MARS — It was neither surprising nor alarming that Rodney snapped when he did.

The signs had been there for months.

There were the nights he didn’t sleep, but instead stared idly at texture of his ceiling, studying its unremarkable pattern with the concentration a Nobel-winning physicist at Harvard might study the collision of atoms.

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Then there was his odd habit of circumnavigating the aisles of his local Qwik-Mart. His clothes weren’t wrinkled or odorous in the way one might expect from the vagrants that can, at times, haunt the Pringles section of the store. But he had rather macabre aura about him bolstered by the sagging dark hood that always obscured his eyes as he circled and circled within the store.

When he did buy something — sometimes he left without making a purchase — it was always sunflower seeds, unseasoned.

He’d bring them home and eat them in his bed, the well of sunflower seed shells growing around him.