By Mike

The calendar on the kitchen wall had given up on pretending time was linear. March overlapped July. A Tuesday had elbowed its way into Thursday. Someone—no one would confess—had circled February 30th in red ink and written: Important: Destiny or Tacos.

Celeste, age sixteen and already suspicious of both destiny and tacos, stood on a chair to straighten the crooked nail from which the calendar sagged like a tired saint. She had the particular beauty of a girl who reads footnotes and sets small fires in her mind just to watch institutions burn. Her hair was the color of a late-autumn conspiracy. Her sneakers squeaked like guilty mice.

“Time,” she announced to the empty kitchen, “is a suggestion.”

“Like pants,” said the rat from the pantry.

He emerged with the theatrical flourish of a vaudeville ghost, whiskers aquiver, eyes bright as cheap diamonds. He wore no pants, which lent his argument authority. More importantly, he sang. Not squeaked—sang. A mellow baritone with a surprising vibrato, like a lounge singer reincarnated in a biology experiment.

“Put the kettle on, Celeste,” he crooned. “Let’s boil the minutes until they confess.”

Celeste did not scream. She had long ago made peace with the improbable. There had been the summer of the sideways rain. The algebra teacher who turned into a ficus. The zebra.

Ah yes, the zebra.

He stood in the backyard beside the deflated kiddie pool, a dignified creature except for the absence of his left ear. Where the ear should have been was a smooth crescent of healed stubbornness. The neighborhood children called him Mono. Celeste called him Aristotle, because he seemed to be contemplating causes.

Aristotle flicked his remaining ear toward the kitchen window and snorted as if to say: The rat is flat in the second act. Modulate.

The rat obliged. He leapt onto the counter and launched into a number about municipal corruption, the erotic potential of root vegetables, and the tyranny of unchecked nostalgia. His voice curled around the spice rack like steam.

On the table lay an object that had fallen from the sky during last night’s thunderstorm. It was packaged in a velvet box the color of ambition. Inside, cushioned by satin, rested a gold-plated Trump condom.

Yes. Gold-plated. As subtle as a marching band in a monastery.

It gleamed obscenely, a prophylactic Pharaoh. Embossed along its rim in tiny letters were the words: Make Love Great Again.

Celeste stared at it the way one studies a fossilized mistake. “Is it meant to protect something,” she asked the air, “or to preserve it in a museum of bad decisions?”

The rat ended his song with a tap-dance flourish that would have impressed Broadway and possibly a forgiving deity. “It’s aspirational,” he said. “Like a calendar that believes in February 30th. It promises protection but mostly reflects your own face back at you—distorted, gilded, and slightly panicked.”

Aristotle the one-eared zebra trotted to the fence and regarded the horizon as if waiting for a thesis to gallop by. The wind combed his stripes into a barcode of existential doubt.

Celeste picked up the calendar and tore off March, then July, then the circled non-day. The pages fell like molted skins. “If time is a suggestion,” she said, “then so is fear.”

She carried the velvet box outside. The sun struck the gold and flared like a paparazzo. Aristotle leaned in, sniffed, and recoiled with the delicate offense of a philosopher who has encountered a plagiarist.

The rat followed, humming a reprise. “We could use it as a thimble,” he offered. “Or a tiny hat for a very anxious acorn.”

Celeste laughed, a sound like a match catching. Sixteen is the age when the world begins to reveal its prop department. She placed the gold-plated artifact into the deflated kiddie pool, where it sat like a fallen idol awaiting archaeology.

Then she took a marker and wrote across today’s square on the calendar she’d brought with her: Invent Tuesday.

Aristotle stamped approval. The rat bowed. Somewhere, the sky adjusted its lighting.

And in that backyard—under a sun that refused to be subtle—a girl, a zebra with one ear, and a singing rat agreed that if the world insists on selling you gilded illusions, you might as well turn them into stage props and steal the show.

No drugs were abused during the writing of this story