After our washing machine broke, the laundry started piling up. So one morning I brought it down to Laundryland. Unfortunately, Laundryland was closed. I hadn't realized how early it was. I peered through the front window and saw all the washing machines had their lids up and the doors to the dryers hung open. There was no one inside. I got back into the truck and waited for someone to come. I've always thought doing laundry at a coin-op was fun. When I was growing up, my grandmother didn't have a washing machine in her apartment so we went to the place on the corner. It smelled like manufactured clouds. There was a chicken restaurant next door so the second you stepped outside, your clothes got coated in that smell. Ad there were wing bones all over the street. It was around eight when a woman finally unlocked the door at Laundryland. I brought in three trash bags and stuffed everything into the quad loaders, which were $6 a cycle. After I sat down to read the newspaper, a man came in holding two duffel bags. He put his stuff into the washing machine and I could see blood on some of it. I pretended not to see. But after a few minutes I put down the newspaper and walked outside. It turned out the blood was from a deer. There was an enormous buck on his truck's flatbed. It had blood near its throat and its eyes were black. I pictured the blood coming off his clothes in the rinse and washing through the pipes. After a little while, I went back in to switch my laundry. One of the dryers was out of service. There was a handwritten sign on another that said, "Don't slam the door." I looked over to where the stranger was doing his laundry. It seemed very early in the morning to shoot a deer. I noticed he had taken my newspaper. There is a lot of space in Laundryland so when my clothes were dry I folded them in a separate area. Eventually I discovered that there were field mice in our washing machine and that's what was causing the problem. They'd gotten stuck in the motor's belt drive. read more
