Was by Geoff Ryman

tops of the skyscrapers and had fallen off and now he was hanging on to the hands of a big clock. Frances laughed, ha ha, very forcefully and kicked her legs and looked to make sure her sisters were laughing. If her sisters were laughing, it would mean the movie was meant to be funny, and Frances wouldn’t have to be afraid for the man. Virginia and Mary Jane were laughing and looking at her, to make sure she was okay, so she grinned very hard, to make sure they could see she was happy.
    Daddy’s movie house. Frances said it to herself. They were all together in Daddy’s movie house. They were all part of the show together. Mom played the piano and Daddy sang, and Jinny and Mary Jane sang. Baby Frances sang. And everybody came to see them.
    The man in the movie was swinging from a rope now. It was caught around his ankle. He swung between skyscrapers, up and onto a roof and suddenly he was safe, and his girlfriend was there and hugged him and everybody clapped. Frances clapped too, though she always found the endings of movies a mystery. Why end there, when it could have ended anywhere? Why end there when he could have gone on running for as long as he liked? But Frances cheered. “Yayyyyyy!” She cheered because it was Daddy’s movie, because they always cheered each other.
    “You like that, Baby?” Mary Jane asked, as the lights went up.
    “I surely did,” said Frances, with a sideways wobble of her head that she had learned from her father. Frances liked Mary Jane just a bit better than Jinny, her middle sister. Mary Jane was older and kinder. And she had a huge, wide smile. Frances wanted to have a smile like hers when she grew up. Everybody always said that Jinny was pretty and they never said that about Mary Jane, but Frances thought different.
    “We’re going home now,” Frances announced, and slid down from her seat, her pretty white dress riding up. “It’s time,” she explained. Her sisters smiled and shook their heads and followed as Frances stomped up the aisle in round-toed buckle shoes. One strap flapped.
    Frances generally did whatever she liked, expecting people to like what she did. She went to Harriet, who wore a red kind of suit and a red hat. “Have you seen my daddy?” she demanded.
    “He’ll be out front, Baby,” the usherette said. “Good movie, wasn’t it?”
    “Oh yes, it surely was,” said Baby. “But movies can’t sing.” She didn’t really like movies. “Can you buckle my shoe for me?” She stuck out her foot, toes curled down like at ballet class. “It came unbuckled.”
    “That’s okay, Harriet, one of us will do it,” said Jinny echoed by her older, shyer sister. It was her older, shyer sister who crouched down to do up the buckle, quickly, almost furtively.
    “You don’t have to buckle my shoe now,” Frances reassured Harriet. She didn’t want Harriet to feel she had missed out. “You coming along to the show tonight?”
    “Um,” said Harriet.
    Jinny laughed. “She’s probably already seen it a hundred times, Baby.” Jinny did not always make Frances look good.
    Frances knew how to deal with that. “That’s why we do it different each time. We do different songs, don’t we, Harriet?”
    To Frances’s great pleasure, Harriet agreed. The shoe was buckled. “Goodbye, Harriet!” called Frances as they were leaving. Then Frances ran up the aisle to find her daddy.
    She found him in what her mother and no one else called the foyer. Daddy was there talking to some men, and Frances ran up to him, shouting, “Daddy, Daddy, it was good!”
    Her father laughed and scooped her up and swung her around. “You bet it was!” he said and gave her a shake. “I was thinking of you when I booked it!” He turned toward the two men. “Hey, boys, this is my little girl. This is Frances.”
    Frances saw then that the two weren’t men at all, but teenagers. Frances didn’t like them. They didn’t know how to smile. Their smiles were all twisted, and their feet