Molly and I

In a dimly lit stenographer’s pool reeking of carbon paper and unmet longing, Shirley Brown—wrists powdered, dreams pirated from Philip Smith’s florid novelettes—types other people’s maladies while secretly scripting her own bodice-ripper. Fate, that practiced puppeteer, parks the half-blind author in her musty boardinghouse, where wallpaper roses peel like old scabs. Discovering that his encroaching darkness can be cauterized only by a Milanese ocular virtuoso, she barters her future for his sight: she’ll launder her forthcoming dowry, pay him five thousand Depression-era dollars, and masquerade as a spinster so ancient that courtship would be farce. The contract marriage ferries Philip to Italian sunburst surgeries; he returns luminous, ravenous for Marion Sutherland’s manicured glamour, while Shirley—now legal chattel—ghosts the corridors of his neglect. To rekindle desire she dons the starch-frilled alias of an Alsatian maid, a masquerade so exquisite that the man who discarded her falls rapt to the curve of a collarbone he no longer recognizes. When mask and skin finally converge, the revelation detonates like magnesium ribbon: the trophy wife he ignored and the servant he coveted share the same pulse.