LXIII. Adman madman

The little Martian stumbles out of his beanbag bed on a Sunday morning and lands face-first on the batik-print rug that stretches lazily across my sun-drenched room.

His little MaPhone (like an iPhone, but for Martians, he reminds me) jitters and shudders in a language unknown, blowing up with notifications that no earthly man can understand.

The women haven’t tried yet.

“You know this is my only day off, right?” I remind him, through heaves of uncaffeinated air.

The little Martian started work a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been odd, to say the least.

He’s taken on a remote, work-from-home position with a boutique advertising agency on Mars, and he treats his work like it’s the holy grail of Martianianic development.

I’m waiting for him to hit that bitter six-month landmark where he realizes that selling shitty Mars bars  and motor oil isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Alas, the Martian is in his Don Draper honeymoon phase at the moment… and who am I to pop his bubble?

“You know that Martians don’t believe in Sundays, right?” he groans back, one hand strewn melodramatically across his forehead.

I sink deeper into my powder-blue duvet and hope the bed will adopt me as its own. It does no such thing. “Ducking capitalists” I mutter under my breath, half heartedly.

The Martian’s phone buzzes and pops like a fizzy soda as he types frantically into it, an officious glint in his eyes and an old-man wrinkle in his head.

“Aha! All done! The world has been saved,” he exclaims, smashing the last key with a flourish.

“Which one?” I ask the little high strung intergalactic cruiser. He sticks his tongue out at me in reply.

“What are you working on anyway?” I complain. “What’s so rip-roaringly urgent that you have to be shaken awake on a Sunday morning on a planet far, far away?”

The little Martian looks me dead in the eye and replies, deadpan: “Copycheck.”

The little martian has a lot to learn from his chubby counterpart.