Night Shift at the Laundromat

The machines hum their low gospel, porthole eyes spinning the dark into froth, into the slow weather of someone else's blue shirt turning over and over like a thought.

A man waits with his hands in his lap, patient as a station no train visits. The fluorescent light forgives nothing, counts every fold in his coat, yet he stays, he stays, he watches.

Outside, the street is a wet ribbon, neon bleeding into the gutter's small river. Inside, the air is warm with detergent and the sweet exhaustion of clean things, the world rinsed down to its softest cloth.

When the cycle ends it ends quietly— a click, a stilling, the drum gone calm. He gathers the heat into his arms like something newly born, and carries it home through the dark.