Janna Tierney
bad commercial on internal speakers located just behind her ear. The
words were the same every time, repeated over and over: it was almost
but not quite as painful as stepping on Legos. But she knew her daughter was enjoying it, so she let it be.
Of course, there was a specific scene that caught Abby’s conscious
attention every time she watched the movie: it was a culmination, a
fulfillment. It had the letters of her name hidden inside it, and every
time she watched it, she tried to dig them out. The harder she tried, the
further her efforts pushed the letters into the tangible substance of the
scene, making the abstract reason for her fascination more and more
difficult to name. What Abby did not know was that it was her mother’s
least favorite scene—she only tolerated it because she knew how much
her daughter loved it.
At last! Abby’s little knuckles tensed and she mouthed the lines.
There she was, in the scene, immortalized forever until the moment
passed.
The children were off: flying off and away into the black night of
London, illuminated in golden fairy dust. Abby frowned as the scene
cut temporarily to a shot within the vacant nursery, as the distraught
parents ran into the room only moments too late, the open window
yawning before them, drawing Abby back out into the starlit flight,
further and further away.
“Honey, mind if I turn that off? I need to focus on the road,” called
her mother from the driver’s seat. She was lying—well, partly lying. As a
child, of course, she had enjoyed similar fantasies: flying off into adventure and unknown forever. But as she’d grown up, she’d come to hold
these stories of lost children not as exciting but as terrifying; she’d lost
the ability to suspend her disbelief in the eminent danger the children
faced; she ceased to identify with the happy children and begun sympathizing deeply with the distraught and broken parents they left behind.
Her fantasy interrupted, Abby pressed the side of her nose against
the frigid window. Her breath fogged the glass, revealing a series of
C-shaped smudges, which indicated that she was in the habit of leaning against the window in this way. She looked up and tried to see if
there were any breaks in the clouds, to no avail. It was almost as dark
as nighttime already. She was surprised by how much the light had
changed while she watched the film. The scene outside the car was
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