The water hisses as it fills the mop bucket and Candace folds the laundry, eyeing the water level after each sheet. She can fold around nine sheets in the time the bucket fills to the line. This time, she reaches ten before the water overflows but before she goes to retrieve it, Emir, the Bosnian massage therapist, turns into the narrow laundry room. He insists on helping, he always does, and Candace tells him thank you but she’s got it. 

“No,” Emir puts his hand up. “I help.”

Candace smiles, thanks him again and watches as he pours the clean water down the drain. When he’s gone to his room with a client, Candace grabs the bucket off the ground and places it back in the sink. The water hisses as it fills again and, this time, she only folds eight.  

She wipes her greasy hands, courtesy of the sheets saturated with massage lotion, and walks to the lobby. Before she opens the door, a shrill bark echoes down the dark halls. She hears the squirt of the spray bottle and low wimpers. Candace takes a deep breath and turns the handle. 

Kerry, the owner, chats loudly on speakerphone from behind the desk. A client looks irritated in the corner, side eyeing the front desk as he waits for Marie, a massage therapist that notably takes every client three minutes late. 

 “She’ll be right up to grab you.” Candace says, offering the gentleman a smile. He nods and rubs his forehead. 

Kerry’s interviewing a massage therapist over the phone, no, Candace hears more clearly, an aesthetician. 

Kerry then snaps at Candace and makes a writing motion with her hand. Candace reluctantly grabs a piece of copy paper and places a pen in Kerry’s hand. She’s wearing a tight pink bodysuit today and her blonde curls fall down her back. 

“Right,” Kerry’s voice is loud. “Ok. Sure.” 

She’s trying to sell herself. Kerry writes on the piece of paper and puppets her hand as a chatty mouth. The dog, named Brylee Jean, begins to whimper and jump at Candace’s legs. She picks up the fluffy dog and straightens out her pink dress and bow. Finally, Marie emerges from the lobby door. 

“Benjamin?” She asks the man in the corner and he gets up, eager to escape the lobby. 

Candace idly clicks on Benjamin’s profile when his client note pops up: Has been made aware of our police that he needs to be covered with the sheet when the therapist comes into the room. 

“Creep,” Candace says under breath and closes out his profile. 

“What machines do you do?” Kerry asks over the phone. 

Angel glow, jet peel, hydrofusion, she writes. 

Candace checks the schedule. Kerry’s getting a massage at three, and it’s five minutes past. She looks up from the screen to see Anton, the Russian massage therapist with strong hands, leaning against the door frame. He shrugs at Candace and she does the same back, glancing at Kerry. The dog buries her head in the nook of Candace’s elbow. 

“Can you come in tomorrow?” Kerry asks the aesthetician. 

Then, after a moment, “ok, I’ll have our manager deal with it. I gotta go now. Yep. Bye, bye.” 

Kerry hangs up and apologizes to Anton. 

“Can you watch my baby?” She asks Candace, the first words she’s said to her today, the second acknowledgement. The first being the snap of her manicured fingers. 

“Mmhm.” Candace says and Kerry kisses the dog then follows Anton to his room. Once she’s gone, Candace places Brylee in a bed that’s made for a cat and snaps on her leash that anchors the dog to the front desk. 

“Baby cujo,” someone murmurs behind Candace and she jumps. 

“You scared the shit out of me,” She says to Remy, a massage therapist with curly purple hair that lops on top of her head. 

“I can do a lot more to you if you let me,” Remy winks and leans against the wall. 

“Please, don’t be weird today.” Candace sits in the chair. Remy breaks into a laugh, her hands on her knees and her purple head reaches her black crocs. 

Once she comes up she tells Candace a date to check on the schedule. 

“That one there,” She points at a couples massage. “Who booked that?” 

Candace clicks on it. “New girl.” 

“I’m not doing that.” 

“I know,” Candace quickly says, trying to avoid the tangent. “I’ll call and reschedule.” 

Remy doesn’t do couples massages. No ifs ands or buts. As she once told Candace, she feels murderous being in a room with another therapist. Also, why would she want to be in a room with three other bodies when she doesn’t even want to be with one? But Candace knows she’s bluffing about that last part. Remy is secretly passionate about her practice but she can get away with a righteous attitude because she’s the most requested therapist at the spa. I pay Kerry’s bills, Remy had said to the new girl, she wouldn’t try to mess with me. 

Once Remy saunters back to her room, Lily, a young aesthetician, pops in the lobby with her client. Her client is a sixty something year old woman with tight skin and fake boobs. Candace looks at the schedule to catch the client’s name. Suzzane Binnette. They are talking about the neocutis skincare line.

“This one-,” Lily picks up a small blue bottle that retails at two hundred and eighty five dollars. Candace remembers pricing the neocutis line with Kerry, many of them in triple digits. “- is the one with human growth factors and peptide treatments.”

Suzanne nods as Lily hands her the bottle. 

“So it has real human skin cells that support your collagen and hyaluronic acid production–

“What do you mean real human skin cells?” Candace uncharacteristically asks, curious about the small blue bottle. 

 Lily flips her dark hair and purses her lips. “A baby was donated to skincare to help burn victims. Neocutis made a skincare line with the cells. It’s really interesting, actually.”

“How many dead babies have they used?” Candace asks, appalled. Suzanne glances at her then reads the back of the bottle as if it would be printed under ingredients.  

A nervous laugh escapes Lily’s injected lips. More subtle injections, Candace notes, as she’s seen much worse working at a spa in downtown LA. 

“Just one. They replicate the cells.”  

“Hm.” Candace says, thinking about the logistics of this though she doesn’t know much about science. She’s smart, quick enough to keep the spa under control when it’s just her and the rush of patrons coming in and ringing the phones, but science never interested her. Neither did math. English was fine. But she came to LA for a reason, like a million other people do but she never let that fact bring her down. Not at first, anyways. 

“One dead baby,” Candace mumbles under her breath as Suzzanne makes her way to the checkout counter. Lily tells her to come back in four weeks, that the redness will go down later today but to stay inside. Suzzanne listens intently, then turns to Candace. 

“Ready?” Candace says to the woman whose face is bright red like she spent the day in a staring match with the sun. Candace holds back a cringe and clicks on her ticket. Microneedling plus the neocutis comes to a price that makes her stomach turn and she almost feels guilty for charging her. Then, Candace glimpses at her Rolex and the guilt melts away. 

“Yes,” Suzanne says. “Do you take apple pay?”

“Sure,” Candace brings the machine over and she pays five hundred and twenty dollars with the click of her phone. “How are you feeling?” 

“A little toasty,” the woman chuckles and Candace flashes a smile. Funny, funny, funny. 

“Would you like a receipt today?” 

The woman shakes her head and carefully sets Versace sunglasses on her skinny nose. 

“Ok, you’re all set today.” 

“Thanks girl, keep rockin’ that young skin.” Suzanne winks and walks out the door. 

Candace laughs but as she leaves, she can’t help but feel a crawling sensation over her body. She pictures Suzanne peeling the skin off Candace’s face and putting it on her own, like that one movie her Dad used to watch in their living room. Then, she remembers the dead baby and has to shake it all out. 

Before the top of the hour comes, in which the lobby floods with check ins and check outs, Candace finds solace in the laundry room. The spot in between her shoulders aches as she carries the wet sheets and towels to the dryer. Her back has gone to shit from laundry. Also from painting the floorboards which Kerry paid her extra to do last week. The white paint still stained the pant leg of her black scrubs but she wouldn’t pay a nickel to buy another pair, she barely had enough for gas. 

Journey comes in as she’s folding the white massage towels. Candace found out that Brendan is his actual name when she helped Kerry with payroll. Unsure when or why he adopted the name Journey, her guess was when he lived in the Buddhist Monastery years back. Or maybe when he backpacked through South America. Candace speculated but never felt the urge to ask. 

“Hey,” Journey says. He’s tall and slim. Fair skin and light hair, his eyes a piercing blue but warm with age. “I have a few requests and I figured I would talk to you about it so you can pass along the message to Kerry.” 

“Yeah, what’s up?” Candace asks while folding. 

“So,” Journey begins. “You know I do Ashiatsu massage right? Well, I told Kerry that when I got hired, a year ago now, and she said we’d come back to the idea about installing bars in my room. I get it, she’s busy, and we had to fix both washers and dryers so I let it go with the cost–

“I can talk to her about that.” Candace says. 

“Thank you!” Journey exclaims and his jaw tightens. Here we go, Candace thinks. “Yeah, I mean, it’s been a year now and it would bring in money, man. No other places around here do Ashiatsu so it’d set us apart and we can charge a lot, like a hundred bucks.”

Candace imagines Journey holding onto ceiling steel bars, massaging a client with his pale feet. She holds back a shiver. 

“I’m certified so I’d like to start practicing again. A few of my clients are interested in it, too.” 

“Definitely, it’s a good idea,” Candace says but still thinks about his white feet. “Kerry’s closing on her house soon so she’s a bit distracted but I’ll float the idea around.”

“Perfect,” He says, leaning on the washer now, watching Candace fold. “Then, do you know what the cupping service looks like when you book it?”

“What do you mean?” 

“It comes up as a thirty minute service when it’s just an add on.” His face gets red again. 

“Oh, like hot stones?”

“Exactly! It’s just a simple add on, not a whole time slot. We don’t advertise it well enough.” 

She folds a fitted sheet. “That’s an easy fix, I’ll do it.” 

“Cool, yeah, and I want more commission on that because it’s my own cups.” 

“Of course.”

“Ok, one more thing,” He stands straight again. “The sheets don’t cling to the new beds. It looks horrible.”

“Oh really? They don’t fit?” 

“No! It’s embarrassing! They get out of the bed and it looks like they just got fucked!”

Remy, who’s on her break, is about to enter the laundry room but thinks again and turns away. Candace can’t help but laugh, hoping no clients overhear him. 

She tunes him out for the rest of his rant, assuring him she will talk to them about his list of concerns. Once he leaves, she takes a deep breath and folds the last sheet. 

As Candace adds minutes to the dryer timer, panic washes over her body before she presses start. Immediately, she drops to the ground, flings open the dyer and rummages through the sheets. At first, she has no clue what she’s looking for but, as she comes to, her panic pictures a baby tumbling with the damp sheets and towels, crying for air, red from the burns. She blinks at the sheets, her knuckles white from gripping them, and slowly lets go. There is no baby, of course. Candace glances to her left and right, making sure no one saw. Holding a hand to her chest, she resumes her regular shift. 

Before she knows it, it’s the top of the hour, five minutes till four o’clock and people are filing in. Candace checks in everyone with a smile, including the homeless man that moseys in and calls himself Pirate Pete, inquiring about services every now and then. Pirate Pete has never booked anything and if he did, she would feel the need to tell Kerry, who would tell him he’s not allowed. He’s been caught rummaging through the spa’s trash a few times but Candace only tells Pirate Pete he can’t do that when clients are here and she doesn’t inform Kerry, who would call the cops on him. 

After Candace hands Pirate Pete another flier for their services and chats about his new lady who he’s planning to propose to, the pirate heads out the door. She checks in two clients for a couples massage, the woman is booked for a prenatal even though she isn’t showing. Candace congratulates the two and they beam. The man’s cheeks glow pink and the woman’s hand slides to her stomach. Then, a girl about Candace’s age enters. She’s typing on her phone as she steps to the counter. The sound is turned up and Candace hears each letter as she clicks.

“Hello,” Candace says warmly, even though the girl hasn’t looked up yet. “Checking in?” 

“Yes, sorry. One second.” 

Candace’s nostrils flare and she pretends to do something on the computer. 

“For Lauren,” The girl says but Candace already knew that. She comes every two weeks to see Emir. She’s pretty and fit, like most of the girls in LA.  

“Gotcha.” Candace checks her in. 

Lauren stares at her for a second. “You look familiar. Are you a blogger?”

“A what?” 

“On social media?” Lauren clarifies. “I feel like I’ve seen you before.”

“Oh,” Candace forces a smile. “No. You probably just recognize me from here.” 

“Right,” Lauren says, then takes a seat. Candace knows Lauren’s popular on social media and almost takes the familiarity as a compliment, like Candace can be one of those girls who make money posting videos of their food and workouts with sultry voice overs. 

She checks in four more people and checks out five. After the rush, Sasha, an older massage therapist, enters the lobby. Her client is running a few minutes behind and she sits next to Candace as they wait. Sasha watches a religious video on her phone and Candace looks at her hunched over the screen, her leg vibrating. 

Sasha catches her staring. “Oops. Too loud? Sorry.” 

“Oh, no.” Candace says, feeling bad. “Just curious.” 

“You religious?” Sasha turns off her phone. Her voice is raspy from years of smoking. Candace has seen her a few times outside of work driving with a cigarette and ashing it out her window. 

“I used to be an atheist, actually.” 

“Not anymore?” 

Candace shifts in her seat. “I don’t think about it much anymore.” 

“Why were you an atheist?” The word atheist rolls off her tongue like venom. 

“Seeing bad things happen to good people.” 

Sasha smiles. “Bad things make people good, though.” 

“When I say bad, I mean death,” Candace pauses. “But, it’s impossible for people on Earth to understand death, I guess.” Her chest tightens as she’s surprised to hear herself regurgitate these words. Suddenly, Candace smells the musty walls of the funeral home. Sees the open casket that held her mother. It’s impossible for people on Earth to understand death, right? Candace’s father said after she asked him if she was really gone forever, if she was even gone to herself. 

“There’s some faith,” Sasha’s raspy voice breaks the memory. 

Candace smiles. She finds her hand creeping to her stomach when Sasha’s client enters the front door. Sasha takes the woman back and Candace sits idly for a moment, her hand still on her stomach like the pregnant woman who came in for the prenatal. 

Brylee Jean lets out a yap and Candace jumps, completely forgetting about the dog asleep in the cat bed. Candace shushes her but she yaps again. She grabs the spray bottle with Brylee written sharpie on the side and points it at the dog. Brylee retreats and lays down again. Checking the schedule, Kerry will be out in twenty minutes. Candace sighs, then goes back to the laundry room. 

The difference between LA and her small hometown in Massachusetts alarmed Candace at first. In fact, she almost moved back home after an audition across town, where the city’s lights streaked into the pools of heavy rainfall, the one time she’s ever seen it rain since moving. Candace appeared in the casting room, wet and matted. Her hair clung to her scalp, and her soaked garments dripped on the floor while the casting directors examined her papers, peering over their lowered glasses with squinting eyes. What happened next, Candace still can’t fully recall, but she didn’t show up for another audition for months. She stared at the packed suitcase by the door in her tiny studio apartment every night after work, contemplating the idea of moving back in with her father. 

She folds the last towel and returns to the front. A woman stands by the front desk wearing a long pink coat. The woman’s large and tall, her blonde hair curled around her face and her arms crossed on her chest. 

“Sorry about that,” Candace says, unsure of how long the woman’s been waiting. “What can I help you with?” 

“Hello,” the woman says, her voice is high like a child’s. “I need to buy a gift card.”

“Sure,” Candace replies, grabbing the cards. She’s a bit startled by the woman’s voice. It sounds fake, in the tone you’d talk to a baby or a lover. “How much on the card?” 

Kerry walks into the lobby, holding her golden goose sneakers in her left hand and uses her right to tousle through the mess of hair that’s matted from lotion.  

“Um,” the woman thinks. “How much is a deep tissue massage?” 

Candace can’t believe she’s talking to her in such a voice. She holds back a grin as Kerry shoots a look from the chair. “Ninety for an hour, one-twenty-five for ninety minutes.” 

“Ok, ok.” She brings a pink glove to her chin and Candace stares. “I’ll do three hundred on the gift card, please.” 

“Perfect,” Candace says. “Cash or card?”

The woman hands her a gold amex. The name reads Bethany Bop. Candace says her name over and over in her head, Bethany Bop, Bethany Bop, Bethany Bop, as she swipes the amex. 

“Receipt?” 

“No, darling.” The woman says in the baby voice then giggles at something. “Thank you for all your help.” 

“Of course,” Candace says and sits down. The chair squeaks under her and Brylee begins to whine at Kerry. Once the woman in the pink trench coat leaves, Kerry stands up and grabs the dog. 

“Who was that?” Kerry says. Her fake lashes are tangled and lines indent her face from being stuck in the headrest. Brylee’s tail wags. 

Candace lets out a laugh and shrugs. “Did you hear her voice?” 

“Yeah, that was so creepy.” Kerry says and begins to grab her things. Candace’s heart swells at the thought of her leaving early. Then, she says the magic words. “I have to head out. There’s a cart coming in for me sometime today. Can you put that together and put it in my office? Also, Image inventory is here. Put that away also.” 

“Got it,” Candace replies. 

“Thank you,” Kerry holds her dog, a Louis Vuitton purse, clacking car keys and a large coffee cup with her name printed on it in light blue. “I’m going to take my baby and leave.” 

Candace says goodbye and the door chimes as Kerry exits. She lets out a sigh then switches chairs so she can sit on the one that doesn’t squeak with every swivel. Candace usually takes the computer on the left, farthest away from the lobby camera, as she scrolls through casting calls and eats Kerry’s large back of Antioxidant Nut Mix. She’s been to one audition since the incident. It was for a supporting female role in a non-profit donation blood center commercial. Candace wore a white t-shirt and jeans and straightened her hair. A month later, she hadn’t heard back and had no auditions since. 

Now, she scrolls mindlessly down the casting call list, chewing on almonds and cashews. Her mouse hovers over one audition for a lead in a short film. She reads the roles. Fiona, lead, female, 20-25, navigates life after getting pregnant, tries multiple times to miscarry, fails and accepts her fate. Candace wrinkles her nose. But what if she succeeded? She chews on her inner lip, closes out the page and returns to the humid laundry room. 

Candace thinks of dead babies in Neocutis’s lab, their skin cells retracted and placed under microscopes. Though she doesn’t know what happens next, her mind pictures test tubes filled with green and blue bubbling liquids, she knows it ends with that small blue bottle and Suzanne’s wrinkled hand reaching out to grab. She tosses the wet towels in the dryer and starts it. They spin and slam violently against the rotating walls. 

Thirty minutes until the rush comes again. Candace places two hands on the shaking dryer, trying to control a sudden wave of nausea when Remy comes in. 

“What’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?” Remy asks, leaning against the washer. 

“You’re still on break?” Candace ignores the joke. 

“What’s the difference?” Remy grins. 

Candace thinks for a second but is only brought back to her imaginary neocutis lab. Now, there’s lines of babies in liquid cylinders. Faint cries of infants echo through the white, sterile rooms. Candace blinks back to reality. 

“I don’t know.”

“You can’t hear an enzyme.” 

“You can hear a hormo–” Candace stops herself, then smiles to the floor. 

Remy cackles, brushes a hand on Candace’s back as she passes, then into her room where her client waits. Candace shakes her head, still smiling, but the nausea returns and she’s suddenly spinning with the wet, hot towels. Sweat slicks her forehead and she runs to the bathroom where she vomits dark red. She squints at the porcelain and sees that the color isn’t actually red at all, but hues of green from the leftover salad she had for lunch. 

Candace ditches the laundry and returns to the front desk. She sips water and stares aimlessly at the neocutis line. The phone rings but she lets it go on, scared someone is calling for her. Scared someone knows what she did. Her hand creeps back to her stomach and she takes another sip. The cold water travels down her throat and she remembers what that tea felt like as it slipped past her mouth into her stomach. 

It was hot, earthy and had little particles that clung to her teeth and gums until she rinsed. Four days passed and nothing happened. Candace thought of every possibility during those days. Of returning home and being a single mother in the small town she grew up in. Her heart twisted at the idea but after she drank that tea, she secretly hoped the baby would make it through, that nothing would happen at all. During those nights, she felt comfort in not being alone. Then morning came and she’d wish the opposite, terrified of what was changing inside her. 

On the fifth day Candace came to terms that the tea didn’t work, as she was instructed it should only take three, and she felt a little pride in carrying a small life. Storms were casted throughout LA and the streets flooded. Candace had an audition that night. She paid the taxi driver in quarters and ran inside a white brick building. The part was a woman who embraces her sexuality while on a rendezvous with a mysterious European man. As Candace waited in the room with a dozen other women who were much more beautiful and unique than her, she mouthed her lines until she was called inside.

The scene was short but intimate with words. Candace stood in front of two men and one woman with the script in hand, the ink running onto her pruney fingers. The woman eyed the deteriorating paper and the black ink. The scene started and one of the men spoke in a rich European accent that Candace couldn’t pinpoint to a location. A surprising rush of emotion came over her, along with a pain in her stomach, which she ignored as she was suddenly moved by the man’s voice. 

“But those types of flowers don’t grow on apple trees,” he said. Candace reacted to a story of his little daughter standing on her tippy toes, engulfed by the low-hanging array of branches and crisp red apples when the daughter pulled out the whitest, purest gardenia. “It was a miracle.”

“What a boring story,” Candace said, reading the script, but her eyes revealed the opposite.

They went on with the scene. The man stood and walked to Candace. 

He motioned his hand to recreate the bloomed gardenia, the glint in his eyes with the words pure and white. His daughter, the innocent creature of refined, picturesque goodness became a painting in her mind. How naive and simple as the sun shone on her. The European man lifted his hand and tucked a strand of hair behind Candace’s ear as he spoke. She stared into his eyes, full of ardor, then collapsed on the floor. 

The casting woman shrieked and Candace felt a warm liquid seep onto her thighs. Her vision blurred to black but she could hear them scattering. The chairs screamed against the cement floor. Papers rustled, pens dropped. The European man held her from behind and cursed beautifully under his breath. The smell of blood tickled Candace’s nose and she blinked at the floor, realizing what was happening and stood despite the pain. 

She apologized to the casting directors as she walked out, then to the girls who stared at her with open-mouths, and hobbled out to the damp night. No one followed her out, the streets were vacant from the storm and this time, she was truly alone. Candace sat on the curb and sobbed, her tears and blood mixing with the rare Los Angeles rain. 

“Hello?” a voice breaks through. “Are you alright?” 

Candace snaps back from the neocutis line to see Lauren, the influencer, tapping her nails on the white marble counter. 

“Yeah, sorry.” Candace mutters, and clicks on her ticket. “Tip on card or cash today?” 

Lauren tips twenty five in cash and walks out the door when Candace hears the beep of the washing machine and returns to the laundry room. The cycle is finished so she tosses in the dirty laundry then starts another. 

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