Plenty of room for a revenge plot.

“And with the gem glowing dimly in a burlap sack, she’s about to cut her hair off, dress as a ranch hand, and head into the Sonoran to meet with the Guide, who will help her to the next step.

“Only, a hooded figure with a long spyglass starts following her at Las Cruces.”

He had work to do. On the Elemental Chart of Episodic Thrill, he needed to build the Arrow-Line to its Crux of Sensation Overload.

As far as storytelling, he could always count on a reservoir of confidence, a sort of rightness in his bones. When he looked at colleagues who spoke tentatively or people ahead of him in line at the café ordering with shaky voices, he tried to measure the amber liquid inside. Could it ever run out? he started asking himself, as he aged from a solid 28 years to 28.5.

The car ahead of him was from Maine.

“Storyboard homo whaling expeditions for another Catalpa realm,” he told his phone, and his phone listened.

The studio had already started on:

Margaret, the mine worker’s wife who escapes to the Sonoran in the 1890s

The Afro-futurist beekeeper

The 1980s South Korean skin diver

The Egyptian freedom fighter

A child from outer space

And the whole staff was randomly generating a list of possibilities for the last three lines.

Among his TV peers, Blithe conceptualized the creation process in an old-school way. Most of the writers had simply grown up watching enough television that they internalized the procedural aspects of plot and, beyond that, relied on teamwork and improvisation. Blithe’s parents had banned TV, so he’d spent childhood reading books and doing nothing but painting pictures in his head: a lost, underground people who see with their noses, billions of miles of invisible orange film connecting everyone’s buttholes, runes explaining how sharks are really the most compassionate of species.

He was a lonely and not lonely child.

Each primary writer on the Catalpa team was responsible for one line, with the beta writers fitting them together with enough loud action at the beginning and end to hold viewers. Marcus, the Guardian of Lines, told Blithe he was sure the show would go violet.

“It has this dark, juicy overabundance that everyone wants to guzzle,” he’d said over video chat while he was working out with his trainer.

Blithe parked and entered the building through a set of mirrored doors, pausing to take off his sunglasses.

There was no line at the café. Everyone at Elemental could come in between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. and work two days a week from home. Darryl, the barista, was a former C-list actor. He stirred the threat of downward mobility into every corn-milk latte. That morning, he was smiling in his black apron and unnecessary name tag. Not many could withstand the smugness of people who worked above the fifth floor; Darryl held a secret balm for a dreamy present. He had even thrown in some ideas for a Line about a wise Ethiopian coffee farmer who fled to Addis Ababa from the highlands in World War II. As he foamed Blithe’s milk and then poured it up to the rim of the cup, his eyes were on the frothing. He placed Blithe’s latte before him without bitterness.