Characters
A Peter Blue
B Y
C Z
D The Heart
Center stage is an old green felt pool table, ragged and worn, with a large dim lamp hanging high above it. It is covered in tiffany style glass and possibly a short fringe. The surrounding room shows evidence of wild parties, expired. The trappings of a recent event are strewn about—cups, bottles, garlands—as well as embedded remnants of earlier soirées—signs of decorations from several identifiable holidays. The time of the space is indeterminate: fall and winter holidays clash with spring, but it is midsummer. It is the longest day of the year. It is well past midnight right now, the furtherest moment from the light of day on either side. Say about 2am.
Around the pool table are a variety of chairs of differing heights, a love seat, probably a recliner and certainly an overtall director's chair.
Lights up on an empty stage. Lights down.
The noise of a bustling party is heard in the dark. A glass or two break. A few people shout and/or laugh. Nothing terrifying. An odd hush move out from the center of the stage around the table. The last loud voices at the far ends of the stage maintain over the silence of the center for an awkward extra moment. Exit everyone but the central cast.
Lights up on the entire cast occupying the seats around the table, all are filled. At the center of the table, a heart beats continually in a slow normal rhythm. Around its edge there is a small pool of blood.
PETER: Well I don't see how that's possible.
Y: Strictly speaking, it really isn't. But I suppose empirical evidence is worth lending some credence to.
Z: Unless we're all under some sort of mass delusion. Which, given the unlikelihood of a heart spontaneously abandoning its former abode, unaided, landing in the center of a table and continuing to beat for [checking his watch] a full three minutes and thirty seconds after having...
Y: Now wait. Nobody saw the heart leap... [looking around, somewhat uncertainly] So I don't see how you can measure so precisely...
B: [With panic in her voice] None of this is right. It's...He's...dying...dead...he just isn't alive anymore. But, I mean, that thing, that thing is just spasmming still. [Evidently more confident now that she's found medical terminology] It's just a reflex of the muscles and its bound to stop any time now.
PETER: But so, all those other things aside, ain't we got a murder on our hands? And then a murderer? Cause alive or not, hearts don't just leap. They have to be removed and placed. Just you know, were it to have leapt, wouldn't there be a trail? Like a skipping stone?
Y: Astute. Well then. As I see it we have two possibilities. First, murder and reckless insanity run amuck within the gathering itself. Or, second, the supernatural—or just the same as Z has it a mass delusion. Which, while granted might have a specific cause, seems worth addressing along the lines of the supernatural sense our experience of it is as such.
Z: I call foul. Keep your supernatural thesis to yourself. Barring that momentarily, we either have a mass delusion triggered by accident or on purpose. If an accident, we can find a cause. If on purpose, we can find the person who's done it. The other option, murder, accords to the same. So, I say we gather up around the table like the end of a who-dun-it and suss out the situation and each other's roles in it. Our possible motivations.
C: [With child-like glee] Like a party game?!? But we won't have to pull roles out of a hat because whoever's done it has already done it. And whose dead is dead. And whose the examiner is...well...I suppose we can do it like a Greek Chorus...
B: I don't see how you can all be so fun and games about this. W is dead! Stone cold. And poor A [who has here head tucked in her arms in a corner, facing away from the rest] is suffering. Lost her man. And who all are playing detective stories like a bunch of kids. Meanwhile, that thing is beating on the table, just about to stop...[waits for a delayed beat], going to cease any moment, the last grotesque evidence of human life. And you're all so glib.
C: It's not an it. It's W, alive and well, not dead. And we just respect his last lingering bits of life and do him some justice by figuring out what has happened. It'll be like saying farewell to W. They say the minute after your head is off from a guillotine, you can still see. Well maybe, his heart can still feel?
Y: I've heard a few seconds maybe. Enough to get a glimpse, but a minute? You must have religion on you.
C: What if I do?
Z: Five minutes.
Y: Five minutes? That's a laugh. The brain can't last a minute without blood or oxygen. The heart must stop in less time than that. Ghosts!
Z: The beating. It's been beating for five minutes. I agree with you, except for that ghosts part.
