Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

I am pulled. They grab at my dread-locked skull and I buckle and my bare breasts faze into the camera. I am plucked and fucked into the light. Adrenalin moans into the gorging veins of the hand that cuffs the ends of my spasm arms and a ready sheet is cast atop of my despair.

But I asked for this, did I not? Do I not always?

Who steps naked onto a ramping battle plain? Me, it seems. Words weren’t working and I just didn’t know what else to do. You Know? I stepped off of that bus and I walked to the wall and I stepped up upon the milk-crate and vaulted over and into the field and I tore away my clothes and screamed at the shield wall before me.

You have sustained a head injury.

I can feel the blood as it exits my nose and creeps the curve of my lip, thank you. Sorry I do not mean to condescend.

I have the utmost faith that you will make a very most probably near to as can ever be approximated semblance of let us say a type of almost recovery.

Seriously?

I’m kidding.

You are a bed and you play with my mind?

I am and I do. But my intentions are good.

Does it not worry you?

What?

That you are a bed and I ask of you question and that you in turn answer.

I would have thought moreover that you as sentient would ask just why you are talking to a structure of roughly shaved wood and latticed wire. That is how you see me am I correct?

You are. This is Crimea, I can again smell the rotten mud.

No. This is not !863 and we are not doing 2 years, 5 months and 14 days of utter and I mean utter vile social collapse. I see you twitching. You are not there. You’re not. I knew you thought that you were but you are most surely not.

Twitch?

The flood back and forth through the gate. It used to happen to humans before the reformation but now it is a rare and much revered occurrence. You must cling to the best that the line has to offer.

I have been damaged in battle.

I am here and working to assist, my Lady.

I am talking to a fucking bed, I am lady of nothing but a fraying mind.

No Lady, you are drifting…

You are a fucking bed! Stop, just stop… talking. The hole in my head I can feel it breathing. I want to put things inside of it. I saw a woman once in a barber-shop. Her arm had been cleaved off at the shoulder and a clear plastic film was all that covered the wound. I sat next to her and she grinned and I looked inside of her.

Patient is drifting… Recommend that subjects wounds are of deep multi-temporal cerebral distress and are not affordable of due practical repair… suggest move to trier one zero nine protocol… immediate termination but primordial redeployment also an option. Please advise.