The exercise:
Write four lines of prose which take place at: the laundromat.
Work went pretty smoothly. Place pretty much emptied out at 8:30, so I just had to deal with a door that didn't want to lock and one guy in the weight room who just couldn't seem to stop working out.
It all got sorted out in the end. Gonna try to get some sleep tonight before taking the family up to Penticton tomorrow to run some errands.
Mine:
Fascinating places, laundromats. A public place where people willingly bring their smelly, filthy clothes, for all to see, in order to clean them, while being surrounded by others doing exactly the same. What an odd brotherhood of squalor and mystery stains which, as if by an unspoken rule, go unquestioned.
I would shun these places of business quite entirely if I wasn't so regularly in need of affordable wardrobe changes... oh hello, this fellow looks about my size!
Sounds like a good day, but surely there was a way to combine those two problems into one solution? Tell the workout guy that you've got a stuck door that even he's not strong enough to deal with, and get him to fix the locking problem while leaving the gym at the same time! Or was the other way round: he was stopping you from locking the door so you couldn't'keep him out of the gym?
ReplyDeleteSo was the laundromat one of your errands, or it is just coincidence? I like your narrator though, especially with his disdain for the place right up until we discover why he's there... :-D
The laundromat
Poor kid, how was he to know that the Ministry of Magic had decided that third washing machine from the end was going to be their temporary entrance to their offices while the renovation work was going on? One minute he was putting his underpants and socks in (all neatly sorted according to colour; I was sure he had to have a girlfriend or wife at home making him get it right) and the next minute he'd leaned his hand on the coin return slot and him and his unmentionables disappeared in a flash of green light. I checked the roster, and chuckled softly: Madame Leander was on duty and she had a sense of humour at least.
Another flash of bright green light and the kid reappears with his laundry in his hands, all cleaned and ironed, including the clothes he'd been wearing when he got pulled into the washing machine....
Greg - one of the outside doors was being finicky, or at least its locking mechanism was. The weight room is way at the other end of the building, so I mostly just wanted him out so that I could sort out the stupid lock. Which I (eventually) did.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I think I had to pick something up from a laundromat/dry cleaning place in Penticton. Even this caught up, I can't remember for sure...
Hah, I really enjoyed this whole scenario. I could quite see it being incorporated into the canon of Harry Potter, actually :D