Radiance

The man laughs again. You like his laugh. I like his laugh. We cannot help but feel well disposed toward a man with a laugh like that, even though it is not really his, but a laugh he learned at university, copied meticulously from his favourite screenwriting professor as you and I might copy from our neighbour during an exam.

“But that’s not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don’t even realise that what you’re choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won’t pan out till you’re sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.”

“Papa, you’re babbling. Ada says you have to stop that. She says you’re full of hot air.”

“I’m full of many things, I’m sure. Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”

A bright cascade of giggles splashes out over the crackle of the phonograph. The child lowers her voice to a whisper: “I like it when you swear.”

And at that moment the child leaps out of the phantasmal throng of dancing ghosts, out of the frame, out of The Spectres of Mare Nubium, and shimmers into the shape of the Venusian boy, his serious expression so like hers, turning in endless circles on a grey lawn.

Her name is Severin Unck. She is ten years old. She is talking to her father, Percy.

She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.

Welcome. This beginning is your beginning. We have saved it specially for you. Shall we?

Oh, Those Scandalous Stars!

Places, Everyone!, 3^rd July 1919

Editor’s Note