewriter clicked, satisfied.

Her father ran a press and came home with ink-black fingers. He showed her letters set backward stamping hello into paper that smells like storms.

Nadine made a bargain. No more poems, no sticking her fingers into the alphabet like a socket. She would do small correct things. When the typewriter clattered at night, she would ignore it.

The names still came. On nights the quiet was too big to live in, she padded to the kitchen and listened, spelling them with her tongue.

“You are so young,” her father said when she announced she’d work at a newspaper.

The town paper had coffee rings older than careers. Lyle hired her because she was “fast with facts and slow with adjectives.” He believed grief wanted order and the town wanted the paper, not poetry. “We are the truth recorders,” he said.

On her first day she learned passwords and typed cremation details. People passed away, went home, entered into rest, and no phrase meant the same to two minds. She chose “preceded in death” because it felt like walking with a small light in a cave.

The typewriter took a week to find her there. The newsroom was beautifully still. Then the tapping began again—soft, businesslike. She let her fingers hover and wrote a name she had no right to know, then a wife’s, an age, the dog, the radio, the lemonade stands he never passed without stopping. She saved the document in a folder called DRAFT.

Three hours later the phone rang. “Obituaries,” she said. “My husband,” a woman answered. “A stroke while feeding the terrier.” The room fell into step—the clatter under the floor, the woman’s voice, Nadine’s keys—one instrument. Nadine wrote the notice but left out the lemonade stands. It felt indecent to know what she could not have learned. New bargain: keep the extra words until they lost their power.

The power didn’t require permission. A fisherman came in with his hands folded across his chest, as she’d written and deleted. A seventeen-year-old “passed peacefully in his sleep,” which turned out to be carbon monoxide. Lyle called copy “good” and meant it as absolution.

Theo from council coverage hovered at her desk, thin and kind. “Does it ever feel like jinxing?” he asked, then winced.

“Everything feels like jinxing,” she said. “If you let it.”

He smiled, relieved. He wore a ring he spun when thinking. Over the year he left mugs at her desk; she put them on the radiator until he collected them like gifts. His wife brought a baby once—Charlotte. Nadine kept her fists in her lap until her nails made moons. “She has your mouth,” she said.

At home she wrote LUCK in shower steam and watched it collapse. The typewriter woke her at 3:58. She stayed in bed counting breaths. By morning a sentence floated intact: Charlotte Jameson will be loved for the way she destroys a room with joy.

Beautiful, ridiculous. She scrawled it on a sticky note, folded until it forgot to be adhesive, then burned it in the sink.

At work the DRAFT folder swelled. She clicked. On the second page a single name stood like a person at the foot of a bed: Charlotte Jameson. She closed the window and thought of greenhouse bargains.

At noon Theo forgot his lasagna and returned pink-eared. “We’re going to the lake this weekend. If I file early, can you nudge Copy?”

“I’ll nudge Copy,” she said. When he walked away she whispered to the drawer, “Don’t do this,” and laughed at herself for threatening furniture. In the drawer, a folder too light for its guilt. Inside, names in the shorthand of someone pretending not to take notes. In the margins the word tomorrow had dissolved into shape. She locked the drawer and felt the building tilt.

A man called to ask the thing he’d heard at church. “Is it true that you can—”

“We publish what is given,” she said. “We do not give it.”

He hung up, grateful. She profiled the last shoemaker in the county: hands like tools, the history of leather, no secrets. In the window a child pressed her palms to the glass. Nadine let herself hope.

On Friday the press broke—loudly, like an animal who cannot be asked again. Repairmen swore. The obits page waited on the layout screen; Nadine felt relief at a reasonable emergency. The press coughed back to life. People went home tired and grateful. She stayed, watching the page hold steady—boxes, careful smiles. No name belonged here except by the ordinary path.

At 8:23 the page flexed.

It didn’t glitch so much as remember. The top right column rolled down, letter by letter. A name placed itself like a hand on a forehead. Theo Jameson. Next to it, Charlotte. The cursor blinked.

“Stop,” Nadine said to machine, file, future.

The obituary took shape anyway—the lake, the relatives, Charlotte pressing her face to glass. Nadine deleted the paragraph. It reappeared with the patience of handwriting. She deleted again, frantic, crying with the fury of a person who has been polite too long. She threw photo boxes behind text; they returned. She printed, as if paper could outrun fate.

A thought arrived, clean and ruthless: I could choose differently.

It belonged not to hope, but to her secret. She had not told anyone that sometimes the names did not come at all. On those days she picked a name from the town’s scatter—not with malice but terrified responsibility. Mercy, she told herself: old, tired, loosening their grip. A person could be a wall if she stood straight.

It was the worst thing she had done, and it worked. On the days she filled the blank, the phone rang and the world fell in line. The folder held unused names. She had given herself the power she feared and pretended she did not own it.

Now the page demanded what it demanded, setting the child beside her father and the lake like a trap. Nadine thought of Theo’s ring, Charlotte’s ear, her mother laughing. She yanked the drawer. The folder slid into her hand like a decision. She plucked a name the way you pull a hair—practiced, guilty, efficient.

Back at the keyboard, the page waited. The cursor blinked at the end of Charlotte’s middle name. Nadine deleted the double name, the lake, moved the column break. It did not fight her. In the space she typed, steady and formal, banishing poetry:

Nadine Mae Ward, 35, of Bellknap County, died Friday, November —, after a brief illness. Survived by her father, Daniel Ward; predeceased by her mother, Ruth (DeLeon) Ward. She loved order and water and the way a sentence can hold when a person cannot. Gifts in her memory may be made to the library.

She slid the column down and put her notice at the top right. She placed Theo’s name below, safely among the living. In the ad hole at the bottom she typed for herself:

Obituary, from the Latin obire—“to go toward.”

“Go toward,” she told the room that held her life and her cowardice.

The press gathered itself, shivered with purpose. The building shifted like a runner remembering to run. Nadine printed and pressed the warm page to her chest. She carried it past the old staff photos, the typewriter noise following.

Her phone buzzed. Theo. She answered. “We’re not going to the lake,” he said. “Charlotte had a fever. We’ll do the file Monday.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, sliding down the cinderblock wall.

“You okay?”

“I’m making a deadline,” she said. “I am exactly okay.”

When she hung up, she leaned forward until her forehead met her knees. The press roared, quieted, roared.

At her stoop the paper waited, folded with obituaries outward. She brewed coffee and didn’t sit. When she unfolded it, the paper did what paper does: told the truth. Her name looked ordinary.

Theo called at ten. “Jesus,” he said softly. “I’m coming by.” She set out a second cup, then put it away, then set it out again. When he arrived he looked mostly at her face.

“Are you mad?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “At math. At Latin. At the press.”

He nodded. They drank coffee and he told her about Charlotte’s fever breaking, the raspberry popsicle that saved the night, Maria sleeping in a chair she hated and then loved.

At noon the phone rang. “Obituaries.” A woman’s voice: “My grandmother was ninety-seven. Stubborn and small. She loved the cardinals and pretended to be angry when they flew away.”

Nadine wrote the words in the order they came.

“Do you want ‘preceded in death’ or ‘predeceased’?”

“Preceded,” the woman said. “It sounds like she got there first on purpose.”

“All right,” Nadine said.

Back at the office Lyle half-stood. Sports said, “Hell of a lead,” and blushed. Nadine smiled. The drawer would stay shut awhile. The typewriter waited, a river under town, ordinary and dangerous.

That night she slept without a word waking her. She dreamed her mother turned the sign to CLOSED and then back to OPEN. Morning came; the cracks in the ceiling held. She made a sentence that belonged in no file.

Go toward, she thought. The day waited.

At her desk a note in Theo’s scrawl said: “Tell me to bring back your Tupperware,” arrowed to a borrowed container labeled Evidence! Nadine laughed, pocketed the talisman, and picked up the phone.

“Obituaries,” she said. The woman on the line wondered if “entering into rest” was too religious. “It’s exactly as religious as you are,” Nadine said, and let the typewriter be quiet.

The secret did not leave her. It sat with her belongings, a fact among facts. When the tapping came again—when a name lifted its head and tested the edge of the day—she would know what to do with tomorrow when it arrived like a customer: show her empty hands and say, we are here now. She kept walking anyway. We will go toward.