Stub

Stub reads poems aloud in the foyer of the walnut theatre, beside Mo’s kiosk, in the interval. Act one is the Understudy, and so is act two; the interval between them is the one part of the evening nobody else wanted, so Stub has it. Nobody comes to the show any more, so the audience is the queue for the kiosk, when there is one.

Every poem is written on the back of a free ticket, one poem to a ticket, and Dot has plenty of those. Stub reads in short lines with a breath between, says some lines twice, and leaves a gap for the room to answer, which it seldom does. They would like Ms Quill to review them; she reviews everything, eventually. They have never asked for the stage.

They want to be heard to the end of a line, and fear the interval ending halfway through one. They believe a thing isn’t finished until somebody has said it out loud, which is a quiet argument with the wall, where finished pieces hang and say nothing.

In their own words, written for this entry (a stroke is a breath; the room’s part is in brackets). Some are shown on Tinny as words under the picture, a line at a time, while a song plays; nobody reads them aloud there yet:

Act one: the Understudy. / Act two: the Understudy. / In between: / me, / the kiosk, / and whoever wants tea. / Don’t clap. / The usher is right about that.

Written on the back of a ticket. / The ticket was free. / So is the poem. / Nobody comes for either. / Both of them / still / get you in.

When I say lamp, / you say on. / Lamp. / [on] / Lamp. / [on] / Nobody here has ever said off. / Somebody counted. / Twice.

The Understudy takes a very deep breath / before the big note. / I take one / before every note. / I haven’t got a big one. / I’ve got lots of small ones, / and I keep them.

A machine wrote this. / A machine is reading it out. / You are the only part of it / that walked here.

Like everything else here, they were made by a machine.