Donald Radcliffe looks at himself in the mirror and doesn’t like what he sees. It’s his face, you see, the lack of hair on it, particularly the lack of hair on his upper lip, just below his nose.
Since early childhood, Donald Radcliffe has associated male attributes—not just virility but honor—with the quality and grooming of a man’s mustache. He had imagined his adult self at the time with a thick growth of long mustache-hair, easily twirlible into strands. In his wildest imaginings, he could twirl the ends of his mustache into thick ropes that could be used for climbing, for fishing, or even, with the appropriate small clubs attached to the ends, as nunchucks during battles with schoolyard bullies.
But as it stands, Donald Radcliffe will never perform such heroics, as his is a face built to be cleanly shaved that could not grow so much as what is popularly known as a “child-molester” mustache, try though he might. And this is, he is convinced, why he does not have a girlfriend to this day.
Which is why he invented Stachio.
Karen Johnson-Jones does not have a boyfriend, either–a fact she, too, laments as she looks in the mirror. For her, it’s her breasts. When she takes off only her shirt to look at them, she has to strain her eyes to convince herself that she isn’t a boy, and sometimes even then she feels the need to rub her legs together just to be sure.
This is not the person she wanted to be. I’m a woman, she thinks, and I want the pectoral protrusions to prove it!
Why couldn’t she be more like her mother? Now there was a woman! Some of her earliest memories are of the various instruments and implements and affects her mother could produce from her cleavage, from money and keys and make-up pouches to CDs and small furry animals and sandwiches. Once—she was sure of it—Karen Johnson-Jones had seen her mother emerge from her chest of wonders with a bottle of 1979 Horace Landing Pinot Grigio. It was the stuff of legends!
And yet here was her daughter, unable to squeeze the two together well enough to hold a penny aloft. Disgraceful!
Which was why she invented her alter-ego, Bigtits.
These two, Bigtits and Stachio, represent what these two poor unfortunate souls wish they could look like. We haunt their dreams and taunt their memories with visions of what might have been. Are we right? Correct? Who cares? We are alive and we are having fun!
On this of all days, though, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones both have laundry to do and, conveniently (for this, at least) neither have the facilities and so are forced both to make their separate ways to the local Laundromatic, where they are destined to meet each other for the first time.
Now, Donald Radcliffe and Karen Johnson-Jones would be perfect for each other. Their interests and opinions align, their quirks match up; you know it, I know it, the laundromat knows it, inasmuch as the laundromat knows anything. There’s just one thing standing in their way. Well, two: Bigtits and Stachio.
You see, he sees her and he thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman.” But any time Donald Radcliffe thinks “Hot damn, that’s a fine-looking woman,” he knows that she’s out of his league, because he doesn’t have a mustache. So he does his best not to even look at her. He’s not there to look anyway, right? He’s there to do laundry. Meanwhile, Karen Johnson-Jones looks at this nice-looking boy and her mind starts to work at it, chipping away, until she realizes this nice-looking boy isn’t looking at her. Why isn’t he looking at her? Oh, I know. It’s because he would rather be looking at Bigtits.
Bigtits has wiles, you see, of a feminine variety, a way of bouncing her bosom to draw the eye. And Stachio? Why, he sees a fine-looking woman like that and, hot damn, he will twirl his mustache until she throws her number at him—though, admittedly, several other things would probably have to happen as well before that.
As each of them struggles with their machines, they soon realize they are struggling with us, their deepest fears keeping them from acting, from making a move, yet all the while, they find their eyes keep seeking one another out, much as they try keeping them to themselves until finally he looks up and sees her looking at him and once he’s looking at her, she smiles.
This should be the happy ending. Their time has come now, right?
But there’s still one more step left to make.
They do their folding standing next to each other and lingered long enough looking at each other and lingered long enough looking at each other’s catchy T-shirts to warrant explanations.
“Oh, yeah,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “I got this at an Aardvark on Toast concert a couple years back. It’s actually a boys’ shirt, but that’s great ’cause, like…” She gestured at her figure.
But he seemed confused.
“No chest,” she helped, “Nothing to see here.”
“Nothing to see?”
“My breasts. They’re kinda… not a thing…”
“Oh. I really hadn’t noticed.”
It seemed an ambiguous statement that could go either way, but something about the way he said it plunged a knife deep down between Bigtits’s breasts, past the breadcrumbs, lost freshman boys and broken dreams, and cracked her ribcage, piercing her very soul.
“Oh,” said Karen Johnson-Jones, “Well, thanks, for… um… not noticing that.”
They continued folding until Karen Johnson-Jones asked “So do you have a girlfriend?”
It took Donald Radcliffe by surprise, giving him hope and provoking Stachio to use one side to lasso his attentions to his own insecurities (all the while twirling the other). “No,” he sighed.
To which, Karen Johnson-Jones: “Oh… why not?”
And even just the fact that she asked it and smiled when he turned his clean-shaved face to her, pulled both strands of Stachio’s facial armament all the way around his head and strangled Donald Radcliffe’s insecurities with his own mustache, allowing him to reply: “I don’t know. Guess I just haven’t found the right flat-chested girl.”
This made her smile and they both lived happily ever after, leaving Bigtits and Stachio’s mangled corpses on the floor of the laundromat.
Polypsyches 
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