Sun Mother's Hands

Jacqueline Varon’s hands worked feverishly. The light was dim, her workroom saturated with the pines and sepias of the evening gray, but that was not, as it was never, the cause for her hurry. 

Carefully, quietly, she bent over the uneven table purchased for sewing and kitchen work, but that was instead laden with scraps, screws, gears, bobs and bits. Threaded through her gloved fingers were the wide glassine reels of filament that made up the real cause for her speed.

She had to be careful, quiet, as she threaded the ‘plastic’ paper not through a sewing needle, but between the tight, ‘squeak-like-the-devil’ finger partitions of her own gloved hands, and up along a series of knobs where it would be turned and processed in the style of a factory belt. It was her own contraption, and there were still some kinks to work out, but they could not be addressed now. She had to get the plastic into the machine. Quickly, carefully. To turn it with the bolt pliers, and weld the door into place. She still had to secure the photo-protective insulation before that, and arrange the mirrored dual-lens, after that.

Simple enough, for a mechanic’s daughter, who paid attention where she most certainly should not.

Indeed, this, the threading, was the most trying part for Jacqueline, and if light ever caused her hurry, it was from the brightness of it, not the fading. It was from the risk of burning her work prematurely. ‘Developing it,’ as some said.

India rubber being hardly a careful or a quick skin encasement, she often found her gloves in the way. Sweat made her fingers stick, and the thickness and stickiness made her clumsy. With a stroke of frustration, she ripped it from her hand with her teeth. Light burst from her fingers forthwith, and she scrambled to hide her eyes and also the plastic strips away before they were unduly exposed. As if it were some sort of accident; as if she hadn’t known the light would be there.

She cursed in her poor provencal, like a mechanic’s daughter who paid attention where she most certainly should not, and scrambled to dust her wet flesh in a coating of cheap sawdust and chalk and wrest it back in the glove. 

She frowned. Her own skin’s light emissions made her see spots. 

More time, more time wasted, she thought, sighed, and glanced at the evening sun. She followed its slant with her eyes, the reddish blear splashing her many newspaper clippings in a watery, oxide red.

‘Free Metal for Scrap, Come to the Shipyard, 4:30 am,’ read one such headline.

‘Doctor of Physics Henri Cadeau Offers Free Lessons in Light Refractivity in Exchange for Experimentations and Volunteers,’ read another. 

It was the last clipping, however, that made Jacqueline’s frown deepen. A newsprint photograph—with several distinguished ash-holes in the pulp— presented two smiling, mustachioed men, and below them, the tag line: ‘Inventors of the Cinématographe, August and Louis Lumière, Address the Scientific Academie of Paris.’

“Inventors of the Cinématographe indeed,” Jacqueline said to herself. She grit her teeth and returned to her work. She was running out of time, but from here, the persnickety gloves managed to endure her traitorous, abominable hands, and she assembled the final machine just as the last clap of dusk left her neighbors’ roofs.

The lamps were being lit, but Paris was hardly done with its convivialité. Prostitutes and drunks started early on their slow decant from the interiors of bulb-flooded door frames, and the last of the families hurried inside. Jacqueline kept her nose to the setts as she always did, her father’s coat hooked tight around her chin, and her own moving picture machine slung with a leather strap half over her back, half under her left arm. It was cold for August, and yet the mosquitos and evening insect cavalry were already latticing their havoc on all present. 

Jacqueline did not have to swat them; it was as if they knew there was sunlight in her veins. They avoided her. This did pique her scientific interest. Where humans needed light to see light, in some divine conundrum, it was as if the little creatures of the world could smell light. Could taste light. Perhaps they even produced some of their own light, in the little hormonal mechanisms that wound their behaviors around light and dark, day and night. Work and rest. 

She sometimes wondered if she might progress into the life sciences one day, and explore better the light-reacting mechanism in insects, rodents, and other such beings, perhaps under the pretense of to treating some malady, such as that of the insomniac, or the night-bound, philandering husband. She wondered, but only casually. Of course, there was hardly the time. 

A rude laugh from a stranger at her hobbling form reminded her of a very similar derisive laugh she knew from long ago, from back when her father was first taken with his drunken arts, and she was herself a little rodent in search of the light, and a warm bowl of soup.

Deeper into town, the streets thickened with evening-goers and carousers. Jacqueline ignored them, and muttered her learned curses again, this time in the direction of a careless Académie des Sciences that had so rudely selected to hold their competition and award ceremony on a Friday evening in late summer. After a careless hawker nearly dashed her machine against the curb, she took a quick turn for the allies.

Protected at last in a lonely, empty alley where kerosene would have been a wretched waste, Jacqueline removed her left glove. There were many ways to get around privately in Paris after dark, and for that, at least, ‘the urchin whose hands burst light’ was eternally grateful.

It was a delight to stretch her fingers, and let the skin breathe. Gnarled as they were by work with steel and grit, red and burnt as they were by sparks from smelting, scuffed as they were from sawdust, experiments and abrasive chemicals— they were still her hands. Though they bore pain, they were still her body. Ungloved, unleashed, she lit the ally bright as day, stronger than any bulb, uranium, or phosphorous, and for nearly a full block in either reach.

Reflecting on it, she could not recall when or why her hands started glowing, as she had been, at the time, very young, and the discovery, very unpleasant, but it was certainly around the time her father started drinking, and thereby also around the time her mother, right thereafter, took a very long walk along the Seine.

Nearly orphaned, but hardly a simpleton, Jacqueline knew at once that, firstly, she must mask her ridiculous condition in the sturdiest gloves she might find, and, straight away in this search, found herself at the Academie’s door. Young scientists, it turned out, were a curious bunch, and Jacqueline was quite promptly put to use in their experiments.

Years on, she remained goosepimpled by the memory of their quaking laughter, and the two particular young tinkerers of photography at the Academie who found a special joy in having a little dirt mouse stand for hours into the late night, her hands reached out above their printing plates, developing pictures for their kinetoscope with her child body and child flesh.

She truly wished she were not going back.

She stopped to switch the shoulder her machine was strung across, and wondered as she did what she might name her new, improved contraption. Kineto-projector? Kineto-picture? A movie camera?

A little smirk managed to slide onto her cheek as the leather strap stamped its new rut across her back. She also sometimes wondered if, in betwixt their ruddy cackling, the iron-whiskered old professors and doctors ever realized that their specimen, too, was curious about her strange condition, and their photographic arts. She wondered if they ever guessed how ‘little dirt mouse’ had been schooled in the ABCs by a kind Christian teacher before her arrival on their door, had listened most keenly to their coded dialectic, and snuck peaks in their heavy books when they turned away.

If they ever saw her doodle whole formulae and schematics in charcoal on her little legs with the same glowing hands they stuck with filaments and shocks, as if she felt no pain, and were no more than a stolen Edison bulb, they did not say.

They certainly didn’t believe either way that the Cinématographe design was poor Jacqueline’s.

Picking up the pace, she followed the narrow ally way as it progressed to the next one, and then the ally after that, on and on, like the back-panel of an old tool trunk, riddled with termite scars, all through the greasy growth of the old city. The allies in Paris were never glamorous, and certainly distasteful to the average country mouse’s nose, but the air was dry and cool on that particular night, and nothing foul lingered in Jacqueline’s throat. Almost, she could smell cook fires. Together with the sour stink of pubs, the effect was almost warm. Almost whole. Jacqueline took an inhale, and imagined herself at a fine table, in a fine tavern, and all the meat and potatoes she would buy with her winnings.

Tonight’s invention competition at the Academie was one-of-a-kind. Anyone could compete. Anyone at all. The reward was substantial. 

At last, Jacqueline would be seen for what else her hands could do. 

Her chest puffed against the strap of the machine. She thought it alone might keep her whole being from turning to light and flying up to the sky.

It occurred to her around this time, as a distant clock struck a quarter to the hour, and her hidden path to the institution drew close and near its end, that she might want to dim her hands, and prevent indiscretion. Her left hand, rheumaticky again, as it sometimes was, caught itself up with pinpricks of pain on the folds of the rubber glove, and she paused, lowering her machine, to apply it to its place best she could.

A scream made her stop.

Now, screams were hardly a new thing to hear on a dark Parisian street in such times, but it was the high timbre of the scream that truly stopped her cold. It was a thin, reedy scream. A child’s scream. 

Jacqueline’s heart picked up its own higher thrumming, but she didn’t need to look far for the source, as a little, yellow bean of a thing tumbled over itself around the corner, and hit the corner trash pile, crying. The child’s face was covered in dark dirt, blood, or grease, its yellow dress down to shreds. Coming as well from around the corner where the child was, thrown, she realized, was a loud bark. It was followed by several other loud barks.

Jacqueline was not the protective, active sort. Nor was she much given to children, but the problem was simple enough, and the solution, well, the solution was quite a part of her. She ripped off her newly-applied glove, wincing through the pain, and the blast of light that emanated both silenced the child and put new sound in the dogs, which promptly squealed as if they’d been hit, and clambered over each other, whining and confused. 

The child’s wide-eyed dazed stare made her uncomfortable, and, unable to find the glove again, she tucked her hand best she could behind the movie machine, under her cloak. It was not enough, the fabric was not dense enough to hide her, and her light shone through. She winced.

A man’s voice called a girl’s name, and panic began to slice down through her core as she realized she’d done more than she ever should have done. She looked around, frantic, for the missing glove, and her options. The child, too, was startled by the voice, and scrambled, sobbing, arms-wide, towards Jacqueline.

“Maman! Maman!” The child sobbed.

“No, not at all,” Jacqueline pleaded. “I am not at all.” The little thing rushed her, and clung to her skirts. The machine swayed, and the dual weight nearly took her down.

The child’s awe was clear in the light of Jacqueline’s exposed hand. “Maman, pourquoi es-tu le soleil?” The child asked. “Mama, why are you the sun?”

She figured it was the least prudent time to explain bioluminescence to a street urchin, and did not answer. Heavy boots were coming, and she pushed the little one behind her, and hunched a little, to shield her with the machine, and give herself the illusion of being perhaps a peddler woman.

The boots belonged to a dirty, squat figure of a man, who kicked the still-whimpering dogs, and hollered the urchin’s name twice more he stopped, stunned, at the cloaked figure with some form of lantern in her skirts.

He slurred when he spoke, and Jacqueline could only barely understand that he was asking if she’d seen a girl-wretch run through here, and Jacqueline shook her head, her face to the floor. 

It seemed the man might go, but as soon as he turned, he turned back again, said something about her “lum-mière” and Jacqueline found herself feeling sliced from the top, down, again. Her fingers prickled with remembered pain.

A picture, a photograph, cut from news print, the browning paper singed with ash-holes, bleared by a red and closing sun came to mind. The child sniffled in her skirts.

She wagered with herself that he couldn’t be much smarter than a dog, and exposed her light in full.

The man yelped, and bolted the way he came. She smiled to herself. She had wagered correctly.

“Mère Soleil, s'il te plaît, ramène-moi à la maison,” the child said. “Sun mother, please take me home.”

Jacqueline didn’t answer right away. Her heart was still pounding. She listened to the air, and tried to regain her peace, but all she could hear now was clangor. All she could smell now was sour beer, and grime.

The distant clock marked fifteen past the hour. That slowed her heart. It slowed all of her. She was late. There would be no admittance now.

“Alright, little one, help ‘sun mother’ find her glove, and she shall take you home.”

It was not far from the ally to the poorhouse where the child lived, but, slowed down as they were by children’s little legs and the ever-increasing weight of the machine, Jacqueline found it all the time in the world to explain bioluminescence to an urchin. When they reached the house’s doors, the child’s eyes were wide with new concepts, and questions that showed she quite nearly understood.

The nun on duty at the poorhouse apologized profusely for the inconvenience, and, taking the child by the arm, gave her a firm scolding for ‘taking off’ while running an errand. 

For the first time, Jacqueline found herself looking at the child’s hands.

Small, and chubby, with far too many cuts and bruises for one so small, they seemed so disturbingly familiar, even without the preternatural light.

“Mother, I should like to borrow this child for my shop,” Jacqueline said. The nun and the child turned to her at once. “Not everyday, of course, I’m sure she has duties,” she stammered on, unsure herself of where she was going with this, “but perhaps in the evenings, a few times a week.” She held up her gloved hands, and put on a sorrowful face. “I myself am disfigured, and could use such small fingers to assist in my work.”

The nun flubbed over her bottom lip, and mumbled something about the child being very distractible, and a bother, with many unfinished chores to complete.

Jacqueline shrugged, and assured her this would be two evening meals per week their fine institution would not have to pay for, and this awareness quickly, carefully, changed the nun’s tone.

The child, far brighter than any set of glowing hands, took advantage of the distraction to break free of the old nun. “Sun mother is going to teach me! I am going to have lessons in life and light!” The nun squinted.

“Sun mother?”

“I’ve been called worse,” Jacqueline replied.