Rags

An old woman twists a rag over a bucket and the dampness of the rag lessens. She's sitting in the livingroom of an old house on a chair in front of a low table. It's not clear how old she is. The rag is still damp, but less so now that she's twisted it, and at least mold probably won't bloom under the rag if she leaves it there on the low table spread in a rumpled square, so there she puts it, and now her hands are twisting another rag, steadily centered over the bucket. There are many rags on the table. They're all wet, and it's not clear why they're wet. Maybe water vapor collects on them during foggy nights with the windows left open, or maybe the roof of the old house is letting rain water pass through the part of itself that flies directly over the low table. It's not clear why the rags are wet and it's also not clear how old the old woman is. Sometimes she's as young as five, and often she's sixteen or twenty-nine, and it would not be exactly untrue to say she's about eighty years old. The rags are always damp, no matter how hard they're twisted by the old woman, at first expressing a floodlet that hydrogen-bond-monkey-bars down her hand's skin to the downmost knucklepoints and fingertips and then falls in seven or eight diamitotic streams off into the air above the bucket, after which she has to work hard to get more drops out, hard enough that she grunts. It's not clear why she's twisting the rags, because the house is being sold, and she'll have to move if she's even still alive by then, and the table probably won't make it in the move, so it shouldn't matter if the table gets a little moldy. The rags are always damp, as if they are not essentially mere rags, but rather they are essentially damp rags. Maybe at night the old woman gets out of bed and goes out to the garden to fill a sprinkling can from the hose and then pours the water onto the rags, and in the morning she forgets what she's done. The rags seem like they ought to be dry, though, it'd be better if they were not wet. It's not that there's anything wrong with water, it's just that the water shouldn't stay in the rags so long. Maybe the rags want to be wet, so they crawl around until they find the bucket and take a bath while the old woman isn't looking and crawl back to their place on the low table before she comes to the livingroom where the low table is sitting. That would explain why they're all rumpled, they've been crawling around too much. It's not clear how old the old woman is. It's clear that she's old. It's not rainingtime outside. It's not clear why the old woman is twisting the rags, but it is a relief when a rag gets really thoroughly wrung out because it might dry on its own for a few hours, though it's always at least a little damp and always eventually gets damper. Maybe a few times each day a giant freezes time and picks up the old house with the old woman in it and dunks the whole thing in the ocean and then pours the water out before replacing the house on its foundations and thawing time back out. Although, the rags aren't salty like the ocean so maybe it's a freshwater lake that the giant dunks the old house in. It's not clear why the old woman is twisting the rags if the giant is just going to dunk the old house with the rags in lake water again.

Use a blowtorch, old woman, use a blowtorch to dry the rags out, that will be faster, don't worry, you can't set essentially damp rags on fire even with a blowtorch.

*The word "rainingtime" was discovered by WG.