Empty Feast
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Empty Feast.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Through a stone doorway, a banquet waits. Candles burn in a straight row, flames level, wax not yet in a hurry. Chairs stand pulled out, and no one sits. The room itself has no street under it. Cloud moves past the open arches, slow bodies of grey with no ground showing through. A long table is fully laid: plates, folded linen, covered dishes, a small city of lit towers standing in the middle of the cloth where guests should be. The towers are metal and paper, windows pricked with light, streets no one could walk.
A woman in a gold dress stands at the near edge, the rest of the room in shadow. The dress takes the candlelight and gives it back as a dull shine. She touches the back of one chair and does not draw it in. Her hand lifts the lid from a dish. Steam rises, then thins. The food is untouched, arranged and cooling. She looks along the table to the far place, where a glass still waits, empty, catching a candle. Nothing is poured. The little towers flicker as if their streets had evening in them. She sets the lid down beside the dish, not yet replacing it.
She walks the length of the cloth. With two fingers she pinches out the tiny lights, tower by tower, until the city is only dark metal and paper windows. Each pinch is small. A thread of smoke no larger than a hair rises and dies. She leaves the candles. She replaces the lid. The steam beads once on the metal underside and is shut in. She sits, finally, in the nearest chair, gold against the dark, and sets her hands on either side of a plate she does not use. The far glass stays waiting. No other chair moves.
The chair she chose takes her weight and settles a fraction, legs finding old dents in the stone. The other chairs, pulled out, do not copy the settle. Her plate stays empty of any serving. The covered dish keeps its heat as a faint warmth she can see only as the last thinning of steam at the lid's seam, and then even that seam goes quiet. Far off, the empty glass holds a candle as a small bright line and does not fill itself. She does not reach down the cloth to claim it.
Cloud passes the arches. Time passes as one candle gutters, shortens, and recovers, the row otherwise level. One tiny tower window, already dark, relights by itself for a moment, a single point, and then dies without her hand. She does not pinch it again. The candles burn level. The meal stays covered under the replaced lid, and the unlit city keeps its place among the unused plates, one window briefly remembered and then as dark as the rest.