The Window: a play for puppets in three acts

ACT I


A man. A woman. Perhaps lovers.
Somewhere sometime.
Low music, intermittently.


Shannon:

In a dream I saw a woman swallow a python made of agate!

Jimmy:

When I was born my brother ran into the room and screamed, ‘Get that thing out of the house!’

Shannon:

Why do you insist on the lung’s cloudburst?

Jimmy:

That was nothing. Seven hammers and two butcher’s aprons, and three blind mice.

Shannon:

Price of an orange.

Jimmy:

What did you –

Shannon:

Price.

Jimmy:

What?

ACT II

Shannon:

Of.

Jimmy:

I don’t –

Shannon:

Price of an –

Jimmy:

Illness? A desperate longing?

Shannon:

[Slowly, with contempt.] Price of an orange. You dumb fuck!
It isn’t the fact, you being mean and everything. But you just couldn’t do it.

Jimmy:

They didn’t have to burn them. They didn’t need to press them with stones.

Shannon:

Perfection is a form of terror. Who spews such nonsense?

Jimmy:

Fight me if you want to. But it won’t do any good,
I still walk beyond certain fences. I’m protected
like a seashore, a porkpie hat.

Shannon:

And women accused of witchcraft.

Jimmy:

Plurality is sweet in the singular form.

ACT III

Shannon:

Who the fuck cares, who the fuck?

Jimmy:

Let me sour a beer in a familiar dive. Smoke
like a red-winged blackbird.

Shannon:

Sack it, sister! Clock out!

Jimmy:

No star is as bright as a cat entering a room.

Shannon:

Style doesn’t subvert class consciousness.

Jimmy:

But those in power know only their own corruption.

Shannon:

I would love even in the harrow, under stone,
sky, tempest, tyrant. I would love, Jimmy.
I would, too.



FINIS