Plastic Love
He looked at the keyboard, the keyboard looked back him. It had two piggy
eyes placed above the centre of the function keys.
Write. It whispered to him, using a smaller font than usual. You know you
want to
The writer sipped his hot drink, his hands hovering over the keyboard, but
he didn’t touch the keys. If he touched the keys the keyboard would murmur
words like:
Ohh, I like it. Touch my buttons, harder, harder!
The man couldn’t concentrate with those eyes looking at him, those terrible
words filling his skull. He used to touch-type, never once looking at the
keyboard, but it would always weep when it did this and his fingertips would
become damp from the tears.
Sometimes, when the computer was off, he could swear the keyboard was
talking to the monitor. He could never hear specific words, and whenever he
drew close, the noise would cease. But when he lay in bed, he could hear
them. Talking. About him.
He sometimes sat in his study, listening to Angelo Badalamenti, while his
keyboard wrote poems to him, conspiring with the monitor and the hard drive
to get him to fall in love with them. If he lit a cigarette, the computer
would instantly crash and the eyes – those manic, bloodstained eyes – would
gaze mournfully up at him, begging him to put it out.
Sometimes he would talk back to it.
‘What do you want?’ he would ask.
Just for you to caress me with those long fingers of yours, the words would
appear upon his screen. Touch me.
‘No!’
Play with me.
‘Why won’t you leave me alone?’
Because I want you. I want to be yours, together we’ll write the greatest
novel ever written.
‘Leave me alone!’
The writer would curse and shriek, sometimes even banging his fist against
monitor, but he would never hurt the keyboard itself. Never.
Often, they would just sit, staring at each other. Lost in thought.
Sometimes the writer would look away and try to write something – he hadn’t
come up with anything good for months – but his gaze and his thoughts, would
always be drawn back to the keyboard. He had been known to rest his thumb
upon the CTRL button, his second finger against the END button and, for
several minutes, gently rub his third finger back and forth against the PAGE
DOWN key. Much to the delight of the keyboard, who would softly keen, until
the writer would be overcome by guilt and snatch his hand away, almost as if
it had been burnt.
This state of affairs went on for months.
© 2003 Ben Farmer
