In Etta’s wardrobe there is a typewriter. She can hear the clack clack clack ping! while she tries to sleep. In her dreams, its ribbons coil her up and smudge her skin midnight blue with ink—Mother always had preferred that colour. Etta was never allowed to touch it; the typewriter had been expensive, precious, and always clack-clacking beneath Mother’s ink-stained fingers.
Every step Etta made, from the first to the one that fell in time with her mother’s last breath, was accompanied by a clack or a ping or the whir and click of the platen being pushed and then settling in place. It was not until her mother died that Etta had ever sat in silence, scored by nothing but her own breathing.
Until, clack clack clack—and Etta spilled coffee across the plush, cream carpet. Its only other stain sat beneath her mother’s desk, a cancerous bloom of midnight blue ink.
Now, with her pillow over her head, Etta wishes she’d gotten rid of it along with the house and the furniture and everything else her mother had ever touched. She didn’t need things, Etta had memories and photographs. Mother never liked photographs, so Etta took them in secret. Mother had her typewriter, Etta had—has—her camera. Whether Mother noticed the snap-snap-snapping, Etta will never know.
The photographs, once under her pillow, are now directly beneath her head but Etta cannot bring herself to reach for them. Instead, she imagines Mother lying next to her; Mother’s inky hand in hers. Mother’s voice instead of the typewriter’s. Noses touching under the pillow like they did when she was very small—but never again.
“Where did you go?” she says to the dark.
The typewriter says, clack clack clack, and Mother says, “I’m right here.”
“No,” says Etta. “Not anymore.”
Mother squeezes her fingers. Clack clack clack clack-clack. “Is this not my hand?”
Etta laughs. The sound is hollow and the resulting smile, unkind. “Of course, it isn’t. If you were here—still here—you would be clacking away and I’d be lucky to get a grunt from you.”
Clack clack clack. “That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. When did you last hold my hand? When did you last look at me?”
Clack clack-clack clack clack clack. “I’m looking at you now.”
“No, Mother. You’re not.” Etta sighs. She lifts the pillow with her free hand and rolls onto her back. “You’re gone, Mother. You’re already in the ground and all I have is that stupid typewriter.”
Clack. “Oh.” Ping—whir-click. “Oh—Etta.”
Then she is gone and the typewriter is silent.
Still, Etta can’t sleep. She glances at the clock on her bedside table and the LEDs blink out 2:37 AM. Her own daughter is asleep in the room next door, and Etta wonders what she would do if Etta, herself, had died. Whether she too would be haunted, not by a clack clack clack but a snap snap snap, preceded by the catch release of a lens cap. Would her daughter see Etta on the dark screen of the camera as Etta sees Mother on the explosion of consonants on the paper still loaded on the paper bail of the typewriter? Would her daughter remember her own distorted reflection in the great orb of the lens with more detail than Etta’s own face?
Is that what Etta would become? A hunk of plastic and glass and circuits, with an SD card that her daughter will never ever use. She shudders at the thought. She’s not like her mother, not really—not yet.
From the wardrobe, the typewriter begins its clack-clacking again.