I know this sounds crazy. Shut up. I get it. I’ve heard it all before: “what are you talking about?” “You’re insane.” “This is why you shouldn’t do molly before your brain finishes developing.” My friends don’t believe me. My parents don’t believe me. My therapist doesn’t believe me. And I don’t blame them. I didn’t believe me either, at first. Maybe I still don’t. There’s no moral here; this isn’t some cautionary tale about the importance of keeping clean. If it were, it’d be the sickest, most twisted way to teach someone to fold their stupid clothes.
I normally fold my laundry. I do. I’m not a slob! I hate walking into my bedroom and seeing clothes on the floor. I hate it, seriously! I don’t believe in it, don’t subscribe to it, and don’t condone it. The floor could be as clean as a freshly zamboni’d ice rink, but the second my clothes touch it they instantly get dirty – coated in lint, dust, and grime that latch onto my shirts and underwear like leeches.
But no one’s perfect. I’m not an idiot, ok? I’m a realist. I’m an adult. I slip up sometimes. A bit of depression here, a dash of anxiety there, and suddenly I don’t feel like folding that huge lump of clothes the exact second the dryer vomits them out. In those cases, I put the pile on my desk chair, and I wait a few days. I go to work, I run my errands, I wash my face, and, whatever – you get the gist. Eventually, I work up the courage to square up to that foul fabric beast and tear it apart, devoting twenty minutes to folding and putting away every single piece of clothing until my room is back to its normal, serene state. This cycle is a perfectly normal part of the monotonous yet inconsistent ebb and flow that is adulthood, and I’m not going to put myself on trial for occasionally succumbing to it.
Well, the last load of laundry I did was a particularly big one. Massive, actually. So big I thought the washing machine drum would break off its axle, spin out into my kitchen, and crash through a wall. After the clothes dried, I let them sit in the machine for a few days because taking them out proved too daunting a task (and yes, I opened the dryer door a bit so the clothes could air out. I’m not an idiot).
Eventually, I worked up the courage to extract the atrocious textile pile and take it to my room for folding. The pile was too big and too heavy to fit on my chair, so I threw it on the ground. I know, I know – I’m wincing at the thought. But I had too. It was enormous. At the time, folding felt like too herculean a task to do in that moment. So I waited a day. And another day. And another. I went to work, I ran my errands, I washed my face. By then, a week had gone by, and the pile was still there, on the floor at the foot of my bed. I went to bed that night promising myself I would deal with it in the morning.
Well, girls and boys, I didn’t deal with it. That day I did nothing; I did nothing but go to work, run my errands, and wash my face. And that evening I opened a beer, plopped my ass on the couch, and watched “New Girl.” I hate that show. I despise that show. But I watch reruns when my body is tired but my mind is awake; when I need something to dull my brain until it meets my body halfway on that miserable road to exhaustion.
When I crawled into bed that night, the laundry pile was still there, obviously. A sock was sticking out and touching the foot of my bed. It was funny, though, because I didn’t remember the pile physically touching my bed the night before. But who really remembers things like that, anyway? I figured the pile must have come apart a bit due to vibrations in the floor when I walked – gravity, or something. It was a bulbous, globular, uneven stack of clothes, for fuck’s sake. I know this sounds silly – it’s just that my first thought when I saw the pile had shifted slightly towards my bed wasn’t that it was actively moving towards me.
I have bad dreams often, but that night’s was especially bad. I dreamt I stepped into an enormous bowl of pancake batter and couldn’t get out. I sunk into the batter, slowly, tortuously, inch by inch, until the beige mass globbed onto my face. Just as it covered my eyes and stuck them shut, I suddenly woke up with a shooting pain in my foot. The pain was almost indescribable: a burning, almost acidic sensation. It subsided immediately the moment I woke up and drew my legs up to my chest, curling into the fetal position and rubbing my foot until my mind coaxed itself to sleep. When I woke up that morning, my thoughts returned to that brief pain in my foot. I almost couldn’t even remember if it had been a dream or not. Until I looked at my foot. The top half of my left sole was a patchy red color. I grabbed hold of the foot and held it up as close to my face as my inflexible body could manage. My brow furrowed in disgust. I had the same expression in my face as when I was sixteen and riddled with acne and would pop an innocuous-looking zit, only for it to erupt and bukkake my mirror with an egregious quantity of pus. My disgust, however, then morphed into an acute sense of unease. Because there, in the center of this rosy patch on my foot, were four small indentations. They were deep in my skin, as far as you can press down on flesh before drawing blood. Each mark was parallel to the other. Bite marks.
I looked at my foot, then at the foot of my bed (no pun intended), where the pile of laundry sat. Then back at my foot. Then back at the pile. Something about it was different now. I swear it, suddenly it looked a bit more ominous, more looming, more… big. Yes, it was bigger. It had taken on a new color, too. A pair of jeans, my rainbow socks, and a Grand Theft Auto 5 T-shirt that I hadn’t seen before on the top of the pile were now sticking out, looking right at me. It’s strange; you don’t expect a pile of clothes to activate your fight or flight response, but looking back on that moment now, even if my conscience didn’t register it at the time, I was afraid.
I got up, got dressed with whatever clothes remained in my closet away from the pile (not much), and shut my bedroom door. I went to work that day, I ran errands, I washed my face. I went home. I changed clothes. As I changed, I stared at the pile. Now there wasn’t just a single sock touching the foot of the bed – now many, many socks were pressed against it, reaching out like little white hands of cotton. In fact, the whole pile seemed to be pushing its weight against my bed. But, like I said earlier, this was not something I consciously decided to worry about in that moment. It’s a pile of laundry, for fuck’s sake. I walked into the living room and shut the door behind me. I decided then that that night I would finally dismantle the pile and fold each and every piece of clothing. But not right then. My buddy Sam was coming over any second to have a beer and watch “New Girl.”
He got to my place twenty minutes later than he was supposed to, and when I opened the door four little legs trotted in with him. “This is Clarence!” he said with that bizarrely prideful tone in his voice that new dog owners sometimes have. It’s the same tone new mothers have, but since, as far as I know, humans are not physically capable of giving birth to chihuahuas, the tone in this case is always completely unwarranted. But I digress – I was a little pissed, to say the least. Sam hadn’t asked if it was ok to bring Clarence. We were about five minutes into a random episode I had rouletted from season three when Clarence started yapping. I peeled my eyes off the screen and suddenly realized he wasn’t on the couch with us anymore. Indeed, he was standing right in front of my closed bedroom door, howling into the air and clawing at the wood. “Yo, Clare! Shut up!” Sam yelled as he paused the TV and sauntered over to Clarence. My first thought was Is “Clare” really a nickname for Clarence? My second thought was Oh my god. Do not let Clarence into that room.
“NO!” I blurted out.
“Huh?” Sam grunted as he turned to look at me with that big stupid face of his. Clarence kept barking.
“You… you can’t go in there,” I stammered. “It’s messy.” I straightened myself up.
Sam scoffed. “You got dead bodies in there or something?” He looked at Clarence, who refused to let up. “Something’s bothering him.”
“I can see that, but –“
Sam laughed, put his hand on the knob and started to turn.
“NO!” I screamed again. Clarence stopped barking that time. Sam took his hand off the knob.
“I told you. Don’t go in my room,” I chided.
“Dude. You… you don’t actually have dead bodies in there, do you?” Sam asked as his smile gradually disappeared.
I sighed. “Jesus Christ. Of course not! It… it’s just messy. Super messy. Like, so messy. It’s embarrassed.”
“OK. But now I feel like, as your friend, I have a responsibility to check. Just to make sure…”
“OK, well, I told you, you can’t go into my room.”
“… just to make sure you don’t have any dead bodies in there.”
“I DON’T HAVE ANY DEAD FUCKING BODIES IN MY ROOM!” My face went purple with rage.
“Well now you’re reacting as if you have a dead body in your room.” I sighed and rubbed my forehead. He had a point. “Ok. You can look inside… just… can you pick Clarence up first?”
Sam looked at me weirdly, but then quickly accepted this one condition and picked the little hairy sausage up. He grabbed the knob and turned. I held my breath as he looked inside.
“Oh my god. Dude. What the shit?”
“What? What?” I raced to the door and peered inside. The room was more or less the same as it had been that morning. Well, except for the laundry pile had…
“You should really fold your laundry, dude.”
… doubled in size. It was massive, over half the height of the room now, spilling across my bed. I started to shake. How was this happening? What was happening? There were more clothes in the pile now than I had ever owned in my entire life. And, I suddenly realized, I was no longer able to recognize the clothes themselves. While before I could clearly identify individual pieces within the pile – my red plaid boxers, my cargo shorts, a lone Nike sock – the mass now took on an abstract and mind-boggling shape. It was as if the clothes had stretched, twisted, even fused themselves together. Clashing colors bled into each other like watercolors. Disparate textures met at messy seams like some sort of scratchy, monstrous quilt.
Sam, clearly not understanding the apparent danger of this… this thing in my room, took a step forward.
“NO!” I blurted out. I said that a lot that night. And I would say it again soon.
“What is going on with you, man?” A condescending smile curled over that idiot’s lips. I couldn’t even begin to tell him. It was all too ridiculous. And yet, I had never been so terrified.
“Do you wanna go on a walk? Let’s go on a walk.”
“Huh?” Sam said with that stupid, stupid face of his cocked at such a severe angle it looked like his neck would snap in half.
My eyes turned to Clarence, who was still in Sam’s clutches and staring at the pile with wide, terrified eyes. “He hasn’t peed in a while. Let’s take him outside! Let’s take him for a walk!” I pleaded.
Sam looked at Clarence, who didn’t even register his dear owner’s gaze. His eyes were locked on the pile. He was trembling.
“Eh. He’s fine! You really should fold your laundry, though. I’ll help.” He walked towards the pile.
“NO!”
“OK, can you calm the actual fuck down, dude?” He turned to me again. Clarence squirmed in his arms. He whimpered and gnawed at the air, his little black eyes as if pleading, “let me down. Let me go.”
“What the fuck, Clare?” Clarence managed to wiggle his way out of Sam’s grasp and hit the floor like a billiard ball. Immediately he twisted himself onto his feet and scurried out of the room.
“Maybe he does have to pee,” Sam wondered aloud. I sighed with relief.
“Yes! Let’s go!”
“But first we gotta deal with this.” He turned back to the pile.
“Later, Sam. Please.”
“Nah, bro. This is insane. It’s one thing to put off chores for a couple days, but this… this is mental illness,” He crouched down, right next to the pile, and reached out. “I can’t let you live like this – ”
Then there was movement. A flash of color. A sudden jerk. A lunge. Of polyester and cotton and wool and linen. A brief yelp – “oh!”– managed to escape Sam’s lips just before the pile swallowed him whole.
I stood there like an idiot, frozen in terror as the pile contorted and undulated with Sam inside, re-arranging his big body like a snake swallowing a deer. The most vile and disturbing sounds I’ve ever heard accompanied Sam’s muted screams from inside: tearing, crunching, dissolving, guzzling. Sam let out one final blood-curdling scream before a nauseating POP rang out and everything went quiet. The pile was still now. A putrid smell filled the air, like the smell of raw chicken left out to rot on a hot concrete patio. Death.
Then, right before my eyes, the pile began to grow, metastasizing with new lumps of fabric sprouting in all directions. The smell got thicker and heavier with each inch the pile grew. It wasn’t until it reached the ceiling that I was able to rouse myself from my shock and I turned and ran out of the room. I grabbed Clarence, who had been scratching pathetically at my front door in a desperate bid to escape, and fled my apartment. I ran down the street. I ran down the block. I just ran. I ran for hours, in no particular direction, with Clarence in my arms.
It’s been two weeks. I’m writing this now from a motel room. I don’t know what motel it is. I ran into the first one I came across and haven’t left since. Clarence is fast asleep on the bed. He’s ugly and annoying, but I’ve found myself yelling “Clare!” when I want to get his attention. I haven’t been back to my apartment since that day. I’m never going back. I don’t want to know what’s in there, how much bigger it’s become.
I’m still wearing the same clothes from that day. My shirt and pants are heavy with sweat. I smell like shit. But it’s fine because I’m not changing my clothes. I’m not cleaning my clothes, either. Maybe I will, one day. Not for a long time, though. And if I do ever get around to it, I swear to God – I’m folding them immediately.