Midnight Laundry
by Sarah Hans
After maybe half an hour of trepidation, Patrick finally got up from his seat, sidled over to the plush chair in which the object of his attention was curled with a book, and pulled over an ottoman so that he could sit near her. She didn’t look up from her novel, something romantic with a trashy cover, so after staring at her for a few moments he finally spoke.
“You’re a vampire, aren’t you?” His voice cracked and his cheeks flushed; he steeled his nerves for rejection.
Her eyes swiveled up to meet his over the top of her book. Her pale irises appeared to float unanchored in the whites of her eyes, surrounded only by the faintest impression of milky blue.
When she didn’t reply, he made a second attempt. “I never thought I’d run into one of you at old Suds ‘n Java, but I guess vampires have to wash their clothes too.” He snorted with laughter.
The woman’s eerie eyes slid back to the pages of her novel. As he had suspected from across the room, she was definitely not breathing. Now that he was sitting so close he could really see how pale and papery her skin was, too, so translucent that the fluorescent lights illuminated purple veins crisscrossing beneath the surface. She smelled vaguely of clove cigarettes, the scent nearly obliterated by the reek of detergent that filled the laundromat.
Patrick opened his mouth to speak again, but a washing machine buzzed loudly. The woman was sitting in her chair one moment, and then the next all that remained was a romance novel flat on the seat. When he glanced at the machines, he saw that she was now removing clothes from a washer. A shiver ran down his spine. She could probably kill me in an instant, he realized, his jeans tightening.
Despite his better judgment, he got up and made his way to the washing machines under the pretense of checking his own clothes. She moved at normal speed now, pulling her black garments apart and tossing them into a dryer.
“Do you use that special detergent for black clothes?” he asked, trying out what he thought was his most charming smile. “You could, you know, probably get a lot of use out of it.”
She didn’t even glance at him. She fed the machine some quarters and returned, at a deliberate pace, to her plush chair.
Patrick cursed under his breath as he transferred his own wet items from the washer to the dryer. He was clearly not impressing her, but he wouldn’t let himself be discouraged.
Patrick considered his reflection in the round glass dryer door. Despite the bizarre distortion of the image, he thought he saw a decently handsome man. He was skinny, sure, but he had the lean muscles of a former high school wrestler. He regretted not having showered that day, because his face was scruffy and he wore a battered baseball cap to cover his oily hair. He discretely checked his armpits–he was wearing the same flannel shirt he’d been wearing all week–and found the odor musky and masculine, strong but not offensive. He’d had a girlfriend once who loved the smell of unwashed man, and ever since then he’d kept his deodorant-wearing to a minimum, hoping to find another girl who was just as much an animal in the sack.
His hands were a problem; few women found rough calluses and huge, knobby fingers to be sexy. His knuckles were red and cracked, and here and there his fingers were stained with paint or lacquer. He was proud to be a working man, especially after that time in the penitentiary, and he generally wore the stains and scars proudly, a sign of his success despite the odds stacked against him.
At this moment, however, he swiped his hands on his jeans self-consciously. He could hope she wouldn’t notice. Maybe vampires didn’t care about that sort of thing.
He looked back to the lounge area where she sat, her legs slung over the armrest,reclining sideways in the chair. She would have been pretty enough if she’d been mortal, but her immortality made her irresistible, a glossy white dove among drab gray pigeons.
The laundromat attendant returned from the dry-cleaning room and glanced about, his bleary eyes resting for a few moments on the woman draped over the plush chair near the door. After he had double-checked that his patrons weren’t trying to steal detergent or break the machines he shrugged and disappeared into the back room again.
Patrick made his way back to ottoman. He watched the vampire expectantly.
She looked up at him over her book again, this time with her sandy-blonde eyebrows drawn together in a scowl.
“Is it true you can read minds?” he inquired, trying to sound conversational.
She cocked her head, regarding him with unblinking eyes, and Patrick was reminded of a confused dog. She made no reply. Is she stupid? he wondered, frowning.
With a start, he realized that she might be trying to communicate with him telepathically. Closing his eyes, Patrick concentrated hard on the image of the two of them talking, him saying something clever and her laughing so that her dainty pointed fangs appeared in her pink mouth. Then he imagined them kissing, their tongues writhing together in passion.
When he returned from his reverie, she was engrossed once more in her book.
Anger boiled in his stomach. That trashy novel can’t be more entertaining than I am. This might be his only chance to ever be with a vampire, and the target of his affections wasn’t even giving him a chance. He stood and snatched the novel from her.
Her hands remained poised, as if she still held the book, but her eyes flickered up to his face.
“Now will you listen to me? I’m trying to make friends here–”
He was interrupted by icy cold fingers closing around his throat, lifting him off the ground a good two feet. The vampire growled below him, her mouth opening to reveal multiple rows of what reminded him of shark teeth: sharp, triangular, and made specifically to rip through flesh. Her free hand grabbed the book, tossing it onto the chair behind her.
A voice seemed to simmer up from the depths of her belly, unnaturally low and echoing in the quiet of the empty laundromat. “Will you please let me read?”
With those words she released him. His knees buckled when he hit the ground and he toppled sideways. When he had recovered himself and stood, he looked back to see that the vampire had seated herself once more, novel again held in her pale hands.
Patrick stalked out of the laundromat, hunching his shoulders and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He hoped that she’d be gone if he returned for his laundry in a few hours. As he stumped along, he wondered about the nearest watering hole where he could drown his sorrow.
He supposed that he could always go to the werewolf bar where he usually spent his Saturday nights.
Sarah Hans was a morbid child obsessed with vampires, werewolves and Elder Gods. She’s grown up to become a morbid writer whose horror stories appear in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Historical Lovecraft and The Crimson Pact: Volume 1. She’s also a proud member of the Airship Archon steampunk group. To read samples of her work or follow her airship adventures you can visit her website at http://sarahhans.com/.
© 2011 All rights reserved Sarah Hans
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