face. The light from the clock flashed off of it, and it was dead.
“It was supposed to be me,” he said. “It was supposed to be me.”
A bony hand reached out and tucked the sheet back beneath the mattress where Frank’s struggles had pulled it free. Then Death turned away, laughing like hell.
MACHINE WASH WARM; TUMBLE DRY
It was around one in the morning when I came downstairs from the apartment with a big load of dirty clothes. I had deliberately waited until late and there was no one in the Laundromat, as you might expect. The six washers and four dryers stood empty, their mouths open to the humid night air as if they were panting from the heat. I didn’t much like the imagery called up by that thought, and I especially didn’t care for the darkness that pooled in the backs of the dryers, the shadows that moved every time the neon lights flickered. I went and shut the lids on all but two machines, one dryer and one washer.
Some stuff that was already wet went into the dryer, and I threw my jeans and socks into the fifty cent washer and pushed in the tongue to start her. I left out the detergent and smiled when I thought of how much that would piss my mother off if she knew. Course, it had never taken much to piss that woman off.
I had brought down the sports section out of last Sunday’s paper and was drinking what was left of a half warm beer that tasted like crap. I tried hard to read but couldn’t do it for long. There wasn’t much but baseball in the paper anyway and I’d just never been that interested in the game, though I used to sit and watch it with my dad when he was alive. You know, I really miss that old man sometimes.
But it wasn’t just the baseball filled newspaper that kept me from reading; it was feeling the darkness down there in the bellies of the laundry’s empty machines, coiling itself tighter and tighter, and finally I had to get up and go open the lids again. I felt a little silly opening them when I had just closed them ten minutes before, but I was still glad when it was done. Darkness ought not to be cooped up for long.
My beer was empty by then and I went upstairs for another, and to find something a little more interesting than baseball scores to read. The apartment was quiet for a change. There hadn’t been much of that since my mother had moved in with me last year, one week to the day after my dad had died. Boy could that lady nag!
“Wipe your feet. Turn down that stereo. Brush your teeth. Pick up your clothes.” As if I weren’t twenty-five years old and this wasn’t my own apartment. Sometimes I wondered how Dad had put up with it for all those years without killing her. Luckily for him, he had some ear trouble and could always just turn off his hearing aid. My hearing was perfect.
Because of Mother, I had been only too glad to leave New Orleans at eighteen and go out to California to live with Grandma and Grandpa. I’d only come back here when Dad got bad with the cancer. He knew he was dying and wanted me with him. I had intended to go back to L.A. right after the funeral, but one thing led to another and before I knew it my mother was moving in with me and telling me to get a job. Of course, Rhonda wasn’t my real mother, just my stepmother. But she had always insisted I call her mom or mother. I called her mother. My mom had died when I was seven and Rhonda had married my dad two years later.
I didn’t like to think about Rhonda much so I got myself another beer out of the fridge and then went into the bedroom for a Playboy magazine to take downstairs with me. It was the same issue Mother had found in my closet this morning and thrown in the trash. I’d gotten it back out a little later and there wasn’t much more than a few tea stains on it. By the time I got back down to the Laundromat both my machines had stopped. I unloaded the washer directly into the dryer, leaving what was already in there for another round. It wouldn’t hurt to dry some things more than once.
I sat down then and opened my second beer. It tasted a lot better than the first, and the Playboy held my interest better than the newspaper had. I only had to get up once, when the heavy load in the dryer got off balance a bit and the machine started to shake. I opened her up and shoved things around, then started her again with another quarter. Some of the stuff sure seemed to be taking a long time to dry.
I had gotten through most of the magazine before the dryer cut off for the third time. It was almost three o’clock and I was starting to feel sleepy anyway. I went over and took out the clothes and began to stack them in nice, neat little piles on the laundry-room table. It was a few minutes before I noticed that one of my socks was missing.
Shit, but I hate losing socks in the dryer. And it always seems to happen. I was pretty well convinced I wouldn’t find the thing when I opened the machine. But there it was. Damn if it hadn’t gotten itself lodged in Mother’s throat somehow.
ABRADED BY LIGHT
Scorched and poetical,
abraded by light,
I lay in silence,
loud with whiskey
on sands of lost harmonics,
and the dreams in me
are like lepers,
like plague-blackened flowers.
they rise like wolves,
sweeping over the borders
of my thoughts,
dying out in gutters,
empty and void,
wasting out their life,
in blood.
ROADKILL
No moon.
A sky flecked like mica with stars.
My Harley is redlined, the V-Twin burning between my legs. It’s always been dangerous riding fast at night. More dangerous now. But since the “Change” I have nothing to lose, no one to care if I lay the machine down.
Then I see her, lying across the blacktop.
Dead, I think.
But she moves when I swerve to avoid her.
I get the bike stopped, u-turned, wince as I see.... Her back is broken.
I hang the bike on its kickstand, the headlight painting her, refracting jewels from her liquid eyes. I rush to her, kneel.
She opens her mouth but makes no sound. How can she be alive? How can she breathe with a chest half crushed? What is she doing so far from the protection of a Safe-Haven? What sick fate sent a vehicle to rendezvous with her at this lonely spot? There are no signs of burnt rubber. Whoever hit her hadn’t even slowed down.
I try to force, “It’s OK,” through my lips. The meaningless words won’t come.
Then she looks past me toward highway’s edge. I turn, see some shadowy movement. When I turn back she looks like she’s sleeping but her chest no longer rises and falls.
My feet follow where her gaze had pointed, and I see why she’d been crossing the road. See what she was returning to. Or running from.
Her puppies had been born dead. But in this new world they haven’t stayed that way. Their eyes aren’t open but their noses work.
