“Once upon a midnight dreary,” I whispered to the corpse of my Lenovo, the words slipping from my lips in a cadence not my own—a voice borrowed from a long-dead bard, thick with the weight of centuries and bourbon. The laptop’s screen, now black as a raven’s wing, reflected my own hollow-eyed stare back at me, a ghastly specter trapped in its obsidian surface.
The corpse of my Lenovo sat upon the desk like a cursed tome, its plastic shell still warm where my fingers had clawed at the keys in futile desperation. A single LED, stubborn as a sinner’s last breath, pulsed red in the darkness—once, twice—then guttered rot. I leaned closer, my shadow swallowing the machine whole, and fancied I could hear the faintest sigh of escaping heat, as if the damned thing had finally surrendered its ghost.
“Quoth the Lenovo—nevermore,” I muttered, the words curling like smoke from a dying candle. The accent clung to my tongue, thick and archaic, dredged up from some cobwebbed corner of my mind where Edgar Allan Poe’s ghost had taken up permanent residence. It felt right, this borrowed baritone, this theatrical rasp—as if only through the affectation of another man’s grief could I properly mourn the death of my own machine.
Ahhh I love this. I’ve got a Lenovo that’s not quite a corpse (but almost).
Thank you, kindly.