NEVERENDING

Ingrid found the screenplay: The Enchanted Stories. By Big Todd.

In the time it took her to read the title and byline, Big Todd was upon her, pinning her to the front counter with his looming body, his fingers leaving buttery popcorn fingerprints on the glass where he leaned past her. “I see you found my pages.”

Over the course of Ingrid’s half-year tenure at the Reel to Reel video store, her boss Big Todd had more than once informed her of his passion for screenwriting. He said he’d probably move on from quiet Shermantown, New York for Hollywood when someone optioned one of his scripts.

The Enchanted Stories, Big Todd explained, was going to be the next big fantasy film. “Let’s face it, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia were overhyped messes. The stories are too complex. A successful movie should be written for the screen.” He carried on about his philosophy, then about the dragons and dwarves and damsels in distress he was writing. “But the script speaks for itself. Go on, read it.”

He stepped back, giving her room to step back from the counter, too, and open the pages. It turned out he’d only given her act one, which opened on a scene of a Zebricorn (described as a unicorn with black and white stripes) sinking in quicksand while her best friend (a boy of human persuasion) cried, begging for the Zebricorn to live. The format didn’t read much like a script.

Ingrid called Big Todd on cribbing from The Neverending Story. A scene shortly after saw a French swordsman announce his name and that he meant to avenge his mother in a way that read an awful lot like Inigo Montoya telling the six-fingered man to prepare to die.

“They’re homages.” Big Todd used the same voice he used when he was reminding Little Todd that Basic Instinct went under thrillers rather than horror, or that Die Hard went under action until October, but then got moved to the Holiday Favorites display. “Nothing is truly original nowadays. Every story’s been told. The art is in culling the right material from the right sources so it all works together.”

Ingrid thought that would be the end of it.

There were more pages the next day.

More pages, none of them good. Pages that ended with a stage direction in which the characters stopped to look straight through the screen into the soul of the viewer. They asked in unison, What should we name this mountain we have discovered?

“Well,” Big Todd said, “what do you think?”

Ingrid had been conscious of Big Todd behind her, but not that he was reading the words with her, that he had intuited when she was done. She told him the new pages were better.

“No, what should they name the mountain?”

And so it was a question, not only to the viewer, but to Ingrid in that immediate moment. She looked around, eyes settling on a poster for Ghost. She suggested Swayze.

He lingered there, close enough for Ingrid to feel the heat of his body—always so warm, so he justified keeping the store temperature colder than Ingrid was ever comfortable with, such that she had to wear a zip-up hoodie over her Reel to Reel polo. She imagined Big Todd pondering if the suggestion were serious.

Strange things started to show up. After Ingrid’s suggestion, the name Swayze appeared in the script, not to name the mountain but a mountain of a man who came to the heroes’ aid in a drunken tavern brawl. After a scene of characters eating pineapple in the script, a pineapple showed up in the break room. Then, waiting for Ingrid at the register when she started her shift, a stuffed zebra with a horn—a yellow board game token, like the pieces from Sorry!—crudely scotch-taped to its head.

Ingrid asked what Big Todd meant by all of this. He played dumb. What Zebricorn?

He was messing with her, of course. Or else trying to bring magic into her world. She wasn’t sure which would’ve been worse.

Ingrid left the store after a day shift. It was brighter outside than she expected. Maybe because she’d been working a lot of night shifts and a part of her expected it to be as dark out as it was when she locked the doors at midnight. Maybe it was because it had been overcast in the morning when she opened. Maybe it was her tired eyes, worn out from another shift, a disproportionate amount of it spent reading Big Todd’s screenplay from the beginning, at his insistence, to pick up on the nuances he’d changed and how they set up the climactic scene of the luck dragon carrying the heroine across the sky.

Ingrid was blinded by the sunlight, however briefly. However briefly after, she could have sworn she saw the flash of periwinkle fur. Her own luck dragon, carrying the promise of a ride home, of adventure.

Call it imagination. Wishful thinking.

Maybe Big Todd was getting into her head.

As she got in her car, Ingrid fantasized most of all about riding a great beast’s back to chase Big Todd far, far away if he insisted on force-feeding her another single page.