The Orphan’s Dilemma

In a few minutes they’re going to say, “It’s your turn, Harold.” He will face Ms. Wickham with her thick black frames and smiling, slightly bugeyed look, the question more in her eyes than on her lips because he already knows what that question is.

He and the other orphans at Armstrong have thought, debated, searched and fought about this question for the last two years. It has come to be as much a part of his life as the rules that govern the orphanage itself. It has dogged him through fantasy and chore, sought him in the marvelous and the mundane.

And wasn’t it what every orphan wanted? To wake up one day and have parents.

Not only that, but to have always had them.

Even now, he could scarcely believe it. There was an actual medical procedure in which all the particulars of an unwanted life were whisked out of a person’s very brain, and in their place was inscribed a poem, a life, written from remembered stanzas of song and semblance. It carried a cadence unknown before sleep, but whose new rhythm was as familiar as breathing upon waking. Memory surgery. The miracle whereby Harold’s lifelong fantasies of sitting at a table with a group of people who had spent their entire lives knowing him could leap from the shadows of his imagination and land fully formed in the world, like a favorite character vanishing from the page of a book and appearing in the chair next to him.

Today was his chance to do it, to pull fantasy and reality inside out. He could finally banish the lonely world of Harold. The decision should be easy. Most of the other orphans had made