Project Vulture, episode 1 – Vultures, Act 1
[Content warnings: strong language, cavalier attitude toward violence.]
SCENE I: MAMA KOLSHOV GETS BURIED; LAB GETS SET UP
A young man takes off his stylish, black hat and folds it into an envelope and puts it in a pocket on the inside of his coat. The only colourful items this man is wearing are a pink badge (the breast cancer awareness thing) and a red rose (socialism). This is EMIL KOLSHOV. He steps into the church. Behind him people are filling in like syrup back into the carafe, reluctantly. Many of them touch KOLSHOV’s elbow or shoulder and mutter condolences. One who does not do this is JUNE, a tall man with sunk-in cheeks, sunglasses, and pale skin.
Pastor GORCZI starts speaking without a microphone. People fall silent.
GORCZI
– Everybody in this room knew Tarja Kolshov. To many of us, she was known as Mama Kolshov. She had the strength of character of the Kolshovs.
JUNE looks at his clock. The insides of JUNE’s coat are sort of shining with the blue that people know as ultraviolet.
GORCZI (louder)
– She is the reason I am alive today. The reason many of us haven’t moved away from this otherwise godforsaken piece of land. She gave the workers rights, the people hope, the politicians something to fear and now she’s gone.
KOLSHOV’s eyes are closed. So are Mama Kolshov’s.
GORCZI
– For those of you who want to have one last look at this brave woman, I urge you to slowly pay your respects while the coffin is open. Go on, whilst I speak.
Elsewhere, to the voiceover of GORCZI praising Mama Kolshov, a lab is scrambled into assistance:
TOESCH, carrying a backpack full of stuff, disemelevators into a pristine area known as the lab. She wobbles through the corridor of airtight glass cells and puts down the backpack. Starts taking equipment out of it – a microscope, a mini-fridge, a tube of petri-dishes, something that looks like anEKG-meter, and a fern.
GORCZI
– She was a gale, a force of nature. Wherever she is now, the people in charge of that place are about to face some serious opposition.
Shot of GORCZI again, standing a tiny bit above the milling people. The camera then pans around the church to KOLSHOV.
GORCZI (smiling)
– And she will have her way and make it better for the people there. Never before have I met someone like Mama Kolshov, and never again shall I. I am not joking when I say we would all go to war for this woman.
JUNE moves closer to KOLSHOV without looking at KOLSHOV. JUNE scrunges up his coat a bit to not glow as much.
GORCZI
– She made us aware of the vultures dying. She nursed some of the poor birds back to health.
The lab’s cells are filling up with specimen: flayed pigs, a monkey without a brain, a metre-thick layer of earth crawling with bugs, and one empty cell. TOESCH is talking withMISCHA about things. MISCHA walks away.
GORCZI
– It was already too late when they found the cancer. She took no medication, did nothing to stop it. One day, she just fell.
There is silence for exactly 60 seconds in the church and also elsewhere. A lab asssistant (not wearing the cool kind of lab coat TOESCH and MISCHA are wearing) is rolling a stretcher with a black bodybag into the empty cell. No sound effects on this. He then walks out of there while MISCHA, looking fascinated, zips the bag open and emancipates the corpse of a young man with a few tattoos on his face and some scars on his forehead from where the electric chair got him.
TOESCH cuts him up deftly and pours in some worm-filled dirt into his stomach, and sews the thing shut again.
GORCZI (sound returning; people crying)
– She would have liked us all to be drunk right now. I hope I will see you all at the tavern.
Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost 