Writer
G.G. Elliott
Write to breathe; breathe to write.
Your Subtitle text
"Make sure you evolve into the person
you want to spend the rest of your life with."
(above) One of the Miracle Babies.
Playing With Mercury - Synopsis
Growing up in an old mansion converted into apartments, Sylvie Messinger, who has seen her mother only in fading photos and sleeps in the bathtub every night, is both gifted and ADHD before the labels existed. When she's not inventing unorthodox activities for herself and her sister whom she's nicknamed Peanut, Sylvie frequently sneaks out to a secret hideout behind the old building's crumbling garage which, for a while, provides an escape from her complicated life: the drug addict/prostitute mother who keeps sending home babies of varying ethnicities for Sylvie's grandmother to raise, the taunting she endures by school mates generated by her unorthodox family, her school desk being placed in the hallway as a result of her inability to control her hyperactivity, and the devastating death of her beloved teacher.
But Sylvie's hidden place is not as secret as she thinks. When it becomes the scene of a vicious encounter with a man she and her grandmother once surprised lurking in the basement laundry, Sylvie survives when the man is scared off by Max O'Neill, the older, palpitation-producing boy who lives upstairs.
And one night, not long after her Grandad stops coming home and Sylvie has graduated to the couch-bed, her habit of sneaking to watch late-night T.V. results in a terrible shockâthe news story of her grandfather's killing of a prostitute. Her mother.
After their mother's funeral, the children: Sylvie, her little sister Peanut, and baby brother Sammy; are abruptly uprooted and sent to the country to live on Cemetery Lane with their aunt and uncle, only to learn that bright open spaces, too, can imprison the spirit, as, after the death of their uncle, the children's lives with their aunt amount to being trapped in an emotional ice block.
Sylvie, now almost 18 and tormented by the ghosts of her mother's past, abruptly leaves her siblings, boards a bus, and returns to the city determined to track down the man who attacked her and to unearth the secrets buried in their family's history.
She finds Max O'Neill still living in the apartment house, and, while struggling with the psychological fallout from the inescapable intertwining of her mother's choices with her own experiences, she tries to turn to him for support, protection, and eventually, love. Ultimately learning that the secrets of her family are lodged in layers of shame and deception; Sylvie uncovers an intricate, unexpected trail of love denied and fear misplaced. Yet always buoyant, she manages to grow into a young woman of strength and character who refuses, in spite of justifiable self-doubts, to repeat the choices that doomed her mother.
With Parts One and Three told from Sylvie's point of view, Part Two voiced by her little sister Peanut, and Part Four told by Sammy at age 14, Playing With Mercury shows that the flawed world of the children of lost and desperate adults can be more than survived; it can be conquered.
