The Stolen Kiss

A sun-dappled rectory garden becomes Eden for two children: Felicia, caged by her grandfather’s antique morality, and Dudley, whose red rubber ball arcs over a picket fence like a comet of possibility. One illicit peck—swift as a sparrow’s heartbeat—shatters the Major’s Victorian snow-globe; the girl is banished to the maple wilderness of Canada while the boy is left clutching only the echo of strawberry lip-balm. Years ferment. Felicia re-emerges in Manhattan’s electric twilight, stitching silk by day and translating private longing into kinetic arabesques by night. Dudley, now a sleek Manhattanite, wanders into a rooftop cabaret where gas-jets halo her spinning silhouette; memory detonates. He pursues her through rain-slick alleys, past El signs that sizzle like faulty synapses, arriving in time to wrench her from the groping talons of Graemer, the impresario whose moustache wax smells of backstage vice. In a final tableau worthy of Chagall, the lovers ascend a tenement stairwell that seems to lean toward the moon, resurrecting the kiss that was never truly stolen—only on layaway.