Bill Reed

Living on Mars Bill Reed

Henry had one good eye until the surgeon lost even that one's lens down some drain. He had a wife he could call his own until she started to shack up very noisily with some young turk Australian postgraduate in his (Henry's) own home. He had a housekeeper until she left in built-up disgust claiming Henry continuously confessed to some vague past unspeakable crime. Henry also had this itch which his new housekeeper - his wife's cousin - could keep in check with her very personal fingernails. Then there was his house-full of irreplaceable objects until his new housekeeper's husband came along and proceeded to methodically clean him out. Try as he might, though, Henry couldn't get rid of was his famous father's specimen jars of Australian Aboriginal parts... an internationally acclaimed collection which no one, not even the housekeeper's husband, wanted to rid him off. All this was obviously conspiring to rob him of his morning banana. The thing is he didn't even have his Australia anymore since fate's blindness had him stranded there in Port Moresby, where even people he didn't know were outside gathering into an angry mob just because (he thinks) he is he. Unfair is unfair no matter how incapable you are of looking at it. Still, Henry always had the driven-self of living on Mars, if only he could have gotten around to it.--------------Bill Reed is a novelist, playwright and short-story writer. He has worked as editor and journalist both in Australia and overseas, and has won national competitions for drama and for long and short fiction.