The Bell Before Dawn
Format: Heightened verse-inspired drama
Approx. length: 1-3 minutes
Original audition scene

A bare stage. ISOLA speaks to an unseen city below.

ISOLA
Ring, then. Ring your little iron throat
until the roofs shake loose their sleeping birds.
Tell every shuttered room that morning comes
without consent, and finds us as we are.

I have stood here through the argument of stars,
through soldiers changing guard, through mothers
folding linen by a candle’s failing nerve.
No god descended. No bright judgement split
the market stones. Only the hour moved on,
indifferent as a wheel.

They said I would be brave by now.
As though courage were a cloak one grows into,
left hanging by the door. I am not brave.
I am merely finished with retreat.

Below, my brother waits in chains.
Above, the council sharpens law to look like mercy.
Between them, I have this voice, this breath,
this stubborn body taught to kneel and now
forgetting how.

So ring. Wake the bakers, wake the thieves,
wake every child who dreams the world is fixed.
Let them come to windows. Let them see
one woman cross the square before the dawn
and learn the shape of no.
