CHICKEN: Lissen, he’s out of his bed, he’s in the hall, crawling. Hear him up there crawling, as if there was somewhere to crawl to? He don’t know how to die no more’n he known how to live.

MYRTLE: Put him back on his bed!

CHICKEN: He wanted out of it, he’s out. —Crawling.

MYRTLE: I’m too weak to go up.

CHICKEN: A woman can be weak and not be disgusting. But Lot’s birth register calls him male, and he’s weak. I don’t mean just now but always. I got no respect for weak, inferior people.

MYRTLE: God, he’s—crawling downstairs! And I can’t go up to him! —CAN’T!

CHICKEN: He’s crawling down on his belly.

MYRTLE: Oh, God, help me! [She rushes toward the stairs, then cries out and rushes back into the kitchen.] —CAN’T!

CHICKEN: [Catching hold of her] You want a man living, not dying.

[Lot, crawling, appears on the lighted section of the stairs. He stops. The gasping continues.]

Natural. Human. Nothing to be ashamed of. [He kisses her. She falls sobbing to her knees.] —It’s stopped, the gasping’s quit! It’s finished! [He says this in a gravely triumphant way.] Get up!

MYRTLE: I can’t!

CHICKEN [dropping her to the floor]: Well, stay there while I— [He goes up the stairs and lifts the lifeless body of Lot and carries it above the lighted level.]

[Myrtle pulls herself up by the kitchen table, and staggers out onto the back stoop of the house. The moon breaks out of the clouds to light her.]

MYRTLE: Oh, God, have mercy on my—puzzled—soul, my lost, sinful, puzzled, soul!

[The flood murmur builds as Chicken comes back down stairs.]

CHICKEN: Myrtle?

MYRTLE: —Out here, couldn’t stay in.

CHICKEN: Well, come on in here, now, they’s things to take care of. Lot died on the stairs and I carried him up and put him in the hall. Now what I want you to do is go upstairs and make up the bed with clean sheets.

MYRTLE: Please. I can’t. You do it.

CHICKEN: No, you. You do it. I got something else to do. —I’m going outside now an’ have a look at my place.

MYRTLE: Just, just—go up there with me?

CHICKEN: Not right yet. Expect me up there later, after you’ve made up the bed. [He goes out on the stoop and looks triumphantly about him. The flood-murmur is still rising, but frogs and crickets can be heard above it.] That’s right, you frogs an’ crickets, sing it out! Chicken is king!

[The curtain starts slowly falling as Myrtle comes out beside him. There is the sound of a distant dynamite blast. Myrtle presses close to him like a scared child to a parent, as the curtain completes its descent.]

THE END

I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays