Holloway has come to repair the Goodwins' washer. It chokes and sputters and burps suds across the laundry room floor.
Mrs. Goodwin apologizes for the mess, for the heat, for the mangy cat that glares from the shelves above. She offers him fresh iced tea. He accepts and hikes his jeans up, for her sake.
When she returns with the full glass, the floor is clean and dry, and the washer hums and churns like a hive of honeybees in spring.
Her eyes widen; her lipsticked mouth falls open in surprise. She tips him generously, and asks him if he can repair the air conditioner, too.
He cannot, he tells her. He blames it on his education, but HVAC is for the gods of wind.
"Oh," she says. "That's a pity. I haven't been able to get ahold of anyone to fix it."
****
Sarah Grey is an attorney, a mother, an art historian, a medievalist, an aggressive advocate for the disabled, a militant vegetarian with an unquenchable lust for cheese, and, of course, a writer. She was born on Bloomsday, but prefers her fiction short. Her stories have appeared in Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, and Flash Fiction Online. She lives with her family near Sacramento, California.