I was just sitting here looking at a pile of laundry—it’s always laundry, isn’t it?—and it reminded me of that one Saturday back in ninety-eight, which is a weird thing to have stuck in your head at 2 AM when you should be sleeping because you have to be at the office by eight to handle the various vicissitudes of small-town property tax assessments. Old Mr. Henderson is going to come in and complain about his acreage again, he always does every Tuesday like clockwork, and I’ll have to sit there and pretend I care about his fence line while the coffee in the breakroom tastes like burnt plastic. But anyway, the laundry. I was fourteen, I think, or maybe thirteen because I hadn't grown into my chin yet and I remember feeling so heavy all the time, just this absolute weight in my chest that I couldn't explain to anybody in this town because if you aren't talking about the weather or the high school football scores then you aren't really talking at all, you're just making noise. My brothers, Travis and Lonnie, were sprawled out on the harvest-gold sofa we’d had since the seventies, just absolute giants of boys, smelling like dirt and sweat from football practice. They were eating those orange crackers that turn your fingers stained—you know the ones, with the fake peanut butter in the middle—and I was sitting on the floor because there wasn't room for me, there was never really room for me in that house, not in the way that mattered. The TV was always on, just background noise for the humidity and the sound of the neighbor's dog barking at nothing. And this commercial came on, it was just a mother tucking a kid in or something, a laundry soap ad with some slow piano music and this soft yellow light that looked like it belonged in a different world than our dusty little living room where the wallpaper was peeling in the corners. And I just... I broke. It wasn't even about the soap, it was the way the mom in the ad looked at the kid, like he was the only thing that existed in the whole world, and suddenly I was shaking and the tears were just fat and hot and I couldn't stop them even though I knew better than to show any kind of weakness in that house. It’s funny how your body just betrays you like that, your tear ducts just deciding they’ve had enough of the "stiff upper lip" crap we're raised on around here. I reckon it was the sound of my own sniffing that alerted them, and Travis—he was the oldest, always the one with the loudest mouth and that mean streak that people in town call "character"—he just stops chewing and looks down at me like I’m some kind of specimen under a microscope. He starts hooting, this braying laugh that sounded like a donkey in a tin barn, and he nudges Lonnie and says "Look at her, she's actually bawling over a soap ad, what a total baby." And Lonnie joins in, because Lonnie never had an original thought in his life, just a echo of whatever Travis was doing, and they’re both pointing and making these fake crying noises, "Boo-hoo, the laundry is so pretty!" and I’m trying to wipe my face with my sleeves but my sleeves are too short because we couldn't afford new school clothes that year and I’d outgrown everything. It was just this cacophony of ridicule and I remember looking at the TV and then at them and thinking that my life was never going to be that yellow light, it was always going to be this—being clowned on in a room that smelled like old socks and stale crackers. It’s a peculiar thing, the way shame just sort of petrifies inside you, like those fossils they find in the creek bed sometimes when the water runs low in July. I didn't say anything, I just got up and went to the bathroom and locked the door and sat on the edge of the tub until my legs went numb. I didn't feel angry, not really, just... hollow. Like a bell that someone cracked so it doesn't ring anymore, just makes a dull thud. And now I’m nearly forty and I’m still in this town, working a job that pays just enough to keep the lights on and the car running, and I find myself being real careful about what I watch.