The Lone Typewriter

A lone man on a typewriter clacked away day after day. He made time for rest every once in awhile, but apart from that, the sound of keys hitting paper was incessant.  Sharp little echos always flew from wall to wall in his small, featureless white room.


"DING!" Sounded the machine, time to switch lines.

In front of the man's large wooden desk laid two formidable steel cages. He looked up every now and then to check the status of each cage.  This was his job, to record everything that happened, and he was proud of it.  Lies and omissions were unacceptable.

"The gorilla is calm and cool as ever..." He typed after glancing at the animal in the first cage.  His description was about right too.  The 800 pound monstrous creature was sitting cross legged, smoking a pipe, staring off into the distance with a pensive look on his hairy face.

"And the child is acting strange again..." The man continued to write after shifting his eyes to a wide-eyed, haggard child who was pressed up against the bars of the other cage, stretching his arms out as if pleading.

He didn't look long though, he had to get back to recording. That kid always gave him goosebumps and there's no way he wanted to hear those pitiful words that were always coming out of the child's mouth. 
"Help me."

Suddenly, there was a knock at the room's only door.  The writer looked back toward the door, nervously.  He felt stunned and unsure of himself.

The knocking got louder.

"Well, my good sir, won't you be answering the door?" The gorilla inquired with a very reasonable tone.

"Huh? Oh.. yes, of course." The writer was almost in a daze.  He moved toward the door as if he were pulled by strings.

His hand shook as he apprehensively turned the knob. As soon as the door was cracked, it was flung wide open by whoever was standing on the other side.  There, the stranger stood as a silhouette in the doorway, leaving the writer paralyzed with fear.

Slowly, deliberately, the stranger put a rag in the writer's hand, and with a smile, pushed it up to his face. Within seconds the writer was collapsed on the floor, leaving the stranger free to bend down and remove the writer's key ring.

Observing this, the gorilla howled with pleasure.
"RUHAHAHA OOH OOH OOH!" He beat his chest as the stranger approached his cage.

"NO! Please I won't survive, I can't.. he'll kill me, please just leave me alone, please." The child was faintly audible over the roaring gorilla.

Without a word, the stranger quickly unlocked both cages and left the room, closing the door behind him.

The child could only see the beady, angry eyes of the gorilla before everything went black.

The writer woke up hours later to find his classy gorilla smoking a pipe again.
"Hey there gorilla, looks like I passed out again.  Funny, eh?"
The gorilla peered at the man with a firey glare.
"Yes, indubitably.  Let's return to recording, shall we?"

But as he was approaching his typewriter, the man noticed the child, beaten to a bloody mess.

"What in the hell happened here??? What did you do?!"
Yelled the man furiously as he ran toward the gorilla's cage.

"What have you done?! It must have been you.  Why did you do it??"

The gorilla took a long, slow puff from his pipe and then words began to drip from his tongue like honey, "My poor poor man.  Of course this wasn't me.  We've been locked up in our respective cages- can't you see? I could not have done this.  Besides, you know how clumsy children are- he merely fell over a couple of times while you were resting."

"Oh."
The man's face was blank.
The child groaned through toothless gums and pointed at the gorilla, but the man's face remained blank.  Even as he turned passed the child's cage on his way back to typing, the man's eye's carefully avoided that broken heap.


He sat down behind his desk again and, without lifting his eyes once, noted, "Child fell during rest, hope he's better soon."