Photo by Dcps Chloé on Unsplash
by Kate Horsley
Every time I move, I take the typewriter with me – Olivetti Lettera 35, kitsch relic of the 1970s, the keys like raked auditorium seats climbing towards a silver necklace of typebars – that we found in Prague in a junk store hidden down a back street, that you bought it for me so I would always keep writing, before we went out for some inedible meal of steamed dumplings, dashing to the hotel through perversely heavy summer rain.
The manual described the Olivetti’s body parts – space bar, ribbon spool, paper table, platen knob, ribbon vibrator – and I read you out the last two, tangled naked with you in our hotel sheets, and you laughed at me, oh my god, you unromantic nerd, as long as you write me stories on it though, so I buried my face in your neck, asking, how will our story end? So damn happily, you said, tugging at the sheet dividing us, but three weeks later, you died riding your bike across town to meet me after we’d had a fight.
I’m moving house again, when I find your gift and slide off the case, add paper, type a line – How was our story supposed to end? Tomorrow the moving van will come and take everything away except this bruise of grief that blooms through everything. Night falls, and I dream of moon casting jagged shadows from typewriter keys, then, underneath the line I wrote, your typed answer unfurling – so damn happily – and I wrap myself in paper sheets dark with your words and for the first time since you left the world, I sleep well.
Kate’s first novel was shortlisted for the Saltire Award. Her second was published by William Morrow. Her short fiction has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Citron Review, Fictive Dream & BULL, and placed in Bath, Bridport and Oxford.
