The Circle of Life [short-short story]
They say they are keeping me locked in here until I write at least five hundred stinking words.
Okay, fine, but if they harbor any illusion of getting a solitary extra syllable out of me, they need to do a rethink.
Anyhow, if you are looking for a change, you might try buying a one-way ticket to Mars — I know, I did.
The decision to planet-jump was made after Craig the Desert Rat confessed that he had begun adding a tablespoon of dirt to the morning brew. Something to do with achieving spiritual equilibrium. Final straw.
Being low on funds (so, what else is new?), I was forced to take the ’Slow Boat to Mars’ from Moon Base, spending the next seven months achieving ever increasing empathy for sardines.
Arriving on the Red Orb, I was assigned to the O2 plant near Ares City — where, after a few weeks, life settled into a humdrum routine — which was just fine by me.
Then Corn Dog Rosie arrived to work in the canteen, and my existence was sent spinning in a completely unexpected direction.
Within three weeks, Rosie and I had partnered up. In fact, and don’t laugh, we got married — which allowed us to take advantage of a glaring loophole and get fast-tracked as sharecroppers in the Canal Zone.
Our day-cycles were all about red cabbages. Of an evening-cycle we would sit alone and talk and watch projections of hawks making lazy circles on our dome’s sky-screen. Life was good.
Then, as things are wont to do, everything went turtles up — after Rosie and I volunteered to be guinea pigs in a time travel experiment.
Imagine the good old days as being happier and less complicated? Try enduring a pizza craving in the year 1483 — in Mongolia.
Rosie, though, proved to be a first-rate yurt-keeper. But even more amazing was her ability to make the fermented mares’ milk somewhere in the neighborhood of palatable. Of course, her corn dogs, as usual, were the greatest — though I thought it best not to inquire about the ingredients.
After five years on the steppes — believe it or not — we had reached our limit; so we ‘hitched’ a ride on the Silk Road — eventually making our way to Italy.
There, I tried to convince Rosie about just how cool it would be if we were to become the ones to discover America; but she nipped that idea in the bud, saying that she was not interested in stealing anyone’s fire.
And so, the next few years we wandered the Apennine peninsula, getting by selling Rosie’s cane di mais.
One day, in Milano, we bumped into a fellow named Leonardo da Vinci. Yeah, him, really.
We told LDV our story — and he told us about some work he had been doing, himself, on the side, in the area of ‘time travel.’
To make a short story even shorter, the ‘next day,’ we were drinking Craig the Desert Rat’s soil laced coffee. Rosie says it probably adds a certain something. Go figure.
