On the day that this story takes place, a child sits in band class.
The day could be any late-April day, some weeks before the school’s spring concert, where the Junior Band will premiere the John Williams medley they have been rehearsing since Christmas. The child’s proud parents will be among many lighting up the auditorium with their iPhones so they can point to the speck in the third row at the next dinner party and say, that one’s mine.
It is the year Ellen takes a selfie at the Oscars. When millions douse themselves in ice water for a cause. A plane vanishes over the South China Sea.
Fourteen years earlier, during a snowstorm at the turn of the century, on a day necessary for this day in band class to become possible, a child is born. The girl-child that their parents dreamed of, radiant and pink and exactly right. The child grows. They dabble in ballet classes, house league soccer games, swimming lessons. They don their mother’s old chemo wig to go as Hermione for their seventh Halloween. They celebrate their tenth birthday with all fourteen of their girl-classmates at the local UVlit bowling alley. Their parents watch and smile and don’t have any more children because one is plenty, this one excellent one. The child becomes a teenager but stays a child, chapped-lipped and barely pubescent. They start grade nine at a high school known for its music program and enrol in band class.
Toronto Star Short Story Contest third-place winner Sydney Gilchrist.
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