034. Shouldn't have done the laundry

He was putting the fitted sheet back on the bed when she burst into the room.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled, tearing it from his hands.

He shrugged. “I washed the sheets.”

She grabbed pillowcases from the floor and shook them, viciously. Then she shook the blankets, too.

“I thought you’d be happy,” he said. “I used fabric softener and everything.”

But she didn’t look happy. Her face was streaked with sweat and fear and she was beginning to cry.

“Annie,” he soothed, putting his arms around her. “What is it you’ve lost?”

 “The string,” she said, into his chest. “The one between us. I think it must have broken last night.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“It must have got tangled in the sheets,” she said. “And then you washed them, and now it’s gone.”

He spent over an hour trying to convince her there was never any string between them – that what held them together was as strong as ever, and no missing string would change that. When that didn’t work, he gave up arguing and helped her look for it. They tried the washing machine and the laundry cupboard, under the bed and inside the doona cover. There was no silver-fine string anywhere, and she was inconsolable.

Finally, they lay down on the clean sheets and he wiped smudged mascara off her cheeks.

“We needed the string,” she kept saying. “Without it, we’ll never find our way back to each other.”

He told her she was crazy. It would be easy to find each other, because they lived in the same house. The next day, he kissed her softly on the cheek.  “We’ll have pasta for dinner,” he promised as he left for work. She liked pasta.

But during the day, he felt her starting to fade. First her face, then her voice, then her smell. By the time the knock-off bell rang at 5pm, he could barely remember her at all.