Bubble

3. Begin Again

Later that night Bonita found herself in her apartment. Work had been just as turbulent as normal, but her mind was even more so due to what Minho had told her that morning. She cast her eyes down beside her where the scribbled-up reboot script of 'Bubble' sat as if it were a person itself. Her fingers tentatively flipped back the page to look at the first page. This seemed to be the most heavily abused with notes. That made sense to Bonita. The hardest part about writing a story was figuring out the best place to start.

Getting up from where she was seated, she moved to kneel in front of her television stand. Tucked lovingly underneath the television was a DVD player and below that copies of her favorite shows. The first time that Minho had come over to her apartment and seen her collection, he had asked why she didn't stream the shows. To Bonita, there was something nostalgic about watching her shows this way. It was like tangibly owning a piece of home.

Grabbing the series case for 'Bubble', she opened it up on the small part of the exposed stand under the television, popping the last disc free. Even though it was scary to entertain the thought of trying out for being the head writer of the reboot, she still couldn't help it. However, she knew to do so she had to have a refresher on where it left off. Turning the player on and putting the disc in, she soon got off the floor and moved to sit back down on the couch beside the script again. As she turned the television on and the menu of the DVD loaded, the washing machine running behind her seemed to tumble louder in anticipation. Soon the logo to the show suddenly floated onto her screen. She couldn't keep the small smile off her face at the sight.

Bonita picked up the DVD player remote from the side table, clicking to 'episode selection' and then the finale. The screen temporarily faded to black before the show came into view. It was like no time had passed at all. There was the familiar industrial looking place that Bang Chan called home.

The story had it that Bang Chan's family was very rich and eccentric. They had heard whispers of the end of the world like everyone else, so they started to prepare for it. They built an underground bunker, stocked with all the supplies one would need to last a lifetime. Everyone had thought they were crazy, but they never gave up. The day the world as they knew it would end came faster than they had anticipated though. They barely had time to hide their fifteen-year-old son underground in the bunker before they ended up killed.

Isolated from the outside world where life was in the process of being obliterated, Bang Chan had learned throughout the course of the series to survive in a world of his own. However — with each passing year — it became harder for him. The whole plot of what was accidentally the final season was that Bang Chan, who was now twenty-six and had therefore been in the bunker for roughly eleven years, was starting to struggle. He was not only going through depression from the isolation, but his supplies were starting to run out.

"They either didn't expect to live this long, or they severely underestimated the supplies needed," said Bang Chan to himself.

Getting up from the concrete floor where he had just been doing push-ups as part of his routine to stay sane, he moved to walk towards the faux window wall where the sink had been installed. The camera made sure to display his outfit as he walked. It started by looking at his dusty brown combat boots, panning slowly up his stressed light blue jeans before focusing in on the sweat running in beads down his shoulders and soaking into his black tank top. Bonita watched as he reached the sink and twisted the handle by the faucet only for no water to sputter out.

"Has the day finally come?" muttered Bang Chan. "Does this mean my time has run out too?"

His eyes turned towards the door that had been shut ever since his parents put him in there. Bonita reached out for the remote and pressed 'pause', freezing the show on Bang Chan's dismayed and perplexed face. That had been the end of the last episode. Bonita knew that it was meant to be a cliffhanger for the viewers to make them wonder if he decided to try to venture out from his 'bubble' or not. The writer obviously hadn't anticipated the sad irony of the lead actor's death.