A marquee short one letter

Something is wrong with the marquee on most Tuesdays: a title missing its final letter, an apostrophe pressed in upside down and passing for a comma, a whole word shifted one slot left so the spacing reads like a stutter. Forty such errors, logged from a car window over the years, repeat almost nothing: no two marquees fail the same way twice. The letters are cut from thin plastic or aluminum, a notch along the back edge catching a horizontal rail, three rails stacked to hold two lines of title and a smaller one below for showtimes. A worker on a ladder loads them by hand, one tile at a time, reading the new title off a printed sheet held in the other hand, and errors compound the way any manual re-keying does: skip a letter early in the run and every letter after it needs pulling and reseating one slot over. Tiles go missing with some regularity, borrowed for another marquee down the road, mismatched in font or weight in a way that only shows up close. Wind works a tile loose before staff notice; a strong gust some Tuesday nights leaves a single letter dangling half out of its rail, caught on the lip, advertising nothing in particular until someone climbs up to push it back in. Whichever letter runs out first tends to be a vowel, borrowed too often for titles that all seem, some months, to need the same five.

H. G. Plimsoll