Vagabond Multilingual Journal Spring 2014 | Page 23

Typewriters didn’t write on their own, did they? Eating breakfast one morning I took it apart
and put it back together without finding anything strange inside, and came home later to find
another story as usual. Did someone break into my house every day to write stories? That
possibility seemed a little worrying, but I doubted I was in any sort of danger—maybe it was
just one of my more eccentric friends. Yet I had to know what was going on. Propping it up on
a makeshift tripod, I left my camera to keep watch for a few nights, but the stories just stopped,
so I gave up.
Eerily, as if it knew I’d stopped trying to figure out its secrets, the typewriter soon made itself
audible with a steady click-clack-click on those night I couldn’t fall asleep. Wrenching myself
out of bed and into the other room, all I’d find was silence and a few words on a page. Realizing
eventually that I’d never figure it out, but wanting to keep my sanity, I eventually decided to
cut off my invisible author’s supply of paper, leaving the typewriter to collect dust once again.
It was several months later when I was cleaning my room that I found the folder I’d kept
all the stories in. That time, as before, I found myself drawn into the stories as I had been
before. Enraptured again, I read them all front to back twice, but this time I realized something
strange—incredibly enough, the stories formed an acrostic. Reading over the whole collection
again for the important letters, I knew I had found the strangest story of them all.

by Pandu Rendradjaja

What is brainf*ck?
Here are 8 symbols < > + - . , [ ]
Now program a computer? Awh, f*****ck.
The appropriately named Brainf*ck is a Turing-complete programming language that
using only 7 operations but achieves the same functionality as other more common
programming languages. This added challenge of extreme minimalism proves that,
even the littlest of means gives us an infinite range of expression!

photograph by Olaya D. Barr

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