Short story · 3 min read · Set in Nettle Lane ·
The Laundry of Tomorrow's Weather
The wash house at the head of Nettle Lane presses tomorrow's weather into the shirts on the rail, and the sky holds the crease unless the town instructs it otherwise.
The wash house at the head of Nettle Lane does the linen for the lane's forty houses, and the shirts come back creased from the day after. Not pressed by accident, not streaked by the mangle: creased deliberately, the iron laid on with intent, and the intent is tomorrow's. A wet crease riding the shoulders means rain before the week is old. A fold tight across the chest and low under the arm means a man has huddled from wind — huddled, note, as he has not huddled yet. A bloom of fine crimps low on the back is cotton showing a warm day has been sweated through, and the warm day is due on Thursday.
The lane learned to read them years ago and has stopped calling it anything, which is the highest courtesy this city pays a working rule. Monday the shirts go in. Thursday they come back, cooled and set, and the creases are read off them at night like the shipping lists. Friday the weather keeps to the crease. The rain rides the collar it was folded for. The wind lies down along the backs that were pressed flat. Farmers up from the levels leave a shirt on the counter and hang a price on knowing, which is a sentence I set down as I heard it.
There is a ledger beside the till for instructed days. Any house in the lane may buy its weather off: a market Tuesday wanted plain, a wedding, a court morning, an inquest. The application goes in by the Tuesday before, a line in the ledger in the payer's own hand, naming the day and the pressing required, and the day comes flat. Truly flat — smooth, without weather to speak of. The launderer is Mr. Horace Pell, third of that name at the mangle, and he will not instruct a day for himself. He presses what the week brings and files the crease, and when I asked him once what would happen if the shirts stopped coming, he said: then the sky must mind itself. He said it without looking up. He has never had to let it happen, he said, in his father's time or his grandfather's either, and he does not expect to begin with mine.
I tried him at it, in a small way, the autumn I moved into the lane. I kept my shirts home one week, on principle, hung in my own kitchen, and the week did not settle. Not drenched, not bright: all week the sky sat on the levels like a lid that has been taken off its pan and cannot agree where it goes. Could have been autumn. On the Friday I carried my washing to Pell like a man paying back rent, and he weighed the bundle without comment, and by Monday the creases were back in the trade and the week had found its shape.
One more entry, and it is the one I find hardest to file. The last shirt on the rail last Friday was pressed for no name in the book: collar size eighteen, no ticket, no house number in the docket column, creased in a run the crease book's index has no entry for — a long hard fold from either shoulder to the left hip, unlike any fold a body makes in weather I have stood out in. Pell hung it on the far hook, facing the door, and priced nothing against it, and when I asked him whose day it was keeping he said only: not one the index keeps. Then he balanced the till, because it was Friday and the till was owing.
So the lane walks past and reads the shirt and asks it what is folded into it, and the shirt keeps hold of a day the sky has not been told the name of yet, and nobody on Nettle Lane has pressed it flat. And I keep wondering, since the index has no word for that crease and Pell would not name it: what is coming here that the weather will need instructing about, and who is the eighteenth collar for.