Laundry Day

Written for a Story Club assignment, revised for a flash fiction contest and still my only published work of fiction – published in Ascent Aspirations Borderlines anthology last year.


*

The soap-and-lemon scent wafts upwards as she folds the cotton bundles with three slow, neat motions.

Left. Right. Bottom over.
Left. Right. Bottom over.

She scarcely notices her practised movements as she builds a pile of briefs in the blue plastic laundry basket on top of the drier -- fifth from the left in the row of identical machines that stretches the length of the Ticky-Poo Laundromat. The drier’s cold, white surface reflects her hazy half-shadow, a blurry, unformed image without edge or definition.
The stack of briefs adds a muted rainbow of colour to the grey room. Burgundy. Navy. Dark green. White. Dingy now, she sees; her mother would have used bleach.
She never does. They’re only underwear. Who sees them but her? He never notices. She bought him new ones once, when the holes were too plentiful, the elastic too stretched to be salvaged. He never noticed that either.
She used to wonder about that. How he couldn’t notice. Why he didn’t see the garment that cradled him so intimately.
She doesn’t wonder now.
But her fingers, gently folding; her fingers wonder. The fingers that can feel the velvet-leather canvas of his skin. The glowing heat of his body. The silken tangle of his hair.
Her fingers wonder where he is. When he’ll be home.
Who he’s going home to.

Left. Right. Bottom over.
Left. Right. Bottom over.

He was never really hers. This she knows. This she feels as a relentless ache somewhere deep inside, in that dark closeted place where passion lives. Where body detaches from mind and mind from soul and soul reaches out to body again.

Left. Right. Bottom over.

Let me love you, she thinks as her fingers move in mindless strokes. Let me look at you, marvel at you, see you in your unclothed splendour. Let me wonder at how you came to be.
Let me learn you, she thinks. Let me learn again what happens when my fingers caress the curve of your thigh, the small of your back. When they climb to your face, cradle your chin, trace lazy gentle circles in your curls.
Let me know how it feels. How warm I am. How soft my skin. How right it is when I reach for you and draw you in to me.

Left. Right. Bottom over.

Let me find your flaws, she thinks. The roughness of your skin. The childhood scar on your calf where your brother cut you with his skate. The muscle that spasms when you arch your back -- the hockey injury that never healed. The slightly crooked tooth you try to hide with an off-kilter smile.
Let me kiss them all the skin the scar the back the tooth and make them part of the perfection that is you.

Left. Right. Bottom over.

Let me celebrate you, she thinks. In aria. In sonnet. Let me sing you dance you play you to the world’s end and back again.
Let me save you, she thinks. Let me renew you in a baptism of laughter, cleanse you in a confession of sighs, nourish you in a communion of flesh and spirit. Let me seek redemption in your arms, salvation in your legs and lips and skin.

Left. Right. Bottom over.
Left. Right. Bottom over.

It will not happen. This she knows.
The door will not open. He will not walk in. With jeans slung low and loose around his hipbones, T-shirt damp with sweat. He will not push his hair off his forehead, run a hand across his face, turn the electric pulse of his smile her way.
He isn’t coming back, she thinks.
He’s gone. With nothing left behind but this.
Four T-shirts.
Two pairs of jeans.
Nine pairs of underwear in neatly folded stacks.
And an empty, hollow feeling deep within her.

Let me forget you, she thinks. Let my fingers fail to feel you, my skin erase the memory of your heat. Let me sleep unwakened by restlessness, unhaunted by ghosts of sweat and skin and sigh and song.
Let me lose you.
Let me find myself again.

She tips the laundry basket gently and watches as its contents spill into the garbage bin beside the drier.
She straightens her shoulders. Pushes back her hair. Grips her blue
basket at her side as she walks out into the bright daylight.
She sees the crisp outline of her shadow on the concrete beneath her feet. She feels the sunshine on her shoulders and raises her face to the sky.

Let me live again, she thinks.

And she smiles.