This is from a short piece published back in the eighties. I’m working on a horror anthology and stumbled across this in my story folder. Enjoy!
Warm Pie
Keyboard wears a cloak of innocence, fooling outsiders into believing it is the static plastic input device they see. Yet with me, the familiar creator-lover, Keyboard bends back and exposes a soft, vulnerable underbelly—warm pie, I call it. I can take my experienced hands and mold warm pie into the books the outsiders seek from me. By cupping my right hand just so, I can cull a villain from Keyboard’s right flank. My left thumb gently coaxes a new character from a narrow birth canal, and I stroke it into a cry of bewilderment with the heel of my palm. My fingertips press with precision and mold character faces from lumps of cyber-clay lurking beneath the rectangle of warmth. My heroes surface one by one and beckon gratefully as they emerge into a new, firmer reality.
When I pause and press my palms together, Keyboard preens, knowing the ultimate is coming. Just as any good clay needs water to form into the best vessel possible, so too does my Keyboard crave the sweat and dribbles of diet soda I provide. These gifts, bestowed during my most epiphanic discourses, when sotto voce noise and rapid input caresses form a primal soup of creative vigor. Synapses transfer and we become one symbiotic unit, warm pie and hot mind simmering in a stew of work fluid.
Hours later, exhausted and opaque, I slowly emerge from that kiln of inventive heat, changed forever. Character parts fall off like so much slag and I wearily collect them to load into the pie for later. Keyboard cools and slumbers, warmth turning away. I feel loss briefly but with a glance teasing and playful, I eagerly await the next encounter.
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