by Brendan Todt
The washing machine goes bad. The dryer is old, too. The new ones are supposed to stack, and when the installers ask, Sarah says sure, why not. Sarah’s tall, but the dryer’s knob is now just a little bit above her head. This is not the altar of modernism expected she would come to worship. She looks inside and sees that there are many things moving in her life outside of her control.
Everything’s so efficient now. So quiet. To the point she wonders how well they can possibly work. Once, during intercourse, a man asked her how she was enjoying herself. She kept assuring him, Yes, it’s good, it feels good, but this meant nothing because he kept asking: she, too, was too quiet.
There’s this now-naked space in her hallway near the stack. She could put a chair there and read like she did when she was younger, just calling herself an adult, hauling her dirties down the street to the laundromat where she would sit and study, hauling the cleans back even more carefully.
She and her friends wrote stories and poems about the kinds of things they’d find outside the laundromat, on the sidewalk, in the parking lot. Whose panties, boxers, bra, and cut-off death metal-concert t-shirt? None of the stories ever ended well. Most of them never ended at all.
When one of her bicycles broke, her father disassembled it, part by part, and she watched. When her mother came to talk to her about what was happening to her body, she brought the anatomy book, which Sarah politely declined—though her mother must have just wanted to give her the names and shapes of the things she knew in Sarah that had broken, or would break, and the names of the things that would later replace them.
Brendan Todt lives and writes in Sioux City, Iowa. His story “Sarah draws little moustaches” was a finalist in the Smokelong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Other stories in the Sarah series have appeared in Necessary Fiction, Abraxas Review, Surely Mag, and elsewhere. In addition to teaching and writing, he runs ultras and coaches youth soccer.