The last page

The Last Page

It was an old typewriter, no doubt about it, the kind you’d find at a flea market, collecting dust behind old records and postcards. The shop itself was one of those forgotten places, tucked away on a side street where the buildings sagged under the weight of their own history. I hadn’t meant to stop in—just a moment of curiosity while I walked to clear my mind. But there it was, sitting on a table beneath a flickering light: the typewriter. It beckoned.

“Once in a while,” the shopkeeper said, her voice trembling with a secret, “an item like that comes in. Rare. Unseen for years.”

I glanced at the price tag—cheap. Too cheap for something that seemed so... heavy. Yet, something in my chest told me it was exactly what I needed. I’d been struggling with my writing, always feeling just shy of something—something great, something real—and the promise of finding it in a forgotten machine was too tempting. The shopkeeper warned me, but I didn’t listen. She said it had history. "Don’t let it write your story," she whispered, though I didn’t catch her meaning at the time.

I took it home, excited.


---

At first, it was almost... perfect. The clicking of the keys was like music, a rhythm I hadn’t heard in years. I poured myself into it. I wrote and wrote, words spilling out in torrents. My mind felt sharper, more clear. And with each sentence, I felt a strange, intoxicating satisfaction, as if the typewriter itself was validating every thought I put down.

But then it happened.

One morning, I woke up to a peculiar sight. The typewriter was still there on my desk, and the paper—a crisp white sheet—had lines of text already on it. But I hadn’t written a word. The message was simple, yet impossible: "You cannot escape."

I stared at it, bewildered. It must’ve been a dream, I reasoned. But as the days passed, it grew worse. The messages began to grow darker. A thought would cross my mind, and it would appear on the page. I thought of a man, and there he was in the text—broken and bruised, his life unraveling. At first, I laughed it off, dismissing it as coincidence, but the more I wrote, the more it felt as though the typewriter was... guiding me. Shaping my words, bending them into something more than mere fiction.

The first time I felt it—really felt it—was when I typed a simple phrase: "The sun will set and never rise again." It wasn’t even a sentence I thought would matter. But later that evening, there was an odd stillness in the air, and I could have sworn the light dimmed more than it should’ve.

I shook it off. I was the writer, I controlled the story.

But the typewriter was writing back. And this time, I could feel it more clearly. The moment I left the room, I could hear the clack of keys, even though I hadn't touched it. It was as if the typewriter was waiting for me to turn back. Waiting for me to take control again—or else.

And then it started to change.

It wasn’t just the words anymore. It was the feeling—the presence of the machine. It sat there, staring at me from across the room, almost daring me to touch it. The smell of ink grew stronger, overwhelming at times. And at night, I’d wake up to the sound of the keys tapping away, even when I hadn’t been near it.

I tried ignoring it. But each morning, the words were there—new messages, each more insistent, more demanding. A sense of power, like a drug, had overtaken me. It was as if the typewriter was writing not just my stories—but my life.

And then came the last one—the message I could never take back. I thought, for just one moment, a grand gesture might be worth it. I wrote it without thinking, the words flowing faster than I could grasp their meaning. "I want to be known. I want to be immortal. Let everyone remember me."

And that’s when the typewriter took control completely.

It typed on its own. Unbidden. Unstoppable. "You will be remembered."


---

The walls began to close in, the air too thin to breathe. I could hear its low hum, like a whisper in the back of my mind. My life wasn’t mine anymore. Not really. The typewriter had taken it, had rewritten it without my consent. The ground beneath me felt unstable, as if the very earth were shifting with every keystroke.

I thought I was losing my mind.


---

The last time I tried to stop it, the words that appeared were not my own. They were cold, mechanical. Detached. “There is no escape. You cannot stop what you have started.”

And then, the words kept coming. No matter how I fought against it. No matter how I tried to close my eyes, to erase my thoughts. I was helpless. Trapped in my own creation.


---

I am writing this now because I know I cannot stop. I’m still at the typewriter, still trapped by it. Every letter, every word, carries a weight heavier than the last. My fingers move on their own, the keys clacking with an energy I can no longer control.

The stories are no longer mine.

They are the typewriter’s.

And I know that one day, someone will come across this machine, just like I did. They will sit at it, thinking they can control it, too.

But they will be wrong.

The typewriter is the one who writes now.