A play in five acts by Mike Lesser
Act V Murder
Rouen Market square.
Joan Giles and a crowd come for the burning. Soldiers. Priests.
A desert valley in the south.
Gilles In the war
Of the great
Upon the poor,
Where luck dies
In a land
Of sad options,
Pain is the most reliable measure of distance
Of every sort
In a land butchered to rock ribs,
Waste laid on it,
Standing by a car
Parked in the hot dust
Overlooking a desert valley
Nothing moves.
Only the killer shadows move.
Newsperson Left foreground,
The woman’s car.
Burning.
Its not easy to get a grip on what’s going on
Going on going on.
Eyes closed is high risk on the motor way
But if you look
Its so strange and confusing
You don’t see much
And you get your brain done in.
Chorus Women They say she lost control.
Newsperson They say,
Perhaps
Chorus Women Perhaps
Newsperson Her plastic sandals’
Softened
In the heat.
Chorus Women They say
It was her fault.
Chorus Men Her fault.
Newsperson Right foreground,
Falling,
The woman.
Chorus Men The woman.
Newsperson Background,
In brown herring-bone patterned suits,
With rifles,
A line of secret service men.
Prophet 1 They do not know geometry.
Gilles They do not understand
For instance,
Prophet 2 That their distance from the hinge point
Newsperson Times the bullet’s weight,
In grams,
Prophet 3 Is exactly equal to
Their
Distance
Gilles From the woman’s state of mind.
END