The Laundry Between Worlds
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The washing machine at the corner laundromat has been spinning for exactly 47 minutes. The sign clearly says "30 minutes per cycle," but Maya has counted three times. Her reflection in the circular glass door is folding laundry that isn't there—neatly stacking shirts she's never owned, in colors that don't exist. She's been here almost the entire day, unsuccessfully trying to convince herself that she hasn't already paid for a cycle of looking.
It's possible she could just go home—go back the way she came and find her way in the dark—and she would. But there was no turning back now. So she sighs, flips the sign to closed, and taps the lock to the front door. In the snapshots beside her, her reflection smiles too brightly, wearing a new blouse in an unnatural shade of pearlescent bronze. She dares herself to ask the attendant how to get back. The attendant was nonexistent until now, but here she was, stifling a yawn, almost a gesture of nonchalant familiarity.
The woman bobbled her keys in her pocket. "I wish I could tell you, dear, but I just don't know where you came from. You do seem oddly familiar. You don't recall a little girl do you?"
Maya fell silent, the clock in the bathroom in front of her ticking with erratic beats. If this mutiny was her idea of amusement, she was playing it close to home, but it wasn't.
"Have you a name, dear?" The attendant continued hoarsely. There was the richness of ages in her voice. And years.
Maya paused and frowned. Maybe she should ask what the town was called. Her hand twitched to do it, but she wanted to save the question before realizing the apathy to which she was still bound. "You just called me 'dear.'"
Maya caught her reflection whisper in seductive blue tones: May an feel. "There's no call whatsoever to be rude, Miss."
"Don't you think for yourself?" Maya continued trying to remember what she had said before, but her surroundings ebbed and flowed like an overdose. "What am I even doing here?"
"Per chance you're here for your happiness, dear."
Maya couldn't remember how she had known, but she knew the attendant had spoken the answer before she had audibly asked the question.
She returned her attention to her reflection propped against the drawers. "We're supposed to believe that it's here?"
"Strange irony, two hundred years ago I couldn't get out of my role. Stuck playing the role of victim."
Maya started to ask why she'd had the old woman arrested, but broke off at the puzzled look on the attendant's face.
Maya glanced at the clothes in the baskets, then pulled out a single, rumpled blouse of tatting, the collar lacy as the rests, a light pink against ivory. "Mom wouldn't let me wear it growing up. I was only four." She sniffed and ran a finger over the cotton and lace.
The attendant gurgled from her metal throat. "What's that?"
"A blouse your momma wouldn't let you wear?" The old woman was bedazzled, but Maya was elated. "You're wearing the blouse." Maya looked back to find her reflection abandoned, composed of materials that once had texture but no longer did. They had blasted the smell of ammonia from her clothes and taken the elegance of translucent flesh.
Why were they wearing Mom's clothes?
Maya looked back at the attendant, but she still skewed with bugged out eyes and clamped her lips.
Maya needn't have asked, her own mirror-self clearly had a penchant for sullenness.
It wasn't until she noticed the bag, stuffed with Mom's clothes, which was overflowing near the clothes iron, that Maya considered her mirror-self's ignorance of her surroundings. Her hands flew to her side pockets and she spun back, pausing, stunned. Her hands came away with an odd plastic ring and a live buffalo nickel from 1868, still worn as generations old as the missile.
She's insane, Maya stopped before counting the seams on her new blouse and noticed a mound of laundry at its feet, defiled shreds of cheaper brands buzz-sawed across the denim. Maya decided she didn't care. None of it mattered. She sought refuge in the rushed comfort of her fistful of cooler material. It wasn't until she glanced back at her reflection curtly responding to the attendant, far too anxious and unsettled, that Maya knew she remembered the things that her confusion had erased. Her eyes burned as a drying flame. After all, she was still Maya… But how had the attendant bruised the timeline? Why was she here? How had she been in mom's clothes?
When she asked, her reflection looked over her shoulder and whined, "Don't ask anymore questions."
The stained clothes hamper drawn near, keeping the attendant company, was the smallest pebble in Maya's open canyon. She again dropped her eyes to the floor and wondered when it had happened or if she'd simply forgotten. She couldn't guess the number of bruises, irrevocably imprinted by her mother's hand on her ribs, on her stomach—here and here. And no matter the number, she had to re-envision each one, a dissection again and again…
"Dear Maya, you can't expect answers anymore than you can expect forgiveness. Both just make it sadder."
Maya blinked, remembering. A dream, and now an echo. A mirror shattered. Her past and future existentially lured into the confines of this tiny, forgotten laundromat. Her appearance shifting from one to the next. Little by little, she feigned pictures of her mother instead of the fabricated clothes and lost objects, hoping at the least that it might improve the narrative, however briefly, to that of her own brutal murder. She watched herself in the ripples of twisted glass capture the source of her obsession, her painful fascination with death. Even now, through her fitful indignant voice, Maya could see the contemplative expression of her own mother. And she realized that the perimeter of Maya's anger imprisoned her, as her mother's strength had done time and time again. To protect her was to kill her. She would not ask again what she wanted.
"Dear Maya, we cannot live twice, not even if we learn from our memories."
Her hands deftly pulled a brush from the concrete shelves where they were dead, nothing but ghosts of lifeless goods. "You too?" she asked, pulling a gold auger cap tassel from behind her ear, examining the holes, red and open veins, maroon now through her mirror self's pleading eyes, as she faded. She stripped the hair down with the stiff bobbing brush, wiping away a mound of rubies as she pulled. As the reflection darkened, poised to vanish before she could ask about her lie, Maya tapped. The attendant's eyes blinked and the plastic sifted in the dust.
"Would you like to see something, dear?" The machine winked and creaked with a series of humming and clacking.
Maya hesitated and asked, "What year is this?" The girl who told her to share has gone too far now, causing her to leave the terrible notes of her life floundering at footsteps in the sand.
"It's all relative here."
But it isn't all relative anymore, Maya thought as the attendant reluctantly focused.
"The question now is what year do you want it to be?" Maya looked back in the circular glass door and saw herself, beautiful, staunch, in another blouse of white cotton, with its lace back down close to the firm glaze of her skin, kept hidden among her mother's pasty possessions. The old woman explained: "This is a year in your town, dear. We simply knew and have connected you to the voltage. Have you that much trust?" Maya narrowed her eyes and asked for the year 2008, as she had known her daughter would pick, the year of her death. It's 2008 now, but when she looks closely, Maya finds that it's just different enough that she can call it new. It's the same laundromat, but it's cavernous and blinding. She tears the sleeves off a man's shirt, examining the frayed seams before glancing down to see herself barreling down an alley…the dream reflected.
"Where is she?" "You can't find her?"
But Maya doesn't care. Finally, she's reunited with her baby girl.
If a ring of self-hatred is protection, than Maya is her mother now. She kicks lint into the pink washing machine and slips the ring from her finger. She was beautiful. She always was. I have to be more than this story.
She's walking rapidly now, back the way she came, her heels jerking hard ground. Her final, wispy, mascara-smudged spotless reflection leads her back to her broken home, blocking the front door with her chest, wrought into a lean, into herself. As her reflection shoves herself up, up against the warped pane of glass, she releases the warm pulling keys and rings flutter to the linoleum. The keys hit the mess of her muddy brown carpet like a muffled litter of marbles…and then there's no door, no house, she has run back through time to the past that was hers and finds herself at her real door. Bejeweled dresses and blouses, stained with the spongy acrid of improperly suspended hot-dogs scorch the pavement in front of her like something dying. Her mother throwing another tantrum, but this time, Maya's staying.
She rewards her action with a smile, and at the end of the floor, her daughter crawls across the carpet toward her. Go.
"Are you going to jump out to scare me?" Maya asked, her eyes outlining the boarder of 2008's image.
"I am you!" the girl ran up and threw herself on her, spraying wet from the carpet onto Maya.
Maya pulled her in and buried her face into the warmth of her daughter, surprised at how the site of a then live, limp body was preferable to the tranquil purity of her current location. Finally, she felt like she could hold her too fast beating heart…sealed in this beam of blondie, blonde, blonde hair, rosy cheeks, and light olive complexion, tied tightly with an ill-fitting gold bow. Her daughter. Her destruction.
Too late, she realized that her portrayal of a mother as a beloved figure, a decoy, was undeniably fictitious. That reflection wasn't her daughter; it was a sad little willow tree with blue eyes, which was apparently just as impossible as a murderous grandmother with dead remains to remove from her face each morning. Her daughter was too stiff, too apathetic for a mime to substitute as her.
"And how do I get out of here?" she teased bouncing the apple shaped scissors between her finger tips.
The girl rolled her eyes and tugged on Maya's raven hair. "The machine…"
Here comes trouble again…she turned to punched the glass door, squarely, working to push through it. It wavered imploring, but Maya didn't stop, forcing herself through the thin cracked shell, her broken fingernails gouge the glass with an onyx spill of blood. She bumped against the front of the glass with a splatter she didn't witness, and as she stepped outside, she found herself bruised in the alleyway.
The going is get tough…
She found herself inexplicably able to punch through the glass of the residential windows, to slip into houses, swiping the agitation, more ignorance, than it was worth.
Over and over she tried different doors, but failed time and again to locate her daughter in the fast, punctuated blocks of her memory. Until she woke in an alley again—this time a maze of alleyways and front porches—and there she was, leaning into the night of a neatly trimmed lawn.
She could feel her daughter's staring eyes, feel her legless agitating spirit slip out through her pores and into the evening air. Suddenly everything blurry in the once radiant mirage came into sharper focus—spiders of white were the forgotten windows in every dirt National Drive home in her early childhood and gravel was the dead content of her past. Mom seemed more like her mooncalf daughter from a distance than she did face to face. Not passing curiosity but rather a need for pace crept into her anxious stride◆ About the ending
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