Jon Ureña's Blog, page 11
January 28, 2025
Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 8 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.
Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.
I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.
I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.
I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.
As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.
By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.
My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.
And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?
The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.
I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.
My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.
Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.
I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.
He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.
“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”
He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.
“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”
“But I’m offering it to you.”
“I’ve never shown any interest.”
He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.
“You’d like it if you tried.”
I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.
“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”
I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.
“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.
I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.
I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”
The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”
She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.
“I think that’s all.”
The supervisor stepped down a stair.
“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”
Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”
“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”
“You’re right.”
When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.
The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.
“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”
I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.
-----
Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.
Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.
Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.
About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.
Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.
I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.
I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.
I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.
As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.
By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.
My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.
And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?
The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.
I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.
My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.
Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.
I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.
He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.
“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”
He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.
“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”
“But I’m offering it to you.”
“I’ve never shown any interest.”
He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.
“You’d like it if you tried.”
I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.
“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”
I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.
“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.
I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.
I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”
The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”
She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.
“I think that’s all.”
The supervisor stepped down a stair.
“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”
Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”
“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”
“You’re right.”
When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.
The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.
“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”
I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.
-----
Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.
Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.
Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.
January 27, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 3 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I spotted Elena seated on a bench along the tree-lined waterfront promenade bordering the Bidasoa River, facing the grounds of Dumboa School. She wore a charcoal-gray zip-up hoodie with the hood tugged halfway up her head. Almond-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders. From the angle of her profile, I watched her right hand guide the pen in feverish strokes across the notebook resting on her thigh. She barely paused to flip the page, the motion seamless, as if her hand operated independently. Her pen kept scratching even as she reached for a one-liter carton of orange juice and tilted her head back for a hurried gulp. I pictured Elena as a child, sitting alone in a sandbox, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon beyond the gritty scatter of sand, her mind lost in a world of her own making.
I stepped onto the grass strip flanking her bench, and stood a few paces away. A voyeur trespassing in a museum of one. I wouldn’t startle her while she communed with the divine. Sparrows bickered in the gnarled plane tree overhead. Nearby, a pelota ball ricocheted off the court walls: whap, whap. Elena stopped writing. Her chin settled into her palm, the clicky end of her pen drumming against the notebook.
I crouched, plucked a pebble from the grass, then tossed it onto her notebook. Startled, her head jerked upwards. When she looked down, her gaze lingered on the pebble for a beat before she flipped to previous pages of her notebook. I threw another pebble, but this one hit her arm. Elena bolted upright and scanned the sky as if half-expecting a meteor to rip through the clouds.
With the caution you’d use to approach a stray cat, I edged into Elena’s line of sight. The afternoon light, straining through woolen clouds, gilded the alabaster oval of her face. She had sat with her back to three stories of balconies. Her hoodie was layered over a navy crewneck sweatshirt, and her black joggers bunched at the calves, revealing a slash of pale ivory skin. Her white sneakers, scuffed and worn, sported mismatched laces: one neon-green, one black.
“Nice seeing you again, Elena,” I said.
Her focus snapped to me. Near-translucent skin, bruised-pink lips like petals left too long in the sun. Her pupils dilated as if I had yanked her out of a trance. Her eyes—pale winter blue, adrift like ice floes in a sea of fatigue—held the somber, alienated gaze of someone who’d glimpsed the end of the world. She would haunt your story like the ghost of a tragic heroine, her face lingering long after the last page. She seemed less a person than an open wound: a thing of trembling nerve-endings and unstitched skin.
Her puzzled frown deepened as her stare sharpened, scalpel-like. She dropped her pen onto the notebook, then pulled out foam earplugs and pocketed them in her hoodie.
“Oh. You. That weird guy from the writing course.” Her voice emerged hoarse, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. “The one who didn’t join the lynch mob.”
“I wouldn’t call myself weird all of a sudden, but that’s generally correct.”
She reached down and picked up a pebble I’d tossed. Its dull grayness incongruous against the delicate curve of her fingertips, the fine-boned grace of her hand.
“Jon, was it? Did you throw these at me?”
“Yeah.”
“Throwing pebbles at disturbed writers… is that your thing?”
“I attempted a more interesting way to get your attention than just saying hello. Sadly it misfired.”
Elena studied the pebble before flicking it onto the grass. Her gaze darted between the river, the school grounds, and my face, as if trying to gauge how much trouble I was worth.
“An interesting way to get my attention? I don’t enjoy having things thrown at me.”
“I know you love a bit of dramatic flair.”
She cocked her head, her almond-blonde hair cascading across her cheek.
“You think I’m a drama queen, huh?”
“A connoisseur of the dramatic arts. A woman of refined tastes, who appreciates a little theater in her life.”
“Are you mocking me or trying to flatter me? I can’t tell.”
“Neither. Just saying that sometimes a girl enjoys a little pebble-tossing.”
Elena sighed, a weary exhalation that carried the weight of the day. She then rubbed at her forehead with a pale thumb.
“Sometimes a girl also enjoys being left alone,” she said, her tone dropping to an icy rasp. “But at least you didn’t try to psychoanalyze me or accuse me of lacking empathy. Seriously, what are you doing here, Jon? Are you stalking me, or is this just another cosmic joke at my expense?”
“I’ve been looking forward to bumping into you ever since the debacle at the writing course. And here you are, so I’m taking my chances.”
“What do you want, anyway? Do I owe you something?”
“Owing is not an accurate word for it. But if you feel that way, we can think of something.”
Her pale stare sliced into me. Irises like shards of glacier, sharp enough to draw blood.
“I’m tired of people. I’ve got no energy to spare.”
“I was captivated by your work, Elena. Powerful stuff, quite beautiful in an unsettling way. It has a visceral quality, a rawness that cuts through the bullshit. A shame what happened at the course. I feared that those differently-minded piling on your work would have discouraged you.”
Elena hunched forward and studied me as though I were an alien creature she couldn’t figure out. The sunlight caught her hair, turning strands of it to burnished gold.
“Powerful? Right. That’s exactly what everyone wants to read. Tales of mud, starvation, and eating salamanders. You’ll find that to survive in this world, you need to be sanitized. People want their little feel-good pieces about finding love in coffee shops or whatever the hell is considered marketable these days. They want to be told they’re good people and everything is going to be okay. But that’s not the truth. Truth is ugly. Truth is a woman eating a raw amphibian.”
“Who cares what people want? The whole thing is a hamster wheel.”
She leaned back, her hands gripping the edge of the bench.
“I don’t need your sympathy, Jon. It’s easier if people aren’t interested in me. I’m not like them. I don’t know how to act around them. I’m not good at pretending to be normal. I’m not good at pretending at all, I guess. But hey, since you brought it up… why did you defend me that day? Nobody asked you to play white knight for the class psycho.”
I could picture her as a princess in a castle of bones, her crown a circlet of thorns.
I leaned over the filigreed railing that bordered the promenade. Ferns sprouted from the cracks in the stone retaining wall, fanning outward. The opposite wall, moss-covered, darkened near its base like the stained bottom of an unwashed coffee cup. Below, the Bidasoa River, murky-teal and sluggish, carried twigs, bits of leaves, an orange peel. In the river’s dull sheen, wavy reflections caught the overcast white sky—a sheet of cotton wool pulled over a lamp. A trio of ducks glided over, their boatlike bodies corrugating the water in their wake. They stared expectantly like silent beggars. A silver grey mullet, open-mouthed and thriving even in the city’s sewage-laced currents, slipped into view, its gills pumping, then vanished into the murk. In the plane trees, sparrows chirped in a symphony of gossip over the whap, whap of a ball striking the pelota court walls.
I turned to face Elena, leaned back against the railing, and crossed my ankles.
“You read what you had needed to write, despite knowing it wouldn’t land well with that audience. I like bold people, those unafraid of getting their hands dirty. Who stand their ground. Too many bend their principles whenever society comes knocking. To be honest, I had wanted to quit the course for a while. Isabel is too much of a social butterfly for my taste. But I kept attending because I needed to know what you’d bring next. So after they lost you, I quit too. You can consider me your fellow deserter.”
-----
Author’s note: the scene will continue in the next part.
I spotted Elena seated on a bench along the tree-lined waterfront promenade bordering the Bidasoa River, facing the grounds of Dumboa School. She wore a charcoal-gray zip-up hoodie with the hood tugged halfway up her head. Almond-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders. From the angle of her profile, I watched her right hand guide the pen in feverish strokes across the notebook resting on her thigh. She barely paused to flip the page, the motion seamless, as if her hand operated independently. Her pen kept scratching even as she reached for a one-liter carton of orange juice and tilted her head back for a hurried gulp. I pictured Elena as a child, sitting alone in a sandbox, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon beyond the gritty scatter of sand, her mind lost in a world of her own making.
I stepped onto the grass strip flanking her bench, and stood a few paces away. A voyeur trespassing in a museum of one. I wouldn’t startle her while she communed with the divine. Sparrows bickered in the gnarled plane tree overhead. Nearby, a pelota ball ricocheted off the court walls: whap, whap. Elena stopped writing. Her chin settled into her palm, the clicky end of her pen drumming against the notebook.
I crouched, plucked a pebble from the grass, then tossed it onto her notebook. Startled, her head jerked upwards. When she looked down, her gaze lingered on the pebble for a beat before she flipped to previous pages of her notebook. I threw another pebble, but this one hit her arm. Elena bolted upright and scanned the sky as if half-expecting a meteor to rip through the clouds.
With the caution you’d use to approach a stray cat, I edged into Elena’s line of sight. The afternoon light, straining through woolen clouds, gilded the alabaster oval of her face. She had sat with her back to three stories of balconies. Her hoodie was layered over a navy crewneck sweatshirt, and her black joggers bunched at the calves, revealing a slash of pale ivory skin. Her white sneakers, scuffed and worn, sported mismatched laces: one neon-green, one black.
“Nice seeing you again, Elena,” I said.
Her focus snapped to me. Near-translucent skin, bruised-pink lips like petals left too long in the sun. Her pupils dilated as if I had yanked her out of a trance. Her eyes—pale winter blue, adrift like ice floes in a sea of fatigue—held the somber, alienated gaze of someone who’d glimpsed the end of the world. She would haunt your story like the ghost of a tragic heroine, her face lingering long after the last page. She seemed less a person than an open wound: a thing of trembling nerve-endings and unstitched skin.
Her puzzled frown deepened as her stare sharpened, scalpel-like. She dropped her pen onto the notebook, then pulled out foam earplugs and pocketed them in her hoodie.
“Oh. You. That weird guy from the writing course.” Her voice emerged hoarse, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. “The one who didn’t join the lynch mob.”
“I wouldn’t call myself weird all of a sudden, but that’s generally correct.”
She reached down and picked up a pebble I’d tossed. Its dull grayness incongruous against the delicate curve of her fingertips, the fine-boned grace of her hand.
“Jon, was it? Did you throw these at me?”
“Yeah.”
“Throwing pebbles at disturbed writers… is that your thing?”
“I attempted a more interesting way to get your attention than just saying hello. Sadly it misfired.”
Elena studied the pebble before flicking it onto the grass. Her gaze darted between the river, the school grounds, and my face, as if trying to gauge how much trouble I was worth.
“An interesting way to get my attention? I don’t enjoy having things thrown at me.”
“I know you love a bit of dramatic flair.”
She cocked her head, her almond-blonde hair cascading across her cheek.
“You think I’m a drama queen, huh?”
“A connoisseur of the dramatic arts. A woman of refined tastes, who appreciates a little theater in her life.”
“Are you mocking me or trying to flatter me? I can’t tell.”
“Neither. Just saying that sometimes a girl enjoys a little pebble-tossing.”
Elena sighed, a weary exhalation that carried the weight of the day. She then rubbed at her forehead with a pale thumb.
“Sometimes a girl also enjoys being left alone,” she said, her tone dropping to an icy rasp. “But at least you didn’t try to psychoanalyze me or accuse me of lacking empathy. Seriously, what are you doing here, Jon? Are you stalking me, or is this just another cosmic joke at my expense?”
“I’ve been looking forward to bumping into you ever since the debacle at the writing course. And here you are, so I’m taking my chances.”
“What do you want, anyway? Do I owe you something?”
“Owing is not an accurate word for it. But if you feel that way, we can think of something.”
Her pale stare sliced into me. Irises like shards of glacier, sharp enough to draw blood.
“I’m tired of people. I’ve got no energy to spare.”
“I was captivated by your work, Elena. Powerful stuff, quite beautiful in an unsettling way. It has a visceral quality, a rawness that cuts through the bullshit. A shame what happened at the course. I feared that those differently-minded piling on your work would have discouraged you.”
Elena hunched forward and studied me as though I were an alien creature she couldn’t figure out. The sunlight caught her hair, turning strands of it to burnished gold.
“Powerful? Right. That’s exactly what everyone wants to read. Tales of mud, starvation, and eating salamanders. You’ll find that to survive in this world, you need to be sanitized. People want their little feel-good pieces about finding love in coffee shops or whatever the hell is considered marketable these days. They want to be told they’re good people and everything is going to be okay. But that’s not the truth. Truth is ugly. Truth is a woman eating a raw amphibian.”
“Who cares what people want? The whole thing is a hamster wheel.”
She leaned back, her hands gripping the edge of the bench.
“I don’t need your sympathy, Jon. It’s easier if people aren’t interested in me. I’m not like them. I don’t know how to act around them. I’m not good at pretending to be normal. I’m not good at pretending at all, I guess. But hey, since you brought it up… why did you defend me that day? Nobody asked you to play white knight for the class psycho.”
I could picture her as a princess in a castle of bones, her crown a circlet of thorns.
I leaned over the filigreed railing that bordered the promenade. Ferns sprouted from the cracks in the stone retaining wall, fanning outward. The opposite wall, moss-covered, darkened near its base like the stained bottom of an unwashed coffee cup. Below, the Bidasoa River, murky-teal and sluggish, carried twigs, bits of leaves, an orange peel. In the river’s dull sheen, wavy reflections caught the overcast white sky—a sheet of cotton wool pulled over a lamp. A trio of ducks glided over, their boatlike bodies corrugating the water in their wake. They stared expectantly like silent beggars. A silver grey mullet, open-mouthed and thriving even in the city’s sewage-laced currents, slipped into view, its gills pumping, then vanished into the murk. In the plane trees, sparrows chirped in a symphony of gossip over the whap, whap of a ball striking the pelota court walls.
I turned to face Elena, leaned back against the railing, and crossed my ankles.
“You read what you had needed to write, despite knowing it wouldn’t land well with that audience. I like bold people, those unafraid of getting their hands dirty. Who stand their ground. Too many bend their principles whenever society comes knocking. To be honest, I had wanted to quit the course for a while. Isabel is too much of a social butterfly for my taste. But I kept attending because I needed to know what you’d bring next. So after they lost you, I quit too. You can consider me your fellow deserter.”
-----
Author’s note: the scene will continue in the next part.
Albums that marked me, Pt. 5
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
As a solitary dude, all my life I have relied on music to connect with the world at large, to feel that my feelings weren’t that unique or detached from the rest of humanity. Over the years, I’ve returned to certain albums that have spoken to me in ways that can’t be fully put into words. I love discovering new albums, and perhaps that’s also the case for whoever is reading these words, so I’ll spend some of my limited time on Earth sharing some specifics about the albums that have marked me, and that in many ways changed me.
Today I’m tackling a big one for me: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, released back in 2006. I will need to think about Joanna quite a bit in the coming year, so I may as well tackle this now. Ys, her pinnacle, and as well as I’m concerned one of the pinnacles of artistry, is a baroque masterpiece of music and storytelling, produced by a songwriter at the height of her powers, who at the time danced with her subconscious unimpeded.
Joanna changed her major from music to creative writing in college; she found the constraints that teachers put into music creation too oppresive, like straitjackets. She’s a songstress of old, the kind you could imagine traveling from town to town and reweaving her careful tales to an enraptured audience. All five songs in the album are mesmerizing.
Joanna is the kind of person who would write until four in the morning, obsessing over individual words and meanings. Added to her difficulties interacting with people, authenticity, extreme sensitivity, obsession with obscure people and topics, etc., I have always suspected she’s autistic, but I’m very biased in that respect.
In addition, this version of Joanna retained her beautiful, creaky voice, before she developed vocal cord nodules and could not speak or sing for two months; afterwards, her voice changed permanently, which made her fantastic following album Have One on Me quite tragic to listen to at times.
All the songs in Ys give me chills consistently. You can use words to justify anything, but chills don’t lie. Joanna’s music is unbridled beauty. I revere her as one of the most magnificent artists to ever live.
[check out the rest of this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
As a solitary dude, all my life I have relied on music to connect with the world at large, to feel that my feelings weren’t that unique or detached from the rest of humanity. Over the years, I’ve returned to certain albums that have spoken to me in ways that can’t be fully put into words. I love discovering new albums, and perhaps that’s also the case for whoever is reading these words, so I’ll spend some of my limited time on Earth sharing some specifics about the albums that have marked me, and that in many ways changed me.
Today I’m tackling a big one for me: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, released back in 2006. I will need to think about Joanna quite a bit in the coming year, so I may as well tackle this now. Ys, her pinnacle, and as well as I’m concerned one of the pinnacles of artistry, is a baroque masterpiece of music and storytelling, produced by a songwriter at the height of her powers, who at the time danced with her subconscious unimpeded.
Joanna changed her major from music to creative writing in college; she found the constraints that teachers put into music creation too oppresive, like straitjackets. She’s a songstress of old, the kind you could imagine traveling from town to town and reweaving her careful tales to an enraptured audience. All five songs in the album are mesmerizing.
Joanna is the kind of person who would write until four in the morning, obsessing over individual words and meanings. Added to her difficulties interacting with people, authenticity, extreme sensitivity, obsession with obscure people and topics, etc., I have always suspected she’s autistic, but I’m very biased in that respect.
In addition, this version of Joanna retained her beautiful, creaky voice, before she developed vocal cord nodules and could not speak or sing for two months; afterwards, her voice changed permanently, which made her fantastic following album Have One on Me quite tragic to listen to at times.
All the songs in Ys give me chills consistently. You can use words to justify anything, but chills don’t lie. Joanna’s music is unbridled beauty. I revere her as one of the most magnificent artists to ever live.
[check out the rest of this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 7 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I held the machine part in my hands like it would shatter if dropped. My features had petrified; I blinked only when my one sensitive cornea dried out. The hum of the air conditioner hypnotized me as it battled to cool this box of a room beneath the sun-scorched roof. Droplets of sweat slid like snails down my back, my sides, my chest, while I inspected each part three times before passing it to Christopher.
I pressed the button to start the conveyor belt. Two seconds later I realized I’d forgotten to screw in the bolt clenched in my fist. A wave of rage hit me, sharp as the stench of burning plastic. I grabbed the piece, positioned it, and hunched over to twist the screwdriver. How had I convinced myself I’d completed this part? Why had my brain hidden the mistake? Exhaustion—the kind that comes from juggling multiple jobs at once: assembling machine parts, fixing others’ errors, tolerating coworkers stuck in fight-or-flight mode, locking my anxiety behind a mask of calm. I pretended nothing bothered me, but I was draining the energy I required to function. Soon, others would sense it—that sixth instinct for reading people—and realize that a festering abscess of dread was swelling inside me. Anxiety fissured my face. I’d need stories to explain those cracks, to pacify anyone who noticed.
Someone watched from above. Like daring to glance at a shadow that had cracked open my bedroom door at midnight, I stole a look toward the supervisor’s office window. It showed the lime-green shirt clinging to her frame, her hair loose, a vaccination scar stark on her bare shoulder. Her eyes stayed fixed on the computer screen.
The shift-end horn blared, drilling into my throbbing headache. I sank onto the stool and rubbed my temple. My mind felt liquefied, as if I’d just staggered out of a final exam.
I joined the purple river of workers flowing toward the lockers. The world had turned to glass; if anyone collided with a table edge in the chaos, both would shatter.
As I peeled off my work coat, Héctor slung an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and pulled him close. He held up his phone.
“Check this one out.”
Christopher nodded and scratched his chin. Héctor snorted. He then howled like a cartoon wolf, shaking Christopher until his head bobbed like a clapper.
“The kinda woman you have kids with,” Héctor said.
Christopher traced the arched scar on his scalp with a finger, as if tucking a strand behind his ear. My stomach turned to ice. The man began to stammer, his thoughts filtering through a drain clogged with rot.
“Doubt she’d want me. Besides, it’d ruin her figure.”
“She’d look fine after six kids.” Héctor tapped the screen. “Those hips? Fertile as hell.”
I stepped into the inferno of the parking lot. Dust choked the air as I dragged my feet toward my Chevrolet Lumina, its hood blazing under the sun. Someone slapped my shoulder. I swallowed a scowl. John—or Joseph—in a wrinkled shirt, gestured at the dent in my bumper.
“Someone did a number on you.”
“Found it like that this morning. Maybe a drunk kicked it.”
He shook his head, tongue clicking.
“Bastards slashed my bike last year. Never stick around after.”
He strode to his motorcycle, fastened his helmet, and within seconds shrank into the distance, swallowed by the engine’s snarling growl.
I slumped against my car door, waiting for the oven-like interior to cool. Héctor and Christopher, still glued to the phone, drifted toward the far fence, where Héctor had parked his car. The supervisor emerged waving goodbye, a folder under her arm. Her sister’s silhouette loomed in the SUV’s windshield.
Caroline wandered past the dispersing crowd—a time traveler stranded in the wrong era. Her sunflower-yellow dress tangled around her legs as she tiptoed toward the scrap container, moving with the tentative, wide-eyed stealth of a child sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to swipe cookies. She leaned over the edge and rummaged through broken parts.
By a smoke-gray Porsche stood the woman who picked Caroline up. Deep wrinkles suggested her forties, but her hair was silver-streaked save a few chestnut strands. She hugged herself, a trembling cigarette at her lips, coiled like a compressed spring. When Caroline pocketed a scrap, the woman shot her a look reserved for a dog with chronic diarrhea. Caroline, grinning, bent deeper into the container, her dress riding up her thighs. The woman flicked her cigarette, inhaled sharply, and barked Caroline’s name. She jerked upright and shuffled over, slippers scuffing asphalt.
I drove home through streets clogged with families, café terraces, parks where kids swung from wooden bridges. An antique shop flashed by: rows of tarnished silver, furniture styles extinct for decades. A bronze horse, no bigger than a G.I. Joe, galloped in my mind—hoof suspended, mane frozen mid-shake. Minutes later, a bag sat on my passenger seat. I had dodged the usual guilt over splurging, the fear that I had stolen from savings meant to save me when I next woke in a ditch.
I parked four strides from my apartment door. The bronze horse weighed down the bag in my grip. I circled the car, feigning interest in scratches while eyeing passersby: a twentysomething glued to his phone, a rotund woman hauling a bloated grocery sack.
The trunk key trembled in my hand as if I were descending into a haunted basement. Inside, a beast raged, waiting to claw my eyes out. I wrenched the key. The lid rose. The canvas bag lay there, stuffed like military gear.
My pulse hammered. Nausea tightened my throat. I slung the canvas bag over my shoulder, its weight yanking my collarbone. Closed the trunk.
On the stairs, footsteps echoed. I pressed against the wall, shielding the bag. Jeans and scuffed sneakers paused.
“Back from the gym?”
“Gotta stay fit.”
His laugh clipped the exchange. I hurried upstairs. All it took was to answer these intrusions with some trivial nonsense. People who actually liked human beings needed those signals—hollow small talk, rehearsed smiles—and those gestures turned you invisible. Even though I would have preferred to stay silent and vault upstairs two steps at a time.
Inside, I dumped the bags on the dining table. I stripped to my skin, then collapsed facedown on the couch, breathing dust that smelled of tinsel crushed under asses. My body vibrated like post-marathon.
I woke to rust-colored light bleeding through the balcony. Half-asleep I wandered, chugging from a plastic bottle, thumbing the warm bronze horse. I craved the night—headlights splitting oil-black roads, trucks’ phantasmal glows. But what would happen while I was gone? The landlord might storm in clutching some flimsy pretext—a leak to inspect, a vent to clean. Against all odds, a thief would ransack the apartment, find the corpse, and his conscience would claw him raw until he called the cops, even though that would fuck him over too. I was born smeared with that vile luck, a grease stain no detergent could scrub out.
I positioned the bronze horse beside the canvas bag, arranging it as if mid-gallop along the edge of an imaginary cliff. I slumped at one end of the dining table, opened my laptop, and launched VLC to play the last film I’d downloaded. Forty-five seconds of corporate logos flashed by—a gauntlet of animated studio emblems—before the film began: long shots of a car winding through pine-stitched roads, the background to a long list of credits.
Fiction used to distract me when I drowned in the molasses of monotony, but now I was just killing time. Behind the laptop screen, the swollen canvas bag darkened in the gloom. The horse clung to its bronzed hue as the apartment dissolved into blackness.
I closed the film. The browser loaded Google’s homepage, its search bar blinking a taunting vertical slash. An itch festered in my chest. Every passing minute pumped more diluted poison into my blood.
I typed “corpse decomposition process,” then hammered the backspace key. Police, FBI, NSA—they’d flag the search, log the query, trace the IP. What if I used a public library computer? I scrubbed my face. Brilliant plan: risk being the sunglasses-clad, mangled-faced freak googling how corpses rot.
I stood and snapped the laptop shut. The canvas bag, the horse, the table beneath them—all had grayed into ashen silhouettes. I gripped the bag’s zipper pull. Hesitated, no idea why.
I yanked the curtains shut, cranked the blinds down over every window. Scoured the ceiling corners. Crouched to inspect the undersides of two lampshades, hunting for hidden cameras.
Flicked on the hallway light. The zipper’s teeth split open. While pressing my lips tight, I slid my hands along the sides of the corpse sheathed in plastic. Hauled it out. It weighed like a dog. When I dropped it onto the table, the crumpled mass slid into folds and lumps.
Behind the fogged plastic blurred by condensation, I discerned the contours of the head, the half-closed eyes like those of a dead lamb. The yellowish-green skin had mottled with freckles, except for the bruises stretching from what seemed to be a shoulder down to the hip—areas where the body’s weight had pressed when I’d placed it in the freezer the night before.
I grew dizzy, like a child who had spun a dozen times in a chair. I doubled over, clutching the edge of the table. When I forced myself to look back at the body, I noticed that a band of skin on one wrist had peeled away from friction, exposing a wound that had never healed. A tight watch? No. Handcuffs? Shackles. Iron shackles that had gouged the wrists, with chains linked to a ring bolted into a wall.
I wandered the room as if in a trance. A stench seeped from the corpse, like a chunk of chicken forgotten for a week at the bottom of a trash bin. I needed it to vanish. If I shut my eyes tight, maybe when I reopened them, the plastic would have deflated into a shapeless heap. Should I drive aimlessly, fling the door open mid-road, and hurl the package into a ditch? No—I had to make identification harder, to sever any link to myself. Dismember it. Carve it apart and scatter the pieces.
I dragged my fingers through my scalp, hyperventilated to clear my mind. How had I ended up needing to decide a corpse’s fate? A growl slipped out. I turned toward the boy as though he’d disobeyed me.
“Why did you dart across the road in the middle of the night without checking for cars?”
The boy had chained me to his fate. As long as any recognizable part of the corpse existed, my life hung in the balance. I pulled the chef’s knife from the counter drawer and hefted it. Imagined slicing through an arm at the bicep. Would I need shears? I reached for them with my free hand but, revolted, hurled the knife into the sink, where it clanged against metal. Leaning my forearms on the counter, I realized I’d need workshop tools. A saw. Maybe I could find one in the job-site storage. Tomorrow, during a break, I’d slip away and look. No, no. Even if I brought back a saw, could I bring myself to dismember the body? And how would I dispose of every piece before the weekend?
I slumped against the counter’s edge and slid to the floor. Above me, the semi-transparent package lay on the table, veined with haze. Less than twenty-four hours ago, this boy had sprinted through the night, far from any house I might have glimpsed by day in those oilfield plains. Had he escaped confinement like a tiger that, finding its cage open, would leap and bolt into the thicket, driven by some genetic imperative for freedom?
How much mental disability had burdened this boy? Had he understood how others would see him? If he’d faced a mirror, would he have recognized himself, or would he have thought he stared at a monster?
-----
Author’s note: this story was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
That bit about a high-strung woman barking at Caroline to quit picking up trash and leave was inspired by an unfortunate moment I witnessed. Back when people could still smoke in bars and coffee shops, I was writing in the basement of a coffee shop I liked to frequent because the basement was usually deserted. Not that day: the sole other couple was a high-strung woman in perhaps her early thirties, who kept chain smoking while listening to a bespectacled younger woman who was clearly mentally challenged. The latter woman went to the bathroom. Once she returned and sat down, the nastiest stench of shit filled the basement, as if she had expelled the foulest diarrhea and hadn’t wiped her ass. This clearly mentally-challenged woman kept talking with a smile while the other woman, perhaps her relative, chain smoked even harder while tapping nervously on the floor with her foot. It felt meaningful, the kind of moment you can’t share in a world where the darknesses of interacting with severely disabled people tend to be swept under the rug. At least in Spain, the public message regarding disabled people is that of smiley, good-hearted, resilient folk who just happened to have been burdened with any of life’s myriad nonsenses, which of course they handle without significantly bothering anybody. But sometimes you’re burdened with someone who shits all over and doesn’t know how to clean after herself.
Sorry, Caroline, for turning you into a receptacle of troublesome qualities I witnessed in different disabled people. Even ten years later, I remember you fondly as a distant, mysterious spirit of unbridled innocence.
I’m also quite certain that if you leave a corpse in the trunk of a car in the scorching sun, in less than twenty-four hours, the plastic package would have been swarming with maggots. Just pretend that it wouldn’t, alright? We’re in the business of make-believe here.
I held the machine part in my hands like it would shatter if dropped. My features had petrified; I blinked only when my one sensitive cornea dried out. The hum of the air conditioner hypnotized me as it battled to cool this box of a room beneath the sun-scorched roof. Droplets of sweat slid like snails down my back, my sides, my chest, while I inspected each part three times before passing it to Christopher.
I pressed the button to start the conveyor belt. Two seconds later I realized I’d forgotten to screw in the bolt clenched in my fist. A wave of rage hit me, sharp as the stench of burning plastic. I grabbed the piece, positioned it, and hunched over to twist the screwdriver. How had I convinced myself I’d completed this part? Why had my brain hidden the mistake? Exhaustion—the kind that comes from juggling multiple jobs at once: assembling machine parts, fixing others’ errors, tolerating coworkers stuck in fight-or-flight mode, locking my anxiety behind a mask of calm. I pretended nothing bothered me, but I was draining the energy I required to function. Soon, others would sense it—that sixth instinct for reading people—and realize that a festering abscess of dread was swelling inside me. Anxiety fissured my face. I’d need stories to explain those cracks, to pacify anyone who noticed.
Someone watched from above. Like daring to glance at a shadow that had cracked open my bedroom door at midnight, I stole a look toward the supervisor’s office window. It showed the lime-green shirt clinging to her frame, her hair loose, a vaccination scar stark on her bare shoulder. Her eyes stayed fixed on the computer screen.
The shift-end horn blared, drilling into my throbbing headache. I sank onto the stool and rubbed my temple. My mind felt liquefied, as if I’d just staggered out of a final exam.
I joined the purple river of workers flowing toward the lockers. The world had turned to glass; if anyone collided with a table edge in the chaos, both would shatter.
As I peeled off my work coat, Héctor slung an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and pulled him close. He held up his phone.
“Check this one out.”
Christopher nodded and scratched his chin. Héctor snorted. He then howled like a cartoon wolf, shaking Christopher until his head bobbed like a clapper.
“The kinda woman you have kids with,” Héctor said.
Christopher traced the arched scar on his scalp with a finger, as if tucking a strand behind his ear. My stomach turned to ice. The man began to stammer, his thoughts filtering through a drain clogged with rot.
“Doubt she’d want me. Besides, it’d ruin her figure.”
“She’d look fine after six kids.” Héctor tapped the screen. “Those hips? Fertile as hell.”
I stepped into the inferno of the parking lot. Dust choked the air as I dragged my feet toward my Chevrolet Lumina, its hood blazing under the sun. Someone slapped my shoulder. I swallowed a scowl. John—or Joseph—in a wrinkled shirt, gestured at the dent in my bumper.
“Someone did a number on you.”
“Found it like that this morning. Maybe a drunk kicked it.”
He shook his head, tongue clicking.
“Bastards slashed my bike last year. Never stick around after.”
He strode to his motorcycle, fastened his helmet, and within seconds shrank into the distance, swallowed by the engine’s snarling growl.
I slumped against my car door, waiting for the oven-like interior to cool. Héctor and Christopher, still glued to the phone, drifted toward the far fence, where Héctor had parked his car. The supervisor emerged waving goodbye, a folder under her arm. Her sister’s silhouette loomed in the SUV’s windshield.
Caroline wandered past the dispersing crowd—a time traveler stranded in the wrong era. Her sunflower-yellow dress tangled around her legs as she tiptoed toward the scrap container, moving with the tentative, wide-eyed stealth of a child sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to swipe cookies. She leaned over the edge and rummaged through broken parts.
By a smoke-gray Porsche stood the woman who picked Caroline up. Deep wrinkles suggested her forties, but her hair was silver-streaked save a few chestnut strands. She hugged herself, a trembling cigarette at her lips, coiled like a compressed spring. When Caroline pocketed a scrap, the woman shot her a look reserved for a dog with chronic diarrhea. Caroline, grinning, bent deeper into the container, her dress riding up her thighs. The woman flicked her cigarette, inhaled sharply, and barked Caroline’s name. She jerked upright and shuffled over, slippers scuffing asphalt.
I drove home through streets clogged with families, café terraces, parks where kids swung from wooden bridges. An antique shop flashed by: rows of tarnished silver, furniture styles extinct for decades. A bronze horse, no bigger than a G.I. Joe, galloped in my mind—hoof suspended, mane frozen mid-shake. Minutes later, a bag sat on my passenger seat. I had dodged the usual guilt over splurging, the fear that I had stolen from savings meant to save me when I next woke in a ditch.
I parked four strides from my apartment door. The bronze horse weighed down the bag in my grip. I circled the car, feigning interest in scratches while eyeing passersby: a twentysomething glued to his phone, a rotund woman hauling a bloated grocery sack.
The trunk key trembled in my hand as if I were descending into a haunted basement. Inside, a beast raged, waiting to claw my eyes out. I wrenched the key. The lid rose. The canvas bag lay there, stuffed like military gear.
My pulse hammered. Nausea tightened my throat. I slung the canvas bag over my shoulder, its weight yanking my collarbone. Closed the trunk.
On the stairs, footsteps echoed. I pressed against the wall, shielding the bag. Jeans and scuffed sneakers paused.
“Back from the gym?”
“Gotta stay fit.”
His laugh clipped the exchange. I hurried upstairs. All it took was to answer these intrusions with some trivial nonsense. People who actually liked human beings needed those signals—hollow small talk, rehearsed smiles—and those gestures turned you invisible. Even though I would have preferred to stay silent and vault upstairs two steps at a time.
Inside, I dumped the bags on the dining table. I stripped to my skin, then collapsed facedown on the couch, breathing dust that smelled of tinsel crushed under asses. My body vibrated like post-marathon.
I woke to rust-colored light bleeding through the balcony. Half-asleep I wandered, chugging from a plastic bottle, thumbing the warm bronze horse. I craved the night—headlights splitting oil-black roads, trucks’ phantasmal glows. But what would happen while I was gone? The landlord might storm in clutching some flimsy pretext—a leak to inspect, a vent to clean. Against all odds, a thief would ransack the apartment, find the corpse, and his conscience would claw him raw until he called the cops, even though that would fuck him over too. I was born smeared with that vile luck, a grease stain no detergent could scrub out.
I positioned the bronze horse beside the canvas bag, arranging it as if mid-gallop along the edge of an imaginary cliff. I slumped at one end of the dining table, opened my laptop, and launched VLC to play the last film I’d downloaded. Forty-five seconds of corporate logos flashed by—a gauntlet of animated studio emblems—before the film began: long shots of a car winding through pine-stitched roads, the background to a long list of credits.
Fiction used to distract me when I drowned in the molasses of monotony, but now I was just killing time. Behind the laptop screen, the swollen canvas bag darkened in the gloom. The horse clung to its bronzed hue as the apartment dissolved into blackness.
I closed the film. The browser loaded Google’s homepage, its search bar blinking a taunting vertical slash. An itch festered in my chest. Every passing minute pumped more diluted poison into my blood.
I typed “corpse decomposition process,” then hammered the backspace key. Police, FBI, NSA—they’d flag the search, log the query, trace the IP. What if I used a public library computer? I scrubbed my face. Brilliant plan: risk being the sunglasses-clad, mangled-faced freak googling how corpses rot.
I stood and snapped the laptop shut. The canvas bag, the horse, the table beneath them—all had grayed into ashen silhouettes. I gripped the bag’s zipper pull. Hesitated, no idea why.
I yanked the curtains shut, cranked the blinds down over every window. Scoured the ceiling corners. Crouched to inspect the undersides of two lampshades, hunting for hidden cameras.
Flicked on the hallway light. The zipper’s teeth split open. While pressing my lips tight, I slid my hands along the sides of the corpse sheathed in plastic. Hauled it out. It weighed like a dog. When I dropped it onto the table, the crumpled mass slid into folds and lumps.
Behind the fogged plastic blurred by condensation, I discerned the contours of the head, the half-closed eyes like those of a dead lamb. The yellowish-green skin had mottled with freckles, except for the bruises stretching from what seemed to be a shoulder down to the hip—areas where the body’s weight had pressed when I’d placed it in the freezer the night before.
I grew dizzy, like a child who had spun a dozen times in a chair. I doubled over, clutching the edge of the table. When I forced myself to look back at the body, I noticed that a band of skin on one wrist had peeled away from friction, exposing a wound that had never healed. A tight watch? No. Handcuffs? Shackles. Iron shackles that had gouged the wrists, with chains linked to a ring bolted into a wall.
I wandered the room as if in a trance. A stench seeped from the corpse, like a chunk of chicken forgotten for a week at the bottom of a trash bin. I needed it to vanish. If I shut my eyes tight, maybe when I reopened them, the plastic would have deflated into a shapeless heap. Should I drive aimlessly, fling the door open mid-road, and hurl the package into a ditch? No—I had to make identification harder, to sever any link to myself. Dismember it. Carve it apart and scatter the pieces.
I dragged my fingers through my scalp, hyperventilated to clear my mind. How had I ended up needing to decide a corpse’s fate? A growl slipped out. I turned toward the boy as though he’d disobeyed me.
“Why did you dart across the road in the middle of the night without checking for cars?”
The boy had chained me to his fate. As long as any recognizable part of the corpse existed, my life hung in the balance. I pulled the chef’s knife from the counter drawer and hefted it. Imagined slicing through an arm at the bicep. Would I need shears? I reached for them with my free hand but, revolted, hurled the knife into the sink, where it clanged against metal. Leaning my forearms on the counter, I realized I’d need workshop tools. A saw. Maybe I could find one in the job-site storage. Tomorrow, during a break, I’d slip away and look. No, no. Even if I brought back a saw, could I bring myself to dismember the body? And how would I dispose of every piece before the weekend?
I slumped against the counter’s edge and slid to the floor. Above me, the semi-transparent package lay on the table, veined with haze. Less than twenty-four hours ago, this boy had sprinted through the night, far from any house I might have glimpsed by day in those oilfield plains. Had he escaped confinement like a tiger that, finding its cage open, would leap and bolt into the thicket, driven by some genetic imperative for freedom?
How much mental disability had burdened this boy? Had he understood how others would see him? If he’d faced a mirror, would he have recognized himself, or would he have thought he stared at a monster?
-----
Author’s note: this story was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
That bit about a high-strung woman barking at Caroline to quit picking up trash and leave was inspired by an unfortunate moment I witnessed. Back when people could still smoke in bars and coffee shops, I was writing in the basement of a coffee shop I liked to frequent because the basement was usually deserted. Not that day: the sole other couple was a high-strung woman in perhaps her early thirties, who kept chain smoking while listening to a bespectacled younger woman who was clearly mentally challenged. The latter woman went to the bathroom. Once she returned and sat down, the nastiest stench of shit filled the basement, as if she had expelled the foulest diarrhea and hadn’t wiped her ass. This clearly mentally-challenged woman kept talking with a smile while the other woman, perhaps her relative, chain smoked even harder while tapping nervously on the floor with her foot. It felt meaningful, the kind of moment you can’t share in a world where the darknesses of interacting with severely disabled people tend to be swept under the rug. At least in Spain, the public message regarding disabled people is that of smiley, good-hearted, resilient folk who just happened to have been burdened with any of life’s myriad nonsenses, which of course they handle without significantly bothering anybody. But sometimes you’re burdened with someone who shits all over and doesn’t know how to clean after herself.
Sorry, Caroline, for turning you into a receptacle of troublesome qualities I witnessed in different disabled people. Even ten years later, I remember you fondly as a distant, mysterious spirit of unbridled innocence.
I’m also quite certain that if you leave a corpse in the trunk of a car in the scorching sun, in less than twenty-four hours, the plastic package would have been swarming with maggots. Just pretend that it wouldn’t, alright? We’re in the business of make-believe here.
January 25, 2025
Life update (01/25/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I have a few things to say regarding the first scene of my new novel, named The Scrap Colossus. In the first scene, that encompasses part 1 and part 2, the protagonist attends a writing class and presents her latest piece, with generally disastrous consequences. From now on there will be “spoilers” when it comes to the two released parts, so if you’re interested, you should probably read them first.
First, let’s start with the following three photos:
That weird-looking fellow, all six-foot-two and two-hundred thirty pounds of him, happens to be me from back in 2015, when I attended the writing course that the first scene of my novel is based on. I don’t own, or at least haven’t found, better quality photos, because I hate being photographed. I suppose I’ve always had some degree of body dysmorphic disorder, and I don’t appreciate how I look at all. It doesn’t help that in my fantasies I’m rarely myself.
Anyway, that version of me from ten years ago presented a piece to the class. In it, the instructor, who had requested to be the protagonist, traveled back in time. Instead of showing her having a good time, I sent her to a primeval epoch. There, after suffering a bit, she ended up accidentally preventing the evolution of mammals, which led to her vanishing from existence after a little jab at how she focuses on her social image. Well, the class didn’t like it one bit. When I finished reading it, the room was silent, and shortly after, the nervous instructor brought up the fact that I had never mentioned her daughter. She accused me of lacking empathy. All of this may be sounding quite familiar. Because fiction is generally much better than reality, my fictional version of events is far more eloquent. Anyway, the class continued, with me seated there while wondering why on earth had I decided to sign up for that course. By the way, if that instructor read the two parts I posted on here, she’d be livid.
At the time I was enrolled in two writing courses. The other was imparted by a local writer of English origin who was in his eighties at the time. His classes were a sham. He basically put as assignments for us to continue excerpts from his stories, and then tried to guilt us into buying the books the excerpts belonged to. He let us present our own pieces, but whenever anyone said a word that he didn’t know (and many of them were relatively simple words), he accused us of being pretentious, of trying to look more intelligent than we were. He argued with me for a bit about the word “jade,” for example, which I used to refer to the color of a sea. Throughout the weeks, I presented scenes from the novellas I was revising at the time (you may already know Smile and Trash in a Ditch , although there were four others). Well, the guy was supposed to take the pieces home and correct them or whatever, but by the end, he refused to do so with mine. He was clearly bothered by them.
The way he pushed back my excerpt during the last class, which happened a day after being accused of lack of empathy by the instructor of the previous class, made me decide that I had no business involving myself in these people’s lives, so I just quit both classes and detached myself from the local writing scene. I never interacted with any of them again. Perhaps a week or so later, the instructor in his eighties suffered a stroke that ultimately led to his death, and I heard through the grapevine that he actually blamed me for it. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that blame is real or if I hallucinated it.
The last time I saw him, he was weakened from his stroke, and some family member was holding his arm as he tottered down a corridor of the library. The moment he spotted me coming along the same corridor, he looked scared, and told the woman holding his arm to move into some adjacent room. Can’t say I feel too bad; not only I found him quite fraudulent as a writer, but also who fucking blames a stroke on one of his students presenting stories? And there’s something extremely disturbing for me that as a writer, he was so disturbed by someone else’s writing. However, it wasn’t surprising: he admitted that he hadn’t read fiction in decades, even though he kept writing it. But perhaps his demise never bothered me due to my lack of empathy.
Yeah, I can’t care about most people. I was wired that way. I’m not a good guy, nor do I pretend to be. I do care enormously about people in certain circumstances and from certain angles. My new novel is mostly autobiographical, although I mix in many elements from other people I came to know. So many other shameful aspects of my life will be brought kicking and screaming into the light. That’ll be intriguing to render.
I think that The Scrap Colossus will be a solid, entertaining tale about a reclusive autistic person who is trying to honor the songwriter she’s obsessed with by writing an elaborate novel about the songwriter’s life. That’s what has to happen because that’s what I did. Full-blown autistic obsession that lasted from about 2011 to 2013, an experience and perspective that most people aren’t familiar with, so maybe it will make for an interesting story. Regardless of what others will think about it, I need to do it because my subconscious has demanded it, so my hands are tied.
The hardest parts to handle will be the many, many scenes of the story within a story, the novel that the protagonist wrote inspired by this songwriter. The novel actually exists in different stages of production (the first two “books” of the novel are revised to a publishable state, the third would require at least a couple of revisions, and the last two books are in the draft stage), so it would be feasible to include actual excerpts from that other novel into the current narrative, but I think I’ll prefer for my narrator to act as myself reviewing and offering criticism to my actual past self’s production from ten years ago. That sounds like the funnest angle to me. Besides, I no longer feel like the same person I was in 2015, let alone during my obsession, so I can be somewhat objective.
Anyway, it’s a quarter to four in the afternoon of this Saturday. Although I’m quite groggy due to having woken up at five in the morning to finish the second part of my new novel, now I’ll head to the location where the third scene is going to take place, so I can take notes. Thankfully the story is set where I actually live; I hate having to fake my impressions of a place I’ve never been in, even though you can go quite far with photographs and videos.
That’s all for now, I think. See ya.
I have a few things to say regarding the first scene of my new novel, named The Scrap Colossus. In the first scene, that encompasses part 1 and part 2, the protagonist attends a writing class and presents her latest piece, with generally disastrous consequences. From now on there will be “spoilers” when it comes to the two released parts, so if you’re interested, you should probably read them first.
First, let’s start with the following three photos:
That weird-looking fellow, all six-foot-two and two-hundred thirty pounds of him, happens to be me from back in 2015, when I attended the writing course that the first scene of my novel is based on. I don’t own, or at least haven’t found, better quality photos, because I hate being photographed. I suppose I’ve always had some degree of body dysmorphic disorder, and I don’t appreciate how I look at all. It doesn’t help that in my fantasies I’m rarely myself.
Anyway, that version of me from ten years ago presented a piece to the class. In it, the instructor, who had requested to be the protagonist, traveled back in time. Instead of showing her having a good time, I sent her to a primeval epoch. There, after suffering a bit, she ended up accidentally preventing the evolution of mammals, which led to her vanishing from existence after a little jab at how she focuses on her social image. Well, the class didn’t like it one bit. When I finished reading it, the room was silent, and shortly after, the nervous instructor brought up the fact that I had never mentioned her daughter. She accused me of lacking empathy. All of this may be sounding quite familiar. Because fiction is generally much better than reality, my fictional version of events is far more eloquent. Anyway, the class continued, with me seated there while wondering why on earth had I decided to sign up for that course. By the way, if that instructor read the two parts I posted on here, she’d be livid.
At the time I was enrolled in two writing courses. The other was imparted by a local writer of English origin who was in his eighties at the time. His classes were a sham. He basically put as assignments for us to continue excerpts from his stories, and then tried to guilt us into buying the books the excerpts belonged to. He let us present our own pieces, but whenever anyone said a word that he didn’t know (and many of them were relatively simple words), he accused us of being pretentious, of trying to look more intelligent than we were. He argued with me for a bit about the word “jade,” for example, which I used to refer to the color of a sea. Throughout the weeks, I presented scenes from the novellas I was revising at the time (you may already know Smile and Trash in a Ditch , although there were four others). Well, the guy was supposed to take the pieces home and correct them or whatever, but by the end, he refused to do so with mine. He was clearly bothered by them.
The way he pushed back my excerpt during the last class, which happened a day after being accused of lack of empathy by the instructor of the previous class, made me decide that I had no business involving myself in these people’s lives, so I just quit both classes and detached myself from the local writing scene. I never interacted with any of them again. Perhaps a week or so later, the instructor in his eighties suffered a stroke that ultimately led to his death, and I heard through the grapevine that he actually blamed me for it. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure if that blame is real or if I hallucinated it.
The last time I saw him, he was weakened from his stroke, and some family member was holding his arm as he tottered down a corridor of the library. The moment he spotted me coming along the same corridor, he looked scared, and told the woman holding his arm to move into some adjacent room. Can’t say I feel too bad; not only I found him quite fraudulent as a writer, but also who fucking blames a stroke on one of his students presenting stories? And there’s something extremely disturbing for me that as a writer, he was so disturbed by someone else’s writing. However, it wasn’t surprising: he admitted that he hadn’t read fiction in decades, even though he kept writing it. But perhaps his demise never bothered me due to my lack of empathy.
Yeah, I can’t care about most people. I was wired that way. I’m not a good guy, nor do I pretend to be. I do care enormously about people in certain circumstances and from certain angles. My new novel is mostly autobiographical, although I mix in many elements from other people I came to know. So many other shameful aspects of my life will be brought kicking and screaming into the light. That’ll be intriguing to render.
I think that The Scrap Colossus will be a solid, entertaining tale about a reclusive autistic person who is trying to honor the songwriter she’s obsessed with by writing an elaborate novel about the songwriter’s life. That’s what has to happen because that’s what I did. Full-blown autistic obsession that lasted from about 2011 to 2013, an experience and perspective that most people aren’t familiar with, so maybe it will make for an interesting story. Regardless of what others will think about it, I need to do it because my subconscious has demanded it, so my hands are tied.
The hardest parts to handle will be the many, many scenes of the story within a story, the novel that the protagonist wrote inspired by this songwriter. The novel actually exists in different stages of production (the first two “books” of the novel are revised to a publishable state, the third would require at least a couple of revisions, and the last two books are in the draft stage), so it would be feasible to include actual excerpts from that other novel into the current narrative, but I think I’ll prefer for my narrator to act as myself reviewing and offering criticism to my actual past self’s production from ten years ago. That sounds like the funnest angle to me. Besides, I no longer feel like the same person I was in 2015, let alone during my obsession, so I can be somewhat objective.
Anyway, it’s a quarter to four in the afternoon of this Saturday. Although I’m quite groggy due to having woken up at five in the morning to finish the second part of my new novel, now I’ll head to the location where the third scene is going to take place, so I can take notes. Thankfully the story is set where I actually live; I hate having to fake my impressions of a place I’ve never been in, even though you can go quite far with photographs and videos.
That’s all for now, I think. See ya.
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
A heavy silence draped the room as if the class had witnessed an execution. Upon its weight pressing down on the motley crew of participants, ranging from college-age kids to grizzled retirees, they fidgeted awkwardly, fiddling with pens, flipping through notebooks. The clock on the wall ticked louder. Isabel twirled her chainlike necklace between her fingers as if trying to come up with diplomatic words.
“Elena, I’m… I’m glad you shared your work. Bold piece, raw and visceral. I guess we’ve grown to take water, a warm meal, or even a sneaker that’s not coated in mud for granted, haven’t we, class? That said…”
“It’s not every day that someone eats a raw salamander,” Pink Hamster Face said.
One of the retirees, his hair a mop of white curls, a scarf always wrapped around his throat, folded his arms over his belly. As he brought up routinely, he used to be a professor, and now spent his evening years writing and traveling. I’m not shitting on the guy; I wish I could go on a retirement world tour.
“Sorry, but I have to say I didn’t like this.” His voice sounded as if his throat were lined with sandpaper. “What was the point? It’s just senseless. She gets lost in a swamp and eats a salamander and then disappears? That’s awful! I don’t want to hear about that. People suffer and die every day. I don’t need a story to remind me of the awful stuff in life.”
Elena lowered her face and shot him a stony glare through a blonde lock that fell across her forehead. Isabel rose slowly from her chair as she smoothed down her off-the-shoulder black top. Her smile had the stiffness of a rusted coat rack.
“Elena, I love that you’ve taken the time to present us with a well-crafted experience. Above and beyond, as usual. I can’t deny you have talent, I’m just not sure where you’re channeling it. As your instructor, I feel obligated to remind you that not every story needs to be so bleak. Aren’t you focused on piling on the misery? That’s not to say that dark themes or dire circumstances are out of bounds. The beauty of writing is that it allows us to examine darkness while also finding paths toward light. But, as we’ve discussed in class, a narrative devoid of hope can leave the reader feeling unmoored, adrift without a life vest.”
In the fluorescent light, Elena’s pale oval showed a hint of a smirk.
“I just felt like making a horrible place.”
“Well, in that case, mission accomplished.”
“I named this piece ‘Isabel Zubiri time-travels to the primeval epoch and accidentally prevents the evolution of mammals.'”
Isabel pushed up her off-white cat-eye glasses. The forced cheeriness in her voice had worn thin.
“Seriously though. You’ve subjected our poor protagonist to one of the most unpleasant scenarios we’ve ever come across in my classes. Thrown her into the wilderness and left her to rot. I have to ask: why? What inspired this particular… direction?”
Elena shrugged as if she couldn’t justify spending the energy to explain herself. She slid her gaze onto the white table, her almond-blonde hair falling on her brow. Isabel had started checking her notes when Elena lifted her gaze defiantly and took a deep breath like a beleaguered queen about to address her subjects.
“You asked the class what conflicts they recognized in my piece, but no one answered. So I will. The only conflict that truly matters is that of the protagonist against her own mind. She clings to her optimism even as reality contradicts her at every turn. So, what inspired this direction? The truth did. You wanted us to write a little time-travel adventure, Isabel, so I showed you what would happen if someone actually traveled through time. No meetings with Leonardo da Vinci, no fairy tale endings where you get to take selfies with the Medicis. Just the raw reality of finding yourself alone in an ugly, unforgiving world. There is no epiphany. No divine revelation. The protagonist must struggle to the end although not even words can save her. The fight is its own justification. I’ll leave up to you if that’s meaningful or not. A story needs to be honest or it will fail at being anything. And that ending? I got the feeling you’d still try to maintain your carefully curated social media presence even after you tore apart a living creature with your teeth to survive.”
Isabel’s face froze in a tight-lipped grimace. When she spoke, she adopted the tone one would use with a tantruming child.
“Elena, your stories have been the equivalent of smearing mud on the audience’s faces. When you start writing solely as a means to shock or unsettle for its own sake, that’s the sign of a writer who’s lost their way. You need to dig deeper and confront the underlying issues that drive you to these dark corners. And you spoke about writing the truth. It seems you’ve been perusing my Twitter feed, so how come there’s no mention of my daughter in your story? The moment I found myself stranded in such a hellish place, my main concern would be about figuring out how to return to my Natalia.”
Elena’s blues darted around as she shifted in the chair, her reddish lips parted in puzzlement.
“Your daughter? She didn’t cross my mind. I guess you’d worry about her.”
Isabel squared her shoulders. Her gaze lingered as if she suspected Elena’s pupils would narrow into slits.
“You guess…? You don’t have much empathy, do you?”
Elena winced as if a gust of ice-cold wind had hit her face. Her features hardened, her pale fingers curled tightly around her notebook. Those tired blues met Isabel’s eyes with an intensity that made a couple of students shift in their seats.
“Maybe I don’t.”
After a heavy silence, the instructor cleared her throat and tried to dig up her usual cheerfulness, but her voice faltered.
“Well, Elena, thanks again for taking the time to present. The world is a darker, damper, and more miserable place thanks to your protagonist’s journey, I think we can all agree on that.”
Three students were texting under the table, too cowardly to endure the carnage.
“You think that having a daughter somehow makes you more human?” Elena blurted out. “More understanding? If being a parent granted people some magical wisdom, we’d have lots of enlightened souls pushing baby strollers, wouldn’t we? But that’s not the case, is it? Most parents I’ve met are as selfish and self-absorbed as anyone else, just with an extra layer of entitlement. I’d rather keep my lack of empathy than be a hypocrite.”
The taut string of tension threatened to snap and send us all flying. Pink Hamster Face’s eyes darted between the two women, her mouth hanging open. The former professor, his face set in a frown, spoke up in a raspy voice.
“Well, that was pretty cynical and, frankly, immature.” He leaned an elbow on the table, turning to our instructor. “Isabel, don’t let her disrespect you in front of your students. If she doesn’t like you or this class, she can find another place to waste her time.”
Isabel stood up slowly, her hands pressed on the table. She gave the smile one would give to a barking dog before calling the animal shelter.
“I had been feeling that your work and comments were getting more aggressive and generally destructive. You know, I’m not a self-absorbed idiot. I’m a mother and a writer and a teacher, and I’ve worked hard to get where I am. Elena, I’ve given you plenty of chances to integrate yourself into the class. I’ve encouraged you to participate and share your work. I’ve provided constructive criticism. I’ve reached out to you on a personal level, trying to understand what’s going on inside that head of yours. But it seems you’re not interested in that. Now, your fixation on me has crossed several boundaries: not only have you monitored my social media presence, but you’ve also written an explicitly violent piece targeting me. It goes beyond creative expression into concerning behavior that needs to be addressed through proper channels.”
A tic flickered beneath Elena’s left eye: the monster rattling its cage. Our instructor honed in her focus on me.
“Jon, would you mind staying as a witness after class? I’m going to have a serious talk with Elena, and I’d appreciate your support.”
She had startled me while I chewed on a fingernail. As the biggest guy in a class full of college-age girls, housewives, and retirees, I was expected to work security detail. Shouldn’t I be compensated for that unpaid labor? Could I get someone to advocate for me? Anyway, bold of Isabel to address the narrator, but at least she offered me a chance to defend the pale queen.
I leaned back on my chair and held Isabel’s gaze calmly.
“You did tell us to write a story about you. Your Twitter profile is public. Elena doesn’t know much about you, so naturally she would look into it. You’re taking this out of proportion.”
Elena stared at Isabel as if our instructor’s skull were transparent, revealing a writhing mass of worms and maggots.
“Proper channels? Are you seriously threatening me with administrative action because I wrote a story that made you uncomfortable? You asked us to write about you traveling through time, and I delivered exactly what you asked for, just not wrapped in the sugary bullshit you prefer. And now you’re trying to paint me as a stalker because I looked at your public Twitter feed? The same feed you constantly reference in class when you’re busy preaching about ‘building your author platform’? You want to talk about crossing boundaries? How about making your students write fanfiction about you in the first place? But sure, go ahead, take it to the library director. Tell them that the scary girl wrote a mean story about her instructor. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated to hear how you’re using your position to feed your ego trip while punishing students who don’t play along with your fantasy.”
A tremble of rage twitched through Isabel’s lips, but she maintained a controlled posture, her hands gripping the edge of the table.
“I see how it is. You know what, Elena? I did ask for a story about time travel with me as the protagonist. That was my mistake, and I’ll own it. But let’s be crystal clear about something: this isn’t about your creative choices or your right to explore dark themes. This is about you deliberately crafting a violent fantasy targeting me. As for my Twitter feed… yes, it’s public. Yes, I encourage building an author platform. But there’s a world of difference between professional networking and using someone’s social media presence to fuel hostile fiction. Jon, I appreciate your perspective, but Elena has demonstrated a pattern of fixation that, combined with today’s violent imagery and aggressive behavior, creates a hostile learning environment for everyone.” She leaned forward, her glare fixed on Elena. “You don’t care about the world, just what you think of it. All your stories are you. They’re not written to connect, but to push people away.” Isabel straightened back. “I’ve been running this class for a few years, and you’re the only person who refuses to take my feedback in the spirit of helping you grow. If you want to continue writing, that’s up to you, but I can’t have you poisoning my classes with your bitterness and cruelty anymore.”
Pink Hamster Face sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. The cold fire that had smoldered behind Elena’s blue irises snuffed itself out, leaving her stare lifeless. She tipped her face upward, her eyeballs reflecting the fluorescents. She rose from the chair mechanically, then gathered her papers, notebook, pen, half-empty water bottle, and shoved them into her bag. After pushing the chair toward the table, she addressed the whole class in a flat tone.
“Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the discomfort of my presence. Have fun learning how to write meaningless fluff that’ll never matter to anyone.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Inflammatory Writ” by Joanna Newsom. Also this live version. Also this other live version.
A heavy silence draped the room as if the class had witnessed an execution. Upon its weight pressing down on the motley crew of participants, ranging from college-age kids to grizzled retirees, they fidgeted awkwardly, fiddling with pens, flipping through notebooks. The clock on the wall ticked louder. Isabel twirled her chainlike necklace between her fingers as if trying to come up with diplomatic words.
“Elena, I’m… I’m glad you shared your work. Bold piece, raw and visceral. I guess we’ve grown to take water, a warm meal, or even a sneaker that’s not coated in mud for granted, haven’t we, class? That said…”
“It’s not every day that someone eats a raw salamander,” Pink Hamster Face said.
One of the retirees, his hair a mop of white curls, a scarf always wrapped around his throat, folded his arms over his belly. As he brought up routinely, he used to be a professor, and now spent his evening years writing and traveling. I’m not shitting on the guy; I wish I could go on a retirement world tour.
“Sorry, but I have to say I didn’t like this.” His voice sounded as if his throat were lined with sandpaper. “What was the point? It’s just senseless. She gets lost in a swamp and eats a salamander and then disappears? That’s awful! I don’t want to hear about that. People suffer and die every day. I don’t need a story to remind me of the awful stuff in life.”
Elena lowered her face and shot him a stony glare through a blonde lock that fell across her forehead. Isabel rose slowly from her chair as she smoothed down her off-the-shoulder black top. Her smile had the stiffness of a rusted coat rack.
“Elena, I love that you’ve taken the time to present us with a well-crafted experience. Above and beyond, as usual. I can’t deny you have talent, I’m just not sure where you’re channeling it. As your instructor, I feel obligated to remind you that not every story needs to be so bleak. Aren’t you focused on piling on the misery? That’s not to say that dark themes or dire circumstances are out of bounds. The beauty of writing is that it allows us to examine darkness while also finding paths toward light. But, as we’ve discussed in class, a narrative devoid of hope can leave the reader feeling unmoored, adrift without a life vest.”
In the fluorescent light, Elena’s pale oval showed a hint of a smirk.
“I just felt like making a horrible place.”
“Well, in that case, mission accomplished.”
“I named this piece ‘Isabel Zubiri time-travels to the primeval epoch and accidentally prevents the evolution of mammals.'”
Isabel pushed up her off-white cat-eye glasses. The forced cheeriness in her voice had worn thin.
“Seriously though. You’ve subjected our poor protagonist to one of the most unpleasant scenarios we’ve ever come across in my classes. Thrown her into the wilderness and left her to rot. I have to ask: why? What inspired this particular… direction?”
Elena shrugged as if she couldn’t justify spending the energy to explain herself. She slid her gaze onto the white table, her almond-blonde hair falling on her brow. Isabel had started checking her notes when Elena lifted her gaze defiantly and took a deep breath like a beleaguered queen about to address her subjects.
“You asked the class what conflicts they recognized in my piece, but no one answered. So I will. The only conflict that truly matters is that of the protagonist against her own mind. She clings to her optimism even as reality contradicts her at every turn. So, what inspired this direction? The truth did. You wanted us to write a little time-travel adventure, Isabel, so I showed you what would happen if someone actually traveled through time. No meetings with Leonardo da Vinci, no fairy tale endings where you get to take selfies with the Medicis. Just the raw reality of finding yourself alone in an ugly, unforgiving world. There is no epiphany. No divine revelation. The protagonist must struggle to the end although not even words can save her. The fight is its own justification. I’ll leave up to you if that’s meaningful or not. A story needs to be honest or it will fail at being anything. And that ending? I got the feeling you’d still try to maintain your carefully curated social media presence even after you tore apart a living creature with your teeth to survive.”
Isabel’s face froze in a tight-lipped grimace. When she spoke, she adopted the tone one would use with a tantruming child.
“Elena, your stories have been the equivalent of smearing mud on the audience’s faces. When you start writing solely as a means to shock or unsettle for its own sake, that’s the sign of a writer who’s lost their way. You need to dig deeper and confront the underlying issues that drive you to these dark corners. And you spoke about writing the truth. It seems you’ve been perusing my Twitter feed, so how come there’s no mention of my daughter in your story? The moment I found myself stranded in such a hellish place, my main concern would be about figuring out how to return to my Natalia.”
Elena’s blues darted around as she shifted in the chair, her reddish lips parted in puzzlement.
“Your daughter? She didn’t cross my mind. I guess you’d worry about her.”
Isabel squared her shoulders. Her gaze lingered as if she suspected Elena’s pupils would narrow into slits.
“You guess…? You don’t have much empathy, do you?”
Elena winced as if a gust of ice-cold wind had hit her face. Her features hardened, her pale fingers curled tightly around her notebook. Those tired blues met Isabel’s eyes with an intensity that made a couple of students shift in their seats.
“Maybe I don’t.”
After a heavy silence, the instructor cleared her throat and tried to dig up her usual cheerfulness, but her voice faltered.
“Well, Elena, thanks again for taking the time to present. The world is a darker, damper, and more miserable place thanks to your protagonist’s journey, I think we can all agree on that.”
Three students were texting under the table, too cowardly to endure the carnage.
“You think that having a daughter somehow makes you more human?” Elena blurted out. “More understanding? If being a parent granted people some magical wisdom, we’d have lots of enlightened souls pushing baby strollers, wouldn’t we? But that’s not the case, is it? Most parents I’ve met are as selfish and self-absorbed as anyone else, just with an extra layer of entitlement. I’d rather keep my lack of empathy than be a hypocrite.”
The taut string of tension threatened to snap and send us all flying. Pink Hamster Face’s eyes darted between the two women, her mouth hanging open. The former professor, his face set in a frown, spoke up in a raspy voice.
“Well, that was pretty cynical and, frankly, immature.” He leaned an elbow on the table, turning to our instructor. “Isabel, don’t let her disrespect you in front of your students. If she doesn’t like you or this class, she can find another place to waste her time.”
Isabel stood up slowly, her hands pressed on the table. She gave the smile one would give to a barking dog before calling the animal shelter.
“I had been feeling that your work and comments were getting more aggressive and generally destructive. You know, I’m not a self-absorbed idiot. I’m a mother and a writer and a teacher, and I’ve worked hard to get where I am. Elena, I’ve given you plenty of chances to integrate yourself into the class. I’ve encouraged you to participate and share your work. I’ve provided constructive criticism. I’ve reached out to you on a personal level, trying to understand what’s going on inside that head of yours. But it seems you’re not interested in that. Now, your fixation on me has crossed several boundaries: not only have you monitored my social media presence, but you’ve also written an explicitly violent piece targeting me. It goes beyond creative expression into concerning behavior that needs to be addressed through proper channels.”
A tic flickered beneath Elena’s left eye: the monster rattling its cage. Our instructor honed in her focus on me.
“Jon, would you mind staying as a witness after class? I’m going to have a serious talk with Elena, and I’d appreciate your support.”
She had startled me while I chewed on a fingernail. As the biggest guy in a class full of college-age girls, housewives, and retirees, I was expected to work security detail. Shouldn’t I be compensated for that unpaid labor? Could I get someone to advocate for me? Anyway, bold of Isabel to address the narrator, but at least she offered me a chance to defend the pale queen.
I leaned back on my chair and held Isabel’s gaze calmly.
“You did tell us to write a story about you. Your Twitter profile is public. Elena doesn’t know much about you, so naturally she would look into it. You’re taking this out of proportion.”
Elena stared at Isabel as if our instructor’s skull were transparent, revealing a writhing mass of worms and maggots.
“Proper channels? Are you seriously threatening me with administrative action because I wrote a story that made you uncomfortable? You asked us to write about you traveling through time, and I delivered exactly what you asked for, just not wrapped in the sugary bullshit you prefer. And now you’re trying to paint me as a stalker because I looked at your public Twitter feed? The same feed you constantly reference in class when you’re busy preaching about ‘building your author platform’? You want to talk about crossing boundaries? How about making your students write fanfiction about you in the first place? But sure, go ahead, take it to the library director. Tell them that the scary girl wrote a mean story about her instructor. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated to hear how you’re using your position to feed your ego trip while punishing students who don’t play along with your fantasy.”
A tremble of rage twitched through Isabel’s lips, but she maintained a controlled posture, her hands gripping the edge of the table.
“I see how it is. You know what, Elena? I did ask for a story about time travel with me as the protagonist. That was my mistake, and I’ll own it. But let’s be crystal clear about something: this isn’t about your creative choices or your right to explore dark themes. This is about you deliberately crafting a violent fantasy targeting me. As for my Twitter feed… yes, it’s public. Yes, I encourage building an author platform. But there’s a world of difference between professional networking and using someone’s social media presence to fuel hostile fiction. Jon, I appreciate your perspective, but Elena has demonstrated a pattern of fixation that, combined with today’s violent imagery and aggressive behavior, creates a hostile learning environment for everyone.” She leaned forward, her glare fixed on Elena. “You don’t care about the world, just what you think of it. All your stories are you. They’re not written to connect, but to push people away.” Isabel straightened back. “I’ve been running this class for a few years, and you’re the only person who refuses to take my feedback in the spirit of helping you grow. If you want to continue writing, that’s up to you, but I can’t have you poisoning my classes with your bitterness and cruelty anymore.”
Pink Hamster Face sniffled and dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve. The cold fire that had smoldered behind Elena’s blue irises snuffed itself out, leaving her stare lifeless. She tipped her face upward, her eyeballs reflecting the fluorescents. She rose from the chair mechanically, then gathered her papers, notebook, pen, half-empty water bottle, and shoved them into her bag. After pushing the chair toward the table, she addressed the whole class in a flat tone.
“Don’t worry, I’ll spare you the discomfort of my presence. Have fun learning how to write meaningless fluff that’ll never matter to anyone.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Inflammatory Writ” by Joanna Newsom. Also this live version. Also this other live version.
January 24, 2025
On Writing: Plot point generation #3
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.
A story is made out of meaningful stuff that happens. Each unit of meaningful stuff that happens is often referred to as a plot point. Here’s how to come up with them, before you consider fitting them into a structure.
-Is there a test that the protagonist could go through and that he doesn’t believe he can pass? What events would it suggest?
-What does the protagonist have to confront to solve the problem set up for him?
-What events could come up from bringing unresolved issues to the surface?
-How could you push your characters to the limit?
-Find that thing that your character would rather die than do, and make them do it.
-Characters must confront the very thing they would least like to, and confronting this thing is a kind of hell. More precisely, it is their own personal hell. But through this confrontation, they are transformed.
-How can you make the conflicts varied and surprising?
-Imagine situations in which internal conflict will attack severely a character.
-Disturbances don’t have to happen just at the beginning. You can sprinkle them throughout. When in doubt about what to write next, make more trouble.
-Come up with a long list of obstacles and opposition characters that can be thrown in the lead’s way. Go crazy. When you’ve got fifteen or twenty of these, choose the best ones and list them in order from bad to worse to worst.
-Does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change? Imagine what would you want to avoid if you were your protagonist, and then make her face it.
-A story’s job is to put the protagonist through tests that, even in her wildest dreams, she doesn’t think she can pass.
-Do expose your character’s flaws, demons, and insecurities. Stories are about people who are uncomfortable, and as we know, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than change. A story is often about watching someone’s house fall around their ears, beam by beam. Besides the fact that perfection is not actually possible, things that are not falling apart are dull. It’s your job to dismantle all the places where your protagonist seeks sanctuary and to actively force him out into the cold. But a hero only becomes a hero by doing something heroic, rising to the occasion, against all odds, and confronting one’s own inner demons in the process. It’s up to you to keep your protagonist on track by making sure each external twist brings him face to face with something about himself that he’d probably rather not see.
-Don’t forget there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This is another way of saying everything must be earned, which means that nothing can come to your protagonist easily, after all, the reader’s goal is to experience how he reacts when things go wrong. Stories can help us expand the range of options in life by testing, in small increments, how closely one can approach the brink of disaster without falling over it. This means the protagonist has to work for everything he gets, often in ways he didn’t anticipate, much harder than anything he would have signed on for. The only time things come easily is when they are the opposite of what is actually best for him.
-For maximum conflict, always put your hero in the last place he wants to be.
-For some great conflict, place your characters in an environment that is their opposite.
-The scene where a character must ask for help from someone he screwed over earlier always works.
-You gotta throw your characters in the shit. You gotta kick them. You gotta demoralize them.
-Take a character who hates something more than anything, then put him in a situation where he must pretend to love it.
-Take a character who desperately wants to get somewhere, then have him held up by someone who wants to talk.
-Deliberately write your characters into situations that are impossible to get out of, then figure a way to get them out of them.
-Place your hero in plenty of “character emergencies.” A “character emergency” is when your character is placed in a situation where he has no choice but to act.
-What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
-Think of ways to create lots of internal conflict (hard choices).
-Who can betray the protagonist?
-Make your characters clash. Think of ways of doing so.
-How would the other character(s) and the world react to what the protagonist (or other characters) are doing?
-How could you pull the rug out from under your protagonist when he’s at his most vulnerable?
-How do you make it harder for your protagonist? See what bad thing could happen, and let it happen. Try to make it worse than he imagined it could possibly be, worse than you imagined it could be at first blush.
-Look for conflict that flows from the plot, and that comes down to character, to character motivations, goals and reactions.
You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.
A story is made out of meaningful stuff that happens. Each unit of meaningful stuff that happens is often referred to as a plot point. Here’s how to come up with them, before you consider fitting them into a structure.
-Is there a test that the protagonist could go through and that he doesn’t believe he can pass? What events would it suggest?
-What does the protagonist have to confront to solve the problem set up for him?
-What events could come up from bringing unresolved issues to the surface?
-How could you push your characters to the limit?
-Find that thing that your character would rather die than do, and make them do it.
-Characters must confront the very thing they would least like to, and confronting this thing is a kind of hell. More precisely, it is their own personal hell. But through this confrontation, they are transformed.
-How can you make the conflicts varied and surprising?
-Imagine situations in which internal conflict will attack severely a character.
-Disturbances don’t have to happen just at the beginning. You can sprinkle them throughout. When in doubt about what to write next, make more trouble.
-Come up with a long list of obstacles and opposition characters that can be thrown in the lead’s way. Go crazy. When you’ve got fifteen or twenty of these, choose the best ones and list them in order from bad to worse to worst.
-Does the conflict force the protagonist to take action, whether it’s to rationalize it away or actually change? Imagine what would you want to avoid if you were your protagonist, and then make her face it.
-A story’s job is to put the protagonist through tests that, even in her wildest dreams, she doesn’t think she can pass.
-Do expose your character’s flaws, demons, and insecurities. Stories are about people who are uncomfortable, and as we know, nothing makes us more uncomfortable than change. A story is often about watching someone’s house fall around their ears, beam by beam. Besides the fact that perfection is not actually possible, things that are not falling apart are dull. It’s your job to dismantle all the places where your protagonist seeks sanctuary and to actively force him out into the cold. But a hero only becomes a hero by doing something heroic, rising to the occasion, against all odds, and confronting one’s own inner demons in the process. It’s up to you to keep your protagonist on track by making sure each external twist brings him face to face with something about himself that he’d probably rather not see.
-Don’t forget there’s no such thing as a free lunch. This is another way of saying everything must be earned, which means that nothing can come to your protagonist easily, after all, the reader’s goal is to experience how he reacts when things go wrong. Stories can help us expand the range of options in life by testing, in small increments, how closely one can approach the brink of disaster without falling over it. This means the protagonist has to work for everything he gets, often in ways he didn’t anticipate, much harder than anything he would have signed on for. The only time things come easily is when they are the opposite of what is actually best for him.
-For maximum conflict, always put your hero in the last place he wants to be.
-For some great conflict, place your characters in an environment that is their opposite.
-The scene where a character must ask for help from someone he screwed over earlier always works.
-You gotta throw your characters in the shit. You gotta kick them. You gotta demoralize them.
-Take a character who hates something more than anything, then put him in a situation where he must pretend to love it.
-Take a character who desperately wants to get somewhere, then have him held up by someone who wants to talk.
-Deliberately write your characters into situations that are impossible to get out of, then figure a way to get them out of them.
-Place your hero in plenty of “character emergencies.” A “character emergency” is when your character is placed in a situation where he has no choice but to act.
-What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
-Think of ways to create lots of internal conflict (hard choices).
-Who can betray the protagonist?
-Make your characters clash. Think of ways of doing so.
-How would the other character(s) and the world react to what the protagonist (or other characters) are doing?
-How could you pull the rug out from under your protagonist when he’s at his most vulnerable?
-How do you make it harder for your protagonist? See what bad thing could happen, and let it happen. Try to make it worse than he imagined it could possibly be, worse than you imagined it could be at first blush.
-Look for conflict that flows from the plot, and that comes down to character, to character motivations, goals and reactions.
Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 5 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The horn signaling the hour-and-a-half lunch break blared, and I jolted awake to the sound of my Chevrolet Lumina’s door slamming shut. I’d climbed into an oven that reeked of scorched plastic and molten metal, so I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and waited until I felt steady enough to drive without passing out.
The morning shift had stripped my nerves raw, compressing a week’s worth of strain into hours. Dazed, I started the engine and put distance between myself and the faces that recognized me—faces that might demand answers.
Through the window, workers from other workshops in red and green smocks slid out of view, alongside highway crews in reflective vests. Broken people stranded in this town, far from home and any semblance of destiny. Jobs that barely paid enough to keep a roof overhead. They endured it all, along with the desert and brain-melting heat, because they had no future, because what mattered in these people had died years ago. Their options narrowed to one or two cliff-edge jobs to cling to, while the world kept spinning.
A sidewalk newspaper rack made me slow, though I drove past. I needed to buy a paper to see if any article mentioned a missing child. Had police visited that dirt road near the oil field? Maybe an alert would announce they were hunting the killer. I’d scrubbed the blood I’d spotted in the dark, adrenaline sharpening my eyes, but must’ve missed stains blended into the dirt—blood the child’s wounds had spat when a tire burst his torso. An ultraviolet flashlight would expose cornflower-blue spills. Cops would collect samples, send them for analysis. Or would they assume someone hit a coyote? Would a cornered note in the paper beg the driver who struck an animal to notify animal control? A coyote dragging a mangled leg, bleeding out as it wandered the desert in a nightmare of pain, though a bullet to the skull would’ve sufficed.
As I drove, I startled awake again, catching myself sliding my left fingers under my sunglasses to rub my eyelid. Sweat pooled, teeth clenched. How had I avoided crashing? And now I worried in advance: when I’d hit the child last night, the day’s papers had already gone to print. Any news would break tomorrow. Maybe right now, at that dirt road cutting through the oil field, four or five patrol cars encircled the spot, forensic cops crouching over clues.
On the way to Wendy’s, I spotted two police cruisers prowling the streets. For minutes one idled ahead of me, garish as a parrot among pigeons. They didn’t know who watched them. If they did, they’d rip me from these people grinding through routines, loving others, enjoying life, pairing off, reproducing. The penal system would digest me, and I’d become a nuisance to dozens of eyes that’d rather drag me to a backlot and shoot me.
In the Wendy’s parking lot, trailer trucks walled off the view. A trucker leaned against his cab while chatting with an old man in a vest studded with flag pins and NRA badges.
After parking, I climbed out and arched my back until it cracked. Against the blue sky, bird silhouettes with splayed wings fluttered like kites caught in a draft. I weaved through dozens of parking spots, dodging cars reversing or hunting spaces. In the single-story building’s windows, jutting above the sea of heads, busts of people carried trays heaped with food. From a candy-red pole, the logo’s pigtailed girl smiled, her red braids perked upright.
Inside, I claimed a table near the back but facing the entrance, close to where the woman usually sat. Waiting in line, I stood behind a group of workers in paint-speckled coveralls. Their chatter made me wish for a mute button to block even the reverberations rattling my skull. They spoke to fill silence, parroting phrases others had recycled, mimicking cadences and accents. Truth and worth depended on majority approval.
At my table, the first bite of burger coated my tongue with ketchup and meat juice as if I’d spent the morning gargling sand. By the third bite, she walked in. I clamped the burger between my chin and tray while tilting my head to fix her in my monocular vision. With each step, her blonde hair floated like a feather. Gold hoops swayed from her earlobes. A gym bag hung from the shoulder opposite me, and she wore a sleeveless Lycra shirt with gray yoga pants. Her tanned skin glowed, freshly showered. In profile, her ass curved like a half-globe, the pants clinging to solid thighs, tracing every contour as if she’d walked in naked.
She veered toward a table at my nine o’clock, trailed by her boyfriend, a man around thirty-five. Most of his ash-blond hair hid under a beige hat. His thick belt buckle glinted under fluorescent lights.
At the table, she set down her bag and exchanged words with him before he joined the line. She shifted her hip, distracted by her phone. When she switched her weight, the pants’ fabric outlined the inverted, rounded M of her vulva.
I swallowed a bite to douse the heat flash surging through me, my heart pounding like a skydiver’s. I wanted to grip her nape and devour her mouth, those flamingo-pink lips. Slide my hands under the Lycra hugging her back, hike it up to knead the taut skin along her spine. Squeeze her ass. We’d stagger like drunk dancers, knocking trays from customers’ hands, until a table jarred us still. I’d rip her clothes off, lay her across the table, and mount her like a baboon.
She settled into her chair, thumb gliding over her phone. Features Photoshopped at birth, that hair, that body—crafted by generations of good genes mating with good genes. Her lips curled into an unconscious smile untouched by grief, untainted by intrusive thoughts.
I nibbled fries, head tilted, hidden behind tinted lenses, stealing these minutes while she shared her break with her boyfriend.
He returned with a tray of soda cups, fries, a burger, and a salad bowl. I glanced down to avoid detection. Couldn’t let him wonder why I always sat this distance, facing her. I timed my glances—deniable if questioned. Sometimes I turned toward windows or the clamoring crowd. If caught staring, I’d claim I was zoning out. But when my gaze trapped her, I savored her image like caviar.
Over lunch, their lips shaped silent syllables. Smiles, coded gestures. She laced fingers with his, plucked invisible hairs from his shirt. At some joke, her laugh pierced the din. Drunk on mirth, she doubled over to rest her chin on his arm before straightening with catlike eyes. Her lower face split into a grin as if handing out thousand-dollar bills.
Why did the boyfriend keep stabbing lettuce leaves between comments, ignoring her? He should’ve hugged her, smothered her with kisses. Maybe he’d grown used to his luck, or only those who lacked it noticed, those who’d burned through relationships expecting doom, unable to forget the darkness festering in human minds. Like a centenarian, I envied teenagers’ ignorance, decades still ahead before they’d learn their consciousnesses would settle among body parts screaming in pain.
When his phone rang and his face turned professional, she fiddled with her own device while chewing. He nodded at the void, stood, and crossed the room. His tucked-shirt belly bulged like a half-inflated balloon. Two diners sidestepped him as he strode like he owned the place.
The guard was gone. I relaxed, spacing burger bites and Nestea sips, fixating on her as she tilted her face to check her skin in a compact’s mirror for barely-there creases. Her hair cascaded over one shoulder, baring the opposite side of her neck, where the sternocleidomastoid muscle strained under the weight.
I ached to caress that tan skin, scratch an itch mid-spine. Her hair would drape my arm. In my mind, she cupped my cheek, slid her palm to my ear. How would foreign skin feel—skin that wanted my touch? The memory of such sensations had eroded, unrecreatable by hours of thought or fantasy.
I snapped from hypnosis to my trash-strewn tray, forty minutes left before returning to the soul-crushing job that bought my hours cheap. I’d hit and killed a child, then hidden him in my trunk. The spark I’d briefly contained faded, replaced by swampy cold, that of a reanimated corpse shuffling through a mausoleum.
What did this woman feel, loved and loving, with her aristocratic grasp of pain? What was it like to wake up wanting to live? Did I crave her to replace her boyfriend, or did I mourn being born unlovable, this lump of broken and disfigured flesh? Beyond fantasy, would I even want a partner? My presence would poison her like radiation, warp her into a light-sucking tumor. People didn’t matter enough to me; any woman would realize it in weeks.
Besides, I knew the drill: inane chats about office drama, her friend squabbles that’d feel apocalyptic to her. Filling silences lest she think us doomed. Remembering compliments to keep her valued. Endless shopping hours, holding bags, bored enough to stab my corneas. Abandoning movies and books I liked for hers. Curbing opinions to TV-sanctioned takes, lest she deem me negative. The marathon of impressing her and her circle, competing daily with lurking men. Sacrificing solitude, craving it while she recharged socially. Allowing a job to devour my waking hours so I could one day offer her a two-story suburban home. Reproducing, duty-bound to drag innocents into this dying world.
She’d push me to change, then grow bored once I mimicked her desires. Stranded in the desert, oceans and miles apart, I’d endure calls where she’d repeat some new man’s name—how funny he was, how intriguing his opinions. How I shouldn’t mind, because she thought of him as a brother. They’d evict me from the house I’d helped pay for. If I’d stupidly bred, child support would crush me, funding a kid taught to call another man “Dad.”
Better to admire beauties like this Wendy’s goddess from afar. I’d cherish her like a fresco on a crumbling wall of this rotting universe, while others lashed themselves together with barbed wire to avoid being pulled into the dark.
When the boyfriend returned, he planted his phone-hand on the table, speared salad leaves with the other, then jerked his head toward the lot. She smiled, nodded, tucked her compact away. They left shoulder-to-shoulder.
I slumped. I’d see her the following day, until she stopped coming.
Workers shot glances at me, the weirdo with sunglasses and scars under one eye. One muttered to his tablemate. I’d hogged this table too long. Behind the counter, minimum-wage teens wondered how to eject me without triggering an explosion.
I shoveled the remaining fries, then dumped wrappers on the tray and trashed it, freeing the table for those who deserved it.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Trailer Trash” by Modest Mouse.
The horn signaling the hour-and-a-half lunch break blared, and I jolted awake to the sound of my Chevrolet Lumina’s door slamming shut. I’d climbed into an oven that reeked of scorched plastic and molten metal, so I rolled down the window, stuck my head out, and waited until I felt steady enough to drive without passing out.
The morning shift had stripped my nerves raw, compressing a week’s worth of strain into hours. Dazed, I started the engine and put distance between myself and the faces that recognized me—faces that might demand answers.
Through the window, workers from other workshops in red and green smocks slid out of view, alongside highway crews in reflective vests. Broken people stranded in this town, far from home and any semblance of destiny. Jobs that barely paid enough to keep a roof overhead. They endured it all, along with the desert and brain-melting heat, because they had no future, because what mattered in these people had died years ago. Their options narrowed to one or two cliff-edge jobs to cling to, while the world kept spinning.
A sidewalk newspaper rack made me slow, though I drove past. I needed to buy a paper to see if any article mentioned a missing child. Had police visited that dirt road near the oil field? Maybe an alert would announce they were hunting the killer. I’d scrubbed the blood I’d spotted in the dark, adrenaline sharpening my eyes, but must’ve missed stains blended into the dirt—blood the child’s wounds had spat when a tire burst his torso. An ultraviolet flashlight would expose cornflower-blue spills. Cops would collect samples, send them for analysis. Or would they assume someone hit a coyote? Would a cornered note in the paper beg the driver who struck an animal to notify animal control? A coyote dragging a mangled leg, bleeding out as it wandered the desert in a nightmare of pain, though a bullet to the skull would’ve sufficed.
As I drove, I startled awake again, catching myself sliding my left fingers under my sunglasses to rub my eyelid. Sweat pooled, teeth clenched. How had I avoided crashing? And now I worried in advance: when I’d hit the child last night, the day’s papers had already gone to print. Any news would break tomorrow. Maybe right now, at that dirt road cutting through the oil field, four or five patrol cars encircled the spot, forensic cops crouching over clues.
On the way to Wendy’s, I spotted two police cruisers prowling the streets. For minutes one idled ahead of me, garish as a parrot among pigeons. They didn’t know who watched them. If they did, they’d rip me from these people grinding through routines, loving others, enjoying life, pairing off, reproducing. The penal system would digest me, and I’d become a nuisance to dozens of eyes that’d rather drag me to a backlot and shoot me.
In the Wendy’s parking lot, trailer trucks walled off the view. A trucker leaned against his cab while chatting with an old man in a vest studded with flag pins and NRA badges.
After parking, I climbed out and arched my back until it cracked. Against the blue sky, bird silhouettes with splayed wings fluttered like kites caught in a draft. I weaved through dozens of parking spots, dodging cars reversing or hunting spaces. In the single-story building’s windows, jutting above the sea of heads, busts of people carried trays heaped with food. From a candy-red pole, the logo’s pigtailed girl smiled, her red braids perked upright.
Inside, I claimed a table near the back but facing the entrance, close to where the woman usually sat. Waiting in line, I stood behind a group of workers in paint-speckled coveralls. Their chatter made me wish for a mute button to block even the reverberations rattling my skull. They spoke to fill silence, parroting phrases others had recycled, mimicking cadences and accents. Truth and worth depended on majority approval.
At my table, the first bite of burger coated my tongue with ketchup and meat juice as if I’d spent the morning gargling sand. By the third bite, she walked in. I clamped the burger between my chin and tray while tilting my head to fix her in my monocular vision. With each step, her blonde hair floated like a feather. Gold hoops swayed from her earlobes. A gym bag hung from the shoulder opposite me, and she wore a sleeveless Lycra shirt with gray yoga pants. Her tanned skin glowed, freshly showered. In profile, her ass curved like a half-globe, the pants clinging to solid thighs, tracing every contour as if she’d walked in naked.
She veered toward a table at my nine o’clock, trailed by her boyfriend, a man around thirty-five. Most of his ash-blond hair hid under a beige hat. His thick belt buckle glinted under fluorescent lights.
At the table, she set down her bag and exchanged words with him before he joined the line. She shifted her hip, distracted by her phone. When she switched her weight, the pants’ fabric outlined the inverted, rounded M of her vulva.
I swallowed a bite to douse the heat flash surging through me, my heart pounding like a skydiver’s. I wanted to grip her nape and devour her mouth, those flamingo-pink lips. Slide my hands under the Lycra hugging her back, hike it up to knead the taut skin along her spine. Squeeze her ass. We’d stagger like drunk dancers, knocking trays from customers’ hands, until a table jarred us still. I’d rip her clothes off, lay her across the table, and mount her like a baboon.
She settled into her chair, thumb gliding over her phone. Features Photoshopped at birth, that hair, that body—crafted by generations of good genes mating with good genes. Her lips curled into an unconscious smile untouched by grief, untainted by intrusive thoughts.
I nibbled fries, head tilted, hidden behind tinted lenses, stealing these minutes while she shared her break with her boyfriend.
He returned with a tray of soda cups, fries, a burger, and a salad bowl. I glanced down to avoid detection. Couldn’t let him wonder why I always sat this distance, facing her. I timed my glances—deniable if questioned. Sometimes I turned toward windows or the clamoring crowd. If caught staring, I’d claim I was zoning out. But when my gaze trapped her, I savored her image like caviar.
Over lunch, their lips shaped silent syllables. Smiles, coded gestures. She laced fingers with his, plucked invisible hairs from his shirt. At some joke, her laugh pierced the din. Drunk on mirth, she doubled over to rest her chin on his arm before straightening with catlike eyes. Her lower face split into a grin as if handing out thousand-dollar bills.
Why did the boyfriend keep stabbing lettuce leaves between comments, ignoring her? He should’ve hugged her, smothered her with kisses. Maybe he’d grown used to his luck, or only those who lacked it noticed, those who’d burned through relationships expecting doom, unable to forget the darkness festering in human minds. Like a centenarian, I envied teenagers’ ignorance, decades still ahead before they’d learn their consciousnesses would settle among body parts screaming in pain.
When his phone rang and his face turned professional, she fiddled with her own device while chewing. He nodded at the void, stood, and crossed the room. His tucked-shirt belly bulged like a half-inflated balloon. Two diners sidestepped him as he strode like he owned the place.
The guard was gone. I relaxed, spacing burger bites and Nestea sips, fixating on her as she tilted her face to check her skin in a compact’s mirror for barely-there creases. Her hair cascaded over one shoulder, baring the opposite side of her neck, where the sternocleidomastoid muscle strained under the weight.
I ached to caress that tan skin, scratch an itch mid-spine. Her hair would drape my arm. In my mind, she cupped my cheek, slid her palm to my ear. How would foreign skin feel—skin that wanted my touch? The memory of such sensations had eroded, unrecreatable by hours of thought or fantasy.
I snapped from hypnosis to my trash-strewn tray, forty minutes left before returning to the soul-crushing job that bought my hours cheap. I’d hit and killed a child, then hidden him in my trunk. The spark I’d briefly contained faded, replaced by swampy cold, that of a reanimated corpse shuffling through a mausoleum.
What did this woman feel, loved and loving, with her aristocratic grasp of pain? What was it like to wake up wanting to live? Did I crave her to replace her boyfriend, or did I mourn being born unlovable, this lump of broken and disfigured flesh? Beyond fantasy, would I even want a partner? My presence would poison her like radiation, warp her into a light-sucking tumor. People didn’t matter enough to me; any woman would realize it in weeks.
Besides, I knew the drill: inane chats about office drama, her friend squabbles that’d feel apocalyptic to her. Filling silences lest she think us doomed. Remembering compliments to keep her valued. Endless shopping hours, holding bags, bored enough to stab my corneas. Abandoning movies and books I liked for hers. Curbing opinions to TV-sanctioned takes, lest she deem me negative. The marathon of impressing her and her circle, competing daily with lurking men. Sacrificing solitude, craving it while she recharged socially. Allowing a job to devour my waking hours so I could one day offer her a two-story suburban home. Reproducing, duty-bound to drag innocents into this dying world.
She’d push me to change, then grow bored once I mimicked her desires. Stranded in the desert, oceans and miles apart, I’d endure calls where she’d repeat some new man’s name—how funny he was, how intriguing his opinions. How I shouldn’t mind, because she thought of him as a brother. They’d evict me from the house I’d helped pay for. If I’d stupidly bred, child support would crush me, funding a kid taught to call another man “Dad.”
Better to admire beauties like this Wendy’s goddess from afar. I’d cherish her like a fresco on a crumbling wall of this rotting universe, while others lashed themselves together with barbed wire to avoid being pulled into the dark.
When the boyfriend returned, he planted his phone-hand on the table, speared salad leaves with the other, then jerked his head toward the lot. She smiled, nodded, tucked her compact away. They left shoulder-to-shoulder.
I slumped. I’d see her the following day, until she stopped coming.
Workers shot glances at me, the weirdo with sunglasses and scars under one eye. One muttered to his tablemate. I’d hogged this table too long. Behind the counter, minimum-wage teens wondered how to eject me without triggering an explosion.
I shoveled the remaining fries, then dumped wrappers on the tray and trashed it, freeing the table for those who deserved it.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Trailer Trash” by Modest Mouse.
January 23, 2025
Life update (01/23/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.
Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life , some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song "Hey Jane." Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.
I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.
But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.
I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows . You need a strong stomach for that one.
I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.
That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.
Now that my basement girl has decided to embark us two on a new creative journey (the novel The Scrap Colossus, whose first part I posted), I exist in that antsy state of bliss in which I can’t wait to return to my writing desk and commune with my girl in the most incestuous manner imaginable. While the novel isn’t entirely new, as it’s based on a failed story I discarded ten years ago, I’ve salvaged the workable parts as notes for what feels like a wholly new experience. One of the best things is that I know it’s going to be real fun. With Motocross Legend, Love of My Life, my basement girl wanted to process her strange grief, and during those months, I worked at it like a man possessed. It was a very emotionally taxing experience. But with The Scrap Colossus, basement girl is trying to come to terms with a period of our lives in which I had become a reclusive wreck, hopelessly obsessed slash in love with a certain songwriter, and now I can look back upon those years with humor and shame.
Speaking of a certain motocross legend, this morning I woke up spontaneously near the witching hour, from an intense dream. This happens quite often, although it hadn’t recently. For whatever reason, I revisited the aforementioned novella titled Motocross Legend, Love of My Life , some chapters of it. If you enjoy my stuff and you haven’t read it, you probably should. Of course, soon enough I was crying, because that’s what you do when you read that story. Or at least what I do, every single time. When I mentioned before that while writing that novella I felt like a man possessed, I wasn’t being metaphorical. Something came over me. The story sparked autonomously while I listened for the first time Spiritualized’s song "Hey Jane." Right then, my basement girl unraveled with all sorts of images, dialogue bits and such. For the next few days, she sent bubbling up scene after scene, which I dutifully arranged, and ultimately coordinated myself to let her speak through me.
I’ve yet to understand fully, and probably never will, why this story needed to be told. I’ve never loved anyone like the narrator loved Izar Lizarraga. Perhaps it was an echo of something that happened before I was even born. But tonight, as I read through the latter parts of the story, it occurred to me that part of that grief may be related to my childhood. Although I retain very, very few images of my early life, I know that my first seven or so years were spent in communion with my basement girl. I was an autistic kid who never interacted with others spontaneously, a fact that bothered my teachers so much that they pushed others to “bring me out of my shell,” which led me to meet sociopaths, coke addicts, casual bullies, and other colorful people; most teachers around here seem to subscribe to the secular religion of Equality, and all people who stood in the fringes were equivalent. Anyway, my early childhood was spent writing and drawing feverishly. I was always hunched over a notebook or wandering around while daydreaming. It was blissful. In fact, the sole issues I had with that period of my childhood were related to my family and other people; I felt fine alone.
But then, when I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a third child. She had always wanted three regardless of space, but in retrospect she probably also considered me a failed child. She put me as an unwanted guest in my older brother’s room, and from then on until I was eighteen and ended up with a room of my own again, my mental health declined steadily, and my connection with my basement girl suffered to the extent that at times it felt completely severed. At some point I should probably go in length about how depersonalized I became.
I really don’t want to speak much about my experience of sharing a room with my older brother, but let me paint you a small picture: he always had to sleep with the TV and the radio on, because he couldn’t stand silence. I always had to watch or listen whatever he wanted to listen or watch, which were often the most popular idiotic shows, or else sports. I couldn’t read nor study in what was supposed to be my room; to be able to read anything, I had to wander in the streets. I was likely the sole child that could be seen walking around in public while reading a book or manga. There were numerous other noises coming from his person that triggered my sensory issues on a constant basis. By the time I became a teenager, my mental health was so terrible that I slipped in and out of psychosis, although I was mostly psychotic. The complex novel I tried to write at the time was so terrifyingly incoherent and lacking in any sense of reality that at some point I threw away all my copies of it. It’s due to pure cowardice that I’m still alive, as I wanted to be dead most of the time. I think that the story of mine that goes most in depth about my experiences as a teenager is the harrowing tale A Millennium of Shadows . You need a strong stomach for that one.
I’m fairly certain that I have PTSD from my years 7 to 18, from the utter lack of being respected as a human being. I complained to my mother numerous times about many things regarding my living situation, only to always be replied with a variation of, “You gotta understand, he has problems.” My own needs never mattered. I could barely stand to be in the presence of my older brother since, but because my life is a fucking joke, I have ended up working at the same office. The damage that was done to my psyche during those formative years will never be mended; I’m just doing my best with the wreckage.
That relates to my tale about a motocross legend because my innermost self, probably my basement girl herself, mourns that severance: the lost years, all the great things we could have done if she hadn’t been driven away. So we gotta make up for lost time.
January 22, 2025
Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 4 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
When I approached the workshop on my Chevrolet Lumina, I pulled over into a gap among the workers’ parked vehicles, but during lunch break and at the end of the workday, dozens of people with limited reasoning would be swarming near my car. What if some shift in their thinking made them curious enough to pry open the trunk? People who died in their own homes ended up discovered after someone forced the door.
Instead, I parked outside the adjacent lot, an abandoned tire store. Far from the other cars but near enough to the shop to discourage any vagrant from stealing it. With my luck, I had to consider those possibilities. I belonged to the same breed as that ranger who got struck by lightning so many times he ended up in a wheelchair, then shot himself, and whose tombstone was split by another lightning bolt.
I closed the car door and walked a few steps ahead. No one was roaming the workshop’s yard. The clamor of machinery streamed out of the two-story building with its corrugated metal walls as though it were suffering indigestion.
A quick glance at my Chevrolet Lumina revealed a dent in the bumper. I wanted to ditch the vehicle or cover it with a tarp. What would anyone who saw it think? They’d know I’d hit something, and by the shape and size of the dent, probably a rock or an animal. Maybe no one would ask, but between machine components on the assembly line, I’d have to invent some story.
I opened the side door to the locker room, put on my smock and gloves, and stepped into the workshop. I was engulfed by an industrial music concert—the pounding and buzzing of assembly machines, the whir of conveyor belts and the cylinders that drove them. The fans, as big as a fifties TV set, spun their blades to a blur so we wouldn’t bake. I wove between groups of operators seated at their lines, heads tucked between their shoulders, backs hunched in purple smocks. Intent as watchmakers.
At the far end of the floor, I spotted my station and my empty stool. As if radar had warned him I’d arrived, Héctor glanced up from the piece he was handling and shot me one of his disdainful looks. I dropped onto the stool with a huff. My fingers took up the part that was coming down the line. The routine shackling me to this job would cancel out all thought, reducing me to a programmed robot.
“Thanks for dumping your parts on us for a while,” Héctor said.
“Any stabbing pains?” asked Christopher, smiling to my right.
“Vomiting,” I said.
“Feeling better?”
“If it happens again, I’ll run for the bathroom.”
“Thanks for the cake yesterday, by the way—because the supervisor threw you a surprise party.”
“I know,” I replied in a curt tone that said I was done talking about my birthday.
The parts rolled along the belt like bar patrons arriving by name. I knew which loose plastic bits fit together and how to connect each cable. This monotony stung like a rash. It didn’t matter who we were nor what we thought.
Opposite me, Héctor had lowered his olive-toned face, glossy black hair dangling in strands as his fingers worked a part. To my right, Christopher stood slack-jawed, arching his back into an inverted C. Did they feel this job demeaned them? Did they even have any dignity left to lose, or were they glad the steady flow of parts kept them occupied?
To fill the orders, we had to switch off our inner worlds, while our humanity peeled away like sand off skin after a day at the beach. We maintained a conspiracy of silence. We pretended this life was worth bearing, and we dreaded anyone’s saying otherwise out loud lest we dropped dead, the way a machine goes dark the moment you yank its power cord.
Over the next two hours, I stacked tension in my shoulders, arms, and hands. Sooner or later some muscle would lock up, rendering me unable to attach the pieces and cables.
When the break came, I shot up and crossed the workshop to the yard. I stepped out into the heat. As I turned toward the fence that separated us from the adjacent lot, a mosquito buzzed my ear, and I swatted at it.
I expected to find my trunk forced open, signs someone had wedged in a crowbar. Behind me, the workers were spilling out into the yard talking and laughing, so I avoided looking like I was policing my car—or hiding something. A mass of purple smocks crammed into the limited shady spots under the building’s eaves. The sunlight bathed the world in a piss-yellow glow, while the silhouettes of those sheltering workers looked like charcoal sketches.
Even though my hair was heating up, I needed to recharge. Being around so many people would drain me. I planted myself by the fence marking the yard’s boundary, among dry blades of grass shooting from the cracked earth. I took out my cigarette pack. Across the road, the desert spread flat for miles, but my dead eye made judging distance a struggle. A few roads slashed through that orange-cream land. The sun glittered on truck trailers and car bodies like Morse code. The earth, dust clouds, and tiny vehicles shimmered in the distance. Dozens of oil pumps dotted the dead expanse, getting sparser the farther they were, with no pattern I could decipher—like someone had just chosen random spots to drop those machines, convinced they’d suck out buried treasure. The gunk they drew up had financed half the local industry, and that struck me as a miracle.
The sun was roasting my face, and sweat seeped out as if I were being squeezed dry. Christopher, all lankiness and dragging heels, crossed the yard toward me. I blinked against the sun even through tinted lenses, and a wave of discomfort washed over me. He smiled like a puppy, stopped next to me, fanned himself, and tugged at the collar of his polo—buttoned all the way up—peeking out of his smock.
“It’s really hot out here, right?”
I wanted to say yeah, and if he didn’t like it he should join the workers whose silhouettes blurred in the shade, but I didn’t want to waste the energy. I shrugged and took a drag.
Héctor and John—or Joseph—appeared, heading our way. Their footsteps kicked up dust. Héctor’s gut jiggled with each step, and his thick mane glistened in the sun like a gasoline puddle. Next to him, John—or Joseph—walked with a springy gait, like he was on his way to a party. His torso curved along a crooked spine. The smock covered part of a white shirt that must have cost three times what mine did, and he’d popped its collar frat-boy style. His clothes hid the growths on his left shoulder. Past the rolled-up right sleeve, the arm looked like a botched experiment, covered in clusters and folds of rhinoceros-gray skin.
Up close, Héctor’s smock shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff, as if he’d darted outside in a brief snowstorm and hurried back in. He shot me the second type of look he always reserved for me, as if I were a pitbull whose mood concerned him; he hoped that if I decided to attack, I’d choose someone else’s throat.
Four evolutionary dead ends gathered in a miasma of sweat. Magnets glomming together, little circles of humanity where everyone had to save everyone else from boredom.
I avoided their eyes and focused on inhaling smoke to soothe my aggravation. If only I could flip a switch and go invisible. On breaks, I’d escape to some corner of the yard so no one could pin me down with their gaze, and I’d recharge the energy that these pauses allowed. My assigned coworkers would wonder where that one-eyed bastard had gone off to. Camouflaged like a predator in the jungle, I’d hear every nasty remark about me, each personal reason they found me disagreeable.
Héctor was rolling strands of tobacco in paper. He slid the paper between the stubs of his index and middle fingers, which looked like they’d emerged from the womb minus the first joint.
“Did you see last night’s Mavericks game?” John—or Joseph—said. “That alley-oop from Curry to Nowitzki?”
He looked at the three of us. Christopher, maybe embarrassed, shook his head.
“Seriously?” John—or Joseph—said. “None of you? Bunch of ignoramuses.”
He grinned at us as though he’d had his teeth bleached, but in reality they’d worn down in concave and diagonal shapes, enamel grayed or eroded to transparency. Too often the condition of a person’s teeth reflected the state of their mind.
As if John—or Joseph—had just insulted his entire family, Christopher rattled off teams and scores, plus names, presumably players. John—or Joseph—chimed in with stats and point totals while fidgeting with his right sleeve, that snagged on the lumps and folds of gray skin. Up close, his white shirt had clearly needed ironing for weeks.
The sun had me drenched, and my brain felt as though it were melting. My thoughts, swimming in a grimy fishbowl, barely let me lift the cigarette to my mouth. If something about that car gave me away, would I even notice? Next to that vacant lot, the trunk shone, and a few inches of shade fell across it in a rhomboid pattern. How hot must it be inside?
I wiped my forehead, the sweat sliding down my wrist, and patted my cheeks. I had to stay alert—a slip of a few seconds could haunt me the rest of my life.
Héctor nudged Christopher in the ribs as he watched a group of workers crossing the yard.
“Check it out. I ran into him on my way to the bathroom today, and for the third time he flat-out ignored me. Acted like I was invisible. Must think that used Camry he bought makes him better than us.” He craned his neck as if to shout at the group rounding the workshop corner, but kept the same volume. “Conceited bastard.”
Christopher was writing in the palm of his hand with a pen. Héctor frowned and leaned sideways to see.
“Does it matter that much?”
“I’ll forget if I don’t.”
“Do you remember to look at your hand for what you’re supposed to remember?”
“Sometimes.”
Héctor laughed out of one side of his mouth while the other corner gripped the cigarette.
“How’re you ever going to meet a woman? If you land a date, you’ll forget her name or where you’re meeting. Will you even remember you met her?”
Christopher swallowed, his thick Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He straightened, slipped the pen into a pocket of his smock, and managed a smile.
“She’ll have to be patient.”
Héctor shook his head while smiling like a boy who pelts rats with rocks and awards himself points for each kill. Christopher, instead of ignoring him or firing back, wiped away his dismay and hung on every word the man uttered, dancing to his tune in a tutu. Then again, that’s what other people were for: to vouch for your existence, even if only by making fun of you.
“By the way,” Héctor said, “I saw the supervisor carrying a bunch of résumés on her clipboard. She’s looking to fill the coordinator job.”
“The last coordinator started as an operator, didn’t he?” said John—or Joseph.
“That’s what I thought. So get used to the idea you’re talking to the next coordinator.”
“You want to be coordinator?” Christopher asked.
Héctor squinted at him and blew a smoke ring.
“If I said you’re talking to the next coordinator, and you’re talking to me, what do you think that means? Do I want the job or not?”
“You want it?”
“The pay’s better, and I’d get to improve the workshop’s routines. I don’t think anyone else has volunteered. I’ll seduce the supervisor—flatter her for a few days, pick up Starbucks on the way. A Caramel Frappuccino. I’ll tell her what I want, and she’ll take it into account.” He shook his head while surveying the oil-pump-strewn plain like a general sizing up his next conquest. “I’ll clean this place up, break people of their idiotic habits. Sleep like a baby.”
As I clamped the cigarette filter between my lips, I turned my sunglasses on Héctor before I could even think to hide my grimace. That man needed to sit on top even of a heap of shit. I wanted a shower—a cold jet of water to rinse away the sweat sliding down my back, chest, and legs, making my underwear stick.
“You don’t find it funny,” Héctor said.
In the distance, my car called me, demanding attention like a child wandering too close to the road.
“I asked you, Cyclops,” Héctor added.
He furrowed his brow, studying my face as if counting each pimple. What was I supposed to answer? Before I could muster the energy to part my chapped lips, Héctor went on.
“Oh, I forgot—no point talking to us.”
I held his stare drilling into my sunglasses. I took a drag to steady my pulse, to dissolve the image of pressing out my cigarette on his forehead. When I spoke, it was like scraping rust off a pipe.
“Half-truth.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
This part reminded me of dealing with the other disabled folks I met while attending that stupid course and being shown the workshops. Check the first entry of this tale for more details. I don’t miss it one bit. Although I’ve forgotten most of that experience (my neurological configuration is terrible at retaining memories), I’m fairly certain that all the workshop-related people in this story are made out of pieces of those I got to know, either there or at the center for autism. Héctor himself was based on a fella diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, who kept railing on about autists among many others.
When I approached the workshop on my Chevrolet Lumina, I pulled over into a gap among the workers’ parked vehicles, but during lunch break and at the end of the workday, dozens of people with limited reasoning would be swarming near my car. What if some shift in their thinking made them curious enough to pry open the trunk? People who died in their own homes ended up discovered after someone forced the door.
Instead, I parked outside the adjacent lot, an abandoned tire store. Far from the other cars but near enough to the shop to discourage any vagrant from stealing it. With my luck, I had to consider those possibilities. I belonged to the same breed as that ranger who got struck by lightning so many times he ended up in a wheelchair, then shot himself, and whose tombstone was split by another lightning bolt.
I closed the car door and walked a few steps ahead. No one was roaming the workshop’s yard. The clamor of machinery streamed out of the two-story building with its corrugated metal walls as though it were suffering indigestion.
A quick glance at my Chevrolet Lumina revealed a dent in the bumper. I wanted to ditch the vehicle or cover it with a tarp. What would anyone who saw it think? They’d know I’d hit something, and by the shape and size of the dent, probably a rock or an animal. Maybe no one would ask, but between machine components on the assembly line, I’d have to invent some story.
I opened the side door to the locker room, put on my smock and gloves, and stepped into the workshop. I was engulfed by an industrial music concert—the pounding and buzzing of assembly machines, the whir of conveyor belts and the cylinders that drove them. The fans, as big as a fifties TV set, spun their blades to a blur so we wouldn’t bake. I wove between groups of operators seated at their lines, heads tucked between their shoulders, backs hunched in purple smocks. Intent as watchmakers.
At the far end of the floor, I spotted my station and my empty stool. As if radar had warned him I’d arrived, Héctor glanced up from the piece he was handling and shot me one of his disdainful looks. I dropped onto the stool with a huff. My fingers took up the part that was coming down the line. The routine shackling me to this job would cancel out all thought, reducing me to a programmed robot.
“Thanks for dumping your parts on us for a while,” Héctor said.
“Any stabbing pains?” asked Christopher, smiling to my right.
“Vomiting,” I said.
“Feeling better?”
“If it happens again, I’ll run for the bathroom.”
“Thanks for the cake yesterday, by the way—because the supervisor threw you a surprise party.”
“I know,” I replied in a curt tone that said I was done talking about my birthday.
The parts rolled along the belt like bar patrons arriving by name. I knew which loose plastic bits fit together and how to connect each cable. This monotony stung like a rash. It didn’t matter who we were nor what we thought.
Opposite me, Héctor had lowered his olive-toned face, glossy black hair dangling in strands as his fingers worked a part. To my right, Christopher stood slack-jawed, arching his back into an inverted C. Did they feel this job demeaned them? Did they even have any dignity left to lose, or were they glad the steady flow of parts kept them occupied?
To fill the orders, we had to switch off our inner worlds, while our humanity peeled away like sand off skin after a day at the beach. We maintained a conspiracy of silence. We pretended this life was worth bearing, and we dreaded anyone’s saying otherwise out loud lest we dropped dead, the way a machine goes dark the moment you yank its power cord.
Over the next two hours, I stacked tension in my shoulders, arms, and hands. Sooner or later some muscle would lock up, rendering me unable to attach the pieces and cables.
When the break came, I shot up and crossed the workshop to the yard. I stepped out into the heat. As I turned toward the fence that separated us from the adjacent lot, a mosquito buzzed my ear, and I swatted at it.
I expected to find my trunk forced open, signs someone had wedged in a crowbar. Behind me, the workers were spilling out into the yard talking and laughing, so I avoided looking like I was policing my car—or hiding something. A mass of purple smocks crammed into the limited shady spots under the building’s eaves. The sunlight bathed the world in a piss-yellow glow, while the silhouettes of those sheltering workers looked like charcoal sketches.
Even though my hair was heating up, I needed to recharge. Being around so many people would drain me. I planted myself by the fence marking the yard’s boundary, among dry blades of grass shooting from the cracked earth. I took out my cigarette pack. Across the road, the desert spread flat for miles, but my dead eye made judging distance a struggle. A few roads slashed through that orange-cream land. The sun glittered on truck trailers and car bodies like Morse code. The earth, dust clouds, and tiny vehicles shimmered in the distance. Dozens of oil pumps dotted the dead expanse, getting sparser the farther they were, with no pattern I could decipher—like someone had just chosen random spots to drop those machines, convinced they’d suck out buried treasure. The gunk they drew up had financed half the local industry, and that struck me as a miracle.
The sun was roasting my face, and sweat seeped out as if I were being squeezed dry. Christopher, all lankiness and dragging heels, crossed the yard toward me. I blinked against the sun even through tinted lenses, and a wave of discomfort washed over me. He smiled like a puppy, stopped next to me, fanned himself, and tugged at the collar of his polo—buttoned all the way up—peeking out of his smock.
“It’s really hot out here, right?”
I wanted to say yeah, and if he didn’t like it he should join the workers whose silhouettes blurred in the shade, but I didn’t want to waste the energy. I shrugged and took a drag.
Héctor and John—or Joseph—appeared, heading our way. Their footsteps kicked up dust. Héctor’s gut jiggled with each step, and his thick mane glistened in the sun like a gasoline puddle. Next to him, John—or Joseph—walked with a springy gait, like he was on his way to a party. His torso curved along a crooked spine. The smock covered part of a white shirt that must have cost three times what mine did, and he’d popped its collar frat-boy style. His clothes hid the growths on his left shoulder. Past the rolled-up right sleeve, the arm looked like a botched experiment, covered in clusters and folds of rhinoceros-gray skin.
Up close, Héctor’s smock shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff, as if he’d darted outside in a brief snowstorm and hurried back in. He shot me the second type of look he always reserved for me, as if I were a pitbull whose mood concerned him; he hoped that if I decided to attack, I’d choose someone else’s throat.
Four evolutionary dead ends gathered in a miasma of sweat. Magnets glomming together, little circles of humanity where everyone had to save everyone else from boredom.
I avoided their eyes and focused on inhaling smoke to soothe my aggravation. If only I could flip a switch and go invisible. On breaks, I’d escape to some corner of the yard so no one could pin me down with their gaze, and I’d recharge the energy that these pauses allowed. My assigned coworkers would wonder where that one-eyed bastard had gone off to. Camouflaged like a predator in the jungle, I’d hear every nasty remark about me, each personal reason they found me disagreeable.
Héctor was rolling strands of tobacco in paper. He slid the paper between the stubs of his index and middle fingers, which looked like they’d emerged from the womb minus the first joint.
“Did you see last night’s Mavericks game?” John—or Joseph—said. “That alley-oop from Curry to Nowitzki?”
He looked at the three of us. Christopher, maybe embarrassed, shook his head.
“Seriously?” John—or Joseph—said. “None of you? Bunch of ignoramuses.”
He grinned at us as though he’d had his teeth bleached, but in reality they’d worn down in concave and diagonal shapes, enamel grayed or eroded to transparency. Too often the condition of a person’s teeth reflected the state of their mind.
As if John—or Joseph—had just insulted his entire family, Christopher rattled off teams and scores, plus names, presumably players. John—or Joseph—chimed in with stats and point totals while fidgeting with his right sleeve, that snagged on the lumps and folds of gray skin. Up close, his white shirt had clearly needed ironing for weeks.
The sun had me drenched, and my brain felt as though it were melting. My thoughts, swimming in a grimy fishbowl, barely let me lift the cigarette to my mouth. If something about that car gave me away, would I even notice? Next to that vacant lot, the trunk shone, and a few inches of shade fell across it in a rhomboid pattern. How hot must it be inside?
I wiped my forehead, the sweat sliding down my wrist, and patted my cheeks. I had to stay alert—a slip of a few seconds could haunt me the rest of my life.
Héctor nudged Christopher in the ribs as he watched a group of workers crossing the yard.
“Check it out. I ran into him on my way to the bathroom today, and for the third time he flat-out ignored me. Acted like I was invisible. Must think that used Camry he bought makes him better than us.” He craned his neck as if to shout at the group rounding the workshop corner, but kept the same volume. “Conceited bastard.”
Christopher was writing in the palm of his hand with a pen. Héctor frowned and leaned sideways to see.
“Does it matter that much?”
“I’ll forget if I don’t.”
“Do you remember to look at your hand for what you’re supposed to remember?”
“Sometimes.”
Héctor laughed out of one side of his mouth while the other corner gripped the cigarette.
“How’re you ever going to meet a woman? If you land a date, you’ll forget her name or where you’re meeting. Will you even remember you met her?”
Christopher swallowed, his thick Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. He straightened, slipped the pen into a pocket of his smock, and managed a smile.
“She’ll have to be patient.”
Héctor shook his head while smiling like a boy who pelts rats with rocks and awards himself points for each kill. Christopher, instead of ignoring him or firing back, wiped away his dismay and hung on every word the man uttered, dancing to his tune in a tutu. Then again, that’s what other people were for: to vouch for your existence, even if only by making fun of you.
“By the way,” Héctor said, “I saw the supervisor carrying a bunch of résumés on her clipboard. She’s looking to fill the coordinator job.”
“The last coordinator started as an operator, didn’t he?” said John—or Joseph.
“That’s what I thought. So get used to the idea you’re talking to the next coordinator.”
“You want to be coordinator?” Christopher asked.
Héctor squinted at him and blew a smoke ring.
“If I said you’re talking to the next coordinator, and you’re talking to me, what do you think that means? Do I want the job or not?”
“You want it?”
“The pay’s better, and I’d get to improve the workshop’s routines. I don’t think anyone else has volunteered. I’ll seduce the supervisor—flatter her for a few days, pick up Starbucks on the way. A Caramel Frappuccino. I’ll tell her what I want, and she’ll take it into account.” He shook his head while surveying the oil-pump-strewn plain like a general sizing up his next conquest. “I’ll clean this place up, break people of their idiotic habits. Sleep like a baby.”
As I clamped the cigarette filter between my lips, I turned my sunglasses on Héctor before I could even think to hide my grimace. That man needed to sit on top even of a heap of shit. I wanted a shower—a cold jet of water to rinse away the sweat sliding down my back, chest, and legs, making my underwear stick.
“You don’t find it funny,” Héctor said.
In the distance, my car called me, demanding attention like a child wandering too close to the road.
“I asked you, Cyclops,” Héctor added.
He furrowed his brow, studying my face as if counting each pimple. What was I supposed to answer? Before I could muster the energy to part my chapped lips, Héctor went on.
“Oh, I forgot—no point talking to us.”
I held his stare drilling into my sunglasses. I took a drag to steady my pulse, to dissolve the image of pressing out my cigarette on his forehead. When I spoke, it was like scraping rust off a pipe.
“Half-truth.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
This part reminded me of dealing with the other disabled folks I met while attending that stupid course and being shown the workshops. Check the first entry of this tale for more details. I don’t miss it one bit. Although I’ve forgotten most of that experience (my neurological configuration is terrible at retaining memories), I’m fairly certain that all the workshop-related people in this story are made out of pieces of those I got to know, either there or at the center for autism. Héctor himself was based on a fella diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, who kept railing on about autists among many others.
