"The Alpha-Dye Shirt Factory" by Tyler W. Kurt

A fire breaks out at the garment factory and one worker has to make a life or death choice.

“Short Stories For Long Discussions…”

Mission Statement: After Dinner Conversation is an independent, nonprofit, literary magazine that focuses on short story fiction that encourages philosophical and ethical discussions with friends, family, and students.  Each story comes with five suggested discussion questions.

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Letter From The Editor

Preparing 2023 “Best Of” Anthology

Each year we ask our paid magazine subscribers to vote on their favorite stories we published that year and put the top stories into a print/digital anthology. This year is no different. Here is a list of the stories selected, scheduled for February 1, 2024 release on Amazon and through your local bookstore. (ISBN#979-8-9896194-0-5)

Congratulations to following authors for being selected: C.S. Griffel, Cory Swanson, Kim Z. Dale, Earl Smith, Lee Dawkins, Erik Fatemi, Edward Daschle, Jan McCleery, Lea Pounds, Julia Edinger, Porter McKoy, Allison Padron, Kathryn LeMon, Kelly Piner, Ishan Dylan, Celia Lisset Alvarez, Mark Bessen, Michael “Mikhail” Shainsky, and Thea Swanson.

Also, I should mention we are always looking for volunteer readers to help us find the needle in the haystack. If you would like to learn more about being a volunteer reader, here is a video link explaining how it works.

~Kolby

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"The Alpha-Dye Shirt Factory" by Tyler W. Kurt

I don’t know where how I should start my story: with the fire, with the things leading up to the fire, or how I made my escape.

Well, my name’s Mary and I worked at the Alpha-Dye Shirt Factory, a seven-story building in the middle of the sugar district falling apart in every which a-way. It’s a brick building, red brick, not that you’d know it on account it’s been whitewashed over, except for the fire escape, which was painted black about a hundred times to hide the rust, and more paint than fire escape. The building had just the one elevator so most of the ladies would take the fire escape if they was on one of the lower floors, but I never did that, on account of I didn’t trust it as old as it was, and mostly rusted, like I said.

I should mention the smell, too. You never smelled nothing like it. The factory was right in the middle of the sugar district; cheaper rents I guess. All I know’d is something about the manufacturing process for sugar makes it so the air smells like chicken fried steak. When I was young and first started out I remember thinking it was a pretty good smell, that I’d be getting to go to work every day smelling my mama’s cooking and maybe I wouldn’t be so homesick.

Of course, pretty soon that smell started getting bothersome cause it just worked its way into your clothes. I hadn’t counted on that, still smelling of chicken fried steak in my clothes when I got home at night. That smell would get into the bed sheets till the whole one-room apartment I lived in got to stinking. Now, when I smell that smell all I think of is long hours and the foreman yelling at me about production quotas.

One year early on I went home over Christmas to visit my family and you know’d what my mama made for me? Chicken fried steak, and she was so proud of making it for me, but I about threw up right there at the table and had to explain to her about the factory, and about the sugar and the way it smelled. Course, I didn’t tell her everything about the factory or how I was living, cause I didn’t want her to worry about me.

And here I am rambling on and on about chicken fried steak when you want to know about the fire. That’s the way it goes sometimes, a person hooks you in with the promise of a great story, then get all sideways.

So, there I was, like every day, just settled in and working my sewing machine, the same two stitch lines on the shirt I sew’d every day for years, when Maria whispered across to me over the noise of the sewing. Maria was a Cuban girl who had worked across from me going on a year-and-a-half, and we was pretty tight on account of we both liked going to the movies on our day off.

“Mary,” Maria whispered across the machines, and I looked up. And when she seen me looking she nodded her head to where the bathrooms were, meaning we should go there to talk. We’d done it a few times before.

She’d call over to the foreman to go the restroom, then I’d wait a bit and do the same. Restroom breaks was limited to three minutes, but if you timed it just right with someone else you could get a good minute or so of overlap to chit-chat so long as you was quick about it.

And so she done it, she got the foreman over and he waved her on to use the facilities. And a minute or so later I done the same. Come to think of it, he must a known we was going into the bathroom to talk, but he didn’t seem to care much, I guess. Mostly, I think, because he didn’t care much about anything. He always had the airs of a man who felt that his position was beneath him and he was just biding his time until his real ship come along. Also, I think he keep’ed the job because he liked some of the ladies from time to time.

So off I goes to the ladies room and there is Maria, just beaming from ear to ear, pretty much like she had been doing the whole morning, but even more so now that it was possible to do in earnest. And soon’s as I walked in she blurts it out, no warm ups or nothing, in her Spanish accent.  “I got engaged!”

Maria reached into her pocket and pushed out this tiny gold ring for me to see. She wasn’t wearing it cause you had to be a single to work at the Alpha-Dye Factory. Not all the factories had that rule no more, but Alpha-Dye had that rule, and girls would still get fired pretty regular if the bosses found out they’d got hitched.

Of course, I was excited for her, but not nearly so excited as she was. She’d know’ed darned well Raul was going to ask her to get married soon enough, as she’d been going on to him about them getting married the last few months.

But still, I was pretty excited for her because getting engaged ain’t something you do every day. She meant to tell me the details as quick as she could before the foreman missed us, but then we heard a bunch of noise coming from outside.

We opened the door and everyone was up from their sewing machines moving around in a hurry. And that’s when I seen the smoke coming up through the floors. The floors, you see, was made a wood, like most floors in these older buildings, and smoke was coming up between the depressions of the wood floors thick and black.

I seen pretty quick that a bunch of women was standing by the elevator waiting for it until two of the woman, a Russian pair, decided they was going to pull the doors open and look down and see if they could figure where the elevator was or how much longer it might be till it showed up.

Well, as they was doing that the women behind them was a pushing on them pretty hard, on account of they thought the elevator had arrived and these two girls were trying to be the first ones in. So when these Russian girls pried the doors up, a thick black smoke from the shaft came billowing out, and what, with the women behind pushing, they done pushed both of them Russian girls, and one other that was next to them, into the shaft, and down they went. And that’s the last anyone saw of them, I suppose.

I turned back to Maria, but she’d already assessed the situation and was to the window with one foot on the fire escape.

I figured she had the right idea, so I headed that way as well, pushing through the people best I could. The smoke was getting blacker and thicker all the time, and it was already getting mighty warm from the depressed floors below.

As I was pushed my way to the fire escape, everything seemed to go real quiet and real slow like and I had the time to examine the faces of every woman in the place real good.

There was two women in the corner on their knees, with a Rosary, just praying as hard as could be. There was another girl just standing there with blank eyes, like she was a statue. And I seen one girl with blond hair that was dead, or near dead, on the ground, who must a got pushed over or fall’ed over and now people was just tripping and stepping on her to trying to get past her in a panic. But she ain’t moving none.

The foreman, he was funny, if there could be such a thing. He was pushing past all the other girls on his way to the fire escape, saying over and over again, “Let me through, I’m in charge.  I’m in charge!” But what he was really doing, of course, was trying to get to that fire escape to be one of the first ones out.

And you know, in all that bedlam and screaming, you know what my first thought was at the time? It’s stupid to say it now, but it’s the God’s truth. My first thought was, “Who’s going to clean all this up?” Which of course, now, I know, was a pretty stupid thing to think.

Just before I got to the window for the fire escape, I seen a girl next to me fall through the floor where the wood had saddened out so it couldn’t take the weight no more. It was like watching someone jump from the end of a dock into a lake. One second you could see them, and the next thing they were deep under water. Except, it ain’t water, it was the floor. And it ain’t them getting wet, it’s them going into the fire of misery and getting burnt up.

And when I seen that, well, that woke me up plenty, and all of the sudden like, I could hear everything around me, but it was real loud now. And that’s when I heard a pop from the outside.

I was at the window, you see, trying to push my way out onto to the fire escape to join Maria, and I could see her, too, when I looked down, on the sixth floor working her way down the stairs. The foreman had just pushed past her. And I was gonna try to yell to her, to tell her to wait up for me, but before I could speak I heard a pop. That pop was the steel bolts that’s holding the fire escape together.

So, I heard that first pop and that gave me a pause, then I heard a bunch more, like a gun being fired a bunch of times in a row. Then the whole fire escape come crashing down on the ladies below taking all the metal and bodies with it, including Maria and her ring.

The whole thing sort of folded up like an accordion, breaking up into different pieces as it go’ed and throwing people off it or trapping them under it. And I nearly went with it, on account of the woman behind me trying to push her way out the window, not knowing yet there was no fire escape to go down.

“It’s busted!” I yelled, as loud as I could. “It’s busted, let me back!  Quit pushing!” And eventually I worked my way back to the room.

When I turned back to the room its soul was plumb full a black smoke. I couldn’t see no more than a few feet, and couldn’t hardly breath, but I could see the glows of red from the fire where the flooring was opening up, and where women had fallen through it into their darkness.

I covered my mouth with my sleeve and tried to think as calm like as I could, but it wasn’t no doing. The fire was coming up, glowing red, and the bodies of ash-darkened women was piling up on the floor from them that couldn’t breath no more and had passed out. I knew in a few seconds I was next.

And man was it hot. Not the kind of hot where you say, “Today is a really hot day.” I know you know’d it was hotter than that. But I mean it was hot! Like if you’d a put a stove on the highest temperature and grabbed a black pan that had been sitting in it all day with your bare hand. Imagine that, but all over your body.

Now I know’d escaping was impossible. I know’d I ain’t got but seconds left to make a decision about just one thing; how did I want to die? Did I want to keep my mouth covered and burn up? I thought about that.

Burning up alive; feeling the flesh slide off my bones. That sounded, I thought, like about the worst way a person could die. So, I’d decided I’d better do like them other girls and try and fall asleep from the smoke. So, I took my shirt away from my mouth to take a deep breath, which seemed like me making the smartest decision in the world against me getting burned up in that fire.

The problem was I tried to take a breath, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t because when I breathed in it felt like someone was pouring hot coal dust down my throat and it just hurt so bad I couldn’t force myself. By instinct my shirt cloth hand went back up to my mouth to stop the coals from burning my throat.

“Dear God,” I thought. “Anything but burning alive…” Then I remembered the window. Not for the fire escape, cause I know’ed it was gone, but the window where the fire escape was.