Tracking, Pursuit

Yesterday I returned to the laundromat, entered the dryer, crawled through the cave, and willingly let the hooks snag my cheeks and drag me up.

Pulled upward, I heard the cars rolling through the streets -- again like distant birds and squirrels.

I never seemed to get closer to the sounds of the town, yet they also never seemed any more distant, no matter how far I let the hooks drag me. Certainly, we had eclipsed the distance I had traveled down from the laundromat -- the hook was taking me somewhere beyond laundry, beyond the dryer.

I soon sensed something else around me in the darkness, a brush of something here and there, a grunt or warmth beneath and above me. At first I couldn't be sure I wasn't just pulling sense from the random humming and static, but the grunts and brushings and warmths escalated to almost a chorus. A lone beam of light, shone far above me, and when I passed through it, illuminated all around me were the writhing bodies of fat, naked men -- lathered in an oil or mucous and struggling to breathe, their cheeks taught and stretched along the hook and against their own weight.

The school of us slid upward, pulled by the strings, as if it would never end. For hours it seemed we rose, the ground beneath us all but a memory. I lived many lives there, thinking and rethinking old mistakes, but my thoughts were halted by the embankment.

It came into sight almost suddenly and soon we were over it, dragged like rags around the corner. As I slid across the dirt, suddenly feeling my heft in a new way, feeling it pressed against the ground, I followed the cord to its source: a horse. It heaved and whinnied, sucking the nylon string into its throat like angel hair pasta, its teeth and gums gnashing and splashing about.

All around me, the fat men were dragged as well, scaly and web-footed -- and as I saw one and then another enter a horse's mouth, skinned by the molars and swallowed, nothing left behind but a pink hide -- I quickly slid the hook from my mouth and rolled off behind my horse. I watched as its cord spewed back out and down over the cliff, back down into the cave, waiting just inside the dryer. And soon, the men were falling from the anuses of the beasts, birthed like oranges through a wet keyhole or nails through wood.

I scuttled away as some began to look around, gaining vision. I searched for somewhere to hide, but found only open asphalt in all directions. Scouring the ground, though, I found a grate and tossed myself down into it. I slid for only a few seconds and found myself in another cave, dewy and wet.

Following its corridors, I came to a line of holes, each spinning and full of clothes.

Dryers.

Yet, they were full. I peered through the pants and shirts, out through the glass, and on toward the people. They mingled and read newspapers, sat drinking sodas and tea. The smell of hot Cotton surrounded me as I watched them waiting, washing, drying.

I fell asleep there on the other side of the machines. When I woke, it was quiet, nighttime. I emerged from the closest dryer, let myself out, careful to re-lock the door, but found myself not where I remembered. Rather, it was a whole other town, snow on the ground.

I looked back at the locked laundromat -- I wasn't getting back in there tonight. Then I looked upward, but there were no hooks to attach to, no strings to pull me up and out.

I found a place to sit, and then I sat.