The Laundromat

Carla Birch glances at her cell phone, notes the time as 11:00 pm, and begins tossing dirty clothes into a washer at Beechville’s only laundromat, the Suds-n-Clean. She hasn’t been in the Suds-n-Clean for over a year, but her washer broke down a week ago, and she can’t even afford to buy a used one, especially after spending all her savings on divorce lawyers, protection orders, and surveillance cameras.

She’s startled by how dumpy the laundromat is now. Only two ceiling lights are working, and they’re buzzing like dying hornets. Cobwebs hang from the motionless blades of ceiling fans, and palm-sized tumbleweeds of dust and hair litter the tops of the washers, dryers, and tables. Oddly, it smells like bleach in the building, although the grimy green linoleum floor looks like it hasn’t been mopped in months. She remembers an attendant being on duty 24/7 the last few times she was here, but nobody else seems to be around. It doesn’t make any sense to Carla that the owner wouldn’t have someone watching the place 24/7. Teenagers could come in and vandalize the place. A crazy arsonist could burn the dilapidated building down with a lighter and a little gasoline. Somebody could break into the coin machine. A violent, drunken ex-husband could burst through the door and grab her by the throat…

Carla glances uneasily at the door and then stares out the big front window before pushing quarters into the slot and setting the water temperature on hot. The quarters make a loud clang as they hit the bottom of an empty coin box. That doesn’t surprise her. Who the hell would want to do their laundry in this creepy, filthy place unless they absolutely have to? She walks over to a small window and scans the alley outside the laundromat. One flickering streetlight illuminates a small area of the alley where potholes, discarded fast food wrappers, one dirty sneaker, and several plastic grocery bags lend an apocalyptic ambience to the place.

Carla smokes a cigarette down to the butt and shoves it through a bullet-sized hole in the glass. Her next shift at the nursing home where she works as an STNA starts in 12 hours, and she’s exhausted. As soon as she gets home, she’s going to take over-the-counter sleeping pills and collapse into bed for 10 straight hours.  After smoking her fourth cigarette and pushing another butt through the hole in the glass, it suddenly occurs to her that the washers are still sloshing and gurgling noisily. They should be in the rinse cycle, at least.

Her cell phone says it’s 11:00 pm, but…isn’t that the time she arrived here? All the control panel lights are blinking, and there’s a gravelly humming coming from the machines. Of course, it’s just her luck that something’s wrong with the decrepit equipment. They probably haven’t been maintained for years. Carla knows the doors lock and won’t open when the machines are running, so she decides to unplug the damn things and start wringing out her clothes.

Stepping behind the washers, she finds nothing--no cords, no outlets, nothing except gleaming green linoleum that looks like it’s just been waxed. 

What the hell? Why is the floor so clean? Where are the power cords? Where are the outlets? How are these machines running?

Carla stands in front of the washers, unsure of what to do next. Suddenly, the soapy foam splashing against the window becomes pink, then a darker pink, then dark red. Both machines are running faster now, aggressively pushing her clothes around and slamming miniature tidal waves of red water around in the machines’ drums.

Carla’s uneasiness escalates into an inexplicable fear. What the hell is happening? The washing machines abruptly come to a dead stop. For several seconds, the silence sizzles like something burning in a pan, pressing against her eardrums with an almost physically painful force. Then, the hissing stops just as rapidly as the machines stop. At that moment, the door creaks open behind her, and Carla gasps, jerking her head around in time to see a woman entering the laundromat, carrying a basket of clothes.

Carla nearly faints from the terror that seizes and paralyzes her. She can’t think or speak or move because the woman is—her. She’s staring at herself, somebody who looks just like Carla Birch. Brown hair tied in a ponytail, small, pointed nose, pale lips, a nondescript, cosmetic-free face. The woman is wearing jeans and a short-sleeved, plain blue shirt. The woman is wearing a pair of sneakers that Carla mysteriously misplaced a month or two ago. She never found those shoes.

The other Carla Birch drops the basket on the floor and points to a calendar hanging on the wall next to the empty attendant desk. Carla is positive the calendar was not there when she first arrived. The woman keeps pointing at the calendar and staring. Carla slowly realizes this hallucination wants her to go over to the calendar. She can’t feel the floor beneath her feet when she walks over to the calendar. She thinks she may be gliding, as though she is hovering just above the floor. The page is flipped to “October,” and the 10th is circled in red marker, a series of circles that crookedly overlap each other numerous times. The compulsion to tear off October pulls her hand upward, until her fingers grab the page and rip it away. The next page is also October, with the 10th circled in red. Frantically, she tears more pages off the calendar, but it's always the same month, October, with the 10th circled in thick, red marker.

“What does it mean?” Carla screeches in horror at the silent imitation of herself. When the other Carla doesn’t reply, Carla screams, “WHAT DOES IT MEAN? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?”

The other Carla points at the floor. Carla looks down and sees the glowing white outline of a human body, the kind of outline you see detectives draw around a dead body in crime movies. Dropping to her knees, Carla lets her fingertips graze the linoleum under the luminous white outline. The floor begins to undulate and fade in color until it is as white as the outline. The whole floor is milky white now, moving like small waves rolling into a nonexistent shore.

The door creaks and slams shut. Carla stands up and sees the other Carla has been replaced with Justin, her ex-husband, the man who chose alcohol over their marriage, the man whom she had fallen in love with at first sight, the man who had threatened over and over again to make her life a living hell if she divorced him.

"Hey, baby," he says. "You think you can just leave me? You think you can get rid of me with those protection orders? You think a piece of paper is going to keep me away?"

"This isn’t real.” Carla has to pull the words out of her throat violently, as though the words are choking her. “You're not real. You're not really here. None of this is real!”

Justin growls with rage and lunges toward her with his arms outstretched and his fingers curled, ready to grab her neck and squeeze until she stops breathing. She screams, transfixed by his murderous intent and the unrealness of everything. Carla thinks she is going mad.

Then, as suddenly as he appeared, he vanishes. In front of Carla are rows of washers stretching infinitely into the distance. It’s so radiantly bright that she has to squint to keep from being blinded. A shimmering, white wall ripples like satin in a gentle wind where the door once existed. Suddenly, she is no longer alone. A police officer steps out of the luminescent wall and shines a flashlight around the laundromat’s interior, illuminating random areas until he finds what he is looking for—a dead body.

The body lies where the white outline used to be. It is her body. Her neck is broken, her head resting at a 90-degree angle in a pool of blood. The policeman shines his flashlight at her, nods once, and steps back into the depthless wall.

Carla Birch says a silent goodbye to her dead body as a strange, immutable longing possesses her with the destructive permanence of a fatal black hole.