Mollie Maggia
( 12/21/1897 - 9/12/1922)
“If you place a Geiger counter over the grave of a Radium Girl, it will click for more than a thousand years.”
Before I was a ghost, I was sparkly.
I was a drop of glitter against the
sullen Jersey skyline.
I was all swishing skirts and angel glow.
Heads turned at my lighthouse lips while
My tongue caught on the sparkling sand
Stuck behind my teeth.
When boys called out to me,
I told them I was made of magic.
When we got home from work, the babies
would fawn at our dresses, at my flashy blush,
the stain on my lips, our real life fairy dust.
I was a glimmering, glittery Rosie girl with
undark on my nails.
Us sisters with our matching brushes,
matching dresses, matching blisters.
I was first to get the ulcers;
agonizing, leaving me
doubled over in my work dress, screaming-
wailing, as they sprinted with fiery feet
through my whole body, impossible
to pin down long enough for the
doctor to put it out. I start to haunt the
hospital, desperate for a doctor to listen,
to not label me some kind of slut,
not stick STDs on my chart, not send me
still puking, out to the sidewalk.
Hope ran out with the painkillers.
My sisters begged and pleaded,
the babies with their signs,
the eldest with her petitions,
but what are four women to a hospital?
What are women for if not for dying?
Doctors pulled my jaw from me like a stillborn.
My father sat in my hospital room and prayed
with my porous hands in his. He told me
he still loved my smile.
I couldn’t say it back.
Dylan Phillips is a dual degree undergraduate at the University of Central Florida, pursuing a Bachelors in English Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Screenwriting. Her work can also be found in The Cypress Dome Literary Journal, and she is an editorial intern at The Florida Review and Aquifer. When she isn’t writing, she is probably playing Dungeons and Dragons.
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