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.