Short Story Writing Contest Adult Winner: Jordan Long
Thank you to everyone who submitted entries to our Short Story Writing Contest during National Novel Writing Month. Writers were asked to follow the theme, At one point(e).
We were thrilled with the response and are excited to announce the winners from each category:
Our winners received Library prize packs and we will be publishing all three winning short stories during the month of January, here on MidPointe Library’s blog, The Pointe. Please check back to read them!
The final piece we would like to present is the winner of the Adult category, Afterglow by Jordan Long.
Afterglow by Jordan Long
This is a ghost story. But, when you think about it, aren’t they all?
It didn’t rain on the day they put me in the ground, the gravediggers struggling under the weight of my coffin, lined with lead, as they lowered it. I’ve always thought it would be more poignant to be buried under a deluge from the heavens, as if the world was mourning the dearly departed. But the sun was out that day, reflecting off the handles my pallbearers had grasped and the buttons of my husband’s coat. Birds sang me into the earth.
Later, when they planted the sod over the spot of bare soil that marked my plot, the grass turned brown and died. They tore it all up, poured a layer of concrete, and tried again. That time, the grass lived, emerald green.
This is a ghost story, but I wasn’t always a ghost. I had been a girl, vibrant and alive, silly and flighty, beautiful like all youthful things are. And then later, glowing like the shine off a cat’s eye in the darkness, or the way moonlight glowed through closed white curtains when I would lay awake at night.
So, I guess the question is, at what point did this thing change from the story of a young woman and her first job, to that of a coruscant wraith? If I had to go back through the memories of the last few years and cherry pick that specific moment out, I think I know what it would be. That very first time the woman at the factory guided me to put the camel hair paint brush between my lips and form it with my saliva to a fine point, dipping it next into the off-white powder, painting the first number onto the watchface, and then, still saturated with the powder that was supposed to herald the future, into the hollow of my mouth once more.
***
“It tastes like a farm smells the first time,” the older woman told me on my first day, waving her own, slightly worn brush in the air between us as she spoke. “But after that, you just taste the powder. It’s a little bitter, but mostly gritty. You get used to it pretty fast.”
The watch face laid on the table in front of me, black and empty with possibilities. I held a new brush, the bristles still stiff, and next to the watch face, a wide, round vial of the radium paint powder. I expected it to be glittering and green, so the white gritty dust I was given had been a disappointment. It wasn’t until that night, when work was done and we pulled the shades of our factory floor closed, that the true brilliance of it all became apparent.
The other girls... well, they shone like fireflies in the darkened room, the outlines of their painted lips and nails tiny, bright phantoms, and their dresses and skin subtly gleaming, so pale that someone might miss it if they weren’t paying attention. The girls liked to paint themselves to surprise their husbands and lovers when the lights went out. Who could resist a glowing girl, invigorated by the world's new panacea, radium?
They would kiss the poison from their lips, but never took enough into their own beings to save their glowing girls the fate that was to be bestowed on them.
“They call it lip pointing,” the woman on the other side of me said, flecks of paint on her bow- shaped upper lip. When she smiled at me, I could see the void of a missing tooth, halfway back on the right side of her mouth.
I don’t remember when I first slid that brush between my teeth, but that first taste of a clean brush wasn’t the one that sealed my fate. It was the second lip point, molecules of radium permeating the mucous membranes of my mouth, that made me a ghost. I dipped, and I licked, and then I did it again, painting the days, and then the years, of my life away onto the faces of so many pocket watches.
I marked a thousand twelves, and traded them for my future grandchildren. A thousand elevens, and with them, any possibility of children. A thousand tens, and for them, I gave every tooth in my skull. Prices I was charged, yet ignorant of, until I was spitting canines and bicuspids into the factory sink, blood covering any trace of the luminosity I had painted onto my lips the night before.
They paid us one cent per watch face, good pay for easy work that came with the glamorous upside of becoming a Radium Girl. Our peers said it like it was a title; Engineer, Surgeon, Ballerina, Radium Girl. People would press their faces against the windows as the Radium Girls would walk home, beautiful spectors on the otherwise dark streets.
Radium Girls—or, sometimes, we were known by our other moniker—Ghost Girls. I did say that this was a ghost story, didn’t I?
I met my husband at a dance hall where I wasn’t the only Ghost Girl, but I was the one who caught his eye. When he twirled me across the floor, the radium paint flecked off my fingers and onto the shoulders of his suit jacket. He brushed them off as casually as anything. Years later, as I was dying, he would stroke my skin in fevered patterns, and it seemed as if he was trying to brush off the now-invisible bits of radium that had long since sunk into me. The only thing he sent floating to the floor in those times were the strands of hair that fell from my scalp.
That was my first sign, the hair loss in the porcelain white sink of our new shotgun home, filaments like thin black snakes, more than ever before. I thought nothing of it then. After all, as women, we are taught that our bodies will change like the tides as we grow. Even as our manes turn the color of iron we are still changing, so why should some hair loss at twenty years of age frighten me? Luckily, in the 1920s, short, finger wave curls were all the rage, so I had it chopped off at the ears. It was very stylish, and when the strands continued to drift into the sink, they were much easier to wash down the drain.
When the first stool turned up empty at the factory, word around the floor was that she had a dental emergency. A lost molar, a mouthful of blood...it was in a lot of our futures at that point, but we continued to lip point into the paint, gossiping up and down the lines as more and more seats were left bare.
Then, we stood in all black as they buried the first of us. We hadn’t seen her in months, but those who visited her on the last days whispered things that gave me nightmares for weeks–her jaw was black and blue, and it hung limp on her face like a puppet’s.
‘Syphilis’, her death certificate read in angry, scarlet letters. A Hester Prynne for the new age. Typical, that they would mark her death with shame, to cover up their own sins. It was never syphilis.
I wish I would have seen the truth right in front of my eyes back then, even if it would have been too late for me. Even more, I wish I had been one of the girls brave enough to fight back when the truth came out, knowing their clocks had run down but still battling like Valkyries until radium dragged them into their graves, kicking and screaming.
I didn’t go kicking or screaming. I didn’t rail against injustice in the courtroom, wrapped in layers of blankets to ward off the cold of decay. Some Ghost Girls even came, rolled in on their literal deathbeds, and testified for the truth that would do them no good, save them no pain, but only because it was the right thing to do. I sat in the crowd, hands folded in my lap, and tears streaking down my face, too afraid to face my own mortality.
“Her bones are irradiated,” one of the experts said, “And they will be for a thousand years.”
That was the crux of it. Our damned bones. Tricked by the radium into taking it into themselves instead of calcium, those shimmering particles turning our once solid, white skeletons pockmarked and phosphorescent beneath our skin. Hollow, like those of a birds.
I know...I know for certain, that when our stories are written, they will write of the heroes among us. The warriors of the Radium Girls. They deserve it, of course, for their perseverance to the bitter end, but their tragically triumphant ghosts were the only ones who walked out of the factory doors those days past. They were lions, and I was a lamb, but our honeycombed bones will still glow the same into eternity.
As my time ticked away, I agonized over that singular moment, that point of no return that was my downfall. Then, even further back, tracing the decisions that led me to that factory floor and the radium paint on my tongue. If I hadn’t visited that restaurant, if I hadn’t attended that play, if I hadn’t dreamt of enough money to buy the dress I had seen in the window on 8th Avenue... which change would have saved me?
When I was alone I wore my trauma like a cloak, hiding from the calendar counting days beneath it. There was love, but not really, because it was dressed as grief. I was already so full of grief that it spilled out of my pores, from the corners of my eyes, blooming from me in wracking sobs that I feared would shatter the brittleness that still held me together.
What moment... what point... what decision?
God, if only I could go back, I would do it better this time. I would plant the seeds of a better life in the cracks of those bad decisions. I would be somebody new. I could shed this fleece and beneath, I would be a lion.
But, this is a ghost story, and by the time they buried me, they knew to line my coffin with lead. At least I wasn’t one of the early ones who they had to exhume, silently bearing the indignity of being jerked back into the open air, lungs long still and unable to breath the fresh air just one last time. They dug them up dressed in hazard suits, alien and detached, and buried them again in metal, so not even the warm, rich earth will be able to embrace them at the end of times.
We remain radiant even as the roots of trees grow around us, never breaking through our metal cages. Radiant, even as my husband’s new wife stands on the edge of the cemetery while he brings their children to the foot of my plot to lay down flowers, guilt still skittering through his mind every few years, only assuaged when he reminds himself that I once loved yellow roses. Radiant, even when the new wife is afraid that even a minute at my tomb will harm her children.
She’ll never know that I was once lightness, luminous and brilliantly alive, or the way I’d paint my husband’s name on the inside of my arm with radium paint long before we wed, still stealing kisses during my lunch break behind the factory.
So, this is a ghost story. Mine, even when I was still treading about the streets with the living– breathing, eating, laughing until my belly hurt. I was just an echo, the milliseconds of forward motion after a car drives off a cliff before the fall. Even now, if a Geiger counter is laid on my grave, it will tick like a fluttering heartbeat, but don’t be fooled... I am as still as night air after the year's first snowfall. Motionless, and luminous. Phosphorescent, and phantasmal. As inevitable as the afterglow that lingers once the sun sets.
