Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
All because he’d decided one kid shouldn’t have to face that worm of a director alone.
That was what really had him so agitated, wasn’t it?
Before he’d even realized it, he’d somehow decided that brown-eyed, translucently pale boy was his responsibility.
And what was he supposed to do with that?
Brendan slumped himself down onto the sofa, letting his legs sprawl out, and dragged his copy of the script off the coffee table. He should read his lines. Start internalizing, building a shell of the character within his interior landscape, creating him like a skin Brendan could slip on and off to become someone else.
Instead he flipped through the first few pages, then dropped the script on the cushion next to him, tugged his phone from his pocket, and pulled up Cillian Tell’s IMDB listing.
Although Tell’s biographical data was bizarrely empty, the actual number of listings was somewhat impressive—considering Tell was only twenty-nine and apparently had just started acting three years ago. Over two dozen film and television credits, the majority of them named characters instead of roles like Distressed Cashier #2. A cluster of online brand ads for some small indie fashion designers, and a rather distressingly long list of moody contemporary arthaus pieces that made the rounds at film festivals, building word of mouth for their directors. Buried in the credits were a few quiet, low-budget romances.
Hm.
Brendan snagged the remote off the coffee table, feeling for it without looking up from his phone, and vaguely pointed it in the direction of the wide, nearly theatrical-sized flatscreen TV on the freestanding wall opposite the couch. It took a few nonresponsive jabs against the power button before he finally looked up, aimed, and snapped the TV on in a bright flare of light, bringing up a dashboard lined with the icons for various streaming services.
He found the film he wanted with a quick search: a romantic tragedy from just last year called The Sound of Glass, the only one with more than a dozen IMDB ratings. The reviews had caught Brendan’s attention: polarized wildly between love and hate, with very little of the middle ground that made up the bulk of critical commentary. Comments ranged from a depressingly broody piece to match the leading man’s broody stare to the film’s washed-out lighting lends a dreamlike surrealness that helps to uplift the leads’ subtle, nuanced performances to not even that pretty face could save this maudlin train wreck of a movie and one cryptic yet entirely plain F.
So fairly typical, when it came to either praise or criticism.
But rather interesting, that very few people had simply liked it or been wholly ambivalent.
Which had Brendan curious enough to press Play, and settling in to let something—anything—distract him from the disquieted feeling inside him.
The film opened on a shot of a girl with long, honey-yellow hair running through a tall field of dry grass and tiny dotted white wildflowers. Slow motion caught sun-spangles on the lens, the individual lashes of single strands of hair, the swirl and flare of her gauzy, sleeveless white sundress around her legs. The IMDB listing had identified the actress as Cordelia Porter; Brendan somewhat remembered passing her at a few gala events in the last few months. Her character, however, was named Natalie, and Natalie laughed in exaggerated close-up detail, her joy the center of the shot as she turned to look at someone behind her. Someone who chased her, someone one would assume shared the same joy she did, a carefree and exhilarating moment between friends, lovers, siblings, whatever the bond might be that stretched such a powerful thread between her and someone off-screen.
But when the camera abruptly switched focus…
The young man who chased her was anything but joyous.
Cillian moved in a long, desperate, full-body stretching run, arms reaching out before him as if clawing at the air for traction to pull himself faster, his expression one of tortured loss, fear, despair—all written in stark lines around his eyes, in the wet streak of tears on his cheeks, in his open mouth shouting something desperate, begging. No sound other than the music, plinking piano notes that should have been soothing but, like Brendan’s apartment right now, were just enough of an off note to feel wrong. Unsettling.
Eerie, the tension building with every soft droplet of noise.
Still the girl laughed without sound, turned back to look at Cillian, skipped backward, then spun and dashed forward again. Chase me, chase me, her dress bouncing in gradual ripples. Watching all of this in slow motion felt like a single second extended into a lifetime, giving time for dread to build as the camera switched back and forth between Natalie and Cillian’s character, a young man named Roland. Nothing else in the scene gave any cues to the source of Roland’s distress: blue sky, flitting birds, now and then a burst of dandelion wisps as their steps exploded the little nodding puff-heads. Yet although Roland and Natalie ran beneath the same sky, they lived in two different worlds—and while Natalie laughed and laughed, the Roland character’s changing expressions and widening eyes told a story of terror, of realization, of…