A piece of paper printed with three typewritten paragraphs that read (lightly edited) as follows: / A man finds a typewriter in a shop. The co-proprietor beams when she sees he’s picked it up. “I used that to write my first novel,” she tells him. “It’s got a bent part in the body, but otherwise still works great.” The man wonders why she’s selling it since it appears to have sentimental value for her, but he does not ask her why. Instead he purchases the typewriter for $45. The co-proprietor tells him of a nearby typewriter repair shop. “Run by two brothers,” she says. “They took over the business from their father who started it in the fifties.” The man thanks her and says he’ll check it out. / The man walks a few blocks to where the woman told him the typewriter repair shop is. There is a sign advertising the space for lease and what looks to be a new, cheap paint job on the exterior of the building. He peers around the sign, through the glade of the front door. It’s empty inside. Next door is a bright white shop selling tiny cactuses and succulents. / The man arrives home to his apartment. He sets the typewriter up on his kitchen table and goes to look for a sheet of paper. Sure enough, the body of the typewriter is dented, right at the space bar, so that the space bar doesn’t easily depress. He immediately has an idea for a story where the main character buys a dented typewriter with a non-functional space bar, but the reader doesn’t discover that the spacebar doesn’t work until some way into the story. However, the story itself is written without spaces between any of the words or punctuation marks, as if it were written on the typewriter WITHIN the story, likeso,sothatwhenthereaderdiscoversthatthetypewriterdoesn’thaveafunctionalspacebarhesuddenlyunderstandswhythestoryiswrittenthisway. The man thinks this idea is very clever. He sits for a moment and considers writing that story right now, and then goes to bed instead.
