Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

The wood spits and its sputum climbs the back of the heath. Fragments of flame igniting as massing armies upon spent char.

“Is this the end, Frances?”, I ask as the orange caress weeps upon her skin and she tightens the muscles at the base of her back.

“Do we… really care. Any more?”, offers said Frances as I correct my balance and dig the stubs of my legs into the tops of her thighs.

“I want to say yes, but no. I really don’t think that we do. I know that we don’t”… wait now, see there as her long many times broken fingers grip down and claw into the sheepskin hide that splays beneath of our bodies. So beautiful.

“These bastards would have us think that for all the evil and the distrust and the putrid slight of hand that… that…”

“…they are at their very core,,, only are but good.”

“Yes. But their faults are colossal and their desire to make amends so very fleeting.”

“Let me lick the salt’en beads from the cusp of the side of your nose and trace your form with the tip of my tongue as I would with fingers had they not been torn all the way back to my shoulders. Savour every instant as I believe our time here is just about done.”

“I think this also… I just wish there was more about them to love”, she mouths and her fingers trace the seared sinew that appears as time patinaed wood at my chest.

“I loved the smell of vernix caseosa.”

“I loved potatoes doused in balsamic vinegar.”

“We were sent here… to… evolve as they should have. A test group with which to compare and not a thing more.”

“We were thrown here. Nobody cares about the data we have amassed. There is no truth nor guidance to be mined from us now erring on the right side of right if the greedy always sit at the same end of the lop-sided bench. We amount to not more than insects balancing at the end of an unseen leaf.”

“Some believe this world to be flat and some do not. And some of those who do not believe believe instead this spherical plain was created out of nothing by a god that lives on a cloud…”

“End them. Really, just stop them all this instant… I cannot stomach them… “.

“Ok… I will dearest… you whom dragged what was left of me from the wreckage and yet loved me never ever less than completely… I’ll give them a hundred more years but this is their very last chance.”

“You do spoil them so… I love them too.”