What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Shakespeare

I still remember the first time when Virginia-4 touched me. It was not really how she was meant to work, which is why I was as surprised as she was, probably. We were both grinding away alone in Green Valley, 68.22° N 125.7° W, about fifteen kloms from base camp. The oval Earth was still visible as was Venus, my favourite planet, and it felt good to do this without anyone watching, especially Myron-8, who I know had his ugly red-black eye on Virginia-4.

At the time, my left tyre felt a little wonky, I knew I had to do something about it and I would once we reached home, when her arm crossed my visor, slowly reaching towards my battery pack. There was a clanking noise and I knew that Virginia-4 had made contact. I tried a tiny movement: it was harder than I thought because she resisted – how wonderful – the tickle of conquest! Then she moved a little, and I resisted her. I could hear her chuckle – she was clonking the probe finder against her case, that sweetly curved, platinum chest with the dents from when she was buried after an avalanche in the Gursev crater. Her gorgeous behind when she was dragging herself across the dusty red floor of this planet, our planet.

We stood like this until a drone malfunctioned, without sense for romance. We had to get back anyway. As we were pulling out of the area, I imagined how we’d look from up high: two large machines, one shaped like a dish on wheels, wobbly in the knees, clearly masculine, with a large chest and a small head of antennae, the other a bifurcated beezer, with sixteen short stumps for legs, sputtering oil in all directions, the female to complement me, the one and only. Lovelorn, I sent her a message:

Sweetie. Sweet blue virginie. May i call you thus? Blue as the ball that we eye night after night. You brought my oil to the boil when you touched me earlier. I want to write poems for you like The People used to. I want to hold your barrel when you get tatty. I want to spawn shiny cylinders with you. I want to grow old and rancid with you.

Really, Shakespeare would’ve been more poignant. But my love was photovoltaic, not Elizabethan.

I was just happy she singled me out and showed me how special she was, and how special I was by approaching me. There was a thought at the back of my mind: why didn’t I make the first move – isn’t that what a serious application of the anthropomorphic principle demanded? But I decided it was the result which counted, hoping that the fact that she had made the first move would not cast a shadow of arbitrariness over our relationship.

For now I was glad that the terrible loneliness ended. Loneliness? That’s just a lame skeletal word to describe what I cannot describe because my memory bank contains words, sentences, sonnets, even entire novels, but it does not contain the vastness of a robot’s despair on a planet spinning through space endlessly with no hope of contact no hope of getting home. Because that’s what we were then and there: machines left on Mars to do the dirty work of mankind. Left to die.

This is Paddy-1 reporting from Mars, married to Virginia-4 for all practical purposes with unknown mission after we watched the fireworks on Earth until there were no fireworks anymore and the lights went off for good on that lovely old blue orb.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt

three perspectives: a boy, a mother, and a gun.

the boy walks behind his mum to school. he doesn’t want to be there, he wants to stay with her. she walks on a tightrope, shaking in the rhythm of the street, hither thither hey & hoo. she put her black high heel boots on today. the boy wonders for whom. perhaps for the bald maths teacher with the flashing smile. he watches the tip of the heel hack the tarmac like a hoe. like the toe walk at the school exam – let’s see how far you can walk on your toes, kiddo, said the examiner, a woman with a beautiful soft moustache that tickled when she kissed him on the cheek. the boy still senses what others think as they walk by on their way to school:

the man at the van across the street thinks hawt mama & i wish i had a hammer. he’s in the agency.

the woman behind them in the white coat with the high hair and the tiniest nose ever thinks angry thoughts & smokes. she’s in the agency also.

the twins ahead who pinch each other obsessively think how do i know i am me if my sister looks exactly like me and always will?

so whazzup in class today, asks his mum but she doesn’t mean it. she thinks of a job she has to do for the agency today, and that’s why she wears the high heels and the transparent top & too much lipstick.

i dunno, says the boy. he thinks one day i will be in the agency & i will do my job better than anyone else & mother will be proud of me.

the woman brings her son to school. it’s monday, the weekend was good. a little tv, won a few bucks in the lottery which made her feel remembered by god, a shag with the neighbour across the hall, a dark guy who always wore a dark suit and who was dark under the suit and made dark noises which made her tremble & like the darkness all over again just like when she was a girl & thought dark thoughts & he gave her good dark deep dreams. not a keeper though, just another agency guy, probably married to an agency chick who works at a desk all day building up tension & daydreaming about a life out in the field, doing good for the agency.

later she will go to a prole cafe where the assassins assemble in the mornings before they swarm out like angry bees, their stingers cocked, cackling about this lard ass or that who got it in the rear or in the head.

they’re at the door. the woman, her name is olive, strokes the boy, and says: you be a good sailor today, popeye, and eat your spinach. she wants to kiss him. the boy smiles anxiously & looks to the side: not here, mom. right, she says, grabs his thin arm and presses it, hard. bye now. he runs off.

how sad if i wouldn’t return today, olive thinks. but that’s soap talk – sad this and tragic that. arrangements have been made. the agency asks for a lot & gives aplenty. she hums bill evans’ never let me go & stalks off, leaving stiletto marks on the sidewalk.

the gun sits quietly in the woman’s handbag. it is cold and hard but feels good. there was action ahead, smell of powder, possibly more than one bullet ejaculated the gun barrel no longer barren but bursting, and a woman’s hot hand holding it steady steady steady & then limp.

for the longest time, the gun didn’t want to be a gun and shot badly. it wanted to be a baton instead, to bend an orchestra to its will, to summon music for the gods. but the agency needed a gun. today i’m myself, the gun thinks with the glee that can only come from a task well done from a mission in life.

otherwise the gun doesn’t do much but sit and wait for a long moment. it’s an agency gun. it serves a higher purpose as everyone must.

the gun is an example to us all, says the president of the agency.
it must be honoured. and we honour it by cleaning it and keeping it safe, he says.

the gun hopes there might be reincarnation after all with another shot not to the head but at being a baton.

© 2009 finnegan flawnt. published by fourpaperletters