Glass Alley
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Glass Alley.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Rain runs down an alley of glass brick. The floor is glass too, lit from under, and the light keeps a grid. Drops on the brick break the grid into brief bends and the grid returns. Memory screens hang in the air at different heights, each one playing a room that is not the alley: a kitchen, a stair, a bed, none of them entered from here. No one in the alley has a name yet. Rain is loud on the brick and softer on the glass floor.
A figure stands under the screens, face turned toward the hanging rooms and not toward the street's far end. Hands work in the rain over a small table that is already awake: orange wire, a jack, a coil of light being edited down to a few seconds of a dream. The coil shortens as the hands work. A spark travels the orange wire and dies before the jack. The figure does not look up at the rain. The screens keep their rooms without being asked.
The jack seats. Red light comes up over the figure's face. The dream installs. On the nearest screen, a door opens in a room the alley does not contain, and the door stays open. A hallway beyond that door is only light and a further door, shut. Street sound drops away from the figure. Rain is still loud on the brick for everyone else. The figure's shoulders do not register the rain the way a wet coat should. The orange wire hangs and swings. The grid under the glass floor does not break its lines.
Rain beads on the orange wire and runs to the jack without shorting the red light. The coil of edited light, shortened to its few seconds, rests on the table and does not grow back. A screen farther down the alley keeps playing a stair with no one on it, step after step, and does not copy the door. The figure's hands leave the jack and hover, wet, and return to the table's edge. Street lamps at the far end remain street lamps. Their light does not reach the face under the red. The glass floor shows the shoes and the bright square and the grid continuing in every direction the figure is not walking. No one calls a name down the alley, because no name has been given to call.
The figure does not take the jack out. Time passes as the red light pulses once with the installed dream and then holds steady. The adjacent screen copies that open door a beat late and then freezes, two rooms now showing the same unentered opening, while the other screens keep their separate rooms. One square of the floor grid brightens under the figure's shoes and holds. The alley runs on. The figure remains under the red light with the jack in, and the street is no longer where that face is pointed.