The Little Things

Jeremy’s day began with the utmost triumph: perfectly toasted toast. The bread, teetering on that oft-sought step between cooked and burnt, took butter and jelly in equal measure and crunch-squished between his teeth, every bite a testament to his culinary prowess.

Jeremy’s day continued with a lesser, though not inconsiderable victory: the shower was hot when he stepped in. The streams above his head, which so often yielded nothing but cold water thanks to Mr. Paulaski’s daily neverending bath, today lapped gentle and warm across his back. He scrubbed in peace, still proud of the toast.

Next was the drag of his favorite comb through his messy hair, which—normally uncooperative—yielded to each plastic stroke. He tilted his head, considered the calmed shock of black atop it in the mirror, and beamed. The crack in the center only slightly distorted his nose. Brushing his teeth and getting dressed and getting ready continued the trend of minor but not trivial successes, and it was with an unusual bounce in his step that he took the ten paces from his bathroom to his front door.

He nodded at the Collection, lining three walls of his studio at various wobbling heights. Monitors glowed, LEDs blinked, fans hummed, and a lone Apple logo blazed; all, it seemed, in cheerful response.

Jeremy relished the triumphs of the morning, grabbed his broken doorknob, and stepped outside ready to seize the day.

Judging by the wave of icy water a passing car immediately kicked up; the suddenly mussed hair soaking on top of his head; the muffling gray of the sky, and the flat tire on his Honda across the street, the day would do some seizing of its own.

He still had the toast.

Baby it's Cold Outside

GHS-30938 was the worst planet in the solar system.

In the galaxy.

In the universe.

At least other planets had the good grace to be so terrifying, so gaseous, so poisonous, and generally so Goddamned uninhabitable that not even the most desperate spacers would attempt to settle them. Planet Meteo, bombarded daily by chunks of rock which, thanks to the atmosphere's unique characteristics, turned into planetwide cluster bombs. Planet Dust, so named because the wind storms made even the inanimate probes choke and die. Planet Siphonia, which leached energy out of engines and blood out of people. All of them horrible, all of them unsettled.

GHS-30938, which was so loathed no one bothered to name it, was the worst planet in the multiverse precisely because some desperate colony ship put down upon its just-barely-livable surface. Perhaps the stay was supposed to be temporary; MacIntyre could only hope so, because what kind of ancestors would land on a planet that was half ice cube, half lava intentionally?

GHS-30938 orbited a star so closely that its Day Side nearly boiled, and always stayed that way. Tidally locked. Its Night Side was, in a way, better for habitation--provided you didn't mind living frozen in perpetual darkness. Not figuratively frozen, unable to move--literally frozen, as in constantly buried in ice.

McIntyre kicked an outcropping of ice, briefly illuminated in his path by the spotlights behind him, and reflected on this. It snapped against his boot, spiraled off into the distance.

That meant he was getting closer. Only about ten below, here; try that shit farther from the equator, you'd break every toe in your foot, the ice solid as rock.

I live on the worst planet ever, he thought, and now I'm going to die on it.

Looking up, seeing the dim, alien light on the horizon, he was given small comfort: at least he wouldn't die cold.

Opposite Day

David Roe was very much alone.

Understandably so. At parties, he was the one in the corner muttering judgment and incessantly tapping his smartphone. He didn't like loud music, he didn't like to drink, conversation seemed to bore him. Those who braved social interaction with the pale, dark-eyed man in the corner felt they could very well have been dead or chickens or on fire for all he cared. For some reason, this air of bitter disinterest seemed to net him more-than-occasional lays, but every woman who went to bed with him couldn't shake the feeling that to him, the sex was pretty much masturbation.

The fact he cut up dead people for a living didn't help his social life.

In truth, to David conversation was at best white noise and at worst something akin to a swarm of particularly eloquent mosquitoes whining in his ears. He didn't hate people, not really, but they were so damned boring most of the time. He'd find himself tuning Scott this or Jen that out at the bar, wondering how big Scott's heart was, how much Jen's martinis had soured her liver. He had better conversations with corpses--at least they told him useful things, like what type of knife created that wound, or how many hours it'd been since the final breath.

David Roe, county medical examiner, was very much alone.

But he wasn't lonely.

Had rehearsal tonight. Met a cute girl. Actively weighing the awkwardness of getting shot down by said cute girl against the awesomeness of her saying yes to a date.

Jeremy was not a lonely man.

Every day he met hundreds of people, sometimes thousands. Talked for hours about every conceivable subject, argued at length--often won!--on many as well. Always, at that point, raised his skinny fists in victory and crowed triumph to the heavens. Or his ceiling. Mainly his ceiling. And often, oh, so often, he had sex. With women. Well, people who claimed they were women. With chat rooms, it was possible they were lying, but Jeremy didn't want to consider the possibility.

Jeremy was not a lonely man.

But, bathed in the light of his computer monitor at two AM, stripped to his boxers and surrounded by blinking, beeping, humming, looming electronica, for some reason he felt very, very much alone.