The Sunday Scaries
Volume 1, Number 38
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

Out of Mulberry Street

It was the brightest fuckin light I ever saw, like as if the sun jumped out and surprised you in the middle of the night. For a week or more I’d heard word of this fellow going around making mischief in all the alleys and slum houses below Fourteenth Street, but I never did see him myself until that night, and I can’t properly say I saw him then. I was drinking in a Mulberry Street saloon, not a usual haunt of mine, but thirst being what it was, and it was dark as hell, and loud with singing and some women laughing who looked better in the dark. I happened to be glancing toward the door, where just beyond you could see a little of the streetlamp through the dirty window, and I saw the door open and a fellow walked in holding some items in both hands. I thought, Jesus, he’s got a pistol to shoot up the place, and the next thing I know this light, like a blue knife slashing you across the eyes, and the women shouted and the brats all cried and before we knew what had happened he was gone.
          Now later I saw the photographs when he had them on exhibit way uptown in a Protestant church on Broadway at 71st Street. Me and my girl walked all that way and home again one afternoon to see the man talk, and he was a right moralizing man at that, to be sure, with unkind words for those of us doomed to spend our sad wee lives around the Five Points, though in fairness my girl thought he had a kind heart and was especially worried about the children, and it’s true that in the lantern light of his slides those babies gathered in their straw beds like a passel of rats were a most affecting sight.
          Naturally my girl and me were most inclined to see the portrait he had made of us in the saloon that night, since that was the very night we met, but on that occasion he did not display it. However, I approached the man himself after his sermon and he was most generous and opened a case he had with him and displayed a number of images that he had not chosen to present that day, and among them was the very one, and my girl and I both were sort of in a marvel about it, because as she said, this was the first time she had ever seen her own face outside of a mirror, and that was true for me as well. We thanked him, and she gave him some pennies even, and homeward we walked.
          However I said good-bye to my girl very soon after that, and have not seen her since, and the reason for that is that when I saw her face and figure in that photograph, very much white and almost glowing like a lamp in fog, only a few moments before we met and fell to talking about the light that had surprised us, I seemed to see within her dress the shape of her bones inside, and even the shape of the stool and bar behind her, so that it seemed that the light had shoved all the spirit out of her that night and left only the thinnest creature behind. If she had spied this herself in her image she did not tell me, but it was a conception that never again left my mind, so that I could no longer bear to spend time in her company and left her behind, though we both wept sorely about it.
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