The washing-machine

When he flipped the Flor plug, he was surprised to see a dark liquid in the softener compartment. He thought it was dirty water. He did not realize that it was oxidized blood, like the one that remained in the polystyrene trays when he bought the fillets and spent a couple of days in the refrigerator, nor the slight faded color of the clothes, their strange aroma; it was her husband who said "This pant smells weird" thanks to his bloodhound smell, and then they inspected the drawer, where that brown stock again stagnated; they dipped a napkin in it and, as it approached her nose, the stench of rotting blood became evident . They thought about whether there would be some dead animal inside the washing machine, a bird that had sneaked somewhere, a rat. They had the appliance on the terrace that overlooked the closed apple courtyard to which their block belonged, where there was a tiny pool and a children's playground with recycled tire flooring. The birds did not perch on the windowsills because there were no trees in that space. They stayed in the gutter, or on the roof. It also seemed absurd to think of rats. In the storage rooms there were no mouse poops or any other bug, and they lived in the fifth. However it was summer, they dragged seven days of heatwave, and when venting, wasps and flies sneaked away from perishing burned. Why not think that some sparrow had sought refuge behind the device, in a salamanquesa crossing some of the ducts of the machine until it was done porridge and distilling its cold nectar on the softener?

For a time they resided in a villa in the countryside, and when spring came the birds nested next to the smoke outlet. Their comings and goings were heard amplified in the kitchen by the sheet metal tube. One day he heard a hysterical flutter inside the bell, an anguished trill. He managed to disassemble the base of the extractor and a bird flew throughout the house, banging against the walls, until it hit one of the many windows she had been widening, terrified that it would end up taking the fatal blow. Operators who called to check the duct did not arrive until two weeks later, and could not prevent a Sunday night, after spending the weekend in Tenerife, feathers and bones fell on the fried sausages of dinner , which were already beginning to brown when the extractor was activated. He noticed the resistance and the creak as he unfolded the filter, as if there were litter, but it was - he supposed - a dry body breaking. He threw the sausages; Her husband told her to open a can of tuna, that he would cut the tomato, but she didn't want to eat anything anymore. Why didn't it smell like dead? , he asked several times. If the bird had fallen in those three days that they had been out, shouldn't it be rotting? He tried to remedy the matter. Could not.

The bell seemed to have welded, although the rain of feathers and bones did not cease on the hob every time the filters slipped laboriously. That night she didn't keep an eye. He thought there were hundreds of dead birds there, and that the weight of all those skeletons prevented the mechanism from being dismantled. It was an irrational fear, for he had recently released the goldfinch that escaped through the hallway window. But he could not take away the idea that, during those months, tiny remains of birds had landed on the food. They had been devouring almost invisible bits of pens and cartilage. The next morning two men arrived who broke the mechanism effortlessly and repaired the rack. There was only one bird, which fell with a dry blow . Dead body plague flooded the room.

On Monday morning, with the embarrassment of July pounding on the awnings, the blood he found in the washing machine was fresh, red, as if someone had beheaded a beast inside. He remembered the chickens that his grandmother killed with a cut in the neck. They bled on top of a basin and she stalked them. The clothes were dyed an ostentatious carmine. During the hour and a half that the washing lasted, he stared at the influx of the liquid into the drum, and everything was a red trail, an agony of the machine , the impression that there was an elephant that they were slaughtering. It did not occur to him to give the stop ; remained spellbound. On the other hand, he found it so implausible that he thought he was straining some substance that gave the water that color, for example the hair dye of the girl of the sixth, whose mane resembled a ripe cherry. When the program ended and he took off his clothes, it was viscous; He buried his hand in it and it was like removing still hot guts. The tufo to slaughterhouse attracted the moscardones, and called the police with stained hands. She also phoned her husband, who showed up before the cops and looked at her as if she had just killed someone with razors. She pointed to the bloody plasta on the terrace. He had put it in a plastic bucket with little holes through which the nonsense dripped.

"The blood is falling into the yard," he said, and then picked up paper towels and spread it across the balcony tiles. She was shaking. After filling the cellulose floor, her husband hugged her.

Agents arrived shortly after. She had already washed her hands. The two men looked at the bloody clothes, and when he told them that he had come out of the washing machine like this, the taller one said:

-That can't be, ma'am. They will have to accompany us to the police station.

In the time they spent taking a statement, they searched their home. They found no bodies or any indication of crime . They then took the hypothesis that blood was coming to the appliance somewhere. That same afternoon, and in the presence of another agent, a Balay technician disassembled the device. They found only traces of dried blood in the water ducts and in the drum. The police appeared several times in the following days; perhaps there was some neighbor dismembering bodies whose blood, for some strange reason, was going to stop at his machine, but they failed to find out anything in the exhaustive inquiries through all the floors of the neighborhood, where only families lived who at first showed them solidarity and shared their horror and then, when the police began to investigate them too, they began to hate them, to send them anonymous letters inviting them to leave the floor.

"I think we should go down and tell them that we are as scared as they are," she told her husband one night in which a gathering had formed in the courtyard where no one lowered his voice to talk about them.

-Who can believe that a washing machine comes out of blood? he replied.

But perhaps it would have been a good idea for them to come down. In the two years they had been there, they had not entered into a relationship with anyone, even superficially, and she thought that made them suspicious. They had been forbidden to throw in the washing machine while the investigation continued . They ignored why the police had not taken the appliance as evidence, why they had left it to them. They did not dare to touch it, they hardly slept because of the restlessness and the heat, and they had to cancel their vacations on the beach, since they had to remain at home for any requirement. In the following days they came to chop the wall and open the pipe, and the police were present again. They put plastic throughout the kitchen and did not pick up the rubble. It took a week to close that wound; She got fed up and removed the plastics ahead of time to cook. Anger began to gain ground in fear and shame: he no longer hung his head in the elevator when his greeting was unanswered, but stared into the eyes of the other person. Her husband endured that silence better, perhaps because she was not so exposed to him. I worked in an office, and during the week I barely spent time at home. It was she who, while drawing - was dedicated to illustrating books, especially children - went to the living room and watched the patio.

Although August arrived, that was a modest block where proletarians and young middle-class adults came home unless they used to have nothing more than for a long holiday weekend. Most of the people worked almost all month, and only women with very young children frolicked in the tiny pool in the morning, a luxury to be an officially protected home. In the afternoons, on the other hand, the artificial turf was barely visible because of the amount of towels and parents with children who fought and threw themselves into bombs. Every time she looked out, someone discovered her. As if there was always a conversation about what happened in his apartment. No one had cleaned the blood stains in the courtyard, and that the janitor was wiping early, although avoiding deleting the remains of the unknown crime . Were they forbidden and forbidden to make them disappear? Only the infants were running over that dirty trail, when the afternoon fell and the pool closed. On one occasion, some very skinny boys and twins made a run around the blood and began to sing. There was too much screaming; Despite this, he could distinguish the word "murderer" in the chorus. Every once in a while there was a gathering there, around the trampled ignominy, but now they were careful to speak. As much as she tried, crouched behind the lamas of the terrace, she couldn't distinguish what was said.

One morning when she got tired of drawing, she went down to the pool when it was not yet noon, and the two mothers with their children resting under the umbrellas left as soon as she got into the water. He spent two hours with the only lifeguard company. He dared not look up at the balconies; I knew they were there, I even knew that at some point all the neighbors had gone out to their terraces to observe her, as if she were a monster sunbathing. When she went up to her house, she wrote on a sheet "we will leave this disgusting neighborhood, but we can't until the investigation is over," and she turned it on the windowsill until her husband arrived and removed it. They had a fight.

You can't stand that crowd all day! She snapped at him by the living room window, which he hurried to close, although the neighbors gathered in the courtyard looked at them mercilessly. Her husband begged her to go to the doctor to be prescribed anxiolytics -We will look for a floor as soon as the investigation is over, she said-, but the next day she woke up as if they were never going to leave, and instead of making an appointment at the outpatient, called a TV event program. They ignored him and contacted another of paranormal phenomena. A journalist showed up and she first put the washing machine in three weeks. He put the sheet painted with the spray. She feared that only water would come out, but the appliance did not disappoint her. The journalist went white when he pulled out the bloody cloth , and left shouting, "Timadora, faker!" Without any proof that this was a scam; all he possessed was his own disbelief, to which he clung, as if all the insults and falsehoods he uttered were directed not so much at her as at his wish that what he had come to confirm - the spectacular news for his program - it was not true, because what could be behind was something so horrible that it was imperative to believe that such a thing was not taking place.

-Don't you realize that this pot can be alive? -he released the journalist desperately as the elevator door closed.

He put the washing machine back in, having filled it before white cloths he bought in a bazaar. Then he spoke softly; obviously the machine did not answer. However, the blood percussed with such force on the drum that it seemed to him that there was a message there, an attempt to communicate with her. That nonsense thrown at the journalist was suddenly a plausible hypothesis by virtue of the pure exhaustion of explanations, and he thought then that perhaps the most far-fetched was often the only thing true. If he put it to work many times, he told himself, he would end up killing her, the mechanism would gradually run out, like those chickens that his grandmother bled to then pluck and cook them, and that they were closing their eyes slowly, cradled by the sound of their own blood falling into the basin. He tried, but it only gave him time for the rags to soak three more times. When he was going to act for the fourth time, the police appeared to take the appliance. Her husband had appeared at the police station to beg to have the device removed. He explained that the neighbors had called him to tell him that his wife had spent a good part of the day in front of the washing machine, which had not stopped working. They were very worried.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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