Through a Glass Window

In a soot-choked East Side alley that Dickens never lived to sketch, Mrs. Martin—stoic matriarch of a family pinioned between tenement shadows and the perpetual clang of the El—keeps house for two children whose futures already smell of newsprint and burnt lard. Summer’s furnace breathes tuberculosis across her lungs; a doctor murmurs of green places beyond the Hudson, but coins have long ago been fed to the gas meter. Jenny, the daughter whose eyes carry the bruised shimmer of dawn on brass, transfigures a barren scrap of yard into a riot of marigolds and tomato vines, coaxing color from coal dust and coaxing breath back into her mother’s chest. Winter arrives with switch-blade wind; Dan’s paper route becomes a Via Dolorosa of frostbitten fingers. A five-dollar bill—dropped by Pete, the doughnut-shop satyr with grease in his grin—becomes the Judas kiss that buys a second-hand coat, then demands repayment in terror. Jenny’s promise ricochets through the alleyways until Dan, cornered, loots a corner store and is swallowed by the reformatory’s iron mouth. To shield their now-blind mother from the abyss, Jenny spins a tale of South-American plantations and steady wages, a fiction luminous as the streetlamp halos that blur in Mrs. Martin’s cataracted gaze. While the city’s seasons wheel overhead, Jenny opens a rival doughnut shop whose sugar-glazed rings become edible halos, drawing queues that out-the-door eclipse Pete’s grubby till. When Dan re-emerges, taller and haunted, Jenny’s garden has gone fallow, but her ledger blooms; she accepts Tomasso’s求婚 beneath the same windowpane once clouded with soot, letting the pane now refract a sky rinsed clean by possibility.