Using one of my old toothbrushes and a tool I’d made out of a bicycle spoke, I carefully removed the folder from the stratum labeled “office cupboard”. It contained short stories and poems dated “1993”. They had been printed on a machine that called itself a text processor and printed using this cartridge that looked like a cassette tape only smaller, which held a plastic band from which the pigment was transferred to the paper using a technology we no longer understand. “Pressure,” perhaps, or “heat,” or both. There were several copies of each story and each poem, indicating that the author had intended to send them out to potential publishers; the fact that they were still in the folder indicated that
- he had worked somewhere where he could use the copier for free and had therefore made more copies than he could ever use and/or
- he had given up
They were all written with an antiquated cuniform script.
Some were not so bad. This was a surprise. Normally, finding old stories is like finding old love letters, they make one cringe. The stories included the last one the author had written back then, before his kid was born rather early (the stuff was dated 1993 but that was just the date everything had been rewritten and copied; some of the poems may have been more recent, but carbon dating puts the last story at around 1989, just before the kid was born. We’ve mentioned this here before. The story came true, just in a different way than expected, that freaked out the author and he stopped writing. Someone else had a similar experience, or not, and writes about it better.)