Chrononauticles

“I will die yesterday. I knew it the day after tomorrow,” he will tell me, waiting for me to be
surprised. After all, I will observe him, expressionless. “I will accidentally fall in the
Cretaceous Period where a dinosaur crushed my cranium right when I step out of the
machine,” he will continue saying. Then, in one long draft, he will finish the beer he pissed
last week. “I came to the last tomorrow, the one I no longer saw. I will never know what I
thought at the time of my death. Is it inevitable?” And I will nod, knowing that it will mean
nothing to him. “Anyway, yesterday everything will be worth shit, so best to get it over and
done with,” and having said that he will get up, climb to his machine and travel to
yesterday, where he will set off to the Cretaceous. As it will not be easy being a crononaut,
you will be able to find these anachronic stations where we, the travelers, can pit-stop for
some drinks and remember the future. We would go crazy otherwise.

By Bernardo Fernández, BEF.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Lilibeth Moreno.
 

Bernardo Fernández, BEF,  aka Bef, is a writer, story teller and graphic designer. He was born in Ciudad de México in 1972. He has published the novels Tiempo de alacranes (Scorpion Times, 2005), Gel azul (Blue Gel, 2006), Ladrón de sueños (The Dream Thief, 2008), Ojos de lagarto (Snake Eyes, 2009), Hielo Negro (Black Ice, 2013) And Bajo la Máscara (Behind the Mask, 2014); the short-stories collections ¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Ciudad interfase (¡¡Bzzzzzzt!! Interface City, 1998) and El llanto de los niños muertos (The Crying of the Dead Children, 2008); the children’s books Error de programación (Programming Error, 1997), Cuento de hadas para conejos (Fairy Tales for Rabbits, 2007), Groar and Soy el robot (I Am the Robot, 2010); and the graphic novels Pulpo cómics (Octopus Comics, 2004), Monorama (2007) and Monorama 2 (2009). He is one of the best young Mexican writers of our times and he has won several prizes, such as the national novel prize Otra Vuelta de Tuerca (Mexico), the prize Memorial Silverio Cañada for best first crime novel (Spain), Ignotus prize of the Spanish Association of Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror. .
Lilibeth Moreno is a fourth-year Literature/Writing student at UCSD. She has studied translation methods at the University of Barcelona and is currently writing her honors thesis, a work exploring Jacques Derrida’s under erasure method as applied to translations of contemporary Latin American poets such as Eduardo Milán, Flora Calderon, and José Eugenio Sánchez. Also, she likes grapefruit.