Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,11
floor and opens a door at the end of a dark hallway. The room inside is undecorated, used as an attic. Peeling wallpaper in some places, dust motes caught by the light streaming through gauzy curtains. Against one wall is a hope chest. She maneuvers her way to her knobby knees to kneel before it. As she opens the hope chest, soft piano notes begin to play, still so quiet they are barely audible. The camera pans to the contents inside, things we recognize as events embedded in the layers of time, each one taking us further into the past… a paper with a headline of the Challenger space shuttle disaster, Nixon’s impeachment, Kennedy’s assassination…”
Annaleia watched the members of the committee shift slightly in their seats or look down briefly at the table as each event that registered a connection to their particular generation was mentioned. Their ages ranged from forty to sixty-four; she’d chosen the range of time for the events with them in mind. One after another the blips in history appeared and disappeared in shifting black ink on white across the screen behind her, scrawled across the tops of the newspapers and magazines the old woman pulled from the chest’s depths.
Anna went on, feeling the restless excitement build in the room. It always began low and slightly curious. Like a murmur. “Until at last she reaches the bottom layers and pulls a cardboard shirt box from their depths. She slowly slides the lid off to reveal three objects inside – an engagement ring, another folded newspaper, and a still-wrapped gift complete with bow. The gift is obviously from another era, its corners rubbed off by time.”
This was where Annaleia began to get chills as she told the story, because this was where it became structurally beautiful, like more of an actual story and less of an advertisement.
“But the paper is ancient. The old woman carefully unfolds its cracking, yellowed pages in the still silence to reveal a headline similar to the one we just saw on the kitchen table downstairs, but much more meaningful. It strikes a deeper chord because this one is the original. This is the London Herald release from April 16th, 1912, in which the title in bold text read simply, ‘Titanic Sinks.’
A tear has escaped the old woman’s eyes, and the piano music is unobtrusively rising in volume.” In the conference room, Anna manipulated the controls out of sight in her hand, and the music in the room echoed her words. “The old woman turns silently to the gift, and after a moment of obvious deliberation, she pulls the bow free. It’s stiffened with age, as have her hands, but the bow eventually falls and the woman continues to unwrap the gift.”
On the screen behind Anna, the animated pen sketch woman removed the paper from a box and then opened the box. “Inside is a crystal bottle. It’s an older design, with the atomizer attached. It has no visible label. She lifts the bottle free from its casing, and with fresh moisture on her cheeks, she squeezes the atomizer. Droplets of mist enter the air around her, and she looks up.”
This was where the story changed and the audience was drawn in. This was the clincher, the tightening part of the ad, and the point of no return. This was the part that Anna had been waiting for, and the reason she’d wanted the pen sketch animation to help sell her pitch. “We, the audience, look up along with her to see that the drops suspended above and around her are changing, becoming larger. The room is shifting, becoming brighter. Soon the perfume mist has transformed to confetti, and when the camera pans out once more, the old woman has become young again, no older than perhaps sixteen or seventeen years. She is standing in bright daylight amidst a crowd of revelers on the docks of a pier.”
In the conference room, the fog horn sounded again, accompanied by the pleasant noises of a celebrating crowd and piano music now at normal volume. At the same time, the animated black and white pen drawing behind Annaleia suddenly blossomed into full color, the sky erupted into periwinkle blue, the confetti set with rainbow hues, and the vibrancy of the woman’s eyes was the color of the Caribbean Sea.
“All around her, people are celebrating, tossing streamers and torn paper. A nearby sign wishes good fortune upon the maiden voyage of the ‘Unsinkable Titanic.’”