AntipodeanSF - "Prickly Green" by PS Cottier

PS Cottier has worked as a university tutor, a union organiser, a lawyer and a tea-lady. She wrote a PhD on images of animals in Dickens, and now writes poetry and short stories in Canberra. She won the Odyssey Convention prose-poem/flash fiction contest earlier this year with 'Pod, cast' and read her piece at the convention in Madison, Wisconsin. She lives with a man, a child, a dog and two guinea pigs. She does not have a single cactus in her garden, although there is quite a lot of clover.

The cactus opened like a door, scraping my fingers. I didn't register the pain. Inside the surprising succulence, a spongy oasis, sat a little green man. No-one believes in little green men any more. Little green men have been erased from possibility, almost from imagination. Martians and leprechauns — both exiled to the arid zone of the done-to-death file, from which no return is advisable. Mental refugees never to be granted asylum, or so I'd thought.

This throwback was smoking a pipe, which further dated him. When was the last time anyone smoked a pipe in public? Those little wooden tobacco smelters are about as popular as carrying around a sheet of fibro and slowly peeling off threads, then allowing them to waft like evil fairies towards one's neighbours. Although I suppose, if you live inside a cactus — if that spiky mansion is your home and castle guarded by a moat of prickles — you're entitled to smoke whatever you like. Public health doesn't really enter into it. There was a tiny chimney inside the cactus's main living area, and he blew smoke into that. It emerged in a faint plume on the left hand top of the open cactus, a delicate feather of smoke tickling the morning sky.

"Begorrah," said the little man, "but it's a cold one, yet."

No right, I thought. You have no right to sit inside a cactus, with your arcane pipe and your aquamarine skin and your shocking pastiche of an Irish accent, playing with my notions of reality and racial stereotypes as if you were strumming a merry jig on the strings of my fraying synapses. What have cacti to do with the Irish, anyway? It's not as if such desert plants thrive in emerald-turfed, clover-infested Erin.

The little man turned towards me, knocking ashes from his pipe on the side of the fire's grate. "You are right there, my lovely," he said. "Sure but that I thought a little warmth would be good for the chest." He coughed. And with that the cactus swung shut, hiding my psychic green mini-Irishman from sight.

I turned for home. I needed a drink. Sure but I had a thirst like a three-humped Iraqi camel who has tramped his way to Dublin. My God, had I caught it too? I must have been injected by the cactus needles, as sure as O'Flaretty's nag runs a distant last every Saturday at Curragh. My shadow seemed to be diminishing as I danced down the road towards a beckoning sea of bubbling stout. The comforting brown slowly turned to a sickly pistachio. At least it seemed closer than Mars. I dived in. Sláinte!