Heart of Flame: A Tale Of Sauron

Toss the Dice

New York City, 1925

"Where are the eggs?"

Maryanne dug through the cloth shopping bag that had been dumped on the splintering kitchen table. "I thought I asked you to buy some eggs for dinner? So we can actually eat something before we leave for the theater?"

Ivy shrugged, flipping open a box from the department store and tossing the tissue paper aside. "Well, these ended up being a little more expensive than I expected."

Maryanne glared at her roommate across their one room flat. "Are you telling me that you forwent food for a new pair of silk stockings?"

Sinking into a nearby chair, Ivy peeled the old pair off her shins. "There was a hole in the toe and a couple obvious runs up my old pair. What did you expect me to do? Go bare legged?"

"Better than going hungry!"

Ivy gave her friend a calming simper as she smoothed the new fabric over her calves. "What's one more notch in our belts going to hurt, hmm? Besides, you know we can find a way to get food without using our hard-earned money."

Biting into their last apple with a spiteful crunch, Maryanne rolled her eyes and moved towards the gramophone by the open window. Among the cramped tenement buildings of Brooklyn, it was the nicest thing they owned and they treated it like a holy relic. Maryanne set the needle down on a jazz record and focused on fixing the finger curls in her strawberry blonde hair.

Ivy grinned, tugging up the hem of her skirt and admiring her long legs in their cracked mirror. It had been a worthy sacrifice. What was an empty stomach to looking one's best? If she was going to get herself out of that rat hole of a theater and earn a place in a real Broadway show, she would have to cut corners.

Maryanne Maier had something to fall back on. Her large, German family in Duluth, Minnesota wrote her constantly, begging her to return home. She even had a sweetheart who still pined for her even though she had broken things off with him after she hopped a train for New York City.

An orphan, Ivy McKee had been raised in a home for girls up in Bangor, Maine. She had been left on the doorstep as a baby with no note or any personal affect. In high school, she'd had a beau, David, but he was killed in France during the Great War.

All she had was dance. And she would not allow anything to keep her from going as far as she could with it, certainly not an empty stomach.

"Button me up, will yah?" Ivy turned to her friend as they dressed in their costumes, the clock on the wall showing five minutes past six. They were due at the theater in a half an hour. "It's a little loose at the hips."

Maryanne scoffed. "I wonder why... what with you spending all our money on frivolities."

"Frivolities," Ivy mimicked in a nasally tone, tossing her friend a wink. "I'm sorry, Mare. Desperate times, you know..."

Maryanne bit her bottom lip to keep from grinning as she finished the last button at the base of Ivy's neck. "You're lucky I love yah, kid."

"Love you too, sugar."

Ivy meandered to the mirror while Maryanne dug the last of her favorite lipstick out of the tube with a spoon and carefully applied it. Pinching her cheeks, Ivy tried to bring some color into her sallow complexion. Naturally fair, she was looking paler than usual recently. She didn't want to admit that it was from a lack of sleep. It was less frightening to blame their poor diet than her reoccurring nightmares.

Smoothing down her sleek, bobbed hair, she cocked her head to the side and peered out the window. The frantic ding of a fire engine rang through the streets. She perched on her tip toes to spy where it was headed as Maryanne came up beside her.