WHEN ELSEWHERE IS EVERYWHERE
a story
by JC Hemphill
Maddie was ready to explode.
Today was the
day of days, the one she’d anticipated since last season’s finale, the day that
would allow her to cross off the sole item on her bucket list. The day, she
knew, that would mark the highest of highs in a lifetime comprised of far too
many lows.
She grabbed her phone from the nightstand as soon as she woke up, opened the
media app, and selected the page for her favorite TV show, Elsewhere. Part of her suspected the new season wouldn’t be up. She’d
dreamed the show had been canceled. But it was right there where it belonged,
accompanied by a new picture of the cast huddled around a campfire, the dark
wilderness closing in on them, pressing them closer to the cone of firelight
illuminating their haggard faces.
It was
official: Season 9 of Elsewhere was
ready to binge.
And what a
season it promised to be! Considering the way Season 8 ended, with Malcolm on
the verge of insanity, with the wastelanders launching a massive attack on the
colony, with Petra and Anna-May finally—finally—admitting
their love for one another and then seeing the torches of the invasion force as
it descended on the colony from the surrounding mountains, a love connection
that came just a little too late.
It’d been
too much for Maddie. She’d spent weeks after that cliffhanger brooding. Almost
lost her hospitality gig because she’d grown so sour over the unresolved
tension.
But eventually
she turned her thoughts to Season 9 and formulated a plan—an epic plan that turned
her brooding into excitement—and here, today, that plan was coming to life.
She could
hardly keep still.
As if fate
was rooting for her, the bullet train system the government spent years constructing
had been completed last week. She’d feared it wouldn’t be done in time and that
she’d have to drive the whole way, but they did it. Now as she boarded the 8:15
train to Estes Park, Colorado, she would reach her destination in an hour.
As soon as
she found a seat on the crowded train, she pulled her phone out and selected
the media app. Once more she studied the cover image of her favorite characters
huddled around a campfire. Tyler looked particularly good. Handsome and rugged,
per usual. But crouching next to him, like a fat, ugly spider, was Eldritch,
the scum responsible for betraying the colony’s location to the wastelanders.
Eight seasons the colonists remained hidden from the feral tribes littering the
mountains. Eight seasons! And for
what? To be betrayed by that coward?
Disgusting!
Maddie
wished all the pain and misery in Elsewhere
on Eldritch. Hopefully he died. Or worse, she hoped the wastelanders decided to
make him their next meal. Like they had of poor Jonas way back in Season 3.
The train
began moving. Somebody wearing earbuds had taken the seat next to her, and, not
all that surprising since it was the number one show in America, he was
watching Elsewhere on his phone.
Maddie looked
away, fearing spoilers.
Across the
aisle from him, a woman and her son pressed their heads together, peering down at
one of the new SS-HD tablets. They too were watching Elsewhere. In fact, everyone Maddie could see was staring down at
brightly lit screens, the colors dancing across their faces like the firelight
from the new season's cover image.
She wanted
to watch it so bad she felt a pang in her stomach. Yet her plan was to wait until
she reached her destination. It would be hard—dang near impossible, that pang
told her—but rewarding. Because she was on her way to Elsewhere itself. She’d discovered where they filmed the show, a
valley outside Estes Park, and would spend her day in Elsewhere watching Elsewhere.
Magnifique!
Her
roommate—the only person in the world who loathed television—had compared
Maddie’s plan to a pilgrimage.
Maddie had
been insulted at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she
realized there was nothing wrong with that. Lending this day that sort of spiritual
significance was poetic. And true, really. If Maddie worshipped anyone, it
would probably be Wanda Bilks, the writer and creator of Elsewhere.
So yeah, this
was a pilgrimage.
But there
was a problem. Her eyes wouldn’t stop wandering to other people’s screens. She
kept catching glimpses. Eldritch skulking through shadowy undergrowth; Anna-May
pointing to something behind Petra; an explosion.
Did
somebody blow up the habitat!?
It
couldn’t be . . .
Maddie
turned her phone back on and, with a trembling finger, played the first episode
of Season 9.
As the
opening credits rolled, accompanied by that sad, iconic strumming of a fiddle,
Maddie experienced a deep sense of coming
home. That was the best way to describe the flighty sensation in her chest—like
returning to a home she never wanted to leave in the first place.
Happy
tears filled her eyes.
This was
it . . .
No.
She turned
off the phone. After waiting this long, she couldn’t surrender now. So she
tried looking out the window at the Kansas landscape zipping by. But Kansas was
flat and boring. No will-they-or-won’t-they love affairs took place outside
that window, no tense stand-offs between colonists and wastelanders, no
exploding habitats (Cripes, is that really
what happened?). Just the azure and emerald
meeting of land and sky.
Bleh.
She turned
the phone back on and pulled up Season 1 to re-watch the pilot. Soon, her
anxiety melted away, replaced by that coming-home feeling.
She
exhaled. It was almost—maybe this was a bit dramatic, but oh well—it was almost
like a heroin addict greeting the day’s first high.
The second
episode was just starting when the train stopped. She looked up to see half the
car empty. People had debarked without her noticing and since she wasn’t sure how
much time she had before it started rolling again, she scrambled off. But leaving
the train didn’t slow her down; she sprinted to the nearest bus stop, checked
the sign to make sure she was in the right place, and waited. Knowing it was
another ten minutes before the number 17 arrived, she dove back into the show.
Even on
the sixth viewing, Season 1 held up nicely. She caught things she hadn’t
noticed the first five times. Like how Eldritch (still a good guy at this
point) sometimes let his gaze linger on Mary-Ann a little too long. Had he
coveted her even then?
She didn’t
bother looking away from the screen when the bus arrived. Somehow she found a
seat and somehow—another sign that fate was her companion—she managed to pull
the cord to stop the bus at the right time, all without missing a single line
of dialog.
She did,
however, tear her gaze away when she exited the bus. There must’ve been seven zillion
pine trees lining this stretch of road and she needed to find a dirt path
tucked between them somewhere. That’s what the fanzine that revealed the
filming location said.
After
searching in both directions for a few yards, she found the path. It was wide
and easy to spot when she stood before it.
Nearly
there, she thought.
Proceeding
down that corridor of trees, listening to the crunching of pine needles under
foot, the sough caressing the branches, the chirping of birds, Maddie felt as
if she were floating through a pine-scented dream. At the end of the path, she
came upon a lake that reflected the many mountain peaks enclosing it. Just like
in the show. To the left was a large boulder—Fishing Rock, the colonists called
it. Again, it looked exactly as in the show. She watched as a hawk slid across
the sky, dipping low over the water, presumably seeking a trout to snatch,
before ascending once more, talons empty, and vanishing beyond the treetops.
Maddie,
still floating, went to Fishing Rock and sat upon it. She might’ve stayed there
consuming the entirety of Season 9, in the very spot Petra had finally—finally—kissed Mary-Ann, if not for the serenity
of this place lulling her every sense. For no matter how clean the
cinematography, no matter how HD the screen, the show had never revealed such vibrance.
Never had she smelled the sweet aromas of nature, never had she felt the cool mountain
air on her skin, never had she seen her own face reflected in the waters.
It never
occurred to her that elsewhere—or anything outside her living room—could feel
so essentially spiritual. It was just a place, after all. Yet this place felt like coming home, too.
So she sat
upon her rock and just absorbed it all. Eventually she took a stroll around the
lake, just her, her thoughts, and that soothing breeze.
The show,
it seemed, could wait another day.
END
My writing group meets once a week to discuss craft and do
writerly things that make us feel productive and artistic and to generally justify our smugness for being productive artists. Every meeting begins with
exercises designed to flex our imaginations. These exercises are always five
minutes long and include things like sketching images based on a given theme,
writing six-word stories, etc. 
