I never could understand why the factories ran on Saturdays, as if they hadn’t produced enough shoes, enough cotton, enough sausage by Friday evening to clothe and feed America, two, three times. The rest of us didn’t work on the weekend— we sat in our apartments listening to the radio, or we walked. We walked to clear our minds. We walked to find a breath of air in a city that was becoming increasingly industrial and spiteful. There were a number of us walking that Saturday afternoon. It was chilly, the way Spring is when she is stretching her arms and rubbing her eyes.
        The girls would have been lovely indeed, if they could have afforded Woodbury and running water to clean beneath their chins. Even in last year's dresses and finger-combed hair, we always could tell they were going to the factories by the haste in their steps. We watched from the benches, the shops, the windows, as they ran the last hundred feet to make time.
       “Good morning, Mister Wilson,” Martha called to me. She was smoking a cigarette on the corner. Her dress was gray plaid, and she wore a white waist apron that, by now, was closer to the color of coffee. 
        “Morning, Martha.”
        “Writing anything good?”
         I was, but I wasn’t in the mood to mention it. “It’s Saturday, Martha. I don’t work on the weekends.”
        “Well, Mister Wilson, the most exciting things happen on Saturdays.”
        “I’ll be prepared if they do,” I said, patting my chest pocket where a fountain pen hung. My fingers grazed the bulging pocket beneath the pen, where I had stuffed today’s observations and yesterday’s drafts. “Just waiting for inspiration to strike,” I added. This was a lie. My gabardine jacket already weighed a noticeable amount, and it was getting heavier with every interview.

.   .   .

	“How do I look?” Ruth asked, holding the finished blouse to her chest. She had loved the fine blue linen so much that she had given it an extra three hours, hand-stitching lace trimming to its collar. It was the loveliest piece she had made in her four months at the shirtwaist factory. If only she could take it home.
	“Like a doll,” Alice beamed. “Fredrick would go mad if you wore that.” Alice and Ruth had met at Ellis Island four months ago in the line for immigrants planning to stay in New York. They both spoke English with an accent. They were both turning seventeen this year. 
	“But she won’t,” Julie snapped from behind her sewing machine. Julie was two years older, but she acted more like twenty. She had long replaced ribboned-braids with a practical bun, and coltskin pumps with lace-up boots. And she was already on her sixth shirtwaist of the day.
	“We were just joking, Jules,” Ruth said, placing down the linen shirt.
	“Maybe if you spent less time joking and stitching lace, you’d have gotten more done today.”
	“We’re paid by the hour,” Alice chirped, ignoring Julie’s unusual sharpness.
	“Well, they’ll get rid of you just as easy.”
	Ruth and Alice went silent, looking between each other the way that twins do when they share thoughts.
	“Did Mister Harvey say something to you?” Ruth frowned.
	Julie’s machine roared louder in response. She cut the thread and held up her seventh piece— a horrid green shirt with yellow buttons. She finally looked up. “He asked me into his office yesterday.” Her throat bobbed, and she glanced around with paranoia. She could still feel the manager’s lustful eyes on her chest. She was sure he was watching her mouth right this second, and listening. “I can’t afford to lose this job.”
	Ruth brought her hand to her mouth.
	“Oh, love,” Alice murmured, closing her eyes.
.   .   .

	The needle slipped through Lou’s sweaty fingers into the pile of fabric by her chair. She wiped her hand on her forehead— also damp. Her fingers were accustomed to peeling and chopping and stirring, not stitching. But the Factory paid a few cents more than the Diner, and she and Paul had long-time plans to leave the city. The woman three machines down coughed again. All the sick workers were placed on the ninth floor with the cheap fabrics, cheap sewing machines, and cheap labor. “How much longer must we do this, Paul?” Lou asked. She wiped her forehead with a piece of scrap fabric. It was hotter than it should.
	Paul looked up across the table. His cheeks were also flushed, but he insisted the illness that was going around the tenement where they were staying (“temporarily,” according to Paul) was far too unserious to miss a day of work. “Less than an hour, darling.”
	“I didn’t mean today.” 
	“Lou,” Paul said, warningly. “We’ve talked about this. We don’t have enough to leave yet. I don’t have enough for you.”
	“I don’t need anything,” Lou pleaded, feeling herself sinking into the uncomfortable stool
	“Louise.” His eyes begged her to stop. “What about your parents?”
	“I’m nineteen now,” Lou protested. “I’m hardly a child anymore.”
	Paul frowned at his machine. “How about we go to the beach tomorrow?”
	“Okay,” she whispered. The imperfectly-sewn fabric in her lap seemed to laugh at her, and she knew she would never leave the Factory.
	“Lou. Paul. Do you see that?” Tillie asked from the machine to Lou’s right. Tillie was pointing to the window, where black smoke was curling and weaving itself into a large cloud. Around the room, workers began to rise from their seats, joining each other at the large windows, watching the smoke rise from the floor below.
	“What is that?” Lou asks Paul. Her fiance’s flushed cheeks had gone pale.
	“We need to find the stairs,” he said.
	“What?”
	“Now, Louise.” He leaped up from his seat and began to run towards the stairwell. Lou rushed to follow him, tripping over the piles of fabric on the floor as they ran through the sewing hall, which had never seemed more massive. Paul made it to the door before Lou, reaching immediately for the handle. Lou reached his side with a heaving chest. She could feel the fever fighting her heartbeat.
Paul’s head whipped backwards. His face was horrific. “It’s locked.”
	The fire alarm began to cry.
.   .   .

	I was there when the workers bursted through the wooden double doors, running as if God was attainable and the devil was behind them. I had interviewed what I thought was a good number of the men and women in that Factory, and I thought I had a general idea of who they were and what their lives were like. As they ran, I realized I was very wrong. I knew nothing. They screamed in languages I didn’t know. There was a fear in their eyes that I didn’t know, and probably never would. They tripped over each other, sometimes colliding into the ones who had stopped to look back at the smoke pouring from the windows of the 8th and 9th floors.
	“Call the police!” a voice yelled.
	“They’re stuck up there!” a woman cried, pointing at the floors above the fire. A group of young girls were trying to pry open the window, sticking their limbs and noses and necks into the black smoke.
	“I think you have your story, Mister Wilson.” Martha said from my side.
	I couldn’t speak. I could only watch the first body hit the ground.
.   .   .

	“Oh my God. That was Anne,” Alice cried shrilly, craning over the window ledge. Julie pulled her back with shaking hands, one of which was still clutching the hideous green shirtwaist. She only let it go as Alice collapsed into her arms. Julie stared at her empty palm, black with soot. 
	“We need to get out,” Julie announced over the siren. The heat of the flames licked her neck as she pulled Alice and Ruth by their shirts. The fire, which had started in the opposite corner of the room, had since swelled by feeding on the scraps of cheap fabric and thread. Some of the girls had backed himself to the opposite wall, pounded on the unbudging door to the stairwell. Others had climbed out onto the window ledge.
	“I’m not dying in this factory,” Julie exclaimed. Her eyes were watering, and she wasn’t sure if it was just the smoke.
	“That was Anne,” Alice mumbled, dragging her hands down her face.
“You’re crushing me!” Julie heard. The voice came from the masses forming against the wall by the locked exit. “You’re crushing me!” she screamed again. “I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t breathe I can’t-” Her words are drowned out by the alarm. Soon her voice disappeared entirely.
	“The doors are locked,” Ruth said quietly, stroking Alice’s hair. Both of their ribbons had slipped off their braids, and their hair was turning frizzy in the smoke. “It’s the window or nothing.”
	“I’m not jumping,” Alice whispers.
	“Alice—”
	“I’m not jumping!” she screamed. Tears drew trails through the soot on her cheeks.
	“There’s a fire escape,” Julie said. Her hair had also become undone and wild. The light of the approaching fire cast a somber light on her face that made her four hundred years older. “We have to get to the fire escape.”
	“I’m not going anywhere near that window,” Alice said. She could still see Anne’s body on the concrete and the hungry photojournalists taking their wretched photos. 
	“And you, Ruth?” Julie asked, her eyes ablaze.
	Ruth looked from Julie to Alice to the fire. She thought of Ellis Island and the inspection line. She thought of the boat and ribboned braids. She thought of home, which was still Irish wildflowers, and America, which was sweat and now fire. “I’m staying with Alice.”
	“Fine,” Julie said. She bit her lip to stop it from quivering. “Suit yourselves.” And then she turned away, and by the time she remembered she was still a child, it was too late to turn back and she had lost her friends in the smoke.
	“We have to get to the corner. As far away from the fire as possible,” Ruth said to Alice. She pulled Alice up like a limp doll and they stumbled past fallen machines and chairs, towards the exit. Alice wheezed as they ran. They reached the farthest wall, sinking to the ground and clutching each other tightly. By then, the fire had consumed most of the room already, and it was now making it to the ceiling and the 9th floor. Amongst the sirens, sobbing, and prayers in all sorts of languages, Ruth’s heart began to still. That familiar heat licked her cheek again, and she shut her eyes. 
	“I love you, Alice,” Ruth whispered into Alice’s ear.
	“I love you too.”
.   .   .

	A chorus of shrill, agonized screams reached the ninth-story window, accompanied by the deafening sound of breaking metal. “The fire escape just broke,” a man said to Paul. Paul ducked his head beneath the window to see for himself, but quickly pulled it back in, looking sick.
	“Do you hear the siren?” his fiance said hopefully. For a moment, Paul marveled at the fact her eyes were still impossibly bright and alive. She hadn’t realized they were going to die yet, he didn’t think. “The firemen are here,” she said.
	Paul took her hand and hoped his firm grip said the things he didn’t want to. “Their ladders can’t reach us.”
	“I’m gonna jump,” the man said, not sounding very convinced that he would. “They’ve got nets up now. It’s as good of a shot as any.” He tipped his hat to Lou and shook Paul’s hand, which Paul noticed was shaking. Then he climbed up onto the window ledge and faced backwards. He pulled a cross from inside his shirt, murmured a few words, and kissed it. 
	“Don’t look, Lou,” Paul said, turning his too-beautiful, too-innocentric away. She stared up at him with her impossibly blue eyes and told him, “We have to jump.” She had never looked so beautiful.
	Paul could only nod. The fire had begun to tear through the floorboards, fueled by wooden tables and piles of fabric.  “Here,” Paul said, grabbing a pile of fabric from the floor. “Wrap this around your body. It will soften the impact.” When Lou’s fingers were too numb and limp to accept the fabric from him, he realized that she was scared. He wound the cloth around her neck and back for her. “Promise you won’t look down.” 
	“I promise,” she said, her heels swaying on the edge. “I love you.” 
	Paul guided her chin towards his face and kissed her gently. Then he kissed her knuckles. The whole time, Lou watched him with unwavering eyes.
“On the count of three,” Paul said.
	“One,” Lou whispered. “Two.”
	“Three.” 
.    .    .

SHIRTWAIST FACTORY BLAZES, 146 Dead
Firsthand account from spectator T. Wilson

         I had never felt so small than on that day of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. My legs were liquid, but also immovable. My eyes did not forget the couple that jumped from the ninth story window in each other’s embrace. Their falling bodies broke straight through the nets of the firemen, and joined the other broken bodies on the floor. By the time the rain did what we couldn’t, 146 people had died. We would later find out that the managers had locked the doors to the factory and stairwells to keep Union organizers out.
          Apparently the fire only lasted thirty minutes, but I believe I was there for much longer. It was dark by the time Martha left her shop and placed her hand on my shoulder to guide me away. It took all the strength I had to pry my knuckles from the police barricade. I didn’t touch the coffee she poured me, still thinking about the man and woman who had so pitifully wrapped themselves in fabric to try to dampen the fall. 
           “I think I’ll be going home,” I told Martha. “I’ll see myself out.”
           It was still raining, and I unbuttoned my gabardine jacket to let the water soak me from the inside through. I remembered about my writing a moment too late, and by the time my fingers dug out the parchment, the ink had bled and the paper was irreparable. I made a weak ball out of my writing — a couple of interviews for a story about factory conditions — and tossed it on the street. I watched as the rain took it, tore it, consumed it, until there was no paper left.
          I was angry with the rain, as ridiculous as that sounds to me writing this now. It had come too late, as things often do, and its gentle lull was taunting. 


Wilson is a freelance journalist affiliated with the Wall Street Journal.