Spaceman of Bohemia

by Jaroslav Kalfar

Always tell jokes to an audience, never to yourself, Dr. Kuřák had advised. Once you trap yourself into believing you can be your own company, you will cross the dangerous line between contentment and madness.

“I wish I had the capacity to assist with your emotional distress, skinny human. I cannot offer you the solace of Nutella, for I have consumed it.”

We can’t fight the whole world, the ten million of us, so we pick the people we think should be punished, and we make them suffer the best we can.

“That’s what happens when you force people into lives they hate,” Lenka says. “They snap. Come at you with kitchenware.”

This is what elements do. They leap into darkness until something else catches hold of them. Energy has no consciousness. Force plots no schemes. Things crash into one another, form alliances until physics rips them apart and sends

them in opposite directions.