Lip, dip, paint. The mantra of radium. Amidst the devastation of World War I, there is a glowing substance on the tip of a paintbrush. When you were first hired, you nearly cried at the sight of this beauty, this ectoplasm of God. The other girls at the factory, poised at their stations, looked like angels sent from heaven, all luminescent; they purred the prodigy of radium, a radiant potion with the power to erase the shrapnel-coated visions of trenches and the whisperings of limbless lovers lost to the battlefield. War and its collective memory disappeared under the vibrant sheen of radium. On Fridays, you and the other factory girls would wear your best dresses to work, so that the chemical’s residue would make the dresses glimmer, and you’d dab some of the radium paint on your lips and fingernails, and after the shift, you’d go out dancing together, appearing like a chorus line of shooting stars. And one night, you go home with a boy who smells like a crystalline river in a meadow full of daisies. Your lips, they’re smoldering, he says. Come warm your mouth, you say, and you pull him in and somewhere, a grenade goes off. You’re kissing, and he’s touching the back of your neck, his tongue’s tracing the inside of your upper lip, then along your lower gum, when he suddenly pulls back. In his expression, the shock of the blitz comes back all at once. He pulls down your lip with his thumb to audit your mouth. My God, your teeth are melting. Horrified, you grab your purse and run out of his apartment without another word. It’s true—you feel it, you feel your jaw aching, you feel the blisters forming in your gums. Over the next few years, jaws will fall off, bones will disintegrate beneath the skin, they’ll call it radioactive cosmetics, they’ll call you a bachelorette who died in the arms of beauty, and you’ll wonder, When I die, will my bones, entombed deep within the Earth, glow? But for now, running down the street from a stranger’s apartment, you’re vivid, alive, glamorous, luminous.