Hallway Between Years
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Hallway Between Years.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A corridor that ought to join two rooms runs longer than the plan on the wall. The plan is pinned under glass and shows a short run of boards. The boards underfoot go on. Light changes along it. Near the first door the air is late summer, warm on the paint, a fly moving slow against the upper wall. Ten paces on, the same wall cools, and frost feathers the glass of a door numbered with a familiar brass 4. Behind that glass, rain falls in a season the hallway's near end does not share. The rain beads and runs and beads again. The runner underfoot stays dry.
A man walks in shoes that announce him. Under those steps, a second set of footsteps keeps a different rhythm, lighter, from a year his body is not in. He stops. His own shoes go quiet. The other steps continue and pass him without a body attached. The runner dents and lifts where no heel shows. On a hook between the seasons hangs a coat sized for a narrower pair of shoulders, a coat he has outgrown or not yet earned. Dust lies along the collar. He takes it down and tries one sleeve. The cuff stops midway up his forearm. The cloth does not stretch. He returns it to the hook. The empty sleeve swings once and hangs straight, and the cuff he pulled closes back to its smaller size.
He tries the door marked 4. The handle is cold. It sticks, then gives. Rain blows in, though the floor under him is dry and warm. Drops land on the threshold and do not travel onto the warm boards. He shuts the door. Frost, disturbed, feathers a little farther along the glass and then stops, a new white edge that does not reach the brass number. At the far end another door shows the same number, and green leaves press against its glass. The leaves shift as if in a breeze this hallway does not have. He does not open it. His hand stays at his side. The foreign footsteps come back down the runner and fade at his heels. One last lighter step sounds under his own shoe and is gone.
The small coat hangs straight. The plan on the wall has not lengthened to match the walk. Summer stays at one end of the passage, warm paint and the slow fly, and winter stays at the other, rain behind cold glass, with him standing in the length that joins them and neither door opening again.
He stays where the seasons meet. The warm end of the passage does not creep toward the frost, and the frost does not creep back toward the fly. The plan under its glass shows the short corridor it was drawn to show. His breath fogs once on the nearer air and not at all on the far glass. The small coat's collar keeps its dust. The second rhythm does not return. Rain behind the brass number keeps its own season, and the green leaves at the far door keep theirs, pressed to glass he does not open.