“The Old Man and the Remington” — FWG Flash Fiction for 5/31/2025

What can you do when you can’t do what you do anymore?

The prompt is:

https://pixabay.com/photos/typewriter-write-old-vintage-8622984

THE OLD MAN AND THE REMINGTON

The old man sat at his desk. He lovingly ran his fingers over the varnished oak surface, that was scarred with innumerable sweat rings and cigarette burns. That sturdy piece of furniture was the only thing left in his life older than he was. He told the now infrequent visitors that he could remember the origin of every single blemish, pointing out the pattern of knife cuts in the Mersman leather inlay that fit perfectly between his splayed fingers.

But then again, he told stories for a living. Or, at least, he did years ago. Lately, though, when he reread what he had typed yesterday, he could make no sense of it.

Wiping his eyes with his sleeve, his fingers caressed the true object of his love, his constant companion, through his long life. Remy had witnessed his foibles, affairs, and drunken rants. She listened as he poured out his heart without criticism or comment, translating his many noble, yet ultimately failed, attempts to achieve perfection into something at least coherent.

It was the sparseness of his prose that had won him fame and not the smallest amount of fortune. Indeed, the royalty checks, though diminished, still appeared in his mailbox every year as the nation’s youth were subjected to reading the words he had spewed out like drunken vomit decades ago. Truly, though, they were more Remy’s words than his, as she always seemed, in the morning’s glare, to wrangle them into prose as crisp and stiff as a starched collar.

With the gentlest gesture he had managed in years, he lightly kissed his fingertips and laid them on the keys where they were most at home.

Sniffing at his sentimentality, he lifted his other Remington and wedged its stock between his legs. Its kiss was not so gentle.

THE END