I work at a dry cleaners/laundromat. Because we do both, we stay open a lot later than a normal dry cleaning place would. But that doesn’t really mean we get a lot of customers coming in at night. So, I’m sitting there reading my book, nearing close. I’ve just emptied the coin receptacles, and I’m ready to go to bed. No one else is there, and I’m meant to lock up by myself, like I’ve done a million times. Viola suddenly walks in. Of course, it’s all windows, so I have no clue where the hell she came from. It’s like she just appeared in the doorway. She’s drenched in blood, and...
other matter that I will not say out loud, as I am a lady. Though, I guess I shouldn’t be so afraid to say it, since I deal with it on the reg. I deal with a lot of blood too, but usually we’re talkin’ paper cuts that get out of hand, or errors in reading the lunar calendar. This was an insane amount of blood, though. It looked like she just walked out of a horrible slasher film. She assured me none of it was hers, but that wasn’t great either, because then whose blood was it? Well, I did ask, but I didn’t force her to explain herself before I agreed to help, because we’re friends, and friends are friends with no conditions. She stripped naked right there, while I flipped the sign on the door, locked it, and shut all the shades. I tried to take the clothes from her, but she wouldn’t let me have them. She said they were dangerous, and only she could touch them, which right away sounds like the person who spilt it had a disease, or was carrying some biological weapon. I told her that there was really no way of coming back from the kind of damage those clothes suffered, so she would be better off throwing them out. Apparently, she couldn’t do that. She had to wear them the next day. So I told her what to do.
First, we soaked the clothes in the toilets, with a lot of soap. You don’t want that much of that kind of stuff in any of the machines, and the pipes that come from sinks aren’t designed to handle such great volume. Plus, if you’re investigating a murder—not that that’s what this was—you’re gonna check the sink long before you even consider digging through sewage. After the majority of the bad stuff was off the fabric, I got a bucket, and we soaked them again, but this time with stain remover, and then a little ammonia. Then we dropped the laundry into the washer, so we could clean up the floors. Here we could use bleach, which makes for a better cover-up. After the washer was done, we ran it again, to be safe. And then we used the dryer on high heat. Finally, I dry cleaned them, just for good measure. They looked good as new, but I couldn’t promise all the blood was gone, or rather, the DNA. She understood this, and seemed okay with it. We spent all night working, and when it was over, before she left, she told me she hooked something for me on the garment conveyor. I found what she was talking about, in a beautiful dress worth hundreds of dollars. A note was attached to it, which warned me I was never to tell this story until someone specifically asked me how I knew Viola. You are the first to ever do that, so congratulations. Also on the note was a little round symbol I wasn’t familiar with yet, and a future date. It’s this cryptocurrency called tyros. It was trading at two cents when I bought tens of thousands of them using the money I got from selling the dress. Today, I’m literally a millionaire. Tyros crashed to nothing the day after I finished selling off all 40,000.
