Yard Light

Florence Friermuth has been looking at Mae Ruddock across a church for three years and has never once done a thing about it.There has not been room. Their father is a year and a half in the ground, the still is theirs the way a mortgage is yours, and the man who owns the copper sends a man in a gray suit every Tuesday to look at the yard and write in a little black book. Florence is twenty-seven and has been to Beaver Falls exactly never.Then the mill cuts forty-one men, the house above the fog line goes dark inside a week, and Mae comes down the hollow with a suitcase in each hand looking for work.Susie takes her on. Room, board, and what the house can spare on Thursdays. It is not a wage, and Florence says nothing about that, because she wants her under the roof so badly her back teeth ache with it.A standalone short story set three years before The Copper Line. Allegheny valley, moonshine, bootleggers and speakeasy money, in the hills of Prohibition-era Appalachia.Entirely sapphic. Complete in one sitting.