“Bah humbug!”
Santa Claus*
#quote
Today I rode a
robot dinosaur into the sunset. I want to do that tomorrow, but I
can't because it's a rental. Anyway onto the flash fiction!
Rockin' it
on Mars
Martians hate
rock music. I mean really, really hate it. That's a rule. Now, I
could someone not caring for or disliking rock music. If it's just
something that get's at your nerves then yeah, I could see some hate.
But how could an entire species absolutely despise
rock music? I read a Martian review that said rock music sounded like
the slaughtering of baby animals. I wondered if all their brainpower
was devoted to controlling those eight flailing tentacles of theirs
on their torso. I thought it needed to be, the way they tugged their
slug body along with them.
Yet my friend
Cassandra told me we should play on Mars.
“Virgil,
it'll work. Trust me.”
“It's
suicide.” I told her. Yet I went along anyway. The entire band went
along. Cassandra worked in strange and mysterious ways with her
ideas. She would come up with an idea, a decision that sounds like it
would never work, and somehow, someway it all worked out in the end.
A casual observer would say by stupid chance that everything worked
out the way she thought it would. But she did it so many times that
it defied statistics so I thought her logic existed on a sort of
plane of above ours like magic, and that's why she wouldn't explain
to us, we couldn't hope to understand.
Her strange
plans is how our underfunded band managed to succeed. “Let's
perform here” she would say, it would be some tiny town way out of
our way. Then a rock convention is suddenly hosted near that area and
the hotels are used there and a bored rock celebrity shows up at our
show. We sold tickets, but didn't get famous unfortunately, but that
show got us by for awhile. That's why Cassandra is our manager. Kind
of. We don't enough money to pay each anyone in the band employable
salaries. I'm both guitarist and publicist but I'm not paid that
way.
We all prayed
that Cassandra's suicide mission of playing our rock music for the
Martians would pay off. It took a lot of money to go there. We knew
it would pay off big if they didn't end up attacking us on stage like
anyone else that tried. Maybe our band could get on the news for
being mauled.
“I hope you
know what you're doing Cassandra,” Kathy, our drummer, said. She
looked at all the Martians in the audience. “We put a lot of faith
in you, this better work like everything else.” The band didn't ask
how she planned for us to successfully play rock music for Martians
out of fear. Would we jinx it? Would we just not understand the plan?
Besides halfway to Mars we already blew our money on getting her so
knowing the plan and not having faith in it would make it very
difficult to play.
“How did you
even get such a large crowd to a rock show?” I asked her.
She gave us all
a mischievous smile, “Oh, I lied in the advertisements and told
everyone we were going to be playing disco.”
I yelled at
her, “Are you insane!?” I then lowered my voice to make sure the
audience wouldn't overhear. “If they get mad we couldn't possibly
deliver. I don't care if they love disco and that got them in the
door. We didn't set up all those cameras to record the first
successful performance of rock music to Martians. We set up those
cameras to set up those up to record a bloodbath!”
She giggled.
“C'mon, where's all that faith you put in me before? Now please
take your places on stage and let me handle this.”
Cassandra then
walked up to the mic and spoke into it. “Attention ladies and
gentlemen. I'm sorry but we have deceived you. Today we will not be
playing disco, but rather a form of rock music designed for the
martian audience, specifically the martian king. We wish he could be
here, but of course we're only a small band, so we hope you can be a
humble test audience for this new form of music meant to evolve rock
into something worthy for your king.”
She then said
to us to the players in the band, “Okay play the song I wrote.”
“But it's not
really all that different!”
“Trust me,
go.”
We then played
our music. And the martians loved it. I wouldn't call that song much
of an evolution of anything. We played the other songs she wrote, and
the martians loved it. The entire thing was caught on film. As soon
as we posted the concert on our website it went viral. The best rock
bands couldn't appease the martians yet we did. Of course we asked
Cassandra why it worked.
“Oh, the
Martians always loved rock music. I stalked some Martian music
critics into a meeting and they were discussing rock music, and in
private they loved it. Consistently I found this pattern to be true.
However I wondered why they would say the opposite in public. So I
tried to find motive. I found out that the Martian King apparently
hated rock music. But also nearly the first of anything he was shown
by the humans of type of thing he hated then loved the next. Probably
to show off ego. 'I hate this, but I love this, what an amazing thing
you Earthlings have shown me!'. Make a show of it. So really the only
reason they said they hated rock music was because the king said he
hated rock music. Which upon further examination and stalking of the
king I found out he actually likes rock music so I decided I would
appeal to the king's ego. So once he says yes to this 'evolution' to
appease him we'll be golden.”
After a moment
of shock that I shared with the rest of the band I replied, “Wait,
you stalked music critics,
and the martian king...wait that's why we worked to
perform in that town around the royal city and that's where you
popped off to? How did you not get caught?”
She laughed.
“Oh, all my plans come from research. A lot of it being illegal and
stalking. That time I said I had a dead Aunt I had to go to a funeral
for? That was me stalking a celebrity to find out his habits and
activities so we could get that gig way back, you know the rock con
he went to and the bored celebrity showed up at our show. I sabotaged
the event he meant to go to that evening so he had to go ours.”
“You should
stop talking now. I don't want know anymore,” I told her.
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