‘Likely the oldest business in the Crease, ‘The Whistling Wire’ is a pay-what-you want forest of umbrella-style clotheslines situated in and around the narrowest section of the valley. Historical accounts of ‘The Whistling Wire’ describe the titular sound as ‘…a soothing chord by which one might locate their forgotten linens in absolute darkness.’
Something has changed.
The laundry lines shriek, now. Unrelenting winds squeeze through the pass and turn the rusted posts in their bases, creating an absolute choir of screaming metal that, one has to admit, could be used to locate the destination in the dark from a mile or two away. Clothes left to dry in ‘The Whistling Wire’ come away stiffened and sometimes torn, nearly always marked by red-brown lines where the cloth has whipped against the degraded cords above and below their anchor points. This has long been the fashion in the Crease, not for any reason but that the denizens must dry their clothes somewhere and electricity in the sunken middle of America remains intermittent.
Clothes shaped by ‘The Whistling Wire’ have found a small audience of second-hand buyers in recent years, though little of what is sold can be verified as having once done time in the Crease’s moaning woods. At least one popular merchant has been exposed as having drawn the trademark lines on otherwise unremarkable pieces- another ploy to sell the idea of hardship to those unwilling to suffer it directly.
Come to the Crease and pay what you will. Know that the price is sometimes steeper than the tag suggests.
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
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