The Artful Trade

Sara worked at the resort hotel as a chambermaid, making beds and smoothing sheets for the city people. She had left her home in Maine dreaming of a warmer kind of life but only managed a few hundred miles and that was not enough to outdistance the cold. She was born with a wine red birthmark in the shape of a heart that covered one side of her face. Her daddy always told her, “Some people hide their hearts. Some people wear ‘em on their sleeve. Yours will always be on your face.” But whenever she looked at herself in a mirror, all she saw was a stain. And all she dreamed of, when she allowed herself to dream, was something strong enough, perhaps love, to clean it all away. But love she knew didn’t exist for a girl like her. A big girl. A hard worker. A bedsheet girl, with the stain of a heart on her face. The kind of girl no one could see and if they somehow did could not remember. No, that was for the others that men looked at and dreamed of. Girls with soft hands and fair