The verdict was in and it was small and quick: cancer.
It was also metastasized, which was longer and more dreadful, and incurable which was clipped and harsh, and terminal, which was final.
Her doctor was careful and kind and professional and sincere and sympathetic but not pitying and it was a tremendous waste of some really carefully-calibrated effort because all Martha wanted to do was go home and get her bucket.
***
The bucket was generic. No label graced its side. It was made from plastic and was red in the exhausted sort of way that something overused gets. The handle was metal and sturdy.
Martha picked up her keys in one hand and her bucket in the other and juggled her phone with her chin.
“Hello?” inquired her boyfriend.
“I have terminal cancer and I just wanted to let you know that I always thought you were a creepy little fuck,” said Martha.
Then she hung up and put the phone and keys in her bucket and left the apartment forever without even turning out the lights.
***
First on her list was to buy herself a pair of diamond-studded brass knuckles. Finding the proper boutique was tricky, haggling them was trickier, and getting them to fit her hand was trickiest, but Martha had a retirement fund and the willingness to spend it so things more or less muddled through. Soon she had an incredibly expensive left hook.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Great. Superb. Leaving now.”
And she dropped it into her bucket. It rattled against her phone and keys.
***
There was some change left in her chequing account after shopping, so Martha went to the most expensive restaurant in the city.
“No,” she said, on looking at their menu.
“Pardon?” inquired the waiter.
“Never mind. Not expensive enough.”
So she went to the most expensive recipe in the capitol.
“Damnit,” she said. “Not enough. Who charges only four hundred for a plate of appetizers? Get me someone serious or get out.”
Martha flew halfway around the world and paid sixteen thousand dollars for a single delicately curled and crisped sliver of a potato, topped with a crumb of the tenderest portion of the world’s most lovingly-raised calf. The sauce was applied with an eye dropper and hazmat gloves.
“Beautiful,” she said.
Then she stuffed the plate into her bucket and tipped the waiter 40%.
***
At the airport, Martha remembered something she’d forgotten and rented a private plane.
“Paint it pink,” she said. “I like pink.”
She paid for them to paint it pink, then had it flown to the home of cartoonist Gary Larson, where she bribed the pilot to land it on the road.
Ringing the bell was unsuccessful, possibly because the jet backwash had deafened everyone within a few miles, so Martha simply pushed the door open and wandered in.
“I’m a big fan of your work and always wanted to meet you,” she told Gary.
Then she stuffed him into her bucket and got back on the plane.
***
Beyond people, Martha wanted to see places. The Eiffel Tower. The Empire State Building. The Pyramids. One after another they slid down the bucket.
By the time she was headed to the Great Barrier Reef the world was starting to catch on. Anti-aircraft fire tracked her from the shores; warnings were shouted at her through the radio, and she’d had to bribe her pilots five times over again.
“Just give me a parachute,” she said, and as the tracers buzzed past her feet and the water rose up to meet her she pulled out her bucket and bailed the entirety of the largest living organism on the planet into it with one big scoop.
There was a brief period of eternal confusion, and when it was over Martha was missing and so was an aircraft carrier.
She’d always wanted to drive one.
***
The entirety of the USS Something-Or-Other was meant to be run by a crew of some size larger than one and more trained than not. Martha, having bucketed the staff of the ship, was at a distinct disadvantage. She settled for figuring out how to make the carrier go in a straight line – and when that proved impossible, to do donuts.
Assault boats boarded. Marines waved guns. Martha waved her bucket.
Helicopters sparkled overhead like big freaky bugs and she looked up and said “never ridden in one of those before!”
They were much easier to steer than an aircraft carrier.
***
The planes were back again, and the bloodflow pumping from the hole in her left arm was growing worrying weak. The sunlight was fading away, and Martha realized she’d never quite had a chance to see one from this high up.
“Wow,” she said. “I made it out pretty good. Only half the list, but pretty good.”
She squinted at the sunset again.
“Real nice. Glad I saw it.”
And then she bucketed it.
All of it.
***
Outside the bucket, things were in a pretty bad way. Inside the bucket, atop the Pyramids, Gary Larson argued with several thousand members of the United States Navy over how to split a single sixteen-thousand-dollar meal, as the world’s most beautiful sunset dawned over the rainbow corals of the Great Barrier Reef.
It was a funny old world, and it looked to be a funny new one too.