Winners of the 2026
Prime Number Magazine Awards for
Poetry & Short Fiction

Our Judges

POETRY

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Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas. His poetry has won numerous awards and appears in such publications as Five Points, Barrow Street, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, Four Way Review, New Ohio Review, Aesthetica and Terrain.org. His full-length collection, Requiem in Wide-Open Minor, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. For more information on Justin’s work, please go to justinhunt.online

~ ~ ~

J. Ellis studied Creative Writing and English Literature at Stanford University and is now based in New York City. Much of her poetry explores family relationships, her own mixed Chinese-Hawaiian identity, and complex childhood nostalgia―often through the lens of food. Preparing, eating, sharing food is speaking without words, an act of identity, love, caring, frustration, grief, joy. There is so much in just slicing an apple.

~ ~ ~

Yiskah Rosenfeld is the author of Tasting Flight and Naked Beside Fish, both published in 2024. Honors include the Prism Review Prize, the Reuben Rose Memorial Award and prizes from December Magazine, Kallisto Gaia Press and Frontier Poetry. Poems appear in Rattle, Poet Lore, Slippery Elm, SWWIM Every Day, The Bitter Oleander and elsewhere. Yiskah holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and teaches workshops on spirituality and creativity in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.yiskahrosenfeld.com

SHORT FICTION

A Wreck of a Place

She would tell him she was pregnant in the morning, she decided, after they had gotten settled at the lake house. She had hoped to tell him at lunch, just before they packed the car, but he had left the table to take a call, forgetting or ignoring their promise to turn off their phones for a long weekend, and ended up talking to a client about asset classes and convertible bonds for an hour. She might have hinted at things in the elevator, but he had been irritable about the call and their late start, and they had ended up arguing, or bickering, really, about how she had overpacked for two days in a drafty cabin, and whether it was possible, even, to predict the weather anymore. Leaving Manhattan, he had been distracted by heavy traffic, and, by the time they crossed the Willis Avenue Bridge, the intermittent drizzle turning into a steady downpour. Now, five hours north of the city, he was straining to see the country road dimly visible beyond their headlights.

Maybe she was being too cautious of his feelings. They had been talking about having a child for more than a year. Still, he would feel blind-sided and overwhelmed. For months, he had been unable to focus on anything but work, retreating into his study every night after dinner and, when she protested, telling her she couldn’t understand the pressures he was shouldering in face of unprecedented market volatility, with wars all over the globe upending futures markets and skittish clients constantly demanding answers. It would be difficult to fault him for harboring anxieties or entertaining doubts of the sort edging into her own mind. Already, she felt a sort of disbelief, an awe, in face of the sudden changes to her body, and a sense of vertigo whenever she considered the audacity, the hubris, of bringing new life into a crowded world. She desperately wanted him to share her excitement, though, and the burden of responsibility, but the moment needed to be right. She wanted to give him a proper chance to say the right thing; she wanted him to experience something like happiness.

When she told him, she decided, they would be sitting in the rusted chairs at the end of the dock, looking at the clouds mirrored by the surface of the lake and the band of red and gold fringing the opposite shore, where sumac, maple and oak competed for sunlight between stands of pine. The air would be clear after the rain, and the lake perfectly still, disturbed only by fish breaking its surface to feed. If it was still rainy, or the chill in the air was too sharp, they would sit on the couch in front of the fireplace, wrapped in blankets or curled into one another. After they talked, she would take the pregnancy test she had slipped into her purse—to confirm what she knew—and they would await the result together.

In the quiet of the cabin, they could reset and settle into a new reality, she thought, adjusting a vent above the glove compartment and sinking back into the soft leather of the passenger seat. For now, she would savor her secret, drifting with the ebb and flow of her own thoughts and the feeling—too often, all too fleeting—that, through their hard work, they had saved up enough money to buffer a child from the sorts of hunger and cruelty she had experienced as a child, and saw every day, now, in the headlines. She was so engrossed in her vision of the lake and the wash of rain against the window that she wasn’t sure, at first, if he was speaking to her, or to himself.

“I thought we’d be able to get ahead of the weather,” he said, “but we left too late.”

She sensed something confrontational in his tone, a vestige of their earlier argument, and shifted to look at him. He was gripping the wheel with one hand and massaging his temple, where his dark hair had begun to recede from a widow’s peak. She studied his angular frame, the resolute cut of his jaw, and the slope of his forehead—the same basic outline of the person she had fallen in love with four years earlier—and felt assured that, whatever disagreements they had been having, something essential, something solid about him would never change. “We’re not in a rush,” she said, glancing at the GPS display marking their progress through a narrow river valley. “Just try to enjoy the weekend.”

“What’s left of it,” he said, and she again sensed his annoyance about their late start. She wanted to tell him that she had just been imagining early-morning mist burning off the lake, the calls of a solitary loon readying for winter, and the acorn caps and pine needles carpeting the ground around the cabin; his response, though, had given her no opening.

“Do you want to turn around?” she asked. “It’s ok if you don’t want to go.”

“I’m just upset about that client who called at lunch. When I tried to explain why her portfolio took a hit this quarter, she told me she didn’t need to know ‘a bunch of details about agribusiness and gasoline,’” he said, using his fingers to carve quotation marks in the air. “She actually said it was my job to ‘make the sausage.’ I’m managing her fortune, and she’s treating me like the guy at the deli counter wrapping her dinner in butcher paper.”

“She’s three-hundred and fifty miles behind us.” She reached across the space separating their seats and placed her hand on his thigh. “It’s just me, now. And we’ll be there in an hour.”

“If the road up to the house isn’t half underwater. My parents should have paved it, but then they should have done a lot of things while they were alive. I suppose they thought I’d want to spend my life fixing up a wreck of a place six hours from New York.” 

“We can turn around and go back,” she said, steeling herself for disappointment; he so rarely wanted to go to the lake house.

“There’s no point turning back, now,” he said. “Anyway, I want to see what kind of shape it’s in after being empty for months. I should have hired one of the locals to check on it.”

“Maybe we should use it more often.”

“It was a great place when I was a kid, but it’s in the sticks. There’s nothing to do.”

“Nothing?” She smiled faintly. “Is that why you brought me up here on our first date?”

“I was testing your mettle. Seeing if you could handle September in a shack with a cast-iron bathtub.”

“It was August, and the place has character.”

“That’s another way of saying it’s a teardown,” he said. “Anyway, I don’t feel a connection to the place anymore.”

“I fell in love with you there.”

“I’m just saying my feelings about the place have changed. And the area, itself, has changed. My parents were the last of the locals.”

“What about you?”

“It was my mom’s childhood home, not mine. It was just a summer place when I was growing up. And, yeah, we’ve had a few good times there, but I can’t see why we should keep spending money for its upkeep.”

There arose in her a kind of panic. Her mind ran over all the little things—inconsequential things, he would call them—she had always cherished: the kerosene lamp hanging above the sink, the tarnished silverware, the apple peeler affixed to the edge of the wooden counter, the mason jars and chipped vases his mother had filled with wild daisies, the coffee-stained mugs, and all the furniture his parents had built or salvaged and refurbished while they were alive—things that would end up in a dumpster, most likely, given her husband’s proclivities to cast aside the old and start anew, if only for its own sake and some need to change the face of things wherever he went. She felt ashamed for coveting his family’s things, and ridiculous, too, because he was clearly humoring her, indulging her wish to go to the lake house without fully understanding it.

She drew her hand from his leg as they rounded a bend and saw the flashing lights of a police car blocking both lanes, and a road crew unloading barricades from a flatbed truck. She settled against her armrest as her husband slowed to a stop and lowered the window for a rain-drenched policeman, briefly closed her eyes, and listened to her husband’s terse responses to statements about flash flooding, mudslides where the river had burst its banks and destroyed a stretch of guardrail, and the road closure that would be in effect until morning, while engineers inspected a bridge.

 “There’s an alternate route to the house, but we’ll get there at three in the morning,” her husband said, backing onto the shoulder to turn around. “And there’s no guarantee we won’t face the same problem trying to cross the river on a different road.”

“Then let’s get a motel room. You’re tired, and I’m not feeling my best.”

“I’m tempted to push on. This is ridiculous. The GPS should have alerted us.”

“But it didn’t, so let’s just go back to the highway and find a motel,” she said, imagining, somewhere in the darkness pressing against the windows, a roiling river eroding its banks, drawing splintered branches and litter downstream, and carrying them both further away from the lake house in its indiscriminate sweep.

. . .

He insisted they leave their suitcase in the car, blaming the weight of the extra clothes and four novels she had packed in a moment of indecision, and they ended up sprinting through the patchwork of oily puddles covering the hotel’s crowded parking lot. She paused beneath the tattered awning above the hotel’s front entrance, flailed her arms to shake rain droplets from her sleeves, and followed a trail of muddy prints into the lobby, where her husband was leaning against the front desk, with his wallet in hand and a mildly disgusted expression on his face. It was, she thought, precisely the kind of hotel he had long ago sworn off, a generic middle-class establishment filled with threadbare sectional couches and slip-resistant rugs, racks of pamphlets about low-budget tourist destinations, and a breakfast room filled with Formica tables, waffle irons, and canisters of cereal, and crowded now, with young children in pajamas pouring hot chocolate mix into Styrofoam cups, middle-aged women fishing around in pockets and purses for cough drops and tissues, and old men in hunting vests staring at a mounted television tuned to the Weather Channel. 

“We need a room with a king,” her husband said, and from the set of his jaw, she knew he had already developed a distaste for the clerk, offended, most likely, by the clerk’s disheveled hair and crooked nametag.

“We only have one room left,” the clerk said. “It has two double beds. Do you still want it?”

“We don’t have a choice, do we?” Her husband tossed a credit card on the counter and glanced at a young girl with uneven pigtails pushing hot chocolate mix around on a tabletop with the edge of a plastic knife. “What’s going on? I mean, who are all these people?” 

“Employees who can’t go home,” the clerk said. “A lot of them got flooded out or lost power, and it’s supposed to get cold. The management’s putting them up for the night.”

“You’re telling me no one here can get home?”

“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” the clerk said, pushing a key card across the counter. “Some of them might not have a home at this point. They’ll find out in the morning.”

“I’m so sorry,” she began, stepping up to the counter, but her husband was already gathering the card key by its edges, as if misery were contagious.

“You seemed upset with the desk clerk,” she said, when they were in the elevator. “Like you didn’t think those people should be allowed to stay here.”

“I didn’t say anything of the sort.”

“It was the look on your face.”

“I’m just wondering why they’re all hanging out in the lobby, like they’re in someone’s living room. That’s all.”

“They’ve just lost everything,” she whispered, following him from the elevator and down a hallway filled with the sounds of muffled conversations and televisions, past folding cots crookedly parked beside doors, and a housekeeping office, where two women in sodden coats were standing beside an industrial washing machine, talking quietly.

“I’m not saying it’s their fault. But this place looks like a refugee camp,” he said, when they entered their room. He sat down on the edge of the nearest bed and tugged at a plastic thread coming loose from its quilted cover. “They could at least keep their kids quiet.”

“They weren’t planning on being here any more than we were.”

“I’m exhausted,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Can I just be tired?”

Struck by something desperate in his expression, she felt a tenderness, and, with it, frustration, because she knew something inside of him would break if she sat down beside him before he had worked out his feelings on his own and decided to open up to her—as he usually did after he had resolved a crisis or found some way to avert it; then she questioned her hesitation and moved towards him, but he was already rising from the bed.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”

She shook her head as he slipped past. “I’m going downstairs to get a cup of tea,” she said, hoping he was too tired to notice the peeling wallpaper beside the door. “I need something to cut the chill.”

Downstairs, she paused at the door to the breakfast room and observed a young girl in pink pajamas tearing bits of Styrofoam from the rim of an empty cup, until she noticed a woman staring at her from beneath the brim of a baseball cap. Conscious of the thick wedding band on her own finger and the delicate angora sweater she had so carelessly worn in the rain, she took a step backward, struck by the fact that her own mother could easily have been one of the women sitting beneath the television, wearing a worn fleece for warmth and mourning a trailer swept from the banks of a river. No, she didn’t need a cup of tea, she told herself, turning back to the lobby. She would leave strangers to their grief and warm herself in her own room, with a pair of woolen socks from the suitcase in the black Lexus at the far end of the lot.

Outside, she paused beneath the awning, a few feet from a middle-aged woman using her shoulders to protect a cigarette from the gusting wind and staring at the rain-splatter on the surface of puddles. “I was going to get something from my car,” she explained. “But, looking out at this, I think I’ve changed my mind.” The woman’s expression remained unchanged, except for a slight contraction of muscles around her mouth as she took a drag off her cigarette. Wondering if the woman was in shock, she felt an impulse to provide comfort. “Were you affected by the floods?”

“When I left my house today, the water was lapping at my front door. I shouldn’t complain. Some lady in there couldn’t even get inside her trailer to grab her coat. Her place was half in the river last she saw it.” The woman drew a cellophane pack from her front pocket and offered it. “If you need a smoke,” she began. “I was trying to quit, but today changed that.” 

She felt an odd craving, the pull of a biting scent she associated with her mother, and almost pulled a cigarette from the pack. “Thanks, but I can’t,” she said abruptly. “I’m pregnant,” she added, with forced certainty, knowing she had said the word ‘pregnant’ to see how it felt on her tongue and realizing, too, that she had shared her secret with a complete stranger instead of her husband. 

When she returned to the room, her husband was patting his chest with a towel and trying to see his reflection in a fogged mirror. After he tossed the towel on the floor and stretched out on the bed, she peeled off her clothes and laid down beside him, trailed her fingertips along his ribs, and told him about her short conversation with the woman downstairs.

“I’m wondering if I should have gotten my coat from the car and told her to give it to the woman who lost her trailer,” she said.

“And what would you wear?”

“We can pull over and buy something tomorrow. There must be a store nearby.”

“If there’s a store, they know about it,” he said.

“But that woman probably lost everything.”

“We can’t save everyone.”

“I’m not talking about everyone. I’m talking about one person who could use a coat.”

He propped himself on his elbow and considered her with a pained expression. “People are private up here. Trust me, she won’t want some stranger from New York handing her a coat. You’ll just offend her.”

“Not if she’s cold,” she said, turning on her side to face the nightstand.

“Right now, your hands are cold.” He curled into her and stretched his arm across her waist. At the sound of a door slamming down the hallway, he misinterpreted a tensing of her shoulders. “This hasn’t been the weekend either one of us wanted.”

“It’s not over yet,” she said, drawing from his embrace to turn off the lamp on the nightstand. She sank back onto her pillow, knowing, as he mumbled about the smell of cigarette smoke in her hair, that if it weren’t for the dead weight of his arm resting in the soft flesh beneath her ribs, she might just float away.

. . .

By the time they left the motel, the rain had stopped, and the sun was peeking through the clouds, projecting upon the hills and valleys visible from the road a shifting patchwork of light and shadow, and giving the dark spaces between the trees an uncertain, aqueous cast. The earth seemed groggy, reclaiming its vibrance each time a sun ray lit up the fallen leaves on the ground and slipping into somnolence each time a cloud shadow fell. Still, they were almost at the house, she was telling herself, when the road curved toward the entrance of a narrow trestle bridge spanning the river. Along the banks, fallen pine trees were lying half-submerged in turbulent water, catching shredded garbage bags and battered bicycles and muddy pieces of clothing. A flotilla of bright orange pumpkins swept, she assumed, from a flooded field, was bobbing beneath the bridge. Before she could ask her husband to pull over for a photograph, she saw the line of trailers along the river’s edge—some toppled from concrete blocks and lying on their side next to downed power lines; some twisted like wrung-out rags at the bottom of a sheared riverbank and spilling their contents; one half-collapsed and pulled apart by the current, so that a plaid couch was protruding obscenely from its exposed end; and another wedged between two boulders, with its door hanging open and its white curtains trailing in the water. 

“It’s so sad,” she said, once the bridge and the trailers were behind them.

“Not exactly surprising, though. They were living in a flood zone.”

“It’s what they can afford.”

“It turns out they can’t afford it, after all.”

She might have asked him to stop being so contrarian, to let go his actuarial mindset for once, but they were nearing a line of barricades where a guardrail had been ripped away, and a road crew holding up signs guiding them onto the shoulder and around a downed power line. By the time they were back on the road, he was asking if she had remembered to pack the chevre and a jar of orange marmalade. 

The house had weathered the storm, she was relieved to see, as they parked in the small clearing beside its cinder-block stoop. It was exactly as she remembered it from their last visit. The weathered railings on either side of its door were nearly stripped of paint. Its curling roof tiles were covered in wet leaves, and a gutter spout had begun to separate from the screened porch. Weeds withered by cold had overgrown a garden plot bordered by rotting railroad ties. Near the shore, bits of char were floating in the water filling a stone fire pit. A fallen branch was lying across the steps leading down to the dock.

“We’ll need to move that branch later,” he said, pushing into the house. She followed him into a room filled with light muted by accretions of sap and dust, derelict spider webs, and water droplets clinging to old window panes. She set down her purse and felt her shoulder muscles loosen as she took in the familiar knots in the wooden floor, the rough-hewn roof beams, the buffet filled with hand-sewn napkins and cracked candle stubs and worn decks of cards, and the sagging shelves filled with moldering poetry books and trail guides.

“The electricity’s out,” he muttered, flipping a light switch. “We won’t be able to use the toilet until it’s back on. The septic won’t be working.”

“We’ll go outside. No one’s up here this time of year.”

He shook his head and considered his surroundings with narrowed eyes, and she saw the house as he did, noting the mouse scat in the corner, the lopsided writing desk covered in unopened sympathy cards and condensation rings, and the curved Volkswagen bumper set on the hearth as a makeshift fireplace grate; he was staring at her, with his arms folded over his chest. “I told you, it’s a wreck of a place.”

“But you said you wanted to come up here.”

He crossed the room and considered a woodbin beside the fireplace. “I was serious last night. I wanted to see what kind of shape it’s in. If it’s a place we want to hang onto. Or sell.”

“We don’t need to decide, now. We could hang onto it for a year or two and see how we feel. That would at least give you time to figure out what to do with your parents’ things.”

“There’s nothing sentimental here. I thought we’d get rid of it, though I don’t know who the hell would buy it.”

“Lots of people,” she said, leaning against the desk and trailing her fingers over the rim of a brass bowl filled with old pennies and paper clips. “Your grandparents built this house. Won’t you be sad to lose it?”

“Not really,” he said. “No,” he added, definitively. “And, as I said, I’m not going to pay taxes for something I barely use.”

If she told him she was pregnant, she thought, maybe he would see the house in a new light, as a legacy. Yes, it would cost money to fix the roof and make it their own, but it would be a quiet place to call home, a promise of permanence and stability. “Let’s go down to the dock and look at the lake,” she offered. “Then we can make a fire.”

The dock was sagging slightly, but no worse than it had been last year. Still, she feared he would fixate on its depressed angle, or the mud-splatter on the bottom of the overturned canoe tucked into the blueberry bushes at the water’s edge. The lake was nearly black from the tannins and sap secreted by decomposing leaves and submerged branches, and the sky a dull gray. Between the limbs of bare trees, the houses edging the shoreline were visible.

“It’s so quiet,” she began. “It looks like most people have taken in their motorboats.”

He looked through the trees, at the house closest to their cabin, a two-story house with walls of glass overlooking a massive boat house.

“I think those people have been wanting to expand,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “They want to build a rental. That’s what my mother said before she died. As you might guess, she was complaining about it.”

“They won’t have enough space on that lot.”

“That’s why they’ll make us a really good offer.”

She folded her arms across her chest and hugged her ribcage. “You said this place is a teardown.”

“It is, but it’s not about the house. It’s the value of the land. The size of this property. And the fact that it’s not very developed.”

“Isn’t that reason to keep it?” She paused. “You don’t find places like this anymore.”

“The neighbors have already cleared the trees on the west side of their lot. They’d probably pay above the asking price. We’re not going to find a better time to unload this place.”

She recalled afternoons she had spent on the day bed, listening to loon calls and the sound of rain hitting the roof, and her breath grew shallow. “I thought we’d have more time. To spend here. Before we lost it.”

“We’re not losing anything if it’s our choice, and we’ll make a lot more than you’d guess.” He pressed his fingers to his temple. “We can’t hang onto it forever. I mean, someday, somebody is going to buy this property and build a bigger house on this lot. It’s inevitable. And right now, we could really use the money.” 

“But we have money. We have loads of money. That’s why we’ve both been working so hard, isn’t it? So we don’t have to sweat things like the taxes on this place.”

“Right now, we’re leveraged up to our necks,” he said, quietly, glancing at her. “I shifted some money out of our savings. I know there’s a lot of volatility right now, but that’s when you find the best investment opportunities.”

“I thought you said we would talk about—”

“We don’t have tons of ready cash. To keep this house. It’s a liquidity issue.”

She watched him in silence, until he turned his back on her and faced the far shore.

Climbing the steps to the house, her vision sharpened on a strip of resinous tree bark, a crystalline rock partially covered in moss, the racoon prints covering a patch of sandy soil, a squirrel foraging beside an exposed tree root, and a hawk circling above a red pine. She struggled to retain each image as her mind compassed the fact that she had spent the past few months obsessing over the next twenty years, and they hadn’t even been able to get through a weekend; and the possibility that there was something about him that would never change, something solid, admittedly, but unbending, too, to the point of brittleness.

Near the house, she pulled the pregnancy test from her purse, tapped the test stick into her hand, and tucked the empty box beneath her wallet, taking only the plastic stick with her to the edge of the woods. They, or she, needed to know whether or not the time was right. She slipped the stick from its wrapper, pushed down her pants, and felt the cold air on the back of her thighs. She looked at the stumps of felled trees edging the neighbor’s property, and, as her urine pooled between her feet and mingled with the mud, felt like she was marking the ground. Crouching, she watched liquid leaching through the paper in the test window. Before a set of pink lines could darken the paper and force a decision, she gazed down at the lake and appraised her husband, still standing at the edge of the dock and staring into the distance, looking like a man about to take flight, or perhaps fall off a precipice and drown alone.

~ ~ ~

Alice Hatcher is the author of The Wonder That Was Ours (Dzanc, 2018), which appeared on the long list for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize, and a recipient of Reed Magazine’s Steinbeck Award for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Fourth Genre, and The Bellevue Literary Review. A former academic historian, Hatcher now teaches fiction workshops at the Tucson branch of The Writers Studio.

The Laundry of Missing Things

On the first Tuesday after Labor Day, Machine Seven at Hart’s Wash & Fold finished a cycle no one had started and presented Mabel Hart with a boy’s red sweater still warm from the dryer.

Mabel was mopping at the time. She had already counted the till, flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and told old Mr. Pritchard for the fourth evening in a row that no, he could not sleep in the plastic chair by the change machine merely because his cat disliked him. The laundromat was empty except for herself, a basket of abandoned socks, and the television bolted in the corner playing a weather report to no one. The storm map glowed green over the county like a bruise.

Machine Seven chimed.

Mabel looked up.

All the other machines along the wall sat dark and round-eyed. Seven alone had lit itself from within. It gave a neat, domestic hum, as if proud of its initiative. Then the dryer beneath it clicked open and dropped a small red sweater into the rolling tray.

Mabel stared.

The sweater was child-sized, hand-knit, with one cuff stretched longer than the other. A blue thread had been darned at the elbow with the sort of loving incompetence that comes from fixing something in a hurry because the child wants it now and childhood is notoriously unwilling to wait.

Mabel set down the mop. “No,” she told the machine.

Machine Seven did not respond. It had the serene insolence of all appliances after wrongdoing.

She lifted the sweater. It was clean in the deepest possible sense, not simply washed but restored. The wool smelled faintly of cedar and cold air. Tucked in the collar was a cloth tag, the kind mothers used to sew into school things before permanent markers took the poetry out of ownership.

PETER LOOMIS, it said in slanting blue embroidery. Mabel stood very still.

Peter Loomis had fallen through the ice on Bell Quarry Pond in January of 1978. He was eight. The town had spoken of little else for months, then not at all for years, which was how towns handled sorrow when they wanted to pretend it had grown manners.

Mabel folded the sweater once, because standing there holding it open felt rude, and placed it on the counter.

Then she checked the machine. No coins in the tray. No lint. No dampness. No explanation.

She locked up twenty minutes earlier than usual and took the sweater home in a paper grocery bag, though she told herself all the way down Mercer Street that she was only doing so because leaving the thing alone with the Tide and quarters felt improper.

Her house sat two blocks above the river, narrow and brick-faced, with blue shutters in need of paint and a porch swing no one had used since her husband died. Mabel lived there alone unless one counted the ficus in the front window, which she did not because the ficus had shown no moral character in fifteen years and would likely be dead if it had to rely on conversation.

She set the bag on the kitchen table and made tea. Then she sat opposite the sweater with her hands wrapped around the mug and regarded it like unwelcome testimony.

At half past ten she telephoned Ruth Loomis.

Ruth answered on the fourth ring, voice thick with sleep and age and immediate alarm. “Mabel?”

“It’s not an emergency.”

“That is what people say when they are about to describe one.”

Mabel considered denying it and decided the effort would be wasteful. “I have something of Peter’s.”

Silence traveled down the line so completely that Mabel checked once to be sure the call had not dropped.

Then Ruth said, “You’d better not be joking.”

“I am sixty-three years old. I no longer joke after nine.” Another silence, shorter this time, and then, “I’m coming over.”

Ruth arrived in her robe beneath a raincoat and did not bother with the niceties of front-door weather. Mabel let her in. They stood at the kitchen table, both women braced in that unconscious way people are when they suspect the world has shifted a half inch and are waiting to see what slides loose.

Mabel opened the bag.

Ruth made a sound Mabel had never heard from a human throat and hoped never to again. She picked up the sweater with both hands, very lightly, as if it might disintegrate back into years.

“I made this,” she whispered. “I was angry about that cuff. He kept tugging it with his teeth.” Her thumb found the blue darned elbow. “My God.”

Mabel had no use for God in ordinary circumstances and even less tonight. She said, “Machine Seven produced it.”

Ruth laughed once, the sharp bark of someone standing too near madness and finding it badly organized. “Produced it from where?”

“If I knew that, I would have led with it.”

Ruth sat. She did not ask permission. Neither of them had been the sort of women to ask permission in decades. She laid the sweater in her lap and stroked the wool with a reverence so quiet it embarrassed the room.

Mabel poured a second cup of tea.

. . .

By morning the story had spread across town with the speed and inaccuracy of all important news. By noon, half the people who came into Hart’s Wash & Fold had no laundry and every one of them had an opinion.

“It’s a sign,” said Mrs. Calder, who believed signs occurred in direct proportion to her availability to witness them.

 “It’s mold,” said Gary Voss from the hardware store, proving once again that men would diagnose mystery as fungus if given the slightest opportunity.

“It’s one of those promotional things,” said the pharmacist’s daughter. “Like immersive marketing.”

“For what?” Mabel asked. “Grief?”

The girl had the decency to look ashamed.

Mabel herself preferred not to speculate. Speculation was untidy. She cleaned lint traps, changed out the coin cartridges, and wrote NO, WE DO NOT DRY CLEAN PROM DRESSES on a fresh cardboard sign for the window because people, faced with the supernatural, somehow always became less competent about the ordinary.

At three seventeen that afternoon, Machine Four chimed. The entire laundromat went silent.

Mabel crossed the linoleum with the slow dignity of a woman approaching a snake she intends to outstare. The dryer door clicked open.

Inside lay a man’s white dress shirt, pressed into freshness by no visible hand. In the breast pocket was a folded church bulletin dated April 11, 1996.

The shirt belonged to Reverend Lucas Green, who had vanished in a flood while driving home from the county hospital.

 His widow, Delia, came by within the hour and took one look before covering her mouth with both hands.

“It’s his Sunday shirt,” she said. “He hated that collar. Said it strangled him into holiness.” By Thursday, Mabel had begun a ledger.

September 6. Red sweater, Peter Loomis. Returned to Ruth Loomis.

September 7. White dress shirt, Rev. Lucas Green. Returned to Delia Green.

September 7. One blue ribbon hair bow, likely Marie Bell. Claimed by sister, Tansy Bell.

The list continued.

A waitress’s apron missing since the diner fire. A corduroy cap from the train derailment of ’83. One tiny satin shoe no larger than a teacup, identified by no one but wept over by three different women. A wedding veil yellowed only at the edge where hands had once gripped it too tightly.

The garments came clean, mended when possible, and warm. Always warm. Mabel began staying late.

At first she told herself this was for record-keeping and security. Then she admitted, privately and without enjoying it, that curiosity had gotten hold of her by the collar. The machines never acted during the day. The laundromat had to be empty of everyone except Mabel, as if whatever power had taken up residence in the place preferred a small audience and trusted her not to make a spectacle.

This trust was misplaced. Mabel did not make spectacles because she disliked them, not because she lacked the talent.

On the sixth night, Machine Two began spinning at eleven twenty-three. No one had loaded it. Mabel sat in the molded plastic chair beneath the humming fluorescent lights and watched the dark round glass fill slowly with silver movement, like fish turning in deep water. When the cycle ended, the dryer opened and laid a yellow child’s raincoat into the tray with such tenderness it might have been handing over an heirloom.

Mabel did not move.

The raincoat was small. Glossy. Hooded. One brass snap missing at the throat. Her daughter Clara had worn it the week before the fever.

Mabel remained seated for perhaps a minute, perhaps ten. Time, when properly shocked, loosens its belt.

“No,” she said at last, but the word came out thin.

. . .

Clara had died at six, in 1974, during a winter so mean the windows iced inside. Pneumonia, they called it afterward in the tidy way medicine names a theft. Mabel remembered instead the basin of cooling water, the doctor’s red knuckles, the way the house had gone monstrously normal afterward. Someone still had to empty the ash bucket. Someone still had to answer the phone. Her husband Jonah had punched a hole through the pantry wall and later apologized to the plaster.

The raincoat still bore a faint scuff at the hem from when Clara dragged a stick all the way home through March mud because she had decided it was a wizard’s staff and could not be told otherwise.

Mabel stood.

She did not touch the coat. She turned off the laundromat lights one row at a time, locked the door, and walked home under the streetlamps with her jaw set so hard it made her ears ache.

The next morning she found the raincoat hanging from the lost-and-found hook behind the counter.

She had not brought it there.

Mabel closed the shop for twenty minutes and went into the supply closet, where she sat on an upside down bucket of powdered detergent and said three things about fate that, had Reverend Green still been living, might have caused him to reconsider certain ecumenical instincts.

When she emerged, she was composed enough to resume business.

. . .

That afternoon, Lou Alvarez came in with two mesh bags of laundry and the expression of a man attempting gentleness with tools better suited to carpentry. Lou owned the auto body shop around the corner and had been Mabel’s nearest thing to a friend for fourteen years, which was to say they insulted one another on holidays and exchanged soup during illness without speaking of it.

He looked at the yellow coat on the hook. Then he looked at Mabel. “You gonna keep pretending that’s not yours?”

“I’m considering suing the machine.”

“Seems ambitious.”

“It invaded my property with memory.”

Lou nodded. “Rude of it.”

He loaded his wash, added far too much soap as always, and leaned against the folding table with his broad arms crossed. “You know the whole town’s been showing up here not just for the clothes.”

“I am aware,” Mabel said. “They show up for my sparkling personality and to block the detergent aisle.”

“No.” Lou rubbed a hand over his mouth, thinking. “They come because it’s the only place anyone’s saying names out loud.”

That annoyed her because it landed too near the truth. Since the first sweater, the laundromat had become a place where people spoke of the lost with a frankness the church had never managed and the cemetery encouraged only seasonally. Folks who had once nodded past one another in the grocery store now stood by the dryers saying things like He whistled when he lied and She always burned the biscuits on purpose because she liked the black edges and I forgot his hands were so small then. The place smelled of detergent, coffee from the diner next door, and the sudden rough weather of remembering.

Mabel disliked group-feeling on principle. It tended to get on the floor. Still, she had added a second table for people to sit at.

That night she took Clara’s raincoat home.

She laid it on her bed and sat beside it in her slip like a woman preparing to negotiate with weather. Up close, the coat was impossible in its precision. There was the frayed lining where Clara had worried it with her thumbnail while listening. There was the spot inside the pocket where a peppermint had melted and then, somehow, been cleaned away without erasing its faint sugary ghost.

Mabel touched the empty place where the brass snap had once been.

“I kept your boots,” she said to the room, because grief sometimes requires an audience and will accept walls. “The red ones. Don’t ask me why those and not the coat. There was no system.”

A bus went past outside. Somewhere down the block a dog barked at nothing visible. The house, unlike the laundromat, had always kept itself stubbornly free of magic. It had relied instead on drafts and old grief and the ordinary hauntings.

Mabel bent and pressed her face into the coat. It smelled like rain.

Not mildew, not storage, not the chemical brightness of soap. Rain. The green mineral smell of wet pavement and playground dirt and children who have been outside longer than permitted.

She wept then, though she did not care for the phrase. Wept suggested a tragic posture, and Mabel did nothing tragically if she could help it. She cried with her nose clogged and her shoulder blades cramped and a hiccuping lack of dignity that would have horrified her mother.

Afterward she folded the raincoat and put it in the top dresser drawer instead of the cedar chest where the boots had slept for fifty-two years.

This, though small, was a beginning. The machines grew bolder.

Machine One returned a tuxedo shirt from a dance hall collapse no one under sixty remembered firsthand. Machine Nine produced a pair of kitchen gloves that belonged to Lou’s mother, who had walked out in 1962 and never been found, though Lou had always claimed not to wonder. When Mabel handed him the gloves, he looked at them a long time and said, very softly, “She hated doing dishes.”

Then he laughed, once and helplessly, and had to sit down. Mabel put a cup of coffee in front of him without comment.

News came from neighboring towns. People drove in asking whether the laundromat had produced anything from plane crashes, river drownings, the war, one regrettable bachelor party in Atlantic City. Mabel turned most of them away. Whatever governed the machines observed a strict and probably moral geography. It belonged to Bell County and refused to be franchised.

Some nights nothing came. Some nights three dryers opened in succession, presenting their warm impossible offerings like altar boys with very unusual training.

The strangest item arrived in October.

Machine Seven, the original offender, began at 12:04 a.m. Mabel waited by the counter, ledger open, pen ready, though her heart had developed the irritating habit of running ahead of events.

The drum spun. The machine hummed low and steady. When it stopped, the dryer door opened on a navy wool peacoat with a missing button and a tear at the cuff.

Jonah’s.

Mabel knew it before she saw the name stitched in the collar. She knew it from the slope of the shoulders, from the shiny patch near one pocket where his hand used to rest with a mechanic’s unconscious grace, from the faint pale smear on the sleeve left by house paint during the summer they decided, briefly and fatally, to brighten the kitchen together.

Jonah had not vanished. That was the trouble.

He had died slowly, of his heart, in the recliner by the front window while spring rain tapped at the sill and Mabel was in the kitchen arguing with a pie crust. Forty-one years married, and the last thing she had said before the silence stretched wrong was, “If you keep hovering, I’ll give you a job.”

He had laughed. Then later, much later, he had not. She crossed the floor and picked up the coat.

It was heavier than Clara’s raincoat, heavier than the other returned things, as if it carried not only cloth but seasons. In the lining pocket she found a penny, a screw, and half a cough drop wrapped in paper.

Mabel closed her eyes.

“All right,” she said to no one she could prove. “That’s enough.”

The fluorescent lights flickered.

“Not because I’m ungrateful,” she said, because one should never be rude to forces capable of operating washers without quarters. “But because if you keep hauling the dead through my dryer vents, this town will turn into one long crying fit and never recover.”

Machine Seven gave a small offended ping. Mabel pointed at it. “You know what I mean.”

The machines fell still.

The next day she made a decision that many in town later called brave and Mabel herself called inevitable, which is what practical people name courage when they do not care to wear it on purpose.

She cleared out the back room.

For years it had held broken chairs, old detergent cartons, a rusted steam press, and three banker’s boxes full of things Mabel had not been able to throw away after Jonah’s death. Receipts. His watchband. Clara’s drawing of a horse with six legs and a crown. The chipped green mug he insisted made coffee taste luckier. Mabel sorted the room with a hard, efficient tenderness.

Some things she kept.

Some she boxed for Ruth Loomis, Delia Green, Lou Alvarez, and the others who had begun, under cover of the magical laundry, to remember what they had spent decades avoiding.

Some she laid gently on the long folding table beneath the window and labeled with neat cards.

TAKE IF IT BELONGS TO YOU.

TAKE IF IT BELONGS TO YOUR SORROW.

TAKE IF YOU’RE FINALLY READY.

When people arrived, they stood very quietly before the table.

There was no rush. No grabbing. Even Mrs. Calder, who could make a competition out of hymn selection, behaved herself. Folks picked up objects as if reacquainting themselves with old dialects. They talked. They laughed in the wrong places. They cried in the cereal aisle at Price’s Market later and pretended it was allergies. The town, which had always carried its grief like contraband, began at last to unpack.

The laundromat changed.

Children were still dragged in with socks and soccer mud and the mild despair of Wednesday. Men still overstuffed dryers. Teenagers still forgot their sheets and had to return shamefaced. Ordinary life, thank heaven, remained gloriously ordinary. But woven through it now was a different traffic.

People lingered.

They pinned photographs on the bulletin board beside ads for piano lessons and used snow tires. They left notes in jacket pockets: If you’re there, I loved your laugh and I still have the skillet and once, from Lou in block capitals, YOU WERE A TERRIBLE MOTHER BUT I LEARNED TO COOK ANYWAY.

No note was ever returned. The machines were not a post office. They had their own jurisdiction.

. . .

Winter came. The miracle, if that was what it had been, thinned. Fewer items arrived. Then none for two weeks. Then one final thing on the first snow of December.

Mabel was closing up when Machine Seven rumbled awake one last time. She stood before it with her coat on and the keys in hand.

“What now?” she asked.

The drum turned slowly, almost lazily, like a thought finishing itself. The dryer door opened.

Inside lay a single white handkerchief, neatly folded. One corner bore Clara’s uneven childhood embroidery, done under Mabel’s supervision on a summer afternoon full of mosquitoes and impatience.

The stitched word was crooked.

MAMA

Mabel picked it up. The cloth was warm.

There was no audience for this, which she appreciated. She pressed the handkerchief once to her mouth, then tucked it into her pocket and turned off the lights.

Snow had begun to settle on Mercer Street in the soft undecided way snow has before it commits. The river at the end of the block moved black and slow beneath the bridge. Across from the laundromat, Lou was locking up the garage. He looked over.

“Well?” he called.

Mabel slipped her hands into her coat pockets, one of them closing around the square of warm linen.

“Well,” she said, “I suppose I’m going home.”

Lou studied her face, saw whatever was there, and merely nodded. “Need company?”

“Not tonight.”

He jerked his chin toward the dark laundromat windows. “You think it’s done?”

Mabel looked back.

Inside, the rows of round glass doors reflected the streetlamps in pale coins. Silent now. Harmless as moons.

“No,” she said after a moment. “I think it’s finished saying it the hard way.”

Lou seemed to accept this. People in Bell County had become unexpectedly flexible where explanations were concerned.

Mabel walked home through the new snow.

. . .

In the months that followed, Hart’s Wash & Fold remained precisely what it had always been and nothing like it. People brought laundry. People lost socks. Children ate contraband candy while waiting for their jerseys to dry. The vending machine still cheated everyone equally. But above the folding tables, Mabel hung a new sign in small black letters.

MISSING THINGS TEND TO TURN UP WHERE THERE IS HEAT.

No one knew whether she meant the dryers, the town, or the human chest. This pleased her.

. . .

By spring, the laundromat bulletin board had become a patchwork of notices, photographs, condolences, recipes, and invitations to supper. Ruth Loomis brought tulips in a jelly jar every Tuesday. Delia Green mended hems for free while waiting on her bedding. Lou pretended not to enjoy the fact that people had started dropping by the garage just to ask after his tomatoes.

As for Mabel, she took Clara’s yellow raincoat out of the drawer on the first rainy day in April and hung it by the door where she could see it. Jonah’s peacoat went on the hall tree. Not because the dead were returning. They were not. Not really. The machines had not given her people back. They had done something more inconvenient and, in the end, kinder.

They had returned texture.

The scuffed hem. The peppermint pocket. The missing button. The fact that sorrow, if kept too long in airtight boxes, begins to lose the shape of a life and harden into something smaller.

On quiet evenings, when the last dryer had stopped and the street outside shone with dusk, Mabel sometimes stood in the laundromat doorway and listened to the place settle around her. The machines ticked softly as they cooled. The change machine glowed. The television muttered to itself. Through the open window came the smell of river water and somebody’s onions frying two houses over.

Nothing supernatural moved.

And yet the room felt fuller than before, as if absence itself had been laundered, warmed, and handed back with its creases softened.

If anyone asked Mabel what had happened that autumn, she never said miracle. That word wore too much perfume. She would only shrug and say the town had been overfull of missing things, and some place or power or old mercy had finally gotten tired of the mess.

Then she would hand over a roll of quarters, nod toward the machines, and add, “Do not overload the dryers. They have opinions.”

~ ~ ~

Hridoy Kundu is a Bengali writer and undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies neuroscience and psychology. His poetry and fiction often draw on medicine, family, and memory. His work has been recognized by the North Carolina Poetry Society and other literary competitions.

Private Duties

At six in the morning, when Rita Harvey left the house, there was barely a powdering of snow on the sidewalks of Baltimore. But by the time she stepped off the bus and headed up the drive to the Calvert Park Retirement Community, the snow was beginning to accumulate.

Donna, the supervisor on the night shift, was standing inside when Rita came in. “I’m sure glad to see you,” she said.

Rita brushed the snow from her coat and stomped her feet on the mat. “Bad night?”

“Actually it was quiet.” Donna gave a tired smile. “But I’ll be surprised if Mrs. Hammond makes it through the day. She can’t hold on much longer.”

Rita had been doing private duty for Mrs. Alvera Hammond for five years. As a rule, she just came and went, minding her own business. But since Mrs. Hammond had begun to decline, the supervisors wanted to check in with her at change of shift so as to coordinate with the hospice nurse.

“The family doesn’t want us moving her to Health Care,” Donna said. “Comfort measures only. The son should be down from Philadelphia this morning.”

“Anybody up there with her now?” Rita asked.

“No. There was an agency nurse last night. She’s already left, because of the weather.” Donna glanced beyond the ferns in the glassed-in foyer. The snow was blowing almost horizontally across the parking lot. The groundskeeper was already at work with his shovel and bucket of salt.

“They’re calling for six inches on the radio,” Rita said.

 “Terrific. What a mess.”

“I hear ya.”

When Rita opened Mrs. Hammond’s door, she didn’t bother to call out hello. She stepped inside to the faint odor of the place—not unpleasant, just immediately recognizable as Mrs. Hammond’s own. It was like that, at Calvert Park. Each apartment with its distinctive smell.

The agency nurse had left a light on in the living room—the antique china lamp with the painting of a rosy-cheeked woman in a feathered hat, the one Mrs. Hammond called the lady lamp. It needed a new shade. Months ago Mrs. Hammond had said she’d send Rita to a certain shop in Roland Park where you could get a good silk shade like you couldn’t find in the department stores. But they’d never gotten around to it.

Rita hung her wet coat in the kitchen, switched off the lamp, and opened the draperies all the way. The prettiness of the snow piling up along the balcony railing and on the branches of the trees was almost cheering, even though it had been years since a snowy day meant anything to her other than cold feet, a long wait for the bus, and the steps and sidewalk to be shoveled when she finally got home.

She stood at the window a moment, watching the cars move slowly down the street. Two boys on the dining room staff came sliding and laughing across the parking lot, late for work but apparently unperturbed, because when it snowed in Baltimore, anybody who showed up was a hero. It was Thursday, but the cleaning people probably wouldn’t be in.

It wasn’t that she was afraid to go into Mrs. Hammond’s room and find her dead. Back when she worked in the nursing home, she had prepared plenty of bodies for the undertaker.

When the time came, she would close Mrs. Hammond’s dulled eyes. Then she would bathe the mottled limbs as methodically as she had for the others. At least she wouldn’t have to tie up the jaw or use morgue tape, like they did in the old days.

From the threshold of the bedroom, Rita took stock. Mrs. Hammond had been propped on her side in the center of the big four-poster bed. A shallow snore escaped from her slack mouth—so slow, it threatened to wind down and stop altogether. Her thin white hair was matted flat against her head. She was wearing one of her old nightgowns, plain cotton and faded—the agency person must have dug it out of the bottom of the drawer. The first order of the day would be to get Mrs. Hammond into something more presentable before the family arrived.

“Good morning, Mrs. H.” Rita put a hand on the old woman’s forehead, finding it warm. “We got our work cut out for us this morning. Company’s coming. Jack’s driving down for a visit.”

She gathered what was needed for a bed bath: basin, towels, soap, lotion, powder. She took Mrs. Hammond’s best silk nightgown from the drawer and draped it over the foot of the bed.

“How about we get a little light on the subject?” Rita said and opened the blinds to the bright light of snow.

She pictured Jack Hammond driving down from Philadelphia in all that bad weather, and wondered if his wife Dorsey would come with him. Jack was the one who wrote Rita’s checks and saw to it that she got a bonus at Christmas and on her birthday. He was devoted to his mother and called her several times a week from his law office in Philadelphia. Usually he’d chat a bit with Rita before his mother got on the phone. His wife Dorsey seldom called. Rita had the impression there was no love lost between Mrs. Hammond and her daughter-in-law.

When Rita folded back Mrs. Hammond’s covers, she found that the pads tucked between the legs were entirely dry. The sheets were fresh, still creased from the laundry. A bath was hardly necessary, but at least it would be good for the circulation, and at least that was the routine, a kind of comfort. She rolled Mrs. Hammond gently from side to side to get her out of the nightgown. A sound came from Mrs. Hammond’s mouth, not really a moan, but more like the air in her body had been jostled loose.

The hands were dusky blue. The feet too—death moving in from the far reaches of the poor old body, heading for the heart. And yet the trunk felt very warm.

Rita put in a page to the nursing supervisor. Alice Browning answered. “What’s up, Rita?”

“I think she has a fever.”

“OK. I’ll come up and check. We want to keep her comfortable.”

Mrs. Hammond had always been fond of Alice Browning. Sometimes the two of them would sit outside on the balcony while Alice took a quick smoke on the sly. Alice had been working at Calvert Park even longer than Rita had. Mrs. Hammond liked to ply her for a bit of gossip.

Rita went into the bathroom to get a start on things and turned on the hot water spigot.

But before the water was even coming out hot, Alice was there, poking her head into the bathroom. She was wearing the uniform jacket with the gigantic blue roses on it, the one Mrs. Hammond said gave her a headache. Mrs. Hammond would shake her head and say she’d like to know where in God’s good creation they grow roses that big, not to mention bright blue.

“Oh boy, this is a sad one,” Alice said. “I’m going to miss her.”

They went to Mrs. Hammond, Rita to one side, Alice to the other.

Alice gently curled Mrs. Hammond’s hair behind her ear and inserted the thermoscan. “You’re right,” she said after a moment. “A fever.”

They turned Mrs. Hammond so Alice could insert the suppository.

“You rest easy now, Mrs. Hammond,” Alice said, folding the sheet back carefully, so that the eyelet border lay straight across Mrs. Hammond’s breast.

Rita walked Alice to the door.

“So what’s your guess?” Alice asked. “You think she’ll make it through the shift?”

“Probably. She’s tough, you know.”

Alice laughed her smoker’s laugh. “Remember the time she read the riot act to that prissy little director of dining? What was his name?”

“Stanmore. I remember more than one time.”

“I bet she never read the riot act to you though, Rita. You could do no wrong in her book.”

“Oh, we’ve had our days. But it’s true we got along.”

“So what will you do now? You have anything lined up?”

“Not yet.”

“How about Mrs. Weston? I hear they’re looking.”

Rita rolled her eyes. “Thanks for the warning.”

. . .

Jack Hammond called to say they were on their way, but the roads were bad, and it might take awhile. “Is she all right?” he asked. “Is she in any pain?”

“She’s comfortable, Mr. Hammond,” Rita said. “She’s got a little fever, but the nurse just gave her something for that.”

He was calling from his cell phone, and the connection was bad. All Rita heard was “Wilmington.”

“You just be careful now,” Rita said loudly. “We’ll be fine.”

It was too quiet in the apartment. She turned on the radio. They were reciting the school closings—Baltimore City, Baltimore County, all the other counties.

“You hear that, Mrs. H?” she called from the bathroom as she was filling the basin. “Sounds like the whole city’s shutting down.”

She took her time with the bath, lathering up the washcloth, running it gently across the moles and age spots and bony protuberances she knew so well she could have drawn a map of them. She paid attention to the puffy feet, which had caused them much trouble over the past months, and to the base of the spine, where the bones were so close to surface, where the nurses had been fussing over a little pressure sore that had broken through. After the bath, she slathered on the lotion that smelled like lilies-of-the-valley, and powdered the mottled breasts.

She had to roll Mrs. Hammond side to side a couple times to get her into the nightgown. When she had her propped high against the pillows, she went to work on the hair, fluffing it with the silver-handled brush. Finally, she applied a bit of lipstick and blusher. “Tasteful, but not ghoulish,” Mrs. Hammond would have said herself, if she were awake and if Rita had brought her the hand mirror from the dresser. “Old women have to be careful with the make-up,” Mrs. Hammond always said.

“You look nice,” Rita said quietly, close to the old woman’s ear, because she believed what they said about the hearing being last to go.

She took her break then, made herself a cup of tea and drank it in the living room, which was bright with the reflected light of snow. When she returned to the bedroom, she found that Mrs. Hammond had died.

. . .

Alice Browning went down to the lobby to meet the Hammonds. Rita stayed in the apartment, of course.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hammond,” Rita said first thing, when he stepped through the door.

“Thank you, Rita,” Jack murmured. If he had been emotional at the news of his mother’s death, it must have been down in the lobby with Alice.

The wife Dorsey said nothing. She glanced to Rita as she shrugged off her coat. “Let me take your things,” Rita said.

Some months earlier, Mrs. Hammond had made her own funeral arrangements, so after Jack and Dorsey went into the bedroom and paid their respects, there wasn’t anything left to do.

Still, Dorsey had questions. “Now, how long will they give us, before we have to move things out?” she asked Alice, and before Alice could answer, she turned to Jack. “Your mother left instructions, didn’t she? About what she wanted to be wearing?”

Mrs. Hammond wished to be laid out in the pale-blue wool suit and the cream-colored blouse with the lace collar. Rita had already hung the entire outfit in a dry-cleaning bag in preparation for the undertaker, but she held her tongue.

It was a relief when the two young men from the funeral home arrived, melted snow dripping from their black overcoats. Alice skillfully led the Hammonds into the dining area so they wouldn’t have to see the body when it was wheeled out. Rita went into the bedroom with the two young men. They were quick and efficient. She stood to the side while they did what had to be done. She gave them the dry-cleaning bag and followed them and their cart out of the apartment, as far as the freight elevator, where a security guard was holding the door for them, so that Mrs. Hammond could make a discreet descent to the lower level and out.

When Rita got back to the apartment, the Hammonds were already putting on their coats, and Alice was giving them the final run-down.

“Once you leave today,” Alice said, “we’ll lock up. If you need to get back in, you’ll have to let us know, all right?” She turned to Rita. “If you have any personal items in the apartment, you’d best get them now.”

“Of course,” Rita said. All she could think of at the moment were the slippers for when her feet swelled up, the extra sweater, and a bottle of ibuprofen, all of which she kept in a plastic box in the second bedroom.

“Rita doesn’t have a key?” Dorsey asked.

“We’ll be changing the locks. That’s our policy. It’s a protection for everyone.”

“I see,” Dorsey said.

Jack stepped forward and extended his hand to Rita. “Thank you for all you’ve done. We’ll be in touch.”

. . .

Rita called to let her daughter Cassandra know that she’d made it home through the snow, and that Mrs. Hammond had died.

“Did the Hammonds give you a ride?” Cassandra asked.

“What? Oh. No, I took the bus like always.”

“I don’t understand those people. It’s practically a blizzard out there.”

“They had their minds on other things,” Rita said carefully. “They probably didn’t even realize I was taking the bus.”

“Give me a break. You’ve been working for them how long? Five years? They haven’t noticed you take the bus?”

There was no point in defending the Hammonds to Cassandra. In the next breath she’d be going on about all the spoiled residents of Calvert Park and their privileged children. Same old axe she’d been grinding for years.

“I haven’t even gotten out of my coat,” Rita said. “Let me call you back.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Cassandra said, softly then. “I’m sorry about Mrs. Hammond. I know you were fond of her.”

“I was. We got along fine.”

It was good to be home. Rita turned up the thermostat, put on her bathrobe and slippers, and heated a can of bean soup on the stove. She ate standing at the kitchen window, where she had a fine view of the alley filling with snow—the trashcans holding up at least six inches on their lids already, one back porch after another looking quiet and stunned, all the clutter tucked up in white.

It was her favorite place to stand in the house, her favorite view. When her husband George was alive, he liked to eat in the kitchen too. “What in the world are you looking at out there?” George would ask. She couldn’t really say, but sometimes she thought she’d like to try her hand at a poem, something about that view, about the rooflines, the angles and corners of the crowded block, and the windows like thoughtful eyes. It was to that very spot—at the window in front of the stove—that her mind would wander sometimes during the long day with Mrs. Hammond.

She would also like to try her hand with some lines about the dread she felt as the glass doors of Calvert Park slid open and she stepped into the lobby with its ever-changing bouquets from the florist. Everybody thought she had it easy, because Mrs. Hammond was an amusing old woman, pleasant for the most part, and what was there for Rita to do up there anyway? She didn’t have to clean or cook. She didn’t have to do laundry, except for a few delicates. All she had to do was get Mrs. Hammond to the bathroom, dress her up in beautiful clothes, and wheel her down to the dining room on time. But how to describe the weight of those sometimes fifty hours a week, the almost suffocating intimacy with someone else’s life?

She’d hardly finished the dishes when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Mr. Ogilvie, power of attorney for Mrs. Louise Weston of Calvert Park.

 “Mrs. Weston is declining a bit mentally,” Mr. Ogilvie said, and cleared his throat. “She requires attendants around the clock. And we’ve heard good things about your work, Mrs. Harvey.”

He didn’t mention what Rita already knew: that Mrs. Weston had been through half a dozen private duties already, and that Mrs. Weston had recently escaped from the building with nothing on but a summer bathrobe. She’d made it as far as the bank on the corner before security even knew she was gone. That private duty had been fired on the spot.

Rita agreed to take the job—day shift only—for Mrs. Louise Weston.

. . .

Mr. Hammond sent Rita a nice note, along with two checks: one for what was due her, and another, a full month’s salary, for a bonus.

“You needn’t be so grateful,” Cassandra said. “They owe you that and more. Besides, it’s nothing to them. It’s just another service, like catering or dry-cleaning. They spend a lot more than that on their ski trips to Aspen.”

“They go to Maine,” Rita said. “I don’t think they ski.”

“Maine. Whatever.”

. . .

Calvert Park’s memorial service for Mrs. Hammond was scheduled for two o’clock in the afternoon in the community room. Rita was scheduled with Mrs. Weston that day, but a replacement had been arranged so that she could attend.

It was a beautiful day. On her way to the community room Rita glanced out the lobby windows and saw that the sun was shining on the wet asphalt of the parking lot and on the little islands of melting snow. Jack and Dorsey Hammond were just arriving—Dorsey striding ahead in a long black cape, Jack adjusting his tie.

There was a good turnout for Mrs. Hammond in the community room. Rita took a seat halfway back, in the row with Alice Browning and a couple other people from the nursing department. The service began with a performance by a violinist from the Baltimore Symphony, an old friend of Mrs. Hammond. Rita glanced through the program. Everything had been done as Mrs. Hammond had dictated—the right hymns, the right passages from the Old Testament and New. Tears came to her eyes when they sang the first hymn, “When Morning Gilds the Skies.” Mrs. Hammond had said it was her favorite: “It’s pretty and it’s snappy. Perfect for a funeral.”

Just as Rita was extracting a tissue from her purse, she was startled to see Cassandra slip in the side door.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Rita whispered, as Cassandra settled in beside her.

“I’m here for you, Mom.”

After the service, everyone was invited to a reception in the Chesapeake Room. “I think I’ll skip that,” Cassandra said.

 “Oh, come on.” Rita took her by the hand. “We won’t stay long. They’ll have good stuff to eat. Crab balls and chicken salad, and those nice little Parker House rolls. That’s what Mrs. Hammond had on the list.”

“All right,” Cassandra said with a wry smile. “I’m good with the crab balls.”

In the Chesapeake Room, they had opened the draperies all the way. Almost all the snow had melted away from the grass in the courtyard and there were birds crowding the feeder. Mrs. Hammond had loved the courtyard. Whenever the weather was fair she would have Rita take her out there to inspect the roses and sit in the gazebo for a while.

Jack and Dorsey Hammond were standing near the buffet table. Rita took Cassandra over to them and made the introductions.

“How nice of you to come,” Dorsey said.

“Yes,” Jack said, stepping forward to shake Cassandra’s hand. “Thank you, Cassandra.”

“I wanted to be here with Mother,” Cassandra said. “She was very close to Mrs. Hammond.”

“Your mother did a wonderful job,” Jack said. “We were lucky to have her.” Dorsey gave a blank smile.

At the buffet table, Rita filled her plate with a taste of everything, even the tomato aspic, which was not a particular favorite of hers. She allowed herself three crab balls—they were small—and went back for two more, because there were plenty on hand and she knew Mrs. Hammond would have wanted her to.

“Isn’t this nice?” she asked Cassandra.

“Very nice. But where’s the Watergate salad?”

Rita laughed then. In their family, that was the tradition for the showers and the funerals and Easter, of course—Rita’s Watergate, light on the pineapple and heavy on the marshmallows.

. . .

A month after Mrs. Hammond’s death, on a day when Mrs. Weston was having her hair done in the beauty shop, Rita went to the employee lounge in the basement to eat her lunch. She’d brought a container of leftovers from home. Recently Mrs. Weston had complained that when Rita ate in the apartment, the smell of it got all the way back to the bedroom and made her sick to her stomach.

Rita had just put her lunch in the microwave when she saw the maintenance men pushing a dolly out in the corridor, and there was Mrs. Hammond’s old dressing table. She wondered what they’d done with the needlepoint bench, and hoped it hadn’t been separated. She wondered, too, what had become of the hand mirror, and the silver brush and comb set. Through the grapevine she’d heard the Hammonds hadn’t taken much of anything, and a lot of good pieces had been donated to the spring rummage sale.

That evening, Rita got a phone call at home from Dorsey Hammond. “So how are you, Rita?”

“I’m well, thanks.” She braced herself. “How about you and Mr. Hammond?”

“We’re all right. We finally got the apartment cleaned out, thank God. But Jack has been upset about something, and I promised him I’d call you.”

“He’s upset?” Rita sat down. She felt almost faint.

 “You’re not going to believe this, but then again maybe it won’t come as a surprise. We found a note pinned to Mrs. Hammond’s mink coat. You know the coat I mean?”

“I do,” Rita answered. Mrs. Hammond had refused to let them put that coat in storage, even though it was unlikely she’d ever wear it again.

“It seems she wanted Jack to give it to you.”

“Her mink coat?”

Dorsey laughed. “That’s right. She had her peculiar ways, didn’t she?”

Rita tried to picture it: when and how Mrs. Hammond had managed to write that note and get it into that zippered bag at the back of the closet. Who would have helped her do that, if not Rita herself? Surely the Hammonds were thinking along the same lines.

“I was just telling Mr. Fitzhugh about it yesterday,” Dorsey went on. “You know him?”

“Yes.” Mr. Fitzhugh was the vice-president of Calvert Park.

“Well, he said it was up to us—and to you, of course—what we want to do about this.”

“I couldn’t accept something like that, Mrs. Hammond,” Rita said quickly.

“That’s what I thought you’d say. And Mr. Fitzhugh was of the same opinion. He said you always act like a professional.”

“Thank you.”

“My feeling is we should go ahead and donate the coat to the charity auction, as we’d originally planned. Mrs. Hammond would certainly approve of that, don’t you think?” She sighed then, as though the whole affair were a great burden. “I know my mother-in-law was very fond of you, Rita. But near the end . . . I’m sure she meant well.”

Afterwards, Rita kept thinking about that note, which Mrs. Hammond probably wrote on the pale blue monogrammed paper she kept in the secretary. But how long ago? She could see that zippered bag hanging against the far wall of the closet, though she couldn’t recall a lot about the coat itself. Was it short or long, dark-colored or light? It had to have been at least two years since Mrs. Hammond had worn it.

The next day, on the phone with Cassandra, Rita made the mistake of mentioning Dorsey’s call.

“Jesus, Mom,” Cassandra cried. “Why didn’t you take it? It’s probably worth something. You could sell it.”

“I could never sell it. And besides, it was plain they didn’t want me to have it.”

“So why did Dorsey tell you about it then?”

“I don’t know, Cassandra,” Rita said.

“I’m sorry, Mom, but you know they felt guilty. Well maybe not her—but Mr. Hammond does. He knows his mother wanted you to have it.”

After Cassandra, Rita called Alice Browning for a second opinion.

“You did right,” Alice said. “I wouldn’t touch that coat with a ten-foot pole.” In the pause, Rita could hear the drag on the cigarette. “They’d run you out of Calvert Park, and you could forget about a good recommendation.”

“And what would I do with a mink anyway?” Rita said.

“Well you might have worn it,” Alice said. “I’m sure that’s what the old girl had in mind.”

. . .

On Saturday, a day off for Rita, it was a call from Jack Hammond.

“I’m driving through Baltimore in an hour or so,” he said. “I’d like to stop by and see you, if that would be all right. Will you be home?”

Rita was scrambling in her head for an excuse. She was still in her bathrobe. The dampness had gotten to her knees, and she’d decided to forget the housework and watch a movie, if she could find anything decent on TV.

“I know you’re probably busy,” he went on, something pleading about his voice. “I won’t take much of your time.”

“That would be fine, Mr. Hammond,” Rita said. “You know how to get here?”

“I know how to get there.”

She had to dress quickly, run the vacuum around the living room, pick up the newspapers.

She wished she had some of that incense Cassandra was always burning at her place, because last night she’d had fish for dinner.

She kept watch from the front window. The rain had let up, but the afternoon was dark and gloomy, the street rather quiet for a Saturday. Mr. Hammond pulled up in his little red car, got out, went around to the other side to get something out of the back. And then he was coming up the walk with a clothing bag draped over his arms—the one from Mrs. Hammond’s closet.

“I think you probably know what this is,” he said, stepping in sideways through the storm door, glancing about for a place to put the bag down. “Please don’t say no, Rita. Not until I’ve had my say.”

 “OK.” Rita took the bag—it was heavier than she expected—and flopped it over the back of the recliner. “Won’t you sit down? Would you like something to drink? Some tea?”

He was carefully wiping his feet on the mat. “No thanks. I can’t stay.” He smiled. “Look, Rita, I know Dorsey spoke to you, but I don’t think she told you about my mother’s note.”

“As a matter of fact she did,” Rita said, retuning the smile. “But I couldn’t accept a gift like that, Mr. Hammond.”

“I think you ought to read it for yourself.” He reached inside his overcoat, withdrew a folded sheet of pale blue paper, and handed it over.

Under the monogram, the spidery handwriting was surely Mrs. Hammond’s own. Jack Hammond, I want you to give this coat to Rita Harvey. It’s nobody’s business but hers and mine. She’ll refuse it, but tell her I said she’s a beautiful woman and ought to have something beautiful on her back when she goes out in the cold. If you don’t do this, I will haunt you from wherever I end up. Affectionately, your Mother.

The word beautiful had been underlined, both times. Rita laughed. “Can I keep this?”

“Of course. And you have to keep the coat too.”

“All right, Mr. Hammond,” Rita said. “If you think I should.”

“I think you should,” Jack said, and gave her a pressed smile.

After he was gone, Rita unzipped the bag, and slid her a hand down the length of the mahogany-colored fur. She pulled out a sleeve and held it up to her cheek. The smell of it—perfume, but also the smell of Mrs. Hammond’s apartment. She read the note one more time, then slipped it into the silky, deep pocket.

Later, while lighting the gas under the kettle, she glanced out the kitchen window: the different-colored roofs in a row going down the alley, the chimneys, the clouds moving fast across the sky above them. She was thinking about the day Mrs. Hammond died. She remembered standing at the bus stop, chilled to the bone, the snow already working its way into the tops of her boots. She remembered, too, how happy she was to see the headlights of the bus turning the corner—happy to be set free so early in the day, to be on her way home.

~ ~ ~

Madeleine Mysko is the author of two novels, Bringing Vincent Home and Stone Harbor Bound, and a poetry collection, Crucial Blue. She is the recipient of Individual Artist Awards in both poetry and fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council and has taught writing in the Baltimore-Washington area for many years, most recently at Goucher College. A writer who happens to be a registered nurse, she also served for years as coordinating editor for American Journal of Nursing.