Story Without Middle
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is Story Without Middle.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Ward Elling, leather apron darkened at the waist, stands at a torn wall. Two landscape panels occupy the break: on one side a path into mountains, on the other a castle and a tree. Between them plaster has given way, and a small bulb burns in the gap. The bulb is the middle. It is not a chapter. Thread and a needle lie on the bench where his hands have been working. The torn edge of plaster is pale and new. Dust from it has settled on the bench and not been brushed off.
On the bench an open book repeats the problem. The left page is the mountain path. The right page is the castle and the tree. The gutter is a hole, and a small lamp burns in the hole. The lamp is the book's copy of the bulb, smaller, hotter to look at, the same refusal to be a scene. Ward's hands have been stitching a binding. Thread lies across the wood. A middle signature, blank and ready, waits to be sewn in and make the two pages one life. Minutes pass as the bulb ticking while it heats, and as the little lamp doing the same tick inside the gutter, two middles keeping time with each other and with no story between the pictures.
He picks up that signature. He holds it over the hole. The blank paper darkens along one edge from the lamp's heat and does not catch. He does not lower it into the light. Then he sets it aside, unsewn. The signature curls at the warmed edge, a small roll, and stays curled. He draws the path page and the castle page toward each other and stitches only the outer binding, beginning to end, with the lamp left in the refusal. The needle goes through the outer sections. It does not cross the hole. He closes the book. Beginning and end press together. The middle was not lost. It was declined.
The curl in the unused signature tightens a fraction as it cools, and does not flatten. That curl follows the refusal. The thread he did not use stays in a loose line on the bench. The bulb in the wall ticks louder as it heats, then settles to the same tick as before. He does not pick the signature up again.
He steps back into the tear, apron lit, panels to either side. The bulb ticks as it heats. Under glass on the far desk the closed book stays shut. The path does not continue into the castle. The castle does not send a road back. Plaster dust on his apron does not fall.
A small lamp burns between the mountain path and the castle. The closed book keeps both ends and nothing between. The blank signature stays aside, curled, unsewn, and the bulb does not become a chapter by burning longer.