Grayspace

There's a Ghost in The Laundry Room

The day I set foot in this apartment building, it reeked of weed.

I could hear someone's loud tv from somewhere downstairs.

I got married.

She had one kid already. We cooked up another one.

One late Sunday, she's got one sweaty, squirming baby in her arms and the other pulling on her shorts. Both children have the exact same frozen mask of misery. Squinting eyes that fountain twin rivers down into their canyon mouths. My wife is just as upset but she has an actual vocabulary to spell it out. It's mostly four-letter words. So it's just like crying, except with syllables.

I grab the laundry basket.

The laundry room is just the basement floor where two washers and two dryers are cramped between the doors of two apartments.

Every last insect in the state seems to come down here to die.

Nobody seems to want to move in to these lower units. At first I thought it was because of the noise of the machines.

The last person to live down here moved out just a few months after I moved in. The sound of a loud television still came from the empty apartment.

I figured that they left behind the television and the landlord didn't bother turning it off.

As I'm pushing my quarters into the washer, here comes an old woman through one of the doors. When I say coming through it, I literally mean she walks through it without opening it. Her tired eyes bulge, her shoulders slouched, and her sparsely toothed mouth rambles out every line in an episode of FAMILY MATTERS. She even supplies the laugh track.

I should have been terrified. But I felt much like a ghost myself those days.

Swept up in the unrelenting rapids of a life I used to think I was in control of. Running in circles chasing the next paycheck, the next small barricade against my wife's disappointment in me, undoing the next disaster a child can cause using ordinary everyday objects.

And then when I do laundry the world holds still for a moment. My mind snaps out of the flow. I step out of a blurred dream into a moment of presence.

Mayhaps this other presence was up to the same thing. Caught off guard by a moment to ground. Taking stock of her place in existence. Or oblivion.

Now that I think about it, I don't think I've seen anyone in any public laundry that didn't look like a ghost.

I saw her several more times that same month. Narrating the weather report. Voicing an extended infomercial.

I can't tell if the laundry room is a crossroads of the planes or if it's the simple fact that its a place where life comes to such a sudden halt, that you slide across the surface of time's mirror with sand piling at your heels,

And in the instant you finally hold still.

You see.