He slipped stepping on an S. An S like any other, a shy Helvetica, neither big nor small. A Copperplate R, quite ambiguous, made him lose the balance even more. Instinctively, he searched for something to grab on to. While he was falling, he remarked a robust Goudy Stout M, looking at him quite amused.
He was astonished by the silence and slowness of the whole thing.
Each word, each type, twirled and landed on the floor, like confetti during Lent, and so did he. Even dots, semicolons, exclamation points, question marks, colons, quotation marks: could hold together anymore. He didn’t like silence.
He loved the company of words, with their noise. The content was not important, he wanted to be full of words, to feel their materiality, their body. Maybe that is what made him chose the job he started doing thirty years before: the typographer.
As he was falling, he thought that all that he had always tried to hold together was going back to original disorder. Like a reverse BIG BANG. It seemed to him that an elegant Palatino P winked at him. Maybe it wanted to remind him something. He remembered about his childhood. The snow and the silence that used to fall along with her came to his mind. At first, the silence was full of things and it wasn’t scary. An evil V (he could recognise its severe sans serif Myriad) pierced him between his ribs. It entered like a sharp blade. He couldn’t help wondering what word it belonged to. Maybe it was a V for victory, a V for vengeance, maybe a V for vacuum.
Now he was laying on the floor and he remembered about an old « Wordless » joke; he burst into laughing and the blood sprang, lively.