SANDWICH

When he was a little boy of six or seven he would come in and sit at the wooden table in the front room as soon as school was finished. His mother would have left a glass plate on the table and in the middle of it sat a peanut jelly sandwich cut crosswise.

Before eating, indeed, before drinking even a sip of the milk standing off to the side, he imagined himself two millimeters tall and he would explore this strange land of sandwich. First he crawled around the endless craters, caves, and calderas. A scientific mind created hundreds of reasons as to how and why the landscape was shaped just so. The peanut butter sometimes held large fossils of giant bodied nuts and he would search for nearby fragments to fuse together. By the time his small self reached the third strata of jelly, his contained suit was gummed with the stickiness and all thought of further elucidation was abandoned for pure wonder and sweetness.

He had entirely forgotten his days of micro discovery until, at 37, the man behind the counter handed him his boarding pass and he noticed the pin stuck in the middle of the man's tie. It said, "On to Mars!" and he looked down, wondering how he got so big, and why he was going to Chicago anyway.