A Writer Turned Written

There was once a man, a Londoner, who was also a writer, retired lecturer, avid reader, and very little else. 

He had friends, but only of the professional sort. He had family, though they might as well have lived across the pond for he saw them so seldomly. And he had hobbies that only seemed to serve him like a supplier does a retailer. 

He pushed out published works just as the eighteenth century’s Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz did her fifteen babies in twenty-one years. 

His books were widely considered immersively disturbing. Entrancing his readers with his expertly descriptive scenes and engrossing plots that many readers would reportedly walk away from his books feeling dazed, unsettled, or out of body for a time afterward. 

The writer considered this a great compliment. Both for the fact that these reviews would capture the interest of new readers, and thus increase his royalty installments. But it also meant that he was successful in his aim of accurately captivating the world around him, along with the one in his mind, and transferring it into written word. 

The writer absorbed the world around him in ways that led him to be barely present in it himself. 

He would go on walks in the woods, and instead of enjoying the scenery and fresh air surrounding him, he would contemplate the best way of turning the wonky tree in front of him into perfectly arranged letters in a paragraph. He would converse with strangers on the platform of the Tube, and instead of considering how to enrich the conversation in real time, he’d deliberate how he will add the embellished versions to his next novel. 

He would even, on occasion, go so far as to interrupt an argument between individuals in public and ask them, “What are you feeling right now? Why would you say that instead of point this out? What had they done, before now, to make you this upset?” 

The people in these tense situations would assume he must be a therapist of the mind to ask such questions to aggrieved strangers. They would presume he stepped in to help, but when he clarified that he was in fact a writer interested in gathering context and introspection to use in his story, the strangers would turn their aggression from each other to him for the inappropriate intrusion.

On one cold winter night, the writer, struggling with some seasonal depression, as he often did, had grown stuck on a scene where a troubled teen was trying to convince their only tolerated teacher that their copy of the physics textbook was in fact a grimoire from another galaxy. 

This led the frustrated writer to do what he always did when he got writer’s block: he went to a place where a scene would likely take place with the hope of gaining environmental inspiration. In this situation, that was a nearby high school. 

On his walk there, the writer stumbled upon a new storefront at his local shopping center. 

In the window, he saw an antique typewriter. Its body was a polished, almost flawless black enamel. The letter keys looked as if shiny pearls were embezzled into them, with the respective letters inlaid on top in pure gold. 

He had to have it. 

An unexplained urge pulled him off the cobblestoned sidewalk and through the storefront’s creaky door, which displayed the shop’s name in white loopy vinyl: Odds & Ends & Omens. The chime of a bell sounded overhead. 

He marched straight to the back of the store, completely ignoring all the odd objects lining the store’s counters, to where a little woman walked delicately to stand poised behind the scuffed oak counter. 

However odd it may sound, the old woman moved as though she were a doll in a dollhouse, being held up by the invisible fingers of a giant child. She appeared weightless—though weathered with her fraying grey hair—as if she were the favored toy and traveled everywhere with the child, even into the bath and stream out back. 

Nonetheless, the woman looked somewhat polished and approachable. Like a well-mannered nanny that knew how to give a good hug and also not take any sass. 

The writer said in a hurry, “The typewriter, if you will. I’d like to purchase it.” 

“It’s not for sale, love. I’m afraid it's only for decoration.” The older woman responded, her voice sounding as if the invisible giant child was speaking for her, through her. 

The writer didn’t notice the mismatched youthfulness in her voice, which was highly uncharacteristic of him. 

He went on to say, “Name a price and I’ll double it. I’m a writer—a well endowed one. You’ve probably heard of me or some of my books. I’m published under the name: J.D. Mannerman. I assure you that you will not be left unsatisfied with this transaction.” 

“No, I’m sure I wouldn’t.” The old woman chuckled softly, like a little girl would in a church sermon, “But you would be, if you were to take the typewriter home and use it.” 

“How so?” He asked. 

The writer was more perturbed by the continued denial than of the woman’s warning. He merely thought she was referring to a defect in the device. One he surely could get corrected with the help of a professional. 

“The typewriter has been linked to numerous disappearances. I believe it to be cursed.” She responded evenly, as if it weren’t an absolutely absurd thing to say. To which the writer most certainly thought it was. 

“That’s absurd. Nonsense. I’ve studied curses, written about them, challenged them, even. They are not real. I’m sure those were situations of happenstance.” The writer sucked in a deep breath, steadying himself against his rising frustration. 

He often felt as though reading about and writing about certain topics in length made him, in some illegitimate way, an expert on various subjects. 

In one instance, he had gotten into a fairly heated, and highly irrelevant, argument with the Head of Engineering Department from the local university about how the mechanics of a bird’s wings was the primary factor which allowed it to take flight, and that its near weightlessness was only a distinctly distant secondary benefit. To which the department head eventually answered, “Its bloody both,” and walked away to finish his cocktail in a secluded corner of the benefit hall. 

The old woman stared at the writer in contemplation. It was only then that he broke eye contact and looked around the store for the first time. 

He saw a box encasing a jigsaw puzzle of a girl screaming in the darkness of a dungeon. The label atop it read WARNING: SLIGHTY HAUNTED BUT STILL AVAILABLE FOR SALE. And right when he spotted some truly obscene inventory—like a black bag of eyeballs placed not even a foot away from him (he only knew the contents therein for the yellow label attached to it said so, and they were on sale for sixty-five pounds)—the woman bounced up and down like the hand holding her had grown giddy with their decision. 

“Fine. I will sell you the typewriter. So long as you leave me your address so I can come and collect your novel when you’re through.” 

The writer handed over his debit card without asking the price. He didn’t care if he had just drained his bank account. He just wanted the typewriter. 

He then wrote his address on the receipt next to his signature, not thinking how odd the request was for it. 

The old woman smiled, wrinkles deepening around her slitted grey eyes, and turned to tuck the receipt away in a drawer. When she turned back to face the writer, the typewriter was mysteriously in her small hands. She boxed it up in cardboard and readied it for him to hold heavily on his way home. 

The writer completely abandoned his laptop and the half-finished novel he was working on before procuring the typewriter. As if the last eight months of outlining, plotting, researching and writing were nothing more than a fleeting idea for a subplot. 

The writer lost all sense of time, and of biological needs, when he sat in front of the typewriter. More often than not, one could find him hunched over it, pouring himself into his new novel. 

Which was, of course, about a cursed typewriter that was linked to numerous disappearances. 

The names and backstories of the missing persons came to him as easily as a draft wisping through the cracked window by his desk. Their faces appeared in his mind like sepia photos falling out of an old cook book. It felt only too natural that he wrote himself among the missing members of the tale. 

The writer grew reckless in his investment of time, and obsessed with his illusioned invention of the story. 

He didn’t notice when his lips stopped growing tacky and cracked from dehydration, or when his stomach grew content with being empty. He only cared for the feel of his fingertips on the pearled keys, the melodic clicking of black letters hitting parchment. 

The writer grew frail and feeble. He forgot what a room looked like properly lit and what his arms looked like properly meated. It mattered not for he could have sworn he saw ‘Global Bestseller’ inscribed on his radius under his paper thin skin—in the exact same font of the typewriter. 

The only people he spoke to were those playing a role on paper. 

Months went by with him being sequestered in his flat. Though he looked like it had been a millennia and would tell you it’d only been three days. 

Then, out of the blue, he mistook a knock at the door for his heartbeat. 

The old woman from the peculiar store who sold him the beloved typewriter was standing before him. It went unnoticed by the writer that the woman wore a face of pure pity upon seeing him.  

He told her of his book in length. She listened intently for hours. 

He didn’t find it one bit odd that the only words that left the old woman’s lips were, “Good work, my dear.” Or that she hoisted the large typewriter off his desk like it was only a loaf of bread. 

He didn’t even protest as she took it with her as they left his office. For his book was complete. 

He was finished, at last. 

In what seemed like a blink of an eye, the writer was no longer in his flat but placed in front of a well known literary agent. Who also listened intently for hours as the writer fervently explained the world, characters and plots of his novel. 

There was a sort of ecstasy that the writer felt when he saw the agent’s face crease in concentration and then smoothen with appreciation for his tale. 

Desperate to ride that high forever, the writer found that he could not shut up about his book. 

He told everyone who looked at him about the book: the lady on the southbound tram, the man seated on a bench outside the courthouse, the group of grandmas huddled around a dining table decorated for autumn. 

Time and time again he told his story to people near and far, all the while not noticing how he was positioned as a toddler seated in their lap. 

It was only when he became aware of his blinking that he realized his eyelids and eyelashes had been replaced with crisp beige paper and a green cloth bound cover. 

The opening and closing of his eyes were the flipping of pages.

It then dawned on him that his listeners were in fact readers, for they rarely spoke back to him, if ever. They just stared and stared, eyes bouncing from his left to his right like the metallic balls of Newton’s Cradle.   

Regardless of this realization, the writer found that he could do nothing but tell the people around him about his book. He was stuck on a literary loop. 

He wanted to stop, wanted to sleep, wanted to scream. 

But alas, he couldn’t. 

For he became the book.