The Typist

 The Typist 

I came to in front of a typewriter. Upon reaching out to touch it I discovered that I did not have all my fingers, and in twiddling the stub of a thumb I was made aware of the fact that I did not have all my memories.

This did not initially bother me very much, but soon enough my heart had begun racing in a sickly way. By then I had six minutes worth of time and texture and memory to comfort myself with. Now I began to gather what I knew. I could breathe, and feel, and my thoughts seemed perfectly coherent (at least to me). I did not have any other missing parts as far as I could feel. Neither was I bound to the chair, and I would have gotten up long ago had there been any where for me to go.

The typewriter itself was nondescript, steel gray and shiny. In fact there did not seem to be any colour in anything at all. 

My own skin seemed slightly translucent, the veins prominent as though deliberately making an effort to pull themselves out of me. 

I came to the conclusion that if I could identify gray, black and white, then I knew more colours. I could have sworn my skin was a different hue.

This provided a feeling of discomfort, as I deduced that this was deeply unnatural.

Oddly enough this was not very disturbing to me.

I was at peace with the world.

The thought that did disturb me, however, was that there must have been a time where I was not.

I must have been in pain once. 

But there would also have been colour.

Next to the typewriter was a stack of papers. I  had not noticed it before.

I did not start to write immediately, of course.

I knew there was blood in those veins.

 I could also vaguely imagine what red was like. 

I had picked up a sheet of paper without much thought, and found my fingers tracing it slowly. It was neither thick nor thin and I could not feel any irregularities on the surface and yet it was not slippery to the touch.

It came as a mix of one part surprise and two parts disappointment that when my finger bled, the blood too was grey.

I held it up and let it drip on to the paper.

It did not soak into the fibres.

It just sat on the surface and glistened like... something.

I had a word right on the tip of my tongue.

It slipped off and fell into the rest of the void around the edges of the chair and the table.

It seemed as though space too was relative. Or mutable.

I could leave the paper hanging in nothing, but if I had the slightest feeling that it too should have fallen down, it made its way into the blankness below my feet. 

Strangely enough, no matter how many sheets I pulled off and threw around, the number of papers in the stack remained constant.

For the sake of experimentation, I crumpled a sheet and thought it downwards. 

A similarly wrinkled but still usable paper appeared at the top of the stack.

The stack remained (x) sheets high.
 I had spent about an hour in contentment, and felt something in me become restless and bored. I was fairly certain that even if I found nothing to step onto, I would be returned to my seat.
I would try anyway.

And then

I

       would

come

            to

in

           front

of

          a

t
 y
  p
   e
    w
      r
       i
        t
         e
          r
.