The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst Page A

forces at work. With the help of Cecily, a receptionist at the studio and the only person who shares his ability to see the hidden pictures, Oscar is forced to confront an event he’s long tried to forget: his trip on the ill-fated Titanic at the age of nine.

Excerpt from
CARPATHIA
By Octavia Frost
ORIGINAL ENDING

We sat in the sand as the daylight began to fade. It need hardly be said that I am not one of those souls who take great pleasure in visiting the seaside, but on this day it seemed like the only thing left to do. Somehow I’d thought that if I took Cecily out, if we spent the day together, then we would get to the bottom of this. Cecily was the key, I thought—the only other person to see what I saw, when everyone else said it was just an accident of the way a particular line curved, the way the camera caught the movement of the drawing from cel to cel. But now the day was ending, and I knew nothing more than I had that morning. So I took her to the ocean, and I waited to see what would happen.
I’d picked up a number of stones as we were walking, and now that we’d settled ourselves, Cecily was looking at them. “Do you think this might be a moonstone, Oscar?” she asked, holding up a rough gray rock.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks pretty ordinary to me.”
“Well, they are ordinary, until you polish them up. My mother told me that there used to be piles of moonstones on this beach. She and my father came here once, before we kids were born. She said there were mounds of them, four or five feet high, and people would wade through them, looking for good ones.”
I tried to picture it—ladies in long dresses, perhaps carrying parasols, holding the arms of men with mustaches and summer suits. All of them taking an afternoon to search the ground for holiday treasure. “So where did they all go?” I asked. “I can’t imagine they were all gathered up, if there were that many of them.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they’ve been washed away.”
It could be. We think the ocean doesn’t change, but its borders are never fixed. I thought about the sandy floor littered with bright gems: a payment from the land to the sea, compensation for a debt we couldn’t begin to understand.
I returned to the topic we’d been circling all day. “Langer could have my job for this, don’t you think? If he were to find out—I mean, if he could see the pictures. He already thinks all the animators are slipping racy messages into the artwork. You know he lives in fear of the Hays people shutting him down.”
“Oh, I can’t imagine he’d do that,” she said.
“The censors would find some reason, I’m sure. These are the men who put a skirt on Flossie the cow.”
She smiled. “Well, we couldn’t have her udders showing, now could we? Simply scandalous.”
We laughed. I felt happy to be on this windy beach with Cecily, happy just then that I wasn’t anyone else, not one of the shopkeepers selling postcards and ices or the ragged men fishing for their dinner from the pier. So recently I had been on the verge of becoming a different man: angry, lonely, perhaps even unhinged. It was extraordinary, this effect Cecily had on me. Extraordinary that even in the midst of such turmoil and confusion, I could actually feel lucky.
But I couldn’t let the other matter go. In my mind I went over the sequence of events once again. There was the day it all began, when I’d gone to the pictures after running into Ettie and her new boyfriend in the coffee shop, when I’d seen the playing card hidden in the flower bed in the Cappy Penguin cartoon; the day at the studio when the bell appeared right on the production cel, woven into the pattern of Delilah Pufkin’s dress; the terrible morning when I’d discovered the ship’s oar carved into the bark of the tree where the Singing Sparrows built their nest. Most recently there was my date with Cecily, when we’d both noticed the seagull-shaped cloud in the