Thursday on Mars
When I got up this morning, I had the blankets in my mouth, and someone had mailed me a device having to do with jars. The device is for removing jars from the high shelves on which you have placed the jars. "Ah that a man's reach should exceed his grasp," the poet Browning told us, "or what's a Heaven for?" What is a Heaven for? Toads cough in the bracken but I'll never understand.
A small amount of water is in the bottom of the bathtub. This causes me to think about the radiation belts around our planet, and I feel compelled to walk out by the rhododendron and step on as many boxcar bugs as I can find. A taste of Emmental behind the teeth, what does it mean?
There's a grave I should dig, but the ground is frozen. There's a recipe I should follow: where has it gone?
Now it is time to visit the convenience store so I can purchase tweezers and a Slurpee. I can't feel the earth turning under my feet, and also I can't sense the slow death of my cells, so it's good these things aren't happening. I take out my mobile device and perform masturbatory motions across its surface so I don't have to think about such things.
It's two o'clock in Moscow. It's Thursday on the far side of Mars.
I hear the laughter of a child and I am filled with loathing. I see a duck, and have no opinion on the matter. It is time to eat. It is time to set the clocks to a future that will never happen. There are a million small things to accomplish, so that these things can be settled before the sky falls the sky doesn't fall, the sky falls, it doesn't, good night.
Matthew F. Amati is the author of 50 or so stories that have appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Weird Lit and elsewhere. His novel Loompaland is available from Amazon. He has appeared seven times previously in The Cafe Irreal, most recently in Issue 87. You can find a lot of his stories linked here: www.mattamati.com.