I only manage to do my laundry about once a month. I’d do it more often, but I really don’t have time. Heck, sometimes, I don’t have time to get a really decent full night sleep. When I finally do get a chance to wash it, I need to spend about twenty minutes sorting it. The thing I hate the most is that sometimes, because it rains a lot around here, the bottom layer of clothes is mildewed. Makes the whole apartment stink.

This was a different stink, though. Smelled like something was rotting.

I ignored it for a couple of days, since I just didn’t have the time to take care of it. Finally, a Sunday rolled around and I had a good nine hours. Provided my annoying neighbor wasn’t using the machines, I would be able to get it all done.

Fortunately, she wasn’t down at the machine. That was a relief. Lots of times, she would just do five or six items of clothing at a time, which meant it could take her the whole day to do the equivelent of one load of my laundry.

Anyhow, I started sorting the pile. Underwear here, socks there, pants in another pile. As I approached the bottom of the pile, my clothes were getting notably wet. It looked like one of my red shirts had started seeping dye because several items had notable red stains.

Then I felt it. At first, I thought I had just wadded up a pair of shorts especially tight. When I raised it up, though, I immediately dropped it to the ground. It was a human hand.

A lady’s hand. Pretty decayed by this time.

I am ashamed to say that my first thought was “at least blood comes out easier than dye.”

Damn, I had dropped it right on the floor though. Even though it wasn’t bleeding any longer, I was going to have to clean that section of the floor up - maybe even with clorox. My bedroom was going to stink for a week.

I had no idea where this hand came from. I guess I should have been more concerned, but I was just to exhausted. How was I ever going to get my laundry done if the police were here? They would probably want to go confiscate any of my clothes that had blood stains - not to mention that they would think I had something to do with this.

No, the easiest thing to do was going to be to just do my laundry and worry about the hand later. I moved it over onto a plastic grocery bag and headed downstairs with a load of underwear. I had to bleach it, but I got the stains out.

It was a bit harder to get the stains out of my colored clothes, but with a little bit of scrubbing and focus, they were passable. Couldn’t tell they were blood stains, I’ll tell you that.

I had some time to ponder what had happened. I had had a party at the apartment three or four weeks back. We were all plastered. Bunch of people I didn’t really know were hanging out. I remembered one guy leaving with his girlfriend, carrying her.

“She passed out,” he had said.

Maybe he’d killed her, or just chopped or her hand. I called my friends and tried to figure out who that had been. They all sort of remembered them, but didn’t have a clue who they were.

“Probably just crashers,” we concluded.

I figured that this really wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t help the police figure out who this hand belonged to. Besides, the lady was long dead, if she was dead. If she wasn’t, the hand wasn’t going to do her any good now.

I wrapped it in the plastic bag and put it in my backpack. I left it in a dumpster on campus.

Problem solved.

I’ve written a bunch of creepy stories for the site now - continue with this series or switch to different things? You tell me!