Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer

Space.

I creep up vast multitudes of inky hills though they are not hills but rather mountains of soot and slowly I sink ever down into their glue.

My face is a hollow thing that has two windows and out of them I can see wells with stars that shine in the pit of their pits.

I have been on this vessel for so very long.

My name is a thing that I pluck and twist upon the sweetly embroidered rectangle of my uniform breast and yet it has long since failed to fill my ear.

But I know who I am.
But am I who I know?

She and she is me.
Me and she is she.

She is a thing that whispers into my fingers as they caress the data and adjust trajectory to the ebb and tidal pull of this fathomless cosmic nothing.

She is the dead girl I found with her fingers curled against the glass of her cannister.

She is my future daughter sitting on a rain-flecked curb carving my neglect into her arm in beautiful cursive font with a needle she found in the gutter.

She is the seed that died in the soil, its reach curdling just below of the surface.

She is this ship.

I want to know her more than I do. I want to wow her with my looks. I want her to find solace in scanning every inch of my body as I undress and step into the shower flute. And as I then lay alone upon my empty crib, still swaddled in towels and beading from the heat of the jets — I want her to watch.

My ship is folding in space and the space in my head is folding ever so neatly into that space.

Such obnoxious and vile calm perverted perfection.

Most days I run my long since chewed away nails across the screen. I drag shards of my protruding dried flesh and follow our projected path back to Earth and I think of the beach at the end of the cliff-top road.

Kaupokonui.

I remember how long ago a girl laid me down upon the concrete roof of the war-time bunker. A relic all but completely suckled into the roaming sand. She with eyes as grey as the grains — she who took me whole.

I want to be taken again.
I want to be taken whole.
I want to be taken home.

Endless.