Dryer #6 by Roxanne Doty

Abe Bingham CC




Dryer #6 
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Back again with one of those black, thirty-nine-gallon leaf bags from Ace Hardware full of his dirty laundry, a wall of dryers drone in the musty room, rain drizzles outside and the woman sits in a hard-plastic chair under a TV mounted on the wall, flipping through a magazine, the same woman who smiled at him a couple of weeks ago and said, “First, I need to know how damaged you are.” What do you say to a question like that? He had walked away without answering, though he liked the way her auburn hair fell along the side of her face. The washer eats his two quarters and the last of his powdered detergent, leaves him only four quarters for one cycle in dryer #6 the only one empty, which means his t-shirts and underwear and socks will still be damp when it finishes and he stuffs them back into the leaf bag, leaves the 24-hour Laundromania on Bloomington Street, walks back to his studio apartment and spreads them across the radiator to dry. He glances at the TV, its sound overwhelmed by the hum and whirr and swirl of the quarter-gouging dryers, an occasional ping from something hitting the metal sides, a zipper maybe or key left in a pocket, not that the bullshit on the screen is worth listening to, an interview with someone dressed in a dinosaur costume. He settles into a seat across from the sleeping guy with a baseball cap over his forehead and eyes, half a bottle of Dr. Pepper on the floor beside him. As he waits for the dryer cycle to finish, he feels in his pockets again for any quarters he might have missed, but nothing. The woman looks at him then back to her magazine. She’s young, but not real young. She’s probably lived through some shit, like everyone else in this depressing place where it always seems to be a cloudy day. He gets up and checks dryer #6, the drone louder as he stands in front of his spinning laundry and senses a presence to his left. The woman with the auburn hair. Her dryer has stopped. He feels an urge to tell her how damaged and broken he is or how he can no longer find the line that separates broken from unbroken or that the line wavers in front of him most of the time and he can’t tell one side from the other or how he wonders if the wavering line will follow him everywhere, forever. But, he doesn’t know how to say any of these things to the woman with the auburn hair who is unloading her dryer, putting clothes into a large pillowcase with lavender flowers on it. “I’m not damaged at all,” he says. She smiles.



Roxanne Doty lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her debut novel, Out Stealing Water, was published by Regal House Publishing, 2022. Her chapbook, Hours of the Desessrt was published by Kelsay Books in 2024. Her poetry collection, What Surrounds You will be published by Kelsay in 2026. She has published stories and poems in various journals including Third Wednesday, Anti-Heroin Chic, Amethyst Review, Cloudbank,Superstition Review, Cagibi, Espacio Fronterizo, Ocotillo Review, The Blue Guitar, Lascaux Review,San Pedro River Review.


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