Marta, who’d driven in from the next town with a cooler and a suitcase of costumes, was a veteran of small-town theatrics. She ran the auditions, a kindly chaos of sequins and nervous hands. Today’s theme—“Coastlines of the World”—had inspired everything from paper-mâché lighthouses to a toddler in a shark fin. Between acts, the announcer read submissions sent in online: a string of odd, punctuation-free handles—enature, net awwc, russianbare—mysterious usernames that had somehow ended up in the talent roster. Marta smiled at the names like postcards, each one hinting at a stranger’s life.