Silence For the Dead

by Simone St. James

Any man who attempted to reach the mainland on foot would be risking his neck. I wondered whether anyone had tried and fallen to his death in the churning ocean below.

Even when I tried, I had never had an easy time sounding obedient,

the gloves hid the scar that traveled from the soft web between my thumb and fingers down to the base of my wrist.

If it doesn’t harm anyone, I’d always thought, it’s fair game.

the mad are lacking in moral judgment,

In every group of girls I’d ever encountered—girls working together on a factory shift, girls living together in boardinghouses—the girl who was engaged had the highest status.

There had been grumblings that hems six inches from the ground were too short to be proper on a girl, part of the immorality we girls had learned during the war, though the grumblings never discouraged us from wearing the shortest hems we could find.

What had I gotten myself into? And what kind of girl, I wondered, left her boots behind when she left a job?

“Mr. Mabry suffers from delusions, as do many of the men here. Mind over matter, Nurse Weekes. Mind over matter.

I listened to them and remembered Matron’s words. I think that someone desperate might do. I wondered what made Martha and Nina—and Boney—so desperate that they were the only girls to stay.

Perhaps she’d be angry, or perhaps just disappointed in me. Most people were, sooner or later.

“Everyone knows that men who try to kill themselves are weak. Aren’t they?” “Oh, no,” she replied in earnest. “Certainly not. He’s just had a terrible time like the rest of them, that’s all. The war made some of the men sick. The unlucky ones. It isn’t their fault. They got sick, that’s all. And so we nurse them.”

I tried to take Dr. Thornton’s measure, as I always took the measure of men who had the authority to sack me.

I should be afraid. But when, at sixteen years old, you’ve been held down on the dirty linoleum by a man twice your size, the blade of a kitchen knife put in your mouth as he tells you to be quiet or he’ll cut out your tongue, something inside you shifts.

I turned to them. “It just seems . . . it just seems that it isn’t actually treatment the men get. Medical treatment, I mean. They’re just . . . motivated to behave.” Like in a prison.

Books were a means to an end, even novels; for the more a person knew, the less she could be taken in.

I’d always craved solitude, even on a crowded factory floor. Solitude was safe.

I asked him, locking my gaze with his. His was so mad I almost felt the madness coming out of him and blooming inside me.