Peter and Wendy

Peter Pan cries on the nursery floor because his shadow will not stick, and Wendy Darling kneels in her nightgown and sews it back onto his foot. That single mend is enough. Within the hour she is out the window with her brothers, sprinkled with fairy dust, flying over London toward an island that rearranges itself to fit whichever child is dreaming it that night: lagoons, pirates, a crocodile ticking down the seconds to Hook's death, lost boys who fell from their prams and were never reclaimed. Peter rules over all of it and forgets nearly all of it too, eventually forgetting he ever had a Tinker Bell, and forgetting his own adventures by the time he has finished telling them. J.M. Barrie's real subject is what that forgetting costs: Wendy grows up, grows old, and Peter simply goes on, coming back for her daughter when she can no longer fly, and her daughter's daughter after that, so long as children are, in the book's own last and chilling word for them, heartless.