Orbit of the Unnamed
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Orbit of the Unnamed.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
A woman sits with a star catalogue and a pencil by a low parapet. The pages are stiff with old damp and still turn. The sky is ordinary until the moon clears the water tower. It carries a gold rim and nothing else. No planet hangs with it. She waits through a minute in which a planet could appear and none does. She hunts the catalogue for a number and finds the entry blank, a clean gap where the type should sit. The gap is printed, not torn. Neighboring entries have their numbers. This one has the place for a number and the number is missing.
She writes a number of her own. The pencil sounds on the paper. The mark pales and leaves the page. She watches it go, digit by digit, until the gap is clean again. She writes the same digits on the stone coping. The stone takes nothing. The pencil lead does not even dust the grain. She rubs the coping with a thumb and the thumb comes away clean. The gold-rimmed moon does not travel while she tries. It hangs as if the hour had agreed to wait.
She looks at the roof under her shoes. The tar paper is gone. Older tiles lie there, cracked, belonging to a roof this building does not have. Grit sits in the cracks. She lifts one. The tile is lighter than it should be. Under it the same gold rim shines, small, nested in the dark below the tile. It is the moon's rim and not a coin. She sets the tile back. The gold underneath does not go out. A seam of it shows along the crack and does not dim when the tile covers the rest. Overhead the rimmed moon has not traveled with the hour. The water tower's shadow has not moved across her knee.
The catalogue stays open to the blank entry. Her pencil rests in the gutter of the book and does not write a third time. The gold edge hangs with nothing tied to it, and the older tiles remain under her shoes. She does not stand to chase the moon along the parapet. The unnamed entry stays unnamed. The small gold under the tile stays lit. The sky keeps a rim with no body of planet beside it, and the roof keeps a layer of tile the building did not lay.
Wind crosses the parapet and does not turn a page. The blank entry does not fill itself with type. Her number is gone from paper and never arrived on stone. She remains seated. The gold rim remains. The older tiles remain. Nothing she can hold will take the number the sky is also refusing to wear.
She closes one hand on the pencil and does not set it to the blank again. The gold under the tile pulses once, or only seems to, and then holds steady along the crack. The water tower does not offer a number of its own. Overhead the rimmed moon refuses the hour's travel. The catalogue's clean gap stays a gap, and the roof under her shoes stays a roof this building does not claim.