Alyssa Beatty

Farah watched the washer spin. Once vibrant colors, muted by water and soap, twined together and twisted apart: a hypnotic soggy kaleidoscope.

“Clothes’ll get clean without supervision. Don’t lollygag,” Sadie barked from just behind her. Farah jumped. Sadie was surprisingly stealthy for a woman of her heft.

Farah inhaled a blast of menthol. Sadie kept an endless stock of half-crushed packs of Parliament Greens stashed around the laundromat.

“I’m waiting to transfer it over to the dryer,” Farah lied. The machine had five minutes on it; so, eight in laundry time.

Sadie grunted and shuffled behind the counter to count change, her favorite pastime. She was a mystery to Farah. Who used words like lollygag without irony? And she was always here. No matter when Farah came in, Sadie was behind the counter, smoking and counting. 

She also claimed to be psychic. Farah saw no evidence of this. Sadie said she refrained from reading Farah’s mind out of courtesy, a statement so blatantly out of character it was clearly a lie.

Still, she did have an uncanny ability to predict the cost of every load of laundry dropped off, to the cent, without looking at the scale. Although that might just be experience.

Farah hated working here. The heat, the noise. The smells. Sure, there was a voyeuristic satisfaction in handling other people’s dirty clothes. When she got bored, which was almost always, Farah extrapolated stories from the stains. Was that ketchup or blood splattered on the cream blouse? She could see the petite blonde with the razor-sharp bob committing murder. To be fair, she could see any woman going full murderess. Her divorce had taught her that if you hadn’t felt the urge to kill, it just meant you hadn’t met the right person yet.

When Farah took this job, she thought it would be a good way to meet people in the neighborhood. Six months working here, and Farah still didn’t know anyone. She was just a thing people shoved their dirty clothes at. A washing machine with a face.

“What do you do on your time off?” Farah asked, unloading a bag full of children’s underwear printed with grinning ducks into the washer. Why were there so many? And oh god, what was that smell?

“What do you mean?” Sadie said, past the cigarette dangling precariously from her lip, an ability Farah secretly admired.

“For fun? What do you do?”

Sadie glared at her through mint-scented smoke. “This.” She gestured to the rows of stacked quarters. 

Okayyyy. Farah slotted coins into the machine, holding her breath. The smell would follow her home, she knew it.

What do I do for fun? she thought. Her mind went blank. She couldn’t picture herself outside of this room. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember her last day off, either.

“Can I have tomorrow off?”

Sadie squinted at her. “What do you mean?” These conversational cul-de-sacs were not uncommon.

“Can I not come to work tomorrow, so I can do something else instead?”

Sadie squeezed her eyes shut. “You forgot again. Why do they always send me idiots?”

“Hey.” Even for Sadie, that was harsh.

“Come here.”

Farah wove between towering stacks of laundry bags to reach the counter.

“I’m only doing this one more time. Then you’re on your own. No skin off my teeth.” Sadie pressed a yellowed fingertip to Farah’s forehead. “Close your eyes. It don’t work otherwise.”

Farah closed her eyes. A movie reel played against the dark of her eyelids.

There she was, in her old house, folding laundry. Her most hated household task. She’d washed the shower curtain liner with bleach and Borax—it was sparkling white again, all that nasty orange mold washed away—and she knew Marvin wouldn’t notice. He never noticed, and it drove her insane. She could kill him. Honestly, she could. She heard him slamming the front door behind him; he always slammed it no matter how many times she asked him not to, and that drove her insane, too. She picked up the knife she used to open the Borax and went to meet him.

Farah opened her eyes. “Oh my god. I murdered my husband, didn’t I?”

“Yep. Thirty-two stabs. Impressive. Overkill, literally, but impressive.”

“But…then I moved here. I got a new apartment, and this job. I must have served my time and blocked it all out. Right?”

Sadie snorted. “Sure. You moved here. Look out the window, dimwit.”

There was nothing. Just a white void.

“For the eighty-sixth—no, wait—eighty-seventh time, welcome to the afterlife. Hell sweet hell. You’ve been sentenced to an eternity of punishment designed just for you. Aren’t you a lucky duck?”

Farah remembered it all, then. Her trial. The humiliation, neighbors whispering in the courtroom. Hastily knotted sheets tied to the bunk in her cell.

“But, the people who come in…the laundry.”

“All for you, sweetums.”

It occurred to Farah that perhaps Sadie was a demon. That would explain her general air of contentment. “What did you do to end up here?” 

“Swindled old ladies out of their life savings. They all wanted to talk to their dearly departed husbands. I could do it, mind you. I really am psychic. But all the men did was bellyache about being dead. So, I told their widows pretty lies and took all their money. Died in my sleep and woke up with this peach of a job and all the Parliaments I can smoke. Afterlife is subjective, you ask me. This is my heaven.”

Farah’s knees buckled. She sank into an uncomfortable-by-design plastic chair. It made an awful kind of sense, really. Hadn’t she complained to Marvin a million times—not that he ever noticed—that doing laundry was her exact idea of hell?

 

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ALYSSA BEATTY lives and writes in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has appeared in Penumbric Speculative Fiction, Luna Station Quarterly, and Spread: Tales of Deadly Flora. Find her at alyssabeattywrites.com.

Corbin Hirschhorn

My city is a city of thieves. Our national anthem is “Stand and Deliver.” Our national bird is the magpie. Our adopted hero is Robin Hood. It is difficult to get around this city for obvious reasons. They say here to hold onto your bag when you see your shadow. There is a holiday based on this tradition. A little far-fetched, no? But perhaps I should not say this, because I’ve only just moved here.

The city of thieves was said to be a place of culture, learning, and entertainment. Of course I had heard the stories, but none seemed particularly frightening—at least not more than those from any other city. There are rumors that float around here, such as one that the thieves form illicit guilds with ambitious plans to rob you. Some say that everyone is in on it, with window washers lowering themselves to nick your wallet and laundrymen who steal your undergarments—one sock at a time to hide their guilt. I believed none of it.

A number of philosophical questions are raised among the intellectuals of the city of thieves: Is it wrong to steal once stolen from? Is it wrong to steal something stolen? Does anything belong to he who has stolen? Perhaps ironically, the most important concern to philosophers in the city of thieves is ethics, and more than once they have been accused of publishing the notes of others.

I only moved here for the incredible stories and promise of a good time, but after these observations, the idea of theft often turned over in my mind—perhaps more often than such a thought should. I can admit that I fell victim to checking every corner before turning and carrying money not just in my wallet, but in other pockets—the inside of my jacket, socks, and at least a few times in the elastic of my underwear. It didn’t make sense to take chances in the city of thieves.

I had heard from fellow countrymen also living here bizarre stories of the most elaborate plots to swindle the public. According to one of them, a man on a train, after shoving corn flakes into his mouth, had begun coughing and spitting, standing up and holding his throat, spewing corn flakes and falling over, proclaiming he was going to die. Covered with spit flakes, passengers either helped or fled, distracted as men with fake plastic arms protruding from overcoats emptied purses and pockets with the real ones hidden underneath. I didn’t regard any of it with concern. I resigned myself to thinking that if I were robbed, I would just be paying for the elaborate theatrics and the story. But be aware, I would happily take and tell that story if it were mine.

“Consider at least some of this advice,” one of my acquaintances said. “I’ll tell you that I regretted my nonchalance when I lost my eye.” When confronted by some of the less artistic thieves, a few height-challenged brutes only asking for a wallet, my new robust friend had proudly and rightly told them, “No.” One of the little ones didn’t hesitate to grab and break a bottle and thrust it into my friend’s face for no more than a few dollars. I would take this story too, if the price were right.

Still, I did not let such abject horror stories govern how I would live. I’d rather think no such reconsideration would occur if it had not been for my employers’ change of heart regarding the job that they had promised me. Within only a week, after numerous contributions I had made to the company, they found a clause which permitted my termination. All of this in spite of the dedication I made to move from my home and my country just to work in the city of thieves.

It’s not like I didn’t have enough money or options, so I spent my days combing the streets like a bohemian, looking to take at least some bit of insight from this city. The first thing I noted was the disrepair of the sidewalks, which not only looked worn, but rather as if someone had come by and lifted the individual tiles for his own collection.

Jobless, I took to the much-romanticized life of reading for many hours a day at cafes. This was easy in the city of thieves, because waiters rarely came by to check on you. I found many treats in the public library, which I raided often. No need to worry about late fees here, I found. And I realized that, even unemployed, my time spent with books seldom heard of in my country could greatly help my career (which I’ll only say has something to do with writing or publishing).

Within a week of my termination, that bad day rather seemed to be a blessing as I started the next chapter of my life as one of the great literary figures of the generation. I had only written a few pages, but sometimes an artist knows the coming fruits of his labor after having written only a single beautiful sentence, and the opening line of my piece showed me without a doubt that it would become my magnum opus.

At the start of spring I would stroll the park, chuffed—not just by the blooming of the coral trees, but the progress of my work. Surely this jaunt in the city of thieves would prove worthwhile, and my travels would be noted in history. I rode the bus back to my apartment, nearly dozing off after my long morning’s walk but not before I noticed an advertisement above the window. At first I thought it was a manifestation of my dreamy mind, but after another look, and a third, it was in fact my sentence! The very sentence I had so painstakingly crafted—not just drawing upon my stay in the city, but my entire life—the sentence that would provide for my family was printed as clear as day. And not as part of some great novel, but the most banal of advertisements. And not on a television commercial or a glamorous billboard downtown but plastered on the inside wall of the most plebeian mode of transportation. The cabal of elite spies and thieves had used my sentence for their own corporate greed. A conspiracy of stupid bastards stole my life’s work just to squander it on a rash cream ad.

Slowly but steadily, a pain in my gut developed over the following weeks, which I wish I had taken care of before it was too late. I had to rush to a cab to get to the hospital. Good luck for the cabby that day, because after seeing my agony, he took a large bill and conveniently told me he didn’t have change. I actually made the attempt to find exact change, but my next memory was being told that I needed immediate invasive surgery.

I woke up to find a hefty bill on my bedside table and the news that the brilliant doctors of this city had removed a section of my intestine, apparently the source of the pain. Perhaps I am too skeptical, but I didn’t believe them for a second. I called over to the nurse, who already had hands out to take my money. “Show it to me,” I said, receiving an indignant look. “If you took it out, show it to me.”

“Sir, I cannot do that,” she replied.

“It’s my intestine. I paid for the operation. I want it back.”

“That is not how we do things here,” she said, leaving me to wait. The second she left, I shot from bed to get out of there, but the pain got the best of me. When the nurse came back, she saw that I opened my stitches and was bleeding through the gown. They left me bedridden and bored so that I would concede to pay.

One weekend, with less drive and intestine than before, I decided to get away for a while. I boarded a train for the beach one hour from the city. The ride was smooth and pleasant. It pleased me to see the ocean water had taken on a lovely grayness from the cloudy sky, both which seemed to be taken from the tonalist, Dabo. “Give me the bag, or else.” I hadn’t noticed that the rest of the passengers had huddled with their belongings in the back of the car, and I sat alone to face a thief.

“Oh, please,” I begged. “I assure you, there are only books here. Not worth their weight.”

“Open it,” he said, and I did so, showing him Mondiano’s The History of the World in Seven Dances, Emanuel’s The Fraud of Consciousness and Appearance of the Divine, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and an Oxford pocket dictionary. He seemed to reconsider, but there were seven stops left, so there was time to negotiate terms. “I’ll take the bag, the dictionary, the towel, and these two. You can keep Chatterly.” I did as he said, and I saw him smirk at the pages of my book for the next few stops as I sat awkwardly with Lawrence. My robber got off at the station before mine, and I stopped him.

“Here,” I said, handing him the book. “You may as well take it. It fits nicely in the bag.” He smiled and thanked me.

 

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CORBIN HIRSCHHORN is a writer and broadcaster from Jersey currently living in the Midwest.