Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,13
motionless.
Gotcha, Anna thought.
“As he peers across the distance at his first and only love and the camera pulls out once more, we find he is an old man, as weathered and wrinkled as the woman, who is now old once more. He does not peer at her across a crowded and celebratory pier filled with revelers, but an empty kitchen. We’ve seen this kitchen; it’s her kitchen.
However, it is not as empty as it was the last time we saw it. The once gray walls are now cheery.” The walls in the animated drawing painted themselves a happy pattern of yellow and white stripes. “Their bare spaces are now decorated with lovingly framed photographs of people. Photographs of children, of grandchildren, of aunts and uncles and newborn babies, graduations and soccer games and soldiers returned from the war. These are lives lived, lives that had not been there before, a legacy – that was not there until that single, momentous, life-altering kiss.
The old man’s eyes meet hers. She looks better now than when we first met her, the hair on her head white instead of gray, the bun exchanged for soft curls that cascade over her shoulders, the once drab clothing switched out for pastel hues. She smiles a very soft, very gentle smile. Their eyes speak unspoken volumes, stories of knowledge deep and true.
In this new, not quite as empty silence, the old man has a newspaper in his hands. He places today’s paper on the table. It bears the very same headline we saw earlier, announcing the anniversary of the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic. We hear his shuffling footsteps as he crosses the kitchen and approaches his true love.
He touches her cheek.
They embrace.
The music becomes lilting, its notes carrying us as the camera pans out to climb the stairs to the house’s second floor. On the way, we see more photographs on the walls and atop a piano, we pass taped-up children’s drawings hung proudly by second-graders, we witness vibrant color schemes that filled a once monochrome world.
The camera takes us to the attic room at the end of the hall, where in a beam of light in a much brighter and happier place of memories, a now empty crystal perfume bottle sits, obviously used and loved. On the back of the bottle in scrawling etched letters are the words, ‘Time Enough.’
And our commercial closes with a final, simple farewell message that can be either spoken or scripted across the bottom of the screen. ‘What would you change of fate… if there were just Time Enough?’”
As the music ended and the screen faded to black, Annaleia scanned the faces of the people at the conference table. She managed to keep herself from jumping for joy, but their slow, silent nods and flushed expressions – not to mention the actual tears on the cheeks of more than one of them – made it damn hard to contain her excitement. She’d so badly wanted this sell. It was the last project she’d had to complete before beginning a long-awaited and hard-earned vacation. She’d wanted to leave on a high note because as everyone knew, employees were a lot easier to replace when they were on vacation. Anna wanted to be indispensable.
Finally, the woman at the far end of the table, the director of advertising for the cosmetics company Anna was pitching to, began clapping enthusiastically. Her red-lipped grin spread to envelop the entire lower half of her face. The others at the table joined in right away, and Anna let out a breath of relief that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“Absolutely amazing, Miss Faith,” the director said. “I love it. And I know our buyers will too. We should be able to—“”
But she never had a chance to finish what she was saying, as suddenly, a distant-sounding thump shook the floor beneath their feet and chairs. The unsettling reverberation stopped everyone still and caused the pencils to roll across the table.
A second later the fire alarm blared to screeching life, but before the sprinklers overhead began spinning and spraying, Anna was moving for the door. She’d been in this situation before. She recognized the feel of that particular thump. Now she was on autopilot, even as her nerve endings crackled to terrified life and her mind screamed one sentence over and over again in a loop.
Not again. Not again. Not again.
Chapter Two – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Anna opened the door and turned to the room, holding the door wide with