Radiance

From the Personal Reels of Percival Alfred Unck

SEVERIN UNCK

Daddy, why won’t the movies talk to me?

[PERCIVAL UNCK laughs and crouches down next to his dark-haired gamine child. His beard is thin along his jawbone. She pats the silk projection screen with her hands, imploring it to speak.]

PERCIVAL UNCK

Do you remember Uncle Freddy, from the Christmas party?

SEVERIN

He gave me a wind-up pony.

PERCIVAL

Yes. Well. Uncle Freddy has enough money to buy all the wind-up ponies you can think of, because his grandfather invented the moving picture camera and several other devilishly useful gadgets, plus a few things he didn’t really invent but told everyone he did anyway, including a machine that could record sound and make the movies talk.

[SEVERIN lights up, as though she expects that now her father will reveal to her a world of speaking movies she had heretofore been denied.]

PERCIVAL

Oh, my wee small baroness, don’t look at me that way.

[He takes his daughter in his arms. Her dress crinkles loudly as the petticoat brushes the microphone.]

PERCIVAL

Baby girl, do you remember the bandit in Thief of Light? How he wanted to keep everything locked away in his great lonely house, the crown jewels and the Miraculous Machine and Mina Ivy most of all?

SEVERIN

Yes, Papa. He was bad. And he had a mask.

PERCIVAL

Well, Uncle Freddy is like that. Only the crown jewels are audio patents, and the Miraculous Machine is a stack of colour film patents, and Mina Ivy is a world where a girl in a movie could sing to you in a red dress.