Typewriter
By Rylan Eggers
The typewriter sits in a locked cabinet
glassy-eyed and brass-boned, smelling of
attic dust and rusted metal.
Inside it keeps its specimens:
heartbroken love letters,
unmailed apologies,
pressed flowers of unfinished novels,
the dead wings of words that never quite
learned how to fly.
I pry it open with a hairpin and curiosity,
a puff of dust like a breath held too long.
Ink comes out in a thin, sickly sigh,
pooling out like a secret that forgot how to
stay inside.
I dip my finger.
It stains instantly
no gentle bloom on flesh,
just dark midnight swallowing up the
crescent of my nail.
The color is not black.
It is the smudge left behind by fingerprints of vanished poets.
It is the shade of a sentence crossed out so violently
that the paper bleeds out like a stab wound.
I paint each nail carefully,
labeling the artifacts no one will ever bother to display.
The ink dries slowly,
tightening like a corset around the keratin.
Smelling faintly of rot inside forgotten
drawers.
I hold my hands up to the light,
they look excavated from a desk that drowned in time.
There is a thrill in wearing language
where it cannot be read.
I imagine the typewriter watching me as I
work
its worn out keys jealous,
Its frayed ribbon unraveling in envy.
It was built to stain paper in permanence,
not to see its lifeblood paraded around
on ten curved coffins.
Still, it hums in approval.
It knows that curiosity is a collector
with velvet gloves and very sharp teeth.
And when the polish finally chips
it will not flake,
it will shed like brittle paragraphs,
falling into my lap as illegible letters,
tiny obituary clippings for stories
that never even passed the first draft.
Until then,
I keep my hands perfectly still,
a living display case,
ten painted curios
preserving the vanishing specimen
of a sentence
that chose silence
over history.