Laundralaxy by Katy Storch

Some nights I sense the life I led twelve years ago is ongoing, just elsewhere. In that reality, my barber pumps waves into my deadass flat hair twice a year and there’s a washer and dryer in my unit and my mom calls my landline. She remembers who and why she called. 

Meanwhile in this century, landlines are near extinct and at Sunset Years Living my mom stays in a wing known as Memory Lane—a name the activities director called “cute” during my mom’s first week. “Like a swing set on display at a baby’s funeral,” I zipped. The director looked away as my mom nodded like an improv coach, plunging her elbow in and out of her tea.

1. Prattlers are just mouths with high havoc-potential.
2. We make our own luck in life, and rubber is a key ingredient.
3. When the orb glows orange above the skyline, believe…

Post-it notes in my mom’s handwriting, stuck to her forehead the day she went quiet. The doctor said people tend to “sputter” at the end, that she’d been “drifting from her lane” for a while. The collapse of my mom’s life akin to a car’s final ride—dead engine, off a cliff.

My Prius was impounded and my bike brakes are stripped so like every damn day, today I walk the long way home from Memory Lane, watch a real sunset, think about the blurred line between silence and void. One thing the Sunset staff know for sure? My mom’s lost in the latter. 

The older I get, the more I think certainty is just a response to fear.

Golden hour in the park. The grass is neon. Charged up. A full battery. I squint at a strip of paper taped to a tree trunk and a giant forehead emerges on the bill-sized strip. I blink, the ink dots percolate, lace together, and when Franklin finally congeals at the surface I’m dunked in the hunch that anything could happen. After all, a hundie scotch-taped to a tree is a peculiar thing. 

Then I think: maybe someone from that elsewhere universe left it here for me.

Maybe they’re watching right now—double-dutching on stacked planes to hop back and forth. Fueling this nonsense is how I push myself to peel the hundie off the tree.

I spend mornings watching my mom eat the flowers I pick around town, petals crinkling between her teeth. I’m desperate for change, the kind that comes from taking a proper risk. 

I bring the $100 bill to Laundralaxy—the laundromat with arcade games under a canopy of twinkle lights—the next day and feed it into the quarter machine’s prattler. The machine sucks it in and thrums. A red light flips on, blinks, then fades.

Beyond the washers a rangy woman mops two tiles under a blaring TV. I walk over and say: “damn, my hundie’s vanished like a deer in the Louvre.”

She probes her temples. “The machine can’t handle large bills.”

“Right, except I read a ‘$100 bills okay’ sign on the machine?” I tap her elbow once—real soft, just once—to say: I’ll show you, follow me. Her mop falls, rattles like the solo drummer in a percussion line. “This man struck me!” 

She steps closer, slick—lives for moments like this—to grace me with height-enhanced condescension right down her oily nose. “Some man,” she sneers. I hold her gaze.

She cackles and shoves out the back door lighting a cigarette. I huff past the skeeball players and study my reflection in the metal framing of the quarter machine. My slouch has me down a few inches—I’m five-four now—and my hair’s started growing in patchy. Damn perms. There’s no $100 bill sign, there never was.

The red light on the machine flashes. A wink.

I punch it.

I punch it again.

During her fits my mom used to say: “I’m not really gone, I’ve just been released.”

Bystanders gather. One of them fist-pumps the air and says: “fuckin’ take it down man!” He’s clutching a basketball, NBA Hoops Game roaring in the background, folded laundry stacked in a bag at his feet. “That mothafucka ate my $20 last week.”

Behind him, a woman cradles a bundle of dirt-crusted blankets and shuts her watering eyes. When she flutters the little spigots open they’ve filled to tiny swimming pools. “It stole my sandwich on Friday,” she whispers.

The guy jumps forward, volleys the machine with the top of his foot as if it were a soccer ball. He’s wearing sandals. The word “Dynamite” is tattooed down his calf. He’s tall. 

The machine cracks back with a long, strained beep. The woman bows to it and says: “bless you.” She sneaks a knowing glance at me. 

Maybe she’s reached the cliff too, I think, spine curving, wrung out.

The machine cuts in bellowing—ominous, deep—the start of a countdown: TEN-NINE-EIGHT… The fluorescent lamps blink, the pinball machines chant. SEVEN-SIX-FIVE… My mom’s handwriting flashes like a comet across my mind: rubber is a key ingredient…

I grab a fitted sheet from Dynamite’s bag of laundry and drape it over the machine so the elastic snaps at its base. The machine heaves like it’s suffocating and I kick high to volley the bastard, right in its prattler. The countdown stops and the pinball rhythms hush.

The woman nuzzles the blankets in her arms. “Our hero,” she says, looking at me. My scalp tingles, the soles of my feet warm.

Dynamite claps me on the back. “Nice kick, stud.” He tosses the basketball up and catches it twirling on a fingertip—twinkle lights above, coin-op games the skyline. 

Ball in spin cycle, slings a curiously strong breeze. I imagine my mom double-dutching in the distance as $100 worth of quarters flies from the machine. Around the laundromat her laugh chimes—bighearted as ever, one luminous reality charging through me.

Katy Storch is a writer and visual artist from Southern California, and a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wyoming. Her art and writing can be found on Instagram @kswank8.

8 May 2026