by Hari Navarro | Dec 14, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Approaching Stalag VII A — Moosburg — 1945
He walked and as he walked the cloth of his trousers stuck to his skinny legs as the rapier cold tried to eat of his skin.
The tree on the hill to the side of his ice-pecked eyes felt too the weight of this most bitter of winters and it creaked, but he did not hear it. Though, nonetheless, he looked at it and he imagined it’s shiver.
“It is awfully cold. It matters not if the sun is out there is ice on the ground all day”, he muttered, in recollection of the last letter he had sent home from the camp. And his throat it tastes of bits of the inside of his mouth and the snow he has sucked from his sleeve.
He remembers his parents and he remembers their house in Wanganui. The railway tracks that slid as cold case-hardened iron nailed reassurance just behind the back-yard fence. And he remembers the smell of boiled potatoes and butter and wilted mint.
Frank smiles.
This war has been good to him. In that he had not felt the lead that pushes through skin and fragments inside of meat. He is alive and that was the greatest thing about just about anything at this moment as he squinted at this fucking nothing tree.
But then he has an image, a thing that aches in his head. A friend lost but then found. A man with a family – as all we have. Not a friend, but an acquaintance, a boy/ man with whom he’d played a few hands of Bridge.
The snow is a many faceted thing, its purity so clearly showing the intruding filth. His body, this boy from a farm, he that loved the smell of oil that sleeps in wool, diced down and into the icy mulch beneath the tread of a benzin breathing tank.
Frank had looked upon this ruin and he had tried to cry. But ropes bound in his throat and the liquid drew into itself and pulled his eyes almost but closed. And he walked on and his toes froze in his boots and he pounded his fist at his thigh. And he said…
“This thing, this truth of who we are. This rot which foams and spits on all our branches. I will find you. I will end you. I will.”
Hundreds of millennia later and on a far away planet Francis stands and feels the ice-welded glue of her finger upon the trigger.
“I have tracked you through both time and the space between it. Now you die”, she says as, without further hesitation, she fires and a finely carved missile carves through the putrid mist and opens away its fat head like a bit of bitten fruit and it crashes down unto its cracking knees.
“Thank you…”, it whimpers as whimper it fucking well should and it folds down and into a ratcheting foetal ball.
And Francis kicks its flabby belly with the tip of her boot and she staggers backward as she feels the weight of its death.
“There ya go we did it, Franky. Took a few thousand years but we knocked the bastard off”.
by Hari Navarro | Dec 7, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Arsia Mons, 2nd Division Habitat – Kohi Homestead – Mars.
Every night I fall into the blades and they thin me. I could tell you my name, but all that would do is give label to this skinny fucking bitch that I have become.
I am chosen. But, all I want is to hide beneath the rocks at the bottom of the murky pool. I do not want this light.
Watch as the ink sky rips and it’s sores spill out and crackle upon your tongue, you taste them right? I mean, you do… please, please say that you do. I’m not fucking crazy. These things, they look like stars but they are sent for us to consume.
But, maybe, I should hold still and wait. No?
Do you not think?
I don’t think you do.
See, if perhaps nothing at all falls of worth from these grabbed and twisted nothings, these things I am taken to molest in my ever-twitching and hopelessly gnarled fists — then, maybe we are to be saved.
I imagine I am pushed, you see? With vicious force, down and through all that I have ever thought with frantic anger, and spittle flays from my lips and then I appear back and upon this sanguine thing in a time before ever I was pushed.
I have stacked a wall though, a token to remind. I have felt the weight of every last brick in my hands and their mortar has dried and prised opened my skin.
A rampart.
A convergence of all the fragment bits that time has ever heaved out upon my hands and thrust up beneath of my nails.
And, but yet again, as I fashion this cage of latticed letters around all I could ever hope to be and I try to scrub the ruddy shale — I am lost.
In this pooling instant I wish to erase from my mind only but this::: My hand and that gentle diverting nudge to its weak wrist as the blade skimmed off of the bone of your cheek and you leaked out and onto this wanton plain.
Red on red. Human blood that bubbled through the breach slit at the face of your suit and the ramping vile spittle wheeze that spat death into your visor as you clutched like Kennedy at your neck and you fell.
I do so very much hate this fucking planet and I hereby blame its perpetual lulling silence for all… yes, all. For every last damned thing I have ever, ever done.
I cannot be blamed for this.
This oh so fascinating fuck ball of red dead stone made me do it… do not try to sway me otherwise.
Mind you…
Now she is gone and I am the very last… I can rule as I do and the sand can mind its own mind and I will never have to feel the weep of her warm breath at my shoulder, nor her clasped hands at my breasts as she rocks me gently to sleep. No I do not have to feel ever, not ever… ever again.
by Hari Navarro | Dec 2, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Christmas is a time… a place in time, that has been stolen by so many. So, she, her — did think… she would take it again.
She creamed out of the moulting detritus of the very first rocks. She rolled into the bawling pain that spat her kind upon the arching back of all this plain was ever to become. She had evil at her lips and bits of it dribbled between her thighs.
So, anyway now — it is today.
A house. Any house, you can choose. Go on… any street. Any town.
Christmas eve.
A mother or a father be, they step with delicate toes through the night passage. They want that thing, the prize that is only offered to lovers of innocence. That bleary morning face… eyes caked in barely rubbed sleep — that smile as the gifts they are opened.
Nothing, not a thing compares. The bad… the not so bad at all… the fucking obscene thing you did in that alley… it flakes away… not entirely, but it all, does it not, soothe beneath the weight of a child’s tooth-wanting smile?
Her name is Rhace and she comes for those who need her most, the easer of pain and suffering and that unknown weight that swings in the gallows of the chest of the cheated. In ancient times she was no more than festering disease, a killer of all that sought only but to breathe.
Her face is pale but it talks not of sickness, moreover it screams of blearing light over shifting sands. She stands in the shadow beneath the un-kissed mistletoe and she waits and her breasts inflame and her nails drag against her beading flesh.
She watches as they lay their carefully wrapped presents alone, as they place them so carefully at the foot of tiny beds.
She follows the wronged into their bedrooms and she watches as they lay down beside their unworthy mates. Her purpose has evolved through the millennia, pestilence grew boring, now she has such a very fine and true mission at hand.
She is not of this earth, but then nothing ever is, are we not all just fragments of distant spinning rocks? But here, and it took much time, but this being found her place in our forever fluttering shudder of time.
Her body weeps as it rides yours. It ebbs, it flows and it bends and it fills all that you lack. She holds time tight in her clutch and you are finally allowed to scream. Nobody hears and you finger through the flow until the morning sun punches through and patterns your dried sweat with the intricate spirals of your Grandmothers lovely laced curtains.
And in that final moment as you blink, as she is gone, a whisper…
“Kiss me and suckle again the plump fat of my lips. For upon them there is a cancer that is harmless unto you. But now turn, as I leave, and plant this dirty seed upon the mouth of the one who wronged you so. Or not, the choice is only but yours. Know… I love you. This is my sincere and most merry of Christmas gifts”.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 23, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The Module. Mount Taranaki Crater Radar Observatory. Now.
We don’t have any costumes.
We don’t have any anything, just get your bits of shit in place. Wear what you must. Our hours are now, but minutes.
I’m an astrophysicist.
No shit? Behold all that there is of you, I rolled about on a too-many cushioned bed and masturbated on demand for a living. Full disclosure, i did also cure Covid-19 – thank you, thank you… your applause is entirely necessary. But the wanking thing is what got me the very most likes.
This is a nonsense. Lets just fold and die and the world can curdle and foam and… oh shit, can you feel that? My skin is shifting, unrolling beneath of itself. It’s time to… exit. Stage left or maybe right or up into the mould pocked gantry above the curtain or…
We can transmit. I have caressed the circuits. I can play this final of all plays out into the ever beyond. It would mean something, wouldn’t it?
We can, but in all of our existence we have found not but one that will receive. There is nothing out there.
You do not know that.
Don’t I?
The world is dead. The universe is dead. It is. Nothing is to be had of this waste any-more. We tried but… there is nothing reaching back out of the nothing.
It is a truth, the sky is dripping and the seas have dried to cradle pools of wuthering plastic filth. But still… come on now, lets put on a show. Lets play to this empty old house.
Ok, let us just. But then, this last show we prime it, right? We record it and fire it off into space. We can do that. That is what we can do. A digital show for the ages. A tiny gift for the quiet endless dark.
Ode to the dish. Our collector… it sought out fragments within the outer regions and it tried… to tell us.
This bitch told us what?
That there is something. But this threadbare lonely old cusp was wrong, wasn’t she. We fall into nothing. We are it. There is not a bit else.
Put your fancy pants on, Calamity… let us perform. Lips up not down. Look at the real… this stage, it is even now parting beneath of our feet.
OK, I’m thinking…
Say no more my love, I know exactly what it is you have in store for this most final of acts… it is most surely… that greatest and most succulent of all farces…
The End.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 16, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
A man far younger than his face sits in mist heavy clothes beneath the pulse of a cash-machine and asks you if what I am saying is a science fiction story or not? It’s not.
It’s not.
Rest easy. Science and fiction have not but one part in any of this.
You are going to die.
Nothing to do with the natural progression of your kind — nor the happenstance molecular implosion of the beautiful waxy thing that you once were.
Imagine that you place an old iron stake in the ground and tie an inordinate length of unrealistically strong cord to it.
The loose end is then fired off into space and it travels for, well — a time past all imagining.
It then enters the atmosphere of a world, one so far away from us that nothing that I say nor write now will have survived the journey. Even the digital memories we have all amassed will have faded to smeared clumps on endless badly stacked monitors of grubby scratched black.
This imaginary connection secures to a rock on an alien hill with a stunted tree that wilts in shades of amaranth and there is a tiny habitation that should probably be called a hospital and its impact shudders as It snaps at this new and oh so special mass.
But.
This cord it is only a connection. A path along which, just maybe, a message can be sent.
Maybe.
Two cans with a length of string.
Perhaps one, and I cannot see it as being more, of us survives and whomever you are that does, well, maybe you may just call out.
But this one, so not unlike the unknown soldier who lays beneath the Abbey floor, will perhaps not utter a word. Maybe this last special bit of us will just sit and drink Grappa and inhale intricately rolled tobacco and pick the flakes from god-handed masterful artworks and play with themselves as they watch over our redundant orb until their failing heart succumbs to the streaking colours of our passing and they want of nothing more.
Death, it will be the end of us and the cats tongue it pokes.
