UN-DARK
The brush point must be sharp and delicate. Moisten the tip between your lips, touch it to the surface of the paint, gather a translucent green droplet. Wrists steady, fingers poised. Tiny lines, equidistant, little numerals, careful hands. They called it Un-Dark, this paint we marked time with. You could read a watch even in the dark, all thanks to the glow of radium, and us. We were light-givers, time-keepers. We were girls with hands small and nimble enough for the work.
We painted thousands of dials in a day – lip, dip, paint; lip, dip, paint. After a while, it became automatic. We chattered while we worked, sentences punctuated by a moment of silence for each new mark.
Did you hear – Johnny might be taking Alice – to the dance tonight?
Alice? But ain’t he and Daisy – sweet on each other?
Oh yeah, I saw em having a little – rendezvous round the back – of the boarding house –
She sneak out the window – down that old tree – like you and I used to?
Oh yeah, oldest trick in the book that –
Haven’t the nuns – worked it out yet?
The nuns care less – than you think they do honey – anyway you coming?
Tonight? I think so – got a new dress – pretty little silk thing –
You gonna make it glow? -
We always made it glow. They didn’t mind us taking a little extra paint – no harm to them in the long run – so we’d use the leftover on our nails, our buttons, for lacy little paintings on the hems of our dresses, star trails painted around each other’s eyes, til we flitted into the dance halls like fae.
Once we painted our teeth and spent all night grinning like ghouls, watching the paint swirl into our champagne and streak down our chins in luminescent rivulets, sending ourselves into hysterical giggles over our smiles “lighting up the room”. You could always tell who’d been kissing a radium girl. We stained them with light.
Radium didn’t make us rich, but it made us beautiful. Paid better than most other jobs, so those without families to feed dressed ourselves in furs and silk stockings, treated ourselves to absinthe and sweets.
It wasn’t long ago that the boys were using our watches on the battlefields – childhood sweethearts with numbered faces kissed by us, glowing in the darkness as the bullets ricocheted. Now they were back and keeping time with those same watches, calling us “ghost girls” because of the way we glowed. At first it was just stains and decorations, spilled droplets caught in the crevices of our nails, lips lacquered in light – but after a while the glow wouldn’t leave us. When we left the factory it was a constellation shattering – each girl a pinprick of light, twinkling down the street. It seemed to be coming from within us, no longer on the surface but some internal radiance. The managers had told us, when we first signed on, that radium would put roses in our cheeks. We assumed they were right, that this radiance was a sign of vitality. It certainly felt like it. A group of glimmering girls, what could be more natural? felt like it. A group of glimmering girls, what could be more natural?
What could be more natural than our glowing teeth coming free, dropping like fireflies into our hands? What could be more natural than abscesses blooming like flowers in our gums? We’re girls. Sweetness lives inside of us, so of course our jaws should turn to honeycomb. Of course our crumbling bones should seep light. Of course we should break when touched, become hollow, become fragile.
Make it pretty. Dab at the blood with floral handkerchiefs. Cover the smell of rot with perfume. When you see yourself glowing ghostly in the mirror, moon-faced and waning, don’t scream. When your spine collapses in on itself, be grateful for the excuse to remain horizontal. You opened your lips for this. You wanted to be radiant. Do not fault them when you become irradiated. The difference is semantic.
You opened your lips for this. You opened
your mouth for every minute-hand, every hour,
you opened your mouth
so the boys would know what time they died,
so the boys would pick you up on time,
so you could steal sips of the miracle-tonic,
radium, a hundred thousand a gram, aren’t you lucky to get a taste? their reservoir of light, their gleaming heap
that they shield
themselves from with lead and leather
but you
open your mouth for.
And that first girl didn’t drown in light, she died of syphilis, what a shame,
her jugular rotting til a blaze of poppies sprung from her neck.
Her own fault. Wasn’t the un-dark, was whatever else she did in the dark, whatever else she opened her mouth for in the dark.
And that second girl they’ll call syphilis too, and the third, and the fourth
But maybe they shouldn’t say they hired so many sluts
so the fifth and sixth and seventh are just garden-variety tragedies,
weak lungs, doomed from birth,
never meant to live past twenty.
At least they got to gleam for a while,
Can’t you be grateful?
And look how pretty,
they made her gravestone glow,
Radium Girl no #17,
Died Of Natural Causes,
Taken Too Soon,
Taken into the Dark,
Passage Paid By Un-Dark,
Path Paved in Un-Dark,
Private Burial and Pity Payment Presented
by Un-Dark
and good little ghost-girls visiting their friends’ graves at midnight
can read it all with no light,
look at those letters gleam!
oh the blessing, too full of un-dark
to feel pain
when your jaw splinters under the dentist’s touch
shards scattering over the tiles
and he lifts your bones gleaming clean from your face
focus on the light. you got to be
light.
when your knees bloom tumours the size of oranges
bone growing on bone little radium bees carving channels through you
pollinating those blossoms that grow into fruit
think of yourself as abundant. a garden of a girl.
and when they bury you (rot you irradiate you ruin you)
the ground (your bones your honeycomb bones)
will glow
un-dark.