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Kirsten’s taken care of the comics as best she can but they’re dog-eared now, worn soft at the edges. The first issue falls open to a two-page spread. Dr. Eleven stands on dark rocks overlooking an indigo sea at twilight. Small boats move between islands, wind turbines spinning on the horizon. He holds his fedora in his hand. A small white animal stands by his side. (Several of the older Symphony members have confirmed that this animal is a dog, but it isn’t like any dog Kirsten’s ever seen. Its name is Luli. It looks like a cross between a fox and a cloud.) A line of text across the bottom of the frame: I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.

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THE SYMPHONY ARRIVED IN St. Deborah by the Water in the midafternoon. Before the collapse, it had been one of those places that aren’t definitely in one town or another—a gas station and a few chain restaurants strung out along a road with a motel and a Walmart. The town marked the southwestern border of the Symphony’s territory, nothing much beyond it so far as anyone knew.

They’d left Charlie and the sixth guitar here two years ago, Charlie pregnant with the sixth guitar’s baby, arrangements made for them to stay in the former Wendy’s by the gas station so she wouldn’t have to give birth on the road. Now the Symphony came upon a sentry posted at the north end of town, a boy of about fifteen sitting under a rainbow beach umbrella by the roadside. “I remember you,” he said when they reached him. “You can set up camp at the Walmart.”

The Symphony moved through St. Deborah by the Water at a deliberately slow pace, the first trumpet playing a solo from a Vivaldi concerto, but what was strange was that the music drew almost no onlookers as they passed. In Traverse City the crowd following them down the street upon their arrival had swelled to a hundred, but here only four or five people came to their doors or emerged from around the sides of buildings to stare, unsmiling, and none of them were Charlie or the sixth guitar.

The Walmart was at the south end of town, the parking lot wavering in the heat. The Symphony parked the caravans near the broken doors, set about the familiar rituals of taking care of the horses and arguing about which play to perform or if it should just be music tonight, and still neither Charlie nor the sixth guitar appeared.

“They’re probably just off working somewhere,” August said, but it seemed to Kirsten that the town was too empty. Mirages were forming in the distance, phantom pools on the road. A man pushing a wheelbarrow seemed to walk on water. A woman carried a bundle of laundry between buildings. Kirsten saw no one else.

“I’d suggest Lear for tonight,” said Sayid, an actor, “but I don’t know that we want to make this place more depressing.”

“For once I agree with you,” Kirsten said. The other actors were arguing. King Lear, because they’d been rehearsing it all week—August looked nervous—or Hamlet, because they hadn’t performed it in a month?

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Gil said, breaking an impasse. “I believe the evening calls for fairies.”

“Is all our company here?”

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“You were best to call them generally, man by man, according to the scrip.” Jackson had been playing Bottom for a decade and was the only one who’d managed to go off-book today. Even Kirsten had to look at the text twice. She hadn’t played Titania in weeks.

“This place seems quiet, doesn’t it?” Dieter was standing with Kirsten just outside the action of the rehearsal.

“It’s creepy. You remember the last time we were here? Ten or fifteen kids followed us through town when we arrived and watched the rehearsal.”

“You’re up,” Dieter said.

“I’m not misremembering, am I?” Kirsten was stepping into the play. “They crowded all around us.”

Dieter frowned, looking down the empty road.

“… But room, fairy!” said Alexandra, who was playing Puck, “here comes Oberon.”

“And here my mistress,” said Lin, who was playing the fairy. “Would that he were gone!”

“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” Sayid carried himself with a regality that Kirsten had fallen in love with once. Here in this parking lot in a pressing heat wave, patches of sweat under the arms of his T-shirt, knee-torn jeans, he was perfectly credible as a king.

“What, jealous Oberon?” Kirsten stepped forward as steadily as possible. They’d been a couple for two years, until four months earlier, when she’d slept with a traveling peddler more or less out of boredom, and now she had trouble meeting his eyes when they did A Midsummer Night’s Dream together. “Fairies, skip hence. I have forsworn his bed and company.” Audible snickering from the sidelines at this. Sayid smirked. pqdm.com