Pietro was sitting in his car on the way home after work when he looked over to the off-ramp into Bloomberg and noted that it was no longer there. It had been replaced by a space station. There was a big sign with naked ladies on it advertising the off-ramp into the space station and the naked ladies had moving hair that swung left and right across their really tan faces so that one eye or the other was always coyly covered by a long and wavy length of billboard hair.
It said FLY TO GANYMEDE across the bottom of it but it was difficult to see because, again, there were naked ladies all across the thing.
He thought about the naked ladies for a little while and then about the space station. A space station seemed like a peculiar thing to appear as a replacement for a suburb so he kept driving until he got home. Pietro watered the lemon tree for an hour while he looked at the roof and thought of how much it was going to cost to get it repaired when the time came to do that. It would more than likely cost a lot.
Pietro’s wife, Patricia, emerged from the side gate wearing a yellow dress with smears of dirt along the hem. She kissed him on his cheek and noticed that her bare feet were standing in a pool of water that was hidden by the thick, lustrous lawn.
“Honey, how long have you been watering?”
“There’s a space station over where Bloomberg used to be.”
She paused and smiled anxiously at him. “What do you mean? How long have you been watering?”
“I mean a space station got put where Bloomberg used to be. Bloomberg is gone.”
“I see. How long have you been watering?”
“Did you know Greg and his family lived in Bloomberg? I saw the guy at the market last week and he didn’t even mention it. He talked about his Charger, and Rebecca, she’s pregnant again, and even how his kid’s flunking kindergarten. How does a guy not go and mention that his town’s been replaced by a space station?”
“I don’t know.” Patricia walked closer to the tree and observed that the irrigation ditch was filled with water, and that the hose’s stream had carved a hole into the dirt. Small bits of sediment floated up and gathered along the edge of the grass.
“You’ve been watering for a long time, haven’t you?”
Pietro scratched his thinning hair and turned to Patricia. “The whole damn thing, Patricia. I don’t understand it.”
Patricia smiled again, then walked to the spigot attached to the front of the house and turned off the water.
“Dinner’s almost ready. Take off those soaked pants before you come inside.”
She retreated back into the side gate and left Pietro alone on the lawn with the end of the hose still in his hand.
“There were naked ladies, too,” he said. “Big, huge, colossal naked ladies.”