Piles of paper were stacked on the washing machine. They were little strips of different colours, the sort usually folded to make origami stars. The laundry room carried scents of lavender clothing detergent and Song’s pineapple air freshener. Wednesdays were my washing day, but Song did chores early, often giving me Tuesday night. Unfortunately, the appliance was humming and gurgling with her load. My phone said 20:00. She still had four hours to cart her white and colours and darks out of sight.

She was a good a roommate as any and saved me on the electricity bill when she hand-washed our dinner plates and hung her clothing out on a rope instead of tossing it into the dryer. Both of us, alongside our other four roommates, were strugglers in the culinary field. Munching on health store gummies and college vending machine snacks had quickly become silencers to our growling bellies. Their nutritional value had my auntie raising her brows, yet we couldn’t be bothered to try and learn.  

I let the laundry basket at my hip drop to the floor. The heap of obsidian shirts and sleek, midnight slacks produced a tangle of fabrics. While the wash, they spun in an enticing, dark ocean. I liked to come down between studying sessions to watch my clothes dance. It was a brief, therapeutic break.

While usually a chilly and dark place, the basement’s sole window allowed the sweet sunset to breeze inside. The glass was situated in the upper corner of the laundry room, no blinds nor curtains preventing an outsider from peering in. For a while, I had considered placing a ladder beneath it for an easy entrance into the house on the days I forgot a key, but Jill was terrified of strangers sneaking in. She happened to be the residential crime drama addict.

Climbing up the washing machine, I seated myself atop the dryer. While it wasn’t in use, it provided a better place to sit than the musty floor. It also served as a hiding spot for the days when Sonia was in a pranking mood. Some of the papers on the washer stuck to my heels, and I could faintly make out writing on the little slips. Picking up a handful, I leaned forward until the stack was illuminated by the window’s light. Curling letters made themselves visible. Each paper had a line of words written across the length of it.

Nothing was in English. Sonia was raised in Pakistan and kept up with her language skills with diary, her cute Urdu and Sindhi script flourishing the pages. Although the words didn’t match her handwriting, I could guess the papers themselves belonged to her.

I skipped along until I came across some in German, which my rudimentary skills from college strained to translate. Rhea was the only other resident who could manage German, and it was the bare minimum. She’d learned some in a semester abroad in the Netherlands, where her teacher was a Belgian man who taught lessons in equal amounts German and Dutch.

I clutched my scalp, fingers tightening around strands of hair. The harder I held on, the better I felt I could think. A bald spot was inevitable, but it was a small price to pay. I’d long decided to tattoo over the spot with the words the only way I studied for finals.

Reading out from one paper, it seemed like poetry. From shreds to silver-lined brides. The remaining slips were a struggle to understand. I caught war and cold, but the simplest words - and, it, the- disappeared as I continued. I doubted I was reading German at all, or perhaps it was an unfamiliar form. Ideas floated through my head like loose chains. Maybe it was a list. Duties for a doting wife? Traits of the bride and groom? That is if the papers were even in order.

By the fifth line, I was guessing with my knowledge of phonetics. Tongue twisting and jaw working to pronounce each syllable with the exaggeration of a non-native speaker, I mangled my way through the next few papers.

Germanic languages were rarely associated with beauty, but as I spoke, I felt they be. There was something ethereal in hearing it echo throughout the room, my voice cascading over the howls of the washing machine. The metal lid of the dryer seeped a chill into the seat of my pants, and a small shiver skidded up my spine, dancing up each knob of bone.

With each line, I let the slip of paper fall from my hand. Once I found a flow, confidence tinted the lines with power. I felt like a politician reading a script, even though my only audience was the empty basement and whatever spiders happened to be taking residency in its corners.

Under my toes, the washing machine trembled violently. It must’ve been the last few minutes of its cycle when the clothes inside whirled with the ferocity of a tempest. I would deliver Song’s clothing to her room myself. That way, I would be able to inquire about all the papers. There were some that looked to be Chinese.

The last “German” paper lay in my hands, wrinkled with the perspiration coming from my palm. Releasing my grip on my head, I read it out, not a single clue as to what it said.

The paper fell to the ground, and I turned to jump down to the floor. Laundry needed doing, and I’d fulfilled my foreign language practice for the year. As I touched the tile, a breeze raced over my shoulder, blowing hair off my neck and into my face. I tried to look back but something sharp scraped my cheek.  

Crying out, my hands came up to cup my face. Air jeered around me, and scuttling sounds reached my ears as if there were a herd of insects in the room. The skills of our neighbourhood exterminator were worse than I thought. If I were a middle-aged woman with a love for calling store managers, I would dare say the situation was outrageous.

Bugs were high on my list of fears. Anything that crawled or slithered did.

I reached inside myself for courage. The courage that let me sign a 9-month lease on a house decades old, one that already had three residents and a history of cockroach infestations. I had dragged Song with me and forced the final bedroom onto my cousin Sonia. Bugs were frightening, but humans were equally so, and I dealt with five of them on the daily.

Hands releasing their grip on my cheeks, I shook the hair out of my eyes and looked up.

There wasn’t a single bug in sight.

The papers I’d carelessly tossed on the washing machine were in the center of the room, floating in the air and spinning like an enraged carousel. They formed a cocoon as large as I. It was like a chrysalis, formed in shades of coral and turquoise from the colourful slips. The half of the basement not dedicated to laundry was storage. We kept cardboard boxes poorly concealing hundreds of notes and printouts and exams and paperwork. Their lids tipped away, the papers skidding and rising to thicken the cocoon. Sonia’s lab notebooks, the rough draft of my senior thesis, Jill’s high school diploma, all spinning with ferocious velocity in a terrifying bundle.

I pressed myself to the dryer for comfort, the washer still thundering beside it. Reading out the slips was a stupid endeavour, and despite my fear, my eyes were transfixed on the papery mass. Although I couldn’t be sure, I entertained the fear that I had summoned an enormous caterpillar in the process of becoming a butterfly. All my hate for insects, and here I was, gifted with one that was large enough to overpower me squashing it. Sonia had a coffin in her room where she stored her jewelry. I could be polite, give the creature a funeral.

Light seeped from the gaps in the paper. It was suddenly too bright, bursting like a shattered star and blinding me. My vision flashed white, and I threw up my hands while closing my eyes, trying to block the illumination that filled every crevice of the room.

The colour visible from beneath my eyelids shifted, from pure alabaster to a warm citrus, eventually cooling down to a bleak nothing.

“Your pronunciation is terrible,” someone spat, and I looked up to a little, little boy standing amidst scraps and scraps of shredded paper.