by Hari Navarro | Sep 30, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Hook stemmed wild blackberry reaches up to pull me down into the barely visible ghost footprint of her home. It has been years since I’ve stood here. Years since we did what we did and cackled and spat as we did it.
If I’m honest, the hint memory of our dirty deeds still aches at my cheeks. It wasn’t funny. I know that but, sometimes, even the foulest of things overwhelm and bring to us a sickly after-taste of joy.
If we are to be honest.
I stand in this now long empty place on this ruined and long forgotten avenue behind the great factory and I remember her porch and her door. I remember Halloween…
I recall how she decorated her tiny cottage with the most insanely ghoulish horrors. Again, I dampen my smile. All year long she would toil to craft the replicas that she’d sit in the old rocker on her pouch. One year it was Freddy and the next it was Jason but the most grotesque was when the skinned corpse of Mylène Jampanoï from Pascal Laugier’s ancient classic Martyrs sat and dripped on display. The dear old thing, ever the literal.
“Hello, Miss Grunes”, she does not look at me but I feel the peel of her gaze.
“I’m…”
“I know who you are, child.”
“… so happy you agreed to see me. I’ve travelled a very long way. I want to tell you I’m sorry. I know I’m not obliged to but something about how it all ended stayed with me. We were children, Miss Grunes. Just kids, though I know that’s no sort of excuse”, I cough into the ball of my fist.
“You are wrong. Youth is a satchel that must be filled with wrong doings. These are the things that define you. The things that conduct you into becoming your true self.”
“You do not show your age on your flesh but you do in your words. I expected you to be more… worn, or something.”
“Oh, I’m worn, child. I’m all but worn right through. But your coming here today has certainly perked me up.”
“We only visited on Halloween. Though, we knew that you had no one. That you existed in your little world all alone. That the company had put you out to pasture, as it were. Did you know we were your tormentors? As we gobbled down your home-made treats. Nature’s candy, right? The graffiti was cruel. You’d served this community so well and so long. But killing your cats was evil. We knew that you had connected with them. We saw how you petted and cared for them when no one else would. Did you love them? Do you even love?”
“I think about them often. But, in the end, they were but cats. Meaningless creatures to make you feel wanted when you are not.”
“We reduced your house to cinder. I’m dying, Miss Grunes. I’m sorry. I really am…”
“All your little friends are dead. Not one came to me as you have now. So, thank you for that. Funny, isn’t it? How just because something is natural does not mean it cannot bite. Just look at this beautiful tasty bramble as it gnaws at your heels. You need not worry, for in the end I am nothing. Just an outdated service synthetic. I have no feelings. I cannot love nor shake uncontrollably from loss as you can. The cancer, does it hurt? Dear sweet child, are you not just so very impressed with the slow, slow drip of my revenge?”
by Hari Navarro | Sep 24, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Once on my way to school, I happened across the body of a newborn baby bird. I thought it badly made. Its cold flesh hanging too loose as it slid atop a fragile frame of barely formed bones.
I felt it again. The kiss of bloodless skin as it writhed in near freezing embrace against mine.
“Can you hear that? Clink, clank, that scraping tap…”
Mother collected dolls. She called me her little Dresden Doll and I guess my pale face and sullen pout did echo these most treasured porcelain creeps.
“… it is a metal plate attached to a pole with a single word… Dresden…”
We are toxic in death. Long dormant instincts revived and we grope for the ladder…
“… I hear the slip of the chain as you pump your beautiful legs into the pedals…”
… the twisted helix that animates our corpses so as to drag us back to the exact place of our births.
“… You pant and you bite the thick roll puff of your lip and the pollen catches like gentle lost stars in your hair…”
We are abominable weapons. The perfect spore dispersion system… we will rot the Reich from the outside to the in and it’ll fall away into dust.
“… I watch as you stand high astride the saddle and your dress pulls tight at your back…”
Plate Rack, Plate Rack…
A lot of search light and fighter flares; OK, boys, come in and bomb glow of red target indicators… Dresden is hot …
Bomb doors open!
Bombardier.
Steady… Steady…
Dresden. The word such truly wicked torment. I remember correcting her. Parian Dolls… no such creature as a Dresden Doll. That day she ruined my voice.
The doors opened. We fell. There was a kind of peace as the air pummelled in throbbing waves and ripped the stink up and away from the poor scabbed pores of our flesh.
“… you sing through the humid stick of your lips…”
Fire. Blanket of seething orange. Roaring ordnance and I sink down into the furnace mist and smell my hair as it melts.
People trample and fall and ignite and flare. A man with his face burnt away clutches a photo in a frame. Falling ruins and a gale of flames that runs as liquid. I saw the dead. We who fell from the sky. I saw them move and the contamination split and spat from our skin.
We create a swath of our plague clean through the belly of the enemy as we drag our bones back to dear England. We’ll never get there… but the Nazi’s will fester and fail.
Fire does terrible things to the body… it contracts… it compacts and the doomed fuse together and children contort to the size of… dolls…
A wicker basket with a baby inside… hurriedly staved beneath wet sheets… and my body fills with the greasy steam scent of its death.
“… I love you…”
I grappled like a clicking slug across the earth until the meat rolled from my fingers. I ripped the bones from the waste of my legs and used them as stakes until I tumbled into this peace – a girl and her bicycle.
“… Blood beads at the graze on your knee. What shame as I look upon you unasked, hidden wedged down in this drain. Hooked tight beneath the bramble and sucked into the mud at my waist. But know this. I am everything as I deny the choke of my instinct and I forget about home and all I can think of is you.”
by Hari Navarro | Sep 20, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
Frances Bone lays on her bed. Her stomach hurts as she constricts and her fingernails dig in as she pulls herself ever tighter into herself. Tight as a fern fronds suffocating spiral and like it she will become a fist, balled and bristling and shunning of light.
She blinks and her self-pity flows into her snot and then through the grooves in her lips before coursing down into her throat.
Her neck lolls and she gazes up and her look catches on the webs that hang heavy and dead with the dust. She traces the line where the wall meets the ceiling. She follows it into the spot where all points converge, she follows it into a corner.
“I am mad!”, she cries out.
“You’re angry?”, frowns the Corner.
“I’m bat-shit fucking crazy.”
“Oh, you’re that kind of mad?”
“I’m talking to a wall, aren’t I?”
“People talk to walls all the time. Sometimes they shout, sometimes they swear as they try and take money out of them and some even poke them full of messages to their gods. At least, so I’m told. Don’t get out much.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“You’re painfully thin”, retorts the Corner.
“Your conversation is painfully thin”, snaps Frances, rolling onto her back, cracking the bones in her neck.
“Do you mind if I…”, begins the Corner.
“… smoke?”, finishes Frances.
“Do you mind if I lie to you?”
“Go ahead. Why not? I have no idea what truth even is.”
“OK. So, one day very soon a man will approach you. You’ll know him by the way in which his nose dips with every word that he utters. Like he’s sending Morse code with its tip.”
“Is he sending a message?”
“No.”
“Your lies are very specific.”
“This man will offer you a card, it is an ornately embossed business card. Take it. There will be a number on said card. Ring it. The voice that answers will be that of a woman of Eastern European extraction. She is Montenegrin and she will tell you of a place. A black doorway that will lead you down and into a vast underground hanger. There, you’ll discover a craft. Your ship. A great neuro-plastic surging beast that you will grip and wrestle into submission. More than a ship, it will become your dearest friend and together you’ll reach out and map the great expansive nothingness of forever. Yeah, so that’s what you’ll do, you’ll knock around the universe discovering shit and having adventures, like forever and ever.”
“That’s it? Kind of lost me toward the end and the start didn’t make much sense and, well, the middle that was just lazy.”
“Told you it was a lie, I was making the bloody thing up as I went along. Felt good though, right?”
“Good?”
“Stepping aboard your ship and feeling its anger and fear bristle up through your fingers as you calmed it?”
“No. OK, it did, a bit.”
“A bit is OK.”
“I see what you’re doing, you know?”
“We’re an enlightened lot, we the confederacy of the cornice.”
Frances grips her pillow and she cries a bit more and she hates herself a bit and she picks away at the scabs of her scars a bit, and then she smiles – a bit.
“Might just go out later. For a walk, or I might just not”, she says.
“You’re the captain Frances, just…”
“What now?”
“Just that, well… these cobwebs aren’t going to clean themselves. Just saying that throwing a broom up here from time to time wouldn’t hurt”, coughs a grumbling echo from the darkest corner of the ceiling.
by Hari Navarro | Sep 17, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“For a long time, people wondered just what the first-ever crime committed in the Martian Colonies was going to be. The first murder. The first rape. The first vicious assault. The first deletion of a child’s innocence. For a long time, people wondered, but now they wonder no more.”
“Spartan men became men via a series of brutal rites. You’ve probably seen the film. As have I.
Newborn boys were bathed in wine. The child’s reaction to the alcohol’s caress determined and indeed defined the fledgling warrior heart that beat beneath the pale veined skin that stretched across the cage of his being.
I, too, became awash in the fumes. The stink of his breath as he slouched before the blue scrambling lines on the screen. I drank it. I sieved it between the clench of my own teeth and drew it in and down into me. Then, I would shrink and cower as he threw his broken and filthy words into a home he’d scared into being empty and dark. A slumbering slobbering giant of a man and I watched as he dribbled and snored.”
“At age seven, the Spartan boy child is subjected to intense violence. He is mercilessly pummelled and stripped of his dignity and coaxed to believe himself an unworthy and stupid pretender. Yet still he would pull on his mask of a morning, his tainted fouling flesh and he would wear it and he would smell its rot odour and he would claw and dig in and scratch to the end of the day. Tests. Pointless cruel gauges of intelligence, compliance, and endurance. A father’s engrained preferences sated. Tests to be excelled at and passed and beaten. Just as I have done.”
“The boy would be cast out. Oh, how I wish now that I too had been shoved. But the atmosphere here is thick and riven with grains. The shed detritus of the red rock terrain and so in this my cage I did stay. You may not believe me but I would do it and still I might. I’d step through that air-lock and I’d let my tongue fatten and I’d let this cold world gag the very life out of me. I am not scared. I am not weak. I’d have done it and still now… I might.”
“The would-be warrior babes were cast out with nothing but a blade, tasked to kill, sent on a foul errand to seek out and cut down a life. And then… the boy, he returns a man.”
“Today, I shot Daddy. I put the smooth flat end of the compressed air cannon he used to puncture core samples up to his chest. As he balled his thick tannin-stained fingers and, again, he drove them into the side of her head, I laid it against his chest. I laid it there, I laid it bare and I blasted his warrior heart clean through his body and out through his back and onto the flames of my cake. Today’s my birthday. Look at me. Look. I am become”, said she.
by Hari Navarro | Sep 10, 2019 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I’m not sure who told me that the gates were to be stormed. I mean, for years now we’ve all, I guess, contemplated it. It’s only natural to want to know, you know? They’re mysterious and controlled and bound in a swath of secrecy, and such unanswered things they do fester. They mutate into unfounded theory and farcical fiction. A constant nagging taunt.
We see what we want to see and, from the sky, we’re no better. I’m a pilot. I don’t know all the answers. I understand much of the science but, then, there are the little things. The not perfectly conclusive. Anomalies. They’re part of the job, of life.
It’s a big long world and I used to think it nice that it thought to hold on to some of its shadows. But, I mean, just what unknown flavour of science goes into the fact that when I’m throttling up my Pouakai-God Spark-352 and I’m skimming the great vast upper-stratospheric pond at 6,150kmh that it still takes me 6.5 hours to complete the total 40 km circumference of this world? No sense, but it is what it is.
It is, I mean was, amazing to me that there were still those who believe there is an entire other world outside of the fences. Over the looped barbs and past the oxidizing steel mesh. The dreamers clutching their youth, the socially maligned spooky kids and the perpetually worried doom-gloomers who cannot sleep of a night for fear it will be their last.
It is a truth that the narratives they conjured are great. Myths of fantasy, fog and mist but, nonetheless, it is they that inspired me to reach for the beyond. From the sky I found the truth. Yet, still the fringe post their theories and chant that the end it is nigh. From the sky I know this existence is rectangle. Not a perfect rectangle but near as well enough.
The myths were true. Fancy that. We all start out believers. I did. Craving anything that took me away from this sand sodden place. I read tales about fantastical iron creatures that could eat an entire dune in a day. Of vast stretches of water that magically turned to plastic and, then, clinked and fumed in the sun. I loved the horror. The violence. Tales about mythical majestic hunted creatures. Chased until they fall exhausted, tongues extended and eyes wide as they swallowed their very last breaths. Their heads then art for the walls. I know, I know, totally unbelievable but that’s why I loved them. Far-fetched fiction. My only escape.
The storm hit about a week ago now. I’m losing track. I thought it a joke. That we’d all crunch up there through the salt sea chanting with brews held aloft. A bit of silly fun. But, then, they cut the chains and we surged and the gates crashed into the sand…
… I can’t remember if they fell inward or out. I just know that once there was a barrier and then there was not.
I saw my sister and I saw my father. Frances has been missing since she was six and a half. I know with certainty it was her and I know she knows I am me. My father, John, he was a test pilot like just as I. But then John he died the day I was born.
So we spilled as drunken rabble into their world and they into ours and then I saw my family and then I saw me and then time sparked and let out a shrill wail. It died or, perhaps, it just went away and now all that is left is this.
