Molly Gaudry

The Story Cleaner

She lived on a planet without a sun. Flowers didn’t bloom, only litter and broken glass. One day on her way to work she followed a hissing sound until she tripped on a small red rock. She put it in her pocket to keep her purple rocks company. Her purple rocks used to be just one lonely rock, until she broke it into pieces so it wouldn’t be so sad. She imagined she had a fez of tiny sleeping armadillos in her pocket instead of rocks. At work, people spilled stories all over the place. Her job was to clean them. All day, she went from floor to floor sweeping up stories like stray hairs on bathroom tiles. Once, the stories had been shiny pages. Now, after being crumpled in the factory manager’s fist, they lay curled in tight balls. Yesterday, when the story cleaner came home, her mother said, “You stink.” Her mother was watching TV and drinking a drink with feathers on the rim of the glass. She kept spitting feathers off her glossed lips. The story cleaner put her hand in her pocket and tickled her rockbellies, which felt like boiled eggs. Before bed, she unballed stolen story pages and stacked them into squares hidden between her mattress and box spring. She got under the covers and dreamed of dancing shoes made of sunlight. In the morning, her life still wasn’t a fable, and she was no bed-chambered heroine. She drank myrtle tea. She imagined what it would taste like if she had sugar for her tea and grits. Every morning, always dark, she went to work.

Today, the factory was on fire. Apparently, the fire started at the chassis of an ice cream truck parked out front, and a stripe of flame shot up the side of the building and took out the entire top floor, where all the love stories turned to black crepe. The factory manager was sitting on the curb by the ice cream truck, roasting shrimp on a stick over the embers. She waved the story cleaner over with a finger. “Get ready for the riots,” she said, her watery eyes shimmering. Then she sent everyone home indefinitely. 

The story cleaner’s mother was standing in front of the TV, turning the channel dial. She turned and said, “What happened?”

The story cleaner said, “No soaps?” 

Her mother whacked the side of the TV and said, “Damn you.”

Molly Gaudry is the author of Desire: A Haunting and We Take Me Apart, which was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Osterweil. Find her online at mollygaudry.com.