Uncanny, March/April 2026
At the heart of the story is a neighborhood laundry-mat run by the stingy Mr. Lee, whose flickering neon sign alternates between two spellings—LA NDRY and L UNDRY—each corresponding to one of his two mysterious valets. Landry is all warmth and polish, a figure of comfort and forward momentum who makes customers feel seen and held. Lundry is his brooding counterpart, haunted by loss, tending a basket of unclaimed things, and attuned to the doubts people carry in the seams of their lives. Completing the trio is Mat, a serene, coin-dispensing presence who meditates on a welcome mat and offers change in every sense.
The narrator is Josephine Hong—Jo—a young Korean-American woman who has developed a drunken habit of doing laundry whenever she’s unsettled. She is currently paralyzed by a life-altering decision: Dr. Gagnier, a French oceanic explorer whose pirate radio broadcasts captivated Jo and her childhood sweetheart Moe when they were young, has invited Jo to join a five-year submarine expedition. The offer feels like a dream intercepted from her deepest self—but Jo cannot bring herself to tell her formidable grandmother, Mrs. Hong, known as Grams, and cannot fully commit to going or staying. With nine days left to respond, she is stuck.
On a night dominated by Lundry, Jo encounters what Moe calls a “Laundry Tulpa”—a shadow figure that crawls from a dryer during a blackout, apparently a manifestation of her unresolved what-ifs. Lundry explains that prolonged hesitation causes these psychic splinters to separate from a person and take on a life of their own. In a later visit, Lundry uses a hidden lavender detergent to trigger a vision sequence in which all the washing machines spin simultaneously, their portholes becoming windows into cherished memories—Grams defending young Jo at school with jade-ringed fists, childhood nights with Moe dreaming up impossible sea creatures, tender moments of their shared life. The upper row of portholes glimpses alternate futures, including one in which Moe moves on happily without her. Jo is too frightened to look at her own.
The story reaches its emotional climax when Grams goes missing for a day—she had merely silenced her phone while retrieving her fox stole from Mr. Lee’s dry cleaner. But Jo’s spiral during that search breaks something open: she finally calls Moe, though he doesn’t answer; stumbles upon his completed mural—an angler fish resembling Grams with young Jo and Moe perched on its teeth—and weeps until he finds her. The reunion is wordless and warm. When they locate Grams at Mr. Lee’s shop, she drapes her nine-tailed fox stole around Jo’s shoulders and reveals, without needing to be told, that Jo is going to sea.
The story closes in two registers: a present-tense flood scene in which Landry hits the rarely-used permanent press cycle and all the machines burst open, filling the laundry-mat with iridescent bubbles that reflect infinite versions of Jo, Moe, and Grams—which they all joyfully pop together. Then a future-tense coda, in which Jo is aboard a yellow submarine years later, learning of Grams’s death through a telegram, watching lost garments and imagined sea creatures drift past the porthole—and finally, perhaps, glimpsing her mother in the deep.
Sunwoo Jeong is a Korean writer living in NYC and Seoul in alternation. She is an academic linguist by day and an author by night. Her work has appeared in Split Lip, Fantasy, Lightspeed, and Uncanny Magazine, among others, and has been included in the Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist. A Kundiman Fellow and a Clarion alum, Sunwoo is currently working on a collection of linked short stories and a novel.