'Radium Girls' by Kathryn Silver-Hajo

Those trusting young women moistened and pointed their brushes with pursed lips, dropped tiny dots of radium on the digits of watch faces, magicking them to glow a luminous green in the dark. Their meticulous labors aided the war effort as well, bringing light to cold, lifeless military dials. They’d wear their favorite frocks to work, let the radioactive dust coat them so they’d glow like fireflies when they danced with their sweethearts at night, their broad smiles lighting up the room with radiant teeth as they twirled ‘round and ‘round. But it wasn’t long before those glowing ivories began to ache. Gums to ulcerate, bleed, and ooze. Jaws to crumble and fall like soldiers in the trenches. Yet, people craved those luminescent watches and business was booming, thanks to the radium girls. One by one the companies commissioned special studies which concluded that mysterious illnesses were the cause of their trouble. Come hell or heavy water, it couldn’t be the curative miracle called radium. Some even saw fit to implicate the women themselves, proclaim that their symptoms were the result of syphilis, that the women’s shameless behavior was to blame. Even when science shone the hard light of truth on the dangers of the element, the companies soldiered on, happy to sacrifice young women to the cause of their profit-making as long as they possibly could. Until the dying women decided to sue and their former employers began dropping like the jaws of the radium girls.

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Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s work appears in Atticus Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her publications include flash collection Wolfsong and novel Roots of The Banyan Tree. Kathryn lives in Providence, Rhode Island with her husband and curly-tailed pup, Kaya. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo