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.

The Yard Light

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