Planet Literature

Excerpts from Nadja Dietrich’s Novel Murder in the German Parliament! Investigations of a Cleaning Lady

Perhaps there is a planet somewhere in the vastness of the universe where you wake up as someone else every day. Every day there would be a lottery in which you would always have the chance to win the jackpot.

On the ideal planet that Lidia Afanasyevna sometimes dreamed of, no two days were the same. Sometimes you got up there in the morning with your foot, sometimes with your head. Sometimes you slept during the day, sometimes at night, and sometimes you didn’t sleep at all, but painted unfathomable signs on the firmament, riding through the night on a witch’s broom.

The colour of one’s skin also changed from day to day on that planet. On some days it was light, on others dark, it could be brown or pink, reddish or yellowish. The eyes were sometimes blue, sometimes grey, sometimes brown. Sometimes you even woke up with an eye colour that you could not determine exactly, because the colour constantly changed to a different shade. Particularly feared was the „defective traffic light syndrome“, characterised by a constant switching between red and green.

Thus the creatures on the distant planet always had a different shape: they could wake up with one or with six legs, with shaggy yeti hair or bald like a slug. On some days they were so big that they towered over the tallest trees, on other days they were as small as grasshoppers.

The living conditions also changed from day to day. It could happen that in the morning the extraterrestrial creatures found themselves in a majestic palace, with halls whose other end could not be seen when you entered them. But it could also occur that they had to spend their days in huts which were so cramped that it felt like being locked in a cupboard.

At a cursory glance, it might seem that the distant fellow creatures of the Earthlings would have been unhappy about their situation; that the uncertainty about what would await them the next morning would have made them ill. Instead, however, the inhabitants of the distant planet were, as Lidia Afanasyevna firmly believed, extremely happy creatures.

One reason for this was that life in its unpredictability was one big adventure for them, so that they knew no boredom. Another factor was that their living conditions made violence among them almost non-existent. No one despised the other or made fun of him if he suffered from the dreaded „defective traffic light syndrome“. After all, they could all be affected by it themselves the very next morning.

Envy and greed were also unknown to the extraterrestrial beings. It would simply have made no sense to begrudge others their possessions or even to deprive them of their belongings. For what was taken away from others today would have been lost again tomorrow. It was simply more comfortable to bet on the lottery of life and hope that the next day would bring a jackpot.

Picture: Placidplace: Wormhole (Pixabay)