Author: Hari Navarro

The Martian, he creeps through my window and sits on my chest whilst his steed it looks on with eyes swollen and glazed. Eyes whose voyeuristic bulge look set now to split and ooze their shimmering vitreous down upon the taunting rhythm of his billowing cheek.

My nightgown flows the length of my outstretched form, folding and lapping as it statically clings. A fabulist shroud that tells tales in white; of purity, loyalty, and love. The lids of my eyes they twitch as they feign the depths of a slumber now long since enjoyed and I gnaw the flesh of my lip.

I cannot look again upon this weight that now presses. I cannot face this alien, this impossible thing, this verdant cold huddle of sinew and fat. He that now inches the stub of his toe beneath buttons closed tight at my chest, a digit that curls its filthy nail against the beading flesh of my breast.

I feel the Martian shifting his weight, the bones in his ass they click and they crunch and I want to call out your name. I want to roll over, draw you to me and smother stone dead this hideous thing. I want my ear at your chest to savor as your asthma does rattle, that which ground my patience and kept me from sleep, but now reaches to lovingly anchor me so.

I want your lips to stay closed and not mutter through the night reliving the hell that I wrought. To kiss at your cheek and have you not flinch, to have all of me here with no parts sold nor bartered; all of me here for you.

A midnight breeze seethes through the fall of my scarlet curtains and the horse he forces a grin. He knows what I’m thinking, he knows what’s to come, so accustomed to these visits is he. And so I oblige by twisting ever so slowly, a turn primed with such tension that it surely should creak, toward the man at my side – my husband, asleep.

The Martian unmoved, he stoically too gloats as I waltz into each beat of this dark symphony I wrote. I crane for my husband and my lips brush your lobe as words they struggle to form – a whisper as silent as death.

“I must leave you now, best that I go. I have stabbed through your back and your sides and your chest, sleeping soundly as you broke into two. I lay with that bastard in so many beds licking and caressing not you. I was curious and bored, I wanted my youth and I wanted his words to be true. I am dirt and I’m shame, and center of all I survey. Just hear this my testament, it is I that’s lamented not you. So selfish am I, sleep well and goodbye. I love you”, I don’t say as I rise and to leave.

Now to receive that which I truly deserve, to live in the red dust on the planet of whores. Hoisted across the rump of a celestial hack, we’ll launch my arms wrapped around the fattest of green guts, my face pressed to hair greased at his back.

I sit at the edge of my bed, my sheets they reach for the floor. The weight it is gone and of course so his horse and you dear lay snoring just so. They have left me again, to stew in my pot and wait as I will for this day to be gone and for the return of the night and its mare.