"Do you need help, or...?" His voice drops off as his eyes dart toward her and then away again. He is trying not to be obvious. She looks confused, he considers, in the cute, sort of absent way smart girls are when they start working on something they can't immediately figure out. No map, instruction set or owners manual would withstand that look.She laughs and begins to reply. "No I..."How silly she must look - staring, with parted lips, at the silver triple loader. Between her feet is the empty laundry basket. Her full washer is the only one in the row that isn't busily thumping away with soapy socks appearing now like and again at the window. Besides his, of course. He's removing the freshly spun clothes from the depths of the machine.Cute, she registers briefly. Not her type -- it's the goatee and chops thing -- but nice enough to avoid sounding like guy-know-it-all. Then she wonders how desperate she is that her immediate reaction is to gauge whether or not she would date this tentative Good Samaritan."It's just," she says, attempting to complete her sentence. She wishes briefly she could explain quickly and get on with things but the glass of wine before subjecting herself to the Laundromat on discount wash night has finally hit her head."You looked confused," he says."It's just," she says, pointing to the two column instruction panel, "I'm just figuring out the best way to do this. There are so many choices: Quick wash, heavy duty -- all hot, warm, cold...Extra spin cycle."It's his turn to look confused. He pauses with his hands full of wet boxers and jeans and squints at the machine in front of him."I never noticed all that," he says. A brief flush rises up from his collar and he goes on unloading clothes. " I just put them in, shut the door and press start."Finished unloading, he shuts the round, rubber sealed door and straightens up. He's her height although a bit on the thin side. He has nice shoulders, wide but not bulky.
He looks a little closer at the panel then back at her. She is the smart, instruction reading kind. He wishes he hadn't made himself look like such an idiot."Wow," he says and the blush creeps higher.His eyes are green. He smiles and they both laugh."I just wish they would make a button that says 'Clean,'" she says, occupying her hands with the rest of the routine: add soap, choose a temperature.
She checks for his response with a sidelong glance and catches him looking at her again.
"Yeah." He laughs, and heads for the dryers.She stares at the panel a minute longer and settles for 'Quick Wash.' When she looks toward the dryers he's gone.Exhibit A. How my brain works.Doing my own rather mundane wash tonight in anticipation of my mom's imminent visit (hurry, scrub the corners, get that junk out of the sink and for god's sake put away the JD) I overheard this conversation between two college aged people in the next row of washers. Doing my best not to look at them, I couldn't help but "tune in."
The rest -- his thoughts, her thoughts, facial expressions, the timing of their actions -- that came out of my own head. That's how my brain works. Tiny little snatches of conversation or a glimpse of something unusual and my brain slips of into la la land, fabricating a scenario for whatever it is I just saw or heard. The next inevitable step is to write it down.
That's what writing is for me on a daily basis: keeping track of all the little stories. Some of them have and will end up in longer pieces, neatly transfigured from their origins so as to be unrecognizable to anyone but me, but even if they don't get used immediately they're still worth the time it takes to craft them. These little bits exist on their own, in their own little universes. Not grand or sweeping or epublishableible, but still fodder for the storyteller.
Storytelling in the larger sense of a short story or a novel is like fishing from a stocked pond where story idea is the pole and line. I stock the pond with those collected little snippets that fill in the spaces in a story. They're the scenes that get to characters to meet each other, or get them from one scene to the next. I try to keep the pond well stocked, so when I cast, I've always got a little something waiting for me.
Labels: Write Yourself Out Of This One
