[excerpt] Flawed
Excerpt From Flawed
Note: A long-fiction project being written over the years, which entails a number of short stories connecting to a larger plot. This is the first paragraph of that project.
Maggie May was obsessive-compulsive about her laundry. She didn’t know what obsessive-compulsive meant, but she knew that’s what the funny man in the suit told her when her children complained of her habits. They gave her pills, and made her sit down and talk every week, usually about nothing at all, which annoyed her because she couldn’t do her laundry in the little office so far away from where she lived talking about nothing. After all, there wasn’t a clothesline in his office, much to her growing annoyance. The funny man would ask her mundane questions about her childhood, ignoring anything related to clothes–questions like who her mother had been, her father, her children, and most especially about her first husband, who had so strangely disappeared thirty years ago… Maggie always answered everything accordingly, but she didn’t like it, because it was boring and there wasn’t any laundry to do in the office where the funny man worked. That was at home. She didn’t like leaving the house because the laundry was there, and it stayed there, and that’s where she belonged. With the laundry.
