Oh, Buttons! – Ruby-Rose Whitcher

May 22, 2026

Grace worked in a button factory. They made all sorts of buttons. Pink and yellow and red and polka-dot and sea-shell shaped. It was sixty years old, which was new for a factory. All the women called it the baby because of its newness. Before it was a button factory, it had been a barren plot of land. Before it had been a barren plot of land, it had been an aristocrat’s library. The aristocrat had been Joan who had an irregular nervous system and a split smile. Grace once found a scanned newspaper that described Joan as having “an unusual sense of delight in the morbid and absurd” and “had a face only a mother could love.” This was because her pet tiger had struck her once, its claw going straight through Joan’s philtrum down to her lower lip. Joan’s mother didn’t love her face. In fact, her mother felt such embarrassment over Joan’s scar that she set fire to the library in an attempt on Joan’s life. This, too, eventually made it to the papers. Curiously, Grace and Joan shared the same face.

“You’ve seen this?” Mabel asked, holding up a leopard-print button in the shape of a star. It had an irregular pink zig-zag going down the middle. Grace touched her philtrum.

“Only in my dreams.”

Mabel flipped the button in the air, catching it on the back of her hand. Grace held her breath in anticipation. The staff room filled with balloon static. The wall-clock, an antique contraption that pushed out a singing owl on the hour, ticked. Mabel slid her other palm away from the button, leaving it balanced on her hand.

“It looks a bit like you.” She held it up between her forefinger and thumb, then tossed it towards Grace. “Lock up the baby once you’re done.”

The button did look like Grace. The fleshy-pink zig-zag looked like Joan.

Grace opened the cutlery drawer and removed the plastic section holding the knives. Then she removed the thimble-sized wooden box underneath. Inside were three other buttons with the same irregular zig-zag. She slid the leopard button inside and then stacked everything back on top, in the right order.

Outside it was dark and cold. Grace tightened the rabbit fur-coat she’d stolen from her flatmate. It did little to keep her warm. Her legs were bare. The street lamps were oil-lit. It was a desolate, sprawling wasteland until she turned left and the path diverted into a retro small-town suburbia. Grace plopped her body down into a spinning stool at the diner and asked for one small hot chocolate. She paid in buttons.

“Where did you get that?” Edith asked, pointing to the ladybird button fixed to Grace’s coat.

“Baby.” Grace replied.

“You girls and that baby,” Edith murmured, shaking her head. Her cane wobbled as she leaned forward. Her breath smelt like saline and feijoas.

Grace dug out an iridescent heart button from her coat pocket and pried open Edith’s free hand to stuff it inside her grip. “It’s a present Edie, it will bring you good luck.”

Ada laughed from the coffee machine. Her ring finger had been cut off by the button guillotine.

“Here you go, sugarplum.” Ada put the hot chocolate in front of Grace. The cream had been whipped into a swan.

“Ads, do you believe in luck?” Edith asked, spinning the button on the glass counter. It went ‘round and ‘round in circles.

“I believe in a lot of things, Edie. Labour, luck, dreams. I believe in believing. A whole lot of your luck can change when you trust your own belief.”

Edith rolled her eyes, wobbled back to her seat. Grace finished her hot chocolate. Ada spun a record.

Grace hid a shoebox under her bed. It was wound with red ribbons. When she got home, she tugged the ribbons loose. Inside were newspaper clippings and glitchy black-and-white printed photos and one-of-a-kind letters with Joan’s sloppy, sweeping scrawl. Her favourite image was a polaroid she’d found tucked in the back of one of her mum’s books. Inside the shoebox were books, too. All kinds. Elaborate, technical science fiction and zoology tale tales and wicked women biographies and love-poems. They’d all belonged to Joan’s library, all had the same red J inscribed on the front sleeve. Grace studied the polaroid. It was Joan as a young woman, a very serious young woman. Her hair was tucked inside her coat. Her coat had a trillion buttons trailing down the front. Her eyes were…knowing.

Grace pulled the polaroid closer to her eyes, squinted. Her fourth button on her coat was leopard-print and star-shipped. It had no zig-zag, but then Joan didn’t have her scar in this image.

Marlene knocked on Grace’s door, pushing it open after a few seconds. On her hip she balanced a pot of soup. The ladle was already in her mouth. Flecks of leek and potato were smeared at the corner of her lips. “Hey, tough day at the button factory?”

Grace smacked her palm down over the polaroid. Grimaced. “Always.”

Marlene eyed the shoebox but didn’t say anything. “Want soup?”

“Please.”

Marlene moved forward, unsticking the ladle from her lips and sliding it into Grace’s mouth with ease. The soup tasted like Marlene’s toothpaste.

“Too salty.” Grace grumbled around the spoon.

Marlene touched the clipping of Joan and her parakeet at the country fair with her slipper. “Look just like her, you know.”

In her dream Grace couldn’t distinguish if she was Joan or Grace. If she was at the baby or the library. Someone tugged her wrist and she tumbled down a tunnel. Books and buttons fell over her body. She landed with a thunk on wet cement.

The next day when Grace arrived at the button factory, it had burned down.

“Arson, dear.” Geraldine said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

All those buttons, gone.

Grace cried for the first time in six years on her walk home, kicking pebbles with the steel-toe cap of her handmade loafers. She wanted to say that she had all these questions that needed answers. But that’s the way life went, you didn’t always get your answers.

Her philtrum hurt in the cold. She touched the polaroid in her pocket.

In the clouds, lightning zapped in a zig-zag. She watched it with a dead heart.