We all grow up with a ghost story, right? Or at least some sort of local urban legend?
********************************************************
We stood gathered around the graffiti-ridden wall, chattering in hushed tones.
"Look!" Chris said as he nudged the plywood forward.
If I could go back in time, I would stop him right there. I would shake him violently and warn him that he should just stop. Immediately. His thrill-seeking was a few years away from changing his life forever, but maybe that was a moment that could been an opportunity to warn him. He was three years from making the decision to steal a lighter out of his mom's purse. He was three years from meeting Danielle's brother just a few feet from where we were standing that day. He was three years from deciding to play with fire, a decision which led to both boys being burned within inches of their lives. They grew to be adults, but barely.
Hindsight is 20/20, though. I was only in first grade, so I really didn't understand what could happen when kids go looking for trouble.
We were definitely looking for trouble that day. We stood huddled at the doorway to the laundromat , right at the center of the trailer park. The laundromat had long ago been boarded up and abandoned. We had never dared to so much as stand close to it because we had heard the stories. We repeated the stories as we played on the swings and slides and merry-go-round adjacent to the laundromat, but we never dared venture into its shadows.
Except that Chris HAD gone into its shadows. Apparently he had been working at that plywood for a while. He had managed to push it loose enough that it no longer served its purpose. The window on the door had been busted out years prior, but that plywood was there to keep the building closed off from the world and to prevent anyone from reaching in and unlocking the door.
Chris reached through the gap between the plywood and the door and unlocked it.
We all shrieked with fear.
But we didn't run away. Instead, we waited, our faces crumpled up in preparation for what we were sure was to come. We were certain something really bad was going to happen when that door swung open, but if we had our eyes closed, maybe it wouldn't be real.
Once the door had slowly squeaked open, I dared to sneak a peak. The only light in the room came from the ajar door and a few holes in the roof that were threatening to join the stale air inside the abandoned laundromat with the heavens. Even so, everything was unnaturally black. Dirty. Filthy, even. Streaks of . . . something . . . covered the walls and the few remaining washers and dryers.
I imagined the streaks were dried blood.
They had to be blood. After all, the laundromat had closed because a woman had gotten her long blond hair stuck in a spinning dryer and died. That would involve blood spraying everywhere, right? Maybe her hair was ripped from her scalp as she screamed, and blood shot all over the walls as the other patrons tried in vain to stop the dryer and save her? But then her neck broke and it was all over.
Or at least that was the story we had concocted to explain away the mystery of the abandoned laundromat.
********************************************************
Alexis is about a year younger than I was when we stood in that doorway and whispered the (not true, as far as I can tell) story of the woman and the laundromat. It makes me wonder what ghost stories she and her friends will be telling entirely too soon.
