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The Map of Small Forgivenesses
Nineteen settlements under a reservoir, one sheet to certify, and the officer of record's mother on the wrong side of the line in it.
- ~122 min
- 26806 words
- 19 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 4 endings
- Contemporary
28 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
The Calder Dam closed in 1971 and covered nineteen villages, four hundred and six households and about sixty-one miles of road. The Ossery Valley Water Authority has $2.2 million to give back and one condition: a certified schedule stating, for each settlement, the date the last household left. A compulsory relocation pays a household $1,480. A voluntary seller gets what they were paid in 1963 to 1970, between $240 and $310, and nothing since, because the limitation on a claim to a 1970 transaction expired in 1976. The cartographer of record has to sign the sheet, and she inked the line that decides one of the six contested settlements in 1996, and her mother is one of the eleven households that line moved out of the compulsory cohort, correctly, for three hundred and ten dollars. The file is technically true and substantively a lie, and it has no author: a 1970 amendment that was right on the day, a 1996 consolidation that read the payments instead of the ground, and four hundred people who each inherited a fragment and never held the whole. Five days, four decisions with a signature attached, and a memory of being put on a lorry at night beside rising water that a county surveyor establishes on Monday is the family's own voluntary departure from a flooded marl pit in February 1970. Four endings, and not one of them is a payment.
Content notice8 topics · tap to review
- displacement and drowning of a valley by a dam, referenced and never depicted
- the deaths associated with an impoundment, carried as a number
- forced removal of four hundred and six households
- a family memory shown to be a memory of the wrong event
- institutional record-keeping as the mechanism of a fifty-five-year falsehood
- statutory limitation that closes a claim in 1976
- a public recusal and the loss of a professional position
- a compensation schedule that keeps a resident in place as a condition of payment
Cast
- S Sabra Okonjo Protagonist and viewpoint character. Signs or refuses the certification, and is the household in the classification she is asked to certify. no portrait yet
- R Roy Beckwith The keeper of the private record. Gives the protagonist the date that changes the classification, and asks for nothing with it. no portrait yet
- N Nell Jardine The pressure. Names the fund's own construction aloud on a boat ramp and makes the room hear it. no portrait yet
- B Bev Santana The only person who can open the 1996 file, and the one who reads the retention instruction aloud before doing it. no portrait yet
- J Jonah Pry Finds the *not acquired* column and the chapel at Meryn with eleven stones in its graveyard, and states the cost of publishing it to four hundred dollars an hour. no portrait yet
- W Wynne Oyelaran The worked example. Shows what a payment that assumes the loss is over does to a person for whom it is not over. no portrait yet
- G Garnet Fallow The obstacle and the only person in the building who is entirely straight about the mechanism. no portrait yet
- A Adaeze Okonjo Supplies three versions of the departure in eleven minutes, each better than the last, and admits she has been editing for fifty years. no portrait yet