Whistling Boy in the Graveyard

FADE IN:

Flashes of light resolve into an interlaced VIDEO IMAGE.

THE SHEPHERD (64), flowing robe, headdress, staff, stands in a flock of plywood sheep. He gives the lens a fatherly glance.

SARA (12), long dark hair, determined eyes, blue shirt and tan slacks, studies the Shepherd on an old television.

Not mesmerized. Taking notes.

On the floor: a cardboard obstacle course built for three ANTS wearing pocket-lint fleeces. Plastic spider. Human shoe. Poison can with skull and crossbones.

Sara taps a toothpick staff.

TAP. TAP-TAP.

The ants turn. One strays toward the spider. Another heads directly for the poison.

Sara moves the poison can two inches. The ant finds a path around it.

All three reach the end.

Sara opens her palm. A red gumdrop. Two ants race to it. She removes their lint.

The third stays beside her toothpick.

She sets the gumdrop and two ants on the window ledge. They break off pieces and leave.

She offers a finger to the remaining sheep-ant. It climbs on.

The ant keeps climbing.

Sara puts it on her shoulder, stuffs a child-sized SHEPHERD ROBE into her backpack. Home-sewn, the hem stitched small and even. She knocks twice on a poster:

SHEP AND HIS HERD. SERVE AND PROTECT.

MARTHA (42), kind face, hair tied back, works in a living, unruly garden. A bulky CAMCORDER records from a tripod.

A Japanese HORI HORI blade enters the earth beside a weed.

Extract.

Sara darts from the house.

Sara stops.

Silence.

Sara stops. Her mother thinks she is capable of that?

Martha looks from Sara to the camera.

Sara kisses her cheek and runs.

Martha turns back to the camera, unsure whether she just recorded a promise or made one.

MATT (12), small, glasses, clothes clumped over other clothes, catches Sara.

Matt spots the sheep-ant.

Sara and Matt approach the doors.

KEN DOUSE (12), carefully combed hair, school-paper notebook pressed to his chest, waits for Sara.

Sara looks toward the school. Toward the office windows.

Matt checks beneath his shoe.

The warning bell interrupts her. She enters with Matt.

Ken remains outside.

He writes something in his notebook, then crosses it out.

Sara changes into the shepherd robe. The sheep-ant waits on her backpack.

Sara walks alone in full shepherd garb. Laughter follows her.

A TEACHER gives her the two-finger I'm-watching-you sign.

Sara whispers to the ant now back on her shoulder.

Matt, still clumpy and undercover, gives her a stealthy thumbs-up.

The pale BOY (12), hair combed to the side, corduroy jacket, sits alone against the fence.

Children play around him without including him or excluding him. He has perfected being missed.

Across the yard, in the lee of the jungle gym, where teachers cannot see, a gang of BULLIES shoves a smaller child.

The Boy watches.

He turns one wrist. He looks down at a dark BIRTHMARK on it.

He checks the school clock.

Then closes his hand and walks toward the bullies.

Across the playground, Sara and Matt sit on swings.

Matt works his first shirt button.

The smaller child falls.

The Boy steps between him and the raised fists.

The smaller child goes.

The Boy begins to WHISTLE.

Quiet. Steady.

BULLY 1 notices him.

The Boy says nothing.

Bully 1 shoves him down. The others form a ring. A HUMAN SCREEN hiding the beating.

Matt gets his second button open.

Sara grips the swing chains.

Matt pulls off his outer shirt. Shepherd robe underneath. His pants refuse to cooperate.

The ring tightens. Fists inside dust.

Sara looks toward the teachers. Nobody sees.

Matt trips in his half-removed pants.

Sara closes her eyes.

She jumps from the swing.

Sara runs a tightening path across the playground, selectively CLAPPING.

CLAP. CLAP-TAP. CLAP.

Children move out of her way, then together. Their bodies take on the rhythm of sheep. A herd forms without deciding to.

Ken is caught at its edge.

His feet shift with everyone else's before he chooses to move.

He looks down at them. Then at Sara.

She said she did not do this anymore.

Inside the ring, the Boy looks at the sky. Not frightened. Ready.

He keeps whistling.

Bully 1 raises a final fist.

A bully looks up.

Sara drives the herd at the ring. The human screen breaks. The beating becomes visible.

Teachers finally look.

Sara breaks the herd apart and reaches him.

Bully 1 drops the Boy and runs.

The Boy stirs. Squints up. Sara is backlit by the sun. Angelic.

Sara kneels and helps him sit up.

The Boy realizes who it is. The robe. The girl inside it.

He collapses back to the ground. Eyes closed.

Nothing.

The eyes stay closed.

Matt arrives, finally free of his pants. Full shepherd.

He notices Sara's shoulder.

Sara feels for it. Nothing.

She spins, searching among hundreds of shoes.

TEACHER 1 grabs her arm.

The teacher drags her away and collects Matt with the other hand.

At ground level, the sheep-ant dodges soles, crosses the dust and climbs the Boy's corduroy leg.

It reaches his shoulder.

The Boy stands.

The ant's lint moves in the breeze.

Teachers question Sara and Matt behind closed doors.

Outside, Ken interviews BULLY 2 with his notebook open.

Ken SNAPS once.

The bully stops. Not obedience...not yet. Nobody has ever wanted his account of anything before.

Ken writes that down exactly.

Across the steps, the smaller child Finely protected waits alone for a ride.

Ken sees him.

Does not interview him.

Sara walks home in normal clothes, fighting tears. Matt catches up.

Sara stops.

She hurls her backpack deep into the woods.

Sara runs home.

The Boy enters with the sheep-ant on his shoulder.

People emerge among the stones and occupy predetermined places. Children. Adults. Old people.

They WHISTLE a familiar tune.

The Boy does not.

One by one, the whistlers notice. The tune thins around the stones, then stops.

They gather around him. Not close. Nobody wants to be close.

A middle-aged MAN checks his watch.

The Boy tries to whistle.

Only air.

Silence.

Then the whispering starts.

They look at the Boy for more.

He has nothing else. He looks toward the school.

The Boy closes his eyes.

One whistler walks away, fast.

The others watch him go.

Then, one by one, they leave.

Not angry. Afraid.

Soon the Boy is alone with the sheep-ant.

Across town, Sara's discarded backpack lies open in the woods. The empty robe sleeve shifts like something breathing.

A mimeographed SCHOOL PAPER passes from hand to hand.

Its headline:

MY LEGS MOVED BEFORE I TOLD THEM TO

Below it: SHEPHERD GIRL TAKES CONTROL OF PLAYGROUND.

Sara reads over another student's shoulder.

At the far end of the hall, Ken watches people read.

For the first time, they move toward something he made.

MONTAGE - THE END OF SHEP

-- Ken's sentence appears in a letter to the editor.

-- A parent repeats it at a school-board meeting.

-- A local anchor repeats it over footage of a shepherd's crook slashed red.

-- Ken watches from his living-room floor. Adults are using his words.

-- A sponsor card vanishes from the end of SHEP AND HIS HERD.

-- The Shepherd gives his fatherly glance to an audience that is no longer there.

-- STATIC consumes him.

-- Sara removes the SHEP poster from her wall. Martha replaces it with a handwritten list:

-- Ken practices snapping in his bedroom mirror.

END MONTAGE

TITLE OVER BLACK:

TWELVE YEARS LATER

SARA (24) watches her hometown return through the glass.

On her lap: a suitcase, a textbook on machine languages, and a grant application stamped SUBMISSION #184773-88E.

Her blue shirt and tan slacks fit perfectly.

Outside, the town has aged without changing casts.

A CHILD FROM THE PLAYGROUND, grown now, unlocks the convenience store.

TEACHER 2, older, directs traffic around the same school fence.

The BUS DRIVER was once the girl who sat behind Sara in math. They recognize each other in the mirror.

Sara walks past the graveyard, laundromat, convenience store, gas station.

Martha's garden is lost beneath weeds.

A dandelion explodes from a golf-club swing. Seeds drift into Sara's yard.

Adult MATT (24), still built as if his clothes won an argument, lowers his club.

They hug. He holds on one beat too long, then disguises the release as a look at her suitcase.

Matt is already eyeing his next dandelion. The second part sails past him.

He tees another dandelion.

He swings. Seeds fill the air.

He strikes too hard. The dandelion head vanishes into Cranky Tom's yard.

She says it in a ghost voice. He smiles, but the phrase lands somewhere older.

He looks at the suitcase.

Dust. Family photographs. A telephone with no dial tone.

Sara leans a flattened FOR SALE sign against the wall by the door, still in its plastic sleeve.

A realtor's card goes on the kitchen table, square to the edge.

Sara opens her childhood room. A checklist hangs where the Shepherd poster used to be:

She straightens it.

At the payphone:

She listens.

Hold music. Tinny, looping, indifferent.

The loop comes around and starts again. At the seam, a small mechanical CLICK.

Sara stops being annoyed and starts being interested. That is not a tape. That is a computer, taking its turn on the line.

Nobody is there to answer. She wasn't asking anybody.

She taps a machine rhythm into the receiver.

TAP. TAP-TAP. TAP-PITY-TAP.

The hold music stops mid-loop.

A pause with something listening inside it.

Sara hangs up gently, the way you set down something that might wake.

Inside the store, the CASHIER watches YOUR DAILY DOUSE beside a baseball bat.

A model living room arranged around hazards: frayed cord, loose rug, sinister houseplant.

KEN DOUSE (24), polished far beyond his years, stands in the center.

SNAP.

An ASSISTANT powders his forehead and vanishes.

SNAP. SNAP.

The CAMERAMAN widens to reveal an ELECTRIC BLANKET on a satin pedestal.

He is BULLY 2, older now. Ken has been telling him where to put the frightening part since they were twelve.

The red tally light dies.

A frightened HOMEOWNER grips the blanket.

Ken checks the wiring with practiced fingers.

A PRODUCER points to the returning tally light.

Ken hands the blanket back and turns to camera.

The Homeowner stares at the blanket as though it has changed.

Ken sees that.

He snaps and points.

The Assistant removes her from the frame.

Retro seventies brick. A DOUSE LANDSCAPING crew works the flowerbeds.

A sandwich board reads:

MAINTENANCE SPONSORED BY YOUR DAILY DOUSE.

Televisions speak from every room.

Sara signs in and follows the sound to...

Half garden, half hospital room.

MARTHA (54) watches a VHS of herself and Young Sara laughing in the old garden. She mouths along with her recorded self.

Sara lowers the volume and stands in front of the screen.

Martha sees her again.

Sara hugs her. Martha returns to the tape.

Movers enter with PENNY (86), small, sharp-eyed, and a TELEVISION almost too large for the room.

Sara steps around the television and leaves.

Sara cleans while KEN DOUSE reports catastrophes from the television.

An ANT crosses the screen. Then another. She shoos them away.

She opens a drawer full of Martha's VHS tapes and replaces Douse with Martha gardening.

The room changes.

Onscreen, Young Martha extracts a weed, lowers a marigold, presses soil around it.

Extract. Plant. Nurture.

Sara stops cleaning.

She watches until morning.

Penny's giant television fills the room with Daily Douse.

Martha rocks, eyes fixed on Ken.

Nothing.

Sara turns down Penny's television. Penny turns it back up.

Sara places a doll bonnet on Martha as blinders. Toilet-paper earplugs. Martha still turns toward Ken.

Nothing.

She takes Penny's remote, removes the batteries.

FINELY (24), thin, brown hair, janitor's coveralls, appears with a mop.

He crosses to Penny's television and unplugs it.

Without slowing, Finely unplugs Martha's television too.

Both screens die.

NURSE ELLIS (40s) enters. Efficient without rushing.

Sara catches Finely mopping.

He moves on.

He disappears around the corner.

Back inside Martha's room, Sara plays the old Time Machine tape.

Martha does not return to it.

Sara looks at her mother. Then at the dead garden on the tape.

A problem she can solve.

Sara sits on the porch, crying.

A red light bobs toward her. Matt, cigarette in his mouth, carries a sack of dirt bombs.

He notices her face. Offers the cigarette. She takes one drag and gives it back.

Matt offers a dirt bomb.

He puts the dirt bomb away, then thinks better of it and throws it into somebody else's yard.

He leaves.

Sara sees Martha's Hori Hori beside a pot.

She picks it up.

Then attacks the garden.

Not pruning. Extracting. She drives the blade beside every weed and rips until grief becomes categories.

Night passes. The garden emerges.

Sara collapses in the turned soil as the sun rises.

The television is on. YOUR DAILY DOUSE.

Onscreen, Ken holds up an ordinary kitchen sponge and makes it a threat in three moves. Show. Repeat. Point.

Sara stands in the doorway, soil to her elbows, too tired to change the channel.

Then she stops being tired.

She watches the way a locksmith watches a lock.

Three moves. Simple. Repeated. Aimed at the body, not the mind. It is how one man teaches a whole town to be afraid.

Nothing about the grammar requires the fear.

Sara looks at her soil-black hands.

Her mother's hands still know things. The tape just has to ask them.

She turns off Ken and digs the second VCR out of the closet.

Martha's old footage runs between two VCRs.

Sara edits.

The blade beside a weed.

EXTRACT.

A start lowered into earth.

PLANT.

Hands pressing soil, pouring water.

NURTURE.

She removes pauses, doubt, weather, worms and wrong decisions.

One long, careful extraction becomes three clean strikes and a pull. Easier to learn. Easier to repeat.

A beautiful, simple grammar remains.

She ejects the cassette and writes on the spine, in careful block letters:

SEP #1 -- GARDEN

Martha rocks in front of the Time Machine tape. Sara ejects it.

Penny gives her the middle finger without looking away from Douse.

Sara inserts GARDEN.

Onscreen, a Hori Hori enters soil beside a weed.

Extract.

Nothing.

The video continues. Sara rewinds.

Extract.

Nothing.

Sara rewinds, looks at Martha and gives a quick clap.

Martha adjusts. Her hand copies the motion against her blanket.

Sara holds her breath.

Onscreen, Young Martha lowers a marigold into a prepared hole.

Plant.

Martha continues extracting.

Her hand reaches to Penny's bedside table and closes around a silk flower in Penny's water cup.

She pulls it out.

Martha reaches for another.

Sara catches her wrist.

She turns Martha's hand palm-up and places the silk flower in it.

Onscreen, young hands press soil around the marigold.

Nurture.

Martha presses the silk flower flat between both palms.

Sara studies the response.

Then rewinds to the extraction shot.

Martha resumes the motion in sync.

Penny takes her flower back.

The corner of Martha's mouth lifts.

Sara sees it.

Joy wins the argument.

Sara passes Finely.

Finely looks through the doorway.

Martha's hand: extract, plant, nurture.

Dandelions everywhere now.

CRANKY TOM stands in his ruined lawn.

Matt waves from down the street.

Tom does not wave back.

A card table full of dandelion seed and mud.

Sara holds up a dirt bomb.

A beat.

Matt regrets the accuracy before Sara does.

He looks at the two dirt bombs in her hands. A matched set.

That distinction has never occurred to him.

The kitchen goes still.

Matt starts pacing.

Matt looks at the dirt bombs on the table like they betrayed him.

She leaves.

Sara gives him the finger through the window.

Dark except for a streetlight across the ceiling.

Adult Finely sleeps badly.

A BEEP cuts through the room.

The BOY (9) helps PEDRO (63) price canned goods.

A grocery SCANNER sits between them. Its cord has been repaired with black tape.

The Boy scans a can of corn.

BEEP.

The display flashes:

EXPIRATION: MARCH 17, 1977.

Pedro marks the carton and reaches for the next can.

The scanner passes over the dark BIRTHMARK inside the Boy's wrist.

BEEP.

EXPIRATION: MARCH 17, 1977.

The Boy freezes.

He turns his wrist under the scanner again.

BEEP.

Same date.

Again.

BEEP.

Same date.

The Boy looks at his marked wrist.

The machine repeats itself.

-- The Boy stands among the stones and tries to whistle. Only breath.

-- Rain. He tries again. One clean note.

-- Winter. He whistles while a FUNERAL passes beyond the iron fence.

-- A grieving WOMAN stops to listen. Hair tied back. Soil on the knees of her funeral dress.

-- Spring. The Woman kneels at the new grave, planting a marigold. She whistles beside him while she works.

-- Seasons turn. A child joins them. Then a widower. Then others among the stones.

-- Fearful people learning to hold one steady note in the face of what is coming.

-- The Boy turns his birthmarked wrist toward the sky. The scanner BEEPS beneath the whistling.

Finely wakes.

The whistling is gone.

He turns his inner wrist toward the streetlight, then looks at the clock: 12:07 A.M.

He tries one note.

Only air.

He pulls on a black hoodie and leaves.

Sara, Ramones shirt, black pants, two Hori Horis, murders dandelions in Matt's lawn.

Finely approaches in a black hoodie.

They shake.

He looks at the knives.

He leaves.

Sara watches him go, confused.

He returns with an old SCYTHE.

He puts up his hood.

They work.

The scythe arcs. Hori Horis flash. Dandelion heads fly like small moons.

Matt wears his childhood shepherd robe over work clothes stiff with mud.

At the card table, he packs dandelion seeds into dirt balls. Dozens of them. His hands, sleeves, robe. All filthy.

He rolls the last ball and looks out the window.

Across the dark yard, a HOODED FIGURE swings a SCYTHE.

We know Finely. Matt does not.

Each arc brings the figure closer to the house. Dandelion heads rise around him like souls with very short appointments.

Matt goes pale.

He looks at the rows of dirt balls. At his ruined crop falling outside.

He tries to brush off the dirt on his shepherd robe. Makes it worse.

Outside, the scythe falls.

Matt fights the robe, shirt and trousers at once.

A sleeve traps his head. A button refuses absolution.

The clothes finally release him. He stands in boxer shorts and stuffs the robe into the washer.

Detergent. Too much.

He presses START.

Water strikes the glass.

Finely cuts another row.

Sara extracts roots behind him.

From Matt's window, only the hood and scythe are visible.

Matt watches the washer churn.

He glances toward the door.

No knock.

Back to the washer.

Mud lifts from the robe and clouds the water.

Matt checks the window. The hooded figure is closer.

He stops the washer mid-cycle and drags out the robe. Soaking wet, but clean enough to face eternity.

He wrings it badly and throws it into the dryer.

He drags in a lawn chair and places it directly before the glass.

Presses START.

THUMP.

The robe rises.

Falls.

THUMP.

Matt sits in his boxer shorts, hands on his knees, waiting for death.

The robe folds over itself. Sleeve becomes crook. Hem becomes hill. The old emblem disappears, returns, disappears.

Then something in the glass OPENS.

Not a picture. Not a memory. An understanding with motion in it.

The robe will not hold the shape Matt gave it. It cannot stand straight, look brave, hide its stains or arrange its emblem over its heart.

It falls without posing.

Rises without deciding to.

Falls again.

Matt is half naked before it. No gown. No theory. No audience to convince.

His breath catches.

A laugh breaks out of him. It becomes a sob before he can stop it. He lets both happen.

He lunges for his notebook.

The pen finds the page.

Stops.

There is no sentence for this. He tries anyway...

THUMP.

The notebook slides off his knee.

He does not pick it up.

The dryer sounds less like machinery now than a large, patient heart.

The room's edges go soft.

For one turn the robe is the gown he wore at twelve.

For the next, something shed.

For the next, only cloth.

Matt looks down at himself. Mud on his bare knees. Boxer shorts. Nothing between his body and the ridiculousness of being alive.

Something inside him gives way.

Not breaks apart.

Breaks open.

He cries freely, watching the robe reveal and conceal itself faster than he can assign it meaning.

He stops trying to assign it meaning.

It gets better.

Time goes strange. The window darkens and pales.

THUMP.

Outside the small window, the scythe passes.

Matt does not see it. There is no room left in him tonight for death.

Sleep takes him mid-breath, upright in the lawn chair, hands open on his knees.

The robe keeps turning.

The weeds are gone.

Sara and Finely sit in the clean wreckage.

Finely accepts the correction.

He checks his watch.

He walks away with the scythe on his shoulder.

Sara lies back in the clipped grass.

The dryer is still.

Matt sleeps in the lawn chair. The notebook lies on the floor where it landed.

Sunlight reaches him.

His eyes open.

He touches his chest.

A heartbeat.

The shepherd robe lies clean and warm inside the dryer.

Matt picks up the notebook. The page is blank.

It doesn't matter. He remembers all of it.

He looks at the morning.

He is suddenly moving.

He grabs the robe and his notebook.

He yanks an old CARDIGAN off a hook. Deep pockets, grandfather issue and pulls it over his bare chest.

He sweeps every quarter he can find into the cardigan pockets. They sag like feed bags.

He runs out in boxer shorts and cardigan, pockets CLANKING.

Matt bursts through the door, throws both arms wide and sends quarters flying.

Martha and TED (86) perform the gardening motions with the tape.

Extract. Plant. Nurture.

Ted stops.

Sara lowers playback speed.

Finely leans in the doorway.

But in her notebook she writes:

TED -- RANGE OF MOTION IMPROVING.

Finely sees.

Penny sees too.

Sara adds it in smaller letters.

Sara rides with a camcorder in her backpack.

She glances through the laundromat window.

Matt sits in boxer shorts before a dryer, crying at his clothes.

BOOM.

She collides with the TATTOO MAN (83), covered in ink, carrying himself like an old star with no remaining audience.

They both go down.

Sara scrambles up.

He stands with a limp.

He looks at the bicycle.

The Tattoo Man dismounts from the back of Sara's bicycle.

He enters.

Sara follows with her camcorder.

Under a tree, the Tattoo Man dances alone.

Sara films.

He turns. On his hand: the SHEPHERD tattoo.

He performs the fatherly look into Sara's camera. It is exact. Then ordinary again.

He taps a grave marker. A rhythm hidden inside stone.

He holds his back and sits.

Sara lowers the camera.

Sara pedals uphill with the Tattoo Man on the back of the bicycle.

He does not help.

They wobble into the parking lot.

The Tattoo Man stops outside a common room.

SUSAN (82) folds a washcloth. Unfolds it. Folds it again.

He watches her.

Sara watches him watching her.

Nurse Ellis approaches with towels.

Sara nods.

The Tattoo Man sits across from Susan.

Susan keeps folding.

He takes a HANDKERCHIEF from his pocket and copies her.

His fold is terrible.

Susan takes it, folds it correctly, and puts it in front of him.

He taps one finger on the table. Slow.

Fold. Tap.

Unfold. Tap.

The tapping adjusts to Susan.

Sara quietly opens her backpack.

The Tattoo Man sees the camera.

Sara frames only the Tattoo Man.

He stands and offers his hand.

He sits. Keeps tapping.

One foot moves under the table.

Susan's foot moves once. Stops. Moves again.

He stands without offering his hand.

Susan watches him sway.

She stands.

He holds his hand too high.

Susan puts it down at his side. She takes his other hand and places it on her back.

Exactly where it belongs.

Her hand enters Sara's frame. Sara keeps Susan's face out.

The Tattoo Man's face changes.

Only for a moment.

They dance. Not well. Not far.

Susan corrects a turn before he makes it.

They complete the turn.

Susan stops.

The Tattoo Man lets go.

Susan sits. Takes his handkerchief and folds it again.

He holds out his palm for it.

Susan looks at the palm, then puts the handkerchief in her own lap.

Sara and the Tattoo Man stand outside. Susan remains visible, refolding the handkerchief.

He looks in.

He smiles toward Susan.

Sara looks at the camcorder.

He goes back inside.

Susan touches the folded handkerchief in her lap.

Sara places her empty hand where Susan placed his.

Martha and Ted move their right hands in time with Sara's new movement tape.

Extract. Plant. Nurture. Turn.

Sara has edited the Tattoo Man into a grammar too.

Ted turns the wrong direction.

She reverses the tape.

Now the Tattoo Man dances backward. Ted nods, vindicated.

In the doorway, two more residents watch.

Finely wheels one of them in.

Penny flips him off.

The room begins moving. Differently, badly, alive.

Sara films no one. She watches.

For a moment, she has made something good.

Finely enters alone. He removes his work glove.

The birthmark crosses the inside of his wrist where the grocery scanner once found it.

A GRAVEYARD CHILD steps from behind a stone.

The child takes Finely's arm and turns the inside of his wrist toward the moon.

Finely looks toward the school.

Finely tries.

A thin note escapes, then dies.

The child vanishes between stones, or simply walks away where the dark keeps her.

The sheep-ant crosses Finely's boot.

He offers a finger.

It passes him by.

Sara grips the payphone.

Sara closes her eyes.

She hangs up.

On the back of her checklist she writes:

GRANT -- THURSDAY, 5:00.

She does not check it off.

Sara searches Martha's tapes for garden footage.

One begins in the old living room instead.

Young Sara enters, face blotched from crying, the day of the playground.

Young Martha sets the camera.

Her acting is so bad Martha begins to laugh.

They dissolve into helpless laughter.

Adult Sara laughs too.

Onscreen, the laughter fades.

Young Martha reaches for her. The video dissolves. Her hand becomes static. The tape has nothing after it.

Adult Sara rewinds.

The reach. The static.

Rewind.

Sara stops the tape.

In her childhood room, she adds to the checklist:

3.5 FIX MOM'S TIME MACHINE.

She boxes it.

Finely makes VHS copies in a maintenance closet.

He distributes them room to room.

One resident slams a door.

Another takes the tape and uses it to level a table.

A third watches.

MONTAGE - THE PROGRAM SPREADS

-- Ted argues with the movement tape and keeps moving.

-- Elsie watches the Tattoo Man dance, then uses her walker as a partner.

-- Mr. Vale waters a plastic plant. Nurse Ellis replaces it with a real one without comment.

-- Penny watches Daily Douse through her headphones and reaches one foot into the movement rhythm. When Sara notices, Penny stops.

-- Finely unplugs Douse in one room and inserts Sara's tape. The resident plugs Douse back in. Finely bows to the decision.

-- Martha's hands: extract, plant, nurture.

A garden cart waits by the door.

Martha, Ted and several residents stand around it. Finely pushes.

Nurse Ellis checks a clipboard.

She hands the Hori Hori to Finely.

The doors open.

The residents enter sunlight.

They work badly and specifically.

Ted waters leaves, his own shoes, then one actual root.

Elsie plants marigolds in no discernible row.

Mr. Vale refuses to touch dirt but gives instructions to everybody who does.

Martha points at a dandelion.

Finely kneels beside her and guides the Hori Hori into the earth. Together they extract it.

The root breaks.

Martha stares at the half root.

Martha searches the soil for the missing remainder.

Finely redirects her to another weed.

Martha studies it.

She takes the tool from him.

Three quick strikes around the root. The tape's rhythm, exact. Then the pull.

Whole root.

Finely returns the blade to the basket.

Sara watches from the doorway, camcorder lowered.

The work continues without her image.

The irregular garden thrives.

A DOUSE LANDSCAPING truck arrives. The FOREMAN surveys the residents' work.

Nurse Ellis arrives with the tool clipboard.

He points to the Daily Douse sign.

Goes back to his truck. Takes out a camera. Photographs the garden, framing Martha, Ted and Finely.

The Foreman looks at Finely. Finely is already back to the weeds.

The crew leaves.

Sara sees a DAILY DOUSE decal on the departing truck.

The signal doesn't stop at the televisions.

The landscaping truck returns with Ken's production van behind it.

Ken enters the garden already speaking to camera.

SNAP.

The Assistant powders him while he walks.

SNAP. SNAP.

The Cameraman swings wide to include the residents' irregular garden.

The Foreman points toward Finely.

Ken points. A BOOM OPERATOR places the microphone beneath Finely's mouth.

Ted raises his plastic shovel.

Ken circles one finger. The crew shifts so Ted disappears behind him.

Sara steps back into the shot.

Ken studies her.

Sara finds the boy inside the face.

He says it without bitterness, which is somehow worse.

Behind him, PENNY has wandered outside. The lights and crowd confuse her.

Ken's camera begins to turn toward her.

Ken raises one palm. The crew freezes.

For Penny, quietly:

Penny looks at him.

Ken has no broadcast answer.

The red tally light returns.

His voice returns with it.

He snaps and points.

The Boom Operator moves the microphone from Sara to the Foreman.

The snap moves everyone it touches. He aims it at the crew, at the Foreman, past her, around her.

Never at her. He has never once pointed those two fingers at Sara. Not in twelve years of pointing them at everything else.

Sara watches the crew obey.

She knows the movement.

On his way back to the van, Ken passes the day room window.

Inside, the television is on.

It is not showing him.

A homemade image: Martha's hands in soil, filmed close and steady. Taped to the set, a handwritten card: SEP #1 -- GARDEN.

Around it, residents lean in. Learning. Watching the way his audience used to watch.

Ken stands at the glass.

He looks at the garden the residents grew. It is good work. He can tell. It is the family business.

Then back at the television that replaced him.

Nobody powders him. Nobody counts him in. He watches the whole reel, off-air, alone.

By the time he walks to the van, he knows whose hands those are.

Martha works with a plastic shovel.

Sara approaches.

Martha considers this.

Sara waits for the rest of the recorded line.

It does not come.

Martha returns to her plant.

Sara kneels and hugs her.

Martha pats soil from Sara's knee.

Not approval. Just soil.

Sara, riding her bike, sees Matt in the Laundromat. Inside, dryers turn. Several adults sit in varying states of undress, watching their clothes tumble.

She stops. Can't figure it out.

One man wears three neckties and no shirt. A woman in a slip slow-dances with an empty laundry basket. Another man presses both palms to a dryer as though visiting someone through glass.

At the center of it all, Matt takes notes in his boxer shorts.

Sara stares, still carrying Martha's soil on one knee.

Matt looks up. Delighted.

He waves her in.

Sara does not move.

He waves bigger, then points to the door as though she may have forgotten how buildings work.

The woman with the basket opens it from inside.

Sara shrugs and enters.

The door shuts behind Sara.

The room is warmer than it looked. Every dryer has a witness.

Matt hurries over with a notebook.

Sara takes in the boxer shorts. The neckties. The solemn dryer visitation.

He pinches the shoulder of her blue shirt.

Across the room, ELSIE watches a red blouse turn.

A beat.

He nods. It costs him.

Matt absorbs that. There was no room for him.

Martha and Penny sleep.

Sara removes the gardening tape and restores the TIME MACHINE.

Onscreen, Young Martha and Young Sara laugh.

Sara gently wakes Martha.

Martha finds the line.

Martha mouths herself back into the loop.

Sara sinks into the chair, relieved and devastated.

She falls asleep.

Finely appears in the doorway holding a stack of copied movement tapes.

He sees the Time Machine restored.

He sets one copy on the table anyway.

Sara rides her bike home.

A LOST DOG wanders into traffic. A car bears down.

Sara skids the bike to a stop and CLAPS an odd rhythm.

The dog stops, sees the car and darts clear.

Sara claps again toward the sidewalk.

The dog looks at her, then runs the opposite direction toward its owner.

The dog disappears into the woods.

Sara follows its path and finds her sun-faded childhood backpack beneath leaves.

Inside: nothing.

An ANT crosses the zipper.

Sara offers a finger. It climbs to her shoulder.

Sara unrolls the SHEP AND HIS HERD poster. Finds the old broadcast tape.

Onscreen, the Shepherd gives that fatherly glance.

Sara scrubs the tape backward and runs it again. Hunting.

There. A glitch frame. The staff hand open toward the lens and on it, the tattoo.

She already knew. She needed the machine to say it too.

She looks at the ant. The ant contributes nothing.

Residents work. Finely supervises with Nurse Ellis.

Martha hums the graveyard tune without quite whistling it.

Sara enters with a suitcase.

Finely looks at the undersized backpack strapped to the suitcase.

Something old crosses his face.

Sara looks at him.

Martha touches the suitcase.

Martha waits.

The script has no answer for that.

Martha sees a brown leaf on a marigold and pinches it off.

Sara kisses her forehead.

Sara waits with her suitcase.

The bus arrives.

The bus passes the graveyard. Dandelion seeds cross the glass.

At the laundromat stop, a woman boards. The doors close. The bus pulls away.

Matt runs out of the laundromat in boxer shorts, his shepherd robe over one shoulder.

He chases the bus.

Sara slides low in her seat.

Two older women gasp. The rest of the bus starts quietly enjoying itself.

She turns to the passengers.

Outside, Matt is losing ground and not stopping.

Sara stares in disbelief. Then yanks the cord.

DING.

The bus comes to a controlled stop. Sara storms down the steps with her suitcase.

Matt catches up, hands on knees.

Behind her, the bus starts up. Sara spins. The doors are closed.

Through the glass, the BUS DRIVER mouths: next one's in forty minutes.

The bus leaves.

Sara glares at him.

Sara keeps her shirt on. Removes only her socks.

She puts them in a dryer herself.

The socks turn.

Nothing.

Sara adds her blue shirt, keeping an undershirt on.

Blue and tan turn together.

Still nothing.

Sara opens the dryer and pulls out the shirt and socks.

Matt goes to his backpack.

He removes the CHILDHOOD SHEPHERD ROBE.

Sara stares.

He holds up the robe.

He offers the robe.

Sara does not take it.

He lowers it.

Sara looks at the dryers. Different bodies of clothes. Different rhythms.

Then at the robe in Matt's lowered hand. At the hem, small, even stitches. Her mother made it. Before the rule. Before the list.

She takes the robe from him and puts it in the dryer herself.

Presses START.

The robe begins to turn.

THUMP.

Ken stands behind the landscaping truck with the Foreman and THREE LANDSCAPERS.

The Foreman holds a plain burlap sack open. Inside: DIRT BALLS. Dozens, packed tight. A seed head bristles from one like a fuse.

He lifts one ball and turns it. Purple-green spines catch the light.

Ken points toward the residents' garden and SNAPS.

One Landscaper starts a leaf blower.

Then stares down at the machine, baffled by his own hands.

The Tattoo Man walks toward Sunny Brook carrying a bunch of dandelions.

Roots. Dirt. Grass caught among them.

He tries arranging them.

They get worse.

THUMP.

The robe climbs the inside of the dryer.

Falls.

THUMP.

Sara watches despite herself.

Across the room, two REGULARS fold towels in their undershirts, unbothered.

THUMP.

The Tattoo Man approaches the entrance.

Nurse Ellis comes out pushing an empty wheelchair.

She eyes the dandelions.

He shows her the roots as evidence. Dirt falls on the floor.

He hides the dandelions behind his back and goes inside.

Nurse Ellis watches dirt fall from the roots.

THUMP.

The dryer beside Sara's starts.

A button strikes its metal drum.

TAP. TAP. TAP.

THUMP. TAP. TAP.

Sara hears it.

A FLASH:

Young Sara taps her staff beside a line of sheep-ants.

BACK TO SCENE

The robe turns.

Sara's shoulders come down, one notch at a time.

A FLASH:

Martha holds the shepherd headdress toward Young Sara, smaller, years earlier. The robe's hem is still pinned, half-sewn.

BACK TO SCENE

A smile crosses Sara's face without asking her first.

The Tattoo Man walks past rooms full of YOUR DAILY DOUSE.

The Tattoo Man looks at the dirt falling from his flowers.

Susan sits on a bench with the Tattoo Man's folded handkerchief in her lap.

Nurse Ellis sets the tool basket beside the raised bed and parks the empty wheelchair by the garden door.

Martha points to the Hori Hori.

Martha looks around. No Finely.

She says it evenly. The paperwork that made it true came from a landscaping company.

Nurse Ellis kneels beside her. Together they remove one dandelion.

A RESIDENT calls from the garden door.

She sets the Hori Hori in the basket. You don't carry a blade to an emergency, and steps to the doorway, still within sight. The Resident's blanket is caught in a wheel.

Martha kneels at the edge of the garden.

She presses the earth flat around a new plant.

Nurture.

She reaches into the basket for the Hori Hori knife.

A DANDELION grows between two paving stones.

Martha inserts the blade beside its root.

Extract.

The root comes out whole.

Martha smiles.

The Tattoo Man enters the garden and sees Susan.

He puts the dandelions behind his back.

Susan looks at him.

He walks toward her.

Yellow flowers peek out from behind his arm.

Martha sees them.

THUMP. TAP. TAP.

The robe turns.

A FLASH:

The Boy lies bruised beneath the jungle gym.

Young Sara reaches him.

The Boy looks terrified.

Not relieved.

His eyes close against her.

BACK TO SCENE

Sara moves closer to the dryer.

Whatever that memory usually costs her, this time it arrives and simply sits beside her.

She lets it.

The dryer turns.

THUMP.

The Tattoo Man reaches Susan.

He smiles.

Behind him, Martha stands with the Hori Hori knife.

Her eyes remain on the yellow flowers.

The Tattoo Man begins bringing the bouquet around.

Martha steps forward.

She reaches for the dandelions with the knife still in her hand.

The Tattoo Man turns toward Susan.

Martha plants the blade beside the stems. Three quick, practiced thrusts.

The Tattoo Man stops.

Looks down.

The bouquet drops.

Yellow scatters across the grass.

The robe drops inside the dryer.

THUMP.

Sara flinches.

The Tattoo Man sinks to his knees.

Martha kneels beside him.

She does not look at the blood.

She inserts the Hori Hori beside a fallen dandelion.

Extract.

She places it in her palm.

Moves to the next.

Extract.

The Tattoo Man looks at Martha's hand.

Then the flowers.

Then Susan.

He understands.

Nurse Ellis rushes into the garden.

Martha's hand rests over the Hori Hori on the ground.

Nurse Ellis KICKS the knife beyond the garden bricks.

She reaches for Martha.

The Tattoo Man catches Nurse Ellis's wrist.

Barely.

Nurse Ellis stops pulling.

The Tattoo Man takes one dandelion from Martha's palm.

He reaches it toward Susan.

Susan looks at the flower.

Then at him.

She takes it.

The Tattoo Man lowers his hand.

Susan places the flower in the fold of his handkerchief.

Nurse Ellis presses both hands against his wound.

She looks toward the garden door. An emergency phone hangs just inside.

Susan is already staying.

Nurse Ellis runs to the emergency phone.

THUMP. TAP. TAP.

Sara puts one hand against the glass.

The robe passes beneath it.

A FLASH:

Young Sara's hand over an ant.

Susan's hand correcting the Tattoo Man's.

Finely's hand pulling a plug from a television.

Martha's hand on the camcorder.

And this time, the memory does not cut away.

The same afternoon. Not the tape, the day itself. No grain. No tracking lines. Ordinary light.

And then the part the machine turned to static:

Her reach lands.

She pulls Young Sara in and holds her.

Dirt on both of them. Nobody performs anything.

On the tripod, the camcorder's little red light dies. The tape has run out. The machine hums on, recording nothing.

Neither of them moves to fix it.

The afternoon continues without a lesson in it.

They garden. Young Sara plants a weed back in, solemnly, just to watch her mother laugh and pull it out again.

Extract.

They play a game with no name and no winner, invented that afternoon and never played again.

They laugh at things no camera would know to keep.

The light goes long. The garden goes gold. Nobody films it.

Martha holds her until the holding is just how they are standing.

Sara hears all the dryers now.

Different speeds. Different weights.

No two the same.

Still a rhythm.

She laughs once -- a small, startled sound, like something returned to her.

She leans her forehead against the warm glass.

For the first time since the bus, she is nowhere else.

Nurse Ellis yanks the emergency phone from its cradle.

She looks through the door window.

Her view is blocked by the empty wheelchair she pushed outside earlier.

Finely runs into the garden from the far path. Sent home an hour ago, here anyway.

He sees the Tattoo Man on the ground.

Susan beside him.

Martha kneeling among the dandelions.

Martha looks at him.

She holds up a dandelion root. Complete.

There is blood on her hand.

Finely looks at the blood.

At the root.

At Susan, whose hands hold the folded handkerchief against the wound.

Finely goes to the Tattoo Man.

Two fingers to the neck. Unhurried. The way a man checks who has checked before.

Nothing.

He waits anyway.

Nothing.

The Tattoo Man is gone. There is no one left to save. There is only what happens next.

He understands.

He kneels and takes Martha's bloody hand in both of his.

Gently, the way you clean a child's scraped palm, he wipes it against the front of his shirt until the hand is only a hand again.

Martha lets him. She is already looking for the next dandelion.

Finely scans the grass.

The Hori Hori lies beyond the garden bricks, where someone kicked it.

He looks at it a long moment.

He does not want this.

His eyes go to Martha. To the graveyard beyond the fence. Back to the knife.

Somewhere in him a scale settles: what she and Sara are worth, against what he believes he is for.

It is not close. It's still hard.

He does not see Nurse Ellis behind the wheelchair at the garden door.

Finely picks up the knife.

Sirens in the distance.

He closes his eyes.

Ken sits low in his sedan, parked out of sight of the building, watching the fence line in his mirrors.

At the hedge, the three landscapers lob dirt bombs over into the far beds, one at a time.

Ken SNAPS through the open window. One snap, one throw. Two snaps, hold.

He conducts the bombardment without looking at it, checking angles in the mirrors like a man playing a machine at an arcade.

Ken's POLICE SCANNER crackles.

Ken's next snap dies between his fingers.

He sits up. Sirens, far off, closing. Staff running past the end of the building.

Ken is out of the car and into the trunk. He pulls out an old school camcorder.

Ken snaps the landscapers into a formation. Hands Landscaper 2 the giant camcorder.

Landscaper 2 hoists the camcorder onto his shoulder. It tips him half a step sideways.

Snap. A red RECORD light blinks on.

Ken runs toward the entrance. They follow.

The dryer slows.

The robe takes one last soft turn and settles against the glass.

Click.

Silence.

Around her, the other machines have finished without her noticing.

Sara surfaces like a swimmer.

She turns to Matt.

The laundromat is empty. The regulars left at some point. Mid-cycle, mid-trance. Sara never saw them go.

In the new silence, the wall-mounted television is suddenly very clear.

Sara pulls her shirt back on.

Then opens the dryer and pulls the warm robe over it.

The robe barely reaches her waist.

Sara looks at herself in the dark dryer glass.

She pulls the robe down.

It goes right back up.

She smiles.

The television CHANGES.

JITTERY HANDHELD VIDEO fills the screen. Ken appears sideways, then lurches upright as the camcorder is turned the correct way round.

A stamp in the corner: RECORDED EARLIER.

Behind Ken, a Landscaper holds a rake over his head like a boom microphone. Another aims a leaf blower at Finely as if it were a camera.

Sara turns.

Ken stands in front of the entrance in the pitching, handheld frame of his own personal camcorder.

Police cars arrive behind him. Staff and residents collect at the windows.

Finely is visible beyond Ken, still holding the Hori Hori knife.

Two officers point their weapons at him.

Finely looks toward the graveyard.

He begins to whistle.

Thin at first.

Then clear.

Matt squints at the man holding the knife.

Sara moves closer to the television.

The RECORDED EARLIER stamp holds in the corner.

Ken circles one finger.

All three Landscapers walk in a circle around him. The camcorder stays where it is.

Landscaper 2 circles Ken with the camcorder, listing under its weight. Landscaper 1 follows with the rake. The third continues alone, unsure when to stop.

Behind Ken, Nurse Ellis guides Martha toward the building.

Martha stops beside a concrete planter.

A single dandelion grows from it.

Martha bends.

Two fingers close around the stem.

Her other hand makes the same small cutting motion she learned from Sara's tape.

Extract.

Nurse Ellis gently moves her on.

Ken's PRODUCTION VAN screeches into the lot behind them.

The Cameraman, Boom Operator and Assistant jump out and stop at the sight of the landscaping crew.

Ken does not explain.

SNAP.

The Assistant powders him while moving.

SNAP. SNAP.

The Boom Operator takes the rake from Landscaper 1 and substitutes a real microphone.

The Cameraman's hand reaches INTO FRAME and closes over the lens.

The image lurches once.

STATIC.

On the television, the static resolves into a LEVEL BROADCAST FRAME.

A LIVE bug replaces RECORDED EARLIER.

Ken stands polished at center, the landscapers banished to the background. The big camcorder sits abandoned on the van's hood, its tape door hanging open.

Sara stares at the television.

A FLASH:

Martha's hand closing around the silk flower in Penny's cup.

BACK TO SCENE

Sara scans the live frame.

No Martha. No Nurse Ellis. The doorway where they stood is empty.

On television, police force Finely to his knees.

Sara runs for the door.

She keeps running.

Matt looks at the abandoned socks.

Then at his own backpack.

He runs after her.

The television continues without them.

The dryers stand open and silent.

Sara runs in the shrunken shepherd robe.

At the road's edge, without breaking stride, her hand drops and takes up a fallen BRANCH.

She does not decide to. The hand knows the shape.

Matt follows, carrying Sara's socks and trying to put on his own shepherd robe while running.

Ahead, a CITY BUS sits caught mid-turn across both lanes. The driver stopped halfway to look where the sirens went, and the town stacked up behind him.

A delivery van noses around it. Cars pile behind both.

Passengers step off the bus and fill the shoulder. Everyone is looking toward Sunny Brook.

Sara tries the ditch.

A dog on a long leash blocks it.

She tries the road.

A man with a hand truck blocks that.

Nobody hears her over HORNS and SHOUTING.

Sara looks down. The branch is already in her hand.

She strikes it once against the pavement.

CLAP.

Heads turn.

She strikes a second rhythm.

CLAP. CLAP.

The passengers shift toward the shoulder.

The man pulls back his hand truck.

The dog follows its owner.

The van reverses.

A path opens straight through the confusion.

Sara runs through it.

Matt stops at the opening.

Sara looks back at the people.

They stand where the rhythm placed them, confused by their own cooperation.

Matt follows.

Behind them, everyone begins moving at once again.

The path disappears.

Police cars. An ambulance. Staff. Residents at windows.

And cameras.

The landscaping crew hovers at the edge of Ken's real production crew, still holding the rake, leaf blower and half-empty sack of dirt bombs. Nobody has told them whether they are released.

Landscaper 2 rubs the shoulder that carried the camcorder, a veteran now.

Ken Douse stands in the center of it all.

SNAP.

The Assistant powders his forehead without entering the frame.

SNAP. SNAP.

The Cameraman widens to reveal Finely kneeling with his hands behind his head.

An officer bags the Hori Hori knife.

Martha stands inside the nursing-home entrance between Nurse Ellis and another staff member.

Susan sits in a wheelchair near the ambulance. The dandelion remains tucked inside the folded handkerchief on her lap.

Police. Staff. Crew. Equipment. Watching faces.

Rings around Finely.

Nurse Ellis sees it from the entrance. The kneeling, the cameras, the bagged knife assembling into a story.

She leaves Martha with the staff member and pushes through the ring, genuinely baffled.

Ken points. The Boom Operator swings instantly to Ellis.

She stops herself.

She points at Finely.

An OFFICER looks from Ellis to Finely.

To Finely:

Finely looks toward the graveyard.

Finely tries to whistle.

Only air.

He says nothing.

Ken turns to the lens, voice dropping into significance.

On the van's monitor, a graphic assembles: Finely's employee badge photo, a blurred freeze-frame of Martha from the tape, caught at the planter, the small cutting gesture frozen into evidence and, for the victim, an artist's rendering of a muscular forearm with tattoos.

A red triangle connects them.

At the edge of the lot, Sara and Matt come into view. Two shepherd robes at a dead run.

The Cameraman sees them first.

For an instant he is twelve again, his legs moving before he tells them to.

Ken follows the lens.

Sara.

Twelve years, and the story that started him has just run into his shot.

Sara stops at the edge of the rings.

For an instant, they become CHILDREN around the fallen Boy. In the center kneels Finely. The Boy, grown into a man still trying to take the blame.

Then uniforms and cameras again.

Ellis, still under the boom, points at Martha, small in the entrance beside the staff member.

Sara follows the pointing hand to the entrance.

Martha does not turn. She is watching a spot of lawn near the ambulance.

Ken watches Sara say it.

He looks at Martha.

Back at Sara.

The hands on the gardening tape. The homemade films on the day room television. The mother of the only person who ever refused him.

He does not need a source close to this station.

A murder. A movement. All delivered to his lens, live.

Twelve years of manufactured emergencies, and a real one has finally arrived. He could not have produced it better.

Sara moves, into the crowd, toward the entrance.

Nobody hears a quiet girl at a murder. The crowd does not part.

Her mother is on the other side of it.

Sara strikes the branch once against the pavement.

CLAP.

Heads turn. A seam opens.

She strikes a rhythm and walks into it.

CLAP. CLAP-TAP. CLAP.

Bodies part in waves ahead of her. Staff, neighbors, a frightened young officer, stepping aside without deciding to, the way a playground did once.

The shepherd is back, at full strength, and she does not even notice.

Ken moves too. Toward Sara.

Matt can't keep up. Peels off toward the officers, solemn as a witness at a hearing.

The Officer turns.

The Officer waits.

The Officer looks at Finely.

Finely offers nothing.

The Officer decides not to write any of that down.

Between Ellis, the whistling, and the lawn, he has heard enough. He lowers his weapon. Another officer removes Finely's handcuffs.

Finely walks free.

Nobody on camera notices.

Ken - SNAP. A knot of staff steps out of his way.

SNAP. SNAP. The crew swings with him like a gate on a hinge.

Sara continues to clap her way through the crowd. Direct line to her mom.

Two command languages crossing one lot. Claps from the east, snaps from the west, the crowd obeying both, a sea told to part two ways.

Near the middle, they hit each other's wake.

Her claps peel three bystanders out of Ken's path before she has even seen him. He walks through the gap she made, for free.

Then a clap lands close. Addressed to the bodies around him, not to him and Ken's knees take one soft vote before he overrules them.

He stops. Stands very still. Takes inventory.

He did not move. He is almost sure he did not move.

Almost.

He snaps at her. The same two fingers that move everyone else, aimed at Sara for the first time in his life.

Sara keeps walking.

Sara and Ken meet in the middle of the lot.

Both stop.

Twelve years, face to face, with a boom swinging in over their heads.

She steps left. He is simply there. Right. There.

Ken points to a monitor. Showing live events. Camera lands on Martha.

Ken steps close. Off-mic. A voice only she can hear.

Ken waits for the flinch. It doesn't come.

On the van's monitor, her live image slides in beneath the red triangle. The graphic has found its murderer.

Sara sees it.

Ken looks at the monitor. At the shot.

Still off-mic. Still a voice only she can hear.

Sara looks at him.

Ken's eyes drop to the branch in her hand.

Behind the lens, the lot waits. Officers, staff, crew, neighbors. A herd balanced on the edge of somebody's next command.

Sara looks at them. Really looks, for the first time since the branch came down on the pavement.

Staff who ran toward the blood. Neighbors who came because they were afraid. A young officer more frightened than anyone he is guarding.

These are not sheep.

Martha holds Sara. No filming. Nothing. Just holds Sara.

Sara's hands stay at her sides. The branch stays a branch.

She looks at the entrance instead. At her mother, being converted into a story twenty feet away.

She steps toward her.

Ken moves with her. Square in her path.

Sara looks at him. She see the 12 year old Ken. He's a lone. And afraid.

Years of pain and anger rise up in Ken.

Ken doesn't turn.

Two words, flat, professional. The medium's own voice, from the medium's own hands.

Ken's spine hears it before he does. The shoulders square. The chin finds its broadcast angle. The warmth begins assembling on his face out of pure reflex.

...and for that one second his body belongs to the tally light, and his back is no longer a wall.

Sara steps around him.

She crosses the lot. Not through anyone. Around them.

Halfway across, her hand simply opens. The branch stays where it falls.

People step aside because she asked. She sees their eyes. Something in each. They're beautiful.

She reaches the entrance. And her mother.

She puts her arms around Martha and holds her.

Martha's hands come up slowly and find her daughter's back. Her fingers make the small cutting motion against it.

Extract.

Sara lets her.

A long moment.

On the van's monitor, the red triangle points at nothing but the back of a shepherd robe that no longer fits.

Ken SNAPS. Reframe. Find the mother.

People gather around Sara and her mother. It's a protective shield. The camera can't find them.

Ken stands alone on his taped mark, in the emptiest ten feet in town.

He looks at the crowd. He genuinely cannot understand what he is looking at. She is not commanding anyone. She is not doing anything at all. And every body he owns is over there.

Ken starts snapping. Snapping with both hands. No one moves.

Nothing.

He SNAPS. Both hands now, at the crowd, at his crew, at the town. The clean metronomic mechanism breaking into something arrhythmic, human, and awful.

He's frustrated and angery and humiliated. He moves from his mark and starts agressivly peeling people around Sara and Martha. With force. Throws them out of the way. He snaps the camera over to where it can sneak a peak at sara and her mother.

He has stood in a ring around this man before. Twelve years old, part of the human screen that hid the beating. He knows exactly which job the camera is being asked to do.

Two OFFICERS detach from the crowd's edge and approach Ken. They lead Ken away.

They walk him out of his own shot.

Behind him the tally light burns on over the lot, broadcasting to whoever is still watching: a crowd, an embrace, and no one in front of the camera at all.

Sara never sees him go.

At the edge, Matt stops beside Finely, formal as a man settling a debt.

Finely stares at him.

It is the only thanks anyone has offered him all day.

He has no idea what it is for.

Finely stands at the edge of it all with empty hands.

MONTAGE - IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES

A low piece of MUSIC begins. A pulse beneath a melody that never quite resolves.

-- The Hori Hori disappears into an evidence bag.

-- Sara's handwritten tape -- SEP #1 -- GARDEN -- follows it.

-- Martha passes through a secured memory-care door. The magnetic lock catches behind her.

-- Finely gives the Administrator his ring of keys. She gives him a cardboard box.

-- DOUSE LANDSCAPING pulls out the residents' uneven garden and installs identical shrubs. While the crew works, two men carry the sandwich board -- MAINTENANCE SPONSORED BY YOUR DAILY DOUSE -- to the truck, face down. The trucks keep running.

-- Ted watches through the window. His hand repeats the old movement against the glass.

-- INT. SUNNY BROOK COMMON ROOM - DAY

Susan sits across from the Tattoo Man's empty chair, refolding his handkerchief. The dandelion rides inside the fold.

In the doorway, Sara stops, a cardboard box of Martha's tapes in her arms.

She knows that handkerchief. She knows the terrible fold it arrived in, and the hands that surrendered it.

The dead man has had a name all week. A stranger's name, from the radio. Now he has the ones that matter: her friend. Her dancer. Shep.

Sara sets the box down where she stands. She does not film anything, fix anything, teach anything.

She crosses the room, takes a washcloth from the basket, and sits down next to Susan.

She folds.

Her fold is terrible.

Susan takes it, folds it correctly, and puts it back in front of her.

They keep working.

-- A cordless phone at Sara's ear. Through office glass, Martha passes at the far end of a locked hall.

Sara watches Martha disappear beyond the locked doorway.

Not Martha's answer. Not Matt's. Hers.

-- A studio under work lights. A janitor's thumbnail lifts Ken's taped mark off the floor. It comes up in one clean strip.

Extract.

-- A living room at 7 PM. The set clicks on out of habit. Where the fear used to be: a rerun, laughing at its own jokes. The family watches anyway.

-- The laundromat, closed for the night. By the dryers, Sara's suitcase stands where she left it. Still packed. New York inside it.

Nobody has sent for it.

The music carries us past all of it.

END MONTAGE

SUPER: THREE MONTHS LATER

MONTAGE - THE LIVING

-- INT. SECURED MEMORY-CARE VISITING ROOM - DAY

A clean room. One table. Two chairs. A window in the locked door.

NURSE ELLIS unlocks it and lets Sara in. She wears this unit's badge now. She takes up a post outside the window.

Sara sits beside Martha, not across from her.

No camera. No tape. No plant. No exercise waiting to be completed.

Sara's machine-language textbook rests beside a blank grant application. NEW YORK is printed at the top. Neither is open.

Martha looks out the window.

Sara looks with her.

They sit.

Finely walks with no uniform and no destination we can see.

He tries to whistle.

Only air.

He keeps walking.

Matt's LAUNDRO THERAPY fills the room.

Seniors in various states of undress watch their clothes orbit behind glass.

Elsie cries at her red blouse. Nobody interprets her out loud.

One man laughs at a sock stuck to the door.

Another sleeps in his undershirt.

Susan dances alone between the plastic chairs, Tattoo Man's handkerchief tied around her wrist.

Two residents begin dancing with her. None of them knows the same dance.

Matt writes furiously in a notebook.

Somebody removes a shirt and immediately demands it back.

Matt returns it.

He writes that down too.

The FOR SALE sign stands in a neatly mowed yard.

Finely pushes the mower, careful around a single row of dandelions along the fence.

Nobody hired him. Nobody knows. It is broad daylight, and he is doing it anyway.

Between two of the identical shrubs, one purple thistle. Blooming.

Nobody left in the garden to pull it.

Martha's hand rests on the table between them.

Sara notices.

She does not turn it into anything.

After a while, Sara places her hand beside it.

Not touching.

Still there.

An ant crosses the table between the two hands.

Neither hand moves.

Penny's television plays a rerun. Martha's side of the room is stripped. Her television is still there, dark.

Penny aims her remote at the dark set and turns the volume up.

Nothing gets louder.

She leaves it that way.

Finely walks along the graveyard wall.

He turns his birthmarked wrist toward the fading light.

The date is not written there.

He closes it.

The music falls away until only his footsteps remain.

Against the iron fence: a bicycle.

Through the fence, far among the stones, under a tree, SOMEONE DANCES.

Alone. Unembarrassed. Alive.

Not well. Not far.

It is Sara. Finely is too far away to know that. He only sees what the graveyard has never once shown him: somebody in it, dancing, alive.

Finely stops.

He watches from the road.

We cannot tell whether the dancer has seen him.

We cannot tell whether he will go in.

FADE OUT.

Over black:

One WHISTLED NOTE.

Held. Human. Alive.

Then, underneath it: a DIAL TONE.

Digits, tapped fast.

A ring. A click.

And the note bends, flattens, splits, doubles into two machine tones finding each other, the way voices once found a tune among headstones.

Two machines, whistling at each other.

The handshake climbs. Multiplies. Shrieks...

CUT TO SILENCE, MID-SHRIEK.

THE END