The Typewriter Finishes Sentences I Don't

I restore and collect manual typewriters — there's a small devoted world of us. This one came from a job-lot house clearance, a heavy old machine, beautiful action once I'd cleaned it, and I set it up on my desk with a fresh ribbon and a sheet of paper to test the keys, which is when it stopped being a typewriter and started being a problem.

You type on a manual typewriter and nothing types back; that is the entire nature of the machine. There is no mechanism by which keys depress themselves, levers swing, the platen advances, without a hand. I want that understood as the baseline physics I'm violating.

I typed a test line — the usual quick brown fox nonsense — and left the room to make tea. I came back to a second line on the page, below mine, that I had not typed. The machine had, in my absence, in an empty locked room, typed a sentence. And the sentence was not random: it CONTINUED. Not my fox sentence, but a thought, mid-flow, as if picking up a conversation I hadn't known I was in: '...and still no letter came, though she watched the road every morning from the window over the door.'

It has done this many times now, and the rules have become clear. It types only when I'm not looking. It always continues — never starts fresh, but extends whatever fragment I've last typed into its own thought, seamlessly, so that my banal test lines become the openings of someone else's sentences. And the sentences are always, always about the same thing: a woman, waiting, for a letter that doesn't come. 'She kept his chair.' 'The postman's bicycle bell was the cruelest sound.' 'Forty years is a long time to watch a road.' A whole life of waiting, typed out a line at a time, in a voice with its own cadence and its own grief, using my typewriter and my ribbon and my absences to say the things it apparently still needs to say.

I've researched the clearance house as far as it goes. A woman lived there alone for a very long time. The clearance people, when I pressed, remembered 'a lot of unsent letters' among her effects, bundled and never posted, and a house 'that felt like it was still waiting for someone.' I think I know whose typewriter this was. I think she spent forty years writing to someone who never wrote back, or never came, and I think some residue of that waiting is still in the machine, still watching the road, still finishing the sentence.

I keep it inked and I keep paper in it, and I've stopped testing the keys with foxes. Now I sometimes type a real opening — 'Tell me about the letter' — and leave the room, and come back to a page of her answer, and I read it, and it's unbearable, and I keep doing it, because I think forty years of unsent grief deserves, at last, one person willing to come back into the room and read what it finally got to say. When she's finished — if grief like that ever finishes — I imagine the keys will go still. Until then, I leave the paper in, and the light on, and the road, I suppose, watched.