Hours passed easily that day, and by the time her head settled onto her pillow for her now regular early-evening nap, she fell asleep almost instantly.
That night, the characters complimented her on the decorations, and she was pleasantly surprised by how good it felt to have made yet another improvement in the shop.My shop, she corrected herself, and she liked how right it sounded.
Soon, she and Vronsky were at her desk, ready to begin writing.This is it, she told herself.Preparation over, time to start putting pen to paper.
She’d taken the extra chair out of the back room for Vronsky and put it next to hers at the desk.Her notebook was getting too jumbled to read, with notes that jumped across periods of time and were sometimes just a collection of words that, in the moment, had made sense but now were indecipherable.Deciding it would be easier to start fresh, Aurelia opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stack of loose-leaf paper.
“This’ll do,” she said matter-of-factly.
She grabbed a pen from a mug full of assorted pens and pencils and drew a squiggle on the paper to confirm it actually worked.
“Right—paper: check.Pen: check.”
She pulled her chair to an open corner of her desk, sat down, and set the paper in front of her.Holding her pen in position, she looked up to see Vronsky, who’d been silently observing her with his brows drawn together in a question mark.
“Are you ready?”Aurelia asked.
“I believe the better question is, are you?”he countered.
“Yes,” she said, holding up the pen and pointing to the stack of paper.
“These are the instruments that will catalog the rest of my life?”
He cocked his eyebrow so quickly that Aurelia had to stifle a laugh as she imagined it shooting off his head.
“Well, they may not be a feathered quill and parchment, but they’ll do the job.”
“We do not write with feathered quills in my time,” he said witheringly, but with a hint of a smile at her jab.“But a silver or gold writing implement would seem much more auspicious for the occasion.”
“As it happens, I’m fresh out of silver and gold pens,” Aurelia said, once again trying not to laugh.“But I promise this will capture your story just as well.In any case, this is just a starting point.Once we’ve got a few chapters, I’ll start typing up the finished product.”
“Typing?”
Aurelia had spoken without thinking, but now realized that using her laptop in the shop at night might require more explanation than the characters could handle.Her eyes caught on the slightly battered typewriter that had been on the desk for as long as she’d been coming into the shop and she thought it just might work.
“Yes, hang on,” she said as she moved papers and stacks of books around her desk to pull the typewriter closer.
“Have you seen or heard of a typewriter before?”
Vronsky took a few steps forward and dropped down to inspect it at close range.
“A typewriter… I have heard of such a machine but never seen one,” he said, his voice rising with excitement.
Aurelia remembered that he and Anna had owned the latest and best of everything.He had a natural curiosity for innovation.
“Here, I’ll show you how it works.”
She took a blank page from her stack and fed it into the back of the typewriter.After turning the knob to advance the wheel until the paper was under the guide, she set her hands over the keys and paused as she tried to think of something to type.Once an idea came to her, she began typing, the keys clacking away as she went.
Vronsky read aloud over her shoulder: “‘Count… Alexei… Vronsky… is… a… Russian… aristocrat.’Ha!Just like that!Much faster than a pen!”
“It can be.But a pen and paper are still better for some things, like writing out our first ideas.”
“But you’ll use this—you will type my story when it is finished?”
“Sure.Then we can use the typed manuscript for the experiment.”Aurelia leaned in to inspect the faded ink of her typewritten words.“I’ll just have to get some new ink ribbons now that we’ll be pressing this thing back into service.”
“Wonderful.Very modern indeed.”Vronsky nodded his approval.Then, seeming to recall himself, he said, “I suppose we ought to begin if we are to have something worth typing.Do you agree?”
