the Funnelwhich

Scientists find evidence of plants, seeds, fertilizer, soil, and water at a Mars Home Depot.

[AMBALA, INDIA] It’s here in the remote region of Shropshirefarmbriar that Marvin, a local boy of ten who attends the preparatory school in nearby Shimla (London), discovered commerce on Mars. But all is not well in Marvin’s family. It all began when the Royal Academy of Scientific Royal Astronomy visited this young lad of twelve years.

“How was your experience with the RAS, Marvin?” I ask, sitting down for crumpets and trumpets … music. “They’re more like royal douchebags,” Marvin replies in a tone as bitter as the tea I’m served. They swarmed this tiny apartment wearing monocles, fluffy suits, and fluffy monocles.

“They stole my ideas, plain and simple,” Marvin says.

“What were you saying? I couldn’t hear you over the bitterness of this tea.”

“I said they stole my ideas.” He grows quiet, perhaps also disgusted by the bitterness of this tea.

The astronomers, however, paint a much different picture. “He clearly used our data,” says spokesman Cory Starr. “We run the machines, we control the data. Do you have any idea how hard it is to arrive here day in and day out to make sure the machines are still doing all the work? Pretty hard, I’d say. I wouldn’t know. I’m just a spokeswoman.”

“I mean spokesman!”

“Don’t you think you’re being too hard on the kid,” I say.

“He’s 14! He should be able to handle this sort of healthy scientific competition.” “No, he’s 12.”

“I’m 8, actually,” Marvin says as he pops through the door segregating Marvin’s office from the hallway.

“You said 12!” I accuse him. “Actually, I said 10, but I was lying. You should really take better notes.” I blush and wait for a change in the conversation. It came, but only after three hours of silence.

“So, do you think life exists on Mars?”

Cory replies, “Well, we know commerce exists, which means CEOs exist. Are CEOs alive?”

We stare at each other before mutually agreeing that no, they in fact are not. But without consensus between the RAS and Marvin, the question remains hotly contentious among the scientific and the surprisingly well-informed pornographic community.

To resolve this dispute, I brought the two parties together for some one-on-one face time, which seriously cramped into my three-o’clock massage.

“Look, I think you should be reasonable,” Cory says to Marvin.

“I should be reasonable? You’re calling it Cory’s Depot. And you’re just a spokeswoman! I mean spokesman.”

“It’s our data.”

“I found the depot first on my telescope.”

“Prove it,” Cory yells, knocking Marvin’s telescope out of its painstakingly found coordinates. Cory runs away, giggling insanely. Marvin sighs and swivels the telescope to the planet. He asks me to look through. Instead of seeing a Home Depot, I see dejected Martians disassembling their Home Depot and scribbling a gigantic symbol into nearby rocks.

“What are they writing?”

“It’s the Greek symbol for impending doom or impending hope. I don’t know which; it depends on the context. The Greeks were an ambivalent lot, you know.”

I nod, pretending to condone their ambivalence when—in reality—I loathed them for it.

“I don’t think they want our attention anymore after they saw this dispute air on our news networks,” Marvin says quietly. “Can you blame them?”

Marvin brooded for a while before walking to his local county courthouse, changing his name, and then buying a cape and pistol from the costume and weapons shop right next to the pharmacy and peep show store.

“Marvin, where are you going?” his mother asks, fear in her eyes and elbows. “Don’t call me Marvin. Call me John Wilkes Booth. Booth because I love telephones, Wilkes because I love the names of old people, and John because I love farewells. I’m leaving to set some things straight in this twisted world of ours.”

I try to ask for an interview, but he swooshes his cape at me and walks away. And that’s how I inadvertently caused the deaths of a million human beings.