Onism

Francine couldn’t remember when the noise had stopped. It might have been a month. A week? Maybe only an hour passed, or a handful of minutes. For all her thirty years of life she’d known a world that screamed from sun up to sun down, but there was no one left now to say for sure that it ever existed, only things.

She rode her cruiser bike down Samuel Twain Street. The sun was setting, but a storm that traveled across the bay made the sky a pouting shade of gray. To her left a neat line of office buildings flew past like the stroke of a rainbow colored pencil on smudged paper. 

When she was little, her mother made her see a counselor in the skinny yellow building at the end. Through its broken windows she could see shadowed forms swaying inside, some tall and some very small. The last and only time she was there, the counselor sat her down at a little table with that same colored pencil and told her to draw whatever she liked. 

“How about what you’d like to be when you grow up?” They prompted gently when she only stared up at them in silence. Nothing formed on the page but a senseless scribble and a dot wherever the lines crossed.

“It looks like a tornado,” said the counselor in the way courtesy was really only a loading screen that rendered a person’s patience. “Do you like storms? Some people chase them and measure the–”

Her mother gave an exasperated sigh and snapped, “she never talks and won’t stop crying.” 

The woman had no patience whatsoever.

Francine was touched with melancholy. The dissonance in her mind made it so difficult to nail down a clear thought that it took time for her to speak. Her family teased her for being slow and stupid.

The world was just too loud and fast. It easily overwhelmed her. Sometimes her eyes burned while they absorbed all the colors and shapes and motions; and her head would throb trying to process it all. She was like a tired battery that could only half charge, constantly needing to go away and rest so as not to overheat. It designed a lonely life for her. Whatever friends she managed to make eventually ostracized her because she didn’t live up to their standards. 

“You don’t consider us,” they’d say, though she was always thinking, worrying that her thoughts made no sense or wasted their time. “Just talk to us. It's like we don't even know you,” they’d say and when she opened her mouth they either talked over her or grew bored waiting for her to articulate. So she stopped talking and tried to listen instead. It wasn’t enough. It seemed no matter what she did it never was, and sometimes that hurt her heart so much she’d scream until she couldn’t breathe.

It was decided Francine had agitated depression. Relieved that that was settled, the counselor recommended some candy on a slip of paper and shooed her and her mother off to the pharmacy. The candy was no help, it only made Francine’s head worse. She decided people were like a lenticular print. They showed you what they wanted you to see, that they were good and they cared, but were revealed to be grotesque when inconvenienced by a new vantage.

As the sky grumbled overhead, she felt warm rain soak through her curls and brought her bike to a stop at the corner of 14th Avenue. The wind had picked up enough to make the traffic lights swing violently on the loose wire stringing them across the intersection. There was a flash between the dark clouds and then a thundering boom shook the entire town awake. 

Francine held her breath, frozen stiff in the downpour. She could hear them coming, a gurgled hiss hidden throughout the applause of rain crashing onto pavement. Soon the cacophony would rise like a tidal wave, louder than she recalled the world had ever screamed before.

Francine pushed off down 14th in search of a quiet place, and as she went dozens of milk white eyes followed.

. . . . . . . . . .

The laundromat was the only building that looked to be able to withstand the coming disaster. Francine parked her cruiser out front and locked it to the bike rack.

It was small and unassuming, a humble thing when compared to the modern industrial structures surrounding it. Though nothing had escaped the grime of the final days, the laundromat at least still had its windows intact. Francine tried to peer inside, but could not see clearly through the debris.

Her bones jumped in her body as another explosion cracked open the sky, leaving her with no choice but to make it work. Francine retrieved her pack from the bike basket and tried the front door. It screeched on the concrete, only pulling out a couple of inches, so she wedged her hatchet in the opening and used it to pry enough space for her to slip inside.

Now she just needed to bar the doors.

Francine turned to take stock of the interior. There were silver machines lining the square perimeter of the laundromat; washers to the right, dryers to the left and folding tables standing back to back in the center. To her left all the carts were parked neatly in a corner, except a lone soldier standing vigil in front of one of the larger washing machines. 

She found herself drawn to it, moving quietly across the sage colored floor to get a peek inside the window. The washer’s job had been completed at some point recently, but no one had come to retrieve what appeared to be bed linens within. Francine peered over her shoulder and noticed that all of the other washers and dryers were empty. It was only then that she realized the laundromat was clean. 

Actually clean.

Confusion straightened her spine, all of her senses suddenly attentive to the silence surrounding her. Outside the rain pelted the windows and the roof, the sky rumbled on, but she could not hear those things, nor anything living apart from her own breath.

In fact in this space it was almost surreal, a sort of pocket dimension separate from the reality she had come from. Here it was as though the world hadn’t ended but was simply asleep. The silence possessed a life with its own set of lungs, like the tranquil bubble cast from a cluster of ancient trees. 

It couldn’t be possible. Francine laughed at the absurdity of it.

Everything was in ruin. Everything. You couldn’t go anywhere without moving through it. There were cars abandoned just outside the door, the majority stripped for parts or thrown open in the same fashion that every home was turned upside down for what it could yield the passing survivor. The photos on their walls, the toys left in the middle of play, the lives they left behind in the chaos were as gravestones marking the tragedy that swept through them. 

And yet this place was untouched.

Francine returned to the door and pulled it closed, her fingers lingering on the handle as her anxiety sank to the pit of her stomach. 

For what felt like ages she stood in place, waiting for something she couldn’t name. Slowly she drew back her hand. She stepped away from the door and with every step a part of her peeled off like snake skin. Suddenly she was left smooth, the din ever present in her mind had synced to the quiet of the laundromat. 

She felt that she was like new, another Francine she had yet to meet.

This time as she turned back to her surroundings, it was with new eyes. Things she hadn’t noticed before were present, as though new neighbors coming out to wave hello. 

The posters on the walls were hand drawn with a cute sheep mascot teaching lessons about different types of stains and how to care for certain fabrics. As she moved through the space she found a giant cork board pinned with newspaper clippings. They showed school sports teams that had won several games, even a championship trophy, a group of volunteers smiling broadly while they worked a clothing drive, glossy photos of graduates giving speeches, a community and a family she slowly began to see orbited around one woman who seemed to overflow with love in every memory.

The source of her love lay in a backroom of the laundromat. Precious garments hung in plastic bags surrounding an organized workstation equipped with an old but cared for iron and steamer hook up. Francine read the labels on the bottles, some of the names she could recognize from the lessons given by the sheep on the posters. She couldn't help but smile.

On either side of the workstation and above, dozens of handwritten letters and thank you cards told her what was already evident in this sacred space. The woman in all the photos, the apparent owner, had a passion for cleaning and had saved hundreds of treasured possessions throughout the course of her life. Francine admired her bright eyes and flushed cheeks, the openness of her heart, and imagined she must be far from here now, someplace with all these people who adored her.

She discovered the owner’s apartment upstairs. The bed was bare, it must have been her own linens in the wash. Here that living presence Francine had felt downstairs was abundant. The apartment seemed to breathe on its own, as though the owner still remained in spirit for everything within felt like it was a piece of her.

There was a knocking somewhere deep within, so soft she could barely hear it. 

The sound was coming from a closet in the owner’s sewing room. On the door was a note. It said:

Please, help my mom.

Francine saw claw marks around the frame of the door, and small tears in the surrounding wallpaper. As the silence grew loud in her head she could hear it… those things and their rasping groans. 

She swallowed as she stared at the door, trying to picture the sweet woman she had come to know through the words of others as an animated and decaying corpse. Behind the door those milk white eyes would be staring up through the ceiling, seeing nothing but longing for the soul that had departed from it. 

Francine opened the door.

In the darkness the corpse within gurgled and chattered its teeth at the sound. Its skin was pulled disgustingly tight across its bones, skeletal hands moving to its head to cover its ears and block out the noise of the world, always screaming. It began to cry. Its claws raked down to its soiled yellow dress and over the daisies embroidered on the skirt. 

“Come on, Joy.” Francine consoled her, reaching out to take her hands. “Let’s clean you up.”