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UNDARK
Radium Luminous Material. Shines in the Dark.
Undark is a combination of zinc sulfide and radium. The latter is used in such minute quantities that it is absolutely harmless.
—From an advertisement by the United States Radium Corporation
I could hardly believe the manner in which they worked. …
There is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.
—Marie Curie
The dial-painter strips for the examination. She can see already that
something is wrong.
The professor stands in the corner, breathing through the thin lawn
of his sleeve.
In the windowless room, light escapes from her skin like a cry. He
takes notes
and doesn’t speak. Later, she makes her way through the dark trees
at her parents’ house, miles from the factory in Orange, New Jersey.
Hours with rough cotton washcloths, water hot as the pipes would
give, and still
she feels weight on her skin, an invisible greenish-pearl. Steam in
her lungs,
hot and heavy, like the radium wasn’t. She’s going down to the lake to
be alone,
she tells her mother, but she doesn’t. No more water. No more trying
to scrub it away. The other girls had laughed, sucking paint into
their mouths.
In dark ecstatic bedrooms, they’d gasped bright O’s, love visible as
a moon.
She’d been embarrassed at the stories. Following their voices on the breeze,
she opens her mouth as wide as it goes. She’d been quiet on the bench,
hating the loud girls, the louder laughs at her red face. She painted
more watches
than anyone—thousands of faces. She grew almost proud of the glowing
spidery numbers, pin-sharp brush. She makes her way. Through the
dark trees,
she can almost see the rows of girls. The pine needles wobble
like her left hand, painting the small nails of her right with luminous
radium paint. The needles sway like loose teeth. Her tongue
touches the steep curve of her gums, and the distant stars are all
she sees,
bright as watch paint, dolls’ eyes, the numbers on every
Washington Avenue
shop front. Everywhere, something is undark. Stars so bright
the sky
looks darker, the way the X-ray’s honeycomb of black holes
had made the white bone shine whiter. They cannot light the way
she’s gone
or where she’s going. The light comes from her fingertips. From inside
her mouth. She knows they will die first, the other girls. The ones
who’d brought home paint in their handbags, dabbed it on
underclothes.
They’d wanted it. Had she? She makes her way through the dark trees.
She’d loved the work. The beautiful dials, the money she spent
on cold milk,
ribbon for Eleanor’s hair. She could have stayed in her parents’ home,
read the story in newsprint. It’s wrong, she thinks, but she feels a kind
of pride.
Thousands of faces, all glowing like stars. She goes down to the lake to
be alone.
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FARM HOUSE
1.
I said I loved the sun-hot dirt, but I r...
