The Haunted Traveler May 2017 Edition

mark beneath her left eye: pink, in the shape of a teardrop.
She summoned me, for she had to go to the toilet,
and I let her step out and do what was needed-even
though there wasn’t much left of the day. There were
just seventeen more minutes before all two hundred
and forty women and girls on my floor collected their
wages, and flung themselves into the early spring evening.
The next foreman over, Kelly, was heavy-handed,
hungry, and had already forced out another foreman
and taken his girl-approach. His eye hawked on Rosa’s
empty chair.
“It’s too late in the day for a break.”
I looked beyond him, toward his area. One of his
girls was on a chair, shaking a hanging light, which had
apparently gone out. A tiny spark shot into the air.
“Perhaps you should be paying mind to your own
charges.”
He glanced at them, then back at me. He nodded at
my cigarette.
“Extinguish that.”
He watched as I took one more puff, and then tossed
the nub the few feet toward the cistern. He retreated
with a grunt. I anxiously awaited Rosa’s return. At first,
there was a tingle in the nose, a tickle in the throat,
an itch in the eyes. Then there were pigeon-colored,
greasy clouds of smoke, reeking of oil and singed cotton.
Before long, flames swept across piles of cuttings
on the floor, hopscotched to an unused table, leapt to
some hanging patterns, and licked at the corner ceiling.
I did not attempt to put it out; I was transfixed by
it, a ravenous bird spreading its wings.
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