Word: toad
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...Toad processed words like a demon. His fingers flew across the keys, and the words arrayed themselves on a magic screen before him. Here was a miracle that imitated the very motions of his brain, that teleported paragraphs here and there--no, there!--as quickly as a mind flicking through alternatives. Prose with the speed of light, and lighter than air! Toad could lift 10 lbs. of verbiage, at a whim, from his first page and transport it to the last, and then (hmmm), back again...
...happy life, until one day, Toad, when riding his bicycle in the park, took a disastrous spill. Left thumb broken, arm turned to fossil in a cast, out of which his fingers twiddled uselessly, Toad faced the future. He tried one-handing his word processor, his hand jerking over the keyboard like a chicken in a barnyard...
...There is no going back in pleasure. "Bother!" said Toad. He picked up a No. 1 Eberhard Faber pencil. He eyed it with the despair of a suddenly toothless gourmand confronting a life of strained carrots and peas. He found a schoolboy's lined notebook and started to write...
...words came haltingly, in misshapen clusters. Toad's fingers lunged and jabbed and oversteered. When he paused to reread a sentence, he found that he could not decipher it. The language came out Etruscan...
...Toad perforce persisted. It had been years since he had formally and respectfully addressed blank paper with only pen or pencil in hand. He felt unarmed, vulnerable. He thought of final exams long years ago--the fields of rustling blue-book pages, the universal low, frantic scratching of pens, the smell of sour collegiate anguish...