Jon Ureña's Blog, page 12

On Writing: Plot point generation #2

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.

-Could weather create delays and accidents? Could it obscure vision, or make someone weak or faint?
-What setting in your story could make some character to feel sad, fearful, nostalgic, angry, guilty, etc.? Think about the plot points that could be derived from that.
-Find in your setting specific places that have extra significance, or places where events recur. To make a place iconic, make something big happen there.
-Prior to the climax of the novel, find, brainstorm, try to apply six points at which your protagonist can demonstrate some heroic quality.
-How will you show what your characters feel? What will express their thoughts? What will reveal their inner struggles?
-Have your characters do things only they would do. Every character action represents that character. So when they act, have them act in a manner unique to them. Use every character action in your story to sell us on the unique nature of that character.
-What events would reveal character?
-Create stakes-raising dilemmas that give your protagonists opportunities to use their unique abilities. Let that explain why this character succeeded where others failed.
-Can you allow characters to do the things that characters with different labels (protagonist, villain, etc.) would do?
-How would a reflection character show the protagonist why and maybe how he can make it through the door, when he might slip back, have fear and doubt, second-guess himself?
-Figure out plot points in which the allies are there for your hero, stick by him, speak truth in love, reflect back what the hero needs to see in order to understand and move one step closer to his goal?
-In what plot point could the most “ally” character oppose your character regarding her goal?
-Can you find a moment for each of your main characters to want the opposite of their hearts’ desire? Can you make it bigger, more emotional?
-Where can you have characters say something other than what they mean (subtext)? Hint at something secret?
-Can you find/add five places in your novel where a character acts rashly, inconsistently, contrary?
-Imagine a moment when your protagonist is moved, unsettled or disturbed. This might occur when he’s facing a difficult choice, needing something badly, suffering a setback or surprise, having a self-realization, learning something shocking, or feeling in any way overwhelmed. Write down all the emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.
-What’s the biggest way in which your protagonist can act out? What can she destroy? -Whom can she attack? What truthful thing can she say? What will shock others in the story?
-Let your characters make mistakes: protagonists, antagonists, and secondary characters.
-What events would push someone’s buttons relative to worldview and personal belief systems?
-What would a character’s belief/past experience cause him to do?
-What secrets does a character have, what lies he has told, to others and even to himself, that might cause plot point issues?
-Think of plot points that would suggest the main character will get just more entrenched in his flaw, making it impossible to change, and others which suggest the possibility of changing.
-What key moment in your novel showcases the primary reflection character/ally’s support?
-What is your protagonist good at doing? Throw them the opposite of what they’re best at and make them deal with it.
-Think up a moment in your novel in which the hero and the antagonist agree on something.
-Think of a moment in which the antagonist is actually vulnerable and / or empathetic.
-What is the primary antagonist and what key moment showcases the big conflict and issue between them?
-The impact character may or may not be actively trying to get the protagonist to see that Truth, but he’s going to be there at crucial moments in the story to help the protagonist see the error of his ways. He has the answers the protagonist is looking for (even though the protagonist won’t know that at the beginning of the story), and those answers are going to end up being pivotal to the protagonist’s ability to conquer the antagonist and the external conflict in his quest for his story goal.
-A character can’t change without something that impacts him by consistently and convincingly conflicting with his belief in the Lie.
-What events could show off or amplify the inner journey?
-Start by determining self-revelation, at the end of the story, then go back to the beginning and figure out the hero’s need and desire.
-Brainstorm actions that prove the transformation.
-Plant a redemptive action, the actions which could solve MC’s “fatal flaw”, and have the other person fail to do it.
-Think of a way of showing a character’s change by putting him in a similar situation but acting differently, even to the point of disagreeing with his previous action in similar circumstances.
-What event could bring about change for your protagonist?
-What event could bring about change for a secondary character?
-Throughout the story, the protagonist and his blind faith in his Lie are going to keep running smack into the impact character’s Truth. The protagonist may want to be left in peace with his Lie, but the impact character’s persistent presence keeps churning up the protagonist’s awareness of the Truth–and creating internal conflict.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I staggered out of the bedroom while pressing my temple to contain a throbbing headache, and from the dining table I was greeted by the sight of the duffel bag open and gutted, clots of blood around the zipper. T-shirts, pants, and the undergarments of my military uniform lay spread out across the table, rolled into cylinders and secured with elastic bands. Balls of socks. Razor blades and shaving lotion tucked into a plastic ziplock bag.

To distract myself, I opened the balcony door and stepped onto the two-foot ledge that served as a terrace. I leaned against the railing. Delivery vans were stirring the stillness, and a few sleepwalkers were getting into their cars on their way to work. The sky was so clear it seemed clouds existed only in someone’s imagination, so the air would stay mild until daybreak.

I rubbed my face. Before I drove to the workshop, I’d reserve a few measured minutes to breathe in that mix of desert air and traffic fumes.

The stretch of street on my left reminded me of the landscapes the Coyote would paint on a rock wall to catch the Road Runner. Past a winding path between trimmed lawns, a parking lot surrounded a beige, boxlike building housing a Mexican restaurant, and right next door stood a single-story Jack in the Box. Above their roofs rose a tall pillar, like a ruin missing the roof it once supported, showing the Chevron gas station logo. At the end of the road, the cars coming and going looked like grime on an old lens, blurring with the distant silhouettes of trees, one-story buildings, and billboards.

I had gotten to know this view the day I traveled to the city, was guaranteed a job at the workshop, and wandered around until I saw the vacancy sign in front of this apartment block. Such a backdrop convinced me that I lived in a solid world, but for all I knew, those cars and pedestrians that came and went may have vanished from existence as soon as they disappeared from sight. Sure, I’d grown familiar with the stretch leading from my apartment to the workshop, plus a few miles on the outskirts among the oil fields, but the rest of the world could have disappeared, erased into the void between planets.

I took a deep breath and returned to the living room. I dragged the duffel bag into the shower, soaked it under the spray, and scrubbed away the clotted blood. Diluted blood stained the rush of water flowing down the drain. When I was satisfied, I left the soaked bag in the sink. A trace of the stench of urine and excrement lingered in the fibers, woven into them.

I wandered around the living room. What had I left out of place yesterday for the future version of me, the one getting up in the morning, to deal with? The breakfast mug beside a spoon crusted with dried milk. The open box of cornflakes. On the other side of the counter I had stacked the three freezer drawers and the ice tray.

A chill went through my guts. I checked each drawer to see what food would go bad. A few boxes of instant noodles, steaks wrapped in plastic. Fortunately, my paycheck didn’t allow me to stock up on too many supplies. By tonight, after getting home from the workshop, I’d cook whatever my stomach could handle, and toss the rest in the garbage.

I washed the breakfast mug. I brought it along with the box of cereal to the dining table. I fetched cold milk from the fridge. As I poured cornflakes to fill the mug, the sound of that little cascade satisfied me like a dog hearing food rattle in its bowl. I splashed the milk in. Sitting there, lifting the spoon to my mouth, I lost any sense of actually having breakfast, and whenever I snapped out of it, my gaze was glued to the closed freezer door. The fridge’s hum called to me like a prayer echoing in a church. My insides rumbled, the milk tasted bitter. I left the mug by the sink.

Under a lukewarm shower, I braced my hands against the wall and blew away the water running over my mouth. I could call in and say I’d woken up sick. I could fake it. But no, I couldn’t. If any clue on that dirt road led the police to me and the very next day I, someone who never took vacation days, failed to show up at work, that would instantly label me a suspect. To survive until the boy disappeared, I had to stick to my routine. I’d endure the anxiety, the waves of chills threatening to rattle my spine, for the rest of today, Thursday, and Friday. Those forty-eight hours of the weekend were mine. I could travel without making excuses. I’d hide the body in some bushes and close this chapter as if the boy had never crossed paths with my car.

I walked around the bedroom looking for yesterday’s shirt, until I remembered I’d thrown it away. I put on a clean shirt. At the front door, before putting on my sunglasses, I fumbled with my key ring as I pictured what a cop would notice if he came in. Nothing among my small hoard of belongings hinted at a boy, and nobody would show up here for the rest of the week. I’d dodged that bullet. Until the weekend, my apartment would serve as a mausoleum. The boy would lie there, oblivious to the world of traffic and work baking in the sun.

I put on my glasses and headed downstairs. In the heat of dawn, I wanted to tug at my shirt collar to cool off. I took refuge behind the tinted lenses, which blocked other people’s stares the way a one-way mirror does in an interrogation room.

Traffic was still lined with cars and delivery vans. How would my coworkers see me over the course of the split shift? I had to act the same as always: the guy who keeps quiet, stays out on the periphery. But in my mind’s eye I saw myself sitting at my station on the line, hunched over another anonymous metal part, struggling to hide that I’d killed a child. During breaks, I’d hurry around the staircase leading to the supervisor’s office, avoiding her, and duck into the bathroom to take a deep breath. When we all went out to the yard, I’d huddle with the other workers—a colony of elephant seals—in the rectangle of shade under a small roof, to smoke while the sun roasted the tips of my sneakers, and my lungs filled with that superheated air smelling of dirt and metal. And the entire time I’d be anticipating the moment someone discovered the corpse packed away in my freezer.

For these three days, all my energy would be devoted to keeping that shield in place. The rest of the time, I’d be a vegetable.

My mind had dissolved, but suddenly I jolted upright behind the wheel as though my guts had turned to ice. I nearly rammed into the car ahead of me; the line had stopped at the sign before the intersection. I slammed on the brakes, and the tires squealed. Through the rearview mirror of the car ahead, the driver frowned, studying my reflection.

I clutched the steering wheel like I wanted to rip it off in one yank. Three days until the weekend. Yesterday was Monday, not Tuesday.

I grabbed my phone and held it over the wheel while I waited for traffic to move. I followed the line of cars. When I spotted an opening, I sped into a tight turn, arms twisting on the wheel, crossing into the opposite lane. The front right tire mounted the curb. When the car crashed back onto the asphalt, the suspension squeaked, and I jolted in the seat. A delivery van approaching from that lane laid on its horn.

I kept glancing between the road and my phone’s contact list until I found the landlord’s number. I called. It rang once.

“Who’s this?”

The man sounded like he’d barely turned his head toward his phone’s mic.

“This is Alan Kivi. You were coming to check on my apartment this morning, 3F. But I’m working from home and need to focus.”

“You’re not here.”

It was hard to think while driving. The landlord must already be in my apartment, and he sounded irritated, though not in the way someone would if they’d found a dead child.

“I stepped out for an errand. I’m on my way back.”

“We agreed on this time, a general inspection every Tuesday at 7:45. I have limited time for each unit.”

While he spoke, I parked in the first open spot outside my apartment block, jumped out of the car, and sprinted upstairs. My nostrils flared so I wouldn’t pant into the phone.

“Sorry, but something came up and I have to juggle it from home. My hours are tight too.”

I slid the key in the lock and flung the door open. I stepped inside while pressing my lips together so I didn’t exhale too loudly. My eyes swept over the fridge and the closed freezer, the stack of plastic drawers on the counter, the dirty mug and spoon in the sink, and on the dining table, the cylinders of army uniforms, the socks, and a plastic bag of toiletries. Standing to the right of the doorway, the landlord was facing me. A gaunt man in his forties, crow-black hair streaked with gray, wearing frameless glasses and sharply creased pants.

It reassured me that my sudden entrance startled him, the same way you might surprise someone who’s cleaning a room only to look up and see a stranger standing under the door frame with a hollow grin. I had hoped that the day I rented this place would be the only time I ever saw him. Whenever I moved out, if I survived this apartment, I’d slip a note and the key through his mailbox and vanish.

He tucked his phone away. As if to avert his gaze, he turned to the entryway cabinet, ran a finger over the dulled varnish, and rubbed that fingertip against his thumb.

“You could wipe things down once in a while,” he said. He tapped the cabinet, near a pile of dusty coins and old keys. “To prevent damage, you should gather your coins and stuff in a tray, just like you’d use coasters under your bottles.”

I shut the door behind me while trying to breathe through my nose. Sweat clung to the hair on my forearms in thick drops, and a vibration pounded in my skull, making it hard to think. I stepped between him and the kitchen area like I was absentminded.

“Sorry I didn’t let you know.”

He ventured deeper inside.

“I can inspect while you work. I won’t make a sound.”

“No, I really need to wrap this up before I head to my main job, and I can’t concentrate with someone moving around in the corner of my eye.”

He gave me a once-over. Like dozens of other people, he peered at my sunglasses, maybe thinking I was joking by wearing them indoors, maybe debating whether to ask me to take them off.

“I can’t come back this week.”

“The apartment will survive.”

He craned his neck over my shoulder to look at the stack of drawers on the counter.

“All that food is going to spoil. Is something wrong with your freezer?”

I wanted to grab him by the shirt and toss him out. I’d told him to leave, and he was still getting on my nerves. I worked hour after hour to afford a one-bedroom with a kitchenette carved out of the living room, and I had to put up with someone who wouldn’t go when asked. No privacy, no peace, even in the space I paid for.

“The freezer works. I was just cleaning it out. Really, I need to finish up and get back to the workshop.”

He pulled out his key ring, twirling it around his finger, and then his features twisted as if a sudden jolt hit him. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and massaged his temple.

“If you wanted to postpone the inspection, why didn’t you let me know?”

“I forgot, that’s all. There’s no mystery. I’m just disorganized. If my head worked better, I doubt we’d have ever met.”

He rubbed that circle on his temple and stared right through me. Maybe he was thinking of fitting my inspection into the rest of his week, or maybe he was waiting for some kind of bribe.

I reached into my back pocket for my wallet. I counted fifty dollars in two twenties and a ten, and held them out. Already I pictured the meals I’d be missing for the next few days.

“For your trouble.”

He glanced at the bills, and through those frameless lenses I watched his pupils widen. He took a step back and raised one hand like I’d just offered him a line of coke.

“No, no. Let’s just forget it. Tuesday next week, can I come then?”

“Same as always.”

“At the same time?”

“If it changes, I’ll let you know.”

He let his gaze slide away. He opened the apartment door, nodded a goodbye, and slipped into the hallway. I rushed over and peered through the peephole just in time to see him heading for the stairwell.

I slumped back against the door. While my pulse calmed, I mustered enough saliva to wet my mouth. My face, my wrists, my back all itched like spiders were scuttling across my skin. If the landlord had suspected I was lying, would I have noticed?

I limped to the bathroom. I tossed the damp duffel bag onto the floor and filled the sink with cold water. I plunged my face in up to my ears. The bubbles from my nose rolled across my cheeks, and the freezing sting dulled.

I pulled off my shirt and used a towel to dry my neck and chest. I scrubbed my armpits. I wanted to sit under the warm shower again, but every passing minute came off my shift at the workshop.

I paced the apartment. What else had I forgotten, which tiny clue would betray me? Today I’d been certain—just as certain as I knew I’d woken up here, just as certain as I’d known where to find a clean shirt—that it was Wednesday. I would have shown up at the workshop like any other Wednesday, until a line of cop cars parked outside and the officers swarmed in to arrest me. While they handcuffed me and pushed my head down into the back seat, I’d wonder how they found out.

I needed to keep a shield even against my own mind, my own impressions. I had to double-check every fact in case this broken brain was trying to sabotage me.

I collapsed onto the moth-eaten wreck of a couch and propped my elbows on my thighs. I’d call work. I remembered the way my supervisor smiled, as if chasing off the darkness of the world, and I heard the echo of her tone with us, the same one she’d use with a baby or a drooling old man. I dialed her number. She picked up.

“I was surprised you weren’t here. Are you okay?”

Instead of faking coughs, degrading myself with that performance, I tried to keep my voice free of anxiety.

“I woke up nauseous, and threw up. I think it’s been coming on for a couple days.”

“That why you disappeared yesterday?”

“When?”

“We got together to celebrate your birthday. A surprise. But you vanished. I called your cell a few times in case you were still around.”

She’d pry some excuse out of me, like I’d asked for a party in my honor.

“I barely use my phone. Whenever I need it, the battery’s dead. Sorry.” I cut her off before she scolded me about my phone habits. “But yes, I’ve been feeling sick for days. I figured I’d rather throw up at home.”

“Too bad,” she said, half-playful, half-scolding. I pictured her pouting her lower lip. “I bought a chocolate-pecan cake. A shame you missed it. Your coworkers devoured it, but at least they’re grateful to you.”

She paused, waiting for me to thank her. Nobody had asked her to plan that ambush. What about me, or my behavior, made her think I wanted her to gather a bunch of people I barely tolerated so they could shine a spotlight on some personal milestone I hadn’t mentioned? In her world, as she looked over her minions from that big window in her office, maybe she saw us all as identical little cogs, each with a slightly different face.

She let ten seconds of silence pass.

“If you need to, stay home. If you feel better in the morning, come in. I’m sure your coworkers can manage one day without you.”

“No, I was calling to say that although I’m running late, I’ll be there soon. Throwing up cleared my head, and I took some medicine.”

“You’re sure?”

“You’ll see me at my station in a little while.”

We said our goodbyes. I hung up, removed my sunglasses, and buried my face in my hands. I stifled a groan. My animal self must have sensed a threat before my rational mind did, and as much as I wanted to shut down, I had to brace for an impending assault. My head was pounding. I stood up and looked at the closed freezer door. The landlord had said he’d be back next week, but could I risk believing him? Maybe I had annoyed him enough that he’d pop in unannounced another morning this week, claiming he had a gap in his schedule. Meanwhile I’d be on the line at the workshop, assembling one piece after another, and during each break I’d dread seeing flashing red-and-blue lights reflected in the windows.

I went to the bathroom and lifted the duffel bag. Water dripped into the puddle around my feet. I dried the bag off with a hair dryer and set it down, open, a few paces from the freezer. I waited, crouched in front of that closed door, as though some chemical shift in my brain might ready me for what lay inside. As much as I wanted to bury the boy in there and forget him, I had to keep him near, under lock and key, a key I carried in my pocket.

I opened the door and let the cold air wash over me. Part of me wanted to revel in the chill a moment, to clear my head, but inside, among the frosted walls, sat the plastic-wrapped package whitened by ice. Taut plastic forced the body into the shape of a Thanksgiving turkey, folded and compressed, the boy’s back and buttocks bruised purple. The soles of his feet. Around his torso, a band of skin as wide as a tire had turned black with necrosis, and on the back of his head, among thinning hair, a gash revealed a mass of blood and tissue—like an egg cracked open and left to rot.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally written by someone I have to assume was me, about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Picture this: inside a meeting room in Irún’s main library, an assortment of office workers, students, and pensioners hunched over their notebooks around a large rectangular table. Coats and bags hung on the backs of their chairs, and at the center of the table lay a box of chocolates. While pens scratched against paper, the writing instructor hovered nearby, often pulling out her smartphone to shoot group photos for her Twitter feed, without consent I might add. Isabel Zubiri. A forty-year-old woman with warm olive skin, hair worn in a casual topknot, dangling earrings, a chainlike necklace, and cat-eye glasses with off-white frames. But nevermind those people. By then, I had deemed the course pointless, and I attended because among us sat an anomaly: Elena. Late twenties, last name unknown. You could feel her presence like a shadowy figure in the corner of your eye. Her almond-blonde hair fell limply around her pale face. Slavic features. A ghost’s beauty. Dare to look into those haunted blues framed by reddened skin, and you may have glimpsed echoes of commissars starving her ancestors’ village. Listen closely and you’d hear a distant wail, that of a newborn child abandoned by her mother. Elena was a quiet bird, born tired and with a heart full of holes. She usually wore a loose gray sweatshirt, likely the same one, in which you could barely make out her tits. I won’t get into how she behaved; that’s coming up. All in all, she was sexy as fuck. Her look and demeanor screamed “fix me.” She would ruin your life. But as the old song says: better to burn out, yeah, yeah, than to fade away.

Isabel, our teacher, her cheer a barricade against life’s harsh truths, adjusted her cat-eyed glasses and tapped her fingers lightly on the wooden table.

“Well then, let’s see what creative adventures you’ve cooked up for me in your time-travel stories! Who wants to be brave and go first? Remember, no wrong way to tell a tale… unless you’re not telling it at all.” She laughed. “And please don’t worry too much if you’ve sent me somewhere outlandish, okay? God knows I could use a vacation, even a fictional one!”

Elena eased the chair back, her slender, underfed figure rising. Her fingers held gently the edges of the printed paper while she focused on the words.

Isabel’s cheer faltered at the volunteer who had once stated that literature’s purpose was “to make the reader cry, scream, and bleed.” She quickly bolted on a professional smile.

“Ah, Elena, always the trailblazer. I must say, your commitment to sharing your work is inspiring. You’re one of the bravest souls in our little circle. Or should I say the boldest? Please, do regale us. Let’s hear where you’re whisking me off to.” Isabel’s gaze swept over the group. “And remember, everyone, we’re looking for those conflicts we’ve discussed: whether it’s a clash of personalities, a moral dilemma, or just the universe throwing some cosmic curveball. We’re all about the drama here.” She gestured at the silent ghost. “The floor is yours, Elena.”

Elena, her tired eyes fixed on the page with the intensity of a cryptologist, sighed, then began to weave her tale. I wish you could hear her voice: soft and creaky as if from disuse, and burdened with the weight of a thousand unsaid things.

“Isabel Zubiri, writer and teacher of writing, clutched the armrests of her time machine as the jostling journey shook the frame. An indicator glowed in the dim cockpit: July 1st, 1497. Florence, Italy. She would stroll through its streets, observe its people. Men in doublets and ruffs, women in gowns flaring out to their ankles like closed flowers. The air would smell of bread and dung and sweat, of herbs and spices from the markets. Amid the clucking of chickens and human chatter in that old Italian dialect, she would hear the bells of Santa Maria del Fiore. Secretly she would photograph the crowds, the palaces, and the churches. In the end, she would vanish without harming anyone nor pushing them off their paths, for fear of snapping the thread of history. The ultimate tourist in this land of the past, a voyeur to the lives of men and women long turned to dust.”

Isabel, seated, had leaned forward slightly, her fingers interlaced on the table as she listened. But she straightened up in relief.

“Well, Elena, that’s quite an evocative opening!” she encouraged. “I can already feel the weight of history in your choice of setting. Renaissance Florence, no less. The period clothing details were a lovely touch.” Some classmates nodded. “And I’m glad you’ve taken the ‘no harm to history’ rule to heart. That’s an interesting conflict right there, the struggle to remain unobtrusive and avoid altering events. It’s like the ultimate challenge for a writer, isn’t it?”

Elena’s eyebrows twitched. Somber and distant, she resumed her reading with the alienated air of the perpetually exhausted.

“Inside the time machine’s cramped cabin, a flash of light flickered. A jolt threw Isabel around, slamming her against the curved wall. She blinked to clear her vision. The indicator’s numbers blurred. While cursing, Isabel groped in the darkness for the control panel. She pressed buttons meant to reset the circuits, but the indicator’s digits kept spinning. The time machine crashed with a metallic crunch, squashing Isabel into the padded chair and rattling her teeth. Then the machine tumbled down, rolling over as Isabel, strapped in place, flipped and spun. The contents of her stomach rammed against her clenched throat in waves. Suddenly the time machine groaned to a halt, rocking Isabel against the seat, and its hatch door popped open, letting in a blast of heat. The indicator displayed dashes instead of numbers. She shuddered. Her head throbbed, her stomach churned. She tapped at the panel, but no sequence of buttons revived it. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Stay calm. The time machine came with a user manual for such emergencies. After unbuckling herself and crawling out of the hatch, she stepped onto cloggy ground. Hot, humid air filled Isabel’s lungs, heavy with the pungent stink of sulphur. Isabel, dizzy and nauseous, kept coughing. She stood wobbly in a vast swamp that stretched out into a brownish haze. On the horizon rose the dark bulk of a volcano, from whose peak climbed a column of ashy smoke lit by flickers of lightning. A ceiling of gray clouds hung heavy, casting the landscape of mud and reeds below into gloom.”

As Isabel listened, her smile had grown rigid, and she had shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Now her fingers drummed a nervous beat on the table.

“Oh dear. This is getting… rather intense, isn’t it?” she said, her voice carrying an edge of unease like a mother who has stumbled upon her teenager’s morbid drawings. “That’s our Elena, though, always taking the path that’s anything but well-traveled. Keeping us on our toes! A vivid departure from the serene Renaissance Florence, I must say. And those sensory details, they’re so… I can practically feel that sulphurous air choking my lungs.” Her eyes darted to her students. “And class, notice how Elena has woven multiple types of conflict into this scenario: person versus technology with the malfunctioning time machine, and person versus environment with that hostile landscape.” She adjusted her glasses and cleared her throat. “Would you like to continue, Elena? We’re all, uh, dying to know what happens next.”

Elena, while fidgeting with the sleeve of her gray sweatshirt, offered a thin smile. Then, gaze locked on the paper, she continued reading with the detached demeanor of a funeral director.

“The time machine, its hatch gaping like a wound, lay half-sunken in the muck. Isabel crouched beside it, coating her sneakers and ankles in mud, and inspected the metallic hull, which reflected the somber sky, for dents or cracks. A low moan rose from somewhere in the swamp, as if the earth itself suffered. Isabel wiped her forehead, her palm coming away slick with sweat. Her clothes clung to her body. The air burned her throat and lungs, forcing her to cough and spit. Isabel tugged her foot free from the clinging mud and nearly lost her sneaker. She trudged through the sludge, her feet sinking ankle-deep, to the time machine’s rear, and pried the storage compartment open. She pulled out the user’s manual, a thick binder of glossy pages, sealed in a waterproof bag. For a couple of hours, she followed the troubleshooting section’s steps. She tinkered with the innards of the contraption, wrestling with tangles of wires, flipping switches. Repeatedly she ducked inside the cockpit to check the control panel, then scrambled back out into the mud. The controls remained lifeless, and the indicator’s dashes glowed like the eyes of a corpse. In the gloom, Isabel, her eyes aching from strain, read the troubleshooting section to the end, and stared at the fine print: ‘In the event of a catastrophic failure, please contact your nearest time travel agent.'”

I chuckled, which earned me a swift glance from our instructor.

“Isabel hurled the binder into the distance.” Elena went on in her soft, creaky voice. “It sailed in an arc, its pages flapping, then landed with a wet plop. She slumped to the mud and wept, her chest heaving with sobs, the tears cutting grimy tracks down her cheeks. The time machine had become a useless sculpture in a world that never knew her name. Stranded. Abandoned. She would die here, her bones mingling with the mud.”

A few students exchanged uneasy looks. Isabel toyed with her necklace as a furrow deepened on her brow.

“Okay, Elena. You’re certainly throwing our intrepid writer-protagonist straight into the deep end. A classic case of Murphy’s Law, right? Anything that can go wrong, will. Just my luck! But hey… you’re not planning on stranding our poor heroine in this dreadful swamp forever, are you?”

Elena’s eyes lifted to meet Isabel’s, her gaze as blank and distant as the moon’s. She then resumed her reading.

“Isabel took deep breaths, inhaling the sour, sulphuric air, and her sobs subsided. I won’t die like this. I am a writer. My place is not among ghosts but among the living, men and women who have yet to read my works. She hauled herself upright, her legs trembling, her clothes heavy with mud. Calm down. Stay optimistic. Maybe I’ve landed in a bad spot, but the rest of this world can’t be so bleak. She pulled out her smartphone and turned on the camera to study her stained, wide-eyed face framed by dark, disheveled hair. Wisps of ash clung to her eyelashes; snowlike ash drifted gently in the half-light filtering through the ragged cloud cover. Isabel, her hands shaking, snapped a panoramic shot of the volcanic wasteland, the phone’s flash briefly illuminating the mud and reeds in stark white. Once she returned home, she would share the photo with the caption: ‘Guess who’s on vacation! #SwampLife. #TimelessTravels.'”

A faint smirk tugged at the corners of Elena’s mouth, and vanished as quickly. Isabel leaned forward, her fingers steepled. She opened her mouth to speak, but Elena, her gaze glued to the paper, soldiered on in a flat voice.

“Isabel set out across the swamp toward the volcano, its slopes a smear of black, its summit wreathed in smoke and lightning. The mud sucked at her sneakers with a rhythmic squelch, and the reeds brushed against her thighs. She would keep on trudging until her legs gave out. The swamp stretched out before her, a steaming expanse of mud, reeds, and fetid pools of bubbling water shimmering in the heat. The volcanic horizon flashed with lightning. Isabel walked for hours, treading when she could over narrow banks of earth that crisscrossed the marshes, where clusters of reeds rose with wide, yellowish leaves. Otherwise, her feet sank into the warm mire. The heat pressed down on her, thick and stifling. Her skin glistened with sweat, her hair was matted, her clothes reeked of sulphur, her trousers and sneakers were caked in thick mud. Isabel’s eyes watered and her nose burned from the acrid vapors. The muscles of her thighs and calves ached. Intermittent thunder silenced her labored breathing, the squelching of her steps, and the burps of the mud pools. A loud crack shook the ground, making Isabel lose her balance and fall forward, plunging face-first into sludge that swarmed with tiny, wriggling worms. She scrambled upright and clawed the sludge’s surface. While crawling onto solid ground, Isabel cried out. The echo mingled with the earth’s moans: a low, unsettling rumble. The reeds swayed and the water rippled. The volcano was hurling rocks and ash. Its peak, a jagged black crown against the leaden sky, spewed forth a towering column of smoke. Lightning danced in its depths. Down the sides of the mountain oozed a glowing orange trickle.” Elena, whose gaze was lost in the depths of the page, cleared her throat, then continued reading in a tense voice, as if the text was holding her at knifepoint. “Isabel had exhausted her emergency kit: the fresh water of her canteen, and the pack of vacuum-sealed astronaut meals. She yearned for a drink. Her face was a mask of dried mud, her hair hanged in muddy strands, and her clothes were caked in grime. Her heart pounded, her hands shook, her stomach growled, her tongue swelled from thirst. She found a pool of slightly less brackish water, where she washed her face and hair, her fingertips stopping at knots and tangles. Soon enough the landscape grew darker until the gloom forced Isabel to pull out her phone and switch on its flashlight. The pale light revealed a watery world of tall reeds and gnarled, barren trees rising from the mire. The volcano’s black slopes glowed in the darkness with streaks of red lava, and in the sky, the cloud ceiling swelled and churned like a living thing, flickers of lightning outlining its roiling contours. Isabel lay down on solid ground and slept as thunder rolled overhead and the earth trembled beneath her. She woke up ravenous. The sky had dawned with heavy cloud cover and a dusky glow. The volcano loomed like a titanic boil, and its slopes glistened with molten lava sliding down like charred cheese. Her throat burning, her eyes bloodshot from the volcanic ash and the acrid atmosphere, Isabel roamed for hours through the endless bog until she heard waves crashing. As she staggered toward the sound, the ground grew firmer, and the mud gave way to dry land. Out of the fog emerged a coastline where waves crashed against rocky outcroppings. Following the shore, Isabel came upon a beach. She crawled to the water’s edge, scooped up some in her palms, and drank. The aftertaste clung like rotten eggs. Isabel, spent, collapsed on the sand, and curled into a fetal position. The volcano loomed sideways, bleeding streams of lava. The rolling of the waves lulled Isabel to sleep.”

Isabel’s expression showed barely concealed horror. Her eyes darted around the room as if searching for a fire alarm to pull. When she spoke, she tried to inject a bit of sunshine into the oppressive atmosphere, but it came out strained.

“A frankly terrifying landscape… Endless marshes, being baked by a volcanic environment… I can practically feel the mud and the oppressive heat. Not the most pleasant sensation, of course. A bit too vivid for comfort. I must say, Elena, you have a knack for painting a bleak picture.” As her fingertips tapped on the table, she spoke like a negotiator trying to talk a person down from a ledge. “Do keep in mind that conflict can’t just be a relentless onslaught; it needs moments of reprieve, of hope, or even humor to balance the tension. Readers need a breather now and then, even if the character’s situation remains dire. Otherwise, it can feel a bit, well, hopeless, right? And hope is what keep us turning the page. You see, our craft is a careful balancing act. Too much tension can wear down the reader.” She turned to the rest of the students as if imploring them to save her. “Take note of the escalating stakes and the sense of isolation that Elena’s crafted here. They aren’t just setting elements; they’re creating psychological pressure on our protagonist. It’s not just about overcoming her immediate situation, but also about the emotional weight of being stranded in time and space. She needs to stay sane in the face of adversity. There’s a hint of existential crisis there, I think. Class, I’d love to hear from you. What conflicts do you recognize in Elena’s piece?”

A hamster-faced college student wearing a pink hoodie raised her hand, then spoke in a chipmunk voice.

“I liked that whole thing with the protagonist taking photos. It added humor in the midst of a very weird scene. Even in this strange, desolate world, she still thinks of posting it on Twitter or Instagram. I would do the same thing.”

“Right. A nice touch of absurdity. I appreciate that.”

Elena’s reddened eyes sought our instructor’s.

“I wish to continue,” she said in a hoarse murmur from a distant planet. “I’m almost done.”

Isabel straightened in her chair. She put on a porcelain doll’s smile.

“Of course, Elena. I think we’re in a good place to take a breather, do a little feedback round. Maybe give our other would-be authors a chance to test-drive their time machines.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “But please continue. Let’s hear the conclusion.”

Elena sighed, then focused on the paper like a diver following a spotlight in the murky depths.

“Isabel dreamed of water. Clear, cold water dripping from a faucet, gushing from a tap. But she awoke to the roar of the sea, the sun a faint smudge behind the cloud cover. No sense of how much time had passed. A thin layer of ash had coated her, ash that drifted down onto the beach and the waves that rolled in from a dark, metallic sea. Isabel’s throat was parched, and hunger twisted her guts. The sand was black and coarse, mixed with fragments of pumice and obsidian. She stumbled along the shoreline, her bare feet leaving footprints that were soon washed away by the waves, their white foam hissing as they receded. At times Isabel dipped her arms into the cold current, searching for fish shapes. When she gave up, she lay exhausted and shivering on the sand and passed out.”

“Elena…”

“She opened her eyes to blackness save for the fiery veins of lava throbbing in the distance. Thunder rumbled in rolling peals. Her swollen tongue clung to her mouth. She felt dry as the dead leaves from last autumn, brittle and ready to crumble. She pulled out her phone, switched on the flashlight, and illuminated the damp, coarse sand. The bubble of light glinted off flakes of ash drifting in swirls. By the water’s edge, she spotted a foot-long silhouette. Isabel dragged herself forward. Her vision blurred and flickered with dark spots, but she distinguished a short-legged, flesh-colored salamander. Its gray eyes looked blind, its slimy skin shimmered sickly. A pang of hunger glazed Isabel’s eyes. She snatched the salamander, that wriggled weakly in her grasp. Her heart pounded. I’m sorry. She dropped the phone onto the sand, clasped the salamander’s head and snapped its neck with a crack. She chomped into its belly and tore out hot, pulsing chunks of viscera. Once the offal sat in her stomach, she picked up the phone and pushed herself upright. Activating the front-faced camera, she took stock of her ash-stained face, her mouth gleaming with blood. She forced a grin and lifted her index and middle fingers in a victory sign. When she snapped the photo, the flash blinded her. No matter; she already imagined the photo caption: ‘Conquering the elements. #KeepOnGoing.’ Isabel vanished. Before the phone plopped onto the the soaked sand, it blinked out of existence. A breaking wave lifted the salamander off the sand, and the undertow swallowed its carcass.”

Elena marked the end of her tale by sitting down, scooting closer to the edge of the table, and looking down at her paper with a blank face.

-----

Author’s note: today’s song is “I Was Born (A Unicorn)” by The Unicorns.

Hell yeah, new novel! I hadn’t been this antsy to return to my writing since I was immersed in a certain tale about a motocross rider. Could barely sit still at work while rearranging my notes. I hadn’t created anything totally new in months, and I’ve felt a bit rusty. Anyway, I thought this was quite the impactful introduction for our new protagonist, at least when it comes to the first outer layer of such a hopefully intriguing woman.

The next part should conclude this scene. I hope you folks stick around, because this one’s going to be lots of fun.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I drove toward the outskirts as the sun hid itself, painting the sky bubblegum pink and the horizon raspberry red. I sank into the night the way a frog might slowly cook in a simmering pot. I switched on the headlights. The amber pulses of the roadside reflectors split the road into parallel lines, while in the dusk the rectangular white signs floated. In the next lane, glowing orbs of light would appear and swell until the cars passed me with a whispery rush.

My left arm rested on the rolled-down window frame as I smoked, dragging on the cigarette again and again, flicking ash into the cooling wind. The vibrant guitar riffs followed one after the other sounding weary, the way they might at the end of a tour.

I took a shortcut skirting an oil field and used the strip of plastic—like police tape cordoning off restricted land—to guide me. The car’s wheels rolled over barren dirt.

Hidden, nestled in the night, there was no one around to bother me. To keep me company, I would have only the coyotes prowling around and other creatures that had been raised in the desert.

I parked on the shoulder of the track. The headlights shone on an oval of cracked, mummified dirt. They bathed some shrubs with branches like insect legs, and the shadows they cast arched over the fissures in the brown earth like bridges.

I unhooked a Modest Mouse CD from its case and slipped it into the player. When the first track started, I leaned back in my seat. Still except for my arm and lips, which moved together so I could inhale each drag, I listened to the guitar, bass, and drums. The dashboard clock and other indicators floated in the car’s darkness like bioluminescent fungi in a cavern. Out in the headlights’ cones, insects—tiny black dots—fluttered silently. Isaac Brock lisped about endless parking lots.

My neck, which had been stiff as bone the rest of the day, relaxed as if a pillow cradled the base of my skull. My back slid down the seat inch by inch. I bobbed my head in time with the melody, while filling my lungs with smoke.

Those dark expanses of desert convinced me that there wasn’t another soul for dozens of miles around. I confused the background noise of far-off traffic with some gust from a distant storm. Any occasional honk was just part of the night’s wildlife—herds of prehistoric beasts that, upon seeing me, would ignore me the way I would ignore an ant colony.

Here, alone, nothing could hurt me. No one could force on me tasks and principles that revolted me. My mind ran free, unbothered by prying looks or those compulsive conversations people insist on just to fill the silence—those efforts they make so that their fellow humans will confirm they exist. The complications that choked the rest of my time distracted me from why I needed to come to the desert in the first place. I lived to water this inner core I understood and valued, at the risk that the world might tear it apart the way an invading army burns the fields. Whenever I drove to work or back, maybe some of the pedestrians framed by my car windows had been born with a core, too, but had let it die. They’d suffocated it to tend what they were taught mattered.

Even in my apartment, these moments of solitude slipped away—my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps drummed the ceiling in the small hours, and in the apartment next door, a family argued and yelled in Spanish. The night in the desert gifted a hush that the society I was supposed to belong to had forgotten. Time and the world pressed on these moments like tons of water against a submersible, but while the night lasted, I escaped the toll life demanded. I was saved from the people who insisted I cater to them and speak, who believed I should be grateful for it. I was saved from their forcing me to celebrate what I rejected, from making me wear a smile—just one of the many ways humanity demanded I betray myself.

I listened to three Modest Mouse albums and one by Radiohead. They turned the darkness into a canvas on which melodies and lyrics painted a living picture. Those musicians had saved their virtues from oblivion, while their everyday lives—the ones everyone else gets entangled in—would be lost like a millennia-old civilization beneath the sands. The music rose like a red clover sprouting through dry, stony soil. Even between miles and miles of wasteland where real people were missing, some persistent individual had managed to create life.

I headed back. The silvery oval of the headlights traced out the cracks in the earth, inking them black.

Memories crept in: the people at the workshop, the responsibilities they had pinned on me, the conspiracies they’d drag me into. My supervisor had glanced at my file. Why? And all day, my coworkers—the strangers in the team they’d stuck me with—knew she’d eventually haul me into her office for that idiotic ritual. They kept me in the dark. If they hid one thing from me, they could ambush me on a hundred pretexts. When I let my guard down, they’d corner me, their eyes gleaming with a shared intent. The mere thought that at some point in recent days the supervisor had been thinking of me, evaluating me, horrified me—like coming home to find the lights on and someone roaming around inside.

My headlights washed a figure in silver. It had stepped into the road, crossing perpendicularly. It stood on two legs, its head barely rising above the hood of the car. Glimpsed in my vision, like the afterimage of staring at the sun, was a face drained of color and two eyes gazing at me in surprise.

My muscles clenched. I slammed the brake pedal, but the figure vanished beneath the horizon of the hood. With a thud, the chassis jolted. The car lurched once, twice, as though the right tires had rolled over a rock.

My back slammed against the seat. My left hand jerked the wheel. The car skidded diagonally off the path, snapped through the plastic strip marking the off-limits zone, and plunged several yards into the oil field. I yanked the handbrake.

The headlights shone through a dust cloud swirling with insects, as though I had kicked over a hive. The engine rattled with clanking metal that sounded like a loose part.

My hands were locked, gripping the wheel and the handbrake, knuckles going white. I was panting. The impact’s echo reverberated in my skull like a tolling bell, and then it faded.

Heat radiated through my body. I pried my hands off the wheel and the brake.

Some bit of fabric was burning. Two inches from my knee, I felt a spot on my thigh heat up. I slapped my pants and sent the lit cigarette flying, a streak of smoke floating in the glow of the dashboard for a moment. A tremor inside my skull muddled my thoughts. I rubbed at the hole in the pants and the stinging skin beneath. I swept my foot around the mat under the pedals, just in case the cigarette was still lit and, in a few minutes, might force me to deal with a car engulfed in flames.

I shoved the door open and staggered out. It felt like escaping the wreckage of a Humvee in a blackness so absolute it suggested I’d gone blind. Keeping one hand on the hot hood, I circled toward the bumper while touching the right side of my face with my free hand—the ridges of the scars on that cheek and near the corner of my eye. A thin membrane of skin covered the bone and the knotted tissue. Nothing had exploded peppering the car with shrapnel, but the smell in my nose stung like melting metal or explosives.

I cut across the left headlight’s cone. I crouched near the bumper, but the glare hid the spot right in front of me, so I twisted around to fish my phone out of a pocket. It lit up with the manufacturer’s logo animation. Once the icons showed, I rummaged through the menu for the flashlight, but the phone vibrated and spat out a distorted chirp that grated on my nerves like a whistle shrieking inches from my ear. The screen alerted me to four missed calls.

I switched on the flashlight app. The now-bright screen took a slice out of the night. The center of the bumper was caved in with a head-sized dent, shiny with blood. Thick drops dangled there like strands of phlegm, tapering off toward the parched ground.

I straightened and felt dizzy. The phone’s white glare lit the windshield, revealing the seats as though I’d just peeked into a house window at night. I staggered backward while pressing one palm over my mouth.

When my head cleared, I searched the ground along the side of the car toward the trunk. I followed the skid marks in the dirt, tracing the tire tread pattern until I reached a place where the tracks on the right side were speckled with blood, like splatters on ceramic. I moved on until the light fell upon a body sprawled there, barely three and a half feet tall. Was I looking at a coyote’s back?

I approached the way I would enter a house I was breaking into. I made out the back of a shirt, filthy with stains and caked mud. A stench of urine and dried feces slapped me in the face, so I pressed the back of a finger beneath my nose. The legs were tangled, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He wore pajama pants. Fine, wispy hair—like a baby’s—covered his head, and a few inches above the nape, a gaping wound had opened, matting what hair he had. Beneath the head, a dark red pool of blood had spread. Floating in it, like bits of food in vomit, were gray, wrinkled matter and curved fragments of bone.

My arms went limp at my sides. In the phone’s shaky beam, I saw the trail in the dirt behind him, where the tire tracks vanished into darkness. I rubbed my eyelids. My legs barely held me. Surely I’d made some mistake, and if I stood still, holding my breath, I would open my eyes to find myself back in the car, still driving toward the main road.

The distant traffic noise could easily pass for a windstorm. Silence was broken now and then by snapping sounds, like the crack of a twig in the brush.

I shook my head. I stepped over the child in a single stride and crouched to shine the light on him. His arms—pinned under his torso or splayed across it—were twisted and bent as if they had no bones left. A tire had left its tread across his shirt, right over his heart.

When I finally dared shine the light on his face, for a moment I saw an animal in clothes. Then I blinked. An albino face. A cleft lip forced the nose upward, breaking one nostril and twisting the bridge, like someone had hacked it with an axe. From the reddened gums, teeth jutted in different directions like kernels of corn. The eyes, half-closed and slanted, hinted at some mental disability, and his ears—large and sticking out—spread like satellite dishes.

I moved backward until the gloom blurred his features. If I took three or four steps more, the night would swallow the corpse as if it had never existed.

My head spun, my whole body hit by a feverish chill. A child. I had run over someone’s child.

When I lowered my gaze and held my breath, the background noise swelled as if someone had turned up its volume. The traffic, hundreds of yards to my right. I braced for the sound of an adult running this way, calling a name over and over. Footsteps, then some figure bursting out of the dark to find me standing a few yards from their child’s body. No matter if the child had dashed in front of my car when he must have seen the headlights, this person would only understand that I had killed him. Around here, they’d probably be armed if they came out at night.

I aimed the phone downward and covered the light with my palm. A thread of white glow leaked between my fingers. I waited two or three minutes. When a distant horn blasted across the plain, I pictured a man perched on a tower blowing a horn.

I wandered around. The dried-out earth crumbled under my soles. To my right lay a wide desert cut by a highway. To my left, whose depths I couldn’t gauge, oil pumps dotted the landscape. They would be creaking in rhythm as they siphoned.

While pressing my temples, I shook my head. I glanced back at the blackness hiding the body, and felt like scolding the child for having run blindly into the road.

“Where were you going? Did you even know where you’d end up?”

Bent over with my hands on my thighs, I thought: What should I do?

Of course I’d call the police. With a trembling hand, I exited the flashlight app and punched in 911, but my thumb froze over the call button.

Besides wanting to keep silent, how could I explain myself to the cops? The dispatcher would pry out every detail. I’d wait for a patrol car that might get lost for a few minutes before it arrived, headlights picking out my silhouette maybe fifteen feet away. Two officers would step out, a hand resting on their holsters, ready for any excuse to shoot. They’d blind me with their flashlights and zero in on my scars, on my dead eye. They’d ask why I’d driven down this road in the middle of the night—what was I up to, dealing drugs? Hiring prostitutes? They wouldn’t buy that I only came out here for solitude; they’d call it suspicious. I’d end up in the back of the cruiser on the way to the station, passing through rows of desks under fluorescent lights. My mind would recede into static. I’d be put against the height chart, and the bored officer running the camera would tell me: Look forward. Flash. Look right. Flash. From then on, anyone who Googled my name—any prospective employer—would discover I’d killed a child. A disabled child. Even the workshops would refuse to hire me. The radio stations, the TV news, everyone would know. I’d live in a glass cell riddled with eyes. A disturbed veteran who’d failed to rejoin normal life, like some feral child found years later and unable to speak. Someone who would grunt, eat out of a bowl on the floor, run around naked.

I paced, rubbing my face, tugging on a beard that wasn’t there. About thirty feet away, the car’s silvery headlights formed an oasis in the dark, and as I walked in circles, the car’s body either concealed or revealed the beam.

How could I leave the child behind? Whoever found him would see he’d been struck. If I brushed dirt over the tire marks, that alone would look suspicious—someone obviously tried to erase something. I’d have to hide any sign that suggested I hit the child and then covered it up.

I turned the phone’s flashlight back on and rushed toward the car as though I was running out of time. I opened the driver’s door, knelt on the seat, and stretched my right arm into the passenger seat, where I’d left my Coke and the food wrappers. Gone. I groped the floor mat under the dash, among cigarette ash, butts, and old wrappers. The plastic cup had spilled, but the lid was still on. I picked it up. It felt like there was about a quarter left inside.

Contorting as I got out, I set the phone and the cup on the hood. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Shirt in one hand, cup and phone in the other, I walked around to the front of the car and dropped to my knees at the dent in the bumper. I popped the plastic lid off with a snap, soaked the cuff of my shirt’s sleeve in the Coke, and under the phone’s beam, scrubbed the concave metal until every last crease shone spotless of blood.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago, contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.”

I have zero memory of having written this scene. Zero. That disturbs me. I don’t know if to produce the details contained, plenty of which impressed me (I can say that because it feels like someone else wrote them), I just used my imagination or instead references. I’m not sure if these days I would be able to write similar details. Where did you go, me from ten years ago?

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

The conveyor belt slid the next metal piece into the field of vision my tinted lenses cast in gray. My gloved hands hooked the cable pins into their holes and verified that no previous operator had ruined the work, while I measured my movements to prevent any later operator from blaming me for holding up the line. I pressed the button that ran the belt. The piece slid off to my right, lurching forward and stopping like a car stuck in traffic.

I rested my gloved fists on the edge of the table. The conveyor belt whirred, its segments blurring past. I already knew the shape of the piece that would stop at the center of my vision a few seconds later.

Seated across from me, Héctor yawned, warping that bray into an announcement that he needed to take a leak. Someone stopped the belt. A metal piece was left stranded halfway between Héctor and me.

The familiar sequence of motions for assembling each piece sedated my mind, dimming it to black, but now my thoughts were stirring awake. How long would Héctor take in the bathroom? Sweat had slimed my forehead and neck, and my underwear clung like a soaked pad, even though the air-conditioning units hanging from the workshop walls droned on tirelessly—our only defense against stewing inside this metal sarcophagus.

Christopher, seated ten feet to my right, stretched his neck to look around at the other crews. The jagged, arched scar on his scalp stood out pink against his brown skin. For the hundredth time, I pictured a surgeon pressing a stapler to Christopher’s skull until it clicked, branding both sides of the seam with jutting, pointed ridges—a zipper of scarred flesh.

“How strange that the coordinator’s absent,” the man said.

John, or Joseph—whatever his name was—ambled behind Christopher to stretch his legs. He rolled the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows, but the right sleeve got stuck on the gray, bulbous growths that deformed that arm. His genes had gotten mixed up, producing enough skin and flesh for three people.

“He quit a couple of months ago.”

Christopher hunched over, frowning as if thinking hurt. He toyed with the raised seam that cut across the side of his head.

“I knew that, right?”

“It’s no big deal.”

Three minutes later, heavy footsteps announced Héctor’s return from the bathroom. He circled the worktable, dropped onto his stool, and pressed the button that got the conveyor belt moving again.

A metal piece halted in front of me, its black cables overlapping and crisscrossing like arm hair. I checked every connection. I unhooked a couple of cables Héctor had misplaced, and fastened them into different slots. One day, they would invent robots to replace us.

Forty-three minutes before the shift ended, the conveyor belt stopped, jamming pieces at intervals between the operators. I waited, slouching, letting my gaze relax on the sections of belt in front of me. The next piece should have arrived by then.

To my right, Christopher glanced over at me, checking if I was the one holding things up, but across from me Héctor had slumped forward, resting his chin on his chest. The black-haired jowl bulged out. He had closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and tangled his gloved fingers in some cables on the piece he’d been working on. His black Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, printed with a horned hand, had ridden up over his belly, and through the gap between shirt and pants peeked a swarthy fold of flab dotted with bristling hair.

When the horn signaling the end of the workday blared through the workshop, I sprang up and walked around Christopher toward the locker room, but he tapped me on the shoulder.

“See you later.”

I went on with my eyes locked on the locker-room door as workers filed in, opening and closing it behind them. The smell of hot rubber and metal stung my nostrils. What did he mean by “see you later”? Had he made up some plan for after work?

By the time I walked into the locker room, my pulse was shaky. After opening my locker, I took off my coat, folded it, and tossed it inside. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. It was hard not to light up right there, but at least I’d finished another shift, scratched another mark on the wall, and I was about to claim the rest of the day for myself.

An electronic crackle buzzed. Everyone in the locker room turned toward the loudspeaker mounted in the corner.

“Alan Kivi, to the supervisor’s office, please,” a singsong female voice said.

I froze with one glove halfway off. What did she want? What had I done? I tossed the gloves on top of my coat and locked the locker. Coat and gloves put away, locker locked—my excuse to refuse overtime.

Shaking my head, I opened the door from the locker room to the workshop. In the supervisor’s office window, which rose above the shop floor like a second story, the glass blurred the figures of the four people gathered. Even though Christopher’s neck was hunched and his shoulders slumped, he still stood a head and a half taller than the others. The thick, barrel-shaped outline of Héctor fiddled with his phone. The supervisor, her hair down to her shoulders, leaned in close to each worker and touched them. She reached across the desk and lit the candles of a cake with a lighter.

I froze beneath the locker-room doorway. An operator from another team stopped in front of me and gave me a look, wanting to go inside, but before he could say anything, I stepped back. I paced in front of my locker. I fished around one pants pocket until I found my keys, and I fiddled with the cigarette filter in my shirt pocket as if I could sneak a drag.

How had the supervisor found out? If she noted my birth date when she hired me, she would have ambushed me last year to celebrate. In these past few days, she must have pulled my file, run her honey-coated fingers over it, and spotted the day I was born. I shuddered like someone who’s realized, while sitting on a public toilet, there’s a camera filming. Any private detail of my life worked like a tail sprouting from my coccyx for them to grab and hold me in place.

I hurried to the door leading out to the yard. I stepped into the dense, overheated air that smelled of scorched earth and traffic. I was heading for my car alongside the dispersing workers, but Caroline distracted me like a neon sign.

She was standing on tiptoe, bent over into a waste container. When she straightened, she was holding a plastic valve-shaped part with a cracked casing. She turned the piece over in her fingers, her lips moving as though greeting it. Her chestnut hair, tumbling halfway down her back, had frizzed the way it does on a day that threatens a storm. Beneath her bangs and between the strands framing her face, her skin was tanned like someone who labors under the sun. The floral pattern on her white dress had faded. It suggested that in the seventies it had belonged to some collection, only to be abandoned at a flea market. Her pockets bulged with broken machine parts, lost keys, odd stones she salvaged from dumpsters, ditches, landfills. Even from ten yards away, I noticed that horizontal tears had ripped open the dress’s sides and the flare of the skirt, as if Caroline had snagged them on bushes. Her cheeks were puffy and flushed. Her eyes, slanted and alien, glistened wet. Either allergies were hitting her, or she was stockpiling tears for the next time she burst into sobs.

While the sun pounded my forehead as though I’d pressed it against a light bulb, I slowed my pace to keep Caroline in sight through the stream of workers leaving the lot. She might have believed herself invisible, and the way everyone else ignored her only reinforced that notion. Caroline drifted around the waste container as if floating there—a specter that once lived in the house torn down to make room for the workshop. You’d expect a cold breeze to precede her, and I was surprised no one paid attention as they might if a dinosaur appeared out of a primeval jungle.

One of my coworkers—or the supervisor—might come looking for me. I reached my Chevrolet Lumina, but the moment I dropped into the driver’s seat and shut the door, I’d trapped myself in a sauna. A mistake I made every three or four days. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out to breathe while the seat roasted my backside through my pants and underwear. The air inflating my lungs coated their lining with the smell of overheated plastic.

I started the engine amid sputters and a gust of smoke. Once the dashboard lighter heated up, I lit a cigarette, drew on the filter, and blew the smoke out the window into the scorching air. The engine rattled phlegmatically as it accelerated toward the city center. Hanging from the rearview mirror, my vial filled with bits of shrapnel shivered while it spun.

On my left whizzed low-slung shops and single-story offices—white-painted corrugated metal walls that flashed under the sun, forcing me to squint behind my tinted lenses. On my right stretched the flat, orange-tinged desert, dotted with a few scraggly shrubs. Against a heat-warped horizon stood miniature telephone poles. Soon, the hunched silhouettes of oil pumps appeared, nodding like hammers in slow motion, their gears groaning and creaking—a herd of elephants drinking from the cracked earth. The desert’s immensity shrank the buildings, roads, and cars to dusty specks scorched by the sun.

Another year of this boiling air, of these people.

As I reached the city, I waited at a red light for ghosts to cross. A few yards ahead, a child crouched at the curb with a bored expression, pressing the tip of a metal rod against a flattened explosion of entrails and white-and-gray feathers smeared on the pavement.

Traffic thickened. Pedestrians roamed the sidewalks. I drove on to an In-N-Out Burger and joined the line of cars. Lounging against the seat, I smoked while the sunset sun beating through the windshield heated my face and hands.

A group of office workers in white shirts and dress pants walked by on the sidewalk. They followed one another like ducks. They had cloned each other’s hairstyles and that look of fatigue and resignation. A father carried his daughter on his shoulders, held his son’s hand, and used his other hand to grip a bulging bag. Next to him, a woman talked as she pointed to the end of the street. The man’s mouth hung half-open, and his features were weighed down by a week’s worth of exhaustion.

On the adjacent sidewalk, two groups of thirty-somethings ran into each other. Half the men wore Dallas Cowboys shirts or caps. I could have dubbed in real time exactly how they greeted each other and the small talk they exchanged. I could have predicted a split second early how their heads would nod, how wide their smiles would stretch. At some mention of where they were headed, someone in the other group laughed as if at a joke. There was only one group of thirty-somethings in hundreds, maybe thousands of miles around, even if they tried to fool me by changing outfits and bodies.

Did those people see their choices the way I recognized them? Their lives resembled museum galleries. They chose which corridor to walk down or linger in, while I wandered inside a cage. A prisoner locked up for decades in a six-by-eight cell, a person whose name got lost during a staff turnover—none of the new employees had bothered to learn his name or find out when to set him free.

Yet in the faces of those passersby—businessmen, office workers, families, couples—and in the faces reflected in the mirrors of the cars waiting in line for takeout, I recognized exhaustion. They had resigned themselves to the road they ended up on, knowing that if they dared veer onto a different path, they might land in a dead end. Other routines, other partners, other children.

What could anyone want of humanity and the systems that chained them? To deal with other people, to sacrifice their days working—just to start a family, spit out offspring, save for retirement? Those goals satisfied the ghosts around me. But if the emptiness, the desolation, and the lack of meaning in each maneuver to wade through these societies nagged daily like a dislocated joint, what was there left to do?

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, about ten years ago.

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern.”

I feel like I need to explain myself for this one. First of all, I had completely forgotten about every single detail of this story so far. It was like reading it for the first time. As I read some parts, I did get some faint recollection of having “seen” them before, but I don’t remember having come up with nor designed those characters. This story was very personal for me, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t revisited it even in my mind, as it closed a period of my life I’d rather forget.

You see, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was 26 years old or so. That came after a few failed jobs that proved I couldn’t work a regular job due to my autism-related peculiarities. So when I got diagnosed, I had hit rock bottom, and I didn’t see myself adjusting to society at all. I lived like a recluse, the pee-in-bottles kind, except for my therapy sessions and the group meetings with other adults on the spectrum (I ended up leaving those group meetings, ironically, because one of the psychs, a thirty-year-old woman, was overtly hitting on me). A local organization offered me to take part in a course to help disabled people rejoin society and get hired.

Because most social workers are apparently retarded themselves (I swear I’ve never met any of them I could respect) and into the whole “everyone is equal” shit, they lumped together people with intellectual, social, and physical disabilities. We had people whose limbs didn’t work right having to be told how to talk with an interviewer in a way that a Down Syndrome fella would comprehend. People with social disabilities such as mine weren’t particularly tolerated either; a few of the disabled there, one diagnosed with paranoia and persecution syndrome or some shit like that, and another with fetal alcohol syndrome due to what a bastard her mother was, kept railing about some autistic guy at their workshop, and how autistic people were this and that. I didn’t interact much with them, but at least I got some sense of satisfaction when we “had” to reveal our disabilities and they realized that the guy whose disability they have kept shitting on every day heard it all.

You see, one of the things that bother me the most about the imposed public perception of disabled people, and I mean from the moderately disabled (among which I include myself; I’m 52% disabled) to the hyper disabled that you only see in such centers, is that social workers and such pests have forced a vision onto society that disabled people are all so resilient and understanding and kind to others because they endure such trauma and discrimination. Well, plenty of the people I met there were fucking bastards. Some real nasty ones too. There are details that I decided not to include in this story because it would seem like I was insulting people with such disabilities, even though it actually happened; for example, a Down Syndrome guy routinely waltzed over to groups, ripped the loudest farts, and casually left. Another guy kept calling everyone a faggot. Someone else seemed to be converting to Islam, and regularly claimed that priests and such ought to be killed. It wasn’t particularly surprising that some of the particularly vulnerable disabled would convert, because the fucking moronic social workers put illegals with a jihadist mindset among genuinely disabled people, under the category of “risk of exclusion,” as if wanting to conquer this country for their religion was a disability. Is it really a wonder that I was regularly enraged?

Anyway, that organization showed me a workshop similar to the one featured in this story, an offered me to work there. But I couldn’t due to the extreme noise, my intestinal issues, and other stuff. I did learn plenty about how they experienced that life, though, and it resulted in this story. Whatever good it did.

Anyway, I dare you to enjoy it if you can.

Life update (01/18/2025)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Well, what do you know. In a week, I’ve translated a whole novella I wrote about ten years ago, mostly thanks to OpenAI’s Orion 1 model, although I’ve needed to edit plenty of parts; regarding some, the original Spanish version wasn’t worded ideally, which becomes obvious when translating. Why would a Spanish old boy like me be writing in English anyway? Well, I’ve never gotten used to reading nor writing in Spanish. It always felt off, unnatural. If you knew I’m also Basque, you could think that I’d rather write in Basque instead. Nope, I can’t stand that language and can’t speak it either. But English has always been my private language; when my mother, who didn’t believe in privacy, read my hidden notebooks every chance she got, I started writing in English, or what passed for English at that age, to keep my intimate thoughts to myself. My mother complained that she could no longer understand them. I don’t want to say any more about my parents at the moment, although there’s plenty to say.

My old tale Smile was cooler than I remembered. Revisiting stuff you wrote many years ago is shocking, because the self that created it no longer exists. These days, I wouldn’t have written that story the same way. Likely I wouldn’t have written it at all, as my subconscious worries about other matters. In my impression, the unnamed narrator comes out very strongly; a solid, memorable character. I was surprised also by how much I liked that vagrant girl who shows up and disappears forever, as well as Cassie, despite only showing up at the tail ends of the story. These people were born from me and were forgotten along the way. It’s strange how that goes. I never quite got rid of the narrator, though; as I mentioned in other posts, he shows up in my daydreams whenever someone from the past needs saving. I also wrote a novel protagonized by him back in 2011, but I doubt it’s good enough to translate. Two of the people who read it shook their heads, and one told me that it was way too violent. Bunch of pussies.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll start writing a new novel. Its backstory is quite interesting (for me at least). From about 2010 to 2012, I was utterly obsessed, autistically so, with a US-based songwriter. I have never in my life been that obsessed with anyone again, thankfully. Along the way, I don’t recall the exact timeline, I wrote a whole novel that was thinly-veiled fanfiction of that songwriter. The impact such an obsession had on me felt interesting to circle upon, so in 2015 I planned a whole novel about an autistic person writing the novel I had written about that songwriter. Very meta, I suppose. Although I planned every single scene of that novel painstakingly, I only ended up writing half of it. By then, my subconscious felt like I had gotten it out of my system. In retrospect, the structure had fatal flaws that couldn’t be solved without a full redo. So I abandoned it. A few years later I produced the six novellas in Spanish contained in my books Los reinos de brea and Los dominios del emperador búho. If you’ve followed Smile, you’ve already read one of those novellas.

Anyway, it seems my basement girl needs to delve into the notion of being haunted by someone, of secluding oneself and working in such a labor of love/deranged obsession. I’ve gathered about 125000 words of notes. I’ve figured out the proper narrative tone for such a strange piece, as well as how to handle the many, many scenes of the book-within-the-book. This will be such a personal story that I’m not sure if anyone else is going to enjoy it, but for me it’s always about pleasing my subconscious; if anyone else enjoys my work, even better.

So, for those interested, in hopefully a few days I’ll post the first part of my novel The Scrap Colossus, introducing the autistic, reclusive, obsessive, unique protagonist who’s trying her best to honor her muse.

I’ve checked my site visits; in the last hour alone, a single person from Spain has hit every single part of Smile. That kind of shit makes me nervous.

Smile, Pt. 13 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Cassie June walked into the restaurant. She must have been about one meter seventy tall. She shivered from the cold while speaking to someone out of sight. She took off her coat, letting snowflakes slip from her shoulders. Cassie’s husband came in with their two daughters—a bright-eyed twenty-one-year-old and a lanky thirteen-year-old—crowding together in the narrow entry. The twenty-one-year-old unzipped her jacket and removed it, revealing a University of Minnesota sweatshirt. The thirteen-year-old’s eye shadow ringed her eyes dramatically like she’d colored them in with charcoal. A waiter approached the family and guided them to a free table in the opposite corner of the restaurant.

While they ate, I kept glancing away from my plates on the sly. Anyone who glanced my way might have caught me studying Cassie’s face—those wide, lively eyes, that distinctive mouth set a little higher than most. As Cassie listened to her husband and daughters, she nodded and smiled, and when she laughed, her silver earrings swung gently.

When they finished eating, the family rose and drifted apart. Her husband and the twenty-one-year-old waited by the entrance. Glancing around for Cassie, I spotted her weaving between the tables in the middle of the restaurant toward the exit, followed by her thirteen-year-old. I lowered my head like a schoolboy caught staring at the pretty girl.

In my mind, an image lingered of the woman noticing me, but that vision dissolved. It was replaced by a picture of her as a child, seated in the back seat of a rental car that would have been scrapped or crushed into a cube years ago. Cassie was crying. The face that had glanced in my direction at the restaurant looked like a caricature time had drawn in mockery.

The family regrouped in the foyer. They retrieved their coats and jackets. Cassie spoke while pointing at the street, and she laughed at some joke.

I wanted to say something. Anything.

They went out into the night then walked away along the sidewalk, huddled in their coats with their hands thrust in their pockets. They passed under arcs of light flickering yellow, red, and white—bulbs glowing in the darkness like milky vapor.

At eleven, I took my laptop down to the hotel bar and searched online for albums to download. Modest Mouse had never released Good News. They put out an album in 2003 and then retired. The first album by The Restless was a hit, and the band stayed together, including their original keyboardist. Eddie Ingram’s girlfriend had avoided the accident, so he never composed his masterpiece. Thom Yorke’s Facebook profile suggested he was working as an orderly in a mental institution. The present adored a band called Beasts of Downtown, which burst onto the scene in 2002 and redefined rock. On the album Reckoning, released in 1984, R.E.M. included a track called “Girl on Skates,” alluding to how for years Cassie June had claimed that a stranger—the one appearing beside her in the famous photo—had saved her from being killed by the Southern California Prowler. A stranger whose DNA belonged to no one. Joanna Newsom’s albums were missing. I searched for an hour and a half, but any proof that she had ever been born had vanished.

At three in the morning, I went to the hotel gym. The echo of my footsteps spread as though I were entering an abandoned building where the lights had been left on. I worked my back and chest; the pain of my tearing fibers anchored me. I ran for half an hour in front of the glass wall, where my doubled reflection overlapped a sea of ink lit only by a streetlamp at the end of the road.

The next afternoon, the snow had stopped, and I strolled beneath a leaden sky. I browsed the shop windows. I bought whatever I fancied and piled the shopping bags in my hotel room.

I had dinner at the restaurant. Every five minutes, I looked toward the foyer, imagining Cassie would walk in. Why would she come?

That night, I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my laptop and read the news. In Sweden, a jihadist had boarded a train with an AK-47 and mowed down eleven people. My body froze; my numb fingers lost feeling on the keys. I closed the laptop.

I swallowed four sleeping pills and got into bed. The black tide rose. I grabbed my portable music player, played Roy Harper’s “The Same Old Rock,” and jammed the earbuds into my ears. I pulled the covers up to my forehead and curled into a ball. As my consciousness faded to the sound of the guitars, images appeared in the darkness of my mind as if carved from obsidian. Scenes trapped inside. The family who visited me every night when loneliness overwhelmed me, and who would always be there.

A girl was skating toward her home when a serial killer convinced her to get into his car and took her to a dark place, where he raped and sodomized her, then strangled her and crushed her skull with hammer blows. A group of unkempt, bearded men, armed with hammers and machetes, ambushed a tennis player and dragged her toward a van, which minutes later, out of control, ran over one of the men, whose chest imploded. Two men broke into a villa in the early hours of the morning, went up to the bedroom of the elderly couple sleeping, and beat them to death. A naked woman climbed onto the railing of her balcony on the tenth floor, and while humming a tune, she opened her arms in a cross and let herself fall forward. A girl with a bruised face lay half on a filthy floor and a mattress dotted with stains, and her arms were covered with the black marks of needle marks. A woman was walking down a busy street when the man who was stalking her grabbed the woman’s hair and plunged the blade of a dagger into her chest and side again and again, while the rips in the woman’s blouse soaked with blood and her screams escaped along with the air through the slits in her lungs. A drunken woman drove her car across the median line of the road and crashed into another car, whose occupant, a twenty-something girl, was thrown through the windshield, which tore her face apart, and when she hit the asphalt, her head exploded. A woman lay among some rocks, half-buried under rotten leaves, genitals exposed, her legs twisted as if her bones had been broken. A group of teenagers dragged a child into a forest, where they beat him and raped him while recording it on their cell phones. A woman crouched by a bathtub was holding a child’s head under the foam, while the child’s arms flailed and his hands groped the woman’s rolled-up forearm, until the last of the bubbles that clustered on the surface of the water burst. Inside the charred shell of a car, the driver’s seat had melted and fused with the legs of a man whose torso had been charred to a crusty black shell, torn open in breaches that revealed flesh red as a coal, and from the open guts the intestines had spilled like charred sausages. A woman was distracted browsing the frozen foods in a supermarket while a man dragged the woman’s daughter to a car; the man locked the girl in the trunk, drove her to a vacant lot, raped her, and smashed her head with a rock. A five-year-old girl was playing in front of her apartment building when the leader of a group of prepubescent children pressed a knife to the girl’s throat and dragged her to a laundry room, where they stripped her, groped her, and urinated in her mouth while laughing. A woman was hugging her decapitated daughter. A teenager hunched under the crumpled hood of a car was feeling the ruin of her face, which when it had hit the front seat had torn apart like a half-peeled rubber mask, and the globe of her left eye hung loose from its socket. In a forest at the foot of a volcano hung the desiccated corpses of hundreds of suicides. Some men lured a teenager by offering her alcohol to pass her around among themselves and their friends as a prostitute, kept her quiet with threats, and when they got tired, they killed her, dismembered her, and served her flesh as kebabs. On a plastic sheet lay the naked bodies of half a dozen boys and girls, and on their torsos, from the junction of the collarbones to the navel, tortuous sutures closed with staples showed that they had been gutted to sell their organs. A man disguised as a police officer gathered dozens of teenagers and climbed onto a platform to pretend he needed to inform them of some news, but he sprayed them with an assault rifle. Some men burst into a concert hall and machine-gunned the crowd while praising an imaginary character, and the wounded, and those who pretended to be dead, they disfigured, stabbed their eyes, castrated them and stuffed their genitals into their mouths, and ripped the fetuses from the pregnant women. A lion ripped open the belly of a gazelle, tore the fetus from the womb, and devoured it. A cat crossing a highway was sprinting, stopping, and jumping to the side against the hulks of cars, vans, and trucks that charged. In row after row of metal crates two meters by ninety centimeters, hundreds of pigs grew so one day they would be taken to the slaughterhouse. A parrot forgotten in the sun suffered a heat stroke and dehydrated to death. A hamster locked in a forgotten cage ate the plastic from the walls to escape, and the plastic tore the walls of its stomach. A fish caught lay on the grass gasping. A mouse chewed in half dragged its entrails. A fly got tangled in a spider’s web, and the spider injected it with a paralyzing agent and sucked it into a husk. A spider was weaving its web in the corner of a ceiling when a hand crushed it with a napkin. An army of ants scurried around a caterpillar, which wriggled as if dreaming while the ants dragged it toward their colony, pinching it with their tiny jaws. In a drop of water, thousands of microscopic organisms hunted each other or escaped, suffering an endless war.

In the symphony of organic life, each member of every species contributed its note of pain.

I stopped feeling like I was lying in bed, or even inhabiting a body. I shrank to a grain of lead plunging into a swarm of nightmares.

The following afternoon, I wandered through the city in a snowstorm that turned my hair white and covered half my coat. My atoms interacted with dark matter, weighing me down as though I were wading through a swamp. Pedestrians passed by, hunched under their umbrellas. If they weren’t careful, they would walk right through me. A few passersby peered at me from the hollow sockets of their rubber masks.

That night, I went back to the restaurant. They served me my lamb stew. Three spoonfuls into the broth, potatoes, and meat, a hand with rings on two fingers and veins standing out slid a newspaper clipping under my face.

In the center of the yellowed paper was a black-and-white photo. Two paramedics carried a stretcher beneath a plastic cover that outlined a human figure. Behind them, ten-year-old Cassie June watched, eyes wide, her fists pressed to her thighs. Next to her, I had placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder, staring at the stretcher with a calm I had never actually felt. It reminded me of certain Victorian photographs in which families posed with relaxed faces alongside their dead children.

I lifted my eyes to Cassie’s face—her lined forehead, the creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes.

Time had infected every human cell to break them down into dust, and I couldn’t stop it.

Five meters away, her daughters and husband looked on, astonished. Cassie’s irises and her hand trembled like a schoolgirl handing over a poem.

I wanted to burst into tears.

“Come over for a while,” Cassie said. “We live nearby. We’ll have tea, we’ll talk.”

I swallowed hard.

“Tea sounds good.”

THE END

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in my collection titled Los reinos de brea, about ten years ago.

Today’s songs are “The Same Old Rock” by Roy Harper, and “Esme” by Joanna Newsom.

Smile, Pt. 12 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I drove along a grassy track worn bare by years of footsteps, until a stand of fir and maple trees blocked the way. I switched off the radio and the engine. Figures showed up in the windows of the neighboring houses. A woman hunched over a kitchen sink was scrubbing a plate.

I got out of the Chevy Caprice. My soles flattened the grass. The breeze carried dog barks and the murmuring of televisions. Birds fluttered and chirped. The air, growing cooler as the sun slipped behind the horizon, felt worlds apart from the polluted coastal atmosphere, as if I had crossed into another country.

In the nearby houses, behind walls and drawn curtains, a baby would be nursing at its mother’s breast, with her warm smile in return. A couple would be making love. A girl, lying on her stomach in bed, would be reading a novel. A teenager holed up in the attic would be learning a guitar solo, all the while dreaming that someday another teenager might imitate his riffs. They were sustained by dreams unlike those that drive someone to lock a serial killer in a car trunk. I disparaged those people because I had never belonged among them. A searing anger coursed through my veins, burning them, tainting everything I experienced, rotting me like a heroin addict. And for whatever years remained, fueled by this boiling rage inside, I would hunt down those who deserved punishment. I would find my rewards in the crunch of my knuckles meeting another jaw, in the shot that punched through another terrorist’s skull. I would save someone today, and tomorrow I’d save the next. Even if my anger melted my organs and cracked my skin until it vented scorching steam. No one would take my place, but I would bear it.

I took out the scissors and gripped them in my left hand. With my other hand, I slid the key into the trunk’s lock. When I opened the lid, I was hit by a reek of hot brass and urine. I stepped back on guard against what was inside.

Richard Alcala’s scalp had gone as white as plaster. A gash glimmered across his right eyebrow. The lower half of his face, including the duct tape covering his mouth, was stained with dried blood. The killer’s cheeks were swollen, and as he breathed, little blood-bubbles popped in one nostril. He gawked at me in terror.

I cut through his duct-tape handcuffs with the scissors. Richard Alcala wobbled his trembling arms, trying to find something to hold onto. When I tugged his forearms to haul him out of the trunk, he dropped onto the grass like a sack. As the gag stifled his cough, the killer’s cheeks quivered, and his nose blew blood as if he had just sneezed.

I slipped one tip of the scissors under the duct tape stuck to his cheek and cut carelessly, slicing the skin. Richard Alcala’s whimper died in his throat. I pinned his shoulder to the grass and peeled away the layers of tape until they came off his face, leaving a purplish stripe.

He rolled onto his side and vomited blood, scraping his throat as he coughed. The lower half of his face had become so mangled that, between all the blood, you could barely make out a mouth—like a tiny cannonball had burst out of his throat destroying everything in its path. In the puddle of blood soaking the grass, the white fragments of molars, incisors, and canines glinted.

Richard Alcala stood up, but his legs wavered. He lurched unsteadily, coughing and whimpering. When I shoved him toward the grove, he toppled forward. Crawling away on all fours until he reached the first maple, he pulled himself upright, clutching the bent trunk, which quivered under his weight. The killer mumbled some sort of litany. Letting go of the maple, he edged from tree to tree as if trying to lose me in a maze.

Shifting shadows from the canopy glided over us. A breeze rustled the leaves, an unseen bird flapped its wings.

Richard Alcala veered to the right. I drew my Smith & Wesson and took off the safety. I aimed at the trunk of a maple two meters ahead of the killer, who was stretching out his arms to stay upright. I fired. The blast sent birds clattering from the branches where they’d been perched, and their silhouettes streaked across the grass, tracing shadow puppets on the trunks. Richard Alcala staggered back and fell onto his backside. Once he got up, he bolted deeper among the maples and firs toward the edge of the grove. Ten meters on, he turned left. I fired at the trunk inches from him, spraying splinters into his face. While muttering, he shook his features as if he’d disturbed a beehive. He changed direction. He shoved one leg in front of the other postponing his collapse, and leaned against each trunk as he passed.

When the echo of the shot faded, I called out to the killer.

“Do you think someone’s going to save you?”

Richard Alcala peeled himself off the trunk he was clutching, lurched forward, and laughed like he’d been holding it in for years.

“Nobody gets saved.”

He stumbled out of the grove into a blaze of sunlight. He lowered his head, dazzled. Ahead lay a broad yard dotted with a trampoline, a swing set, and a few raised garden beds. Beyond that rose the back wall of a single-story house. At one of its windows, a hand pulled the curtain shut.

Richard Alcala ran across the yard on a diagonal, heading for the path between the side of the house and the hedgerow marking the property line. I aimed just shy of the corner of the house. While the killer wavered and stumbled in a drunken arc, I pulled the trigger. With the shot’s crack, Richard Alcala screamed and fell on his backside, clutching his calf.

He pushed himself upright. Dragging his left leg, he made his way along the side of the house toward the back door. He kept muttering like a radio jammed between two stations. He hurled himself at the door, and on his third shove, it gave way. As he slammed it shut, he glanced over his shoulder—a clown with bulging eyes in that stark white upper half of his face, the lower half smeared in red.

A woman screamed. I heard blows, glass shattering. Someone growled. A shot whipped through a curtain and punched a hole in the window, cracks spidering around the bullet’s entry point like tiny veins.

I sprinted over to the path running alongside the house toward the front door, crouching as I went, keeping the wall between myself and the inside. I hurried under a window in a single stride.

Two more shots. A woman’s screams, then running footsteps.

In front of the house’s facade, I stood up next to a rhododendron bush that reached my neck. I thumbed the safety on my Smith & Wesson and tucked the gun behind my belt. Approaching the front door, I drew a deep breath and glanced at myself. My jacket was spattered with blood droplets. I wet my thumb with saliva and scrubbed at the stains, but they barely lightened.

I rang the doorbell. I realized that a woman’s panicked voice had been filling the silence only when she suddenly fell quiet. On the other side of the door, footsteps approached, then stopped about five feet away. She held her breath, trying to make it seem like I had rung the bell of an empty house.

I rang again.

“Neighborhood watch. I heard gunshots. Are you okay?”

The door opened a crack. Through it peered Cassie’s mother, her face flecked with blood. Her lips trembled. For a few seconds, her turquoise irises wavered while her tight throat suppressed any words.

“You.”

“They told us a fugitive had been spotted in the area. I can help you.”

Cassie’s mother opened the door. As I stepped through, she shoved it shut with a bang. A bullet hole had scarred the doorframe. Several gleaming bloodstains marred the pattern of the woman’s apple-green cashmere dress. In her right hand she clutched a Colt Python double-action revolver. She had lowered the hammer. Light slid along the eight-inch chrome barrel.

Cassie’s mother lifted the revolver as though to aim at me, but gave up halfway. She spoke in a strained voice.

“I shot someone. He broke in through the back door. I’d heard gunshots in the yard, so I grabbed the gun. This man ran in here, and I have my daughter… so I fired. The radio said something about a serial killer. He was hurt, but I don’t know… I don’t…”

She shook her head and looked toward the living room.

I had worried that when the front door opened, I’d find Richard Alcala holding the revolver he’d wrested from her, ready to blow my head apart as I rightly deserved. I stifled a smile. Relief flooded me, the kind you feel after emptying your bladder when you’ve been holding it for hours.

I placed a hand on Cassie’s mother’s shoulder, and for a moment her gaze pleaded.

“You did what you had to,” I said. “Let’s see what’s left.”

I guided her into the living room, where a wet gurgling sound arose. I caught the scent of gunpowder. Richard Alcala lay on his back, sprawled on a shaggy rug whose ash-gray fibers were darkening with blood. In the lower half of his face, a gaping hole bubbled with tarry phlegm between ragged breaths. His eyes roamed void of humanity, like a fish gasping in a fisherman’s hand. Two bullet wounds—one between his fifth and sixth ribs on the right side, the other in his throat—were leaking ribbons of blood.

Cassie’s mother covered her mouth, shook her head, and wept.

“You got him,” I said.

She slid the hand lower, stretching her bottom lip.

When I reached into the inside pocket of my jacket to pull out a folded paper, she noticed the bloodstained bandage wrapped around my palm, then she lifted her gaze to study my expression. I spread out the wanted poster.

“You stopped the Southern California Prowler—killer of at least twenty-six women and girls.”

Cassie’s mother snatched the paper from me and skimmed it. She examined Richard Alcala’s pale face; his pupils had shifted toward her, his chest shaking in time with the blood gargling in his throat. She let her muscles loosen, her brow lowered, and her features hardened.

“Oh.”

She wiped her tears with her forearm. Reaching out blindly with her right hand, she set the revolver on the hallway table, nudging aside two picture frames. She gave the dying man a look you’d offer a spider swirling down a drain. Then she moved to the phone mounted on the wall, lifted the receiver, and turned the dial for a nine. I thumbed the Colt Python’s hammer back with a soft click.

I found Cassie huddled by the sofa, facing the egg-yellow wallpaper. She wore a T-shirt printed with a whip-poor-will. Her index fingers were jammed in her ears, her eyelids clenched so tightly that the skin at their corners wrinkled. She was trembling like a tower on the verge of collapse.

I placed a hand on her hair.

“Cassie.”

She stopped trembling and lifted her face to me, her eyes shining with tears.

I helped her to her feet. I pointed at her mother, who was in profile, murmuring into the phone receiver. I guided Cassie to the shag rug in the middle of the living room, beside Richard Alcala, whose wounds kept spreading bloodstains like overflowing lakes. Cassie shuddered and let out a whimper. She turned away and covered her eyes.

I stepped behind the girl and turned her toward the killer.

“Cassie.”

She lowered her hands and opened her eyes. She looked down at the dying man the way someone would stare into an abyss.

Richard Alcala’s pupils flicked across the ceiling. With every convulsion, his mouth spewed bloody gobs like a broken faucet. Lying on the rug was a tar-molded mannequin foaming and steaming as its human features—face, torso, arms, and legs—melted into a puddle of black muck.

I pressed a hand on Cassie’s shoulder.

“Don’t look away.”

-----

Author’s note: this story was originally published in Spanish about a decade ago, in a collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Smile, Pt. 11 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

After four blocks, the adrenaline rush wore off, and I realized the car’s body was rattling in time to metallic thuds. Richard Alcala was thrashing around, trying to pop open the trunk lid. He moaned and cursed but didn’t quite beg for help—whoever freed him would discover his identity. On one side, death row was waiting for him. On the other side, I was.

As my stolen Chevrolet Caprice passed by, some pedestrians shot sidelong glances. Drivers in the cars ahead eyed me through their rearview mirrors. With my nerves frayed, I couldn’t tell if I was just imagining those stares, or if it was obvious I had someone locked in the trunk.

The car’s body lurched with each jolt, like the parked van where I’d kept my cargo from killing the would-be model. Richard Alcala shouted for help with a tinny voice.

I switched on the radio and turned up the volume. The news anchor was talking about the Prowler again, repeating a tip line number. I spun the dial. Stations flickered in and out between bursts of static, snatches of sound. I landed on a classical music station but found the silences between notes too hollow. The next station played Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” a few lines after it began, about four minutes before the guitars would crash in and blow the song apart.

I listened, leaning back against the upholstery like I’d wrapped up a day’s work, but within seconds, a fresh round of thrashing, pounding on metal, and shouting ruined it. I squeezed the steering wheel, cursed, and cranked the volume to drown him out. I was drawing attention like a circus promotion vehicle blasting ads through a megaphone. A group of young men and women in bell-bottoms recognized the song and hollered. One woman in the group bobbed her head in time. Another one looped an arm around her friend’s elbow and started hopping, the hand holding her cigarette high, sketching a sinuous trail of smoke.

Traffic slowed me down and kept me from taking shortcuts. I was mapping out a clear route in my head, but the pounding reverberating through the car body shattered my concentration. Was Richard Alcala still screaming for help, or was I just hearing echoes in my mind?

The singer sang the last verse, and the guitars went wild. In the rearview mirror, two cars back, a police cruiser appeared. The officer behind the wheel leaned over to look at me through his sunglasses.

I pressed my fingertips against the radio volume knob like it was a membrane of glass, and eased the sound down until the song barely overlaid the cries for help. But the car was still rocking, as if Richard Alcala were kicking at the trunk lid with both legs.

We stopped at a red light. The police cruiser lit up its overheads, and the street woke to the howl of the siren.

I gritted my teeth. My blood turned to hot coals. I floored the accelerator and jerked the wheel. The cruiser followed. I barreled down a side street, slaloming between cars. I smashed the headlight of a car coming straight at me.

The cruiser wobbled in and out of my rearview with its lights flaring off the windshield. The cops inside were moving their lips, shouting something. As I drifted around a curve, tires screeching, the smell of burning rubber filled the car through the open window. I noticed that at the sound of the siren, Richard Alcala had stopped pounding and gone quiet.

My neck was stiff and aching. My grip on the steering wheel was so tight it felt like my palms and fingers would fuse to it. I shifted gears like a madman while ducking my head between my shoulders in case one of the cops decided to shoot through my back window.

I searched for narrow passages, shortcuts, but kept finding fenced-off lanes or dead ends where the car would get stuck. I refused to turn down any alleys; I might trap myself with nowhere to go.

The cruiser’s wail faded a bit amid the traffic noise. I got distracted scanning vacant lots along the sidewalk, and a pedestrian at a crosswalk had to leap aside to avoid me mowing him down.

I spotted a gate, its door ajar, leading to a paved path flanked by garages. I jerked the wheel, careened across the oncoming lane, and crashed through the gate. The door whipped inward, screeching. I followed the asphalt between the garages, and after passing half a dozen I spotted one open and empty. I spun the car around and skidded inside at an angle. Part of the trunk stuck out, but I didn’t have time to straighten the car fully.

I turned the radio down until it would only bother the neighboring garages. Richard Alcala was hammering on the trunk door. The guitars on the radio shrieked like harpies. My heart was pumping so hard it felt close to bursting, and the rush of blood in my ears blotted out the cruiser’s siren.

Red rings throbbed around my vision. A familiar fury was boiling in my gut. I shoved my way out of the Chevy Caprice and rounded the side to the trunk, where the lid bulged from all the pounding.

Shelves packed to overflowing lined one garage wall, with junk scattered across the floor. I blinked to clear my sight. Bleach bottles, two toolboxes, a shovel, a vacuum cleaner, a pair of scissors, even a surfboard. A roll of duct tape.

I rolled it between my fingers, searching for the tape’s edge. Tried to pry it free with my ragged nails, but no luck. I bit a corner, warping several layers of the tape. I snatched up the scissors, accidentally knocking over a metal box that crashed to the floor and spilled a couple dozen tools. I wedged one scissor tip under the tape edge, but it slipped and sliced open my left palm, the sting like ice water. Even as blood trickled from the cut, I worked the blade until I could peel up the middle of the tape. Then I tugged, and the duct tape came loose with a squeal.

I held the roll in my mouth. Its dangling flap swayed as I slid the key into the trunk lock. The flurry of high guitar notes clawed at my veins.

I threw the trunk open. Richard Alcala lunged sideways, reaching his arm toward my face. I smashed a punch into his eye, sending the side of his head crashing into the trunk rim. I grabbed his neck with my left hand and hammered punches into his mouth with my right until static buzzed through my arm and my fist went numb.

When I let go, Richard Alcala collapsed inside the trunk with a string of groans. The lower half of his face was disfigured in a bright burst of blood, as if he’d vomited straight up.

I relaxed my jaw, letting the roll of duct tape drop into my hand, then stuck the tape’s end to his cheek. I wound it around his head a few times, covering his mouth. I tore the strip off with my teeth. Next, I seized his wrists, pressed them together, and cuffed them with more duct tape.

I slammed the trunk shut, staggered back. The song was fading out to silence. My right hand throbbed as if several knuckles had cracked. The skin was peeled raw, and a broken tooth dangled from one of them. I shook my hand until it fell away.

On the radio, a DJ was cheerfully chatting about the bright sun and the weeklong stretch of fair weather.

I propped myself against the trunk to catch my breath, and listened for sirens.

In a far corner of the garage, three young Hispanic men sat on the floor. One, with obsidian-colored hair and a cat-like mustache, had an acoustic guitar across his thighs. He held a G chord in his left hand, his right hand—holding the pick—resting on his knee. Another guy, his hair clipped short with shaved sides, raised both palms in a peace gesture.

I dropped the roll of duct tape. It bounced and rolled out of the garage. I slipped the scissors into my jacket pocket, and from that same pocket pulled out a few bills. I counted four fifties and folded them. I tossed the money in front of the three young men.

“Buy yourselves some better duct tape.”

-----

Author’s note: today’s song, for no reason, is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” Wish I could have returned back in time and prevented you folks from getting on that plane.

As one commenter of the video put it succinctly: all crimes committed during the “Free Bird” solo are hereby forgiven.

Smile, Pt. 10 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I ran to the opposite sidewalk. Slipping among the tourists, I searched the alleys and parking lots for an out-of-the-way car. I collided with someone rooted to the spot. When I pushed that person aside with one hand, my palm sank into the supple flesh of a breast, hot under my touch. I mumbled an apology.

I came upon a parking lot wedged between two buildings, that stretched into an L-shape. Four cars and a van. I stopped by the nearest car, a cherry-red Mercury Bobcat, and tried the driver’s door handle. It held fast. I moved on to the next one, a chalk-colored Ford Pinto.

Time was speeding toward zero. I pictured the bodybuilder and the girl talking to a cop while another officer handcuffed Richard Alcala, and it felt like I was the one getting arrested. If cops were waiting for me when I got back, there’d be questions I wasn’t ready to answer.

I closed my fingers around the Pinto’s door handle. Another shadow joined mine, spilling across the Pinto’s bodywork. I turned around as if expecting someone to bury a knife in my back.

It was the aspiring model. The flare of her dress had lost its grace beneath wrinkles. Strands of blonde hair stuck out in all directions. Her eyes had grown glassy. A bruise shaped like a hand clung to her throat.

I refocused on the car. When I pulled the handle, the driver’s door opened. I bent inside and sat down.

The woman approached the gap of the open door, darkening the interior.

“Why did you call me an idiot?”

I flipped down the hinged flap of the sun visor in case the owner had stashed a key.

“That man hurt me,” the woman said, “and you insulted me. You could’ve given me a hand.”

I bent over to slide a forearm under the seat, rooting among candy wrappers and clumps of dirt. I barely diverted my gaze toward the midsection of her dress.

“Why the fuck are you still here?”

“Where should I go?” she asked, sounding dazed. “Home, like you said? To hide in terror? No. I’m supposed to get my pictures taken, and I will. That nasty man won’t ruin my day.”

I slumped against the seat as if my muscles had fallen asleep. I leaned over to frame her face in the door’s opening.

“The photographer assaulted you.”

“Excuse me?”

“The photographer assaulted you after shaving his head and sticking on a fake mustache.”

“The same photographer we talked to yesterday?”

“The only one that connects us.”

“Why would he do that?”

“You ran into the Southern California Prowler.” I shook my head. “A serial killer. Besides, do you really want them photographing that hand-shaped bruise on your neck?”

When the woman traced the bruise’s outline, pain twisted her features. She let her gaze wander over the other parked cars and the sky, as if cementing the information to the slow rise of the mountains.

While I felt around the gearshift, someone rapped on the passenger-side window. A middle-aged man, hair combed like some bank employee. He eyed me, eyebrows raised. I stretched across the passenger seat and turned the crank to lower the window.

“Yes?”

The man creased his brow and tried to smile.

“You’ve mistaken this car for yours.”

“I need it. It’s vital. Can you give me the keys?”

He stared at me like I was refusing to admit that this was all a joke.

“I don’t think so.”

I got out. The man came around the car and hurried to sit behind the wheel. He shut the door while throwing me a suspicious glance. He then started the engine and pulled out of the lot.

I was heading for the third car, a cinnamon-colored Chevy Caprice, when the woman grabbed my arm.

“People like the guy who attacked me show up when everyone forgets how to be kind.”

I shook loose.

“Jesus. Go home or to a hospital. But leave me alone.”

I tugged on the Chevy’s door handle, and it opened. I slid in, fitting my legs beneath the oversized steering wheel, and rifled through the glove compartment. Under a mess of papers, I found a key ring.

The woman bent over the doorway, holding onto the frame.

“I’ll stay happy. I owe it to the world.”

I wanted to scream until she fled. I made it clear with a scowl that I was sick of nonsense.

“You owe it to the world that let you get raped? That nearly strangled you to death?”

“I knew someone would save me. And you showed up.”

My back sank against the seat. I dipped my head, filled my lungs, and exhaled for three seconds. Then I stuck the key in the ignition.

“Thanks to you, I’m still alive,” the woman said.

When I turned the key, the engine purred, making my seat vibrate. The door handle shook as well.

She was smiling, leaning in so that her breasts all but spilled from her dress like upside-down bells framed by glossy, golden strands. A pang of hunger hit me.

“I don’t need your gratitude. I stopped expecting it a while back.”

She straightened, and backed away while fumbling with her left hand. She softened her voice.

“We should spread love, you know? In the end, that’s the one thing we’ll remember.”

I closed the door and gripped the steering wheel. I sighed. I let go with my left hand to open the door again.

“Sorry I called you an idiot, even though it’s true. Enjoy the rest of your life.”

I shut the door. I jiggled the gearshift into reverse and drove out to the street. On my way back, traffic slowed me down. I should have stolen an ambulance and blasted the siren.

I hopped the curb near my comrades-in-arms. The bodybuilder was driving a knee between Richard Alcala’s shoulder blades while the vagrant girl pressed the killer’s head into the dirt. As I climbed out of the car, Alcala’s eyes went wide. He whimpered like a frightened dog.

“Oh, you parked nearby,” said the bodybuilder.

“It’s not my car. Thanks for your help. I’ll take care of the Prowler.”

Richard Alcala flailed around like a fish on the boards of a pier, but the bodybuilder dug his weight into Alcala’s back. He growled, and the girl punched him in the crown of his head.

“Shut it, bastard.”

The bodybuilder freed a hand to calm the girl.

“We’ve got him. Don’t go overboard.”

She shot him a glare.

“Are you serious? You know he raped and killed like a dozen women, right?”

I popped the trunk. It was stuffed with camping gear. I cleared it out by dumping the bags next to a parked car until a body would fit.

“What are you doing?” asked the bodybuilder.

“Taking the Prowler somewhere else.”

“The police will come.”

“He hasn’t called them,” the girl said casually.

The bodybuilder looked at us, confused.

“Isn’t it enough if the police take him?”

I stepped closer. With half his face mashed against the dirt, Alcala strained his eyes toward me.

“The cops will hand him over to the legal system,” I said. “Trials. A media circus. Years spent arguing whether keeping him locked up or executing him is humane. His victims are rotting and their families suffer. I’m ending this for good.”

“Spending the rest of his life in prison seems like punishment enough.”

“I’ll keep him from ever getting out. Decades from now, someone may set him free.” I fixed my gaze on the vagrant girl’s. “Some idiot puffed up with pride over how compassionate he is, someone who’d be outraged to learn what I’m going to do. This killer deserves a classical treatment.”

“In a few decades, we’ll have forgotten all this,” the bodybuilder argued.

“I’ll remember it like it happened yesterday.”

“You can also let me go,” Richard Alcala said, spitting dirt. “I don’t hold grudges.”

“Need any help?” asked a woman over my shoulder.

A retired couple with bronze-tanned skin had come up behind us. They wore sleeveless shirts and shorts, carrying towels and toiletries.

“Move along,” said the girl, nodding toward the beach.

“He’s a thief,” the bodybuilder said. “We’ve got it under control.”

The woman looked down at the killer.

“Have you stolen something?”

Richard Alcala flared his nostrils and scowled.

“Fuck off, old toad.”

The retirees backed off, mouths agape. They scurried toward the Venice Beach boardwalk, whispering and eyeing us nervously, as if we were hooded thugs loitering outside a bank.

The bodybuilder forced Alcala’s chest into the dirt while pinning me with his stare.

“I see your point, but turning him in spares us a lot of trouble.”

I clenched my jaw. I longed to kill from a distance, offing murderers who suspected nothing, distracted by their own schemes. How would I convince two people I’d rather not harm?

Partly due to the unrelenting sunlight, a throbbing pain in my head demanded I barricade myself in a dark room, lie down, and hope that when I woke, this week’s nightmare had passed. The clamor of tourists, beachgoers, and traffic scraped my skin like sandpaper.

I lifted the hem of my T-shirt to show off the Smith & Wesson’s grip.

“You’ve noticed the guy’s missing a few fingers—courtesy of this gun. You two are the most decent people I’ve met in a while, but you’re letting me take the Prowler.”

The bodybuilder raised a hand.

“Listen, man, neither of us wants to get shot over this.”

The vagrant girl was eyeing the gun.

“Are you an undercover cop?”

“No.”

“You’re carrying a gun for no reason?”

“No. Let me put this killer in the trunk.”

“I knocked him out by throwing my bike,” the bodybuilder said.

“I remember. That was cool.”

The bodybuilder looked down at Richard Alcala, whose frantic thoughts escaped in mutters, but the giant mushroom of a man remained indecisive.

I rubbed my eyelids and took a deep breath.

“This killer raped and murdered someone I cared about. I’m not letting him rot in a cushy cell. Richard Alcala and I are going to have some fun. Whatever’s left, I’ll send to the police in boxes.”

I crouched down and seized the killer’s wrists. The bodybuilder eased off the weight of his knee.

“Help me if you feel like it,” I said to the girl.

“Absolutely.”

We hoisted Alcala by his arms and legs while he squirmed. We wedged him on his side inside the trunk, then I slammed it shut. Alcala let out a screech.

On the boardwalk, the retired couple, far enough that they could fit between my fingers, was talking to two cops who looked our way. Electricity shot down my spine.

“How do we know you’ll do what you say?” the bodybuilder asked as he rubbed his palms on his pant legs.

“Read the papers.”

The cops were weaving through the streams of people on the boardwalk, pink faces turned toward us.

When I opened the driver’s door, the girl slid a hand inside my unzipped jacket and grabbed my shirt. Her eagle eyes a couple of inches away. The smudge of dirt on her cheek suggested she’d started putting on war paint but got sidetracked. Her open mouth shifted the chewed gum like a washing machine’s agitator. She smelled foul.

“You need a Robin?”

“I work alone.”

She pressed her lips to mine and slid her tongue into my mouth. She tasted of strawberries and neglect.

I stepped back. I groped the air before remembering I had opened the door. Sweat coated me like I’d just climbed out of hot water.

“Thanks.”

I slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door. Once I sped off, in the rearview mirror, the bodybuilder was scratching his neck, and the girl crossed the road while eyeing my stolen car. She was slender—her body worn thin from life on the street—and her fixed smile rarely meant joy.

I kept watching her, a pressure swelling in my chest, until her figure vanished from the mirror. Was she still alive in my present? How had she filled those decades? Found a partner, had children? Died within a few years thanks to any of the disasters that loom over those who sleep on the streets?

As I turned a corner, I let go of another person that time will ruin.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los reinos de brea, about ten years ago. I guess back then I considered romancing a vagrant girl who doesn’t brush her teeth. I can fix you, babe.