All but the newest laundromats seem to have a funny timeless quality to them. Tile that is inevitably broken and aged, but broken and aged juuuuust enough that it could be ten years old or fifty. Washers designed for strange commercial applications with designs that haven’t changed appreciably in years. Lighting that hurts your eyes no matter where it comes from or which bulbs they use. A laundromat is just there to scream “come on inside and feed me quarters, you unwashed wretch!”
We have an especially confusing one, clearly placed over the nexus of multiple temporal events. Several of the machines are old enough that they ARE recognizable as long-discontinued styles of machines, made by long-defunct companies, 80% with signs claiming them to be out of order.
The plants are dead, and have been dead for years. Remarkably well-preserved! But dead. Stickers proudly proclaiming chamber of commerce membership decorate the sliding doors, somehow stuck in place since 1995, continuously open nearly that full time, with an occasionally staffed counter (so it seems, though we’d never seen any proof of it) and a single employee who would come and silently sweep at a bit after midnight before locking himself into a back room, face oddly unmemorable.
It seems an end of an era, then, to have recently visited and discovered that the flow of time had somehow suddenly been jostled… artwork of unknown vintage replaced by a local public health poster, a fresh clock on the wall and a brand new sign: Open 6am-Midnight. Doors automatically lock at 11:50pm.
As if now to eagerly reclaim all the time it leaked out into the wrong spaces over the years, our own little twilight zone. Now, suddenly, for one night, a proper laundromat. Or maybe this is the true laundromat, the version it was always meant to be, just for a moment, caught at the right time when the timelines synced up perfectly. Maybe next time we visit, it will have come once again unmoored from our timeline, anachronism creeping back in. The artefacts indicating displacement still lined the walls depending on where you looked. The 1970s vintage soap dispenser looking bright and cheerful as always, prices unchanged, still one of the rare sources for a refreshing can of Slice, virtually impossible to find in the outside world. I expect next time we’ll wander in to find Ms Pacman restored, the lighting near the entrance broken once more, a pile of 90s magazines to flip through and enjoy.
There’s a price to time loops and portals, of course, and thermodynamics takes its toll: now a full 90% of the machines are inoperable.