Source A: Above the empty stage

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

From the stage, the lighting bridge looked like a black pencil line drawn beneath the theatre roof. From the bridge, twenty-two metres above the stage, the red seats lost their importance. They became neat stitches in the dark, and the EXIT signs were green squares no bigger than postage stamps.

I had worked up there often enough to stop looking down.

That morning, the theatre was closed while I inspected the cables carrying power to the lights. The bridge was a narrow metal platform suspended on steel ropes. A motor could lower it to the stage, but during an inspection it was locked in position. I checked the control panel: one red light, two green. I pulled the emergency lever until it clicked three times. Then I clipped my harness to the overhead safety wire and wrote SAFE in the first box on my form.

There is a comfort in a checklist. Each tick seems to make the next tick inevitable.

Halfway across the bridge, I felt a tremor beneath my left boot. It was slight, no more than the shiver of a train passing under a station floor. I stopped. The platform settled. Somewhere above me, hidden among the beams, metal gave a small, dry knock.

I told myself it was the building cooling after the night’s heating. Old theatres speak constantly: pipes tap, timber complains, ropes turn in their wheels. Silence would have worried me more.

I continued towards the centre, where a cable had begun to split near its socket. To inspect it, I had to kneel with my shoulders outside the handrail. I shortened the strap connecting my harness to the safety wire. I tested it once with my weight and again with a sharp pull. It held.

Then the bridge moved.

It did not fall. Falling would have been simple. Instead, the right side dropped perhaps half a metre and stopped, turning the platform into a steep metal slope. My knees struck the grating. The torch left my hand and travelled soundlessly through the dark before bursting against the stage with a crack that arrived a moment later.

The inspection form slid past me. SAFE flashed under my palm, absurdly large now, before the sheet slipped through the rail and sailed down towards the seats.

I grabbed the nearest cable. It was the damaged one.

For a second, nothing in my body understood this. My hand tightened because hands tighten when they are afraid. The split covering opened under my fingers like the skin of overripe fruit, revealing the pale inner fibres. I released it and began to slide.

The bridge had become all noise: the scrape of my boots, the rapid ticking of the harness buckle against the rail, the long metallic cry of something taking more weight than it had been designed to carry. Below, the stage seemed to expand. The pale circle painted at its centre was no longer a distant mark. It was a target.

My safety strap caught.

The force turned me sideways and drove the air from my chest. One leg remained hooked through the handrail; the other hung over the stage. The bridge shifted again, only a few centimetres, but the movement travelled through the steel into my teeth.

I looked towards the control panel. The two green lights still shone. From where I hung, they appeared calm and official, as if they belonged to a different version of the morning.

I tried to pull myself upright. The strap held me, but it also pinned my shoulder against the rail. Each attempt made the bridge answer with another low groan. I stopped moving and listened for footsteps in the empty theatre.

There were none.

Only then did I remember the knock above me. It had not been the building speaking. It had been a warning, and I had translated it into reassurance because reassurance was what I needed.