The Amber Typing

My wife’s grandmother, Nonna Rosa, had three siblings: two sisters, Fiorella and Carmela, and a brother, Matteo, who died before I ever met my wife. They were born in a small village in the hills of Calabria, but Nonna Rosa was born in Boston, where her father worked as a stonemason. He would return to Italy every few years, and each time he left, Nonna’s mother was pregnant. Finally, when he had saved enough, he brought the whole family to a cramped apartment in East Boston. My wife was the last of her line, and our twin boys are the last to carry the family name.

Carmela, the youngest sister, is now in a memory care facility in the suburbs. She has severe dementia and doesn’t recognize her own children. The nurses say she is physically healthy, but her mind is lost in the past. I visited her last month, hoping to find some connection to my wife’s heritage, but she just stared at the wall, humming an old lullaby.

After that visit, I started noticing something odd. It began with my laptop. I would step away to make coffee, and when I returned, there would be a single letter ‘A’ typed in the search bar, always lowercase, always alone. I chalked it up to my kids messing around, but they swore they hadn’t touched it. I cleared my browsing history, changed my passwords, even put a password on my user account, but the ‘A’ kept appearing.

Soon, it wasn’t just my laptop. My phone would show an ‘A’ in the notes app. My tablet, which I used for reading, would have an ‘A’ in the margins of whatever book I was reading. My smart TV would have an ‘A’ typed into the search function, even when I hadn’t used it in days. I began to feel like I was being watched, like some invisible presence was leaving its mark on every device I touched.

The ‘A’ appeared on my office computer at work, on the public library’s desktop, even on my father-in-law’s old typewriter, which sat in our attic as a dusty relic. I tried to ignore it, but it was relentless. I started covering my laptop camera, but the ‘A’ still appeared.

My wife thought I was losing my mind. She saw the ‘A’ too, but she dismissed it as a glitch, a message from the ghost in the machine. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the letter ‘A’ burning in my vision.

Then, one night, I was alone in the house, and I heard a faint scratching sound from the attic. I went up, flashlight in hand, and found the old typewriter sitting on a table, the roller moving by itself, punching an ‘A’ into the paper. The ribbon was dry, but the impression was clear. As I watched, the machine paused, then typed another ‘A’, and another, in an endless rhythm.

I felt a cold dread seep into my bones. I remembered that Carmela’s maiden name was Amato. The ‘A’ wasn’t a glitch; it was her name, her initial, calling out from the fog of her mind. I called the nursing home, and a nurse told me that Carmela had been found that morning in her room, typing the letter ‘A’ on her keyboard, over and over, with a serene smile on her face.

I drove to the facility, my heart pounding. When I entered her room, she was sitting upright, her eyes clear for the first time in years. She looked at me and said, ‘He’s coming.’ I asked who, and she whispered, ‘Matteo. My brother. He died in the war, but he’s coming back. The letters are a trail for him.’

I didn’t know what to say. I backed out of the room, and as I did, I saw her finger move to the keyboard, typing a single ‘A’.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the hum of the house. At 3:03 AM, my phone buzzed. It was a message from an unknown number: ‘Amato’. I sat up, and the room felt colder. I went to the window, and in the frost on the glass, there was a faint ‘A’.

I know now that the letters are not for me. They are a summons, a call to the dead. And I fear that Matteo is not coming back as a memory, but as something that has been waiting in the dark, biding its time, using Carmela’s fading mind as a beacon. The ‘A’ is on every screen, every surface, every corner of my life. And as I write this, I see it now, reflected in the dark of my monitor: the letter ‘A’, blinking at me, patient and hungry.

I don’t know when it will arrive, or what form it will take. But I know that my sons, the last of the Amato line, will inherit this curse. And I fear that when Matteo finally crosses over, the ‘A’ will be the last thing we ever see.