THE BROWN COUNTY DEMOCRAT
OCTOBER 6, 2085
When Shana Payne was five years old, she got in trouble for drawing God. The kindergarten class at Temple Sholom outside Cleveland was instructed to draw a picture for each of the seven days of creation. When Shana got to day seven, she drew a bearded, potbellied God reclining on a celestial couch, which was itself floating on a fluffy cloud. She had only a five-year-old’s vocabulary, but there was something touchingly mortal about an omniscient and deathless god needing to take a load off after a long week. She could relate to him in a way that Shabbat services didn’t permit.
Her teacher loomed. “You can’t draw God,” she said. “That’s idolatry.” She smashed a finger into God’s belly. “This is no better than the golden calf.” She made Shana start over, from day one.
But how do you draw God resting without God? What’s so holy about an empty couch?
Shana Payne didn’t try to be a rebel, and maybe that’s how she ended up one. Mrs. Payne died on Mars this week, the second human to die on a planet other than Earth, and the first to be buried there. She was 112 years old.
Before Mars, Shana made her home in Brown County, where neighbors recount stories of Shana warbling 20th-century songstress Pat Benatar while sashaying through the aisle of the IGA in a vintage floor-length mink.
Bonnie Stark, proprietor of Bonnie’s Café (famous for their “ten-cent” coffee with any purchase, a quaint artifact from the days of coins) remembers Shana differently. “‘Shtup’ was the word she used. She said she was ‘shtupping’ my husband, which I guess means sex in Jewish. Everyone in town knew, but Shana was the one who told me, which I guess makes her honest. I was so stunned I could hardly speak. She said, ‘Your husband would rather lie and cheat than talk to you, this is a marriage? Give me a break. Divorce the bastard.’ So I did. And then he died anyway.”
When asked what kind of pie Shana preferred, Bonnie said, “Strawberry rhubarb.”
Mrs. Payne was part of the pilot resettlement program with Red Care, the historic crew of 36 centenarians who arrived on the red planet in August 2078. As part of her contract, she donated her remains to Red Care (the Mars Colonization Project officially) “via an exciting experimental process that we believe will result in arable land on Mars for many generations to come.” Her body will be the first to be rapid-decayed and turned into compost. Then, the agrarian arm of Red Care will attempt to grow wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans for consumption and export, compensating for the shortages on Earth, with the ultimate goal of human resettlement on Mars.
Though contractually enthusiastic about her life on Mars in public livestreams, Shana was privately critical of Red Care. “They say we’re not actually here to colonize, not because it’s true, but because ‘colonize’ is bad PR. All these centuries and we haven’t changed our thinking, just our words,” she wrote in pencil, on paper, and encrypted using Hebrew letters with phonetic English. “They believe Mars is empty, and you can’t colonize empty space, you can only fill it. Also, the food is terrible. I suppose we’re here to fix that part with our corpses.” None of the other pioneer centenarians could be reached for comment.
Just a few weeks ago, Payne became entangled in a controversy that some claim could spell the end of Red Care. The AI known as Peregrine had mysteriously appeared on the red planet, imprisoned for reasons that remain classified. Peregrine had been hiding illegally in the home of Payne’s neighbor, fellow centenarian Henry Konishi, and when Mars Security Forces came to apprehend her, Konishi was fatally wounded in the altercation. MSF claimed the shooting was an accident, as their target was the fugitive AI and obviously not Konishi, but some are claiming they used excessive force. Payne was the only witness to this event and had been undergoing a rigorous cognitive evaluation to determine whether she was fit to testify.
Payne was born Shana Epstein, the only child of two high school English teachers, Bernard and Susan (Morton) Epstein. Bernard’s family emigrated from Israel, and Susan’s family was Catholic, her first ancestors stepping onto American soil in the 1650s. Bernard built their house using the bulk of his inheritance from his estranged father’s book royalties.
That’s right, our Shana Payne was also the granddaughter of famous 20th-century novelist Ari Epstein, author of the beatnik Bible “Water Water.” Shana also described herself as a writer, but unlike her grandfather, never published. This obituarist has not found a single document or private journal, other than the handwritten note above, and he has looked everywhere. “She may not have written much, but she loved to talk,” said her former neighbors. Indeed, there are plenty of pithy quotes from her in the local papers. The Democrat included her in its series on local artists in the late 2050s, and when they asked why she never published, she replied, “We love to believe that making art for money is freedom and making it for any other reason is failure. Isn’t that twisted?”
Shana leaves behind no descendants. “My ex-husband, Paul, was sure he would outlive me,” she said in the 2050 Democrat interview. ‘‘But he couldn’t even outlive the flu.”
An obituary ran on October 6 for Shana Payne, the first human to be buried on the planet Mars, self-proclaimed writer who had never actually written anything. A single poem was found by Fox personality Raleigh Durham in his spam folder on October 8, which we have been able to trace back to Mrs. Payne. Mr. Durham’s secretary stopped him from deleting the strange email. We publish it here in its entirety:
UNTITLED #77
The shift of light before sunset is so depressing
I know this is a circadian thing
Hormones go soft, lose their boners.
In people with dementia, this is the hour they get lost.
It’s called “sundowning”
I wish I had known the Mars sunset was blue
It’s a daily horror for Earth eyes
It makes you want to wander and get lost and disappear
I forgive myself for being a reflective surface
For hiding.
Listen, your truly best work will not be beloved because it’s not a mirror.
“You made me, therefore you owe me”
is every prayer in every faith.
A doctor tells me I’m healthy as a horse, those words exactly.
“How long will this saying persist,” I ask, “on Mars, a horseless place?”
He says, with grave seriousness, “A good sense of humor keeps you young.”
But I don’t want to be young.
“Everyone wants to be young,” he snorts, very like a horse.
Rosy-fingered dawn, Homer called it
Bloated dawn, gangrene dawn, who will be Mars’ epic poets?
This orange planet with its blue sunsets
My blue planet with its orange ones
In the correction to Mrs. Shana Payne’s obituary on November 3, we assumed the only piece of writing the deceased ever wrote had arrived in the email inbox of a media personality, but as of today, 36 poems and essays and short stories have appeared as spam around the world, sent to journalists and world leaders and artists, in the days and weeks following Mrs. Payne’s death. The Democrat requests that you share this correction with your social networks and check your spam folders. Msg any findings to Mike Mattingly at mmatt@bcdemo.news.