What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost
everyone, but there was still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining half a mile away. Kirsten as Titania, a crown of flowers on her close-cropped hair, the jagged scar on her cheekbone half-erased by candlelight. The audience is silent. Sayid, circling her in a tuxedo that Kirsten found in a dead man’s closet near the town of East Jordan:
'Tarry rash wanton. Am I not thy lord?'
'Then I must be thy lady.' Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London’s theatre’s reopened after two seasons of plague.