Benicia

By Kenton Erwin

It used to be simpler, this business of the dead helping the dead. For over a thousand years the washer-fairies, the Bean-Nighe, emerged from mist and gathered by some frigid Scottish stream or lake, at night. Into their hands appeared the clothes of the good souls about to die. 

Rubbing the soiled cloth against wet rock, the women sang anguished dirges. Each fairy, a mother, sometimes centuries earlier, who’d died in childbirth. They mourned their babes as they sang of life and loss. 

The fairies worked the fabric with wizened fingers rubbed near to bone. Shoulders aching, necks sore. Til the detritus of impending death flowed lazily away. 

Then the garments flew back upon the dying, to console and comfort them in their final moments. Humans might see bodily fluids on the clothing, but to the Reaper they looked clean, signaling ‘this one’s spirit is welcome.’

And, when their work was done, the fairies returned to cold thin mist amongst the trees. Until the next calling.

***

Benicia appreciated her assistant Martin’s staying on, as she rose to become CEO of Northeast Linen Company. Her phone never stopped ringing. Her inbox collected hundreds of emails a day. The incessant streams of meetings and people barging in.   

The company’s ancient ferrous-beamed edifice sported the nickname “Old Iron Lady,” and while Martin never told her, she knew that some folks used that name for her. But it was a misnomer: The only time he’d ever picked her up, to perform the Heimlich Maneuver to dislodge a chunk of tuna salad, he said it felt like lifting a feather. He said she looked old, frail, and exhausted, and needed to rest more. He said she worked harder than anyone. She’d heard him ask his work friends, “When does the Old Iron Lady sleep?”

***

Benicia did not sleep. At night, after the cleaning crew left, she’d leave her third-floor corner office and walk through a ghost town. The C-suite at night. 

In a locked closet down the hall she donned worker’s garb and rode the freight elevator to the basement. Elevators reminded her of flying, ages ago. Then, through a long tunnel and behind a huge iron door lay the abandoned original laundry room. 

Since the early 1900s, the dirty uniforms of chefs, police, ironworkers, security guards, butchers, bakers, firefighters, all streamed in through ornate brick arches on wagons, just after dinnertime. Bernicia paused to remember. She was one of those lowly-paid laborers who’d worked all night to wash, dry, press and wrap the clothes. Loading them, bundled with handwritten labels and string, back on the wagons by 6am.   

Nowadays they used trucks for pickup and delivery, and order management software. The ‘new building’ next door, already 50 years old, sported gleaming rows of modern machines on cold, smooth concrete, with robotic sorters. A triumph of efficiency.

In contrast to this room. Benicia looked up, smiling at the echoes of ghosts amongst the rafters. Old friends, all.

Then, to work. Instead of a Scottish brook, she opened two big valves for hot and cold water. The synthetic streams gurgled into old cast iron pipes. 

Instead of wet rocks, she turned to an ancient industrial drum washer made by the Hurley Electric Laundry Equipment Company. Built to last. Benicia had watched, aghast and terrified, as horses and men wrestled it across the stone slab floor. 

How many souls have I sent on since then? How many times has the Reaper enlarged my tasks? Wasn’t it always so? Doing my job so well that the thank-you was only more work added to my burden? Tis faint reward, some might say. 

A familiar sadness washed over her. She’d mourned for 460 years since her half-out baby and she perished in that thatched Highland hut. 

With a sigh, she opened her laptop and the app called ‘Forecasting.’

***

Even in a large city, not terribly many died each day. The app helped, but she struggled with the judgment calls. It had to be done. 

Back in the Gaelic times, the Reaper weighed the souls and sent the chosen clothes to the Bean-Nighe for washing. But eight billion people clogged the planet now, so the Reaper delegated the soul-weighing to the ten thousand or so washer-fairies. 

Benicia’s fingers flew on the keyboard as images and data flashed by. A cop would die in the protests today, shot in the neck.  A sous chef, to be killed by a heart attack provoked by a screaming customer. A lab researcher, asphyxiated by a faulty vent hood. A car wreck, a cancer. If she clicked the green button for each of them, items of their clothing appeared in the washing machine. When she clicked the red button, they didn’t.

The next candidate: a young woman carrying a near-dead fetus, but doctors said the law prevented them from removing it. That mother would die today. A tear rolled across Benicia’s cheek. Really? In 21^st  century America? Green button.

Finally, the day’s sorting of the laundry was done. Just before 2am, Benicia added soap, closed the washer’s lid, and reached to turn it on. But she felt a chill and looked down at herself. She stood naked. 

What? Where are my clothes?

Then she realized. Looked into the washer, and there they were.

She laughed, then whispered, “Thank you, Reaper!” She turned the machine on. After all these years, she was finally, finally, going to die.

A woman she didn’t know walked in.

“I’m Benazir. Started in Marketing yesterday.  I’ll be taking over in here now. Reaper wrote me, asking me to tell you this: “Thank you, Benicia, for all the good you’ve done. Your daughter’s waiting to meet you. And so am I.”

As Benicia drifted up, she looked down to see Benazir stooping to pick up the prone body of the Old Iron Lady.

Kenton Erwin’s had five short stories and two nonfiction books published. Recently he won Punk Noir’s ‘A Good Death’ writing competition, with his story ‘Killing House.’ He is active in the Speculative Fiction Writers Association, and lives in Ridgefield WA  USA.