Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

“This is not who we are”, I mutter as I watch the images cycle over and over on the screen. We are a haven and we love and hold close the freedom and liberty that we’ve cultured here on our tiny beautiful moon. Our special speck of clean green, out on the farthest tip of a bitter and cruel blood-streaked cosmic sea.

We’ve no time for such violences. We play in the surf and we play in the snow, the envy of all those who visit our lush and fertile shores.

My son was a magical child. Really. He had the power to pull down words and render them apart and, then, mix and shape their elements into things. Tangible, tactile, real things.

“I was called into the big chief man’s office today. I have to give it to him, he’s done well. Not sitting and sucking from the system like so many others who filter on down from his swamp, and I totally forgot the projected figures for the next quarter. So, I say, your wife has a nice figure, they used to write rhyming couplets about that flavour of ass. Your kind really pack the junk in the trunk. Am I not wrong? Oh, how we laughed!”, I’d said, more than once, many long years ago.

My son, as a baby barely able to stand, formed from my words countless lengths of cylindrical metal. Pellets that dribbled down his chin and amassed in great piles at his feet.

“Real men don’t put colour in their hair and a man who castrates his penis is not a woman. You cannot re-write that which is written in stone, the sacred tomes that set us apart from the animals – marriage is between a man and a woman”, and again I casually shared my vast knowledge as we sat at the table and ate.

My son, as a young child, he hollowed out the cylinders. Drilling the tip of his tiny fingernail into their base with the keenness of a chisel spiralling away wood at a lathe.

“They’re lazy. The city ones definitely but the rock apes that come in from the country, stuttering and forcing us to assimilate their dead language, it’s on a respirator for fuck’s sake. You want to talk to me then do so in my fucking language, am I right? Tell me I’m wrong. If we find sickness, we vaccinate against it. Their beliefs are a disease. We need to vaccinate ourselves against that. Radicalisation is here, we imported it. We are told to tolerate and embrace the good ones, for they are the majority. But how do we differentiate? Will they whisper their good intentions through the slits in their shrouds? Or must we just await for their cleavers to fall?”

My son, as a teenager, he tapered the ends of the tubes with the suck of his lips and he formed lead pointed tips for their ends, as yet again he plucked their weight from my words.

“They’re coming and their wave will drown all that you love. They will pollute your freedoms.”

Today, as an adult, my son needed only his own words as he ground their bitter dark taint with a mortar and pestle and he filled each of the cylinders to its brim.

My beautiful son, flickering in blue on my screen as he spat at them vitriol and he spat at them bullets and the dead, they stacked as they fled.

“The real cause of this bloodshed is not the sick killer but rather the immigration program, which allow fanatics to migrate to our world in the first place”, said the man with the microphone on the screen, swallowing his spit as he, too, savoured the taste of his words.

This is who we are.