A Cow on Mars
The biggest discovery in the cosmos was a dead cow. But the real story was happening on Earth
STORY
The date was June 9th, and the year was 2029. An anomaly appeared on the camera on one of the rovers. Scientists didn’t know what to make of it. The discovery was escalated to the Oval Office and classified as Top Secret. Nevertheless, the news eventually leaked to the public. The media headlines were unanimous: We found a cow on Mars.
It should be noted that Mars still does not contain breathable air. As such, you can deduce that the cow was indeed dead. Nonetheless, there is a planet out there that we intend to inhabit that has, by all observable data, a dead cow.
Excuse me one moment; the President is approaching the podium. I’d like to hear what she says.
“My fellow Americans, and people of the world who are watching this now, what you have seen, heard, and read in your social news feeds is true. At approximately 5:34 am EST, on Saturday the 9th, the Pioneer rover confirmed the discovery of what appears, by all indications, to be a cow on Mars.”
In a run-down diner, Harold Schmidt momentarily looked up from his phone at the small group of people gathered around the display, drawn by the breaking news. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. It’s dead.” His eyes narrowed and his forehead creased. With a flash of irritation and a hint of disdain, he took a sip of coffee and returned to the spreadsheet on his screen. He continued to scroll through the list of yellow and red cells. Yellow meant that the payment was late. Red indicated that something was going to be turned off or taken away.
There were a lot of yellow and red cells.
Ginny Ashford-Schmidt sat across from Harold. She was scrolling through her phone too, examining the same worksheet. Her task was to look at the yellow cells and determine which line items to risk, so they could make it through the month.
“Harold, what if we stock up at the farmers’ market? I’m thinking of green onions, carrots, potatoes, celery, and the like.”
“And save the seeds for another failed attempt at a vegetable garden?” The coffee in his cup rippled from his exasperation.
“At least they won’t spoil when the power is shut off.” She lowered her glasses and wiped the speckled lenses by bringing a napkin to her lips and using some spittle to moisten it. She removed the spot but left a smear instead. She decided to set her glasses on the table and make the best of what she could see by zooming in on the contents.
Harold slowly walked his fingers across the middle of the table and retrieved Ginny’s glasses. He removed a kerchief from his pocket and dipped the corner in the complimentary glass of water. With some careful circles across the lens, he held the glasses up to the ceiling lights. “Here you go, Gin.” He placed the glasses where Ginny had set them down.
Ginny’s face managed a brief semblance of the youthful hope they’d shared when they first met at the county fair thirty-two years ago. She stood at a booth with several darts in her hand, aiming for the red balloon in the middle of a circle of tightly packed blue ones tacked onto a white corkboard. The first dart went left and popped a blue balloon.
Her arms dropped to her sides in disappointment before she devised a strategy for the second dart. She pinched the brass base between her forefinger and thumb, lined the intersection of the fins with her dominant eye, and when the red balloon lined up, she cocked her forearm and released the dart. It hit the red balloon dead center and bounced off.
Harold and a few of his friends happened to be passing by in the background when the curls of Ginny’s shoulder-length auburn hair first caught his attention. He noticed the butterfly barrette she wore, with glitter outlining the wings. He stood back while his friends kept walking. His ears were attuned to the escalating tone that Ginny was making in her futile attempts to convince the game master that she had indeed hit the balloon.
“Sorry, doll. Them’s the rules,” the game master said.
Harold made a deliberate, but quiet, approach. Ginny’s face was flush, and the confrontation was causing her heart to beat so fast she could feel her fingertips throb with the blood. Harold stood beside Ginny and gave a friendly nod to the game master.
“What about you, feller? Care to try your luck, or... maybe you wanna help the little lady over here?” He spit out his tobacco behind the prize shelf.
“It’s okay, don’t listen to him. If you did it once, you could do it again.”
Ginny’s breathing was quick and shallow. The last time she was this angry was when the Comstock girl took her brownie and replaced it with baby carrots in preschool.
Harold leaned into Ginny’s ear. “You wanna know somethin’? The darts bounce right off that red balloon ‘cause they don’t fill it up all the way.”
“So, I can’t win, can I?” She placed the last dart on the wooden counter and took a long look at a bear on the prize rack.
“That’s the one you want, right?” Harold asked, as he pointed to it.
Ginny nodded without a verbal answer.
“Tell you what, you wanna get that bear?”
“Of course I do. But you said the dart will just bounce off. It’s rigged. That’s how life is, I suppose.” Ginny’s shoulders slumped forward, and she lowered her head with a sigh.
“Aim high,” Harold said. “Give it a good arc and let gravity do the rest.” He picked up the dart, took hold of the back of her hand, and placed the dart gently on her open palm. He marveled at the warmth radiating from her onto his fingertips.
The bridge of Ginny’s nose crinkled with a few lines of anger. Her eyebrows arched at the outer corners and narrowed towards the inner ones. She looked Harold in the eyes for the first time. She noticed his light brown irises accent the darker rings near the pupils, and she lost her train of thought for a moment.
“Look at me,” he said with his eyes locked onto hers. “Get that bear.”
Ginny squared up in front of that red balloon, raised the dart at eye level once more, and with a slow inhalation, she exhaled in an equal manner and aimed for the blue balloon above the red one. The arc was high, and the distance was as close as it could be. The tip of the dart grazed the outermost edge of the blue balloon, and it jostled one fin. The dart continued to fall, with its tip pointing directly downward, on a trajectory to meet the top of the red balloon.
Ginny closed her eyes; Harold widened his and the game master grumbled. The pop was loud enough to turn heads at the nearby booths and passers-by. The red balloon at the center was no more.
When she opened her eyes, the game master had lowered the bear from its perch, high atop the prize board, and placed it in her open arms as she hopped in place with excitement. He turned his gaze towards Harold and snarled with a curled lip and said to him, “Go on now, get. Y’all got your prize. Shoo now.”
Harold took that cue, turned, and extended his hand to Ginny. “Hi, my name is Harold. Friends call me Harry.”
Ginny’s smile was buried in the fur of the stuffed bear. “Thank you so much, Harold. I wouldn’t have ever...”
“You can call me Harry, and it’s nothing, really. You did all the work. You should be proud of yourself.” He patted her on the shoulder. It was so soft that he gave it a little squeeze to check if she was real.
“I rather like Harold. Besides, if everyone calls you Harry, it makes it that much more special, doesn’t it?” She lowered the bear and revealed a smile, with a glow around her eyes that made him feel weightless, like he was only kept on the ground by the weight of his shoes.
“Then it’s settled. You can call me Harold.” He put his hand to his waist and extended his elbow. “Care to take a stroll through the exhibits, Miss...”
“’Ginny,’ my name’s Ginny with a ‘G’, and I’d be happy to.” She interlocked her arm through his, and with the bear in her other, the two spent the entirety of the night walking the midway, laughing, and sharing stories, while the ride booth operators shut down for the night.
Harold took another sip from his coffee cup. “Fine, we’ll save the seeds and give it another go.”
Ginny picked up her glasses, looked through the spotless lenses before putting them on. She blew Harold a discreet kiss with a slight purse of her lips.
Ginny craned her head towards the growing murmurs from the crowd around the screen. “You know, Harold, they found a cow on Mars.”
Harold cocked his head to the side, peeked one eye towards the group and shHarold cocked his head to the side, peeked one eye towards the group and shook his head with a hint of a smile. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about... it’s still dead.” He looked back at Ginny. “But I suppose it proves impossible things happen every day.”
🎧 Companion Audio: Themes & Hidden Threads
This story is fully human‑written. The audio below is an optional AI‑generated (NotebookLM) commentary created after the story — a kind of literary companion that highlights themes, symbolism, and patterns readers might enjoy exploring.
Author’s Note
This story originates from a workshop at Dominican University’s MFA residency. The task was to implement multiple points of view.
The Story Behind the Story
There are several shifts that occur. The story starts with a narrator, Rod Serling, if you will. He sets the scene where people gather around the television and he shifts the scene to the President, while he makes his exit.
After the President’s speech, the camera shifts to a little area, a small, confined booth where we meet Harold and Ginny, who seem non-plussed about the discovery of a cow on Mars.
I think of Harold and Ginny as old souls from the George Bailey and Mary hanging out and singing Buffalo Gal after the school dance in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. They two are a mix of the Baileys and the couple in Pixar’s Up. They have hopes and dreams as well as trials and tribulations—-all of this set with a backdrop of the fantastical cow on Mars bit.
So we’ve got the intimate Raymond Carver-esque human struggle juxtaposed to Rod Serling’s fantastical. But it still needs some bite to it. This is where Samuel Clemens comes in as the voice of snark and cynicism of Harold.
Okay, setting set, characters defined, now onto the story. There’s not much I can do with a cow on mars, so the story needs to shift to the problems this couple are having trying to make ends meet.
The original draft of this story caused a reader to ask, “If they’re broke, why are they in a diner?” This caused me to shift to a deteriorated diner and the couple only having water but using the booth as space away from the visible reminder of their condition at home.
With that pivot in place, the couple have a problem they’re trying to solve. The real problem is that I don’t know how to solve their problem, so I figure let’s give them some old timey moments that show their longevity and resilience as a couple.
If you pay attention to their dialogue, it parallels the conversation my wife and I have over her garden and some of the little things I do for her. She doesn’t wear glasses, though.
I needed these two to meet somewhere energetic and noisy, so when they bond, they can do it in the quiet moments. This is where time elasticity comes into play at the dart game during a carnival.
Every June, the city of Colusa would host the Colusa County Fair. I went for the rides, food, and the bootleg cassette tapes that were sold there. While there, I did see plenty of meet-cute beginnings. That’s what inspired the setting of Harry meeting Ginny.
An old timey guy wouldn’t win the bear for her, especially if he was trying to court her in a gentlemanly way. That’s why Harold is a smooth operator of sorts. Ginny is a firebrand. She’s independent, has strong conviction, and she has a glitter of hope in her eyes that Harold sees when he meets her.
They’re dynamic is very much how the dynamic was early in my relationship during before marriage. We’d hang out, I’d tell her not to give up and keep being her. Though 25+ years we’re still at it. If that electric car / rocket guy can actually get to Mars, we might not care about a dead cow being there before humans.
And that is the story behind the story.
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