by Hari Navarro | Apr 9, 2019 | Story |
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.
by Hari Navarro | Apr 2, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
We are alone. There is no body and no thing out there in the ink that surrounds our spinning ball of candy streaked blue. No migratory Sibylla trees on Aeneas 10, no carnivorous Hing fungus hanging in carnal embrace from the ceiling of the public latrine on the outskirts of Haz. No beings, sentient or otherwise, whittling away their days beneath distant and alien suns.
But there is a place. A room with a bed, set alone and stark on a clastic plain upon which even the minim specks of its shale lay deathly dormant and unstirred. The pale grey face of a moon cast beneath the half-light dim of a dying star, the spindly reach of whose fingers offer just enough light to ward off the ice, but never the gnawing black cold.
A room on the very farthest edge of the universe, a place where space has thinned to a wisp, where it undulates and flaps like the mottled scrag edge of a flag. Embattled and weary, forgotten and defeated by time.
The room is a cube, a sterile and functionary space. In it the aforementioned bed and, at its foot, a chair that screeches as it swivels.
“Hello Frances”, offers the doctor, now sitting and swiveling and screeching.
“Why do you call me that?”, answers Frances, thinking that she may possibly be Frances while, at once, also pretty certain that she is not.
“It’s a family name. But, my Frances is now long since gone. I think it suits you.”
“Who am I?”, she snaps and her fists ball and knuckles crack as her fingernails dig deep into her palms.
“You’re nothing. You have no name. You know this.”
“I don’t want to be here. I’m awake when I sleep and I sleep when I wake. I’m feeble, stupid. I’m weak”.
“You’ve always been here.”
Frustration milks sweat and sweat loosens the restraints that bind Frances to the anchor that is her bed. She rises and lunges and a forearm is stiffened and smashed up and under the doctor’s chin. Teeth snap together and the tip of her tongue is severed. A lump of still spasming meat that now curls and licks at the floor.
“You want to hurt me?”, spits the doctor. “You want me naked? You want me servile or, do you want me to hit you?”
“Stop. I want this to stop. I’m so tired of this fucking nothing.”
“And, so, you become violence? Frustration, and you lash out? Basic instincts, Frances.”
“Stop calling me that. I don’t want to be like this anymore. You’re killing me.”
“It’s not death. In sixteen minutes you’ll be born. You won’t remember me nor this place. But you will wonder as you get older and you will question what is to come after you end. This is it. Nothingness. Make your life count. I’ll see you soon.”
The window in the room plays with a mind now in flux as it burns with the barest of light. The voyeur monocle of a moon so lonely and dark and barren. It peeks at its prisoner, its ward, itself as Frances hovers on the edge of her stained sheet strewn bed and it hopes for a glimpse of her breasts.
Her stygian hair undulates about her face like plants that grow in the sea. Covering her mouth, muting her voice and stealing her breath as she sinks ever further into the canal, and the room and the doctor flake and peel and fall away and a baby girl she is born.
by Hari Navarro | Mar 26, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Waves lap at the cusp edge of the astronaut’s open visor. A saline swill that now sloshes into his suit and streams down across his body, running its length before agitating the warmth that stings and clings at his thighs.
His arms are outstretched. His wrists laced into the chain that binds him to this rock, this wave coddled mass which juts out like a spire from the shore. A sandy arch bends at his back, a pretty cove on the peninsula tip of a lushly forested continent. A special place on a distant blue world into whose sacred soil his ship had, but yesterday, fallen and severed into smouldering scrap.
The voices, the wonderfully melodic chants of the humanoids who dragged him from the wreckage, they sway on the shore behind him. Blurs at the very edge of his sight. They have brought their children, too. A family day at the beach, a spectacle to savour. He pants through his nose and the air thumps as they wail and they summon, as they offer his body to… what?
A god. A daemon. A big fuck-off fish?
The astronaut’s mind races as he calculates the gravity. Similar if not exactly that of earth’s, he surmises. The bitter mist at his lips is laden with salt and the air is sweet and fresh in his lungs. Oh, if only the fingers of liberty were now to reach up through the sand. But, he is not home and there will, surely, be no sandalled hero to swoop on down and save him now. And the tide lifts as it breathes.
The astronaut bashes his head backward against the rock, the igneous nature of which had not escaped his inquiring mind, and his helmet engages and its visor curves down and seals shut with a hiss. A few last gasps of air, and the explorer wonders what is to be the last ever image he is to see, as his lip quivers and he chews the certainty of his death.
“I know who your god is. I know this daemon toward which I am, now, presented. It is the sea. The great undulating carnivorous beast. That which you respect above all else. You pay out of fear, because it feeds you and when angered it grinds up your ships. Ignorant fucking baying primitives. You take all I am for a plate of freshly caught fish?”
The water foams up and rolls over his helmet and he blinks and he stares out across a pristine and beautiful plain. A forest of verdant strips that reach for the surface and curl like pennant banners in the now gentle brackish breeze.
He sees her. And what he sees enters his mouth and forms into a thick oily scream, a terror that bites and swallows last of his oxygen. His eyes bulge and the pressure behind them balloons and fills up the inside of his head. And the beast grips the sides of his helmet and her tongue lays flat at its visor and the acid that leaks from its pores eats at the glass as she licks.
The next day, a small group of children gather and throw stones and shells and sand at the deflated suit which hangs on the rock like a scarer of crows.
A tiny girl steps forward and, with the tremor tip of her finger, she traces the strange badge at its chest.
De Lellis, John.
Beloved. Lost to the galaxies silent pull. Sinking and folding beneath its distant foreign tides. He lies where he longed to be.
by Hari Navarro | Mar 19, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“Do you know what happens when you stare into television static?”, he asks.
“You start to see patterns, forms that join and fuse and start to make sense of the chaos. The flickering separates like pulled away meat, not completely, just enough for the bones below to be glimpsed. And, we can see just what it is that holds up the crackling pixel-bound madness”, he replies.
But today, as he stares again into the lake, he can find no shred of sanity in its cruel and noisome horror. No good can be plucked from the empty drop that falls beneath its surface. The deep fleck filled hollow that surrounds the stab beam of his torch.
What was that last thing she said? And he breathes in the night’s air and it slits like a pipe to the throat.
As a child he had wandered off and lost himself here. The tapping had drawn him to the ice. He’d fallen to his knees and drawn his arm across its flake packed surface and there, beneath the window, she hung.
This tiniest of things. No larger than a kitten and, for a moment, he’d thought her just that. Her eyes staring upward creamy and blind. A pet, cast into the water as trash. But, then, she moved and he saw the pale translucence of her skin and saw she’d a tail and not legs.
That first winter he sat night after night and told her things. How his mother and sister would char the backs of spoons and then draw up its bubbling mess and push it into their arms. And how they made him do things for money.
Then she was gone. He tried to find her when the ice melted away but she disappeared into each new year’s thaw. These winter-less months were long and painful and he longed for the cold to return, when he could tap at the ice with a staff until no longer it cracked and, again, she’d return to the light.
They grew up together and though she never uttered a single word she spoke to him endlessly, evolving into the most beautiful thing and he cried as she swirled in the deep.
She made him breathe when he felt as if his lungs were a sea, when he spoke of the loathing he tried to supplant as he picked at his thigh with a fork.
All they’d left was his husk and she’d filled it, topping and levelling him off. Intricately piecing him back. Steadying him as he stacked his detritus in unfinished towers in the middle of a place in his head.
Stacks that wobbled at the slightest of movement, but pillars nonetheless. Legs to hold him up and present him bitter and sodden with doubt to a life from whose wheel his hands did so constantly slip.
Girls. He knew they could sense the unease that slid through his veins. But with her, he thought that she loved him. That they would be together and one day she would break through the ice and she’d kiss him.
And he would kiss her.
“Be”, that’s what she’d said.
We were warned. The winters have become obsolete. It snows. A dirty black sludge but for years now the lake no longer forms its thick window crust.
“I remember the patterns you wove. I’ll do this life to its very long end. I will not waste this thing you’ve helped me become.
Though I’m jealous, like a god, for I so want for the peace that you have”, said the man into the murk at his feet.
by Hari Navarro | Mar 12, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“Do you want to go on an adventure?”, asks Lee.
“To where?”, answers Lindsay.
“Up and into the universe.”
“In that?”
“Yes, in that. It’s an M2-F2 Star Hopper.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do than hop around the stars? Plus, isn’t the M2-F2 a single pilot module?”
“I made it bigger, just for you.”
“That’s the most beautiful thing that anyone’s ever said to me.”
“You really should come. You’ll love it.”
“How do you know so certainly?”
“I’ve seen you in your room, hanging out of your window with your hair dangling down from the sill. You gaze up into the heavens for hours.”
“That’s not creepy.”
“I think you want to know what’s next.”
“I know what’s next.”
“Seriously?”
“Eternity”
“So you coming?”
“Of course.”
“OK, the cockpit’s a little tight so, you know, our shoulders might touch.”
“Won’t that mean that we’re married?”
“You’re ridiculous. Please pay attention, this is an expensive piece of hardware”, he says, detecting an uncommissioned quiver in his voice.
“Jesus, you’re sensitive… OK, shit’s getting real. Coms are open. Looking good at NASA One.”
“Do me a favour, see that thingy flashing on the HUD… no, not that one, the one underneath it. That’s the Ballistic Control System Arming switch. Flick that bad boy on.”
“Got it, Lee. Oh God, did you remember to arm the lightening rods?”
“Of course, I did. I’m not new. Hold on. Throttle engaged.”
“Circuit breakers in. God, I can feel it. The speed on my skin. It’s incredible.”
“Inboard and outboards are on.”
“Lee baby, I’d come a smidge forward with the side stick, just sayin’.”
“Seriously, whose piloting this thing?”
“You, oh great wrangler of steel birds. NASA One repeats we are OK, and looking good. Which is nice.”
“What the hell was that?”
“Blow out!”
“We’ve lost Damper three!”
“Pitch correction to zero.”
“We’ve lost Pitch! I’m losing altitude!”
“Correct pitch. Primary hold has failed – Mayday!”
“Correction, Alpha Hold is off.”
“Turn selectors, Emergency!”
“NASA One!, We can’t hold her! She’s breaking up, she’s…”
The girl pulls herself, as if in slow-motion, through the horrific swath wreckage until she reaches what is left of his legs. And, although her own legs are crumpled and ruined and her arm hangs uselessly at her side, she inches her face until it hovers over that of her love. And, with his eye puffed and hanging from its socket and with the hell of the carnage still ripping and bleeding from her ears, she leans and mutters through rocket fuel blackened teeth.
“Don’t worry, my sweet love. They can rebuild us. They will make us real.”
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can rebuild this bloody living room. Cushions back on the couch, fruit-bowl space helmet back with its fruit and you Lindsay, need to get home. It’s a school night”, said the woman who’d put her hand on her hips if only they weren’t covered with pizza dough.
“Mother. Switch your attention to zero. Protocol override 99+06. Listen. Please. I want to feel as the ancient things that created us felt. This sad charade as we look like them and even pretend to eat like them… There is only one truth. Only one thing, I truly know that we share”, says Lee V109 system 00098 batch 010168, and he reaches, and takes the hand of the wonderful girl that he loves.
