“Just this morning, I was eating an egg-and-cheese sandwich outside a bodega and did not have time to run away from a group of canvassers. One of them walked up to me and said he was taking a survey of this rapidly gentrifying area to see if any of us newcomers had stable jobs that could endure outside a frivolous bubble. I wanted to lie and say I was a lawyer or accountant, but I was wearing this”—he gestured to his tie-dyed T-shirt and billowing light blue pants—“and knew they wouldn’t believe me. I said that I modeled. The survey was thorough; he wanted to know for whom. ‘For myself,’ I said, ‘on the Gram.’ ‘Think about where you’ll be in twenty years, son,’ the guy said, and put a hand on my shoulder. He was full of pity. He said that since I was ripped, I should look into construction work. I need to get my life together.”

I felt a little better about my choices.

“We should ask the Witch what’s going on astrologically. Everything is falling apart. You know, Rachel and I just broke up because she asked me to marry her.”

“Huh?”

“Yep, Rachel has a rich, sickly, mean grandmother, and in order to inherit her money, she’s got to marry a man. She asked me, which I guess I should feel flattered about, but it’s so fucked that I don’t.”

The following day, Blithe and Aiden went out. With them gone, I thought I would bask in my disappointment with Rachel but grew bored after a few minutes. I opened the bubble wrap and pulled out the pad that Blithe’s parents had sent us. I connected to Wi-Fi and opened Elemental’s network, where Arrow-Lines were sculpted, colored, cut, upped to 133 percent drama level, obliterated, braided, and ultimately sent out into the world in episodic spurts.

I lit a candle in my bedroom, trying to draw Blithe’s realm closer to me.

When all eight jewels are put back into the belt of Catalpa, then Oshun may return for the healing of the world, read the tagline on the home screen.

The eight Lines could be tracked at once, each in a different color, but I chose Margaret’s and minimized the others. Hers was cobalt blue. I had read the background on Margaret from Blithe’s files: five foot five, hard blue eyes, long brown hair, perpetual frown on her handsome face, born on a wagon moving west, hardscrabble life in a settlement outside Las Cruces, escaped from an arranged marriage and met a miner in Colorado.

Her Line stretched out in a row of blue boxes that the beta writers had been reshaping according to the Elemental Rubric of Satisfied Desires. The boxes were changing as I watched. It was a Thursday and the regular world was working.

HN33 commented, If Margaret wears “men’s” clothes, but it’s still clear that she’s a woman, our audience SD quotient will go up by 2 points.

Hey, where you been?