‘Sentencing’
A Children’s Story

This is the tale of a typewriter. His name is Imperial Typewriter Machine Unit #17573, but he doesn’t mind if we call him ‘Imp’ for short. You might not know what a typewriter is. You may have seen one in an old book or movie, but you’ve probably never played with one in real life. Many of them are still around though, hidden away in closets and attics, waiting forever to be useful again. They were born to eat paper and crap stories, and now most of them are either starving or constipated.

Imp was the hungriest of them all. Even when he had been regularly fed, the only stories he’d produced were very long and boring reports about suspected criminals and terrorists. His owner was a secretary in the Durban office of the security police. For her it was just a job like any other, but for Imp it seemed a prison sentence. Despite his inexperience, he felt he knew the difference between good and bad fiction. The big story he’d been forced to type for was called Apartheid, which I’m sure you’ve heard of before. It was a particularly dumb story. It told him that people who wanted to live closer and be nicer to each other were the bad guys. The good guys on the other hand had terrible grammar and spelling. He didn’t know how they could read all the papers they sent through him. But for many years they did, and not much changed.

And then, just when a new story was starting, he was replaced. People wanted to be able to rewrite their stories without using more than one piece of paper. They wanted machines that could be replaced every year with better versions of themselves. They wanted to send stories to other people without leaving their rooms. They wanted computers. Imp could understand this, but he couldn’t see why people couldn’t see that he had character and computers had none. He was old enough to have a story of his own, while every computer seemed to never get older than a toddler before being thrown away. The secretary was too kind and old-fashioned to throw him away too, but for twenty-and-a-bit years he sat on a shelf in her garage, trapped in his case, needing a new ribbon, collecting dust.

One day, because her grandson asked her to, she took him down, opened him up, blew the dust off his yellowing keys and gave him a shiny, new black-and-red ribbon. He couldn’t believe he’d been given such a reprieve. The secretary’s daughter took him with her to Cape Town to deliver him to his new owner. Her son was an English student who wanted to make himself write more, and he thought having a typewriter like Imp would help tremendously. He also thought Imp’s character would rub off on him and he’d look as old as he felt inside. Both predictions proved mostly true. His new owner covered a whole noticeboard in pages of incoherent poetry and unfinished stories. He was trying to write for a new big story that didn’t have a name yet. He wasn’t succeeding, but Imp was at least happy to be helpful to his attempt. Occasionally Imp’s ribbon would break and he’d have to collect dust again, but he knew now he would never be thrown away. His own story was written on a computer but he wasn’t disappointed. The stories he would write would be more important than him but wouldn’t exist without him either.