Dan continued staring out the window. He was stuck. Without money, no actors would sign on, and without actors, no financiers would come aboard. It was a frustrating double bind, made more so by the fact he had worked so hard to write something with real commercial viability for once. This was not Andrei Rublev they were talking about here; this was Animal House meets Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, as the pitch went. The tale of a young, idealistic politician arriving in Washington, D.C., to board with a group of rambunctious elder statesmen at prankish war with the president. It was a broad comedy, and topical, but with the election only a year and a half away, the window of relevance was closing. Either the script would find it’s funding imminently or it would retire to the purgatory of Dan’s hard drive forever, yet another unmade screenplay joining the rest in the digital lake of fire.

They loved it, whatever that meant. The decision was out of his hands. What could he do? His only idea was to go downtown and buy new shoes for his daughter, Celia.

Celia was in the living room, sitting on the couch in her sundress and a witch hat left over from Halloween, reading a book about North American fowl. Dan watched her from the doorway, marveling at the intensity of her concentration. She was a lithe, brown-haired girl, seven years old, with a fine, sharp nose, black eyes, and lips almost always pursed in contemplation. On the table beside her was a glass of water, and on the pillow at her hip a fat, purring calico cat.

Dan’s mother had warned him that his child’s youth would go quickly, and indeed it had. Celia was barely a child anymore. He’d missed certain crucial passages of development during his travels the last few years, coming home from New York or Australia to find an utterly changed creature in the house. But over the past months, being home all the time, he’d been able to witness her blossoming into full, functioning personhood, complete with her own advanced reasoning faculties and her own immutable impressions of the world’s order. Every day she was onto something new. Recently, she had gone through dinosaurs, medieval castles, tropical flowers, and still the knowledge continued pouring in. Milton Berle, Tesla’s coils, the Capricorn project. Where did it come from? The information seemed to drift into her head from the air itself. Dan sometimes believed he could actually see her mind growing as the world traveled past her.

“Ahem,” Dan said, but Celia, engrossed in her book, chose to ignore him. The cat, however, purred a little louder. “Ahem,” he said again.

“Yes?” Celia said. Her pronunciation, as always, was amusingly precise, but still she refused to look up.

“I thought you were putting your jacket on,” Dan said.