Click.

Click.

The tactile sound of a letter being input on a typewriter. 

The clicks were what drove Joseph mad being raised by his Grandmother. Joseph’s grandmother was a retired secretary who just couldn’t kick the habit of using her old Olympia typewriter around the house while he was growing up.  With his parents killed in a car accident as an infant, his Grandmother was all he knew.

But he hated her.

And that’s why he hated the Click. 

One could imagine how the news of Joseph’s Grandmother being diagnosed with dementia would leave him feeling ambiguous. Now in his thirties, Joseph had long forgotten the feeling of being in his Grandmother’s house.

He swore he would never return to his Grandmother’s home. But at the request of his Grandmother’s social worker, he was now sitting in the recliner next to the bed where his Grandmother was sleeping. “At least that godforsaken typewriter is in the basement” he thought, “and she’s too dense right now to even think about it”. Joseph rocked back and forth in the recliner watching his Grandma, as his eyes closed to sleep. 

Rage entered into his mind as he heard it. 

Click. 

Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. 

He knew as he woke up, that his Grandmother was typing on the Olympia downstairs. He stormed down the stairwell and shouted at her, “What are you doing down here?” 

All she did was point at the page, Joseph ripped it from the roller of the typewriter and read it.

I can write

Those were the only words typed at the top of the blank page. 

“No you can’t.” Joseph replied. “You’re too stupid to even write out a full page anymore! Why don’t you just go back to your bed? That way we can both try to get some rest.” But his Grandmother just remained seated at the desk where the typewriter lay. “Fine you hag.” Joseph yelled as he grabbed his Grandmother by the arm and dragged her up the stairs.

Joseph sighed once his Grandmother was back asleep. He had noticed the bruise he had left on her arm when he had dragged her up the staircase of the basement. He screamed into his pillow at the thought of his Grandmother’s social worker coming in the morning and having to find some way to explain it away to her. 

He went back downstairs to the basement to move the typewriter out of the sight of his Grandmother. He didn’t want her coming back downstairs to mess around with it anymore. But before he went to go move the typewriter, he sat down at the desk his Grandmother had been sitting at. In an act of spite, he loaded the page into the typewriter and quickly typed. 

THIS STUPID TYPEWRITER SHOULD SHUT UP

Afterward, he slammed both of his fists into the keys. But the sound stunned him for a moment. Or rather the lack of sound. The noticeable Click of the keys was mute. Thinking he was too tired, he went to remove the page and slid the roller anticipating the sound of the bell to echo from the typewriter. But no bell rang. 

Joseph sat in a state of dubiety for a few moments before quickly rerolling the page and typing out another line to disprove what he just saw. 

The ink on this typewriter will turn blue

But surely enough, the letters on the page turned a royal blue.

Still denying the anomaly, Joseph quickly went back upstairs to the recliner next to his Grandmother’s bed and went to sleep. 

The morning soon came with the knock of a social worker waiting at his Grandmother’s front door. “Good Morning Ms. Greenwald”, Joseph spoke in a drowsy state of being. Joseph had spent the morning trying to dress his Grandmother in something other than a hospital gown to no avail. He was hoping to get her in something that would hide the now bloodied bruise on her arm after dragging her up the stairs the night before. But in confusion and duress, she shut herself in the basement and locked the door so Joseph was just going to let the social worker address that matter when she arrived.

“How are you settling in Joseph?” the social worker inquired as she set her stuff down on the dining room table. “Just fine. It has been great to see my Grandmother.” The lie had an unnecessary bite to it that he hoped wouldn’t tip off the social worker to any problems he’d been having with his Grandmother. 

“Let me see if my Grandmother is awake.” Joseph was hoping to stall a bit so he could try to lure out his Grandmother from the basement. However, just as he went to enter the key into the basement door’s keyhole, it opened to his Grandmother walking out in an elegant maroon ball gown. The initial shock was smothered by his relief when he saw that this dress covered her sleeves. He didn’t know where it came from, but as long as she was dressed and her bruise was covered, he was content for now. 

The social worker gasped as she saw Joseph’s grandmother do a pirouette across the dining room. “Wow! It seems like having your grandson here has done wonders for you!” And while Joseph knew there was nothing that he did that made this miracle occur, he couldn’t help but stand in awe at the sight of an senile old woman with dementia dancing across the dining room. 

Shortly after the social worker left, he went downstairs to see where his Grandmother had found this ball gown. He realized that after his half-awake episode in the evening, he had completely forgotten about putting the typewriter away where his Grandmother couldn’t reach it. He quizzingly looks down at the page in the typewriter and realizes there are more words typed on the page from last night. Joseph couldn’t fathom how he wouldn’t have heard the Click of the keys typed if his Grandmother had written more. But the sight of more words typed out in blue ink, quickly made him realize that the episode he had in the evening was more than just the illusions of a sleepy stupor. 

I will relive the joy of my youth. It starts with the beautiful maroon ball gown I had as a teenager

Joseph was indignant. His grandmother was continuing to get joy out of something he hated so much, but he couldn’t dismiss the bizarre supernatural occurrences surrounding his grandmother’s Olympia typewriter. 

The feelings of confusion and rage continued the next morning when he awoke to the sound of Clicks over the blaring melodies of Ride of the Valkyries. When Joseph arrived downstairs, he saw that the dreaded Click of the Olympia typewriter truly had returned. He also saw a giant jukebox now in the basement that was the source of blaring opera music. The whole scene made him sick to his stomach. The clicking of the typewriter, the blaring music, it all reminded Joseph of when his grandmother was raising him. For Joseph, nothing was ever going to fill the void of growing up without his parents. But his grandmother always tried to fill that void. 

He hated that she tried so hard. He hated that she tried to get him to like the things that she grew up with. He hated being forced to listen to opera music day in and day out. He hated being forced to write. He hated the Click. 

The rage welled up inside of him and he struck his grandmother across the face. He couldn’t handle it any longer. With his grandmother now on the floor, he turned off the newly appeared jukebox. He gazed at the typewriter to see what she had written:

I want a Jukebox playing Ride of the Valkyries, it reminds me of teaching Joseph to write.

I want the click back on my typewriter, it just doesn’t feel right without the sound. 

I don’t want Joseph to take away the typewriter. 

I want—

The cutoff was where his grandmother had left off before he struck her. 

Still coming off the rage that had welled up inside of him, he quickly typed a conclusion to the sentence his grandmother had started.

I want the clicking of the typewriter to stop and to never come back

He typed a few letters and the sound of the Click was no longer there. Although, when he went to pick up the typewriter hoping to throw it away, it stuck to the desk. Joseph’s mind immediately went to what his grandmother had typed. 

I don’t want Joseph to take away the typewriter

The thought of this made Joseph scream obscenities toward the direction of his grandmother who was still curled up on the floor. “This typewriter is a game to you! It’s all you care about! You would rather superglue a typewriter to a desk, and waste your life savings on a Jukebox you probably can’t even hear!” Joseph was so angry, he had to stop to catch a breath. “I hope I hurt you. You deserve it after all the years you didn’t care for me and my needs”. Joseph stomped up the stairs and slammed the basement door. 

A few hours later, he moved the typewriter with the desk attached, upstairs to his grandmother’s room. He moved the recliner he was sleeping in the previous few nights down to the basement and helped his grandmother into it. While still angry, he at least rendered aid to the wounds that he inflicted and gave her a blanket to keep warm while in the basement. 

Joseph locked the door and went back upstairs to his grandmother’s room to sleep in her bed. He slowly drifted to sleep as the sight of the desk with the typewriter gradually faded to black. 

Joseph woke up on his own, surprised that he got a full night of sleep. To his bewilderment, his grandmother was sitting at the desk with the typewriter. Joseph wasn’t angry at her yet. He got up and started to joke around with her. “So how’d you get out of the basement? You’ve got that iron-will and determination. I will give you that.” He chuckled in amazement, in her state it’s a miracle she was able to make it up the stairs. He continued through the giggles, “I didn’t hear any clicking last night, no new writings today?” But his chuckling stopped when he saw that there was writing on the page. So he read what his grandmother had written. 

I was a good grandmother. 

I didn’t fail Joseph. 

I raised Joseph right. 

The rage returned with a vengeance within Joseph’s soul. He grabbed his grandmother by the scalp and screamed in her ear, “Do you think this is a joke? Was my life a joke to you? You weren’t a good grandmother!” 

The desk jumped as he slammed his grandmother’s face into the typewriter. 

“And you certainly failed me by not raising me right!”

After the final scathing remark, he slammed his grandmother’s face into the typewriter one last time bloodying and deforming her face even more, causing her to fall. He slammed it into the typewriter so hard, that it slid off the desk and landed flat on the floor where his grandmother lay. 

Joseph quickly began to realize that this was all going to look bad on him once the social worker returned later in the day. He ran downstairs to get towels, to blot up the blood pooling upstairs. He stopped in horror when he heard the noise that had haunted him. 

Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. Click. Click. 

Click. Click. 

It was the sound of his grandmother typing. 

He ran up the stairs, clouded by childhood trauma and the greatest level of rage he had experienced thus far. He walked into the bedroom and kicked the final breath out of his grandmother’s lungs. He then kicked the Olympia typewriter out into the hall and down the stairwell where the typewriter broke into hundreds of pieces, the hammers for the letters going all across the floor. 

Joseph came back downstairs to the typewriter mangled on the floor, with the white page sticking out of it. “What could be so important?!” he yelled, as he went to read 

One day Joseph will love me

Joseph burst into tears. 

The social worker soon found the massacre at his grandmother’s home. The police came and arrested Joseph for 1st degree murder. But as he walked out of his grandmother’s house in handcuffs, he looked back at the doorway hearing for the last time. 

Click. Click. Click.