This choice: Earth. Earlier than the 1950's. • Go Back...
Chapter #2
Some time during the industrial revolution
by: Unknown
The body was not found for many hours. The woman's face, ghostly in the surrounding night, stared blindly up at the starless night, completely alone. She must have been very poor as she lay in woolen garments, sodden and mouldy, instead of the new cotton dresses which didn't itch and infect.
But she was beyond feeling now. She was stone cold dead. It could be seen by the marks on her neck that she had been strangled.
A child came running up the street on the way to his work in a factory as morning slowly arrived. When he saw the lifeless shape of a woman, lying on the floor, he stopped running but he did not scream or cry. At first he thought she was a drunkard, but sidling past cautiously, he saw the blank eyes and greying skin. Even then, though he froze, he did not cry or scream. He was only nine but this was not the first body he had seen. He had watched in horror, just the other day, as the lady that collected up the thread from the floor with him got her dress caught in the terrifying machine. She had been pulled up with the swing of it and the blood had dripped onto his little hand.
His stared at her for a moment. She had dirty blond hair like his mother but she was much prettier and her face was less angular. He checked her for coins but she had none with her. There was a necklace about her skinny neck though- odd as she looked like such a poor woman. Uneasily touching her cold skin, the boy removed the neclace and studied its value.
The boy gasped. Could it be real gold? No, that is not possible- the woolen dress, the ill-fed thinness of her wrists- yet it shon like a tear in the sunlight.
He opened the tiny locket with his cleanest fingers and what he saw inside made him gasp once more. It was a carving in some white material of a door. The boy knew which door it was as many poor factory boys did. It was the door of the orphanage with its cruel lion-head knocker.
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