The Clean Cycle and the Thread

The fluorescent lights hum a flat, tired sound above the folding tables. Four a.m. The machines are hot metal blocks, smelling of stale bleach and pennies. I am standing by the dryer bank, picking at the pull-tab on a forgotten coat. A single crimson thread unwraps from the seam of the bench and leads across the industrial floor. It pulls taut, carrying the geometry of a road I do not recognize, down into a silence that weighs on the palms.

I follow the line. The thread ends at a wall of chipped green enamel. When I look back the way I walked, the tiled floor surface is solid. The path I followed, the track of wet concrete, is not there. Only the dry, salt-stained grout lines remain. I reach out, my fingers touching the cool metal of the next empty machine. The thread continues, vanishing into the darkness behind the coin slot.