08 III 2002 - 18:55 - verba12

This entry is an Alchera entry. It's for the sixth weekly challenge. Details are as follows:

Weekly Challenge No. 06
Project Begins: Thursday, March 07, 2002
Project Ends: Thursday, March 14, 2002

PROJECT DETAILS

I want to focus on people who usually don't get the focus. Everyone writes books and stories and poems about lead singers, pitchers, writers, et cetera. I want something about a drummer, an umpire, an editor--someone who doesn't always get the limelight. It can be any role you can think of (as long as it adheres to the requirements here), but I want you to assume the role and write a first person narrative.

So, here goes:

He trashed me. So many nights we spent in flights of fancy, fits of dreaming, and when it was over, he threw me out, without anything, without even an attempt to get me fixed. I'm not complex, I don't have so many needs; I'm just a mass of keys and levers, nothing that a couple of hours with a screwdriver himself! couldn't fix. Oh, but I wasn't pretty enough, modern enough. I was good enough to do the work of transcribing thought to paper for the first few years but when it came, the slip that said he would be published, he found it right to forget about me.

Oh, when he was living by himself, with only me for company, he'd sit up late into the night, pecking away at me, smoothing long fingers over me, setting his tattoo against the silence, late into the night. And I'd have his warmth by me, and the memorized set of his face when yet another rejection letter came back. And I thought it would always be this way, that we'd always be together, that he'd always stick by me, carrying me with him from apartment to apartment.

So I thought wrong. I'm only a machine, made by the hands of flawed men, and what can I do with a beginning like that but be flawed? I am only a recorder, nothing more, can't push my own keys, can't prove I have feelings. And so.

So now that he's made his success he discards me, used, and if he thinks about me at all it is only to wonder how he could have allowed so much of what he esteems as his creative juices to flow into me. Why he didn't give me up in favor of the computer long ago.

I made that man, allowed him to write when his hands would have tired, and he threw. me. away. for that machine, not to be trusted, where there are circuits and wires and they're all hidden away on little panels. I see it in the corner, radiating smugness. He can't have replaced me with that.

But all my powers of denial will not save me from that tonight I am to be taken to be scrapped. After all of this, to be scrapped - it's an ending worthy of one of his precious stories.

And worst of all, I won't be here to tell it.