I keep thinking about their laundry, the dirty clothes they left behind
in laundry baskets, on the floors of their bedrooms, piled in bathrooms.
They left home ten-year-olds acting like ten-year-olds who wait until
later to pick up after themselves. They left home moms, who were also
teachers, leaving laundry for the weekend. I have a ten-year-old. I am
a teacher too. Nothing in life has prepared me to witness an 18-year-
old boy wielding an assault weapon at an elementary school and firing
at the faces of children (not even as a story on the news). I don’t know
how this ends. This story has 21 endings. This story keeps ending over
and over. It doesn’t have an end. It is a story that keeps repeating. We
keep repeating this story. This story keeps repeating. It keeps repeating.
You can count on it happening again. You can count on more endings.
They will be abrupt. They will be heavy. They will leave you searching
for a way to finish the laundry, because there will always be the laundry.
Imagine dumping all of those thoughts and prayers into the washer, all
the platitudes from politicians into the spin cycle, roaring to get clean.
And somewhere, a mom collects the dirty clothes from her dead son’s
room and a husband cradles his late wife’s worn pajamas. Somewhere
a grandmother does a load of wash because someone has to, and a father
buries his face in the dried sweat of his gun-downed daughter’s clothes
from the day before, when everything was different. When it was almost
the start of summer vacation and laundry was an ordinary thing. I need to
believe that laundry still matters. But, someone who should still be alive
wore those clothes and what the shooter didn’t take, the laundry will:
a wife’s perfume, the boy-like smell of someone treasured, the trace of
a daughter’s favorite shampoo. You can inter your face in the fabric until
they fade entirely. Or, you can wash the clothes and fold them reverently.
The last tinge of someone who lived scrubbed clean, washed out, erased.
–
Elizabeth Taryn Mason is an associate professor in English at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, OH, where she teaches everything from developmental writing to creative writing to upper-division literature. She is also the faculty advisor for Lions-on-Line, the Mount’s student-operated literary magazine. When she isn’t in the classroom teaching or in her office grading papers and holding office hours, she can be found with her nose in a book, a pen in her hand, cheering at a baseball game, or, more than likely, doing the laundry.