The Weight of the Mask
Key art
Filed beside the screening
The picture is The Weight of the Mask.
Scenario
2:57 · 16:9
Morning light sits on an empty plate. A figure lifts a pale mask with both hands. The mask is light and then, once lifted, seems to consider its own weight. A strap brushes the plate and does not move it. The plate stays centered. Through the glass door, an office corridor waits, already lit. Doors along it are shut. A runner runs the length of the floor and ends at a turn the kitchen cannot use.
The figure is in that corridor, tightening the straps before the glass. The eye opening reduces the corridor to a slot: doors, a runner, nothing to either side of the slot. A man passes on the far side of the glass and does not stop. His coat is ordinary. He does not slow for the mask or for the kitchen. At the kitchen table, seen through the same glass, the mask rests between plates, and a face is already in it, not the face of the one who carried it. The face is still. It does not track the man who passed.
A hand settles a strap on that mask anyway. The buckle finds a hole it does not need. The mask does not need the strap to keep the face. The strap loosens a finger's width on its own, and the face remains, a small refusal that follows the settling and does not empty the mask. Later the mask lies on a row of files, a bone-pale skull-face set in the opening, straps loose. The files take the weight and do not slide. The empty plate remains in the kitchen. The glass door is closed. Morning light has moved a little across the plate and still finds it empty.
No one wears the mask. The skull-face in it stays. The files hold its weight, and the plate in the morning light stays empty beside a chair no one has pulled out. The loose strap does not tighten itself again. The man who passed does not return. The corridor beyond the glass keeps its doors shut and its runner straight, and the kitchen keeps the empty plate and the unpulled chair as the whole of its morning.
The morning light finishes its small travel across the empty plate and starts back nothing. No second figure comes to lift the mask off the files. The bone-pale face in the opening does not blink and does not require the strap that loosened. The buckle hangs. The row of files keeps a straight edge under the weight. In the corridor the runner stays dull and straight, and the doors stay shut. The glass door to the kitchen stays closed. The chair beside the plate stays pushed in. A strap that once brushed the plate leaves no ring on it, and the plate remains a plate with nothing served. The passed man does not reappear at the glass. The slot the eye opening made is no longer worn by anyone, and still the mask holds a face that is not the carrier's.