At a Loss for Words

Fran’s spot was a ledge under an apartment windowsill lined with tumbling plants. It used to be outside the Pantheon by a record shop, but a man with his pet bunny perched like a parrot on his shoulder took it over a few mornings ago.

Every morning just after sunrise, when owners rolled up metal gates covering cafe doors, Fran’s shopping cart rattled over uneven brick roads between her apartment and the spot. Her olive green typewriter balanced on a stack of paper and clanked against a plastic crate in the cart’s basket. She’d sit cross-legged in an orange tree’s shadow, flip the crate’s open side over and perch the clunky typewriter on it. She attached a small cardboard sign to its front that read 1 euro per word, 3 euros per paper.

One Sunday, Fran cracked each finger individually, interlaced them and stretched her palms. She winced when pain shot through her wrists. Like the skin drooping from her knuckles, her wrists gave up a little more each day. On busy days—Sundays brought the most traffic from nearby churches—she wrapped splints around them. Her thick grey hair was held in a knot in her usual sapphire comb.

On her hike to the spot she picked up that day’s city newspaper. Photographs covered most of the pages, like a children’s book. In white spaces, short bursts of text shared events of the previous day. Each article, if they could be called that, had a strict three sentence maximum. Each was like a puzzle piece missing most of its sibling fragments, some which you could grab from earlier issues but some who were entirely alone. She recognized some reporters’ bylines, older people who used to be her colleagues. They were her favorite customers now. They’d divulge more details to color in outlines of the brief stories. Sometimes even they did not know the full picture.

Most of the reporters were young, crisp like the short sentences they wrote. They carried small voice recorders with several buttons, while the older journalists who visited Fran carried narrow spiral notebooks. The younger ones began stopping by out of pity—they’d noticed Fran while rushing past her with cardboard cups of coffee in hand. They appreciated the old ways their industry worked, and had money to spare to ease their bruised conscience that ached when they saw Fran. They’d toss her a coin without reading a word.

Most of her customers were closer to her age, or younger people shopping for gifts for older people in their lives. They’d commission a fiction story about their grandmother becoming a painter in South Africa, or a dramatized version of a real life story about their wedding. They’d give her freedom with her prose to amplify the flat memories.

“Ciao, Fran. Tell me this week’s story,” Sal said during his regular Sunday visit. He was ten years older than her, matching the age of most of their customers. It was less noticeable on him though. Their faces crinkled in the same way, like balls of paper filled with typing errors. Copier ink covered the sun spots sprayed across his hands.

He carried a stack of paper each time and wore a ragged newsboy hat to go with it, usually had a fat cigar wedged in his lip crease. His crooked fingers bent in different directions and curled oddly around the papers as he handed them over. Between stories ordered by others, she worked on her own narrative concoctions. She’d hand these stories over to Sal who’d add it to the stack.

After decades spent squinting at tiny print, Sal’s vision had aged rapidly, so he asked Fran to read her stories out loud. They were short stories about worlds Fran remembered or dreamed of. A lot of stories, especially a few years back when she first started writing on the street, talked about her, Sal, and the people they used to work with at the city’s newspaper.

A lot of the staff still worked together, but instead of one office they were spread across the city, perched outside or in bars or coffee shops, selling their words for the lowest price. Though many were frail, their hands aching, they reported local news, commented on politics. Sal crowned himself editor — the project was his idea ten years before — and collected stories from across town to piece together a weekly issue. He’d make a few dozen copies; the printer was the same hunchbacked man who’d printed the paper they all used to work for, before computers took over his job, and cut him a deal. Sal would hop back on his bike and make his round again, delivering stacks for each street writer to sell.

Fran read her story out loud. It was a shorter one for her, only a couple paragraphs recreating a dream she’d had the previous night. In it, the entire world woke up and no one could speak. Sal nodded along to the beat of her words. Usually, assuming his editor position, he’d have comments when she finished. This time he continued nodding slowly for a stretch.

“I walked past the office the other day,” he said. “Last time I saw it a few years back it was boarded up. The windows are completely gone now, and you know what I saw, Francesca? It’s exactly the same. Desks lined up the same, computers on them.”

“I thought they were selling it all? It’s been a decade.”

“One reporter, the guy with the small glasses and big eyes, he said they’re raising funds to build an office complex. They want to preserve some of our space for some kind of museum.”

Fran shifted the typewriter to start a fresh line without saying anything. She thought about the luxury of plugging a monitor into a wall and watching it wake up each morning. She shrugged and look down at the keys.

“Do you remember the conversations we used to have in that room, Fran? All of us,” Sal said. She shot him a confused glance; her typewriter’s clicks usually entranced him, teleported him to a time when his hands worked and leaving him speechless. “My god, when words would fill whole pages.”

“Reminiscing about it all the time isn’t going to help, we’ve talked about this. I’m tired of thinking about it,” Fran said. The paper jutting out of her typewriter looked like someone’s tongue mocking her. She ripped it out of the platen and handed it to Sal. “There you are.”

“Come see it with me,” Sal said.

“You mean leave the one place where I make any money to go stare at the dead place that took all that away?” Fran held her watering eyes on Sal’s. Her hard stare and tense lips indicated the conversation was over.

Sal tipped his hat and cleared his throat. “See you next Sunday, Fran.”

A young woman with her hair pulled back as tight as her fitted athletic clothes jogged up to Fran. Her face didn’t look eager, but bored, no brightness in her eyes. She caught her breath and handed Fran a cut-out from the morning paper.

“Can you write this in a way that actually makes sense?” she asked. The paper held just a sentence fragment, President threatens Roma. The woman tuned into her phone. Her nails clicked on the glass rapidly. Sometimes she asked it do things, like it was a tiny robot butler.

Fran held the paper like it was a fragile glass shard she couldn’t drop. She re-read the phrase, red traced up her cheeks.

“You want me to make up a story, ma’am?”
The woman didn’t answer and stared at her phone.
“Ma’am?” Fran repeated. The customer’s attention snapped back to her.
“Like, fiction? No, no, no, tell me what’s going on. Everyone’s talking about it but no one knows a thing.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Fran said quietly. “I don’t know this story. Perhaps another writer will.” “You’re the third one I’ve come to and you all say the same thing. Cagata, you all actually are just cute, useless street decorations.” The woman continued her run without the paper.
A few others came to her with the same question. They seemed worried, and vented their concerns to their handheld assistants when Fran failed them. She wrote a handful of stories for the usual old women leaving evening mass. She packed up her things when the flow of people decrescendoed.

Fran walked back to her shabby apartment with her coin purse noticeably lighter than average. Her home was a studio in an old building tucked in an alley, small enough only she could fit in it. The stove fit two pots, and rested four steps from her narrow bed. Yellowed newspapers covered every inch of wall. She counted up her day’s earnings and put it with the rest of her savings in a box stashed in her closet. She picked through a pile of envelopes stacked on her small bistro- style kitchen table. Red ink on one from her landlord screamed IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED.

She picked up her clunky phone and twisted the dial.
“Ciao, Signorina Esposito’s office,” the voice on the other line said cheerfully.
“Ciao, Berto, it’s Francesca.”
“Ah, Signora Esposito! It’s been too long,” Berto’s voice kept up the jolly lightness ingrained

in it after years as a secretary. “I am afraid Signorina Esposito is out for the night. Is there anything I can help you with?”

It was like the tears from her talk with Sal dripped from a leaking ceiling into a bucket that now overflowed. She shook her head, clenched and unclenched her free hand.

“I was just going to ask for some help with...uh, what she wanted me to send for her birthday, but I might have an idea. Thank you, Berto.” She hung up the phone, then picked it up, spun the dial again.

“I’m interested in taking out a loan,” she said to the faceless person who answered. “Yes, I understand that will add to my existing debt.”

The next day, she collected the cash she had, about half a month’s rent. She remembered she was out of ink and cut into the sparse pile. The streets were quiet. People walked in groups but everyone watched their screens. She stopped in the print shop a few blocks down from her spot under the orange tree. The clerk was the first set of eyes she’d seen looking up that morning. He was listening intently to the radio.

She started to greet him, but he held up his index finger. “Listen,” he said.

“We’re reporting live from outside the president’s estate,” an Italian accent with a prominent lisp said. “We have not yet confirmed whether or not he is on the premises. My colleagues over at The Reporter office say there appears to be no human life anywhere. Computers seem to be tracking happenings and printing out our papers. It is unclear whether or not humans are involved, and how long they haven’t been, in publishing The Reporter. We will keep you listeners updated as more information becomes available about yesterday’s mystery and hopefully answer the lingering question: is our president threatening Rome?”

Spunky commercial music played, the clerk turned it down several notches.
“What do you think is going on, Fran?” The clerk asked.
“Nobody knows what the next part of the story is,” she replied, quietly like she was talking to herself.
“Si, si, si, but what do you think that is? My bet’s on sending us to war.”
“Aren’t there people asking these questions for all of us?”
“You heard the guy, it’s just the computers, and I don’t trust them,” the clerk said and twisted the volume dial back up. “Can I help you with something?”
She nodded quickly, but not at the question. “Black ink, twice as much as usual.”

Fran walked the route her feet recognized despite the stretch of years since she’d traveled it. She passed her spot and the usual nuns heading to the nearby church. Eventually, she ended up in front of smashed windows where it once read Il Messaggero. She saw the desk she used to sit in, the one that faced Sal’s and his overstuffed rolodex, which remained intact. Stepping through the gaping window, she moved to her old place and set the typewriter down next to her computer. She crouched over her keyboard and typed. She paid attention to the way her tired hands and ancient keyboard both worked through the pain to put words on the screen. She wrote until her hands couldn’t anymore.

The pain intensified and Fran struggled to straighten her fingers. She managed one final sentence on the twenty-first page: “Il Messaggero returns. Meet at office/word cemetery, 04.07.2028.” She clicked “Print” and waited for the hundred copies to fly out of the electric printer’s gaping mouth. She found an old canvas grocery bag and walked out with purpose like a paper boy en route.

She traveled the few blocks to Sal’s home, a grey two-bedroom he shared with three other writers. Sal answered after the second knock, wearing a greasy off-white tanktop he’d recently used as a napkin.

“Francesca?”

“I need help,” she said. Sal held a shiny square in his hand he tried to hide by wrapping his thick fingers around it. “You got one?”

“What else was I supposed to do? The rent needed to be paid. Ah, that’s probably what you’re here for, isn’t it? Some money?” His tone was defensive, but also apologetic. She knew she’d hurt him, and that it hurt him more that even if she was asking for money he couldn’t help.

She pulled her writer's manifesto out of her bag. “Read this. I want you to help me find writers, ones who can still do it. I’m not that anymore. But I want you to find us people, writers, reporters, and bring them all to Il Messaggero.”

“You want to go back there?” Sal asked while he took her papers. She grabbed his hand with the phone in it, knocking it to the floor.

“We need answers to a lot of questions, one of them being ‘how in God’s name are we going to pay rent this month?’ The office is the answer. We bring what furniture we can, if we all work together—”

“You want to move in to the office?” Sal asked. He rubbed his forehead like he was massaging the thoughts out to comprehend them.

“That answer, Sal, yes. Because they,” she gestured toward the window behind him, smiling, “need us to find the answers.”