Doing Sophia stings a little. I have a stock photo of her I use as a guide, from the first time I fixed her to Mrs. Tyburn’s approval. Opening these frames in Illustrator, I change the brush size to one hundred and liquefy her little sepia legs, use the pucker tool until they’re sticks with some prepubescent hint of a shape. I zoom in and shrink each finger, her wrists, her arms. I bring in her waistline a few pixels at a time. I’m a child abuser, I’m a flesh-eating virus.

I’m a cartoonist. This is a joke.

It’s quarter past five. I’ve been editing for three hours and I’m sixty-four seconds into the film. My work is all seconds and pixels and millimeters. My work is the size of a lifetime. I wonder if life seemed so long before I started looking at it one frame at a time. I’ll be up here forever, fixing Mrs. Tyburn’s memory. I’ll stay up here forever until my parents come and climb the stairs, burst in and gather me up. Mrs. Tyburn will try to stop them. “She isn’t finished. I still have bad memories up there. You can’t have her until she’s finished.” But my mother will be awesome. “Back off, Madame Bovary!” she’ll shout, and then probably flick out a switchblade or something embarrassing like that. And we’ll go. We’ll live in one of those places you have to get to by train. I’ll go back to school and learn French in no time. Or German or whatever. And we won’t talk about anything in the past. We won’t be able to. We’ll live in a place where nothing has a memory, and I’ll have a chance to catch up with the world.

I paste the frames I’ve been editing back into the parent file and play it at speed. There are a couple of hiccups. Pause, step back, tweak. I consider letting a couple of small errors slide but I never do. Someone will see this film after all. Just once. Mrs. Tyburn will watch all of these, one time, to replace her memory of the day with the spotless memory of a film of the day, and she’s paying me to make the memory perfect.