Deus Ex Machina takes on a whole different hue when you’re dealing with one that is stuck in your fast spin cycle, waiting on the rinse cycle. Did you separate your whites and your colours? Are they going to run together? Put more coins in the slot. The lid lifts up so you can add softener. There’s an agitator at the centre of it. Everything is going around. You have something there to gather the microplastics.
Sat on a plastic chair, you are looking old white man European with socks and sandals, and you are reading Double Deez, ignoring the daggers being stared by the female occupants of this launderette. When you were a younger man you would have been asked to leave, but now, as you have ripened to an age where the boundaries soften — your supposed dysfunction is the only thing making you safe to be around and sadly unthreatening.
You are praying that everything will come out OK. Which wouldn’t be necessary if you took the time to learn about what you are doing. But who has the time to do that when they have such a busy life. TV shows to watch, itches to scratch, and the like. He falls asleep and wakes up in the middle of a forced video loop for Lupine, the latest social media craze. His brief burst of anger goes viral, and people come to follow him at his laundry station. Fuck em.
Which god is it in there? Does it have a name? He doesn’t ask. It seems to be friendly though — it doesn’t fuck with his washing. It wants to offer opinions and it whispers them to him, so if he were to answer out loud they would think he was crazy and lock him up.
Everyday it appears, just as he puts his clothes in there. It says to him this is what you must do in the world, and he laughs because he thinks that the god in the machine doesn’t understand just how small his world is. It’ll come out in the wash, he figures. Is it just the way the thing spins or is there a parting of the waters? Is the leak a miniature version of the biblical flood? You could read a lot into things. He is not about to start a religion based on this though. He’s the only person who hears it, and he doesn’t have a solid enough footing in any community to start talking foolishly.
When he gets home, all he can think is that he is lucky not to have a washing machine at home.