Jon Ureña's Blog, page 45
June 2, 2022
Life update (06/02/2022)
This last Sunday I failed to write a single word of my ongoing novel. After a while I gave up and spent the rest of that day playing a board game. I also failed to write on Monday, then again on Tuesday. Although I started my current contract, which will last until October, merely three weeks ago, I’m struggling with the exhaustion and dizziness that ten hours or so a day of surrounding myself with sentient creatures causes to my broken brain.
I’m someone whose instincts and particular neurological configuration require him to spend as much time as possible alone in a quiet room, but I have to wake up at six in the morning, plough through my ruined town to the train station, sit among dozens of commuters, then take a bus and stand among dozens of commuters so I can reach the hospital complex where I work at. Usually by the time I get to the office I’m already overwhelmed. I don’t drive (can’t drive, actually), so I have no choice but to take the public transport.
I usually read on the train, but for two days I had given up on doing so, and instead I closed my eyes and listened through my earbuds to a MP3 (ripped from YouTube) of a torrential storm while I tried to lose myself in daydreams. It didn’t help that recently I had been struggling to get through a collection of stories by David Foster Wallace, that involved sifting through innumerable details and getting little enjoyment, but I didn’t feel like reading anything else either.
This week started with me suffering another migraine; at about nine in the morning on Monday I experienced the common symptom of losing sight in my left eye and becoming increasingly unable to understand whatever I needed to read for my job. Thankfully I always carry some ibuprofen with me, but I still struggled through the visual disturbance (a floating multicolored rod in the left side of my vision) for half an hour, and the resulting headache lasted a couple of days as a throbbing discomfort in the right side of my brain. Whenever I endure a migraine, afterwards I get the feeling that I’ve become a bit dumber. Apparently migraines can also “increase the risk of stroke, coronary events, and other related death by roughly 50%”, so that’s some wonderful stuff to look forward to.
I didn’t want to give up on the current scene of my novel for a fourth day, but yesterday I only managed to progress three or four sentences. However, I struggled so much to put them together that I considered the effort a success, so I gave myself a break and moved on to play another scenario of my ongoing Arkham Horror campaign. I had only finished setting up all the moving pieces and drawing the initial hand for my lead investigator when I felt like I was facing the prospect of clambering up a mountain slope. I wasn’t feeling any enthusiasm, let alone joy. I suddenly understood the whole picture of my recent symptoms (persistent brain fog, increased difficulty interacting with people even to the restrained level that I force myself to, lethargy that made me feel like I was dragging my body around, crushing exhaustion, constant irritability, a dull ache in my chest, ghost-like cold flashes): I must be depressed.
These periods, whenever they get serious, may last a few weeks during which I can do little else than sit tight in my head and get used to the dark. Back when I was blissfully unemployed, I could have just hidden under a blanket and tried to convince myself that I had successfully disappeared from reality, but today I had no choice but to wake up before sunrise and try to prepare myself mentally to endure through another meaningless workday.
Yesterday, at about half past one in the afternoon, I had donned my lab coat and headed to solve someone’s problem (I can’t recall what was that particular issue, but I retain very little of what I do, to the extent that I don’t remember the circumstances that led me to write the notes I rely on to solve many recurrent problems; I’m quite sure that life-long depression is linked to memory loss). Anyway, I was waiting for the elevator when someone asks me, loudly, “what’s the matter, Jon?” from nearly the other end of that long hospital hallway. It was our secretary, whom I suspect had been standing there for a while looking at me as these nasty humans do, waiting for the other person to notice them and acknowledge their existence.
I have no idea what I was doing at that moment that prompted the look of concern in that woman, but I had believed myself to be isolated from anyone who knows me, so I had dropped my hypervigilance. My body may have been busy with the stuff it does when I lose focus: idling in circles like the autistic spaz that I am, grimacing and rubbing my face to dispel whatever flashback to a past trauma with which my brain assailed me, or who knows what else. Although I was wearing a mask (I’m forced to breathe in my CO2 throughout most of the workday), I must have looked troubled (or troubling) enough, given that the secretary went out of her way to voice her concern.
Anyway, I dismissed her nosiness with some measured response, then I got on the elevator. When I returned to the office fifteen or so minutes later, she eyed me as if she intended to bring it up, but I ignored her and walked past. Thankfully she must have gotten the right idea, because this morning she greeted me normally.
Sometimes I feel some coworker’s gaze on me, and I can tell that they are expecting me to look up and acknowledge them, usually to hear them say “what’s up” or make some pointless comment. I guess that most human beings want others to pay attention to them even just to find some semblance of moral support to whatever minor issue they are dealing with (am I doing that now, although I feel like I’m just writing to order my thoughts?), or just because they are bored. However, whenever anyone demands my attention through insistent staring, I’m tempted to snap at them, ask them what the fuck do they want, and tell them to leave me alone. I’m the kind of person that in some previous century would have been employed at an isolated lighthouse (hopefully one unrelated to Robert Eggers), where I’d do little else than daydream, masturbate and go insane. I really can’t handle people. I’m only willing to interact with them in a controlled environment (online messages, mostly), but being physically in their presence makes my skin crawl and forces me into a state of constant alertness and anxiety.
In summary, I’m not doing good at the moment. I want to go to sleep for a long, long time.
I’m someone whose instincts and particular neurological configuration require him to spend as much time as possible alone in a quiet room, but I have to wake up at six in the morning, plough through my ruined town to the train station, sit among dozens of commuters, then take a bus and stand among dozens of commuters so I can reach the hospital complex where I work at. Usually by the time I get to the office I’m already overwhelmed. I don’t drive (can’t drive, actually), so I have no choice but to take the public transport.
I usually read on the train, but for two days I had given up on doing so, and instead I closed my eyes and listened through my earbuds to a MP3 (ripped from YouTube) of a torrential storm while I tried to lose myself in daydreams. It didn’t help that recently I had been struggling to get through a collection of stories by David Foster Wallace, that involved sifting through innumerable details and getting little enjoyment, but I didn’t feel like reading anything else either.
This week started with me suffering another migraine; at about nine in the morning on Monday I experienced the common symptom of losing sight in my left eye and becoming increasingly unable to understand whatever I needed to read for my job. Thankfully I always carry some ibuprofen with me, but I still struggled through the visual disturbance (a floating multicolored rod in the left side of my vision) for half an hour, and the resulting headache lasted a couple of days as a throbbing discomfort in the right side of my brain. Whenever I endure a migraine, afterwards I get the feeling that I’ve become a bit dumber. Apparently migraines can also “increase the risk of stroke, coronary events, and other related death by roughly 50%”, so that’s some wonderful stuff to look forward to.
I didn’t want to give up on the current scene of my novel for a fourth day, but yesterday I only managed to progress three or four sentences. However, I struggled so much to put them together that I considered the effort a success, so I gave myself a break and moved on to play another scenario of my ongoing Arkham Horror campaign. I had only finished setting up all the moving pieces and drawing the initial hand for my lead investigator when I felt like I was facing the prospect of clambering up a mountain slope. I wasn’t feeling any enthusiasm, let alone joy. I suddenly understood the whole picture of my recent symptoms (persistent brain fog, increased difficulty interacting with people even to the restrained level that I force myself to, lethargy that made me feel like I was dragging my body around, crushing exhaustion, constant irritability, a dull ache in my chest, ghost-like cold flashes): I must be depressed.
These periods, whenever they get serious, may last a few weeks during which I can do little else than sit tight in my head and get used to the dark. Back when I was blissfully unemployed, I could have just hidden under a blanket and tried to convince myself that I had successfully disappeared from reality, but today I had no choice but to wake up before sunrise and try to prepare myself mentally to endure through another meaningless workday.
Yesterday, at about half past one in the afternoon, I had donned my lab coat and headed to solve someone’s problem (I can’t recall what was that particular issue, but I retain very little of what I do, to the extent that I don’t remember the circumstances that led me to write the notes I rely on to solve many recurrent problems; I’m quite sure that life-long depression is linked to memory loss). Anyway, I was waiting for the elevator when someone asks me, loudly, “what’s the matter, Jon?” from nearly the other end of that long hospital hallway. It was our secretary, whom I suspect had been standing there for a while looking at me as these nasty humans do, waiting for the other person to notice them and acknowledge their existence.
I have no idea what I was doing at that moment that prompted the look of concern in that woman, but I had believed myself to be isolated from anyone who knows me, so I had dropped my hypervigilance. My body may have been busy with the stuff it does when I lose focus: idling in circles like the autistic spaz that I am, grimacing and rubbing my face to dispel whatever flashback to a past trauma with which my brain assailed me, or who knows what else. Although I was wearing a mask (I’m forced to breathe in my CO2 throughout most of the workday), I must have looked troubled (or troubling) enough, given that the secretary went out of her way to voice her concern.
Anyway, I dismissed her nosiness with some measured response, then I got on the elevator. When I returned to the office fifteen or so minutes later, she eyed me as if she intended to bring it up, but I ignored her and walked past. Thankfully she must have gotten the right idea, because this morning she greeted me normally.
Sometimes I feel some coworker’s gaze on me, and I can tell that they are expecting me to look up and acknowledge them, usually to hear them say “what’s up” or make some pointless comment. I guess that most human beings want others to pay attention to them even just to find some semblance of moral support to whatever minor issue they are dealing with (am I doing that now, although I feel like I’m just writing to order my thoughts?), or just because they are bored. However, whenever anyone demands my attention through insistent staring, I’m tempted to snap at them, ask them what the fuck do they want, and tell them to leave me alone. I’m the kind of person that in some previous century would have been employed at an isolated lighthouse (hopefully one unrelated to Robert Eggers), where I’d do little else than daydream, masturbate and go insane. I really can’t handle people. I’m only willing to interact with them in a controlled environment (online messages, mostly), but being physically in their presence makes my skin crawl and forces me into a state of constant alertness and anxiety.
In summary, I’m not doing good at the moment. I want to go to sleep for a long, long time.
May 28, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 54 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The cerulean sky, bedecked with the indigo silhouettes of amorphous clouds, has been ripped open as the October sun falls, aching to incinerate me into ashes along with this whole planet. My chest has constricted, and an itchy sensation keeps crawling between my shoulder blades like a centipede.
I'm hunched over and tapping my feet anxiously when I realize that Jacqueline is returning through the corridor between the tables. The leafy canopies of the palm trees are sliding their shadows over my girlfriend's luscious body like some greasy pervert on a crowded train. When our gazes meet, her mouth stretches in a smile, bending the pink bow of her upper lip. Her eyes shine like a riverbed of sapphires.
My heartbeat kicks up. I leap to my feet, then I walk to intercept Jacqueline.
"Gotta empty your bladder?" she asks.
"That's right, I'm going to the bathroom."
I rest my hands on her shoulders, I stand on my tiptoes and I press my lips against her cheek. Jacqueline chuckles and draws her head back, confounded by my sudden warmth.
"Oh? Have I taken that long?"
I swallow the lump in my throat.
"Thirty years," I say in a quavering voice. "Thirty years of suffocating in this suit of bones and blood. But thank you for being so nice to me."
She cups the back of my head and kisses my forehead.
"I'm not done yet, idiot. Go to relieve yourself, will you? You'll feel better."
I nod, then pull away from her towards the watermelon-pink building of the pub, but I've just passed by two occupied tables when I look over my shoulder. Jacqueline has retrieved the purse with which she claimed a chair, and she's sitting down gracefully.
When I turn my head forward, I'm forced to sidestep two dickheads wearing pit-stained T-shirts and shorts that parade their hairy, masculine legs and their cloven-hoofed feet. Their stench reminds me of the flatulences my grandfather spewed out as he sat on the toilet seat, even before I helped him unbutton his trousers and pull down his underpants. The tennis players have slung their bags over the shoulder; they must have bought them too small on purpose so the racket handle would stick out. Surely they noticed that I was distracted, so they intended to march their way through me.
I shudder, then quicken my pace. The itching between my shoulder blades has spread to the back of my neck; my skin crawls as I imagine the human vermin skulking behind me. Their calloused hands will rove over me, creeping up my armpits and thighs. I'd love to close my eyes to shut the world out and grope my way to the bathroom, but I have to keep an eye out in case some barbarous child sets itself on a collision course with my legs.
I pass between the counterfeit Greek-style columns that guard the front door, and I find myself in a dim room. The recessed lights mounted above the bar counter, as well as few globe lamps, light up the varnish of the rosewood tables. Long-dead tennis players from the beginning of the Age of Modernity have been captured in faded, black-and-white photographs. Regarding a row of flags mounted on the wall, their colors have waned as if they were medieval paintings displayed in a cathedral. The air smells of beer and wine, and of Spanish omelette and crab meat from the small portions on sale behind a sneeze guard.
I approach the bar counter. The two men working behind it are middle-aged, grey-haired and broad-shouldered, their iron-colored shirts smooth and ironed. I flag down the closest bartender, who takes his time chuckling at whatever comment the other dude made. He places his hands on the counter and locks my gaze.
"What can I get'cha, miss?"
"Bang," I say.
The bartender draws his head back and blinks twice. His lips twist in a smile.
"That a shot? Sounds like one helluva hangover cure. I don't think we serve it, though."
He shuts up, likely because my eyes have gone wide and the color has drained from my face. My tongue swells inside my mouth like a fat slug. I swallow a gulp of saliva to quell my sudden nausea.
"You don't have bang?" I ask in a rough voice. "I was looking forward to it. Bloody brilliant drink."
The bartender knits his brows in suspicion.
"Would you like a beer instead?"
"You know I'm a non-drinker."
"I know nothing of the sort, miss."
I catch him staring at my crotch through the bar counter, so I quickly cross my legs.
"W-well, can you point me in the direction of the nearest bathroom?"
The bartender leans in and lowers his voice.
"You're looking a tad unwell, like you should go to a hospital."
I straighten my back and furrow my brow.
"How dare you? This is my regular look. Besides, it's nothing that peeing won't fix."
The bartender crosses his arms over his chest, then he stares me up and down.
"You're gonna pee to make that green look disappear from your face?"
My heartbeat hammers at the base of my throat. Why does every random human I come across have to make my life more difficult?
"I'm sure you guys don't have bang because you've stocked that stockroom of yours full of crystal meth," I say in a dry voice. "So how about you point me towards the nearest bathroom, you insensitive prick, before I call in an anonymous tip to the authorities?"
The bartender glances at his buddy, then he chuckles as if he was the victim of a dumb joke. He points somewhere behind my left shoulder.
"Right around the corner. Can't miss it."
I sigh.
"Sorry for insulting you, but pricks piss me off."
Both men laugh.
"Aren't you special?" the bartender asks rhetorically. "Don't forget to wash your hands, miss."
I spin around and tramp my way towards the toilets. My head keeps spinning, my body withering. When I turn the corner, I come across a row of decrepit, wooden lockers that show, through a wire mesh fit for a chicken coop, the caveman's version of a tennis racket. The bathrooms are identified with framed, drawn depictions of a member of each gender; the woman is brushing her black mane with her fingers while she flaunts her naked, rotund backside.
I go into the ladies' room and lock the door behind me. I flick on the light to dazzle the dark, but the claustrophobic space feels suffocatingly full of blood and vomit. A taste of copper lingers in my mouth; I turn on the tap and take long gulps of chilly water.
When I straighten my spine, I dare to face the tarnished mirror, which is streaked by tiny cracks that form a fine web like a spider's. My hair is a mess of brown snakes. The wrinkles on my forehead have deepened into crevasses. My eyes are bottomless pits except for their whites, that have become two pieces of blood-spattered glass swirling around in a soup made of stagnant water and bits of rotting vegetation. A sickly hue stains the skin beneath my eyes, and I can discern the capillaries that crawl under the surface. The bones of my cheeks are protruding like those of a months-dead corpse dug up by a necrophile. I'm as fragile as a brittle-boned baby bird fallen from its nest, who waits for someone to step on it carelessly.
What did I expect to see when I opened that pair of face holes? A comforting vision of myself as an innocent baby? No matter how I imagine the person in the mirror, she will always remain a stranger. All I've achieved in my thirty years of living is a form of self-exsanguination.
A flurry of sparks runs through my brain. I plop down on the toilet seat and rub my face.
Spike, whose equine existence had become a permanent vacation as far as I can tell, decided that I was responsible for his despair; when I proved myself impervious to his charms and tricks, the horse demon, devastated, chose to kill himself. I've had enough of men of any species believing that they have the right to manipulate me.
I'm a thirty-year-old female programmer. My first instinct is to shrug off the notion. I want to be something else: a horse, or a wolf, or a basilisk. I want to be an alien, to have my own spaceship with which to land on pristine worlds so I can terraform them to suit my tastes. Spike had wanted to be an angel, and thus he seduced me with the promise of eternal peace, but I'm a human. I'm meant to suffer for eternity.
My hands are trembling. I slip my right one under my jacket, reaching into the interior pocket where I've felt a conspicuous weight pulling down throughout the whole date. I draw the revolver out. Its shiny, metallic frame feels heavy and warm against my sweaty palms, solid like an erect penis encrusted with steel. With my fingertips, I trace the contour of the engraved skull and bones. I open the cylinder; its chambers are loaded with lead. I push the cylinder closed.
My whole skin is sweating like an armpit. I get the urge again, a mental command, to shove the barrel of the revolver in my mouth and pull the trigger. Dying would solve every problem I've ever had, along with the thousands of problems I can only anticipate in horror. I'm going to save myself from the consequences of my abysmal luck, my rotten genes, and my own actions, by walking out of this dream.
I close my eyes and I rerun the simulation: the muzzle of the revolver presses into my palate and the trigger resists against my finger as I squeeze it first slowly, then all at once. A deafening blast shakes the toilet room. The force of the explosion sends bits of porcelain flying, and propels me against the ceiling. I fall, landing face first on the floor with my neck twisted. A black, sticky substance spills from my mouth, and my lips are dusted with gunpowder residue, but I'm wearing my sexiest smile; I've succeeded in blowing my worthless head off.
I scratch the edge of the revolver's muzzle with the bitten nail of my thumb. I should shoot myself now. I won't have to see what face Jacqueline makes when they find my corpse. She won't love someone like me. Nobody could.
A fresh wave of nausea takes hold of my innards. No, I don't want to put Jacqueline through such grief. And if I die, I'll never see her again. I won't feel her skin against mine, nor hear her heart beating within her chest.
I slide down the toilet seat until my knees hit the floor. I slump forward. The revolver slips out of my hand as my face lands on the cold ceramic tiles, which are moist as if someone had splashed water from the sink, or pissed on the floor. My chest hurts; I have a splinter lodged in my heart.
If Jacqueline likes me, if my company improves her day, I guess I can keep on hanging on.
I haul myself to my feet, but my back spasms and I eject a mouthful of bile. After I wipe my mess up, I grab the revolver and shove it under my jacket. I wash my hands and my face thoroughly with cold water.
If I could, I would have walked out of the pub's main building with my hands over my ears and a hood pulled over my head. I feel like I'm walking for the first time after I've spent a week lying in a hospital bed.
I'm dragging my gaze along the floor of the terrace; the voices coming from the occupied tables that I leave behind judge and mock me. When I dare to look up, Jacqueline is leaning back against her chair. She has entwined her fingers behind her head and she's staring sideways at me. My mommy would have thrived as a fifties pin-up model. That raven-black mane of hers looks dark and mysterious like a bat orgy at midnight.
When I reach the chair I chose for myself, I fear that my flesh will pass through any solid material, so I lower my ass carefully. My head hurts as though a couple of crows have built a nest inside my skull. I guess I can't subject myself to the prospect of annihilation without earning a headache.
"You're always so pale," Jacqueline says.
When her warm hand strokes my cheek, I restrain myself from bawling like a child. It takes me a few seconds to compose myself.
"I'm a glassy-eyed, naked baby bird whose wings are still wet," I say in a thin, squeaky voice. "I'm a fatigued soldier whose tank was knocked out in the war. I'm a rusty key for a long-decommissioned lock, waiting for its owner to retrieve it from a chain that has been thrown in the ocean."
Jacqueline chuckles as a courtesy, but I've learned to recognize whenever she grows concerned about me.
"You are the strangest person I've ever met. But what has been troubling you today, Leire? I can tell you are dying to open up about it."
I avert my gaze, then I lean forward to rest my arms on the table, but it wobbles. I adjust my elbows to even out the motion.
"Leire," Jacqueline says in a tone that harkens me back to the times I've lain sideways on her lap and latched on to her breast. "Look at me, baby."
I shake my head weakly.
"I couldn't bear the sight of your splendorous face right now."
"Well, that's nice of you to say. But surely you know that you can tell me anything, right?"
Although if someone were to prick my skin with a needle I would implode, I hoist my gaze to Jacqueline's lips.
"H-half of it is the usual business. I'm being controlled by a stranger, someone who doesn't care for my comfort or consent. A person who despises me for having been born."
"That's horrible enough, Leire. What about the other half?"
As I struggle to gather my thoughts, an electrical discharge shakes my brain. I shut my eyes closed and suck air through my teeth.
Jacqueline squeezes my right hand, that I had rested on the table.
"Baby, people don't get zapping in the brain for no reason," she says, worried. "Maybe you should call for an appointment with a neurologist."
I lean back in the chair and open my mouth to speak, but a man's cheery voice violates our privacy.
"Coffee and spicy potatoes, coming up."
Our waiter is a South American guy with coffee-colored skin, who's wearing tiny hoop earrings and that has ruined his hair with frosted tips. More importantly, he's striding towards us while holding a tray with two lattes and a plate of steaming, spicy potatoes.
I sit upright.
"Ah yes, we came here to eat..."
As the waiter sets the two cups of latte and the spicy potatoes on our table, he dares to speak to us.
"How are you two doing this evening?" he asks in a too-friendly tone, as if we chose this establishment to have sex in front of him and his fellow staff members.
"Very well, thank you," Jacqueline says.
"Is it okay if I call you Gerard?" I ask him.
The waiter tilts his head, then his cheeks dimple as he smiles.
"Gerard is fine. My name's actually César, though."
"Are you a time traveler from the nineties?"
Jacqueline lets out a noise of surprise. She taps my right shoulder with the back of her hand.
"Leire, don't be a dick for no reason."
"But that was an honest question."
The waiter seems more amused than disturbed.
"I was born in ninety-three, back in Brazil."
"Like anacondas and Brazilians."
He chuckles.
"That is true. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your food, ladies."
Gerard saunters away from us like we're no longer worthy of his time.
The mound of fried, roughly cubical potatoes is sprinkled with gunpowder, and covered in a cum-colored alioli sauce. Its aroma invades my nostrils and delivers a tangy, spicy kick to my brains. My mouth fills with saliva, so I hurry to close it in case I start drooling.
Jacqueline pours sugar onto her latte, then she stirs it until the powder dissolves. She's smiling warmly at me like a parent at Christmas.
I grab one of the forks. Instead of stabbing myself in the neck again, I impale one of the potatoes and I bring it to the cavernous hole in my face. As I taste the hot, spiced potato and the oily, garlic-based sauce, I feel like I'm going to tear up, so I close my eyes.
"They look so small," I mumble with my mouth full, "but they're so fucking heavy."
My limbs loosen up, and I sink into my chair.
"That's the stuff, isn't it?" Jacqueline asks softly. "Despite our worries and pains, we can look forward to tasty delights, and in our case, we can also care for each other."
---
Author's note: This week I've been listening to one of my favorite albums from fifteen or so years ago (most of my favorite albums are from at least a decade ago, because I've grown old): The Unicorns' 'Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?', particularly the ghost-themed songs 'Tuff Ghost' and 'Sea Ghost'. They were also favorites of Irene, the protagonist of my previous novel. Self-promotion!
Anyway, I've had a hard time getting through this scene. I thought that by working in the afternoon this week, I would wake up early and write for a few hours until I was forced to abandon my post to waste my time and energies at the office. But my brain has been a muddled mess recently.
I've decided to hyphenate what I call color qualifiers like 'watermelon-pink' from now on. I use that stuff a lot, and I refused to hyphenate it because it didn't look good to me, but it looks better to me now, so that's what I will do. I will revise all the other instances whenever I finish this novel.
How come Leire, one of the most dangerous people in the world to own a revolver, suddenly has one? If you don't know already (why are you reading this?), you should likely read through the entirety of the previous sequence, that started back at chapter 43. It actually happens right at the end, but just read through the entirety of it, will you?
Yesterday, a Friday, I returned home from work at eleven. I fell asleep like a couple of hours later, and woke up at six in the morning for my solitary shift on a Saturday. Thankfully, for a few hours my desk looked like this:
I've gotten back to the 'Arkham Horror' LCG, probably my favorite "board game" ever. I played through the first scenario of the 'Edge of the Earth' campaign, with the decks I made for Zoey Samaras (a vicious damage dealer who gets rewards for engaging enemies), Monterey Jack (who mostly travels around doing his stuff), and Jacqueline Fine. Of course, I have no choice but to play with an investigator named Jacqueline, but apart from that, her ability to manipulate the Chaos Bag tokens is very powerful. The links go to each of my public decks at ArkhamDB. I prefer to build thematic decks that mainly focus on the one or two things that an investigator does that nobody else can; however, that requires a good team. My Zoey got screwed bad in Agility-based treachery cards because she doesn't have a single related skill card.
Anyway, I wrote about this board/card game because it keeps me entertained and distracted from the shittiness of the rest of the world, in a similar way that writing does. I feel like crap otherwise.
---
The cerulean sky, bedecked with the indigo silhouettes of amorphous clouds, has been ripped open as the October sun falls, aching to incinerate me into ashes along with this whole planet. My chest has constricted, and an itchy sensation keeps crawling between my shoulder blades like a centipede.
I'm hunched over and tapping my feet anxiously when I realize that Jacqueline is returning through the corridor between the tables. The leafy canopies of the palm trees are sliding their shadows over my girlfriend's luscious body like some greasy pervert on a crowded train. When our gazes meet, her mouth stretches in a smile, bending the pink bow of her upper lip. Her eyes shine like a riverbed of sapphires.
My heartbeat kicks up. I leap to my feet, then I walk to intercept Jacqueline.
"Gotta empty your bladder?" she asks.
"That's right, I'm going to the bathroom."
I rest my hands on her shoulders, I stand on my tiptoes and I press my lips against her cheek. Jacqueline chuckles and draws her head back, confounded by my sudden warmth.
"Oh? Have I taken that long?"
I swallow the lump in my throat.
"Thirty years," I say in a quavering voice. "Thirty years of suffocating in this suit of bones and blood. But thank you for being so nice to me."
She cups the back of my head and kisses my forehead.
"I'm not done yet, idiot. Go to relieve yourself, will you? You'll feel better."
I nod, then pull away from her towards the watermelon-pink building of the pub, but I've just passed by two occupied tables when I look over my shoulder. Jacqueline has retrieved the purse with which she claimed a chair, and she's sitting down gracefully.
When I turn my head forward, I'm forced to sidestep two dickheads wearing pit-stained T-shirts and shorts that parade their hairy, masculine legs and their cloven-hoofed feet. Their stench reminds me of the flatulences my grandfather spewed out as he sat on the toilet seat, even before I helped him unbutton his trousers and pull down his underpants. The tennis players have slung their bags over the shoulder; they must have bought them too small on purpose so the racket handle would stick out. Surely they noticed that I was distracted, so they intended to march their way through me.
I shudder, then quicken my pace. The itching between my shoulder blades has spread to the back of my neck; my skin crawls as I imagine the human vermin skulking behind me. Their calloused hands will rove over me, creeping up my armpits and thighs. I'd love to close my eyes to shut the world out and grope my way to the bathroom, but I have to keep an eye out in case some barbarous child sets itself on a collision course with my legs.
I pass between the counterfeit Greek-style columns that guard the front door, and I find myself in a dim room. The recessed lights mounted above the bar counter, as well as few globe lamps, light up the varnish of the rosewood tables. Long-dead tennis players from the beginning of the Age of Modernity have been captured in faded, black-and-white photographs. Regarding a row of flags mounted on the wall, their colors have waned as if they were medieval paintings displayed in a cathedral. The air smells of beer and wine, and of Spanish omelette and crab meat from the small portions on sale behind a sneeze guard.
I approach the bar counter. The two men working behind it are middle-aged, grey-haired and broad-shouldered, their iron-colored shirts smooth and ironed. I flag down the closest bartender, who takes his time chuckling at whatever comment the other dude made. He places his hands on the counter and locks my gaze.
"What can I get'cha, miss?"
"Bang," I say.
The bartender draws his head back and blinks twice. His lips twist in a smile.
"That a shot? Sounds like one helluva hangover cure. I don't think we serve it, though."
He shuts up, likely because my eyes have gone wide and the color has drained from my face. My tongue swells inside my mouth like a fat slug. I swallow a gulp of saliva to quell my sudden nausea.
"You don't have bang?" I ask in a rough voice. "I was looking forward to it. Bloody brilliant drink."
The bartender knits his brows in suspicion.
"Would you like a beer instead?"
"You know I'm a non-drinker."
"I know nothing of the sort, miss."
I catch him staring at my crotch through the bar counter, so I quickly cross my legs.
"W-well, can you point me in the direction of the nearest bathroom?"
The bartender leans in and lowers his voice.
"You're looking a tad unwell, like you should go to a hospital."
I straighten my back and furrow my brow.
"How dare you? This is my regular look. Besides, it's nothing that peeing won't fix."
The bartender crosses his arms over his chest, then he stares me up and down.
"You're gonna pee to make that green look disappear from your face?"
My heartbeat hammers at the base of my throat. Why does every random human I come across have to make my life more difficult?
"I'm sure you guys don't have bang because you've stocked that stockroom of yours full of crystal meth," I say in a dry voice. "So how about you point me towards the nearest bathroom, you insensitive prick, before I call in an anonymous tip to the authorities?"
The bartender glances at his buddy, then he chuckles as if he was the victim of a dumb joke. He points somewhere behind my left shoulder.
"Right around the corner. Can't miss it."
I sigh.
"Sorry for insulting you, but pricks piss me off."
Both men laugh.
"Aren't you special?" the bartender asks rhetorically. "Don't forget to wash your hands, miss."
I spin around and tramp my way towards the toilets. My head keeps spinning, my body withering. When I turn the corner, I come across a row of decrepit, wooden lockers that show, through a wire mesh fit for a chicken coop, the caveman's version of a tennis racket. The bathrooms are identified with framed, drawn depictions of a member of each gender; the woman is brushing her black mane with her fingers while she flaunts her naked, rotund backside.
I go into the ladies' room and lock the door behind me. I flick on the light to dazzle the dark, but the claustrophobic space feels suffocatingly full of blood and vomit. A taste of copper lingers in my mouth; I turn on the tap and take long gulps of chilly water.
When I straighten my spine, I dare to face the tarnished mirror, which is streaked by tiny cracks that form a fine web like a spider's. My hair is a mess of brown snakes. The wrinkles on my forehead have deepened into crevasses. My eyes are bottomless pits except for their whites, that have become two pieces of blood-spattered glass swirling around in a soup made of stagnant water and bits of rotting vegetation. A sickly hue stains the skin beneath my eyes, and I can discern the capillaries that crawl under the surface. The bones of my cheeks are protruding like those of a months-dead corpse dug up by a necrophile. I'm as fragile as a brittle-boned baby bird fallen from its nest, who waits for someone to step on it carelessly.
What did I expect to see when I opened that pair of face holes? A comforting vision of myself as an innocent baby? No matter how I imagine the person in the mirror, she will always remain a stranger. All I've achieved in my thirty years of living is a form of self-exsanguination.
A flurry of sparks runs through my brain. I plop down on the toilet seat and rub my face.
Spike, whose equine existence had become a permanent vacation as far as I can tell, decided that I was responsible for his despair; when I proved myself impervious to his charms and tricks, the horse demon, devastated, chose to kill himself. I've had enough of men of any species believing that they have the right to manipulate me.
I'm a thirty-year-old female programmer. My first instinct is to shrug off the notion. I want to be something else: a horse, or a wolf, or a basilisk. I want to be an alien, to have my own spaceship with which to land on pristine worlds so I can terraform them to suit my tastes. Spike had wanted to be an angel, and thus he seduced me with the promise of eternal peace, but I'm a human. I'm meant to suffer for eternity.
My hands are trembling. I slip my right one under my jacket, reaching into the interior pocket where I've felt a conspicuous weight pulling down throughout the whole date. I draw the revolver out. Its shiny, metallic frame feels heavy and warm against my sweaty palms, solid like an erect penis encrusted with steel. With my fingertips, I trace the contour of the engraved skull and bones. I open the cylinder; its chambers are loaded with lead. I push the cylinder closed.
My whole skin is sweating like an armpit. I get the urge again, a mental command, to shove the barrel of the revolver in my mouth and pull the trigger. Dying would solve every problem I've ever had, along with the thousands of problems I can only anticipate in horror. I'm going to save myself from the consequences of my abysmal luck, my rotten genes, and my own actions, by walking out of this dream.
I close my eyes and I rerun the simulation: the muzzle of the revolver presses into my palate and the trigger resists against my finger as I squeeze it first slowly, then all at once. A deafening blast shakes the toilet room. The force of the explosion sends bits of porcelain flying, and propels me against the ceiling. I fall, landing face first on the floor with my neck twisted. A black, sticky substance spills from my mouth, and my lips are dusted with gunpowder residue, but I'm wearing my sexiest smile; I've succeeded in blowing my worthless head off.
I scratch the edge of the revolver's muzzle with the bitten nail of my thumb. I should shoot myself now. I won't have to see what face Jacqueline makes when they find my corpse. She won't love someone like me. Nobody could.
A fresh wave of nausea takes hold of my innards. No, I don't want to put Jacqueline through such grief. And if I die, I'll never see her again. I won't feel her skin against mine, nor hear her heart beating within her chest.
I slide down the toilet seat until my knees hit the floor. I slump forward. The revolver slips out of my hand as my face lands on the cold ceramic tiles, which are moist as if someone had splashed water from the sink, or pissed on the floor. My chest hurts; I have a splinter lodged in my heart.
If Jacqueline likes me, if my company improves her day, I guess I can keep on hanging on.
I haul myself to my feet, but my back spasms and I eject a mouthful of bile. After I wipe my mess up, I grab the revolver and shove it under my jacket. I wash my hands and my face thoroughly with cold water.
If I could, I would have walked out of the pub's main building with my hands over my ears and a hood pulled over my head. I feel like I'm walking for the first time after I've spent a week lying in a hospital bed.
I'm dragging my gaze along the floor of the terrace; the voices coming from the occupied tables that I leave behind judge and mock me. When I dare to look up, Jacqueline is leaning back against her chair. She has entwined her fingers behind her head and she's staring sideways at me. My mommy would have thrived as a fifties pin-up model. That raven-black mane of hers looks dark and mysterious like a bat orgy at midnight.
When I reach the chair I chose for myself, I fear that my flesh will pass through any solid material, so I lower my ass carefully. My head hurts as though a couple of crows have built a nest inside my skull. I guess I can't subject myself to the prospect of annihilation without earning a headache.
"You're always so pale," Jacqueline says.
When her warm hand strokes my cheek, I restrain myself from bawling like a child. It takes me a few seconds to compose myself.
"I'm a glassy-eyed, naked baby bird whose wings are still wet," I say in a thin, squeaky voice. "I'm a fatigued soldier whose tank was knocked out in the war. I'm a rusty key for a long-decommissioned lock, waiting for its owner to retrieve it from a chain that has been thrown in the ocean."
Jacqueline chuckles as a courtesy, but I've learned to recognize whenever she grows concerned about me.
"You are the strangest person I've ever met. But what has been troubling you today, Leire? I can tell you are dying to open up about it."
I avert my gaze, then I lean forward to rest my arms on the table, but it wobbles. I adjust my elbows to even out the motion.
"Leire," Jacqueline says in a tone that harkens me back to the times I've lain sideways on her lap and latched on to her breast. "Look at me, baby."
I shake my head weakly.
"I couldn't bear the sight of your splendorous face right now."
"Well, that's nice of you to say. But surely you know that you can tell me anything, right?"
Although if someone were to prick my skin with a needle I would implode, I hoist my gaze to Jacqueline's lips.
"H-half of it is the usual business. I'm being controlled by a stranger, someone who doesn't care for my comfort or consent. A person who despises me for having been born."
"That's horrible enough, Leire. What about the other half?"
As I struggle to gather my thoughts, an electrical discharge shakes my brain. I shut my eyes closed and suck air through my teeth.
Jacqueline squeezes my right hand, that I had rested on the table.
"Baby, people don't get zapping in the brain for no reason," she says, worried. "Maybe you should call for an appointment with a neurologist."
I lean back in the chair and open my mouth to speak, but a man's cheery voice violates our privacy.
"Coffee and spicy potatoes, coming up."
Our waiter is a South American guy with coffee-colored skin, who's wearing tiny hoop earrings and that has ruined his hair with frosted tips. More importantly, he's striding towards us while holding a tray with two lattes and a plate of steaming, spicy potatoes.
I sit upright.
"Ah yes, we came here to eat..."
As the waiter sets the two cups of latte and the spicy potatoes on our table, he dares to speak to us.
"How are you two doing this evening?" he asks in a too-friendly tone, as if we chose this establishment to have sex in front of him and his fellow staff members.
"Very well, thank you," Jacqueline says.
"Is it okay if I call you Gerard?" I ask him.
The waiter tilts his head, then his cheeks dimple as he smiles.
"Gerard is fine. My name's actually César, though."
"Are you a time traveler from the nineties?"
Jacqueline lets out a noise of surprise. She taps my right shoulder with the back of her hand.
"Leire, don't be a dick for no reason."
"But that was an honest question."
The waiter seems more amused than disturbed.
"I was born in ninety-three, back in Brazil."
"Like anacondas and Brazilians."
He chuckles.
"That is true. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your food, ladies."
Gerard saunters away from us like we're no longer worthy of his time.
The mound of fried, roughly cubical potatoes is sprinkled with gunpowder, and covered in a cum-colored alioli sauce. Its aroma invades my nostrils and delivers a tangy, spicy kick to my brains. My mouth fills with saliva, so I hurry to close it in case I start drooling.
Jacqueline pours sugar onto her latte, then she stirs it until the powder dissolves. She's smiling warmly at me like a parent at Christmas.
I grab one of the forks. Instead of stabbing myself in the neck again, I impale one of the potatoes and I bring it to the cavernous hole in my face. As I taste the hot, spiced potato and the oily, garlic-based sauce, I feel like I'm going to tear up, so I close my eyes.
"They look so small," I mumble with my mouth full, "but they're so fucking heavy."
My limbs loosen up, and I sink into my chair.
"That's the stuff, isn't it?" Jacqueline asks softly. "Despite our worries and pains, we can look forward to tasty delights, and in our case, we can also care for each other."
---
Author's note: This week I've been listening to one of my favorite albums from fifteen or so years ago (most of my favorite albums are from at least a decade ago, because I've grown old): The Unicorns' 'Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?', particularly the ghost-themed songs 'Tuff Ghost' and 'Sea Ghost'. They were also favorites of Irene, the protagonist of my previous novel. Self-promotion!
Anyway, I've had a hard time getting through this scene. I thought that by working in the afternoon this week, I would wake up early and write for a few hours until I was forced to abandon my post to waste my time and energies at the office. But my brain has been a muddled mess recently.
I've decided to hyphenate what I call color qualifiers like 'watermelon-pink' from now on. I use that stuff a lot, and I refused to hyphenate it because it didn't look good to me, but it looks better to me now, so that's what I will do. I will revise all the other instances whenever I finish this novel.
How come Leire, one of the most dangerous people in the world to own a revolver, suddenly has one? If you don't know already (why are you reading this?), you should likely read through the entirety of the previous sequence, that started back at chapter 43. It actually happens right at the end, but just read through the entirety of it, will you?
Yesterday, a Friday, I returned home from work at eleven. I fell asleep like a couple of hours later, and woke up at six in the morning for my solitary shift on a Saturday. Thankfully, for a few hours my desk looked like this:
I've gotten back to the 'Arkham Horror' LCG, probably my favorite "board game" ever. I played through the first scenario of the 'Edge of the Earth' campaign, with the decks I made for Zoey Samaras (a vicious damage dealer who gets rewards for engaging enemies), Monterey Jack (who mostly travels around doing his stuff), and Jacqueline Fine. Of course, I have no choice but to play with an investigator named Jacqueline, but apart from that, her ability to manipulate the Chaos Bag tokens is very powerful. The links go to each of my public decks at ArkhamDB. I prefer to build thematic decks that mainly focus on the one or two things that an investigator does that nobody else can; however, that requires a good team. My Zoey got screwed bad in Agility-based treachery cards because she doesn't have a single related skill card.
Anyway, I wrote about this board/card game because it keeps me entertained and distracted from the shittiness of the rest of the world, in a similar way that writing does. I feel like crap otherwise.
May 21, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 53 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Jacqueline and I stroll through the sand back to the promenade. I thought that we would cross the stretch of gardens, but instead she guides me along the low wall that delimits the western edge of Ondarreta beach, past the open courts of the tennis club, which are half-filled with players that intend to sweat their way through the remaining hour of sun on this October afternoon. We leave behind two teenagers on their bikes, a group of seniors walking their dogs, a mother pushing a pram. All thankfully absorbed in their own little worlds, without a second glance to spare for the couple walking past them.
Jacqueline tugs on my arm to stop me. On the opposite side of the narrow road, a canopied entryway flanked by tennis courts leads to an outdoor café, although a sign next to the entrance calls it an English pub. To the right of the overhang of palm trees that line the outdoor café, the apartment buildings built on the terraced slopes of Mount Igueldo look so close that I want to figure out how crazy rich I'd need to be to afford them.
"Have you been here before?" Jacqueline asks.
"Are you kidding me?"
She chuckles.
"But it's nice enough, right?"
"And likely expensive."
Jacqueline takes my hand and pulls me into the pub's grounds. Past the tall hedges meant to offer some privacy to the tennis players, the spread-out tables and chairs are white and plasticky; likely promotional items from some brewery. The folded parasols stick out like erect, hooded penises.
I choose a table distanced two empty ones from a family that has come to watch their kids play, judging by the flamboyant tennis bags. Our table has been placed next to a hedge, but on the opposite side of the terrace, only a chain link fence separates us from two ongoing tennis matches in which men wearing shorts are pursuing a bouncing ball to whack it severely.
I take off my backpack and put it down next to my picked chair. I roll the sore shoulder that had endured the weight all the way from my apartment. Jacqueline observes me as I exaggerate a grimace of pain.
"Are you into tennis?" she asks.
I narrow my eyes at her. My girlfriend has seen me cry during the strain of merely exercising to a YouTube video in her living room, yet she asks me if I would enjoy witnessing a more gruesome torture.
"I don't know much about tennis except that it's a sport, a horrifying fact, and that it involves two men hitting each other's balls."
Jacqueline giggles.
"It can also involve two women hitting each other's balls, or a combination of genders hitting each other's balls."
"I was unaware of such crude details of the game."
"Oh yes. Men are not the only ones who get their jollies from other people's pain and humiliation."
Spike's stupid horse face flashes in my mind, and I find myself scratching my cheek anxiously. I clear my throat.
"Well, if the sport also mixed species, I may have found it intriguing. What, does tennis get you off, Jacqueline?"
"Oh, I wish," she says, sounding wistful. "But I do love to see two people compete over something, it's fascinating. One of these days I'll drag you down here to play."
Although Jacqueline smiles, my skin prickles with unease, to which also contributed the loud thwack of a racket hitting a ball behind the hedge that separates us from another tennis court.
"I think you meant bring."
She crosses her arms and tilts her head as if she intended to look stern, but the silly grin betrays her.
"You know what I mean, don't you, sweetie? The same way I got you to sweat with me in the living room, you'll learn how to whack tennis balls."
My muscles complain in anticipation.
"A simple glimpse of you, with your graceful yet commanding presence, suggests that you were born with the tennis skill and an instinct to use it as a choice in warfare."
"I know I'm gorgeous, Leire, and you are just changing the subject."
"What I meant to add is that, in contrast, I'm lucky if I can rely on enough energy to remain coherent throughout a whole workday."
Jacqueline shrugs cruelly.
"Well, now you'll have to adapt to a life in which you play tennis all day long. But don't worry, I'll show you the sport in the most unusual ways."
A ball hits the chain link fence, making it rattle with a metallic sound.
"Once you experience such a level of second-hand embarrassment, you'll regret it," I say wearily. "In any case, please let's sit down. Gravity is torturing me more than usual."
When I plop myself down, the plasticky chair creaks. Jacqueline rests her hands on the back of the closest chair, which is facing the hedge.
One of the tennis players behind the fence shouts incoherently; sportspeople believe they have the right to annoy others in such ways. The man swerves to intercept an incoming projectile, and I imagine his sweaty penis flopping around inside his shorts. The glans must be shaped like a tennis ball.
"I don't think I'll be able to enjoy this place..." I mutter. A chill shoots up my spine, and I go wide-eyed. "W-wait a second, tennis?!"
"What sudden realization has horrified you?" Jacqueline asks patiently.
"Is this where you met...? I mean, you did date a whole lot of tennis players..."
"I've never dated a tennis player. However, I have fucked a couple of them, and yes, I met them here. One of them was trying to lose his virginity."
I sit bolt upright as if someone just offered me a cupcake.
"What does that have to do with anything?!"
Jacqueline's eyes shine with mischief.
"He wanted to have sex with me, I wanted to have sex with him, and we happened to play tennis together."
I try in vain to suppress a shudder.
"I'd rather not hear about your conquests. So why have you brought me to this restaurant in particular? To see how I'd react? To hurt me?"
"No, baby! I just like this place and it's relatively close to my apartment, plus, I didn't think you'd mind."
I lower my head and rub my temples.
"I'm in no shape to pass any type of test. I'll warn you: if those men approach us to greet you, I may implode."
"Don't worry, they wouldn't recognize me looking like this. But if we had to avoid the locations where I met my lovers, we'd barely go anywhere." I feel the blood drain from my face. Jacqueline reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently. "Oh, you know I'm joking, right?"
When I take a deep breath, my belly growls.
"You sound like a hungry bear," she says. "I'll go order two lattes and a plate of spicy potatoes."
Jacqueline takes off her purse and leaves it on the seat of the chair next to me, claiming it for herself. She struts away down the corridor between the tables and its occupants, as well as palm trees, towards a two-story building, which is painted watermelon pink, has greek-style columns guarding the front door, and features a signboard that brings attention to the word 'Wimbledon'. A toddler totters into my girlfriend's path, but Jacqueline, instead of punting the tiny creature, crouches enough to pat the toddler's head. The kid keeps waddling away until a man in his late thirties, presumably the father, hurries after her and scoops the toddler up, to the little girl's displeasure. The father glances at Jacqueline, who's walking away with a spring in her step, and my girlfriend's long legs clad in thigh-high tights must have registered in his depraved mind, because he does a double take.
At the table where that toddler originated, a pair of nine-or-ten-year-old kids are running around and taking turns hiding behind chairs from the other's murderous impulses. Meanwhile they scream and laugh, oblivious of the lives being crushed around them.
A weight is pulling down the inside pocket of my jacket, as if I had stuffed in there a block of lead. I slouch in the chair, take a deep breath of the sea breeze, and close my eyes.
My nose gets molested by the smell of salty food, hot coffee, perfume and sweat. My ears are assaulted by the hubbub of nearby conversations, the brouhaha of strung-out children, the whaps of taut nets getting abused by errant balls, the grunts of men who've just hit a projectile into someone's sternum, and the cries of their opponents as they fight for their lives.
The sound of a tennis ball smacking hard rubber reaches me muted, as if I were sinking to the bottom of a lake. A rumbling is building up under my consciousness: a herd of stampeding horses bearing down on me. Once it reaches me, my body will crumble like made of cardboard and plaster.
At the edge of hearing, someone whispers my name: the gurgly voice of a female who needs to swallow a build-up of phlegm. I sigh, then dig out my phone and hold it to my ear; nobody would consider me crazy for talking to a phantom as long as they can picture a presence talking from somewhere else on this wretched planet.
"Who's there?" I ask weakly.
"I am a caryatid," the female voice whispers.
"And what the hell is that?"
The female presence remains silent, but I feel her breathing near my nape.
"Are you a friend?" I ask.
"I am not a friend."
"A stranger, then?"
Something hits the canopy of a nearby palm tree. When I open my eyes, a tennis ball bounces on the terrace between the tables. A smiling kid runs to grab the ball, then tosses it back over the fence.
"I asked you something, intruder," I say gruffly. "Are you listening?"
"I'm always listening to you, and I answered: I am not a stranger."
A few gulls scream as they fly past. I wipe my sweaty palm on my denim trousers.
"What do you want from me? Do I have to take revenge on these tennis players? Or are you the vengeful spirit of someone I killed in a past life?"
"I am not a spirit."
An electrical zap makes my brain tremble. My eyelids twitch.
"You aren't any fun either," I say, my voice cracking. "I'll tell you what you are, though: a burden that I carry on my shoulders. And I'm sick and tired of carrying it, you're just too heavy to bear. So tell me, what can I do to get rid of you?"
The horses are galloping towards me. Their hooves are thundering, their nostrils foaming. Their eyes are hollow and hungry.
"You think that your suffering will end if you get rid of your consciousness," the caryatid whispers.
I cast my gaze down at the fossil grey tiles of the terrace. My shoulders sag, my vision blurs. I blink the sudden surge of tears away.
"Well, it would end. What else do you expect me to do?"
"You might find a cure for your malaise, but you'd miss out on experiencing the world."
I groan.
"How about showing yourself if you are going to insist on bothering me?" I complain in a croaky voice.
From behind me, a tan-colored bust creeps sideways into my field of vision. Her Hellenic face resembles a cliff. Despite the serenity of her expression, her nose has been chiseled off, her cheeks are worn like rubbed with sandpaper, her lips and chin are nicked like pecked at by crows. She's marred by downward, soot black streaks as if someone had toppled an inkwell on her head.
I roll my eyes.
"Oh, fuck off."
My backhanded swat pops the vision like a bubble.
I draw a deep breath, inhaling a cocktail of smoky smells that are getting drowned in the sea breeze, then I place my phone on the table.
As I sink in my chair and I rub the bridge of my nose, I grow paranoid: what if someone witnessed me assaulting a hallucination?
Seated near the trunk of a palm tree as wide as an Egyptian pillar, two middle-aged women, both sporting a layered bob and a chiffon scarf around the neck, nod gravely at each other's words. A woman in her early twenties beams as she hunches over to feed with a spoon the concealed baby inside a pram. A bald guy dressed like an electrician guffaws and slaps his knee while his mate slugs a pint of foamy beer. A solitary woman in her mid-forties, who's wearing a gingham dress and white sandals, pours wine in her glass. On the other side of the fence, a sweaty man twirls his racket, then he strikes a pose and swings at an incoming ball.
Why would I be surprised that otherworldly apparitions feel familiar, or at the most annoy me for invading my personal space? I've spent most of my life surrounded by incomprehensible monsters. I'm stuck in a low-budget horror movie, doomed to witness it while drooling all over myself in a state of undiluted panic.
For how long must I walk the same ground wearing this human costume, for how much time must I endure being me? Three more decades going by averages, four or five if I'm unlucky, six or seven if the universe despises me like I'm sure it does.
---
Jacqueline and I stroll through the sand back to the promenade. I thought that we would cross the stretch of gardens, but instead she guides me along the low wall that delimits the western edge of Ondarreta beach, past the open courts of the tennis club, which are half-filled with players that intend to sweat their way through the remaining hour of sun on this October afternoon. We leave behind two teenagers on their bikes, a group of seniors walking their dogs, a mother pushing a pram. All thankfully absorbed in their own little worlds, without a second glance to spare for the couple walking past them.
Jacqueline tugs on my arm to stop me. On the opposite side of the narrow road, a canopied entryway flanked by tennis courts leads to an outdoor café, although a sign next to the entrance calls it an English pub. To the right of the overhang of palm trees that line the outdoor café, the apartment buildings built on the terraced slopes of Mount Igueldo look so close that I want to figure out how crazy rich I'd need to be to afford them.
"Have you been here before?" Jacqueline asks.
"Are you kidding me?"
She chuckles.
"But it's nice enough, right?"
"And likely expensive."
Jacqueline takes my hand and pulls me into the pub's grounds. Past the tall hedges meant to offer some privacy to the tennis players, the spread-out tables and chairs are white and plasticky; likely promotional items from some brewery. The folded parasols stick out like erect, hooded penises.
I choose a table distanced two empty ones from a family that has come to watch their kids play, judging by the flamboyant tennis bags. Our table has been placed next to a hedge, but on the opposite side of the terrace, only a chain link fence separates us from two ongoing tennis matches in which men wearing shorts are pursuing a bouncing ball to whack it severely.
I take off my backpack and put it down next to my picked chair. I roll the sore shoulder that had endured the weight all the way from my apartment. Jacqueline observes me as I exaggerate a grimace of pain.
"Are you into tennis?" she asks.
I narrow my eyes at her. My girlfriend has seen me cry during the strain of merely exercising to a YouTube video in her living room, yet she asks me if I would enjoy witnessing a more gruesome torture.
"I don't know much about tennis except that it's a sport, a horrifying fact, and that it involves two men hitting each other's balls."
Jacqueline giggles.
"It can also involve two women hitting each other's balls, or a combination of genders hitting each other's balls."
"I was unaware of such crude details of the game."
"Oh yes. Men are not the only ones who get their jollies from other people's pain and humiliation."
Spike's stupid horse face flashes in my mind, and I find myself scratching my cheek anxiously. I clear my throat.
"Well, if the sport also mixed species, I may have found it intriguing. What, does tennis get you off, Jacqueline?"
"Oh, I wish," she says, sounding wistful. "But I do love to see two people compete over something, it's fascinating. One of these days I'll drag you down here to play."
Although Jacqueline smiles, my skin prickles with unease, to which also contributed the loud thwack of a racket hitting a ball behind the hedge that separates us from another tennis court.
"I think you meant bring."
She crosses her arms and tilts her head as if she intended to look stern, but the silly grin betrays her.
"You know what I mean, don't you, sweetie? The same way I got you to sweat with me in the living room, you'll learn how to whack tennis balls."
My muscles complain in anticipation.
"A simple glimpse of you, with your graceful yet commanding presence, suggests that you were born with the tennis skill and an instinct to use it as a choice in warfare."
"I know I'm gorgeous, Leire, and you are just changing the subject."
"What I meant to add is that, in contrast, I'm lucky if I can rely on enough energy to remain coherent throughout a whole workday."
Jacqueline shrugs cruelly.
"Well, now you'll have to adapt to a life in which you play tennis all day long. But don't worry, I'll show you the sport in the most unusual ways."
A ball hits the chain link fence, making it rattle with a metallic sound.
"Once you experience such a level of second-hand embarrassment, you'll regret it," I say wearily. "In any case, please let's sit down. Gravity is torturing me more than usual."
When I plop myself down, the plasticky chair creaks. Jacqueline rests her hands on the back of the closest chair, which is facing the hedge.
One of the tennis players behind the fence shouts incoherently; sportspeople believe they have the right to annoy others in such ways. The man swerves to intercept an incoming projectile, and I imagine his sweaty penis flopping around inside his shorts. The glans must be shaped like a tennis ball.
"I don't think I'll be able to enjoy this place..." I mutter. A chill shoots up my spine, and I go wide-eyed. "W-wait a second, tennis?!"
"What sudden realization has horrified you?" Jacqueline asks patiently.
"Is this where you met...? I mean, you did date a whole lot of tennis players..."
"I've never dated a tennis player. However, I have fucked a couple of them, and yes, I met them here. One of them was trying to lose his virginity."
I sit bolt upright as if someone just offered me a cupcake.
"What does that have to do with anything?!"
Jacqueline's eyes shine with mischief.
"He wanted to have sex with me, I wanted to have sex with him, and we happened to play tennis together."
I try in vain to suppress a shudder.
"I'd rather not hear about your conquests. So why have you brought me to this restaurant in particular? To see how I'd react? To hurt me?"
"No, baby! I just like this place and it's relatively close to my apartment, plus, I didn't think you'd mind."
I lower my head and rub my temples.
"I'm in no shape to pass any type of test. I'll warn you: if those men approach us to greet you, I may implode."
"Don't worry, they wouldn't recognize me looking like this. But if we had to avoid the locations where I met my lovers, we'd barely go anywhere." I feel the blood drain from my face. Jacqueline reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently. "Oh, you know I'm joking, right?"
When I take a deep breath, my belly growls.
"You sound like a hungry bear," she says. "I'll go order two lattes and a plate of spicy potatoes."
Jacqueline takes off her purse and leaves it on the seat of the chair next to me, claiming it for herself. She struts away down the corridor between the tables and its occupants, as well as palm trees, towards a two-story building, which is painted watermelon pink, has greek-style columns guarding the front door, and features a signboard that brings attention to the word 'Wimbledon'. A toddler totters into my girlfriend's path, but Jacqueline, instead of punting the tiny creature, crouches enough to pat the toddler's head. The kid keeps waddling away until a man in his late thirties, presumably the father, hurries after her and scoops the toddler up, to the little girl's displeasure. The father glances at Jacqueline, who's walking away with a spring in her step, and my girlfriend's long legs clad in thigh-high tights must have registered in his depraved mind, because he does a double take.
At the table where that toddler originated, a pair of nine-or-ten-year-old kids are running around and taking turns hiding behind chairs from the other's murderous impulses. Meanwhile they scream and laugh, oblivious of the lives being crushed around them.
A weight is pulling down the inside pocket of my jacket, as if I had stuffed in there a block of lead. I slouch in the chair, take a deep breath of the sea breeze, and close my eyes.
My nose gets molested by the smell of salty food, hot coffee, perfume and sweat. My ears are assaulted by the hubbub of nearby conversations, the brouhaha of strung-out children, the whaps of taut nets getting abused by errant balls, the grunts of men who've just hit a projectile into someone's sternum, and the cries of their opponents as they fight for their lives.
The sound of a tennis ball smacking hard rubber reaches me muted, as if I were sinking to the bottom of a lake. A rumbling is building up under my consciousness: a herd of stampeding horses bearing down on me. Once it reaches me, my body will crumble like made of cardboard and plaster.
At the edge of hearing, someone whispers my name: the gurgly voice of a female who needs to swallow a build-up of phlegm. I sigh, then dig out my phone and hold it to my ear; nobody would consider me crazy for talking to a phantom as long as they can picture a presence talking from somewhere else on this wretched planet.
"Who's there?" I ask weakly.
"I am a caryatid," the female voice whispers.
"And what the hell is that?"
The female presence remains silent, but I feel her breathing near my nape.
"Are you a friend?" I ask.
"I am not a friend."
"A stranger, then?"
Something hits the canopy of a nearby palm tree. When I open my eyes, a tennis ball bounces on the terrace between the tables. A smiling kid runs to grab the ball, then tosses it back over the fence.
"I asked you something, intruder," I say gruffly. "Are you listening?"
"I'm always listening to you, and I answered: I am not a stranger."
A few gulls scream as they fly past. I wipe my sweaty palm on my denim trousers.
"What do you want from me? Do I have to take revenge on these tennis players? Or are you the vengeful spirit of someone I killed in a past life?"
"I am not a spirit."
An electrical zap makes my brain tremble. My eyelids twitch.
"You aren't any fun either," I say, my voice cracking. "I'll tell you what you are, though: a burden that I carry on my shoulders. And I'm sick and tired of carrying it, you're just too heavy to bear. So tell me, what can I do to get rid of you?"
The horses are galloping towards me. Their hooves are thundering, their nostrils foaming. Their eyes are hollow and hungry.
"You think that your suffering will end if you get rid of your consciousness," the caryatid whispers.
I cast my gaze down at the fossil grey tiles of the terrace. My shoulders sag, my vision blurs. I blink the sudden surge of tears away.
"Well, it would end. What else do you expect me to do?"
"You might find a cure for your malaise, but you'd miss out on experiencing the world."
I groan.
"How about showing yourself if you are going to insist on bothering me?" I complain in a croaky voice.
From behind me, a tan-colored bust creeps sideways into my field of vision. Her Hellenic face resembles a cliff. Despite the serenity of her expression, her nose has been chiseled off, her cheeks are worn like rubbed with sandpaper, her lips and chin are nicked like pecked at by crows. She's marred by downward, soot black streaks as if someone had toppled an inkwell on her head.
I roll my eyes.
"Oh, fuck off."
My backhanded swat pops the vision like a bubble.
I draw a deep breath, inhaling a cocktail of smoky smells that are getting drowned in the sea breeze, then I place my phone on the table.
As I sink in my chair and I rub the bridge of my nose, I grow paranoid: what if someone witnessed me assaulting a hallucination?
Seated near the trunk of a palm tree as wide as an Egyptian pillar, two middle-aged women, both sporting a layered bob and a chiffon scarf around the neck, nod gravely at each other's words. A woman in her early twenties beams as she hunches over to feed with a spoon the concealed baby inside a pram. A bald guy dressed like an electrician guffaws and slaps his knee while his mate slugs a pint of foamy beer. A solitary woman in her mid-forties, who's wearing a gingham dress and white sandals, pours wine in her glass. On the other side of the fence, a sweaty man twirls his racket, then he strikes a pose and swings at an incoming ball.
Why would I be surprised that otherworldly apparitions feel familiar, or at the most annoy me for invading my personal space? I've spent most of my life surrounded by incomprehensible monsters. I'm stuck in a low-budget horror movie, doomed to witness it while drooling all over myself in a state of undiluted panic.
For how long must I walk the same ground wearing this human costume, for how much time must I endure being me? Three more decades going by averages, four or five if I'm unlucky, six or seven if the universe despises me like I'm sure it does.
We're Fucked, Pt. 52 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
Electric trees flash in the velvety darkness of my mind. The zaps come more frequently when I move my eyeballs from side to side, even behind my eyelids. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with fresh, brine-scented air, and I try to forget about the crackle and sparks inside my skull.
Fifteen meters ahead, a wave breaks with a languid whoosh. Beyond the Cantabrian Sea that washes over the bay, the ocean burbles and hisses like the stomach of some leviathan that swallowed a whale. I would have thought that after millions of years of unabated hunger despite having gulped down one giant beast after another, its belly would have bulged with blubber until it exploded, which would have drowned the entire planet in black sludge.
The beach is covered in bits of rotting wood, sun-bleached bones and blistered flesh. Torn, traumatized ships that have drifted from the oceans are stacked in a floating graveyard that gets rhythmically pounded against the rocky shore like driftwood. The wreckage and their dead crews are shrouded with a layer of muck and algae. Colossal squids propel themselves around the hulking carcasses to gnaw at the rotting corpses, leaving trails of coagulated blood and viscera in their wake.
When I open my eyes, a bright world assaults me: a pitted, banana-colored carpet of sand slopes down to the opaque, teal seawater; nearby, four students have gathered their backpacks on the sand and are lounging with their backs to us, although they are wearing coats and jackets to protect themselves against the October chill; and in the distance, a town-sized island stands against the horizon like a rocky, green sideways boob. The island's tiny spit of beach, jutting out from the rocky shore, must be littered with bones: the destination of an arduous pilgrimage where every traveler is bequeathed a bone by a weary skeleton that has stood sentry for millennia.
I start rubbing my temple, trying to relieve a tingle of pain. A hand strokes my left shoulder tenderly. The sea breeze ruffles Jacqueline's raven black hair as her skin glows faintly in the afternoon sun. She's wearing a chocolate brown, suede trench coat over a white turtleneck blouse. Her scarlet skirt has a tapering hemline and is decorated with white dots; a cum-stained tulip.
Jacqueline deepens the creases at the corners of her eyes in a warm smile.
"Are you getting a headache?"
"Brain zaps," I say wearily. "Even worse than I used to get years ago, when I stopped taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors."
"I don't know what that is. A drug?"
"Uh-huh. The kind that a psychiatrist prescribes to you when you say that you regret being alive."
Jacqueline's eyebrows come together in concern. My throat tightens, and I avert my gaze to the apartment buildings that are clinging to the forested face of Mount Igueldo, past the far end of the beach.
"I guess I was using them to suppress my existential dread," I continue, "but they didn't do shit. At least not remotely enough. Once I dropped them, the withdrawals taught me how it feels to experience short circuits in your brain, and I'm getting an echo of them now."
"Do you think they are stress-related?"
"Who knows? I'm always bobbing in an ocean of anxiety and stress, and I can't tell when I'm going to start drowning in my own mind. It's a bit like thirst: by the time you feel it, you are already dehydrated."
The strap of my bulky backpack, filled with clothes I grabbed from my apartment, is pulling down on my right shoulder, but as I shift the strap, it gives me the chance to avoid Jacqueline's gaze; if her expression suggested that she's getting sick of broken old me, I would start wading through the sea until I reached Iceland or I drowned, whichever happened first.
But could I admit that my recent spike of anxiety may be related to the self-murder that I witnessed yesterday? That horsey scoundrel's only crime was looking for love in the wrong places. Who would have suspected that I, a creature that otherwise passes for human, was born an unlikely abomination: a living being with a cavity instead of a heart? I knew that my unwieldy backpack would burden me throughout our date, but what will I be for Jacqueline as her girlfriend but a humpback whale draped across her shoulders?
The students lounging nearby laugh, and their exuberance floats to our ears along with the lapping of the foamy breakers on the shore.
"So... this may turn out to be an abysmal date," I say guiltily. "I'm sorry."
Jacqueline raises my chin gently so I can meet her cobalt blues.
"Come on now," she coos as if dulcifying a child, "you don't need to apologize for having a brain meltdown. Why, I am pretty much used to it by now. And look at those waves rolling in. The sea's alive here. We all are, in fact."
"I'm not."
"Oh, really? Well, I'm sorry then," she says with mock annoyance.
I gulp to ease my growing sense of dread. My memory flashes with an image of my grandfather's face back when the rusty shard of a ship's anchor impaled it, because he bludgeoned his skull against the anchor during a psychotic episode. He had daydreamed that he was steering his beloved battleship to fight against evil spirits that were trying to destroy the world. When the ship ran out of fuel, he ordered his sailors to murder everyone aboard so he could set sail in a great voyage into space. His final words before he threw himself off the stern deck were, "Take me to the stars, men!" I never found out what made my grandfather snap, but I was transfixed by his gruesome act of self-mutilation.
"H-have you ever felt that the island over there has been unduly haunted by the restless souls of drowned sailors and abducted mermaids, who are longing to break free?"
Jacqueline grins as she gazes out at the island with a captivated expression.
"Not particularly."
"Neither do I, but it's what they say," I mumble, aware of the desperation in my voice.
Jacqueline pats my back.
"I'm not sixteen years old anymore, you know."
"Could've fooled me," I say as I dig my sneaker into the sand. "But what do you mean?"
"You don't need to impress me by organizing some mind-blowing outing. I just want to spend time with you. Maybe even do some necking."
I rest the side of my head against her shoulder, then I sigh.
"Don't you think you pamper me excessively?"
"Don't you need to be pampered to that extent?"
Maybe so, but I don't know why you would want to, it's what I was going to say but didn't dare utter.
It's far easier to pull someone down than to pull them up. Those misguided souls that want to help the depressed should flee and save themselves.
Jacqueline slides an arm around my shoulders. Her warm breath tickles my earlobe.
"I happen to know just what you need to shut down that self-harming mind of yours," she whispers.
Jacqueline turns my head towards her, leans in and kisses me lightly on the mouth. I close my eyes; the warmth of her silky lips and of her face lights up in shades of red against the pale blue of the autumn breeze. Her tongue finds mine, and I turn into a kid standing up to my waist in a strong tide that's receding from the shore. I step closer to Jacqueline, bumping my hips into hers, and I wrap my arms under her coat, around her lower back, while her hands move down to cradle my ass cheeks through my denim trousers.
My heart thuds against my ribcage, my blood becomes electrified, my brain turns to jellied oatmeal. I long to be swallowed by my woman, to dissolve in her insides and become part of her.
I'd love to let myself fall backwards onto the sand and pull Jacqueline down with me. Instead, she pulls back a few centimeters, elongating a catenary of saliva between our lips.
For a moment we had constructed our own universe, an impenetrable bubble of spacetime, but now my brain is absorbing a flood of prickly sensory information as if the outside world was trying to reclaim me. The breeze is cooling my exposed skin. A salty scent tickles my nostrils. The distant shrieks of gulls pierce through the noise of the sea. Two of the students, both girls, are looking over their shoulder to pry into the private affairs that we've conducted in public. One of them, petite, with short-cropped auburn hair and ivory skin flushed pink, makes a point of holding my gaze.
My cheeks burn, and I'm forced to dilate my nostrils to pass enough air through them. I let go of Jacqueline's hips and I step aside. I feel like a tween again, back when I was caught masturbating in a public park, a misadventure that concluded with me passing out in a puddle of my own pee.
Jacqueline wipes my lips with her thumb.
"Oh, come on now. Don't look so shy. Does it bother you that others may find out that you are mine?"
"I... dislike when strangers stare at me for any reason."
"They are thinking how nice it would be to join us, you know."
"It's none of their business," I mutter.
Jacqueline chortles, then she shakes her head.
"You are an incorrigible nutjob."
"And you're a diva!"
Her grin displays a row of straight white teeth that glisten against her rosy gums.
"How about we move somewhere else, huh? Do you want me to treat you to an ice cream?"
I sigh.
"We could take a nap in some quiet cove until sunset."
"You do sound tired," Jacqueline says, and wraps her hand around my nape. "I know a nice place nearby to sit down for a cup of coffee and an appetizer. How about some spicy potatoes?"
I open my mouth to answer, but my stomach interrupts me by gurgling loudly.
"I just have to mention food with you, huh?" she asks, amused. "Let's go."
When we turn around, Jacqueline runs her hand down the back of my jacket and grabs my ass. I flinch.
---
Author's note: These last few days I've been listening to The Stone Roses almost exclusively, particularly to 'I Am the Resurrection' and 'This Is the One'. I'd like to leave the country / For a month of Sundays / Burn the town where I was born.
I intended to upload this chapter and the following as a single part, but I got carried away with nonsense, as usual. Although this chapter by itself is far gentler than I'm used to writing, it was a nice change of pace. The next chapter is mostly finished, just needs another pass, so I'll likely upload it tomorrow.
I've been in a bad mood recently. I grew even sicker of human beings and ended up doing a spring cleaning of contacts both on Goodreads and on WordPress.
---
Electric trees flash in the velvety darkness of my mind. The zaps come more frequently when I move my eyeballs from side to side, even behind my eyelids. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with fresh, brine-scented air, and I try to forget about the crackle and sparks inside my skull.
Fifteen meters ahead, a wave breaks with a languid whoosh. Beyond the Cantabrian Sea that washes over the bay, the ocean burbles and hisses like the stomach of some leviathan that swallowed a whale. I would have thought that after millions of years of unabated hunger despite having gulped down one giant beast after another, its belly would have bulged with blubber until it exploded, which would have drowned the entire planet in black sludge.
The beach is covered in bits of rotting wood, sun-bleached bones and blistered flesh. Torn, traumatized ships that have drifted from the oceans are stacked in a floating graveyard that gets rhythmically pounded against the rocky shore like driftwood. The wreckage and their dead crews are shrouded with a layer of muck and algae. Colossal squids propel themselves around the hulking carcasses to gnaw at the rotting corpses, leaving trails of coagulated blood and viscera in their wake.
When I open my eyes, a bright world assaults me: a pitted, banana-colored carpet of sand slopes down to the opaque, teal seawater; nearby, four students have gathered their backpacks on the sand and are lounging with their backs to us, although they are wearing coats and jackets to protect themselves against the October chill; and in the distance, a town-sized island stands against the horizon like a rocky, green sideways boob. The island's tiny spit of beach, jutting out from the rocky shore, must be littered with bones: the destination of an arduous pilgrimage where every traveler is bequeathed a bone by a weary skeleton that has stood sentry for millennia.
I start rubbing my temple, trying to relieve a tingle of pain. A hand strokes my left shoulder tenderly. The sea breeze ruffles Jacqueline's raven black hair as her skin glows faintly in the afternoon sun. She's wearing a chocolate brown, suede trench coat over a white turtleneck blouse. Her scarlet skirt has a tapering hemline and is decorated with white dots; a cum-stained tulip.
Jacqueline deepens the creases at the corners of her eyes in a warm smile.
"Are you getting a headache?"
"Brain zaps," I say wearily. "Even worse than I used to get years ago, when I stopped taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors."
"I don't know what that is. A drug?"
"Uh-huh. The kind that a psychiatrist prescribes to you when you say that you regret being alive."
Jacqueline's eyebrows come together in concern. My throat tightens, and I avert my gaze to the apartment buildings that are clinging to the forested face of Mount Igueldo, past the far end of the beach.
"I guess I was using them to suppress my existential dread," I continue, "but they didn't do shit. At least not remotely enough. Once I dropped them, the withdrawals taught me how it feels to experience short circuits in your brain, and I'm getting an echo of them now."
"Do you think they are stress-related?"
"Who knows? I'm always bobbing in an ocean of anxiety and stress, and I can't tell when I'm going to start drowning in my own mind. It's a bit like thirst: by the time you feel it, you are already dehydrated."
The strap of my bulky backpack, filled with clothes I grabbed from my apartment, is pulling down on my right shoulder, but as I shift the strap, it gives me the chance to avoid Jacqueline's gaze; if her expression suggested that she's getting sick of broken old me, I would start wading through the sea until I reached Iceland or I drowned, whichever happened first.
But could I admit that my recent spike of anxiety may be related to the self-murder that I witnessed yesterday? That horsey scoundrel's only crime was looking for love in the wrong places. Who would have suspected that I, a creature that otherwise passes for human, was born an unlikely abomination: a living being with a cavity instead of a heart? I knew that my unwieldy backpack would burden me throughout our date, but what will I be for Jacqueline as her girlfriend but a humpback whale draped across her shoulders?
The students lounging nearby laugh, and their exuberance floats to our ears along with the lapping of the foamy breakers on the shore.
"So... this may turn out to be an abysmal date," I say guiltily. "I'm sorry."
Jacqueline raises my chin gently so I can meet her cobalt blues.
"Come on now," she coos as if dulcifying a child, "you don't need to apologize for having a brain meltdown. Why, I am pretty much used to it by now. And look at those waves rolling in. The sea's alive here. We all are, in fact."
"I'm not."
"Oh, really? Well, I'm sorry then," she says with mock annoyance.
I gulp to ease my growing sense of dread. My memory flashes with an image of my grandfather's face back when the rusty shard of a ship's anchor impaled it, because he bludgeoned his skull against the anchor during a psychotic episode. He had daydreamed that he was steering his beloved battleship to fight against evil spirits that were trying to destroy the world. When the ship ran out of fuel, he ordered his sailors to murder everyone aboard so he could set sail in a great voyage into space. His final words before he threw himself off the stern deck were, "Take me to the stars, men!" I never found out what made my grandfather snap, but I was transfixed by his gruesome act of self-mutilation.
"H-have you ever felt that the island over there has been unduly haunted by the restless souls of drowned sailors and abducted mermaids, who are longing to break free?"
Jacqueline grins as she gazes out at the island with a captivated expression.
"Not particularly."
"Neither do I, but it's what they say," I mumble, aware of the desperation in my voice.
Jacqueline pats my back.
"I'm not sixteen years old anymore, you know."
"Could've fooled me," I say as I dig my sneaker into the sand. "But what do you mean?"
"You don't need to impress me by organizing some mind-blowing outing. I just want to spend time with you. Maybe even do some necking."
I rest the side of my head against her shoulder, then I sigh.
"Don't you think you pamper me excessively?"
"Don't you need to be pampered to that extent?"
Maybe so, but I don't know why you would want to, it's what I was going to say but didn't dare utter.
It's far easier to pull someone down than to pull them up. Those misguided souls that want to help the depressed should flee and save themselves.
Jacqueline slides an arm around my shoulders. Her warm breath tickles my earlobe.
"I happen to know just what you need to shut down that self-harming mind of yours," she whispers.
Jacqueline turns my head towards her, leans in and kisses me lightly on the mouth. I close my eyes; the warmth of her silky lips and of her face lights up in shades of red against the pale blue of the autumn breeze. Her tongue finds mine, and I turn into a kid standing up to my waist in a strong tide that's receding from the shore. I step closer to Jacqueline, bumping my hips into hers, and I wrap my arms under her coat, around her lower back, while her hands move down to cradle my ass cheeks through my denim trousers.
My heart thuds against my ribcage, my blood becomes electrified, my brain turns to jellied oatmeal. I long to be swallowed by my woman, to dissolve in her insides and become part of her.
I'd love to let myself fall backwards onto the sand and pull Jacqueline down with me. Instead, she pulls back a few centimeters, elongating a catenary of saliva between our lips.
For a moment we had constructed our own universe, an impenetrable bubble of spacetime, but now my brain is absorbing a flood of prickly sensory information as if the outside world was trying to reclaim me. The breeze is cooling my exposed skin. A salty scent tickles my nostrils. The distant shrieks of gulls pierce through the noise of the sea. Two of the students, both girls, are looking over their shoulder to pry into the private affairs that we've conducted in public. One of them, petite, with short-cropped auburn hair and ivory skin flushed pink, makes a point of holding my gaze.
My cheeks burn, and I'm forced to dilate my nostrils to pass enough air through them. I let go of Jacqueline's hips and I step aside. I feel like a tween again, back when I was caught masturbating in a public park, a misadventure that concluded with me passing out in a puddle of my own pee.
Jacqueline wipes my lips with her thumb.
"Oh, come on now. Don't look so shy. Does it bother you that others may find out that you are mine?"
"I... dislike when strangers stare at me for any reason."
"They are thinking how nice it would be to join us, you know."
"It's none of their business," I mutter.
Jacqueline chortles, then she shakes her head.
"You are an incorrigible nutjob."
"And you're a diva!"
Her grin displays a row of straight white teeth that glisten against her rosy gums.
"How about we move somewhere else, huh? Do you want me to treat you to an ice cream?"
I sigh.
"We could take a nap in some quiet cove until sunset."
"You do sound tired," Jacqueline says, and wraps her hand around my nape. "I know a nice place nearby to sit down for a cup of coffee and an appetizer. How about some spicy potatoes?"
I open my mouth to answer, but my stomach interrupts me by gurgling loudly.
"I just have to mention food with you, huh?" she asks, amused. "Let's go."
When we turn around, Jacqueline runs her hand down the back of my jacket and grabs my ass. I flinch.
---
Author's note: These last few days I've been listening to The Stone Roses almost exclusively, particularly to 'I Am the Resurrection' and 'This Is the One'. I'd like to leave the country / For a month of Sundays / Burn the town where I was born.
I intended to upload this chapter and the following as a single part, but I got carried away with nonsense, as usual. Although this chapter by itself is far gentler than I'm used to writing, it was a nice change of pace. The next chapter is mostly finished, just needs another pass, so I'll likely upload it tomorrow.
I've been in a bad mood recently. I grew even sicker of human beings and ended up doing a spring cleaning of contacts both on Goodreads and on WordPress.
May 15, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 51 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
I step closer to Spike, although he stinks like shit and rancid death, and I glare into those protruding eyeballs that are the color of storm clouds.
"Do you want me to cry, you horsey cunt?" I sneer, my voice sounding like a rusted-out door. "Do you want my tears so you can feel superior? Get your fill then! Witness my pathetic self in all its ugliness! But I can make you cry too with this little mouth, and I don't mean biting down on your tongue to fill my oral cavity with blood! Although you dared to call me a child, I'm an adult who will make the best of her life despite having been born in hell! How would you know what it means to be human anyway, huh? You're a horse-shaped demon. You don't even have a pussy! Life must have been so easy for you, spending your whole day eating hay and having your legs stroked. And you called me a bad person! What about all those times you chased me through the city's streets? As I attempted to reach a shelter, you would snatch me up and throw me onto your back, then you carried me in circles as I flailed to keep my balance. You galloped and galloped even though I begged for mercy! Every one of our encounters ended up with me returning home covered in mud and shit and bruises. You even tried to strangle me on occasion."
Spike stares down at me like a deaf, silent beast who doesn't understand why the strange human keeps scrunching her face and making wild shapes with her mouth hole. Then he smacks his lips and speaks calmly.
"You can't use stuff that has never happened as an argument in your defense."
"It may have happened. Who can be sure? What I intended to convey is that it matters little whether you're bad or good, even if you are a horse, a whale or a worm. I'm just a whore who needs a hug. But soon enough I'll get to kneel at the altar of the goddess of depravity, and one of these days I may never have to masturbate again! Now, trot off to your grave, you deplorable ungulate! Lie down in that hole and get buried in your own shit, you stinking corpse!"
Spike hangs his head low and sighs.
"Like me, Leire, you've been dead since you were born."
His words hit my face like a sharp punch. I step back until the pile of board games blocks my escape.
"Stop saying things that hurt!"
Spike averts his gaze, running it over the eggnog yellow wallpaper of the living room, as if he himself were hoping to find an exit and return to his horse paradise, to the love of hooves and the never-ending gallop.
"You are lucky, regarding Jacqueline I mean," he utters in a mournful tone. "I've never experienced such intimacy. I never would have, even if I had existed for centuries."
Until a moment ago, I wanted to slap him across his stupid horse face, but now I'd rather hug him so hard that his eyes would burst from their sockets and his ribs would shatter. I'm left with nothing but the taste of shame.
"Spike, don't sell yourself short. You pretend to be an ordinary horse, but you are the one true horse, because nobody else will ever speak to me with such disrespect. Do you remember all the good times we spent together? I would ride you along the seaside, play on the beach and use sticks as lances to fight pirates. We swam with dolphins in the ocean, we bit into seashells, we cooked seafood, we sank in quicksand up to our noses, we explored caves beneath ancient castles, we wrestled goats then shot them with crossbows. You once told me that you would die for me, that you would always be my faithful horse. Those days will never end, they will remain with me forever."
"Yeah, none of that happened either," Spike murmurs in a voice that is breaking apart.
"In any case, when you come out of your horse trance, you're still Spike. I don't think anyone is really the master of their life except Jacqueline. As for me, I can only act out of desperation."
Spike's lips tremble while he struggles to formulate a sentence, as if he had to wrench the words out, but he gives up and teeters away, nearly toppling over the coffee table.
I want to brush the dirt and caked blood off his mane, then place my hand on his round belly to feel the coarse coat as well as the blood pulsing through him. I'd let him lick my fingers one by one with his warm, viscous tongue, which must smell of rot and death. But I fear that any physical contact with this creature would transform me into an equivalent equine abomination.
I take a tentative step towards Spike's trembling, scarred back.
"I can see that you're very depressed, and I'm here for you if you want to open up about it. Let me tell you that, although you stink like rotten dung, you surely are one of the most impressive horsemen in history. In fact, you've never been a horse for me, Spike, but a unicorn in disguise."
His hind legs twitch, his shaggy tail jerks around in a way that reminds me of a puppy, then he tilts his bulky head back and lets out a blaring neigh, raw and deep and full of grief, the first note of a requiem that will be played over the grave of our civilization. I'm astonished at how readily my pal can transform into a beast that could have only crawled out from the underworld.
As my eyes get watery, I stagger to the sofa and I plop down. A throng of words is jostling in my throat, and I want to claw them out as if they were wasps trapped under my tongue.
"The world has become a twisted place," I say in a brittle voice. "I wish I could return to my distant childhood, to those brief moments in which nothing mattered except for how the warm light bathed my body and how the birdsongs filled my soul with a gentle harmony. But ever since, I've never been able to shut my eyes to the truth: we're trapped in an insane asylum with no escape route, surrounded by demented monsters. We have ended up at the mercy of blackguards who consider themselves human beings, although they'll provide us with a hundred thousand ways to suffer, to be humiliated, and to die in our own homes."
I'm enveloped in Spike's fetid, sickly stench, but I take a deep breath, then I wipe away the salty streaks on my cheeks.
"Who knows if I was born with a chance to become a normal person," I continue. "When I was little, I felt like something was missing inside of me. Then one day I realized that it was my humanity. I understood that I could never become a girl or a boy, and instead I grew up into a verminous slug that crawled along the cracks of this world. How could I have the slightest notion of what it means to be a human being, when the most basic things have been stripped from me? If Jacqueline hadn't diverted my destiny, I would have shambled through the rest of my life like a mindless corpse with a hungry heart and empty guts. In my final day, lying in bed and covered from head to toe in dried piss, feces and semen, I would have wasted my last energies masturbating until my heart gave out. What I mean to say, Spike, is that I understand your plight perfectly well: every second feels muddy and heavy as if you were wading through a swamp, and you'd do anything to drown out the agonized squeals from your festering subconscious." My voice has been choking and cracking, but I take a deep breath and I brace myself to continue, because I must explain to Spike how utterly hopeless he is. "If I ever get my hands on a computer that runs on real horses instead of the synthetic ones that the humans have shoved into their pathetic machines, I'll transfer every treasure in my mind onto it: memories and feelings, programs and board games. Then I'll abandon this insane world where people run around with their heads cut off, and from my eternal shelter I will contact you so you can join me in paradise. But for now I remain trapped in this cage of flesh and bones, hopeless and terrified of dying alone as you are of turning into one of the insane horses that roam through the night. So I can't save you from your pain. I had only been able to stifle mine through masturbation, which requires a functioning set of genitals."
When I gather the strength to look up, Spike is standing near the coffee table. His drool-soaked lips quiver as he stares at me unblinkingly with those bulging, crazed eyes of his. I'm overwhelmed by the harrowing thought of becoming another victim of an equine rampage, but he's wobbling like a drunk guy on a rooftop.
"Throughout my life, I always did what I was expected to do," Spike says in a thin, dry voice that reminds me of dead leaves fluttering in the wind. "Maybe I believed that self-sacrifice was noble. Maybe I believed that by following the rules, I was making the world a better place. I performed my duties with nary a complaint, I wore myself down to the bone like a workhorse, and what did I get in return?"
I hoped that Spike had intended that as a rhetorical question, but he's prolonging the silence. I shrug and look down at my pitiful hands.
"Please, don't stare at me with those bulging eyes or I'll scream. You know we are the slaves of some colossal evil, and we've never had any choice but to obey monsters. And then there are all these ghosts, the voices and visions that assail me as my brain torments me with a relentless stream of horrors, which I wish I could ward off with a hammer. If there's one thing I've learned, Spike, is that people are merely bags of flesh and bones that contain all sorts of shit. No one is an exception, except for Jacqueline. As for you and I, we're freaks of nature, abominations that have been thrust into solid frames."
Spike shuts his eyes tight, and as he shakes his head, a string of drool flings towards me and sticks onto my corduroy jacket.
"Nobody ever cared about me," he mutters, "let alone love me. I was always treated like an outcast. For my entire life I was only valued for what I could provide for others, and even then, they noticed me reluctantly. Once I was gone, most of the people of whom I was fond forgot me and carried on with their lives. So what was the point?"
I swallow the lump in my throat. I scoot closer to the edge of the sofa cushion and I press my hand against my chest.
"In the name of your filthy, scarred, decomposing hide," I say earnestly, "I want you to know that from now on I'm going to work towards a world that makes sense, a world that won't contain a single thing that could make me think of death, rape or destruction."
Spike shoots me a look of incredulity as the thick vein that stretches down his neck squirms like a squid's tentacle. His hind legs must be struggling to keep him upright, because he staggers backwards towards the window, making his hooves clatter on the hardwood floor. He takes a deep, tremulous breath.
"If only you weren't all talk, Leire," he says bitterly. "So many times I've tried to warn you about what's about to happen, hoping that we could prevent it together, but I couldn't get you to care, or even to listen. I shouldn't have volunteered to convince you. What the hell did I know about anything? I've always been helpless. I waited for someone to come and whisk me away. I just wanted... to be special somehow."
"You are special, Spike. You are my friend."
As he stares at me befuddled, his lips part slowly in a grimace of anguish.
"Is that worth anything?"
I hang my head low. A pulsating darkness spreads from the center of my chest. I should have known better than to open my heart even to this horse. Now I want to lie down on the floor, hug my knees and sob uncontrollably.
Spike sways as he widens a demented smile, but a single tear rolls down his bony jaw.
"In the end you were right, Leire. Everything is rotten to the core. Why would I care about our future? The whole world can go fuck itself."
A ropey strand of saliva dribbles from his muzzle onto the silvery barrel of a revolver precariously perched on top of his frontal hooves. The weapon has a checkered wood grip and deep shade in the flutes of its thick cylinder. The frame is engraved with a skull and bones. He must have also coated the bullets with rat poison.
I sit bolt upright as a storm of screams racks my skull.
"Spike, where were you hiding that gun?!"
He gazes at me with a mournful, almost apologetic expression. His front hooves fumble to tilt the barrel upwards, but as he attempts to pull back the hammer, the revolver springs from his grip, lands with a thud on the coffee table and slides off onto the hardwood floor.
I gawk at the inert weapon that's lying close to my sneakers. I imagine the click-click-click of the hammer's firing pin striking the primers, and the thunderous blasts of gunfire, and a bunch of bullets ejecting into the air like a metallic bouquet of flowers. I also picture the self-inflicted wounding of a bullet to Spike's craggy face. Not even a horse would have survived such an assault.
My breath comes in heaving gasps and my pulse is thumping in my veins. Spike's hoofsteps clattering against the floor snap me out of my daze: he's tromping towards the window. When he reaches it, he leans his forehead against the windowpane and lets his shoulders droop.
In the moonlight, my friend has become a shadow in the shadows, the silhouette of a horse made of darkness and of the cold chill that clings to its presence. When I squint I can almost make out a saddle and stirrups and the buckles of the leather straps.
I'm struggling to come up with words, but Spike lets out an ear-piercing howl. He slams his head against the windowpane, shattering the glass. Blood-dyed shards and bits scatter over the floor like hail. A cold draught comes in through the empty window frame, curling the curtains.
Reality has mixed its essence with equine blood. The abominable potion must be seeping through all dimensions, leaving behind a residue of madness and despair.
I leap off the sofa. Spike has turned towards me. The ragged fur coat of his elongated face is drenched with red, and glass shards are embedded in his forehead. As he sways on his hind hooves, he splits his lips open, showing his dagger-like incisors, and spits bloody foam.
Spike lifts an atrophied, trembling foreleg. He angles that hoof so it points at the groove of his chin. I see myself reflected in his black eyes, that are wide and puffy with sorrow as they leak copious tears.
"Bang," he says.
Spike throws himself back, somersaulting through the empty window frame, snagging his hide on shards of glass still attached. He disappears into the night. A gasp later, I hear a muffled, sickening splat of flesh and bone.
"Spike!" I yell.
My legs feel numb and slow, but I race over to the window. I clutch at the edge of the frame and I lean out.
On the street below, a large pool of dark blood is spreading under my friend's broken body and splayed limbs. His black eyes, that have rolled back in his mangled head, are staring at the night sky.
The cold October wind whips my hair around my face. My heart is about to burst. I want to crumple on the floor. I cradle my head in my trembling hands and I listen to the roaring in my ears.
Spike had made himself small to escape his pain, but there are no bottoms of despair so deep that they can't be reached. I should tell myself that he's found peace and solace in death, that he has nothing left to fear. I should feel elated because he has been liberated from his prison as I wished to free myself from mine. But instead I'm weeping for my friend and for all other horses who have died like this; for every poor soul who's being crushed under the clattering hoofsteps of despair; for this world that has become a crumbling madhouse of horrors; for everyone, because one day we will all disappear in an endless black void, never to be seen or heard again, never to feel the warmth of the sun, never to hear a melodious song, never to smell the sweet aroma of a mother's milk, never to feel the delicate fingertips of a loved one caressing our skin.
The metallic-tasting darkness has started to lap at my consciousness like black water swirling through a sewer grate. It will become a cool shadow enveloping my flesh, a dark mist settling in my mind. Soon I will be sucked down as well.
I pull out my phone from a pocket of my jacket, but as I try to remember the emergency number, I realize that talking to a professional about this debacle would end up with me dragged to a psych ward. What else can I do now but abandon Spike down there, to be picked apart by carrion birds and scavengers?
My friend's body convulses. His limbs twitch. Inch by inch, Spike rolls over and retracts his legs. Although chunks of his flesh and bloodied hide are plastered across the pavement, he pushes himself onto his hind hooves and raises his mangled head. As if being pulled by invisible strings, he takes a faltering step, then another and another. While he wheezes out inky blood-foam, and blood gushes out from his wounds like a red rain, my old friend continues shambling down the street into oblivion.
---
Author's note: this chapter concludes the sequence that started back in chapter 43. Plenty of far crazier stuff to come in the 12,500 words of notes left to render.
Tomorrow I'll start a six-workdays-long week. Most if not all of my coworkers will be absent due to a strike. I was going to go to work anyway because I'd rather not get involved with that stuff, but in any case I've been forced to work as the token "guy that needs to be present at the office in case some nasty shit happens". My boss even gave me an official note that states that if I decide to stay home anyway, I would be prosecuted for a criminal liability. I work at a hospital, after all. So tomorrow Monday I'll be on phone duty as well as handling whatever stops working in our hospital complex and in nearby outpatients clinics (we serve like half of the province). Apart from this madness, I'm also the sole technician for next Saturday.
So this may have been the last chapter for a while.
---
I step closer to Spike, although he stinks like shit and rancid death, and I glare into those protruding eyeballs that are the color of storm clouds.
"Do you want me to cry, you horsey cunt?" I sneer, my voice sounding like a rusted-out door. "Do you want my tears so you can feel superior? Get your fill then! Witness my pathetic self in all its ugliness! But I can make you cry too with this little mouth, and I don't mean biting down on your tongue to fill my oral cavity with blood! Although you dared to call me a child, I'm an adult who will make the best of her life despite having been born in hell! How would you know what it means to be human anyway, huh? You're a horse-shaped demon. You don't even have a pussy! Life must have been so easy for you, spending your whole day eating hay and having your legs stroked. And you called me a bad person! What about all those times you chased me through the city's streets? As I attempted to reach a shelter, you would snatch me up and throw me onto your back, then you carried me in circles as I flailed to keep my balance. You galloped and galloped even though I begged for mercy! Every one of our encounters ended up with me returning home covered in mud and shit and bruises. You even tried to strangle me on occasion."
Spike stares down at me like a deaf, silent beast who doesn't understand why the strange human keeps scrunching her face and making wild shapes with her mouth hole. Then he smacks his lips and speaks calmly.
"You can't use stuff that has never happened as an argument in your defense."
"It may have happened. Who can be sure? What I intended to convey is that it matters little whether you're bad or good, even if you are a horse, a whale or a worm. I'm just a whore who needs a hug. But soon enough I'll get to kneel at the altar of the goddess of depravity, and one of these days I may never have to masturbate again! Now, trot off to your grave, you deplorable ungulate! Lie down in that hole and get buried in your own shit, you stinking corpse!"
Spike hangs his head low and sighs.
"Like me, Leire, you've been dead since you were born."
His words hit my face like a sharp punch. I step back until the pile of board games blocks my escape.
"Stop saying things that hurt!"
Spike averts his gaze, running it over the eggnog yellow wallpaper of the living room, as if he himself were hoping to find an exit and return to his horse paradise, to the love of hooves and the never-ending gallop.
"You are lucky, regarding Jacqueline I mean," he utters in a mournful tone. "I've never experienced such intimacy. I never would have, even if I had existed for centuries."
Until a moment ago, I wanted to slap him across his stupid horse face, but now I'd rather hug him so hard that his eyes would burst from their sockets and his ribs would shatter. I'm left with nothing but the taste of shame.
"Spike, don't sell yourself short. You pretend to be an ordinary horse, but you are the one true horse, because nobody else will ever speak to me with such disrespect. Do you remember all the good times we spent together? I would ride you along the seaside, play on the beach and use sticks as lances to fight pirates. We swam with dolphins in the ocean, we bit into seashells, we cooked seafood, we sank in quicksand up to our noses, we explored caves beneath ancient castles, we wrestled goats then shot them with crossbows. You once told me that you would die for me, that you would always be my faithful horse. Those days will never end, they will remain with me forever."
"Yeah, none of that happened either," Spike murmurs in a voice that is breaking apart.
"In any case, when you come out of your horse trance, you're still Spike. I don't think anyone is really the master of their life except Jacqueline. As for me, I can only act out of desperation."
Spike's lips tremble while he struggles to formulate a sentence, as if he had to wrench the words out, but he gives up and teeters away, nearly toppling over the coffee table.
I want to brush the dirt and caked blood off his mane, then place my hand on his round belly to feel the coarse coat as well as the blood pulsing through him. I'd let him lick my fingers one by one with his warm, viscous tongue, which must smell of rot and death. But I fear that any physical contact with this creature would transform me into an equivalent equine abomination.
I take a tentative step towards Spike's trembling, scarred back.
"I can see that you're very depressed, and I'm here for you if you want to open up about it. Let me tell you that, although you stink like rotten dung, you surely are one of the most impressive horsemen in history. In fact, you've never been a horse for me, Spike, but a unicorn in disguise."
His hind legs twitch, his shaggy tail jerks around in a way that reminds me of a puppy, then he tilts his bulky head back and lets out a blaring neigh, raw and deep and full of grief, the first note of a requiem that will be played over the grave of our civilization. I'm astonished at how readily my pal can transform into a beast that could have only crawled out from the underworld.
As my eyes get watery, I stagger to the sofa and I plop down. A throng of words is jostling in my throat, and I want to claw them out as if they were wasps trapped under my tongue.
"The world has become a twisted place," I say in a brittle voice. "I wish I could return to my distant childhood, to those brief moments in which nothing mattered except for how the warm light bathed my body and how the birdsongs filled my soul with a gentle harmony. But ever since, I've never been able to shut my eyes to the truth: we're trapped in an insane asylum with no escape route, surrounded by demented monsters. We have ended up at the mercy of blackguards who consider themselves human beings, although they'll provide us with a hundred thousand ways to suffer, to be humiliated, and to die in our own homes."
I'm enveloped in Spike's fetid, sickly stench, but I take a deep breath, then I wipe away the salty streaks on my cheeks.
"Who knows if I was born with a chance to become a normal person," I continue. "When I was little, I felt like something was missing inside of me. Then one day I realized that it was my humanity. I understood that I could never become a girl or a boy, and instead I grew up into a verminous slug that crawled along the cracks of this world. How could I have the slightest notion of what it means to be a human being, when the most basic things have been stripped from me? If Jacqueline hadn't diverted my destiny, I would have shambled through the rest of my life like a mindless corpse with a hungry heart and empty guts. In my final day, lying in bed and covered from head to toe in dried piss, feces and semen, I would have wasted my last energies masturbating until my heart gave out. What I mean to say, Spike, is that I understand your plight perfectly well: every second feels muddy and heavy as if you were wading through a swamp, and you'd do anything to drown out the agonized squeals from your festering subconscious." My voice has been choking and cracking, but I take a deep breath and I brace myself to continue, because I must explain to Spike how utterly hopeless he is. "If I ever get my hands on a computer that runs on real horses instead of the synthetic ones that the humans have shoved into their pathetic machines, I'll transfer every treasure in my mind onto it: memories and feelings, programs and board games. Then I'll abandon this insane world where people run around with their heads cut off, and from my eternal shelter I will contact you so you can join me in paradise. But for now I remain trapped in this cage of flesh and bones, hopeless and terrified of dying alone as you are of turning into one of the insane horses that roam through the night. So I can't save you from your pain. I had only been able to stifle mine through masturbation, which requires a functioning set of genitals."
When I gather the strength to look up, Spike is standing near the coffee table. His drool-soaked lips quiver as he stares at me unblinkingly with those bulging, crazed eyes of his. I'm overwhelmed by the harrowing thought of becoming another victim of an equine rampage, but he's wobbling like a drunk guy on a rooftop.
"Throughout my life, I always did what I was expected to do," Spike says in a thin, dry voice that reminds me of dead leaves fluttering in the wind. "Maybe I believed that self-sacrifice was noble. Maybe I believed that by following the rules, I was making the world a better place. I performed my duties with nary a complaint, I wore myself down to the bone like a workhorse, and what did I get in return?"
I hoped that Spike had intended that as a rhetorical question, but he's prolonging the silence. I shrug and look down at my pitiful hands.
"Please, don't stare at me with those bulging eyes or I'll scream. You know we are the slaves of some colossal evil, and we've never had any choice but to obey monsters. And then there are all these ghosts, the voices and visions that assail me as my brain torments me with a relentless stream of horrors, which I wish I could ward off with a hammer. If there's one thing I've learned, Spike, is that people are merely bags of flesh and bones that contain all sorts of shit. No one is an exception, except for Jacqueline. As for you and I, we're freaks of nature, abominations that have been thrust into solid frames."
Spike shuts his eyes tight, and as he shakes his head, a string of drool flings towards me and sticks onto my corduroy jacket.
"Nobody ever cared about me," he mutters, "let alone love me. I was always treated like an outcast. For my entire life I was only valued for what I could provide for others, and even then, they noticed me reluctantly. Once I was gone, most of the people of whom I was fond forgot me and carried on with their lives. So what was the point?"
I swallow the lump in my throat. I scoot closer to the edge of the sofa cushion and I press my hand against my chest.
"In the name of your filthy, scarred, decomposing hide," I say earnestly, "I want you to know that from now on I'm going to work towards a world that makes sense, a world that won't contain a single thing that could make me think of death, rape or destruction."
Spike shoots me a look of incredulity as the thick vein that stretches down his neck squirms like a squid's tentacle. His hind legs must be struggling to keep him upright, because he staggers backwards towards the window, making his hooves clatter on the hardwood floor. He takes a deep, tremulous breath.
"If only you weren't all talk, Leire," he says bitterly. "So many times I've tried to warn you about what's about to happen, hoping that we could prevent it together, but I couldn't get you to care, or even to listen. I shouldn't have volunteered to convince you. What the hell did I know about anything? I've always been helpless. I waited for someone to come and whisk me away. I just wanted... to be special somehow."
"You are special, Spike. You are my friend."
As he stares at me befuddled, his lips part slowly in a grimace of anguish.
"Is that worth anything?"
I hang my head low. A pulsating darkness spreads from the center of my chest. I should have known better than to open my heart even to this horse. Now I want to lie down on the floor, hug my knees and sob uncontrollably.
Spike sways as he widens a demented smile, but a single tear rolls down his bony jaw.
"In the end you were right, Leire. Everything is rotten to the core. Why would I care about our future? The whole world can go fuck itself."
A ropey strand of saliva dribbles from his muzzle onto the silvery barrel of a revolver precariously perched on top of his frontal hooves. The weapon has a checkered wood grip and deep shade in the flutes of its thick cylinder. The frame is engraved with a skull and bones. He must have also coated the bullets with rat poison.
I sit bolt upright as a storm of screams racks my skull.
"Spike, where were you hiding that gun?!"
He gazes at me with a mournful, almost apologetic expression. His front hooves fumble to tilt the barrel upwards, but as he attempts to pull back the hammer, the revolver springs from his grip, lands with a thud on the coffee table and slides off onto the hardwood floor.
I gawk at the inert weapon that's lying close to my sneakers. I imagine the click-click-click of the hammer's firing pin striking the primers, and the thunderous blasts of gunfire, and a bunch of bullets ejecting into the air like a metallic bouquet of flowers. I also picture the self-inflicted wounding of a bullet to Spike's craggy face. Not even a horse would have survived such an assault.
My breath comes in heaving gasps and my pulse is thumping in my veins. Spike's hoofsteps clattering against the floor snap me out of my daze: he's tromping towards the window. When he reaches it, he leans his forehead against the windowpane and lets his shoulders droop.
In the moonlight, my friend has become a shadow in the shadows, the silhouette of a horse made of darkness and of the cold chill that clings to its presence. When I squint I can almost make out a saddle and stirrups and the buckles of the leather straps.
I'm struggling to come up with words, but Spike lets out an ear-piercing howl. He slams his head against the windowpane, shattering the glass. Blood-dyed shards and bits scatter over the floor like hail. A cold draught comes in through the empty window frame, curling the curtains.
Reality has mixed its essence with equine blood. The abominable potion must be seeping through all dimensions, leaving behind a residue of madness and despair.
I leap off the sofa. Spike has turned towards me. The ragged fur coat of his elongated face is drenched with red, and glass shards are embedded in his forehead. As he sways on his hind hooves, he splits his lips open, showing his dagger-like incisors, and spits bloody foam.
Spike lifts an atrophied, trembling foreleg. He angles that hoof so it points at the groove of his chin. I see myself reflected in his black eyes, that are wide and puffy with sorrow as they leak copious tears.
"Bang," he says.
Spike throws himself back, somersaulting through the empty window frame, snagging his hide on shards of glass still attached. He disappears into the night. A gasp later, I hear a muffled, sickening splat of flesh and bone.
"Spike!" I yell.
My legs feel numb and slow, but I race over to the window. I clutch at the edge of the frame and I lean out.
On the street below, a large pool of dark blood is spreading under my friend's broken body and splayed limbs. His black eyes, that have rolled back in his mangled head, are staring at the night sky.
The cold October wind whips my hair around my face. My heart is about to burst. I want to crumple on the floor. I cradle my head in my trembling hands and I listen to the roaring in my ears.
Spike had made himself small to escape his pain, but there are no bottoms of despair so deep that they can't be reached. I should tell myself that he's found peace and solace in death, that he has nothing left to fear. I should feel elated because he has been liberated from his prison as I wished to free myself from mine. But instead I'm weeping for my friend and for all other horses who have died like this; for every poor soul who's being crushed under the clattering hoofsteps of despair; for this world that has become a crumbling madhouse of horrors; for everyone, because one day we will all disappear in an endless black void, never to be seen or heard again, never to feel the warmth of the sun, never to hear a melodious song, never to smell the sweet aroma of a mother's milk, never to feel the delicate fingertips of a loved one caressing our skin.
The metallic-tasting darkness has started to lap at my consciousness like black water swirling through a sewer grate. It will become a cool shadow enveloping my flesh, a dark mist settling in my mind. Soon I will be sucked down as well.
I pull out my phone from a pocket of my jacket, but as I try to remember the emergency number, I realize that talking to a professional about this debacle would end up with me dragged to a psych ward. What else can I do now but abandon Spike down there, to be picked apart by carrion birds and scavengers?
My friend's body convulses. His limbs twitch. Inch by inch, Spike rolls over and retracts his legs. Although chunks of his flesh and bloodied hide are plastered across the pavement, he pushes himself onto his hind hooves and raises his mangled head. As if being pulled by invisible strings, he takes a faltering step, then another and another. While he wheezes out inky blood-foam, and blood gushes out from his wounds like a red rain, my old friend continues shambling down the street into oblivion.
---
Author's note: this chapter concludes the sequence that started back in chapter 43. Plenty of far crazier stuff to come in the 12,500 words of notes left to render.
Tomorrow I'll start a six-workdays-long week. Most if not all of my coworkers will be absent due to a strike. I was going to go to work anyway because I'd rather not get involved with that stuff, but in any case I've been forced to work as the token "guy that needs to be present at the office in case some nasty shit happens". My boss even gave me an official note that states that if I decide to stay home anyway, I would be prosecuted for a criminal liability. I work at a hospital, after all. So tomorrow Monday I'll be on phone duty as well as handling whatever stops working in our hospital complex and in nearby outpatients clinics (we serve like half of the province). Apart from this madness, I'm also the sole technician for next Saturday.
So this may have been the last chapter for a while.
May 14, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 50 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
"Holy shit! Spike! I haven't seen you in ages! Are you alive?!"
Spike grunts as his sleep is shattered by the joyous tone in my voice. I consider tickling his exposed anus to stir him awake, but the horse's long-lashed eyes flutter open. He lifts his cumbersome head off the armrest, and the fleshy ridges of his nostrils quiver as he snorts a gust of snot.
Good thing I didn't dare touch any part of his anatomy; I could have contracted untold plagues.
"It's okay if you're dead," I say.
Spike jerks his body into an upright position, then he lowers his head to wipe the rheum from his eyes with his front hooves. It looks like he's crushing his eyeballs into his skull.
I rest my fists on my waist and I nod approvingly.
"You look good! Your face is getting longer. But dude, you've never stunk worse! Have you passed the time farting up a storm?"
Spike shakes his head vigorously to jumpstart his brain, as if he had been soaking it in a tub of toxic waste. Otherwise he remains silent.
I press my index finger against my nostrils, and I realize my predicament.
"I was supposed to grab a bunch of clothes to store them at my girlfriend's apartment, but how am I going to wash this stench off the fabric?"
Spike glares up at me through his eyelashes. Those moist, black eyeballs reveal a madness as deep as my own.
I'm taken aback by his malice. Can I blame him, though? I must have awoken him during the sweetest part of his slumber: visions of bloodshed and decapitation, of nipples carved out by vile blades, of mares slithering through a pool of entrails.
"I may be dead," Spike grumbles.
"Maybe you're just dreaming that you're dead. Or maybe you're one of those creatures whose hearts have been removed for medical reasons, then replaced by a fake organ made of silicone."
As he taps on the hardwood floor with his right hind hoof, he dilates his nostrils, which are shaped like a fat, upside-down comma, and he takes a deep breath.
I contain a fit of nervous giggles.
"I swear, I must be the most weak-minded human who ever lived. A single afternoon without Jacqueline, and my brain fills her absence with hallucinations. Alright, I may as well take advantage of my derangement!"
I skip to my pile of board games, a collection of colorful cardboard boxes with exotic names: Terraforming Mars, Dead of Winter, Pax Pamir, Viscounts of the West Kingdom, 51st State, Labyrinth, Shadowrun Crossfire, Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, Through the Ages, Twilight Struggle... Their illustrations promise hours of fun, but nearly half of the games remain wrapped in plastic. Except for Renegade, their exposed upper sides are also coated in a layer of dust that resembles lustrous velvet.
"How about this time we get through more than a turn in Renegade? Our old nemesis, Shadowcluster, remains undefeated."
"I'm done playing games with you, Leire," Spike says bleakly.
I was about to lift Renegade's box off the top, but I hear Spike's hind hooves clack on the hardwood floor as he heaves himself off of the couch. When I turn around, a horse-shaped demon is towering over me. His lips are grey and decayed; they must taste like the dried-out meat of a slug. A hot, fetid gust of exhalation blows into my face. It's the stench of a corpse that has been rotting in a well for a century.
"I had expected you to neigh in delight," I say weakly. "You would turn your back on an activity that offers a temporary relief from reality? Are you trying to tell me that you prefer to live in the stupor of insanity?"
I make the mistake of holding Spike's gaze, and I feel myself getting sucked into the frothy whirlpool of his delirium.
"Everything is going to shit," he mutters in a hoarse, guttural voice, "and you are out there having sex."
He must have waited for me in my living room, but these last few days, instead of returning home from work, I escaped my routine to get fucked over and over by the goddess of depravity. I wish that Jacqueline was here.
"W-well, does anything else matter when you're having sex regularly?"
Spike lets out air explosively through his buttery teeth, which causes a gout of drool to squirt from his mouth and splatter on my pile of board games. Wobbly, he staggers back while his horse tail swishes along the floor. His chin drops to his breast, then he closes his eyes as if he were worn out from looking down upon mankind for far too long.
"I guess not, Leire. Sex is the only thing that matters."
Spike averts his gaze; his shoulders are starting to tremble with repressed sobs. He must have been stewing in his insane horse thoughts for days, alone in my dreary apartment.
"You don't understand how one's life changes after Jacqueline has ravaged your body," I say carefully. "She's only been missing from my life for a single afternoon, but it's like trying to breathe after someone has slit my throat."
Spike's lips curl up in a snarl, and his dark nostrils twitch like a dilated asshole. He shakes his girthy head dismissively.
"Don't patronize me, Leire. I know how it feels to be you, I can read your mind. And you are a bad person."
Why can't my brain conjure up hallucinations that wish the best for me? I could have been given visions of a long marriage and a family, but I'm cursed with treachery instead. The mute parts of myself that dwell in the depths of my subconscious must spend their existence pleading silently for me to self-destruct. When will anyone apart from Jacqueline treat me as if I deserved to feel good from time to time?
"Yes, I've done bad things, I know," I say icily. "I'm a bad person. But, Spike, isn't it true that we all do bad things sometimes? I don't think it matters whether we're good or bad as long as we do our best to be happy with whatever little time we've been granted by our fickle universe. That's why I'm trying to get my life together and have fun while I can."
"Yeah, that's a bunch of horseshit," Spike snaps. "You're so obsessed with pleasure, you live like a child."
My teeth clack in frustration. I'm tired of this horse's bizarre behavior. I'm tired of waiting to feel Jacqueline's arms around me again.
"For your information, I was the one who asked Jacqueline out on a date. I was masturbating in bed when I came out with the idea, so I called her! Would a child dare to do that? Would a child want to spend time with someone they love on their own terms, or would they want to live a life that's completely based on their parents' whims? And you probably want to sabotage my sex life to steal my turn at the board games!"
The old, cracked horse merely stands there as he breathes into my face like a toxic bag of spoiled roadkill.
"No, you're wrong, Leire," he whispers. "You are like a child because you've never been loved."
His acid words seethe through my brain and clench my heart. I'm the daughter of a man who shat me out in jail after another inmate fist-fucked him. When he died, I was thrown into a dumpster on a snowy night. I believed I would perish to pay for the sins of my father, but instead I was scooped out of the dumpster by a crackhead who first tried to snort me and then took me home. This woman, who insisted that I called her mom, was too strung out to care for me, so I was left alone to fend for myself from the age of seven. A couple of years later, mom was murdered by a cop who found her dealing drugs. My father, my mother, both dead from stupidity, sin, or the ravages of this insane planet. After a year of living in squalor, I was passed around to different foster families. One of my new sisters beat the shit out of me whenever I wanted something, so I hid in my assigned closet and masturbated. I became addicted to it because it took away the pain. Another foster family threw me out after I ate the last slice of a chocolate cake. By the age of thirteen I was sleeping in the hallways of a psychiatric ward because I'd become convinced that I was a ghost. My only friend was a psychotic squirrel that hoarded nuts in a cardboard box.
In truth, I've forgotten most of the details that would allow me to understand who I am. I only remember how it feels to have love taken away, to be hungry for it, to yearn for it, to cry in vain for it. I was abandoned. I can't forgive them for failing to take care of me. And now I'm being condemned by a horse.
I feel like a scab, oozing blood and pus for all to see. No wonder I'm a reckless woman who's never had the ability to take responsibility for anyone, even herself. I've only had one true love in my life, and that's Jacqueline. She's my mommy and my lover and my closest friend. Without her, I would revert to my natural state as a lab experiment who shouldn't have been.
---
Author's note: it has taken me about a week to work through this scene, because I couldn't get it to flow right. I ended up splitting the scene into three parts; this is the second one, and I may be able to finish the third one tomorrow.
The issue is that I'm working full-time. I have never been able to concentrate properly at work to write, because I'm surrounded by technicians and the general chaos of working at a hospital, and besides, writing is something you need to do alone. However, whenever I'm working the morning shift, I can only write for about two or two and a half hours in the afternoon, but I tend to be so exhausted, mentally drained from merely being around human beings for hours upon hours, that I can end up dreading the act of writing; getting through any sentence may involve wrenching the words out of myself. As expected, it took me waking up at eight in the morning on a Saturday, and spending most of the day on my writing, to finally shape this thing.
For me, writing is as physiologically necessary as sleeping. I need to write to stave off the tide of meaninglessness that the rest of reality forces me to sink in. I never know if the next period of depression is going to catch me at my lowest. So I'm dreading the day when I finally end up with a permanent contract at my job or any other, which would also pile up more responsibilities on me.
Anyway, I've been feeling the itch to play board games. Every day of this week, right after dinner, I've grabbed one of my game boxes and I've had a good ol' time. Yesterday was Viscounts of the West Kingdom, and tonight Marvel Champions. I'm also waiting to get back to Arkham Horror; they've changed their distribution method, and they'll release a whole expansion box with an entire campaign based upon Lovecraft's story 'At the Mountains of Madness' (link to the expansion's page at the BGG). The fuckers used to sell each campaign mission individually, which ended up making the campaigns much more episodic because they couldn't rely on the player having any of the other cards.
So yes, Leire is into board games because I'm into board games. She's also into other stuff because I'm into that other stuff. Here's a secret, though: her urge to masturbate is my urge to write. Mostly. But writing about writers is fucking lame.
---
"Holy shit! Spike! I haven't seen you in ages! Are you alive?!"
Spike grunts as his sleep is shattered by the joyous tone in my voice. I consider tickling his exposed anus to stir him awake, but the horse's long-lashed eyes flutter open. He lifts his cumbersome head off the armrest, and the fleshy ridges of his nostrils quiver as he snorts a gust of snot.
Good thing I didn't dare touch any part of his anatomy; I could have contracted untold plagues.
"It's okay if you're dead," I say.
Spike jerks his body into an upright position, then he lowers his head to wipe the rheum from his eyes with his front hooves. It looks like he's crushing his eyeballs into his skull.
I rest my fists on my waist and I nod approvingly.
"You look good! Your face is getting longer. But dude, you've never stunk worse! Have you passed the time farting up a storm?"
Spike shakes his head vigorously to jumpstart his brain, as if he had been soaking it in a tub of toxic waste. Otherwise he remains silent.
I press my index finger against my nostrils, and I realize my predicament.
"I was supposed to grab a bunch of clothes to store them at my girlfriend's apartment, but how am I going to wash this stench off the fabric?"
Spike glares up at me through his eyelashes. Those moist, black eyeballs reveal a madness as deep as my own.
I'm taken aback by his malice. Can I blame him, though? I must have awoken him during the sweetest part of his slumber: visions of bloodshed and decapitation, of nipples carved out by vile blades, of mares slithering through a pool of entrails.
"I may be dead," Spike grumbles.
"Maybe you're just dreaming that you're dead. Or maybe you're one of those creatures whose hearts have been removed for medical reasons, then replaced by a fake organ made of silicone."
As he taps on the hardwood floor with his right hind hoof, he dilates his nostrils, which are shaped like a fat, upside-down comma, and he takes a deep breath.
I contain a fit of nervous giggles.
"I swear, I must be the most weak-minded human who ever lived. A single afternoon without Jacqueline, and my brain fills her absence with hallucinations. Alright, I may as well take advantage of my derangement!"
I skip to my pile of board games, a collection of colorful cardboard boxes with exotic names: Terraforming Mars, Dead of Winter, Pax Pamir, Viscounts of the West Kingdom, 51st State, Labyrinth, Shadowrun Crossfire, Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, Through the Ages, Twilight Struggle... Their illustrations promise hours of fun, but nearly half of the games remain wrapped in plastic. Except for Renegade, their exposed upper sides are also coated in a layer of dust that resembles lustrous velvet.
"How about this time we get through more than a turn in Renegade? Our old nemesis, Shadowcluster, remains undefeated."
"I'm done playing games with you, Leire," Spike says bleakly.
I was about to lift Renegade's box off the top, but I hear Spike's hind hooves clack on the hardwood floor as he heaves himself off of the couch. When I turn around, a horse-shaped demon is towering over me. His lips are grey and decayed; they must taste like the dried-out meat of a slug. A hot, fetid gust of exhalation blows into my face. It's the stench of a corpse that has been rotting in a well for a century.
"I had expected you to neigh in delight," I say weakly. "You would turn your back on an activity that offers a temporary relief from reality? Are you trying to tell me that you prefer to live in the stupor of insanity?"
I make the mistake of holding Spike's gaze, and I feel myself getting sucked into the frothy whirlpool of his delirium.
"Everything is going to shit," he mutters in a hoarse, guttural voice, "and you are out there having sex."
He must have waited for me in my living room, but these last few days, instead of returning home from work, I escaped my routine to get fucked over and over by the goddess of depravity. I wish that Jacqueline was here.
"W-well, does anything else matter when you're having sex regularly?"
Spike lets out air explosively through his buttery teeth, which causes a gout of drool to squirt from his mouth and splatter on my pile of board games. Wobbly, he staggers back while his horse tail swishes along the floor. His chin drops to his breast, then he closes his eyes as if he were worn out from looking down upon mankind for far too long.
"I guess not, Leire. Sex is the only thing that matters."
Spike averts his gaze; his shoulders are starting to tremble with repressed sobs. He must have been stewing in his insane horse thoughts for days, alone in my dreary apartment.
"You don't understand how one's life changes after Jacqueline has ravaged your body," I say carefully. "She's only been missing from my life for a single afternoon, but it's like trying to breathe after someone has slit my throat."
Spike's lips curl up in a snarl, and his dark nostrils twitch like a dilated asshole. He shakes his girthy head dismissively.
"Don't patronize me, Leire. I know how it feels to be you, I can read your mind. And you are a bad person."
Why can't my brain conjure up hallucinations that wish the best for me? I could have been given visions of a long marriage and a family, but I'm cursed with treachery instead. The mute parts of myself that dwell in the depths of my subconscious must spend their existence pleading silently for me to self-destruct. When will anyone apart from Jacqueline treat me as if I deserved to feel good from time to time?
"Yes, I've done bad things, I know," I say icily. "I'm a bad person. But, Spike, isn't it true that we all do bad things sometimes? I don't think it matters whether we're good or bad as long as we do our best to be happy with whatever little time we've been granted by our fickle universe. That's why I'm trying to get my life together and have fun while I can."
"Yeah, that's a bunch of horseshit," Spike snaps. "You're so obsessed with pleasure, you live like a child."
My teeth clack in frustration. I'm tired of this horse's bizarre behavior. I'm tired of waiting to feel Jacqueline's arms around me again.
"For your information, I was the one who asked Jacqueline out on a date. I was masturbating in bed when I came out with the idea, so I called her! Would a child dare to do that? Would a child want to spend time with someone they love on their own terms, or would they want to live a life that's completely based on their parents' whims? And you probably want to sabotage my sex life to steal my turn at the board games!"
The old, cracked horse merely stands there as he breathes into my face like a toxic bag of spoiled roadkill.
"No, you're wrong, Leire," he whispers. "You are like a child because you've never been loved."
His acid words seethe through my brain and clench my heart. I'm the daughter of a man who shat me out in jail after another inmate fist-fucked him. When he died, I was thrown into a dumpster on a snowy night. I believed I would perish to pay for the sins of my father, but instead I was scooped out of the dumpster by a crackhead who first tried to snort me and then took me home. This woman, who insisted that I called her mom, was too strung out to care for me, so I was left alone to fend for myself from the age of seven. A couple of years later, mom was murdered by a cop who found her dealing drugs. My father, my mother, both dead from stupidity, sin, or the ravages of this insane planet. After a year of living in squalor, I was passed around to different foster families. One of my new sisters beat the shit out of me whenever I wanted something, so I hid in my assigned closet and masturbated. I became addicted to it because it took away the pain. Another foster family threw me out after I ate the last slice of a chocolate cake. By the age of thirteen I was sleeping in the hallways of a psychiatric ward because I'd become convinced that I was a ghost. My only friend was a psychotic squirrel that hoarded nuts in a cardboard box.
In truth, I've forgotten most of the details that would allow me to understand who I am. I only remember how it feels to have love taken away, to be hungry for it, to yearn for it, to cry in vain for it. I was abandoned. I can't forgive them for failing to take care of me. And now I'm being condemned by a horse.
I feel like a scab, oozing blood and pus for all to see. No wonder I'm a reckless woman who's never had the ability to take responsibility for anyone, even herself. I've only had one true love in my life, and that's Jacqueline. She's my mommy and my lover and my closest friend. Without her, I would revert to my natural state as a lab experiment who shouldn't have been.
---
Author's note: it has taken me about a week to work through this scene, because I couldn't get it to flow right. I ended up splitting the scene into three parts; this is the second one, and I may be able to finish the third one tomorrow.
The issue is that I'm working full-time. I have never been able to concentrate properly at work to write, because I'm surrounded by technicians and the general chaos of working at a hospital, and besides, writing is something you need to do alone. However, whenever I'm working the morning shift, I can only write for about two or two and a half hours in the afternoon, but I tend to be so exhausted, mentally drained from merely being around human beings for hours upon hours, that I can end up dreading the act of writing; getting through any sentence may involve wrenching the words out of myself. As expected, it took me waking up at eight in the morning on a Saturday, and spending most of the day on my writing, to finally shape this thing.
For me, writing is as physiologically necessary as sleeping. I need to write to stave off the tide of meaninglessness that the rest of reality forces me to sink in. I never know if the next period of depression is going to catch me at my lowest. So I'm dreading the day when I finally end up with a permanent contract at my job or any other, which would also pile up more responsibilities on me.
Anyway, I've been feeling the itch to play board games. Every day of this week, right after dinner, I've grabbed one of my game boxes and I've had a good ol' time. Yesterday was Viscounts of the West Kingdom, and tonight Marvel Champions. I'm also waiting to get back to Arkham Horror; they've changed their distribution method, and they'll release a whole expansion box with an entire campaign based upon Lovecraft's story 'At the Mountains of Madness' (link to the expansion's page at the BGG). The fuckers used to sell each campaign mission individually, which ended up making the campaigns much more episodic because they couldn't rely on the player having any of the other cards.
So yes, Leire is into board games because I'm into board games. She's also into other stuff because I'm into that other stuff. Here's a secret, though: her urge to masturbate is my urge to write. Mostly. But writing about writers is fucking lame.
May 9, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 49 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The stench of rotten eggs has blocked my nose, and an acidic taste lingers in my throat. Instead of standing in the pitch-black corridor, I should be lying on the floor and vomiting my guts out.
I grope blindly for the light switch, sliding my fingertips over the bumpy wallpaper. I locate a smooth, familiar shape. As my hand hovers over the switch, my heartbeat pulsates in my throat. A thousand shades of darkness await me on the other side of the beam of illumination.
During my absence, my apartment must have gotten infested with pests, mutated ones that grew resistant to bug spray. If I had been cursed with rats, I could learn to cohabitate with them. Although they would feast on my furniture, scratch my monitor's screen with their claws, and make the crumbling plaster crackle as they gnawed through the walls, I could come to love those tiny, long-whisked furries. They would lie on my lap while I petted their fuzzy bellies. I would let them suckle from my bosom. I would take care of their offspring until they learned to fend for themselves. My biggest threat would consist in sleeping with my mouth open, as I may end up choking on a rat.
When I was younger and stupider, I used to dream about being a cat. I would cuddle up with a warm blanket and sleep at my leisure. My claws would dig into the hardwood floor while I basked in the sunlight. I would hide away in dark crevices. I would slink through tall grass in search of prey to kill and devour. Whenever anyone approached my hideout, I would hiss at them and spray them with a ferocious flow of piss. But I have grown old and wise. My eyes burn and my hands shake. I wish that I had never returned to my apartment.
What if I flip the light on and discover that swarms of invertebrates have overrun every corner of my abode? Dozens of cockroaches, those love children of giant beetles and flies, are clinging to the wallpaper of the corridor; they are scrunching themselves together as if intending to coalesce into a single exoskeleton. The floor is covered by a carpet of centipede corpses, their gray bodies bent at awkward angles from the holes they drilled into their own carapaces to escape into oblivion. The toilet bowl is coated with a layer of slimy slugs. The bathtub is festering with bluebottles that must have laid their eggs before they drowned in the mildew-ridden water. A lone scorpion scurries out of the bathroom, its stinger raised in the air. The desiccated carcass of a cat-sized tarantula is sprawled over the kitchen counter, and the penny-colored paste that the critter contained has seeped down the drawers. The bedroom has turned into a nest of spiderwebs, living tissue of sticky gossamer strands, and thousands of arachnids are crawling over my sheets as their eyes flash like alien stars. In my wardrobe, clusters of wasps are feasting on my hoodies and sweaters. At least a dozen ants are marching across the hardwood floor towards some unknown destination. Once the horde of invaders sniffs out my disdain, they will throng to my frame and burrow into my flesh in droves. The scurrying arachnids will embed their legs in my bones, and my hair will become a mass of cockroach antennae.
My limbs are turning into wings, my fingertips and toenails are growing into scythes. I hate insects and arachnids, and I'm sure I'm despised by them. As the only exception, a female praying mantis is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth; she looks like an artist's rendition of an angel, with her translucent wings and those bulging eyes that resemble fern green gems. Otherwise, I never learned to like the creatures that I find horrifyingly disgusting.
As a child, I witnessed my mother transform into a black widow spider. She had consumed a bowlful of canned peaches, and she was lying on her bed. Her abdomen swelled until it split open, revealing her viscera and a single black egg as big as a pigeon. It hatched: a huge black widow crawled out of the eggshell, then it sprang at me. Its fangs poked into my skin and broke through my sternum and sank into my heart. The venom erased every good memory, and although I continued to live, I forever wished I hadn't.
I've hesitated in this opaque darkness for so long that the world may have ended. I shake my head as if I could dislodge all the filth from my mind, and I steel myself for the upcoming war between insects and a human. As soon as I find a machete, or maybe a hammer, I'll manage to massacre any number of creepy-crawlies.
When I flick the light switch on, the corridor gets filled with light as if a flashbang had burst into it. I squint my eyes at the glaring brightness, and when they adjust, the illumination provided by a single flyspecked lamp reveals a hellscape: my apartment. Instead of an insectoid invasion, I find myself facing the eggnog yellow wallpaper. It drags me back to an era during which people believed in a future of prosperity and plentiful sex; if they had envisioned our harrowing present crammed with vermin, they would have chosen different colors for their walls.
As I rub my gummed-up eyes to recover from the assault of light, I hear a muffled rumbling that comes from the living room: the snoring of some hibernating beast. I totter towards the source, tracking the noise as well as the stench of festering flesh.
I peek into the living room. The moonlight pouring through the window traces the contours of the room's bleak contents: the haphazard pile of board games that occupies the gap in the middle of a birch wood cabinet, and two empty ramen cups I left on the coffee table. A boulder of meat and bones is lying across the sofa, snoring heavily as it dreams of slaughter.
Some foe of mine must have discovered my terror of whales, and has heaved the beached carcass of one of those fiends of the deep into my apartment. My enemy may have timed the build-up of gases inside the bloated corpse so it would reach its peak at the moment of my entrance. The blast will obliterate me in a Big Bang of entrails.
My heart is a drum about to burst, but I shan't face my death in the dark. I flip the light switch on.
The bulky mass of a sleeping horse has occupied my sofa. Its malformed skull has caused its eyes to protrude as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, and its long, droopy ears look like they're melting. The muzzle is drooling mucous saliva onto an oily puddle on the hardwood floor, maybe due to the phlegm this beast accumulated from gobbling up my rotten foodstuffs. The strands of hair of its shaggy mane seem clotted with mud and blood. Its forelegs are retracted and atrophied as if evolution had forgotten to uproot them from its torso. His horse dick and balls have been removed and replaced by a jagged scar like a sword wound.
Although the living room stinks as if I had dived into a full dumpster that everyone forgot for a decade, and any glimpse of this horse-mongrel would suggest he has escaped from a nightmare, I loosen the grip on my nostrils and grin like a child. Only one castrated horse that I know would cloister himself in my apartment: my personal equine stalker, Spike.
---
Author's note: this is just half of the scene I'm working on, maybe even less, but I won't be able to write at all tomorrow.
Spike's last appearance was back in November of last year, precisely on the 20th chapter of this idiotic tale. At least that's the last I remember of the guy.
I have kept track of word counts. This novel is already about 125,000 words long, and it will easily go as high as 160,000. It's a good thing that I will only release it as an ebook that nobody will buy; if I bothered to produce the physical edition, like I did for a couple of books I wrote in Spanish like four years ago, I would hate to carry such a brick around.
I'm on phone duty this whole week, and my next week is six workdays long. I hate it all.
---
The stench of rotten eggs has blocked my nose, and an acidic taste lingers in my throat. Instead of standing in the pitch-black corridor, I should be lying on the floor and vomiting my guts out.
I grope blindly for the light switch, sliding my fingertips over the bumpy wallpaper. I locate a smooth, familiar shape. As my hand hovers over the switch, my heartbeat pulsates in my throat. A thousand shades of darkness await me on the other side of the beam of illumination.
During my absence, my apartment must have gotten infested with pests, mutated ones that grew resistant to bug spray. If I had been cursed with rats, I could learn to cohabitate with them. Although they would feast on my furniture, scratch my monitor's screen with their claws, and make the crumbling plaster crackle as they gnawed through the walls, I could come to love those tiny, long-whisked furries. They would lie on my lap while I petted their fuzzy bellies. I would let them suckle from my bosom. I would take care of their offspring until they learned to fend for themselves. My biggest threat would consist in sleeping with my mouth open, as I may end up choking on a rat.
When I was younger and stupider, I used to dream about being a cat. I would cuddle up with a warm blanket and sleep at my leisure. My claws would dig into the hardwood floor while I basked in the sunlight. I would hide away in dark crevices. I would slink through tall grass in search of prey to kill and devour. Whenever anyone approached my hideout, I would hiss at them and spray them with a ferocious flow of piss. But I have grown old and wise. My eyes burn and my hands shake. I wish that I had never returned to my apartment.
What if I flip the light on and discover that swarms of invertebrates have overrun every corner of my abode? Dozens of cockroaches, those love children of giant beetles and flies, are clinging to the wallpaper of the corridor; they are scrunching themselves together as if intending to coalesce into a single exoskeleton. The floor is covered by a carpet of centipede corpses, their gray bodies bent at awkward angles from the holes they drilled into their own carapaces to escape into oblivion. The toilet bowl is coated with a layer of slimy slugs. The bathtub is festering with bluebottles that must have laid their eggs before they drowned in the mildew-ridden water. A lone scorpion scurries out of the bathroom, its stinger raised in the air. The desiccated carcass of a cat-sized tarantula is sprawled over the kitchen counter, and the penny-colored paste that the critter contained has seeped down the drawers. The bedroom has turned into a nest of spiderwebs, living tissue of sticky gossamer strands, and thousands of arachnids are crawling over my sheets as their eyes flash like alien stars. In my wardrobe, clusters of wasps are feasting on my hoodies and sweaters. At least a dozen ants are marching across the hardwood floor towards some unknown destination. Once the horde of invaders sniffs out my disdain, they will throng to my frame and burrow into my flesh in droves. The scurrying arachnids will embed their legs in my bones, and my hair will become a mass of cockroach antennae.
My limbs are turning into wings, my fingertips and toenails are growing into scythes. I hate insects and arachnids, and I'm sure I'm despised by them. As the only exception, a female praying mantis is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth; she looks like an artist's rendition of an angel, with her translucent wings and those bulging eyes that resemble fern green gems. Otherwise, I never learned to like the creatures that I find horrifyingly disgusting.
As a child, I witnessed my mother transform into a black widow spider. She had consumed a bowlful of canned peaches, and she was lying on her bed. Her abdomen swelled until it split open, revealing her viscera and a single black egg as big as a pigeon. It hatched: a huge black widow crawled out of the eggshell, then it sprang at me. Its fangs poked into my skin and broke through my sternum and sank into my heart. The venom erased every good memory, and although I continued to live, I forever wished I hadn't.
I've hesitated in this opaque darkness for so long that the world may have ended. I shake my head as if I could dislodge all the filth from my mind, and I steel myself for the upcoming war between insects and a human. As soon as I find a machete, or maybe a hammer, I'll manage to massacre any number of creepy-crawlies.
When I flick the light switch on, the corridor gets filled with light as if a flashbang had burst into it. I squint my eyes at the glaring brightness, and when they adjust, the illumination provided by a single flyspecked lamp reveals a hellscape: my apartment. Instead of an insectoid invasion, I find myself facing the eggnog yellow wallpaper. It drags me back to an era during which people believed in a future of prosperity and plentiful sex; if they had envisioned our harrowing present crammed with vermin, they would have chosen different colors for their walls.
As I rub my gummed-up eyes to recover from the assault of light, I hear a muffled rumbling that comes from the living room: the snoring of some hibernating beast. I totter towards the source, tracking the noise as well as the stench of festering flesh.
I peek into the living room. The moonlight pouring through the window traces the contours of the room's bleak contents: the haphazard pile of board games that occupies the gap in the middle of a birch wood cabinet, and two empty ramen cups I left on the coffee table. A boulder of meat and bones is lying across the sofa, snoring heavily as it dreams of slaughter.
Some foe of mine must have discovered my terror of whales, and has heaved the beached carcass of one of those fiends of the deep into my apartment. My enemy may have timed the build-up of gases inside the bloated corpse so it would reach its peak at the moment of my entrance. The blast will obliterate me in a Big Bang of entrails.
My heart is a drum about to burst, but I shan't face my death in the dark. I flip the light switch on.
The bulky mass of a sleeping horse has occupied my sofa. Its malformed skull has caused its eyes to protrude as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, and its long, droopy ears look like they're melting. The muzzle is drooling mucous saliva onto an oily puddle on the hardwood floor, maybe due to the phlegm this beast accumulated from gobbling up my rotten foodstuffs. The strands of hair of its shaggy mane seem clotted with mud and blood. Its forelegs are retracted and atrophied as if evolution had forgotten to uproot them from its torso. His horse dick and balls have been removed and replaced by a jagged scar like a sword wound.
Although the living room stinks as if I had dived into a full dumpster that everyone forgot for a decade, and any glimpse of this horse-mongrel would suggest he has escaped from a nightmare, I loosen the grip on my nostrils and grin like a child. Only one castrated horse that I know would cloister himself in my apartment: my personal equine stalker, Spike.
---
Author's note: this is just half of the scene I'm working on, maybe even less, but I won't be able to write at all tomorrow.
Spike's last appearance was back in November of last year, precisely on the 20th chapter of this idiotic tale. At least that's the last I remember of the guy.
I have kept track of word counts. This novel is already about 125,000 words long, and it will easily go as high as 160,000. It's a good thing that I will only release it as an ebook that nobody will buy; if I bothered to produce the physical edition, like I did for a couple of books I wrote in Spanish like four years ago, I would hate to carry such a brick around.
I'm on phone duty this whole week, and my next week is six workdays long. I hate it all.
May 6, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 48 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
The scrolling, corn yellow text of the LED screen displays the word 'station' in Basque, in Spanish, in French, and in English. We are approaching Gaintxurizketa, but I must take the screen's word for it: the world outside has drowned in a coal-colored blackness. I discern the faint shapes of skeletal trees.
Seated opposite me, a woman in her early forties, who's sporting a few grey hairs and wearing a duffle coat over a turtleneck sweater, has crossed her arms and hidden her eyes with sunglasses to doze off, although a reprobate slumped near the exit door, of whom I can only see the shaved head, is blasting reggaeton through his phone's speakers. Even this late, most of the seats are occupied; the train must pick up those that work the afternoon shift.
Inside this container with plasticky, frost white walls and bent grab poles that reflect the artificial light, the passengers look drained and dazed as if they were woken up in the middle of the night for an adventure. However, a nearby trio of college-aged girls have been babbling for half of the trip. The only one seated facing me whom I can see fully is wearing a loose sweater and ripped skinny jeans. The artificial light dances in her long, neartly parted, chestnut brown hair. She's flaunting the lively eyes and the easygoing smile of those too young to realize that the world is aching to spear us through the heart. People like her represent temporary smudges on the canvas of reality, dirty little stains of light, but they brighten up this otherwise cold wasteland.
The girl's gaze locks on mine, and her smile wanes as if I had offered her a front row seat to watch a stranger lose her mind. After she shifts her weight, she leans towards her friend and speaks in a hushed tone, but she has miscalculated the volume, because I understood her: she mentioned that I look sick. Soon enough I'll have to tune out the whispers of my fellow passengers.
I am sick, though. Sick at heart and sick to the bone. This world has drained all color from me, and I'm growing more fragile every day. I'm a cracked critter who was already crumbling before she boarded this train of madness. I wish I had gotten accustomed to a steady diet of psilocybin and psilocin, but instead I'm haunted by otherworldly visions synthesized by my brain as it slides slowly down the event horizon of a black hole.
I want to lean back in this rigid seat, shut my eyes and feel how the living nightmare recedes into a dull throb. However, only the naïve expose their unconscious self to these human beasts. I take a deep breath and focus on the isolated light sources that zip past our train in the encroaching darkness.
Such rides used to make me envious of the lives I came across. I would have loved to lose myself in the colors that played in so many strangers' irises, to figure out what strange beauty lit them up. On many nights I wished that someone would lean close to me and whisper magical words into my ear while the train rocked back and forth with its steady motion, but instead I suffered the unrelenting screams of my own mind. I wanted to grab strangers and shout that I love them, that they shouldn't feel bad because they're alive, that I should be the one to disappear instead.
Thankfully, now that I've tasted Jacqueline, all other human beings become blurs in my peripheral vision. Their faces feature two dots where eyes should reside. Their mouths are uninviting voids. When they speak, their words sound like a hollow mockery of human speech.
Nobody, nothing can compete with my depraved queen. I need the touch of her fingers as they comb through my hair, I need the pain of her nails digging into my back while I grind myself against her warm anatomy. When she kisses me I feel a taste of the end of all things, like a cup of bitter, caustic liquid that if I drank it I would turn into a black bird. I'd commit any evil to make love to her again.
Blood rushes to my pussy, bathing it in a velvety tide, as my genitals pulsate to the beat of my jittery heart. I yearn for mommy to rub out with her wicked, wet tongue every one of my worries, blanking my mind and memories like those of a newborn baby. My right hand trembles as it struggles to overcome my resistance; if I let go, it will grip my sex in a vice-like hold.
I press my knees together and rub my thighs against each other. I should give in to my urges. Why would these public transports vibrate and sway seductively except to seduce perverts into pulling down their trousers and relieving their tension on the spot? People only reveal their true nature while naked from the waist down and molesting themselves. Those who would resent your public display of self-love weren't meant to stick around, and who knows, through your bravery you might find the unique souls who would cherish your true self.
I bet that if the sapped office worker seated opposite me, whom life has worn down to the extent that she naps on the train, awoke to find my trousers and panties bunched up around my ankles, and me lost in the throes of lust as my oiled fingers polished my throbbing clit, her heart would flutter like a hummingbird's wings. While the wheels of the train clacked against the track in an ethereal hymn, she would gawk at the spectacle and slowly remove her sunglasses. Inch by inch, a child-like smile would crack the mask glued to her face that had helped her endure an everlasting routine of stress and disappointment. Once the mask shattered she would burst into hysterical giggles, which would make her breasts jiggle like two pudding cups filled with caramel. Having witnessed someone escaping the suffocating walls of a cage, the office worker's soul would flare up as if she were born anew. While the juices bubbled out of my groin, I would grin back, tightening the string of saliva that linked my mouth to my crotch. I would rejoice in the knowledge that thanks to my bravery, someone else's heart warmed up in such a hibernal night.
I'm freeing the top button of my trousers when a recorded voice announces that we are arriving to Irún. On our right, past some leafy greenery, the working-class apartment buildings of López de Becerra street, with laundry draped over the balcony railings, loom ominously, sending the first signal that those witless enough to seek residence in this city will soon find themselves like critters that have fallen into a septic tank, helplessly flailing their limbs in the slurry to avoid drowning in shit.
I wipe my forehead. I'm dripping with desire; I must reek of sweaty vagina. I shove my right hand in the pocket of my corduroy jacket to caress the casing of the external hard drive. I can bask in the knowledge that tonight I'll plug the drive into my computer, lie in bed and diddle myself at my leisure as I enjoy a nostalgic look back at our encounters.
Once I disembark at the platform along with the rest of the damned, I hurry up the stairs to reach the Colón promenade. The cold wind that was blowing in Donostia has followed me over here, seeking refuge under my clothes. My bowels are rumbling, my limbs feel heavy as stone slabs, my breasts seem to have lost a cup-sized chunk of flesh. I steel myself for the eight minutes long walk to my apartment, during which I'll need to elude thugs, drunks and other vermin, sights more revolting than any slimy blob lurking at the entrance of my office building.
After I cross the bridge over the railways, I venture through a sidewalk in which only two people can walk abreast. A pigeon lands on the pavement next to me, and the street lights glimmer in the bird's eyes as if it intended to make conversation with a friend. I hurry past darkened apartment buildings like mausoleums where the living are entombed. I scurry across the cracked pavements and narrow roads. I'm a mouse sneaking around a maze of underground chambers, afraid of being spotted by some sinister vagrant. I'm shaken by an urge to pull down my trousers and hump some rusty lamp post until the skin of my vulva peels off. In the infinite blackness above, the moon's craters are crammed with trash and corpses.
I pass the dirty brick wall of the Uranzu market as well as the homeless men that roam around it like a pack of stray dogs. When I lift my gaze, I certify that the cinnamon brown building I chose to inhabit still stands at the end of the street in its grimy, monstrous glory, although one of these days it will collapse under the weight of its own decrepitude like some gargantuan stalagmite.
While I make a beeline for the front door, a lanky familiar figure exits the building: a neighbor in his early fifties who looks like a grey-haired teenager. He's lugging bulging garbage bags to deposit them in the container across the road.
I've spotted this guy dozens of times when I returned from my self-imposed overtimes, because he made a habit of throwing out the trash at night. He should consider throwing out his clothes as well. He must have been present during the few tenant meetings I dared to attend, although I wouldn't have retained anyone's face from the terrified glances I shot at the gathered beasts with whom I'm forced to share this hovel.
As the guy passes me by, he pierces my face with his gaze.
"Hello, hello," he says.
I lower my head and nod. I pull the keys from my pocket, but when I reach with my free hand to grab the handle of the front door, I find myself holding air. Only the escutcheon remains, as if the handle had been unscrewed. Stunned, I gape at the absence.
I'm suddenly sniped by a memory: my mother is fumbling with a handful of keys to open the front door of our old apartment. She's swaying from side to side. Her jacket is half off and her skirt is hiked up to her hips, exposing her knickers. She smells of piss and sour milk. I'm dancing around her while I laugh and repeat, "The lock's busted! The lock's busted!"
My lanky neighbor has returned from his nightly mission and is standing nearby, trying to get my attention. I step aside and shoot him a wary glance in case he wants to persuade me to get naked. I'm in no mood for a session of sex on demand from any brute.
"Someone stole it," he says in a resigned tone.
"H-huh?"
"The door handle. Someone stole the damn thing."
I narrow my shoulders and tremble at having to interact with this creature.
"Well, I didn't do it," I mumble.
The guy chuckles nervously; his crooked smile suggests that he can't tell if I was joking.
"I wasn't accusing you. I know none of us did it."
"Who on earth would steal a door handle?"
The guy smacks his lips and shakes his head.
"Oh, don't get me started. They do it for the same reason they steal copper wire, copper pipes... Unfortunately some local fence must be buying that stuff from the thieves."
A black market for door handles. I'm living through the apocalypse.
"Wh-what should I do?"
My neighbor draws his head back, then he lets out a bitter chuckle.
"You? What the hell can any of us do? Call the cops?"
The city that welcomed the disaster of my birth has decided to add yet another torture to my life.
"I should start sleeping with a knife under my pillow," I utter gravely.
"Good luck! If you defend yourself, you'll end up in jail."
I shudder.
"You're right. If I had a knife, I would cut my own throat."
My neighbor wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket.
"Have you heard that a couple of nights ago two men broke into an apartment in Lekaenea street?"
I picture the scene: the victim had just moved into the block, and he had yet to buy most furniture and knick-knacks. The thugs failed to find any valuables apart from underwear, so they went into his kitchen and ate a couple of olives and a baguette. Then they set fire to his fridge.
The guy nods at my puzzlement.
"The police arrested them only to make a report, and thirty minutes later the criminals were caught trying to break into another apartment!"
"I hope nobody died in the fire."
"I swear, this city is turning into a war zone. Let's hope that those responsible also end up disappearing, if you know what I mean!"
Against my better judgement, I must empathize with one of these humans when they peer through the façade of society and flinch in disgust at the festering rot that hid beneath.
"These streets have degenerated into anthills, and any wrong step will make us slide down their insectoid nightmare."
My neighbor knits his brow and squints as if his brain had gotten stuck processing my words.
"They are working you to the bone, aren't they?" he says carefully. "I hope you get some rest."
My fingers tremble as I tighten my fist around the key ring. Why do these strangers care about whether I have a good weekend or rest enough? I'm a lost soul in a sea of wickedness, and nobody on earth can reach me. I've spent most of my life wishing that I could sink into the ground and disappear. If the sight of my worn-out self bothers any human being, they should pretend I never existed.
"I suppose that I'll sleep at least a couple of hours," I mutter icily.
I unlock the front door. The absence of a handle weighs me down as I push my way in. The lights of the hallway switch on automatically and shine mercilessly at me, as if they had been expecting this chance. I wish that my neighbor had waited until I disappeared out of sight to enter the building himself, but his footsteps are following me. The guy says goodbye. I mumble incoherently over my shoulder. At least he takes the elevator instead of ogling my ass as I drag myself up the stairs.
Now that my neighbor has retreated to his garbage-filled world, I must focus on the task at hand. I'll need to fill a backpack with enough changes of clothes for a couple of weeks, but tomorrow I'll meet with my beloved for our date, and it shouldn't seem like I'm moving into her apartment. There, Jacqueline and I will talk for hours, we will shower together, we will sleep in the same bed. I will stay away from this hellhole for days at a time. However, my body feels like it's been beaten up, so for the rest of the night I'll just grab a snack and masturbate myself to sleep.
When I reach the landing to my apartment, I trudge until my tingling fingertips touch the door that separates the outside world from my sombre shelter. I rub my eyes and try to shake off my lethargy.
Why do I push myself so much? I must believe that I deserve to spend my limited life depleted, or maybe I'm doing myself a favor; who knows what illusory maelstroms my mind would weave if left to its own devising while healthy and invigorated?
I shove the door open, scoot inside, then close it with my ass. As I stand in the pitch-black corridor, I'd prefer to imagine that I'm floating in the void of space, but this mustiness reminds me of a crypt.
I make the mistake of taking a deep breath; a putrid stench assaults my nose and spreads in my head like some deadly neurotoxin. I cough, then gag on the acrid air.
When the coughing subsides and the bitter taste of vomit lingers in my mouth, I resort to pinching my nose closed. Has someone broken into my dreary sanctuary to kill themselves, and their abandoned carcass has been rotting for days?
---
I’ve been recalled to work, this time until September, potentially longer. Except for my bank account, this development represents a disaster. I revise every scene over and over until I turn each of them into an experience, a process that takes me many hours. When I’m working a morning shift, which will be the case for the rest of this month, I can only devote at the most two hours and a half to writing in the afternoons, and that’s assuming that I don’t find myself so drained after the meaningless toil that I'll want to doze off the moment I sit down. And assuming that I don't end up swamped in another period of tarry depression. So until mid-September, I should consider myself lucky if I deliver a single scene every week. No vacations either for this old boy; I’m the guy who subs other workers so they can travel around with their families, or whatever normal human beings do.
I’ve worked in Donostia/San Sebastián at all of my jobs except one, so I’ve experienced this train ride hundreds of times. If you walked down the street on the right at this exact moment of the video, you’d come across the apartment building where Alazne, the co-protagonist of my beloved previous novel, lived. I have to promote my stuff from time to time, although one of these days I’ll likely edit that crude blurb.
Some thieves did steal the door handle of my apartment building as well as of other nearby buildings. Twice. But that’s a minor absurdity in comparison to many crimes that have been perpetrated around here. Just recently, the main suspect of a series of murders involving GHB in Bilbao has turned himself in. He was living in my hellhole of a city; most criminals want to stay this close to the border so they can step into France whenever the heat gets too hot. Bless Schengen!
Anyway, we are nearing the end of the current sequence of events in this stupid novel, and the story will only get crazier from here. I hope you are enjoying it so far, and if you haven’t, why the hell are you reading this?
---
The scrolling, corn yellow text of the LED screen displays the word 'station' in Basque, in Spanish, in French, and in English. We are approaching Gaintxurizketa, but I must take the screen's word for it: the world outside has drowned in a coal-colored blackness. I discern the faint shapes of skeletal trees.
Seated opposite me, a woman in her early forties, who's sporting a few grey hairs and wearing a duffle coat over a turtleneck sweater, has crossed her arms and hidden her eyes with sunglasses to doze off, although a reprobate slumped near the exit door, of whom I can only see the shaved head, is blasting reggaeton through his phone's speakers. Even this late, most of the seats are occupied; the train must pick up those that work the afternoon shift.
Inside this container with plasticky, frost white walls and bent grab poles that reflect the artificial light, the passengers look drained and dazed as if they were woken up in the middle of the night for an adventure. However, a nearby trio of college-aged girls have been babbling for half of the trip. The only one seated facing me whom I can see fully is wearing a loose sweater and ripped skinny jeans. The artificial light dances in her long, neartly parted, chestnut brown hair. She's flaunting the lively eyes and the easygoing smile of those too young to realize that the world is aching to spear us through the heart. People like her represent temporary smudges on the canvas of reality, dirty little stains of light, but they brighten up this otherwise cold wasteland.
The girl's gaze locks on mine, and her smile wanes as if I had offered her a front row seat to watch a stranger lose her mind. After she shifts her weight, she leans towards her friend and speaks in a hushed tone, but she has miscalculated the volume, because I understood her: she mentioned that I look sick. Soon enough I'll have to tune out the whispers of my fellow passengers.
I am sick, though. Sick at heart and sick to the bone. This world has drained all color from me, and I'm growing more fragile every day. I'm a cracked critter who was already crumbling before she boarded this train of madness. I wish I had gotten accustomed to a steady diet of psilocybin and psilocin, but instead I'm haunted by otherworldly visions synthesized by my brain as it slides slowly down the event horizon of a black hole.
I want to lean back in this rigid seat, shut my eyes and feel how the living nightmare recedes into a dull throb. However, only the naïve expose their unconscious self to these human beasts. I take a deep breath and focus on the isolated light sources that zip past our train in the encroaching darkness.
Such rides used to make me envious of the lives I came across. I would have loved to lose myself in the colors that played in so many strangers' irises, to figure out what strange beauty lit them up. On many nights I wished that someone would lean close to me and whisper magical words into my ear while the train rocked back and forth with its steady motion, but instead I suffered the unrelenting screams of my own mind. I wanted to grab strangers and shout that I love them, that they shouldn't feel bad because they're alive, that I should be the one to disappear instead.
Thankfully, now that I've tasted Jacqueline, all other human beings become blurs in my peripheral vision. Their faces feature two dots where eyes should reside. Their mouths are uninviting voids. When they speak, their words sound like a hollow mockery of human speech.
Nobody, nothing can compete with my depraved queen. I need the touch of her fingers as they comb through my hair, I need the pain of her nails digging into my back while I grind myself against her warm anatomy. When she kisses me I feel a taste of the end of all things, like a cup of bitter, caustic liquid that if I drank it I would turn into a black bird. I'd commit any evil to make love to her again.
Blood rushes to my pussy, bathing it in a velvety tide, as my genitals pulsate to the beat of my jittery heart. I yearn for mommy to rub out with her wicked, wet tongue every one of my worries, blanking my mind and memories like those of a newborn baby. My right hand trembles as it struggles to overcome my resistance; if I let go, it will grip my sex in a vice-like hold.
I press my knees together and rub my thighs against each other. I should give in to my urges. Why would these public transports vibrate and sway seductively except to seduce perverts into pulling down their trousers and relieving their tension on the spot? People only reveal their true nature while naked from the waist down and molesting themselves. Those who would resent your public display of self-love weren't meant to stick around, and who knows, through your bravery you might find the unique souls who would cherish your true self.
I bet that if the sapped office worker seated opposite me, whom life has worn down to the extent that she naps on the train, awoke to find my trousers and panties bunched up around my ankles, and me lost in the throes of lust as my oiled fingers polished my throbbing clit, her heart would flutter like a hummingbird's wings. While the wheels of the train clacked against the track in an ethereal hymn, she would gawk at the spectacle and slowly remove her sunglasses. Inch by inch, a child-like smile would crack the mask glued to her face that had helped her endure an everlasting routine of stress and disappointment. Once the mask shattered she would burst into hysterical giggles, which would make her breasts jiggle like two pudding cups filled with caramel. Having witnessed someone escaping the suffocating walls of a cage, the office worker's soul would flare up as if she were born anew. While the juices bubbled out of my groin, I would grin back, tightening the string of saliva that linked my mouth to my crotch. I would rejoice in the knowledge that thanks to my bravery, someone else's heart warmed up in such a hibernal night.
I'm freeing the top button of my trousers when a recorded voice announces that we are arriving to Irún. On our right, past some leafy greenery, the working-class apartment buildings of López de Becerra street, with laundry draped over the balcony railings, loom ominously, sending the first signal that those witless enough to seek residence in this city will soon find themselves like critters that have fallen into a septic tank, helplessly flailing their limbs in the slurry to avoid drowning in shit.
I wipe my forehead. I'm dripping with desire; I must reek of sweaty vagina. I shove my right hand in the pocket of my corduroy jacket to caress the casing of the external hard drive. I can bask in the knowledge that tonight I'll plug the drive into my computer, lie in bed and diddle myself at my leisure as I enjoy a nostalgic look back at our encounters.
Once I disembark at the platform along with the rest of the damned, I hurry up the stairs to reach the Colón promenade. The cold wind that was blowing in Donostia has followed me over here, seeking refuge under my clothes. My bowels are rumbling, my limbs feel heavy as stone slabs, my breasts seem to have lost a cup-sized chunk of flesh. I steel myself for the eight minutes long walk to my apartment, during which I'll need to elude thugs, drunks and other vermin, sights more revolting than any slimy blob lurking at the entrance of my office building.
After I cross the bridge over the railways, I venture through a sidewalk in which only two people can walk abreast. A pigeon lands on the pavement next to me, and the street lights glimmer in the bird's eyes as if it intended to make conversation with a friend. I hurry past darkened apartment buildings like mausoleums where the living are entombed. I scurry across the cracked pavements and narrow roads. I'm a mouse sneaking around a maze of underground chambers, afraid of being spotted by some sinister vagrant. I'm shaken by an urge to pull down my trousers and hump some rusty lamp post until the skin of my vulva peels off. In the infinite blackness above, the moon's craters are crammed with trash and corpses.
I pass the dirty brick wall of the Uranzu market as well as the homeless men that roam around it like a pack of stray dogs. When I lift my gaze, I certify that the cinnamon brown building I chose to inhabit still stands at the end of the street in its grimy, monstrous glory, although one of these days it will collapse under the weight of its own decrepitude like some gargantuan stalagmite.
While I make a beeline for the front door, a lanky familiar figure exits the building: a neighbor in his early fifties who looks like a grey-haired teenager. He's lugging bulging garbage bags to deposit them in the container across the road.
I've spotted this guy dozens of times when I returned from my self-imposed overtimes, because he made a habit of throwing out the trash at night. He should consider throwing out his clothes as well. He must have been present during the few tenant meetings I dared to attend, although I wouldn't have retained anyone's face from the terrified glances I shot at the gathered beasts with whom I'm forced to share this hovel.
As the guy passes me by, he pierces my face with his gaze.
"Hello, hello," he says.
I lower my head and nod. I pull the keys from my pocket, but when I reach with my free hand to grab the handle of the front door, I find myself holding air. Only the escutcheon remains, as if the handle had been unscrewed. Stunned, I gape at the absence.
I'm suddenly sniped by a memory: my mother is fumbling with a handful of keys to open the front door of our old apartment. She's swaying from side to side. Her jacket is half off and her skirt is hiked up to her hips, exposing her knickers. She smells of piss and sour milk. I'm dancing around her while I laugh and repeat, "The lock's busted! The lock's busted!"
My lanky neighbor has returned from his nightly mission and is standing nearby, trying to get my attention. I step aside and shoot him a wary glance in case he wants to persuade me to get naked. I'm in no mood for a session of sex on demand from any brute.
"Someone stole it," he says in a resigned tone.
"H-huh?"
"The door handle. Someone stole the damn thing."
I narrow my shoulders and tremble at having to interact with this creature.
"Well, I didn't do it," I mumble.
The guy chuckles nervously; his crooked smile suggests that he can't tell if I was joking.
"I wasn't accusing you. I know none of us did it."
"Who on earth would steal a door handle?"
The guy smacks his lips and shakes his head.
"Oh, don't get me started. They do it for the same reason they steal copper wire, copper pipes... Unfortunately some local fence must be buying that stuff from the thieves."
A black market for door handles. I'm living through the apocalypse.
"Wh-what should I do?"
My neighbor draws his head back, then he lets out a bitter chuckle.
"You? What the hell can any of us do? Call the cops?"
The city that welcomed the disaster of my birth has decided to add yet another torture to my life.
"I should start sleeping with a knife under my pillow," I utter gravely.
"Good luck! If you defend yourself, you'll end up in jail."
I shudder.
"You're right. If I had a knife, I would cut my own throat."
My neighbor wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket.
"Have you heard that a couple of nights ago two men broke into an apartment in Lekaenea street?"
I picture the scene: the victim had just moved into the block, and he had yet to buy most furniture and knick-knacks. The thugs failed to find any valuables apart from underwear, so they went into his kitchen and ate a couple of olives and a baguette. Then they set fire to his fridge.
The guy nods at my puzzlement.
"The police arrested them only to make a report, and thirty minutes later the criminals were caught trying to break into another apartment!"
"I hope nobody died in the fire."
"I swear, this city is turning into a war zone. Let's hope that those responsible also end up disappearing, if you know what I mean!"
Against my better judgement, I must empathize with one of these humans when they peer through the façade of society and flinch in disgust at the festering rot that hid beneath.
"These streets have degenerated into anthills, and any wrong step will make us slide down their insectoid nightmare."
My neighbor knits his brow and squints as if his brain had gotten stuck processing my words.
"They are working you to the bone, aren't they?" he says carefully. "I hope you get some rest."
My fingers tremble as I tighten my fist around the key ring. Why do these strangers care about whether I have a good weekend or rest enough? I'm a lost soul in a sea of wickedness, and nobody on earth can reach me. I've spent most of my life wishing that I could sink into the ground and disappear. If the sight of my worn-out self bothers any human being, they should pretend I never existed.
"I suppose that I'll sleep at least a couple of hours," I mutter icily.
I unlock the front door. The absence of a handle weighs me down as I push my way in. The lights of the hallway switch on automatically and shine mercilessly at me, as if they had been expecting this chance. I wish that my neighbor had waited until I disappeared out of sight to enter the building himself, but his footsteps are following me. The guy says goodbye. I mumble incoherently over my shoulder. At least he takes the elevator instead of ogling my ass as I drag myself up the stairs.
Now that my neighbor has retreated to his garbage-filled world, I must focus on the task at hand. I'll need to fill a backpack with enough changes of clothes for a couple of weeks, but tomorrow I'll meet with my beloved for our date, and it shouldn't seem like I'm moving into her apartment. There, Jacqueline and I will talk for hours, we will shower together, we will sleep in the same bed. I will stay away from this hellhole for days at a time. However, my body feels like it's been beaten up, so for the rest of the night I'll just grab a snack and masturbate myself to sleep.
When I reach the landing to my apartment, I trudge until my tingling fingertips touch the door that separates the outside world from my sombre shelter. I rub my eyes and try to shake off my lethargy.
Why do I push myself so much? I must believe that I deserve to spend my limited life depleted, or maybe I'm doing myself a favor; who knows what illusory maelstroms my mind would weave if left to its own devising while healthy and invigorated?
I shove the door open, scoot inside, then close it with my ass. As I stand in the pitch-black corridor, I'd prefer to imagine that I'm floating in the void of space, but this mustiness reminds me of a crypt.
I make the mistake of taking a deep breath; a putrid stench assaults my nose and spreads in my head like some deadly neurotoxin. I cough, then gag on the acrid air.
When the coughing subsides and the bitter taste of vomit lingers in my mouth, I resort to pinching my nose closed. Has someone broken into my dreary sanctuary to kill themselves, and their abandoned carcass has been rotting for days?
---
I’ve been recalled to work, this time until September, potentially longer. Except for my bank account, this development represents a disaster. I revise every scene over and over until I turn each of them into an experience, a process that takes me many hours. When I’m working a morning shift, which will be the case for the rest of this month, I can only devote at the most two hours and a half to writing in the afternoons, and that’s assuming that I don’t find myself so drained after the meaningless toil that I'll want to doze off the moment I sit down. And assuming that I don't end up swamped in another period of tarry depression. So until mid-September, I should consider myself lucky if I deliver a single scene every week. No vacations either for this old boy; I’m the guy who subs other workers so they can travel around with their families, or whatever normal human beings do.
I’ve worked in Donostia/San Sebastián at all of my jobs except one, so I’ve experienced this train ride hundreds of times. If you walked down the street on the right at this exact moment of the video, you’d come across the apartment building where Alazne, the co-protagonist of my beloved previous novel, lived. I have to promote my stuff from time to time, although one of these days I’ll likely edit that crude blurb.
Some thieves did steal the door handle of my apartment building as well as of other nearby buildings. Twice. But that’s a minor absurdity in comparison to many crimes that have been perpetrated around here. Just recently, the main suspect of a series of murders involving GHB in Bilbao has turned himself in. He was living in my hellhole of a city; most criminals want to stay this close to the border so they can step into France whenever the heat gets too hot. Bless Schengen!
Anyway, we are nearing the end of the current sequence of events in this stupid novel, and the story will only get crazier from here. I hope you are enjoying it so far, and if you haven’t, why the hell are you reading this?
May 2, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 47 (Fiction)
Link to this post on my personal page, where it looks better
---
As I stand at the beginning of the downward slope that will lead me from the business park where I work to the Lugaritz train station, but that will involve me dragging my sore body through the cold night, hurrying from streetlight to streetlight along a route likely frequented by scurrilous strangers, I realize that I have signed up for a tortuous ordeal of Homeric proportions.
Didn't I own a car, a Renault Laguna? Why did I abandon my trusted mechanical friend, that only intended to save me from having to degrade my legs by walking all the way down this dark and forbidding road? That's the kind of villain I've become: someone who betrays a loyal partner, condemning it to become a rusty pile of scrap.
Now, as my breath puffs in white plumes, I'm forced to trudge through the bitter cold with my hands stuck in the pockets of my corduroy jacket, stepping on the remnants of puddles that may have contained human blood. Even as I slog through the underpass towards the distant tower of an apartment building, the freezing wind ruffles my hair and pricks my exposed skin, causing the wounds in my heart to bleed afresh. Why did I abandon the safety and warmth of my office for this arctic adventure?
In the stretches between the lemon-colored cones of light that the streetlights cast on the pavement, the world is plunged in a dense darkness. I'm forced to progress between a row of parked cars and the overhanging branches of a dense thicket, that exudes the pungent smell of rotting leaves and that likely hides prowling predators like sabre-tooth tigers and feral vampires. Amidst the shadowy gloom, over the sound of my footsteps, the wind whistles, and from the trees comes the rustle of their branches as they sway back and forth. The world seems barren, drained of life except for those of us that have become more ghost than human, but if I closed my eyes I would still see the many people I've hurt: the friends I abandoned, the lovers that I used and discarded, the strangers that I slashed open with my claws. I wish I could listen to the melancholy hoots of the owls as they flew across the stars in their nightly hunt, and the howls of the wolves as they roamed the darkness searching for prey. But as much as I long for the company of other creatures of the night, I must stick to the sidewalks to avoid having a pair of fangs sink into my spine.
At this stage of technological advancement, I should be able to teleport to my apartment with some app on my phone. How have we human beings kept busy for hundreds of thousands of years, or however long we've been burdened with these soggy lumps of jelly-like fats and tissues inside our skulls, that we have failed to research a way to jump from a point of spacetime to another instantly?
As I trudge through this netherworld while the wind buffets me from behind, I spot the round road sign indicating a speed limit of 30 kmh, the harbinger of the bend of the road that leads into the first residential community on this side of the outskirts.
A sudden burst of light blinds me as if someone had pointed a flashlight at my eyes. I blink and shield my vision, but it takes me a few seconds to adjust to the source of such brightness, that is hovering over the sidewalk three meters in front of me. The ivory white glow is pouring as if through a jagged hole in an invisible wall.
I close my eyes and shake my head to dissolve this hallucination, but the light passes through my eyelids. I shift left, towards a parked car, and the light disappears. I sigh in relief. When I step back to the center of the sidewalk, the light returns.
"What the hell is this?" I mutter. "A will-o'-the-wisp? The spirits of those who were murdered by crazed vampires?"
Now that my eyes have grown accustomed to the light, the trees and parked cars have become silhouettes cast in an eerie and dismal grey. I take a deep breath, then I inch closer to peer through the luminous crack. As I lean in, it breathes a tropical warmth on my face, and my nose is flooded with the pungent odor of sea spray.
Unknown colorful shapes flicker in the ivory white radiance, as if I had come out of a tunnel into the daylight, but when I focus my vision, I find myself staring at a lime green field. On the right side of the frame, a grove of palm trees stands tall. Their trunks are striated diagonally, and their fronds, that resemble feathery fingers, are bending in the breeze. In the distance the field breaks off, and a sapphire blue sea extends to the hazy horizon.
I feel like I'm inside a painting displayed in an art gallery, where the patrons would spend hours admiring such a vibrant work of art framed in gold.
On the left side of the view, about twenty meters away from my standpoint, twenty fair-haired men and women, teenagers and a few children are hanging out near an unfinished edifice made of cyclopean stone blocks. The men are wearing wool tunics, the women linen undergarments and strap dresses that reach the ankles. They are barefoot.
Their gazes are following the movements of a man maybe in his mid-twenties, who's wearing a red baseball cap, a pewter grey T-shirt and khaki cargo pants. The breeze carries his warm voice, but I can't make out the words he's uttering. He's holding a metallic staff in each hand, and with the right one he's directing through the air a megalithic, rhino-colored block of stone, that is floating as if weightless. The man tilts his right staff to aim at an unfinished wall on which blue lines of light seem to depict the outline of the missing blocks. As the floating block descends, once it touches the blue lines of light, the block rotates until its shape matches the outline, fitting with the adjoined block like a puzzle piece.
When I gape back at the urban magician, he's chaperoning the crowd of viking-looking folks in a direction close to my standpoint. I gasp, stumble backwards and fall on my ass. The light has switched off; I'm staring unblinkingly at the darkness of a cold October night.
My arms and legs feel numb and heavy as if they were made out of cement, and my thoughts are flying in circles. When was the last time that a hallucination disturbed me this much? It felt like I was intruding into a scene that I would be prosecuted for witnessing. Wasn't my mental health supposed to improve, now that Jacqueline is taking care of me?
I let out a long sigh. I should give myself a break. I'm an unstable monster who festered in a hole of solitude and despair for most of her life, only to have been rescued by a mommy eager to hold me tight against her formidable bosom. I've been deprived of Jacqueline's presence for an afternoon of overtime, so my broken brain has slipped over into psychosis.
I crawl away from the spot where the tear in reality was hovering. Deep breaths, Leire. You just need to follow the route that will get you home.
---
Author's note: this chapter ended up being the shortest in the entire novel so far. I somehow still have 13,000 words of notes waiting for me to render them into the remaining chapters. The number has kept going up consistently, which in part is a good thing (I must really want to experience this whole story, because my subconscious keeps coming up with notes for it), but on the other hand I've been dealing with this madness since October of last year.
I finished watching 'The Northman' like three hours ago. Tremendous film, one of my favorites in a while. A well-researched movie set in AD 895, when people thought very differently, and the actors don't behave like they were picked from a LA street. Also, those two moments involving a valkyrie gave me chills.
A coworker has told me that they are setting up a three-months-long contract and it will start in a week. They'll likely call me for it. Ever since I've known that, I've felt antsy and like my time is running out. I should spend most of my waking life writing, but I became an adult plenty of years ago and adults are supposed to do meaningless, exhausting shit to add more money to their bank accounts at the end of the month. Can anyone pay me a living wage just for existing, so I can focus on my obsessions full-time? I'll provide regular massages and sexual favors if you don't mind that they'll come from a bearded, unkempt crazy person.
---
As I stand at the beginning of the downward slope that will lead me from the business park where I work to the Lugaritz train station, but that will involve me dragging my sore body through the cold night, hurrying from streetlight to streetlight along a route likely frequented by scurrilous strangers, I realize that I have signed up for a tortuous ordeal of Homeric proportions.
Didn't I own a car, a Renault Laguna? Why did I abandon my trusted mechanical friend, that only intended to save me from having to degrade my legs by walking all the way down this dark and forbidding road? That's the kind of villain I've become: someone who betrays a loyal partner, condemning it to become a rusty pile of scrap.
Now, as my breath puffs in white plumes, I'm forced to trudge through the bitter cold with my hands stuck in the pockets of my corduroy jacket, stepping on the remnants of puddles that may have contained human blood. Even as I slog through the underpass towards the distant tower of an apartment building, the freezing wind ruffles my hair and pricks my exposed skin, causing the wounds in my heart to bleed afresh. Why did I abandon the safety and warmth of my office for this arctic adventure?
In the stretches between the lemon-colored cones of light that the streetlights cast on the pavement, the world is plunged in a dense darkness. I'm forced to progress between a row of parked cars and the overhanging branches of a dense thicket, that exudes the pungent smell of rotting leaves and that likely hides prowling predators like sabre-tooth tigers and feral vampires. Amidst the shadowy gloom, over the sound of my footsteps, the wind whistles, and from the trees comes the rustle of their branches as they sway back and forth. The world seems barren, drained of life except for those of us that have become more ghost than human, but if I closed my eyes I would still see the many people I've hurt: the friends I abandoned, the lovers that I used and discarded, the strangers that I slashed open with my claws. I wish I could listen to the melancholy hoots of the owls as they flew across the stars in their nightly hunt, and the howls of the wolves as they roamed the darkness searching for prey. But as much as I long for the company of other creatures of the night, I must stick to the sidewalks to avoid having a pair of fangs sink into my spine.
At this stage of technological advancement, I should be able to teleport to my apartment with some app on my phone. How have we human beings kept busy for hundreds of thousands of years, or however long we've been burdened with these soggy lumps of jelly-like fats and tissues inside our skulls, that we have failed to research a way to jump from a point of spacetime to another instantly?
As I trudge through this netherworld while the wind buffets me from behind, I spot the round road sign indicating a speed limit of 30 kmh, the harbinger of the bend of the road that leads into the first residential community on this side of the outskirts.
A sudden burst of light blinds me as if someone had pointed a flashlight at my eyes. I blink and shield my vision, but it takes me a few seconds to adjust to the source of such brightness, that is hovering over the sidewalk three meters in front of me. The ivory white glow is pouring as if through a jagged hole in an invisible wall.
I close my eyes and shake my head to dissolve this hallucination, but the light passes through my eyelids. I shift left, towards a parked car, and the light disappears. I sigh in relief. When I step back to the center of the sidewalk, the light returns.
"What the hell is this?" I mutter. "A will-o'-the-wisp? The spirits of those who were murdered by crazed vampires?"
Now that my eyes have grown accustomed to the light, the trees and parked cars have become silhouettes cast in an eerie and dismal grey. I take a deep breath, then I inch closer to peer through the luminous crack. As I lean in, it breathes a tropical warmth on my face, and my nose is flooded with the pungent odor of sea spray.
Unknown colorful shapes flicker in the ivory white radiance, as if I had come out of a tunnel into the daylight, but when I focus my vision, I find myself staring at a lime green field. On the right side of the frame, a grove of palm trees stands tall. Their trunks are striated diagonally, and their fronds, that resemble feathery fingers, are bending in the breeze. In the distance the field breaks off, and a sapphire blue sea extends to the hazy horizon.
I feel like I'm inside a painting displayed in an art gallery, where the patrons would spend hours admiring such a vibrant work of art framed in gold.
On the left side of the view, about twenty meters away from my standpoint, twenty fair-haired men and women, teenagers and a few children are hanging out near an unfinished edifice made of cyclopean stone blocks. The men are wearing wool tunics, the women linen undergarments and strap dresses that reach the ankles. They are barefoot.
Their gazes are following the movements of a man maybe in his mid-twenties, who's wearing a red baseball cap, a pewter grey T-shirt and khaki cargo pants. The breeze carries his warm voice, but I can't make out the words he's uttering. He's holding a metallic staff in each hand, and with the right one he's directing through the air a megalithic, rhino-colored block of stone, that is floating as if weightless. The man tilts his right staff to aim at an unfinished wall on which blue lines of light seem to depict the outline of the missing blocks. As the floating block descends, once it touches the blue lines of light, the block rotates until its shape matches the outline, fitting with the adjoined block like a puzzle piece.
When I gape back at the urban magician, he's chaperoning the crowd of viking-looking folks in a direction close to my standpoint. I gasp, stumble backwards and fall on my ass. The light has switched off; I'm staring unblinkingly at the darkness of a cold October night.
My arms and legs feel numb and heavy as if they were made out of cement, and my thoughts are flying in circles. When was the last time that a hallucination disturbed me this much? It felt like I was intruding into a scene that I would be prosecuted for witnessing. Wasn't my mental health supposed to improve, now that Jacqueline is taking care of me?
I let out a long sigh. I should give myself a break. I'm an unstable monster who festered in a hole of solitude and despair for most of her life, only to have been rescued by a mommy eager to hold me tight against her formidable bosom. I've been deprived of Jacqueline's presence for an afternoon of overtime, so my broken brain has slipped over into psychosis.
I crawl away from the spot where the tear in reality was hovering. Deep breaths, Leire. You just need to follow the route that will get you home.
---
Author's note: this chapter ended up being the shortest in the entire novel so far. I somehow still have 13,000 words of notes waiting for me to render them into the remaining chapters. The number has kept going up consistently, which in part is a good thing (I must really want to experience this whole story, because my subconscious keeps coming up with notes for it), but on the other hand I've been dealing with this madness since October of last year.
I finished watching 'The Northman' like three hours ago. Tremendous film, one of my favorites in a while. A well-researched movie set in AD 895, when people thought very differently, and the actors don't behave like they were picked from a LA street. Also, those two moments involving a valkyrie gave me chills.
A coworker has told me that they are setting up a three-months-long contract and it will start in a week. They'll likely call me for it. Ever since I've known that, I've felt antsy and like my time is running out. I should spend most of my waking life writing, but I became an adult plenty of years ago and adults are supposed to do meaningless, exhausting shit to add more money to their bank accounts at the end of the month. Can anyone pay me a living wage just for existing, so I can focus on my obsessions full-time? I'll provide regular massages and sexual favors if you don't mind that they'll come from a bearded, unkempt crazy person.
April 30, 2022
We're Fucked, Pt. 46 (Fiction)
Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better
---
When I push open the front door of my office building to step into the night, the door leaf shoves away a bucketful of the shadowy, bunny-sized blobs that for about a week have thronged the sidewalk. I resent that through the course of my pointless existence I've come to hurt more living beings, until I remember that these blobby, gelatinous abominations have long spilled onto the parking lot and they've proven themselves impervious to being run over by a car, which would otherwise be the most efficient way of obliterating them. I wish I could witness the windshield and windows of some car crisscrossed with a trail of glimmering blobs, because this sidewalk has become an obstacle course that should encumber the workdays of every local office worker. However, these wobbly slugs only exist because I'm hallucinating.
As I trudge in the opposite direction of the row of multicolored garbage bins, that the blob creatures have climbed and turned into their abodes, I clutch my salami sandwich to my chest and huddle deeper into my corduroy jacket. The brisk wind, a vile and vengeful force of nature, is tearing at my clothes. It carries the scents of grass and soil, hints of freshness that the city can't hold for long. Although I turn my head to one side then the other, the wind does its best to tousle my hair. It's also cooling the layer of sweat and stale arousal produced by my recent masturbatory exertions, as well as my terror.
I'm about to shiver; I doubt that I'll last more than five minutes outside. When will the temperatures improve? What's going on with the weather in this cursed country? It's been October for months!
I wish I could stand instead in front of a bonfire, with my eyes closed and my arms spread out so the blazing flames would lick at my skin. If it were for me, the entire province would become a festival of fire. I'd listen to the crackle of wood and the sizzle of flesh. I'd let the hot smoke enclose me in a foggy cloud that would slowly lift me into a private pocket world of peace and solitude. Wishing to become the tastiest, most succulent piece of meat on the planet, I would step forward onto the burning, baby-sized logs. I would savor the pleasure of a fire that would make my flesh glow like a feast of crisp bacon, and my face blaze like a beefsteak. As I cried out with abandon, and greasy fat dripped out of my pores, I would capitalize on the opportunity to chew on mouthfuls of my own charred skin and tendons.
Besides the wind and fire, another force intends to hurl me into oblivion; the dark, deep waters are calling to my blood and to the bones that rest within the hollow of my skin. Its salty liquid will enfold me, smothering me with its freezing embrace, while my hair swells towards the surface. I can almost feel the dark sea's tentacles rushing into my lungs to rid me of all my fears. My eyes will grow so wide and my mouth so open that a giant squid will suck out my last breaths, and my executioner will be accompanied by a blue-green humpback whale. The more I've tried to fight the dark sea, the stronger its waves have become. The only escape would be to turn off my mind and let the glacial liquid flow through my veins.
However, I have to deal with reality, the nemesis of dreams. I'm a low-wage employee in an office building designed to block all the sunlight. The only sun I can bask in, I make it with my own hands.
My stomach gurgles. I remember that I'm holding the sandwich that I bought from the vending machine: bread of an unidentifiable origin, and salami that may have come from a cow. Wearily, I lower my sore body to the dirty sidewalk maculated with ancient chewing gum. I sit cross-legged, then lean back against the granular wall of the building. I rip open the casing of the salami sandwich. After I crumple up the plastic wrapping, likely made from the skin of some oceanic creature, I consider tossing it aside, but I end up shoving it into a pocket of my jacket; the world has already putrefied enough for me to contribute to its entropy.
As I chew on the soggy, blood-spotted meat, I focus on the details: the dry and fluffy white bread and the saltiness of the salami. I didn't expect to be surprised by the flavor, because the meat has already rotted in my mind, but for a few seconds I feel like the most well-fed creature that has ever lived, which would have contributed to soothe my senses unceremoniously dredged by a wind of horror, until a recurrent intrusive vision visits me: I find myself gnawing on a giant, yellowish-white worm that will force my jaw apart.
A pig. The salami has come from a pig, one that was born of the flesh of another pig, and that was butchered by a third pig. All of them died or will die so I would taste their rotting flesh while I felt sorry for myself, but that's alright, because I'm a pig as well. We remain united in an eternal circle of pigdom.
My breath steams in the cold wind, that tries to disperse my feeble satisfaction by fluttering at my hair and my jacket. If I had any control over the situation, I would turn into a human windmill. To prevent the wind from reaching my flesh, my arms would spin at an endless, ceaseless pace.
My fingers are getting numb. I'm waiting for a cold, nasty drop of rain to splat on my head. Soon enough I'll have to endure another torrential storm and a clammy, bitter wind, like the ones that threatened to ruin my first date with Jacqueline. The rain will come down in a deluge so thick that it will dim the streetlamps. Nature rarely ceases to torture me, like a secret admirer that wants me to achieve my full potential as a miserable wretch.
The night is filled with reptilian hisses as the gusts torment the thicket on the opposite side of the road. The gibbous, pockmarked moon casts a faint glow on the sky. I gaze at its rough, cloud grey layer of dust, and at the polished, steel grey patches that reveal the metallic hull of the observation post built by aliens who got bored of us millennia ago.
A movement out of the corner of my eye makes me glance to my left. One of the bunny-sized blobs has disengaged from its gang, and it's wobbling towards me on six legs as its feelers sway like the tentacles of an anemone. I dread that it might be looking for shelter in the shadow of my jacket.
I wipe the layer of salty grease off my lips with the palm of my free hand. As the gelatinous beast comes closer, I try to discern in its blurry frame any eyes or a slavering mouth, but I guess that it senses the world through its squiggly tentacles. Although I want to hold my breath, I continue with my meal; I need the nutrients to fuel the survival of my brain.
The blob bumps against my ankle. After a moment of awkward confusion, the creature stretches its front feelers to probe the bottom hem of my trousers. Maybe a stink of sweat, blood and salami pours out from the opening.
I wait to feel any teeth pierce the fabric and reach my skin, but the blob turns and jiggles along my side as if to circumvent the obstacle, except that in that direction it will hit the wall. I place my left hand palm-up on the creature's path. As it edges closer, I scoop the blob up.
I had expected my hand to pass through this unholy hallucination, but instead my sense of touch reports its faint presence: the squidgy skin, the bottom and side feelers fluttering on my palm, how it shifts its weight as it shivers and squirms in apparent bewilderment. It's oozing a mucous slime.
I sigh with relief.
"As hideous as you fuckers are, I bet you aren't suffocating in depressive self-disdain, hounded constantly by the compulsive urge to release your existential terror through aggressive self-diddling. And that's me at my current best! Before Jacqueline rescued me, I found this struggle meaningless. But who could take pleasure in the idea of living when there's no one to love, or to love you? What can you do when your world is empty, when all you perceive is your shit and the shit of others?"
The blob's feelers twitch as it listens to my words, and I know that it will come to love me, once it stops considering me a food source.
"I was condemned to endure as the empty, hollow shell of a human being, like my mother," I continue. "I couldn't feel my skin, I couldn't taste my tongue, I couldn't feel my stomach rumbling. I couldn't smell, couldn't hear, couldn't think, couldn't do anything at all. I had nothing but the hope that someone would come to my aid, maybe a sexy magical pixie. At times I considered getting on my hands and knees to worship some crack in the sidewalk. You understand, right? You were granted the gift of life, yet you have turned your back on the world and have given up, therefore becoming the perfect example of how we humans have degenerated. We have ceased to know who we are and who we were. We've transformed into gelatinous blobs that blunder around blindly, mindlessly."
I pet the unholy abomination, and its tentacles respond with gentle wiggles.
"To be frank with you," I continue, "I couldn't wait to be dead. I was eager to find my way out of this prison of meat, to turn myself into a squishy, pink puddle of gore, and just rot away. But then this alien, this fucking alien, with her massive tits and her bubbly smile and her plump, soft lips and her twinkling cobalt blues, appeared for me. She stuck her hand down my throat and pulled me out. So in the end, my rescue came in the form of a giant spider-woman with the head of an ouroboros, and I've spent my current life exploring the insides of her belly. If she had come to me as a slug-like blob, I wouldn't have wanted her. I would have dismissed her as an itchy nuisance to be crushed. But she held the power to change the game for me, to take me out of that sorry, loveless world. She's a tender mother, a sexual mistress of the universe. I can't fully comprehend her, but I can trust her to give my life meaning, to make me feel real again. As long as I have my mommy, I'll keep on living, I'll keep on fucking."
The blob shudders. A large, slimy glop trickles out of an anus-like orifice, as if to symbolize its passage into my world, its transformation.
"I know all this might sound weird to you," I continue, "but it feels like my skull has become a furnace in which only a white-hot light of thought remains. What I meant to say is that even a nauseating blob like you deserves to live free, without fearing that someone will snatch you and your pals up to turn you into exotic soap."
My abominable companion shimmies off my palm and plops onto the sidewalk, then it scutters under the bridge of my crossed legs.
"Alright," I say. "If you have any concerns, I'll be more than happy to talk to you about my feelings."
My nose is leaking brain fluid, my teeth are about to chatter. I heave myself to my feet. I intended to wolf down the rest of my sandwhich, but I'm only holding two half-eaten slices of bread. The salami has landed on the dirty sidewalk. The slimy blob has crawled over and it must be feasting; its feelers wriggle excitedly as the salami slides under its gelatinous body and disappears as if absorbed.
A glob of protoplasm is resting on my left palm. I wipe it on my trousers.
When the blob wobbles back towards its companions, the previous spot of the sidewalk has been cleared of salami, ready to accept cigarette butts and glass shards, ready for grass and weeds to grow through its cracks like mold or the long hair of homeless people, to better fit in with this overgrown, overpopulated garbage dump of a world.
I shove the slices of bread into my mouth, then I narrow my shoulders and eyes against the cold wind as I head to the front door.
What did my rotting brain intend by assembling such abominations? No, I should focus on my work. I'll allow my unhinged subconscious to conjure up whatever symbols it requires to express its perverse delusions, to channel its homicidal urges.
What would the extent of my psychosis matter? There are no rules. We have no god to judge us, no heaven or hell to frighten us and make us suffer. Nothing will keep the world in a state of balance, no magic will prevent us from turning the earth into a smoldering cinder or the entire solar system into dead balls of ice. It's just a matter of time.
I only needed a single person to accept me as I am. The rest of the planet may as well burn.
---
When I push open the front door of my office building to step into the night, the door leaf shoves away a bucketful of the shadowy, bunny-sized blobs that for about a week have thronged the sidewalk. I resent that through the course of my pointless existence I've come to hurt more living beings, until I remember that these blobby, gelatinous abominations have long spilled onto the parking lot and they've proven themselves impervious to being run over by a car, which would otherwise be the most efficient way of obliterating them. I wish I could witness the windshield and windows of some car crisscrossed with a trail of glimmering blobs, because this sidewalk has become an obstacle course that should encumber the workdays of every local office worker. However, these wobbly slugs only exist because I'm hallucinating.
As I trudge in the opposite direction of the row of multicolored garbage bins, that the blob creatures have climbed and turned into their abodes, I clutch my salami sandwich to my chest and huddle deeper into my corduroy jacket. The brisk wind, a vile and vengeful force of nature, is tearing at my clothes. It carries the scents of grass and soil, hints of freshness that the city can't hold for long. Although I turn my head to one side then the other, the wind does its best to tousle my hair. It's also cooling the layer of sweat and stale arousal produced by my recent masturbatory exertions, as well as my terror.
I'm about to shiver; I doubt that I'll last more than five minutes outside. When will the temperatures improve? What's going on with the weather in this cursed country? It's been October for months!
I wish I could stand instead in front of a bonfire, with my eyes closed and my arms spread out so the blazing flames would lick at my skin. If it were for me, the entire province would become a festival of fire. I'd listen to the crackle of wood and the sizzle of flesh. I'd let the hot smoke enclose me in a foggy cloud that would slowly lift me into a private pocket world of peace and solitude. Wishing to become the tastiest, most succulent piece of meat on the planet, I would step forward onto the burning, baby-sized logs. I would savor the pleasure of a fire that would make my flesh glow like a feast of crisp bacon, and my face blaze like a beefsteak. As I cried out with abandon, and greasy fat dripped out of my pores, I would capitalize on the opportunity to chew on mouthfuls of my own charred skin and tendons.
Besides the wind and fire, another force intends to hurl me into oblivion; the dark, deep waters are calling to my blood and to the bones that rest within the hollow of my skin. Its salty liquid will enfold me, smothering me with its freezing embrace, while my hair swells towards the surface. I can almost feel the dark sea's tentacles rushing into my lungs to rid me of all my fears. My eyes will grow so wide and my mouth so open that a giant squid will suck out my last breaths, and my executioner will be accompanied by a blue-green humpback whale. The more I've tried to fight the dark sea, the stronger its waves have become. The only escape would be to turn off my mind and let the glacial liquid flow through my veins.
However, I have to deal with reality, the nemesis of dreams. I'm a low-wage employee in an office building designed to block all the sunlight. The only sun I can bask in, I make it with my own hands.
My stomach gurgles. I remember that I'm holding the sandwich that I bought from the vending machine: bread of an unidentifiable origin, and salami that may have come from a cow. Wearily, I lower my sore body to the dirty sidewalk maculated with ancient chewing gum. I sit cross-legged, then lean back against the granular wall of the building. I rip open the casing of the salami sandwich. After I crumple up the plastic wrapping, likely made from the skin of some oceanic creature, I consider tossing it aside, but I end up shoving it into a pocket of my jacket; the world has already putrefied enough for me to contribute to its entropy.
As I chew on the soggy, blood-spotted meat, I focus on the details: the dry and fluffy white bread and the saltiness of the salami. I didn't expect to be surprised by the flavor, because the meat has already rotted in my mind, but for a few seconds I feel like the most well-fed creature that has ever lived, which would have contributed to soothe my senses unceremoniously dredged by a wind of horror, until a recurrent intrusive vision visits me: I find myself gnawing on a giant, yellowish-white worm that will force my jaw apart.
A pig. The salami has come from a pig, one that was born of the flesh of another pig, and that was butchered by a third pig. All of them died or will die so I would taste their rotting flesh while I felt sorry for myself, but that's alright, because I'm a pig as well. We remain united in an eternal circle of pigdom.
My breath steams in the cold wind, that tries to disperse my feeble satisfaction by fluttering at my hair and my jacket. If I had any control over the situation, I would turn into a human windmill. To prevent the wind from reaching my flesh, my arms would spin at an endless, ceaseless pace.
My fingers are getting numb. I'm waiting for a cold, nasty drop of rain to splat on my head. Soon enough I'll have to endure another torrential storm and a clammy, bitter wind, like the ones that threatened to ruin my first date with Jacqueline. The rain will come down in a deluge so thick that it will dim the streetlamps. Nature rarely ceases to torture me, like a secret admirer that wants me to achieve my full potential as a miserable wretch.
The night is filled with reptilian hisses as the gusts torment the thicket on the opposite side of the road. The gibbous, pockmarked moon casts a faint glow on the sky. I gaze at its rough, cloud grey layer of dust, and at the polished, steel grey patches that reveal the metallic hull of the observation post built by aliens who got bored of us millennia ago.
A movement out of the corner of my eye makes me glance to my left. One of the bunny-sized blobs has disengaged from its gang, and it's wobbling towards me on six legs as its feelers sway like the tentacles of an anemone. I dread that it might be looking for shelter in the shadow of my jacket.
I wipe the layer of salty grease off my lips with the palm of my free hand. As the gelatinous beast comes closer, I try to discern in its blurry frame any eyes or a slavering mouth, but I guess that it senses the world through its squiggly tentacles. Although I want to hold my breath, I continue with my meal; I need the nutrients to fuel the survival of my brain.
The blob bumps against my ankle. After a moment of awkward confusion, the creature stretches its front feelers to probe the bottom hem of my trousers. Maybe a stink of sweat, blood and salami pours out from the opening.
I wait to feel any teeth pierce the fabric and reach my skin, but the blob turns and jiggles along my side as if to circumvent the obstacle, except that in that direction it will hit the wall. I place my left hand palm-up on the creature's path. As it edges closer, I scoop the blob up.
I had expected my hand to pass through this unholy hallucination, but instead my sense of touch reports its faint presence: the squidgy skin, the bottom and side feelers fluttering on my palm, how it shifts its weight as it shivers and squirms in apparent bewilderment. It's oozing a mucous slime.
I sigh with relief.
"As hideous as you fuckers are, I bet you aren't suffocating in depressive self-disdain, hounded constantly by the compulsive urge to release your existential terror through aggressive self-diddling. And that's me at my current best! Before Jacqueline rescued me, I found this struggle meaningless. But who could take pleasure in the idea of living when there's no one to love, or to love you? What can you do when your world is empty, when all you perceive is your shit and the shit of others?"
The blob's feelers twitch as it listens to my words, and I know that it will come to love me, once it stops considering me a food source.
"I was condemned to endure as the empty, hollow shell of a human being, like my mother," I continue. "I couldn't feel my skin, I couldn't taste my tongue, I couldn't feel my stomach rumbling. I couldn't smell, couldn't hear, couldn't think, couldn't do anything at all. I had nothing but the hope that someone would come to my aid, maybe a sexy magical pixie. At times I considered getting on my hands and knees to worship some crack in the sidewalk. You understand, right? You were granted the gift of life, yet you have turned your back on the world and have given up, therefore becoming the perfect example of how we humans have degenerated. We have ceased to know who we are and who we were. We've transformed into gelatinous blobs that blunder around blindly, mindlessly."
I pet the unholy abomination, and its tentacles respond with gentle wiggles.
"To be frank with you," I continue, "I couldn't wait to be dead. I was eager to find my way out of this prison of meat, to turn myself into a squishy, pink puddle of gore, and just rot away. But then this alien, this fucking alien, with her massive tits and her bubbly smile and her plump, soft lips and her twinkling cobalt blues, appeared for me. She stuck her hand down my throat and pulled me out. So in the end, my rescue came in the form of a giant spider-woman with the head of an ouroboros, and I've spent my current life exploring the insides of her belly. If she had come to me as a slug-like blob, I wouldn't have wanted her. I would have dismissed her as an itchy nuisance to be crushed. But she held the power to change the game for me, to take me out of that sorry, loveless world. She's a tender mother, a sexual mistress of the universe. I can't fully comprehend her, but I can trust her to give my life meaning, to make me feel real again. As long as I have my mommy, I'll keep on living, I'll keep on fucking."
The blob shudders. A large, slimy glop trickles out of an anus-like orifice, as if to symbolize its passage into my world, its transformation.
"I know all this might sound weird to you," I continue, "but it feels like my skull has become a furnace in which only a white-hot light of thought remains. What I meant to say is that even a nauseating blob like you deserves to live free, without fearing that someone will snatch you and your pals up to turn you into exotic soap."
My abominable companion shimmies off my palm and plops onto the sidewalk, then it scutters under the bridge of my crossed legs.
"Alright," I say. "If you have any concerns, I'll be more than happy to talk to you about my feelings."
My nose is leaking brain fluid, my teeth are about to chatter. I heave myself to my feet. I intended to wolf down the rest of my sandwhich, but I'm only holding two half-eaten slices of bread. The salami has landed on the dirty sidewalk. The slimy blob has crawled over and it must be feasting; its feelers wriggle excitedly as the salami slides under its gelatinous body and disappears as if absorbed.
A glob of protoplasm is resting on my left palm. I wipe it on my trousers.
When the blob wobbles back towards its companions, the previous spot of the sidewalk has been cleared of salami, ready to accept cigarette butts and glass shards, ready for grass and weeds to grow through its cracks like mold or the long hair of homeless people, to better fit in with this overgrown, overpopulated garbage dump of a world.
I shove the slices of bread into my mouth, then I narrow my shoulders and eyes against the cold wind as I head to the front door.
What did my rotting brain intend by assembling such abominations? No, I should focus on my work. I'll allow my unhinged subconscious to conjure up whatever symbols it requires to express its perverse delusions, to channel its homicidal urges.
What would the extent of my psychosis matter? There are no rules. We have no god to judge us, no heaven or hell to frighten us and make us suffer. Nothing will keep the world in a state of balance, no magic will prevent us from turning the earth into a smoldering cinder or the entire solar system into dead balls of ice. It's just a matter of time.
I only needed a single person to accept me as I am. The rest of the planet may as well burn.
