Short Story: How to Get Stains Out, Fast.

We needed help, so I went into the servants’ linen closet and took a sheet, while Marta scrounged in the supply room for shoe polish.

We needed help, because the power went out, the generator hadn’t kicked in, and the staff was on holiday.

We knew we needed help once the sky began turning the most peculiar colors.

We met back at the entranceway, where Murph had already gathered all the shoelaces from the boots in the basement, where we kept the winter clothes, and he’d tied them together to make a long cord we could use to tie up our sign. As I shook the sheet out on the floor and straightened it, Marta and Murph headed out to the storage shed for the ladder. When they opened the front door, we could hear a sound like a marble slowly rolling along a wooden floor, but so loud that I couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard it with the door shut.

I set to work writing HELP in big block letters using a paper towel as a brush for the shoepolish.

“What’s that smell?” I heard Murph ask Marta. I couldn’t smell anything but the shoe polish. I got up to shut the door to be safe. Pausing at the open door, I saw the sky had grown several shades brighter, but still with those eerie glows spread throughout the cloudless morning, like food coloring spreading in a glass of water.

“Could it be whatever’s dyed the skies?” I heard Marta wonder to Murph as I closed the door.

I went back to the bedsheet and started on the next letter, daubing a thick layer of polish onto the tip of the paper towel before kneeling over the bedsheet and working the pigment into the fibers, careful not to smear or crawl over what I’d already done.

“Why did you write held?” Murph asked me as he and Marta came back inside.

“I wrote help,” I said before looking at the sheet. I had written the P upside down. “I swore I did. How the hell did I write held?!”

“Don’t worry,” Marta said. “We’re in distress. I don’t think we can fix it though. Just have to get another bedsheet and start over. I’ll do it this time.”

As I stepped out to help Murph with breakfast, the air smelled like coconut popcorn. That wasn’t it, but it was the closest thing I could think of as I walked around the edge of the pool and found Murph already slicing up the oranges.

Twenty minutes later, Murph and I had made sausage and orangepeel-fried eggs-on-toast on the gas grill on the patio, and I went to tell Marta. “Breakfast’s ready,” I said. “Not you, too?!”

“I don’t know what happened. I swear I started with an H, but somehow it turned into a Y.” The second bedsheet spelled yelp.

I said, “Let’s eat. Once we’re fed, we’ll all three come and try again.”

Once we’d rinsed the dishes, we went back to the linen closet, only to find there was but one clean bedsheet left. The house linens were all dark prints, which ruled them out, and the staff beds had been stripped and their sheets were away at the laundry, which left us one last white bedsheet and one last chance.

As Murph had not made a go of it yet, we supervised as he got to work. A large but well-formed H covered the left flank. He followed it up with a masterful E that fit the height exactly, with perfectly squared lines. Next came the L, a veritable hockey-stick in the third space. And the cup of grace, the closing P standing proud and nosing on the right edge.

As he stood back, we began our congratulations on a job well done, but Murph’s smile soured into a gawk as he sputtered, “H-E-M-P! How is it possible?!”

We all wondered at it. We took a few minutes staring. We had watched him draw those letters, just as sure as we had drawn our own, and yet we’d eached managed a botched job. What had knocked the power down? What had spilled colors too off to be a natural sky? And why did it sound as though some thumb-bowling was in the offing outside?

A quick survey of the cleaning supplies told us we had plenty of paper towels, but what would we use to fix a sheet so we could finish our plea for rescue?

“How do we remove the bad letters? Either of you read that piece after dinner?” Marta asked us.

The night before, while polishing off the last of the dinner wine, we had sat around in the lounge, each of us had read the evening edition of the Lorack Daily What, our beloved paper of record in Lorack County, and each of us had seen the headline: “How to Get Stains Out, Fast.” But other than forwarding a link to the housekeeper for his perusal after vacation, I hadn’t read it. Neither had Marta or Murph.

“And now that the power’s down, we can’t, either,” Murph said.

It took us an hour of moping and a frantic-but-failed search for a light-colored blanket or a missed bedsheet before we realized that between us we already had all the letters we needed. We hung up my L, Marta’s P, and Murph’s HE. But it didn’t end up mattering. We waited a full day after the long-weekend had ended, to see if the maid or cook would return. When they didn’t, we left at dawn and drove down to the county seat.

As we got off the motorway, we saw the evacuation signs, big and bright yellow, all pointing south and each with misspelled words, but we also spied an aid station (ard stapion) set up next to the petrol station. The workers in special suits told us about the evacuation, and they jabbed our arms so they could check our blood for chemical exposure before sending us back on the road.

After driving the rest of the day, we reached the border with the neighboring province, Menton County, and found a little inn on the far side of the line to spend the night. The sunset looked almost normal.