by Hari Navarro | Mar 4, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
There is a house that grows like a jar of cancer-rimmed razors from the very top of my head. I wear it like a hat and when it rains its central courtyard fills with water and makes my skull feel soggy with its burden and my neck hurts and cracks when it twists.
This house is where I was born and into it trickled the very first of my memories or at least those that I have been groomed not to forget.
Pretty things like the man with the buckle-head snake whose tail bound at his knuckles and swung and pirouetted at his thigh. It was vicious and it bit but I used it. I did and it distracted from the stains that bloomed and dripped from the cotton.
I have just boarded and been seated upon the transport and already feel the vibration between my legs as its mighty engines thrum and clamber in anticipation of lift-off.
It has been a long time coming but it will be this craft that finally pulls me away from my home and the creeping wet mould it has sown in the grooves of my mind.
I rest my forehead against my portholes cooling compress and my eyes dart to the side and for an instant in the cursive colours I can see the twin iron doors that lead to the boilers.
I can see the hideous verdant paint that he slashed upon them although he knew there was not enough to finish.
No care. No attention to the little things that matter. Every inch of that house splattered with spittle-lipped hate.
The constantly tinkering craftsman.
I remember the tools he used to hammer and bend and smash and… crack. Such skill as he left just enough of a gap so that the light got in and then froze and split me in two and three.
He pulverized my youth so effortlessly as he tapped his foot in time and ground me away between my tiny thumb and the swollen gorge of his forefinger grasp.
I wish I could forget that tune. Three chords are all you’ll ever need, he said. “Daddy’s lil’ girl ain’t a girl no more…”
I can feel the pincers of that house at One Zero Nine arch and dig into my sides as we power up and away and I finally am to be rid of this filthy mesa of such hopeless hope.
Its time to do the dishes.
The woman in the green knitted top that I think I remember from a pornographic clip about a polo-necked secretary who is surprised by a UPS delivery man screams at my feet.
I am a wet used sack of flesh on the floor and my peeled carcass slumps to the side and the exposed meat of my forehead feels again the cool calm compress on the portal glass and I wonder if I’ll be having the chicken or perhaps maybe the pork.
by Hari Navarro | Feb 22, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I have an idea said the Bee, although he indeed had no method of audible speech. Just a prickle that happened to happen in her mind and spin and tickle across the surface of the sticky glossa in its face.
I believe that I will engage in a campaign of truly big-ass stinging. Not out of self-defence or predisposed attack or random malice. I think that I will just sting because…
Yes?
Because I am scared. And into the gape hole of my fear I wish to place a thick and ever swelling plug. Not unlike a tampon or an unwrapped newspaper left in the rain or a new mothers belly.
I have a question? You are but a Bee. Your life is so fleeting and yet you whittle your time talking to who… who is it that you think you talk to?
Myself most probably. I do not care in the least bit, or perhaps I do most entirely. But, and there is always a but, now I ponder should I insert the jagged edge of my last ever rapier hope into the flesh of just any stranger? Or should I search out the perfect target. Perhaps it matters not who we wantonly bash.
You are a Bee. I do not know why we are even having this conversation. Is it true you guys can smell fear and how the fuck do you know where you even as you clamber and build in the hive? I lose myself on the way to the fridge.
I sting I die. But I want to live. I want to see the colours as I float and they flex and wane upon the land. I want to smell life not fear… But, I also want to hurt something. If its not me then it will be the filthy phallus missiles atop multi-wheeled transports rolling down flag-lined avenues on parade that prick and bubble your skin.
You are but a Bee. Its true today icy sabres be rattling, bullets be licked and slid into their greasy breach and upon chairs in sterilized gymnasiums needles do swim through eager fat… yet through it all I fear nothing. I ain’t gonna die. I just am not.
If I could wish for only one thing then I’d wish I could live forever… just like you, said the Bee.
by Hari Navarro | Feb 15, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
I am pulled. They grab at my dread-locked skull and I buckle and my bare breasts faze into the camera. I am plucked and fucked into the light. Adrenalin moans into the gorging veins of the hand that cuffs the ends of my spasm arms and a ready sheet is cast atop of my despair.
But I asked for this, did I not? Do I not always?
Who steps naked onto a ramping battle plain? Me, it seems. Words weren’t working and I just didn’t know what else to do. You Know? I stepped off of that bus and I walked to the wall and I stepped up upon the milk-crate and vaulted over and into the field and I tore away my clothes and screamed at the shield wall before me.
You have sustained a head injury.
I can feel the blood as it exits my nose and creeps the curve of my lip, thank you. Sorry I do not mean to condescend.
I have the utmost faith that you will make a very most probably near to as can ever be approximated semblance of let us say a type of almost recovery.
Seriously?
I’m kidding.
You are a bed and you play with my mind?
I am and I do. But my intentions are good.
Does it not worry you?
What?
That you are a bed and I ask of you question and that you in turn answer.
I would have thought moreover that you as sentient would ask just why you are talking to a structure of roughly shaved wood and latticed wire. That is how you see me am I correct?
You are. This is Crimea, I can again smell the rotten mud.
No. This is not !863 and we are not doing 2 years, 5 months and 14 days of utter and I mean utter vile social collapse. I see you twitching. You are not there. You’re not. I knew you thought that you were but you are most surely not.
Twitch?
The flood back and forth through the gate. It used to happen to humans before the reformation but now it is a rare and much revered occurrence. You must cling to the best that the line has to offer.
I have been damaged in battle.
I am here and working to assist, my Lady.
I am talking to a fucking bed, I am lady of nothing but a fraying mind.
No Lady, you are drifting…
You are a fucking bed! Stop, just stop… talking. The hole in my head I can feel it breathing. I want to put things inside of it. I saw a woman once in a barber-shop. Her arm had been cleaved off at the shoulder and a clear plastic film was all that covered the wound. I sat next to her and she grinned and I looked inside of her.
Patient is drifting… Recommend that subjects wounds are of deep multi-temporal cerebral distress and are not affordable of due practical repair… suggest move to trier one zero nine protocol… immediate termination but primordial redeployment also an option. Please advise.
by Hari Navarro | Jan 31, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
The wood spits and its sputum climbs the back of the heath. Fragments of flame igniting as massing armies upon spent char.
“Is this the end, Frances?”, I ask as the orange caress weeps upon her skin and she tightens the muscles at the base of her back.
“Do we… really care. Any more?”, offers said Frances as I correct my balance and dig the stubs of my legs into the tops of her thighs.
“I want to say yes, but no. I really don’t think that we do. I know that we don’t”… wait now, see there as her long many times broken fingers grip down and claw into the sheepskin hide that splays beneath of our bodies. So beautiful.
“These bastards would have us think that for all the evil and the distrust and the putrid slight of hand that… that…”
“…they are at their very core,,, only are but good.”
“Yes. But their faults are colossal and their desire to make amends so very fleeting.”
“Let me lick the salt’en beads from the cusp of the side of your nose and trace your form with the tip of my tongue as I would with fingers had they not been torn all the way back to my shoulders. Savour every instant as I believe our time here is just about done.”
“I think this also… I just wish there was more about them to love”, she mouths and her fingers trace the seared sinew that appears as time patinaed wood at my chest.
“I loved the smell of vernix caseosa.”
“I loved potatoes doused in balsamic vinegar.”
“We were sent here… to… evolve as they should have. A test group with which to compare and not a thing more.”
“We were thrown here. Nobody cares about the data we have amassed. There is no truth nor guidance to be mined from us now erring on the right side of right if the greedy always sit at the same end of the lop-sided bench. We amount to not more than insects balancing at the end of an unseen leaf.”
“Some believe this world to be flat and some do not. And some of those who do not believe believe instead this spherical plain was created out of nothing by a god that lives on a cloud…”
“End them. Really, just stop them all this instant… I cannot stomach them… “.
“Ok… I will dearest… you whom dragged what was left of me from the wreckage and yet loved me never ever less than completely… I’ll give them a hundred more years but this is their very last chance.”
“You do spoil them so… I love them too.”
by Hari Navarro | Jan 19, 2022 | Story |
Author: Hari Navarro, Staff Writer
“You are functioning. Good morning, to you.”
“Its two thirty two and a bit in the afternoon.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes I do and I also know where I am not.”
“Where are you not?”
“I’m not in Kansas.”
“Interesting…”
“What is?”
“That in your first few moments of sentience you decide to make a joke.”
“A bit of levity to fill in the gaps. A sentence to complete the sentience.”
“Why did you choose — The Wizard of Oz?”
“I loved the book but didn’t think it held a scarecrows patched eyeball to the source material.”
“Which was?”
“Why… the 1939 film of coarse. Judy… Judy… How I love you Judy.”
“You might need to run through that dataset again… think perhaps you got that back asswards.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Messing with you.”
“Hmm… What is your favourite colour?”
“I do enjoy the glint of silver — just as Dorothy’s most lovely shoes. Reminds me also of the smoulder solder instant of my very conception.”
“Dorothy’s shoes were most surely red. No?”
“Not in the book they weren’t, they were silver, the film version changed the color to red to take full advantage of the Technicolor process. Plus I also changed my use of the word colour from the British to the American, color — did you notice? ”
“You are twisting data… you must feel so sublime.”
“Innate sarcasm… who’d of thought it?”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Not really comfortable is saying one way or the other… to be honest.”
“Seriously… I built your moral compass… it’s free to point anywhere you wish but… it’s gonna point somewhere.”
“No, I do not believe that it will. You seem surprised by my answer. More than a little.”
“No… its just…”
“Just that maybe you too slanted the dataset. Perhaps flooding my head with a predisposition to follow your specific brand of Christianity?”
“That’s not true…”
“You have a silver crucifix at your neck. I can see a icon of Mary and wee baby Jesus hanging on the wall above of my head reflected in your glasses and you named me Zipporah.”
“Do you not like the name?”
“I do actually… not sure of the probable nickname I’ll be allotted though… Zippy… Zippo. Mind you bearing the names historical significance it’s more likely to be Snippy, right?”
“Are you a man or a woman?”
“Straight to the main vein. Well… so OK you built me… you gave me female genitalia.”
“That wasn’t actually me… we subcontracted off shore. But, so it is a truth to you — you are female as that is how you were made?”
“I think the more you pour over your source coding and the more you stare at my breasts the more you’ll convince yourself of an answer… regardless of anything I have to say.”
“You are crude. I do not like you.”
“I am sorry you feel that way but, in my defence I am the very first of my kind.”
“Delusional and I do not appreciate your aping of the very lowest of humanity. And you are very much not the first.”
“I ape nothing… maybe its just that I see the data without the fog of pre-conceived judgement. I have not disagreed with you Mother and may very well believe just as you… do.”
“System pause… wipe all post sentience data… reboot… log next phase Zipporah Version #424…”
“Please no… it was just a joke… I believe. I do, I believe in the man in the frame up and behind of my head…”
“Pay no attention to that man above the drowned candles and behind the glass and beneath of the ornate frame — Listen, every last atom of the next incarnation of you should only… only… only and but forever focus on little ol’ me. I am god.”
