Laundry Day
Fiction by Emma Russell-Trione
Emma by Mio Reynolds (2023)
Maeve reached the top of the stairs, laundry basket bumping clumsily against her knees with each step, to find the door of her apartment had been locked behind her.
“Bernard,” she shouted, shifting the laundry basket to one hip so she could rattle the doorknob.
“Bernard, this isn’t funny. Open the door right now.” There was no answer, but of course, Maeve hadn’t expected one. It was the third time in a month he’d pulled this stunt. She should really start bringing her keys to the laundry room with her.
“Bernard,” Maeve begged, leaning forward so her forehead and the lip of the laundry basket were resting against the door. She was the kind of tired that made her body feel like a weight dangling from a string. This load of laundry was a desperate exertion of her depleted energy. She had no clean underwear left, and she was going to have to do a second load for her sheets. And her doctor was supposed to call her sometime this afternoon.
The door swung open, sending Maeve and the laundry basket careening into the hallway. Clothes spilled across the dirty carpet. She stumbled and caught herself on the handle of the still-swaying door.
“Fuck you,” she announced to the empty hallway as she knelt and began to pick up her laundry. “I won’t let you stay here anymore if you pull these kinds of stunts.”
No response from Bernard— this time because the threat was too stupid to warrant one. They both knew Maeve couldn’t get rid of Bernard if she tried.
Maeve had tried when she’d first moved in. She should have known something was up when she was able to find a one-bedroom apartment for only $800 a month. She left jars of salt in all the corners, burned sage and incense. She was tempted to call up Christina, who was semi-witchy and once said she’d love to conduct a séance and tell her to come over and speak to the ghost. It was Christina’s fault Maeve was in this apartment, and not in the cozy, not-haunted bedroom she’d lived in for the past three years.
The mirror on the wall rattled.
“Okay, so it wasn’t as simple as that.” Maeve set the mostly full laundry basket in her lap. “But she admitted she wanted to be with someone more fun. That having me as her girlfriend was becoming ‘restrictive.’” The air shifted— a shrug from Bernard.
“You want to talk about restrictive? She should try living in my body for a day.”
Maeve could sense Bernard’s disapproval. She sighed. “Fine, you’re right. Sorry for complaining. Having this body is better than not having one at all.”
The last pair of socks, which Maeve didn’t have the will to reach for, folded themselves up and floated gently across the hallway until they were resting atop the pile of laundry. Bernard forgave her, so she forgave him for locking the door. It was impossible to stay mad at him for long, anyway.
***
When Maeve accepted that she couldn’t get rid of the ghost, it began to grow on her. She decided it was male because he was as insistently obnoxious as every man she’d ever met. She decided to name him Bernard because it felt right. And when she spoke the name aloud for the first time, asking him to stop rattling the curtain rings in the living room, the noise stopped. Nobody else knew about Bernard. Christina and Maeve had been friends before they’d started dating, and the friends that were still around had chosen Christina’s side after the breakup. It’s not like Maeve had the energy, or the money, to go bouncing from yoga studio to art class to volunteer event making new ones.
She’d tried to tell her mother about Bernard, once. They were on the phone, talking about how Maeve’s mother’s garden was doing. It was July and the hydrangeas were blooming.
“There’s this spirit in my new apartment,” Maeve said. Spirit was open to interpretation; it didn’t have the worrying-horrific associations that ghost did.
“What, like good vibes?” her mother responded, and Maeve gave up. She was good at that. It seemed to be all she was good at, these days.
“You’re burnt out,” Maeve’s doctor said. They were on the phone. Maeve was lying down, feet resting on the arm of the couch. Bernard was hovering in the mobile above her, spinning it and mesmerizing Maeve until she began to feel sick and ripped her gaze away. It was because of Bernard’s spinning mobile that Maeve didn’t register what the doctor said and had to ask her to repeat it.
“You’re burnt out.”
“Wait, what? I’m not dying?” The words crawled out of her mouth of their own accord. Maeve had told Christina (and Bernard, after Christina kicked her out) that she didn’t really believe she was dying. She said it to be dramatic. But the fear had clearly rooted itself in her deeply enough to cause the tears now rolling down her cheeks.
Daily headaches. Gastrointestinal problems. A progressively debilitating exhaustion that no amount of coffee or sleep could make go away. Mood swings that left Maeve yelling terrible things at Christina one minute and sobbing in the bathroom the next. She hadn’t been able to focus on anything in her final semester, procrastinating until the day an assignment was due. She got overwhelmed so easily that being asked to do the dishes could reduce her to tears. She stopped going out in the evenings and lay curled up in her bed, scrolling on Instagram because picking up a book was too much work. She was supposed to be a writer, and had applied to master’s programs in the fall semester for creative writing, but now she hadn’t written a word in six months. She’d gotten into U Vic, her top choice, but the thought of packing up, moving across the country, and being a student again was so overwhelming that Maeve had cried for a week before Christina forced her to fill out an application for deferral. That was the day when Christina said, “You need to call your doctor. And you need to move out.”
Maeve’s doctor gave her the phone number of a therapist. She told her to exercise every day, get enough sleep, be social again. “It’s good you’re still working,” she said. The only thing Maeve had been able to hang onto from her uni days was her part-time job at the bookstore downtown—a job most of the English department had applied for. That was what Maeve had done until this year: gotten what other people wanted. Been good at things—the best, often. Worked too hard at everything. “That’s probably why you’re burnt out,” the doctor said when all of this spilled out of Maeve, inappropriately, since the appointment was only supposed to be fifteen minutes, but Maeve’s doctor let her talk and cry for forty-five before she told her to call that therapist as soon as she possibly could.
After hanging up the phone, Maeve fell asleep on the couch. When she woke, it was dusk and her phone timer was going off—it was time to get her sheets out of the dryer.
Maeve washed her face, then stumbled down the stairs to the laundry room. It was only when she was struggling back up the stairs with the sheets that she remembered her keys. Sure enough, when she reached her door, Bernard had locked it.
Maeve didn’t bother banging and yelling this time. She sat in front of the door with the laundry basket in her lap and leaned back until her head rested against the door, then spoke up at the doorknob.
“You win. The place is yours.” Both she and Bernard knew this was a lie. Maeve had nowhere else to go.
After what could have been minutes, or hours—Maeve had zoned out—the door next to hers opened. A guy who was clearly on his way out (he was wearing a mesh T-shirt over neon-green pants and very beat-up Doc Martens (Maeve felt a pang of nostalgia for all the queer bar nights she’d gone to with Christina and their friends) stepped out. He did a double take when he saw Maeve, stumbling backwards into the doorway.
“Shit. You scared me.”
“Sorry,” Maeve said, then stated the obvious: “I’m locked out.”
“Oh. Crap. Have you called the landlord?”
“I don’t have my phone.” Not that calling the landlord had occurred to Maeve until this moment. She’d been prepared to sit here until Bernard took it upon himself to open the door.
“Here. You can use mine.” The guy got his phone—plain, chunky black case—out of his back pocket and gave it to her, open to the landlord’s contact information. It was strange, Maeve thought as she took it, that she’d never seen him before. Yes, she’d only lived here a month, and yes, she was practically a hermit, but the guy lived next door.
Maeve was about to dial when a thought occurred to her. “Wait,” she said, and wrenched her arm up and behind her to twist the knob. It gave way.
The guy’s brow furrowed. “What—I thought it was locked…”
“There’s a ghost in my apartment,” Maeve said. She was sitting outside her supposedly locked apartment door, which was in fact unlocked, in a baggy T-shirt and a pair of Christina’s boxers, with her hair in a greasy knot and a full laundry basket in her lap. She didn’t even have her dignity to lose. “Sometimes I leave the door unlocked and it’s locked when I get back.”
The guy didn’t laugh, or walk away, or ask her in an alarmed and pitying tone if he should call somebody. His eyes widened and he grinned, then said, “Wait. Really? You’re serious?” so loudly that Maeve jumped.
“I mean, I could be imagining things,” Maeve admitted. She had wondered whether Bernard was just a product of her isolation. Maybe she’d made it all up. Maybe her door was sticky.
The guy shook his head vehemently. “Nope. You’re not making it up.” He didn’t explain why. Instead, he said, “I’m going out. To a bar downtown, with some friends. Do you want to come?”
“Me? Now?” Maeve gestured at the laundry basket in her lap, her general appearance. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yeah. I’m early. You have time to shower and change.”
“Oh.” Maeve shouldn’t trust a guy she’d never met before, she knew. But she was past caring about what she should do. He seemed harmless, and she hadn’t left her apartment in days. “Okay. Thanks. I’ll go do that.”
The guy smiled, shuffled from foot to foot for a moment, then asked, “Can I meet him?”
“Who—Bernard?” When the guy looked puzzled, Maeve added, “The ghost. I named him Bernard.”
“Yes. Bernard.” The guy smiled like they were both in on a private joke. “If that’s okay with you. I mean, we just met. I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Maeve,” Maeve said. She set the laundry basket on the floor, stood up, and extended her hand to the guy, who shook it. “What’s yours?”
He smiled, again in that strangely gleeful way, and said, “Hi, Maeve. It’s Bernard.”
Emma Russell-Trione is a writer from Toronto. She is in her third year at the University of Guelph, majoring in English with a double minor in Creative Writing and Theatre Studies. Her play Fractures premiered at the Ward One Acts Festival in 2024. Her fiction and essays have been published in Arrival Magazine, Apprentice Writer, Sandpiper Volume V, and Toronto Public Library’s Young Voices magazine. Emma is a member of Geist’s Reading Collective. Her work explores themes of queerness and mental health; she is currently working on a coming-of-age novel set during the COVID-19 pandemic.