A THING by ELIOT S. KU
Flower Salesman on Mars
If I were stranded on Mars with enough resources to last me x amount of time, I wouldn’t waste it trying to grow potatoes so that I could survive a bit longer only to suffer y amount of vitamin deficiencies. I wouldn’t wrack my brain with anxiety trying to stay alive. The overwhelming odds are that I wouldn’t. But I would invest time in a hobby to enjoy while I admired the alien beauty of Mars—its absolute redness and tallest mountains in our solar system. What would I do? Besides write stories in the Martian sand that no one would read anyway? I’d try to plant flowers. Raise them with great care. Because it would be nice to see flowers on Mars. A nice contrast. And if they grew, I’d pluck them and put them together into a bouquet. I’d set up a booth in the middle of anywhere at all and sell them to whoever happened to pass by. Of course no one would come, but if they did, they’d turn toward me without bothering to stop and say “Sorry, I don’t carry cash with me,” the same way I always do when I see Girl Scouts selling their famous cookies outside the grocery store entrance, and the passersby would give me the same rhetorical look I give to the Girl Scouts, sort of like, “What can ya do? There is nothing for it.”
Eliot S. Ku (he/his) is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Whiskey Tit, the Raven Review, Call Me Brackets, Maudlin House, HAD, Roi Faineant, and Carmen et Error, among other places.