Omitab was going to grow up to be a Martian. Trapped in his human flesh suit, he had worked 40 hour weeks for a community club for privileges to soak in their pool whenever he pleased after hours—whenever "people" weren't there. In the sun, the water was almost always just the right combination of chlorine and urine for his skin tone to contort into strange hues with dark orange splotches. Omitab intended to fit in that Red Planet.

On one such swim, while he floated like wooden debris on the pale green water, he found his stomach to have bloated to be embarrassingly noticeable. In a way, he was glad he wasn't going to be a teenage girl's dream version of an alien. If Omitab was going to be immortalised as a fictional character, he'd rather go out as a ghoul in the pages of an obscure magazine than as some fancy hotshot millionaire alien in a love triangle that unfortunately sells a million copies. More horrifyingly, being immortalised, he couldn't even die of humiliation if the latter were to occur.

He poked at his great bloat that so gloriously prevented him from being a pathetic heartthrob. It jiggled ever so slightly. Buoyancy is good. It might not be great because there might not be too much water in Mars, but it's not, by any means, bad.

His now wrinkled finger tips reminded him of his sixth grade biology teacher. With a subconscious smirk, he allowed a memory to play at the back of his head like an ill projected movie. The teacher spoke more through her nose than her mouth and our little Martian wrote it off as a biology thing. Buzzing through boring details about cells, the only thing that really caught the Martian's attention was how animal cells burst in fresh water.

Maybe that's why they keep the pools filthy, he mused. The smirk stretched into a conscious action. The idea that really intrigued him from that memory was how he, despite being a collection of cells, didn't spontaneously explode yet. From the years of biology knowledge he gathered since then, he knew it would kind of almost work if he was below the surface and took up enough water into his lungs that his alveoli would pop. Exploding tiny cherries in his chest.

Omitab closed his eyes at the comforting thought of the possibility of that outcome. He was tired. Sleeping was the most productive part of his day, in human terms at least, because awake he looked for ways for self-destruction which were simply just misunderstood steps to achieving his goal of becoming a Martian.

With a keen eye and a broken brain to mouth filter, Mahejabeen Hossain Nidhi has a habit of throwing obscure insults from classic novels at random people who may or may not have done anything to warrant them. Drop a line at mahejabeen.nidhi@gmail.com