Next Big Book Thing: The Book of Paul by Richard Long (Excerpt)

Laundry Day

Martin felt good. So good he would have smiled if he could. Today was laundry day. He’d been awake for hours, doing his exercises (one thousand sit-ups, push-ups and chin-ups, plus an assortment of martial arts routines), reading his favorite periodicals (Popular Mechanics, Soldier of Fortune, Lost Treasures). Even so, he was still able to tinker with his home surveillance system, take his shower at precisely nine a.m., and then finally…move on to the laundry.

Martin enjoyed many things in life: hunting, hoarding, watching TV…but he loved doing laundry the most. Every day was a contest between him and hard water. New York had the hardest water, like it had the hardest everything else. It helped with the dishes, breaking down the dried spaghetti sauce on his plate like hot corrosive acid. It helped in the shower too, where he rigged a special high-pressure nozzle that practically ripped the skin from his knotted muscles. He entered the bathroom with great determination, carefully hanging his gym shorts on their special hook, and proceeded to shave every hair on his head, chest, arms, underarms, legs and groin with an electric hair clipper, to a uniform one-eighth-inch length. One less thing to think about. Then he turned on the shower as hot as he could stand it, stepped inside and reveled in the fire hose blast of all that hard, hot water. Ahhhhhhh.

Martin was hard too. Looked hard. Felt hard. Yet his one true luxury in life was softness. Soft shirts, pants, underwear…soft sheets, pillows, blankets. Martin cursed the water silently as he washed his hand washables. He had more hand-washables than most people had laundry. How could you trust your personal garments…fabric that came into physical contact with your skin…to anyone else? He muttered and fought fiercely against the hard, spiteful water, but just as he felt the clothes in his hands raise a mushy white flag of surrender, he suddenly heard a sound he never heard in all the time he had lived there. The doorbell.