Oh My Stars

Chapter One On her sixteenth birthday, violet mathers nearly bled to death in a thread factory. The "incident," as it was referred to in the company's 1935 logbook, happened on the graveyard shift, just before break time, when the pounding and the whirring and the squeaking of the machines had crescendoed into a percussion concert conducted by the devil himself. Lamont Travers, the foreman, told her later in the hospital that the worst accidents always happen before break; people can't wait to smoke their cigarettes or drink their coffee and talk about whose man or whose woman had done who the wrongest. Violet hadn't cared about any of that; she wanted only to cut into the marble cake RaeAnn Puffer had brought, wanted only to hear her co-workers raise their tired, smoky voices in a chorus of "Happy Birthday." Excited and jumpy as a puppy with a full bladder, the birthday girl broke the cardinal rule of the Marcelline Thread factory, the cardinal rule printed in capital letters on at least three signs posted on the dusty brick walls: do not attempt to clear or repair the machinery without first turning machinery off. She was running the Klayson, a big reliable machine that sweat oil as it wound and cut dozens of spools of thread. There were women who were possessive of their machines (Lula Wendell even named hers and explained that whenever the machine spit out thread or overwound, it was because "Pauletta" was on her monthly). Violet had formed no deep attachments to the masses of metal, preferring the job of "runner" and working whatever machine needed running. When she ran the Klayson, she felt as if she was wrangling a harmless but stubborn old cow, and it was almost with affection that she scolded the machine when it huffed and burped to a stop. "Now, come on, gal, I ain't got time for this," said Violet, and with one hand on the Klayson's metal flank, she stuck the other up into its privates, feeling for the tangled clot of thread. There was a yank then and the benign old cow turned into a crazed bull, sucking her arm up between its jaws. A flash fire of shock and pain exploded at Violet's elbow joint and in her brain, and just as red hot was her outrage: But it's my birthday! RaeAnn, who was next to Violet on the floor, screamed, and Polly Ball, the only woman on the floor to have gone to college (she would have graduated from UNC-Raleigh with a degree in art history had she not been summoned home after her father died), thought: that's the scream in the Edvard Munch painting. Violet too heard the scream even as she fainted, even as the weight of her falling body helped further tear skin from skin and bone from bone. When she woke up in the hospital, her stub-arm wrapped and bleeding like a rump roast in butcher's paper, the screaming was still inside her headwas in her head for more years than she cared to count. When the morphine curtain lifted on her consciouness, her first thought was: some sweet sixteenth. Violet should have known better; in her short history she had learned that expectations only deepened the disappointment that inevitably stained every special occasionnot that many were celebrated. In excavating her mind for memories of parties and presents, she'd only been able to dig up those concerning her sixth birthday, when her mother baked her a yellow cake iced with raspberry jelly and gave her a real present to unwrap. It was a rag doll Violet immediately christened Jellycakes, commemorating what she told her mother was "the best birthday cake and the best birthday doll ever ever ever ever made." The remembrance of that lone celebration was ruinedLandvik, Lorna is the author of 'Oh My Stars', published 0000 under ISBN 9780345472311 and ISBN 0345472314.