The Day After Names
Key art
Prologue
The street is still a street. The roadway keeps its width.
Watch
Permanent screening
2:57 · 16:9 · not filed.
One line
Before the synopsis
What has fallen are the names.
Synopsis
Yara Flint
Enamel plates lie on the paving where they dropped, letters chipped, screw holes empty. Yara Flint painted those letters when the signs still stuck. She walks the geometry now with a brush case in her hand and no title on the wall above her.
The pale outlines of rectangles remain on the brick, cleaner than the wall, the size of the plates. Screws are gone from the holes. She does not open the brush case while she walks.
Her shoes avoid the plates and then stop avoiding them, because they are everywhere a name used to be. Minutes pass as that walking of angles she still knows, and as no one calling a street by a word. A paper does not blow.
Extended sequence
After labels, in order
The enamel clicks only when her shoe touches one and she steps off it. She stops at the corner she knows by its angle, not by a word. A plate near her boot shows half a name she can still read. She crouches, lifts it, and holds it against the brick where the pale outline of a rectangle remains.
The plate will not take. For a moment the old work is almost back: her letters, her corner, a street that could be asked for by name. The plate's weight pulls at her fingers.
Still
Yara Flint · when the labels fall off
Figures in the frame
Yara Flint
The plates
The brick gives her nothing to hook. A flake of pale paint falls from the empty screw hole and sticks to the enamel. She does not press it back into the wall. She lowers the plate and lays it with the others.
Putting them up again would hire hope to do the work of a plot, and she does not. Residue is not litter to her. It is where the letters ended.
Codex fragment
She walks the length of the unmarked block. The enamel stays on the ground. Fallen letters lie at the corner, and the capped brush stays in her hand. The flake of paint rides the plate she set down.
The scenario is filed in the Codex.
Sound of Imagination
No screw appears in the empty hole to invite the name back up. The corner keeps its angle and not its word. Her brush case stays closed for the length of the block, and the chipped half-name remains among the other plates on the paving. She does not look back at the corner to see if the plate has climbed.
Showcase
Object
She caps the brush she never opened. The half-name, set down, loses one more chip from a letter when the plate meets the paving.
The chip is tiny and bright. It stays beside the plate. The loss follows the laying-down and does not ask her to paint a repair.
The Craft
The Craft · Aftermath / Ruin
Image · Motion · Sound · Result
The block ahead is brick, mortar, and the pale ghosts of rectangles, all of them empty. A screw hole at eye level shows raw brick inside and no thread.
The brush case bumps her leg and stays capped. Wind moves a plate on the paving a finger's width and cannot stand it up.
Read it as written. The scenario.
The next room
After this filing
The half-name she could still read stays face-up among the others, chipped, and the street keeps its curbs without anyone arriving to ask it what it used to be called. The next room is When the Lights Chose Silence.
After the frame
Mark · keep · letter
Released rooms keep a mark from one to five, a keep on this device, and letters that stay with the page after the feed has moved on. The Day After Names is ready.
Letters under the frame
The Archivist · held
Filed in the archive. The page does not expire.