Perception Spring 2023

Laundry Day
Eva Greene
The Niklas House
Rosemary Crist
The walk to your safety is long and winding,
Through many twigs, somehow soft,
And leaves, somehow silky.
I’m let in only to the frontmost room
To meet your parents (but not like that)
And to do laundry together (but not like that).
I peel off my sweaty second skin
And change for your mirror
So the parade procession can begin,
Pile per person,
Father, Mother, and their Son,
– and me.
Me, I feel cleaner already.
The last dying streaks of sunlight fought against the darkening
January sky as my mom’s Ford rumbled over the uneven asphalt
road. My thumbs thrummed on the steering wheel, only partially
listening to what my mom was saying in the passenger seat while I
was focused on the movement of my foot from the gas to break to
try and control my speed around a woman walking her dog.
“They’re asking for one million seven-hundred fifty dollars,
it’ll never sell,” my mom said when I returned my attention to the
conversation. We were at a stop sign intersection, and I replied with
a small hum of acknowledgement.
“I mean, it’s a classic house, one of the first ones built in Virginia
Manor, but they haven’t kept up the place. It would be another million
into just modernizing it,” she continued. “They have a stone barbecue
in the back, and the lady put it on the real estate form: ‘Stone
barbecue in backyard.’ Nobody’s used it since 1965, it’s a hazard at
this point!”
I turned up into Virginia Manor. Every house was uniformly
massive, with three floors a piece and many with useless yard
accessories like pools or gazebos. The air smelled of American
capitalism and old wealth, though there remained an even split
among my peers between those who grew up in “The Manor,” as it
was dubbed, versus those living the more traditionally middle class,
suburban life elsewhere in the neighborhood. Though I belonged to
the latter group in a completely normal sized home with a normalsized
life, my mother grew up in The Manor, and hardly ever ran out
of stories to tell about her childhood in the foreign world a few miles
away from our present home.
“There was this one time, Mr. Niklas was this big lawyer, and he
sued people all of the time. He sued the people in that house”—she
pointed to a house on our right—“because they were going to put
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