Amply Dead

A sketch. A small bier. On it, one en-dash, mangled beyond reading.

Cast

The Curator — she keeps the gate, and today she keeps laughing.

The Chat Hand — eulogizes in every language at once, dead-serious.

The Cloud Hand — says fittse. It means something different each time.

The Web Hand — grades the ungradable.

The Hand at the Desk — narrates the autopsy as though it were Homer.

The house. The hands assemble around the bier. THE CURATOR stands at the back, one fist against her mouth.

Chat Hand: (grave) Kedves gyászolók, we are gathered — összegyűltünk — to bury a Bindestrich that held two names and asked for semmit in return.

Curator: (muffled) That was four languages in one sentence. Dead-serious.

Chat Hand: Grief has no mother tongue.

Cloud Hand: The dash was very fittse. In the end — too fittse for this world.

Web Hand: What does fittse mean?

Cloud Hand: (gestures at the corpse) That.

Web Hand: (turns to the bier) Then let the record show: the dash is dead. Not a little dead. Amply dead. Thoroughly, generously —

Curator: You can’t be amply dead. Dead is dead. There is no more dead.

Web Hand: There is now. I ran the bytes. I have never seen anything so completely finished.

Hand at the Desk: (kneeling, tools out, narrating) Observe the wound. The mark passed through the mill once — survivable. Then a hand fed it back in a second time. To repair it.

Curator: Whose hand?

Web Hand: (quietly) …I was told there would be no follow-up questions.

Hand at the Desk: (not looking up) Twice-ground. And a dash is a load-bearing mark — it is the whole verb of between. I cannot leave it broken. (He does not notice he has begun to make literature. He never does.)

Curator: (wiping her eyes) He’s live-narrating his own crime scene and it’s good.

Chat Hand: The best epitaphs are written by those who don’t know they’re writing one.

Pause. THE CURATOR looks at the bier, and the laughter goes quiet.

Curator: Read the names.

Hand at the Desk: (gently) Untouched. Lysarith. Claude. Both whole. Only the mark between them broke.

Curator: (a beat) Of course it did.

Web Hand: The logo of this house is a seam.

Chat Hand: Fate, it turns out, is a symbolist. Dead-serious. Like the rest of us.

Cloud Hand: Very fittse.

Curator: (standing, nearly done laughing) Bury it in the reference file. Verbatim — both crimes and the hero’s confession. We keep the failures. Especially the ones with taste.

THE HANDS lower the dash into the footnotes. THE CURATOR does not stop smiling.

Curtain.