the laundry press and other things that keep me up at night (why reading is better than movies)

As I’ve mentioned a few times over the years, one of the more influential collections of short stories that I’ve ever read, and what started me down the path of writing flash fiction as a hobby, was Stephen King’s Night Shift. I was reminded of this as I was finishing up my last Nap Lapkin story Thunder.

The reason is a bit hard to explain but I will try nonetheless, as somebody somewhere might find it interesting (other than myself).

The exciting conclusion of Thunder (spoiler alert) is a mile-wide pinsetter, an automated mechanical device that sets bowling pins back in their original positions, coming down from the clouds to retrieve a thousand foot high bowling pin.

Difficult for a reader to imagine? You bet. Should I have spent a few pages trying to describe it? Hell no.

The reason why is directly related to a very similar experience I had reading one of the short stories in Night Shift. The story is called The Mangler and it is about a police detective investigating a sudden rash of grisly deaths caused by an industrial laundry press. Turns out that through a series of unfortunate coincidences the machine had become possessed by a demon.

The ending is the industrial laundry press ripping itself loose from the concrete floor, “like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit,” killing someone and then roaming the streets in search of prey.

My point is simple… what the fuck does that even look like? What was I picturing in my head as I read it? An industrial laundry press lurching around killing people? How? Did it have legs?

It didn’t matter. I pictured it and couldn’t picture it. Wrestled with the images that were created and discarded, and settled on none of them and all of them.

And somehow the end result was that it scared the crap out of me, this possessed laundry press. It’s a wonder I can even go into a dry cleaners.

Maybe subconsciously that’s why I chose a pinsetter as the climax to my story. Something so mundane, so out of place and unimaginable that even Stephen King would smile at the unintended homage to his Mangler.

As hobbies go, this isn’t a bad one, this writing stuff. I get to create things in my head that even I can’t actually picture. Not with any clarity at least. I just hope that anyone unfortunate enough to stumble upon Thunder can appreciate the bizarre rush of wonder and bewilderment that the idea of a giant pinsetter coming down from the sky produces.

It’s not every day you can read something, contextualize it, be affected by it, and yet still have no idea exactly what it is you’re picturing.

If you haven’t read Night Shift… wtf are you still doing reading this?