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AVAILABLE SOON
Clipper
Girls
Gary A.
Braunbeck
Artwork by Conny
Valentina.
Evan Tanner, a single father,
receives a call from the nursing home where his mother (who
everyone assumes suffers from dementia) lives, informing him
that his mother has become too distruptive in the past few
weeks and they're kicking her out: she keeps screaming in the
night about the smell of cigars and crates by the door and
someone who 'warned' her not to go to work '...that
day.'
Evan takes his mother in, much to his daughter's
dismay. As the days infold, both Evan and his daughter awake
in the middle of the night to hear the voices of children
coming from downstairs. When each investigates, they find the
front room filled with the ghosts of dirty, undernourished
children doing piecework sewing - buttons on coats, repairing
socks, hemming dresses, etc. Evan and his daughter soon
realize that Evan's mother only seems to sleep peacefully when
these apparitions appear.
Evan's mother was a child
laborer back in the early 1900's, who was one of the few
children to survive a massive fire at a Cedar Hill sweatshop
mill where she was employed as a 'clipper girl' - the children
whose job it was to snip the stray bits of thread from the
dresses and blouses made in the sweatshops. Evan's mother
isn't suffering from dementia but rather survivor's guilt, and
that guilt has at last manifested itself in the apparitions of
the ghosts of the poverty-striken children with whom she used
to work - and who didn't make it out of the fire.
The
fire was deemed an accident, but Evan's mother and the
'Clipper Girls' know better, and the man responsible for the
fire - who smoked cigars as he stomped up and down the
sweatshop line - is not only alive and well, but flourishing
in his successful family business. And Evan, his daughter, his
mother, and the restless spirits of the girls killed in the
factory fire, cannot rest until there's justice.
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