The Transmuted (Chapter 6)

And she stared at the machine watching the clothes rise and crash over each other, the water cleansing them of all their uncleanness and stench. She stopped it momentarily and tried to climb in herself, to be cleaned and begin again. She stuck her head in and waited, for new life, for swift death, for anything but was unchanged, and as she lay, head first into a washing machine, she realized nothing was going to change.

“Well, someone has to do the laundry,” she said closing the machine.

I laid back in my desk chair staring back at the short story. I’d been working on it since arriving home and now after finishing the story and a long day of nothing, I was much too tired to revise. School always had a way of wearing me out whether, in the early days, I was tired after a long day’s work or, in the later times, when I was finished after a day of inanity.

I picked up my phone, laying by my computer on the desk, and found a few new notifications. Most were throwaways, emails, and news updates, but I could see a couple notifications from the various communication mediums that I had. I started off with checking Snapchat, the white, faceless ghost on a yellow backdrop welcoming once again. I’d received two snaps from two girls, Rachel and Mary. My heart raced for a second when I saw Mary’s name but slowed again when I remembered we were trying to keep a streak.

A streak, a feature specific to Snapchat that tracks the number of days of sustained contact between two snappers, was a simple way to keep in constant, if not minimal, contact with someone. Though I originally looked upon the idea of streak- I thought that the obligatory daily picture would make interactions brief and vacuous- it did have its advantages. With the streak, I could make sure that the avenue to a conversation with Mary could be opened every day, and even if it didn’t sprout into the long conversation I coveted, it would at least have the potential to do so. I opened her snap, a particularly beautiful smile spread across Mary’s face that was captioned, “streaks!” I noticed immediately that the picture was a mass snap and tried to think of a way to spark a discussion. As I thought I absentmindedly opened Rachel’s snap.

Rachel Cameron was a casual friend of mine, a friendship that was born out of having many classes together over the years and not totally despising each other. We liked each other's post but never commented, kept a streak but never kept a dialogue, greeted each other but never saying goodbye, the perfect distant friendship. Viewing the snap, one could tell she was an excellent picture-taker. Her blonde hair seemed to flow forever behind her back, her blue eyes were open wide and popping, and she wore a slight, knowing smile like she could observe you looking and enjoying the picture. Her picture was captioned similarly but was given spice by the wink emoji she placed at the end. I decided to reply to both with a casual picture of myself captioned with the general conversation starter, “what’s up?”

I switched off Snapchat to view a new message I’d gotten to find it was from Beatrix,

“Hey, you finished up the project?”

“Yeah, it’ll be ready for Friday,” I typed back.

I switched off of that and, with some suppressed intrigue, over to Tinder where I was said to have a new match. Her name was Violet and she was eighteen. I vaguely remembered swiping right on her and was glad to know I was in full control of my faculties when I decided. Her black hair lay in bangs falling gracefully over her eyebrows. Her skin was a rich caramel brown and her face was mostly normal and pretty. The only really noticeable feature on her face, in fact, was her nose which was slightly larger than it should’ve been, the bridge protruding just a fraction too far like an assembly worker had been distracted for a millisecond in crafting her face. It wasn’t necessarily a flaw and I saw it as an idiosyncrasy that separated her from others. I wanted to make the long nose my long nose.

I decided to deviate from my basic Tinder greeting and try to start the conversation with a unique question.

“So Chipotle or Freebirds?”

I then took the phone over with me to go lay down on my bed. The springs initially protested my arrival but quieted down after a moment. I closed my eyes and the idea of sleep suddenly seemed like a favorable one. My phone vibrated though and I picked it up and hastily unlocked it to find myself back in the Tinder conversation.

“Freebirds.”