Written by Kristin Kozlowski
Mom stops washing clothes. We rattle around in stained, smelly t-shirts and shorts.
We fight over whose clothes smell the worst. Lizzie has her Sunday dress that still
smells okay if she’s outside and you don’t stand too close to her, but she says the
rest of us are tied for smelliest. Most smelly? Lizzie thinks having one not-so-smelly-
dress means she’s in charge—this and the fact that she’s the only girl smashed
between two packs of boys—so one day she announces that we’re going to wash
our clothes ourselves. She points her pudgy finger at us and orders us to strip down
to our underwear, which we do because we gave up caring when mom did. Lizzie
gathers up the pile and marches to the back room where she squeezes between the
mountainous laundry basket and the washing machine, and then she hollers for me
to come in and fold onto my knees so she can stand on my back to reach the buttons.
Harold hollers for her not to forget the soap so she grabs that, too, which makes her
feel like she weighs twice as much on my back as she did before. She dumps some
soap into the machine, but I know she missed some because a large drip shutters
down the front of the washer and onto my shoulder. I feel my arms weaken like they
might buckle under her weight and holler for her to hurry up as I feel her raise onto
her tippy-toes to stretch as far as she can towards the start button, but just like
mom, I can’t tell if she’s gonna make it or not.
.
Kristin Kozlowski lives and works in the Midwest, US. Some of her work is available online at Flash Frog, matchbook, Vast Chasm, Pidgeonholes, Lost Balloon, and others. Her piece from Cease, Cows, “Salty Owl”, is included in The Best Small Fictions Anthology 2021, and “What’s the Opposite of Thief?” from The Birdseed was nominated for Best MicroFiction 2022. For her upcoming book publications, please visit her website at kristinkozlowskiwrites.wordpress.com. Insta: @kristinkozwrites, Twitter/X: @kriskozlowski.