Breathe
By Ryan Owen
When her husband lowers the newspaper and stops hiding his cancer, Stacy learns that their voting rights have eroded as quickly as his health.
The front fold rests on his lap. “How?” she asks.
“With new laws.” He taps the headline with an ink-stained fingertip.
From the kitchen countertop, a screen’s colorless aura startles awake, its glow spilling onto the tan tiles of the floor.
“Let me explain voting rights to you,” a robotic voice replies from the countertop.
Their eyes go wide.
“They can hear us now.” Arthur mouths the words. A hoarse whisper.
A powdery crescent scars the wall where Stacy pitches the device. Black plastic thorns litter the tiles. She steps around them as she picks her way to the bathroom.
She stares at its dead screen as she closes the door. Arthur yells that it can’t hear their words anymore, communicate them to false protectors, misguided champions. Nevertheless, she’s cautious to act, resist . . . persist.
She can’t let them win, or they will silence her words and know her thoughts. Steal her voice. For a forever that feels like death.
She has already locked her smartphone into its metal box in the attic. When she exits the bathroom, she descends the cellar stairway to cut the power to the house.
“Flip the main breaker,” Arthur shouts his deathbed advice.
He’ll be dead by the election. They both know this. Neither says it aloud.
She comes up the stairs, following the smooth grain of the wood handrail. She sits at Arthur’s desk, harvesting the loose threads in her thoughts. An early-morning rain soaks the sounds drifting through the window.
Her fingers rest on the cool glass keys of the typewriter. Their smooth steel rings brush her fingertips.
She is safe here. No one sees her words, reads her thoughts, as she launches them at the page.
Her inspiration comes alive.
She presses the keys. Like soldiers, the hammers rise, striking the paper, creating the letters, forming the message.
Will it work? She steels herself against self-doubt.
Her finger slips. The word ‘vote’ has two o’s.
She sighs.
Arthur was a gardener once, and she finds a thick thorn like a dinosaur claw, in the desk drawer. She scratches away the ink of the extra letter. She finishes the word, vote, the t grainy on the rough parchment.
Her fingers shake.
The years have swelled her knuckles, her fingers unbendable rods, rigid stems.
Her gray hair sways in the reflections of each of the forty-nine glass panes forming the keys.
Vote. Or you never vote again, she types. She breathes.
Arthur breathes beside her. He watches. It’s all he can handle.
She adds the period. They exhale.
Arthur hands her a new sheet of paper. An eyelet on her sleeve catches on the carriage return lever.
She inhales.
She begins the next letter.
Ryan Owen is a writer living among the glacial erratics and waist-high stone walls of central New England. Ryan resurrects antique typewriters and writes all first drafts from their glass-and-chrome keys. Ryan’s fiction has been recognized with an honorable mention in the Writers of the Future contest and has been published in Idle Ink, Litbreak Magazine, and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag, and is forthcoming in Literally Stories and Writers Resist. Find Ryan on Twitter/X, @4gttnNewEngland or on Bluesky, @iviesofinkribbons.
Photo credit: Ben Rogers via a Creative Commons license.
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