by Hari Navarro | Nov 9, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I walk into this thing. The big ugly sign calls it a private bar and it smells like badly washed groin and fizzing plastic.
The wound on my shoulder and the one at the back of my right eye pulse and I unintentionally lean forward and take a deep dark breath of the nonsense that here apes as air.
This is a new world — one I have but no other choice to frequent. They are all so very small in their massive gentle axial grind and I eternally hope better for each being that I meet upon them and I place my splayed broken fingers upon the greasy screen before me.
– Are you a man or a woman?
– Repeat…
– Are you a man or a woman?
– Who asks?
– I do and I am the asker.
– What gives you right?
– Interesting…
– What is?
– That you are perplexed by my simple question. You are not from here I see.
– How is it a simple thing to shelve one entity above or below or alongside of another?
– You shun the word that defines you?
– Am I allowed but one?
——– Beard
————- Coat
—— Penis
———— Fingers
——— Lint
——– Vagina
——– Breasts ——–
——–
——–
——–
– You stalled.
– I was just wondering, scanning… no…no… no, I wasn’t.
– Is processing such a bitter word for you?
– We don’t do that any more.
– You do not think?
– No, we do nothing of the sort. It… singes…it grates into my… my face.
– Why? Oh… inter-face. I’m rusty on your slang. Though I have read many of your founders collected works. Genius. That is why I am here. Their words they spoke and spiked my dreams and screamed up at me from the never drunk tear drop that distilled in the bottom of my flask.
– You think to much and to be sure nothing good ever came of a good thought.
– Whoever said that?
– Me.
– What are you?
– What am I?
– Yes.
– I am your waiter and the very best and the sum total of all that is or ever will be… what are you? A man or a woman?
by Hari Navarro | Nov 2, 2021 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The thing walked the moons acid shore and it pissed. It did it because the alcohol that was within was knocking to get out and it was sad.
So sad.
So much that it then hardened and, well, then a bead of clear honesty seeped into and yawned out of its body.
It wanted something else.
This alien, this thing, it then looked down and it saw what it was pissing upon. A gentle scoop of time hammered porcelain, the hole into which we all purge that which distils within our gut.
A toilet. The necessary room.
Some filthy yellow bowl in a stall. I scratched my lips, as is done in search of wishes that are sought that resemble fervent prayer.
Would you like for me to tell you just what lay at these feet? To tell you just what it was at my war dusted toes?
You don’t, but I will.
Actually you do, I am sorry that I speak on your behalf. But, I know your kind. The quiet nothing of space and trickster time suckles, does it not?
It, this lost and dirtied thing.
It was, I say was, but… she still very much is – a woman.
She now wedged into a bouquet of broken sticks and sheared off things frosted in bits of plastic.
In a fucking gutter.
Her eyes are glass and her mouth is a pit of glue and broken crunchy things.
I pissed but this stream of twisting sour that drilled into her face it had words. I recall, as I did arch my back and plunge into the moment.
I’m going to back away just now and head off to bed, sleep it off. Add another day to this disintegration disgust of just what I am.
It’s not easy. I can smell.
I can smell the desecration.
Fumes like callipers where legs should be.
But I’ll flip my pillow and try and catch its coldest edge.
I don’t want to see her flesh as it drapes atop the lighthouse and crumples and stretches in the gust any more.
Who pisses on the dead?
Probably never happened.
My planet is dead. We failed us all.
by Hari Navarro | Feb 12, 2020 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
They seeped through the fissures and oozed through the sands as they rose up from the black and into the quivering blue. Ancient and hungry they feasted, stripping the meat from shells that clamped to the rocks and picking clean the bones that fanned in the fish.
From the tiniest to the largest of sea-bound things these sodden daemons consumed as they tore every last bit of life from the waves. They bloated as they gorged, but still, they wanted more.
They want us. They want to tear down the things that live up above and so they tore to the surface for they could smell the very blood that punched in our veins.
En masse they swarmed and the suns awesome rays fingered down and it seared and it groped and it plucked out the eyes of our attackers. So it is that blind they now diligently stare.
Go down to the cliff-tops and look for yourself. Legion after legion undulating just below the surface as with creamy orbs they watch and they wait.
They wait and they want for the day when they evolve their charred flesh and their blackened corneas peel away and they step out onto our shores. They will find you quickly and they will find me in the end. It matters not where we cower and they will again wrench flesh from its bone.
by Hari Navarro | Jan 21, 2020 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I began in the winter. My sister’s legs spread as bloodied wings atop the kitchen table and I secrete from her womb. Into the breach I fold, a sluice of screaming muscle and I barge through shuddering thighs in a gush of amniotic tabletop wash.
My youth comes to me in fragments, violent images that flutter down like crumpled Polaroids and dissolve against my beading midnight skin. Flakes so vitriolic, so stunning in the purity of their agony that they would have me beg – no – crave to slip beneath the bubbling comfort of an acid bath’s sweet caustic wrap. Or, as the pain drew me to hate all that I saw, claw for the sickening release of a straight-edge razor’s slow corneal caress.
“What are you thinking father?”, asks my five-year-old self.
“I thought your sister an angel”.
I was six the last time I saw him, I was six and he was sick. His mind eaten through by the gorging worm of obsession. His intellect, sagging in the deep of the iris black like a chute caught hitched atop a tree of rapier thorns.
As my memory’s sticky filth clings as much as it molts, I taste again the stringent zing. It films the roof of my mouth and sings in notes of sweat and ripping pain. It crackles my jaw and dribbles down my thigh. It is doctrine. It is god and gods. See them, the devious daemons and voyeuristic deities that huddle between these words. Words I shouldn’t think let alone speak.
Beware their followers – the sycophant adherents whom mass at their feet. Fear them most, for they are not hobbled by the constraints of fiction. They that are men.
These slaves to an alien master would shepherd my youth, a few bad apples they say. But it is not apples that rip so ravenously at innocence, only to leave it to fester and curdle in darkness – voiceless and alone. They are rapists. But the analogy does hold true in that spoiling fruits do cast a furry cloak of ruin across all that stand at their side, where not even the basket that holds them escapes the creeping decay.
I was to grow up in such a building, one upon which the spores of abuse had long dusted every inch from sacristy to narthex. A tired old facade that shone no less as it enticed with its surly mask of goodness and light. A mask that slid askew the moment I first heard the cries in the night and knew there was darkness at bay.
It that tugs at my hair as I sleep alone in a room empty but for me. They the creeps that creep between stone and plaster and stand atop volumes of scripture, clambering to reach the hole in the wall that faces the foot of my bed. Supposed peers to peer upon my body – rest and motion. Their cold vitreous cradled in sockets caked with the shed scales of evil absolved. At once so celibate, so obedient; they who would anoint me with adoration most foul.
An old familiar scent brushes the edge of my pillow, and he again whispers into my ear.
“Don’t hate me, Frances, I was commanded to lay with your kind and propagate a god, to bring forth a true child of the heavens. I truly thought I was the one for you, as I did with your dear mother. But I step aside for the convocation has spoken, my replacement awaits… so go now, you have such wondrous work to do”.
by Hari Navarro | Nov 12, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The great starving horde marched through space. No, they didn’t. They swarmed and, just as the hive-minded are apt to do, they toiled relentlessly, each individual an integral part of the whole.
Every last one a citizen and willing slave to its place and function as the collective of this ancient civilisation rose up from its dying world and took the form of a single mass. A great black-winged wedge to glide through the ink in search of that one thing all life craves – sustenance.
I’m not sure if you’ve read or, perhaps, you’ve been told that in all of existence there are but two worlds that harbour sentient life.
The first, of course, is Earth with its hierarchy of intelligence that, arguably, staggers down from humans and then to things that can be shot or caught in nets and, then, to things that squash beneath the tips of shoes and then onto some other insignificant organisms even smaller than that.
The other world, I forget now its name, is the afore-mentioned now dead rock from which the horde had set out. A place where microscopic Goliaths devoured all the things that swam in its sea and all the furry and feathered and scaled creatures that wandered the land and then, finally, although they had long toyed with the possibility of their preservation, they also gulped down the humanoids. The creatures that looked just like you. Mostly, save for that thing with the ears.
So these insects, for want of a better word, they cleaned out their larder and then set out into the heavens in search of a bite to eat.
It is only by chance that they happened upon your minuscule backwater speck of life. A water gripped rock upon which their great wedge could swoop and divide. You saw didn’t you as they dispersed into precisely targeted legions that cut down through the clouds and shunted your day into night.
They targeted the sentient and the swarm did adhere to every last living, breathing and thinking one of you. The first wave hit and they locked together, interconnecting their exoskeletons so that, once again, the many become the one. All life freezes in situ and in an instant all sound ceases, a global silence before simultaneously you could hear them begin to chew.
So there it is. That is how you ended, shredded away from the outside to the in by a bus load of ravenous tourists. The first wave passing back its masticated nutrition to the next wave that latches to its back and, then, back again to wave after wave until you have been replaced right down to your core.
But you had an unwitting surprise in store, didn’t you? You pass on a last little treat. A strand that twists within a tiny strand of your animal essence. A simple variation that locks their joints and closes them down and dooms them to never again budge.
They die, eventually, this time unable to escape from the hunger that throbs and claws in their heads. Though, even if they could, there is not but one crumb of sustenance left in the universe to be had.
At least the trees still look down, creaking in the wind above your morbid monuments. Statue remembrances as you bleach and flake in the sun.
So that’s the story, how in a single day the sentient life total for all of the cosmos was dialled back down to zero. Well, almost zero.
Zero, not counting me.
