Member-only story
The Man In The Window
He knows now, there’s no way around it, this man has to die
Look at him, the way he’s bent over paper, pen gripped so hard his index finger blooms wild rose round the bed of his fingernail as he strokes out words furiously, scribbles in the margin. Later, he’ll go to the keyboard and some days he’ll choose the old vintage typewriter he bought on a whim one day long ago because he liked something about the way it made him feel.
Takes him to some long ago day when writers rolled paper into an old 1926 Underwood like Hemingway pecking away at Old Man and the Sea or maybe a black L.C. Smith & Brothers, pale gold keys perched on skinny stems, big behemoth of a thing like the one Kerouac used to tap out On The Road while cigarette smoke curled up slow beside him from a thick glass ashtray.
Those were the days he sometimes muses, men’s men like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, nursing red wine at some old speakeasy, come home to tap at the old beast didn’t even have a key for the number one but fewer keys left more space for the hammers to strike instead of jam and anyway, didn’t really need one when the lower case L sufficed perfectly fine.
His hand scribbles, hovers, arcs across the paper as he furiously scratches swaths of text then throws the pen on the desk, reaches under his glasses to rub his…
