Jon Ureña's Blog, page 48

Revised: 'Interspecies Misdemeanours'

A few days ago I thought about this long short story / short novella (9,794 words) that I wrote back in July of last year. I was very fond of it. However, as it happened to all my short stories that I uploaded back then, I had refused to separate the paragraphs, because doing so would hamper the final process of putting together an ebook that contained the short stories. Whether or not the spaces between the paragraphs would have been a significant issue, I was dumb to sacrifice the legibility of my entries on WordPress in favor of the annoying ebook product; after all, I have only managed to sell a single copy of my previous novel in English.

So I started rereading this novella with the intention of formatting it properly. However, I found it in a rather appalling state prose-wise. I think that back then I got such a rush out of uploading an entry before the workday ended that I cut corners to an extent that I now consider disgusting. If you read my stuff a year ago, I apologize for the annoyances this previous mindset of mine may have caused. Anyway, this task to format the novella properly turned into a full-blown revision.

For those who didn’t come across this story back in the day, it’s about a trio of somewhat idiotic teens that see a UFO in their neighborhood. I had a lot of fun writing it, and remains one of the stupidest stories I’ve ever come up with. If you enjoyed it back in the day, I have improved it enough that you may want to revisit it.

Interspecies Misdemeanours, Pt. 1
Interspecies Misdemeanours, Pt. 2
Interspecies Misdemeanours, Pt. 3

We're Fucked, Pt. 41 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

Jacqueline was waiting for me in the living room. She has tied up her smooth, raven black hair in a ponytail. She's wearing narwhal-themed plush pyjama pants too short for her long legs, and a reinforced sports bra that looks like a chest plate. I disapprove of any choice of attire that conceals those twin miracles of hers, but at least I get to admire the curves of her midriff.

My beloved has detached part of the L-shaped sofa and pushed it towards the back of the room, leaving extra space in front of the QLED television. An HDMI cable leads from the TV to her laptop, that she has placed on the stand. Both screens are displaying the main page of YouTube.

"We need to do something about your tits," I say without thinking, then I shake my head. "I mean... what's going on, Jacqueline?"

I doubt that she paid attention to my words; she's biting her lower lip as she ogles my lower body with rapt eyes.

"Those leggings look so hot on you. Turn around."

I remain rooted on the spot, so Jacqueline walks around me while her fingertips slide over my right thigh. Once she stands behind me, she fondles a handful of my butt as if she were an older white-collar worker and me an innocent schoolgirl on a train.

"I love this soft ass of yours," Jacqueline purrs hungrily. Her free arm encircles my neck, pulling us closer. "And I'd like to do all kinds of things to it. Would you let me?"

I'm too dazed to get aroused by her advances.

"I... don't know what's happening," I mumble.

Jacqueline giggles, which makes her breasts jiggle slightly against my left arm. It's relieving to know that they remain alive and kicking inside their tight prison.

She pinches my ass through the leggings, then she lets go of me and sashays over to her laptop. After she navigates to her search history on YouTube, she plays the most recent video. On the TV screen, a chirpy, lean blonde, whose yoga pants hug her muscular legs, beams with artificially white, American teeth. She welcomes us both back to her videos, claps, and announces that she will guide us through a thirty minutes long, full body workout.

I don't want to tear my gaze away from the blonde's camel toe and how part of her muscular glutes show up through her thigh gap, but her words register in my brain, and I let out a cry of alarm.

Jacqueline pushes me gently until we stand on the carpet in front of the TV, then she starts stretching.

"Wh-what is this?" I ask in a shaky voice.

She's standing on one leg while pulling her other leg back by the ankle.

"What does it look like? We are going to exercise. And you should be stretching already."

I gape at my lover in astonishment.

"Exercise?! Me?!"

Jacqueline has laced her fingers behind her neck, and as she bends backwards, her tits press against the reinforced bra as if eager to be released from their prison.

"Exercising is something human beings do to stay fit and healthy. It's necessary for a happy life, even if you don't plan on becoming a marathon runner or a superhero," she says with a playful tone that contrasts sharply with what she's doing to me right now.

"I don't want to be a human being," I grumble.

"I can tell, baby."

"Can't you just beat me up instead? I wouldn't mind getting pummelled by an Amazonian goddess."

Jacqueline's eyes glitter mischievously.

"Resist all you want. It turns me on, so I won't disuade you. But in the end you are going to work out with me whether you want to or not. I want to see sweat dripping down your body."

I shiver from head to toe.

"Well, if you order me around, I guess I can't refuse."

"No, you can't. We don't get many opportunities to be active as adults, and I want my girlfriend to stay alive."

On the screen, the blonde is already squatting and twisting her torso as effortlessly as if her body was impervious to the ravages of time.

"This is the opposite of sleeping," I complain.

Jacqueline strokes my shoulder, then she lowers her body into a squat.

"You just have to copy the woman's movements, and eventually your body will thank you for it. Turn off that hyperactive brain of yours and let go of everything except your body."

"I want to turn off my brain, but not like this."

I can't restrain my instinct to whine although I'm already pushing my feeble muscles to satisfy the American YouTuber's instructions.

On the screen, the blonde bends her torso backwards, which makes her abs ripple. She twists around; although she's nowhere well-endowed enough to compete with Jacqueline in the breasts department, I imagine her tits swinging with each rotation of her waist until they tear from their prison and fly out of control like flesh missiles, and I want to giggle hysterically as I picture those jiggling boobs flapping through the air before smashing against an unsuspecting person's face. However, I'm suffering too much for laughter. In reality, the YouTuber merely smiles alluringly at me to mock my plight.

I don't need to read the comments section of the video to know that it must be filled with references to a worldwide community of men of culture.

The squats end, and I already want to die. The blonde straightens her back and takes a deep breath while flexing her glutes. Her abdominal muscles are firm under the taut skin of her belly, and the muscles in her legs bulge making her yoga pants strain against them. Then she claps happily.

"Don't you feel strong already?" the bitch asks.

I groan loudly.

"Once we get into the groove, it will feel really good," Jacqueline says as she exhales through her mouth. "You're going to be sweating so much that you'll forget what it was to be human."

I can barely comprehend my girlfriend when she tells me to get on all fours for some plank kickbacks. Sweat drips from my forehead onto the carpet. I'm holding myself up with both hands, pushing off against the floor using whatever passes for muscles in my back.

"I'm a programmer," I wheeze, "just a mind in a useless body."

"Your body didn't seem that useless to me while we were fucking. Keep going. Breathe deeply through your nose and exhale slowly through your mouth. It'll get easier."

On the screen, the blonde's butt muscles are flexing like two globular tectonic plates sliding over each other. I suffer my way through glute bridge variations, leg drop crunches, bicycle legs and push ups with the grace of a robot trying to execute a dance routine. While Princess Thundercunt from YouTube has been soaring through the exercises without even breaking a sweat, my body has become a limp rag. My heart is pounding away at my chest, my legs are shaking, my joints hurt, the skin on my ass feels hot and tight, sweat runs down my neck and trickles between my breasts, dark thoughts about mass murder are seizing my mind.

I want to scream for everything to end. I want to return control to my brain, so it can order me to lie down in bed and masturbate. Maybe this time I'd bring over some ice cream.

I glance at Jacqueline. The muscles on her neck are tensed, and those glistening, pouty lips look ready to spit fire.

The next exercise, some weird lunges, requires us to balance ourselves on one leg. I only last a second: I get woozy and collapse forward towards the TV stand. I attempt too late to break the fall with my failing arms, so my forehead hits the furniture, that rattles noisily.

I must have gotten dazed for a few seconds, because I find myself on my knees while I rub the bruise. Jacqueline has paused the video. Crouched next to me, my girlfriend attempts to turn my head towards her as she soothes me with her warm voice, although I can't process what she's saying.

I'm mortified. I can't keep my shoulders from shaking nor my eyes from filling up with tears, so I purse my lips and look away.

Jacqueline throws her arms around me and kisses my temple.

"No, don't cry!" She wriggles on her knees until she's facing me. She holds my head to examine the bruise, then she leans in and licks it gently. "It doesn't look like you hit your head too hard. Ah, why is your face so cute? I want to kiss every inch of your body."

She's staring at me with those cobalt blues that sparkle with tenderness. My cheeks flush as if full of fire. I imagine Jacqueline's fangs digging into my nipples and sucking them dry while I beg for mercy, but instead she presses me into a warm embrace. The reinforced bra prevents me from feeling her tits. However, a warmth radiates from deep inside her, and I can smell a hint of her sweaty pussy.

"I'm just a pathetic human," I whimper.

Jacqueline pets my hair with gentle strokes and a wet hand.

"Don't say such silly things, love. You're not a mere mortal. Besides, mommy is here to help you up when you fall down. But you have to keep going."

Although she grabs me by the arm and raises me to my feet, my knees hurt, so it takes some effort for me to stand upright again. While I sway like an idiot, Jacqueline strides over to the laptop and presses the space bar to resume the video.

I keep crying through the rest of the lunges. My eyes feel like they might burst out of their sockets. My muscles burn as if a herd of angry horses had trampled them. My nipples are tingling madly. Sweat pours from every pore in my body and trickles between my breasts, butt cheeks, thighs, clitoris, and everywhere else.

When the exercise ends, Jacqueline pats me on the shoulder as if I had won a competition, but my lips are quivering, and I fear that I'm going to start blubbering again.

"You have been doing very well today, baby, despite your fears," she says during the short break. "You are becoming strong little by little!"

My muscles scream through the prolonged nightmare: crunches with the legs spread open, more hellish squats, kickbacks, squats with twist, plank kickbacks. The blonde YouTuber looks so determined to keep torturing me that I want to throw myself off a cliff.

"W-wait, we've already gone through these!" I yell through my dry throat. "Am I stuck in a loop?!"

"We need to do each exercise twice," Jacqueline says casually.

"It hurts so much! Please stop!"

"There's no pain, baby. It's just nerves sending signals to your brain."

"Pain exists, then! It only ends when you're dead!"

"We are more than halfway through. Too late to quit now. Besides, imagine how much our sex life will improve when we are both in shape!"

I want to yell that we aren't training our tongues, but I purse my lips, as I fear that I will break into sobbing otherwise, and I think about all the lovely orgasms we'll share.

I keep resisting the urge to vomit. I can barely focus on anything except remaining conscious.

I'm floating above myself, witnessing how the weak body I used to inhabit consumes itself. It looks like a train wreck in motion. Have I finally succeeded in escaping the confines of my reality-bound frame?

Somehow, the video has ended. I'm lying supine on the carpet while white noise sizzles from end to end of my body.

Jacqueline kneels down next to me. The image of her face blurs and swirls like watercolors. She lowers her lips to mine, but I barely feel the touch.

"You did good, Leire," she says sweetly while wearing a catlike grin. "Let's take a shower."

I swallow a lump in my throat, but my voice still comes out thin and rough.

"I-I feel like an overcooked steak. I need to drink some water. Maybe eat something too."

"Alright, baby. Do you need help getting up?"

"I'm going to... rest for a few seconds."

I get a clearer look of Jacqueline's face over me. Her cobalt blue eyes and her smile are a beacon in the desert, although a sheen of sweat is making her skin shine like a pearl in sunlight.

"When you are ready, meet me in the main bathroom."

I can't hear her footsteps over the rhythmic thumping in my eardrums, but I'm left alone with the blurry vision of Jacqueline's tall silhouette disappearing into the hallway.

I manage to get myself in a sitting position. When I try to stand up, I almost black out from the pain. It feels like everything except my brain got sucked out through an open wound that still bleeds endlessly. I'm drained, empty, hollowed out from the inside. I've never felt so exhausted before. Not the most maddening, intense workdays, nor those dark weekends when I rubbed my clit raw for hours to climb out of a pit of depression; nothing prepared me for the nightmare that this American torturer designed for me.

I wobble like a drunk as I stumble to the kitchen. I was reaching for a glass from the dish rack when a wave of shame overwhelms me. I hunch over, rest my elbows on the countertop and bury my face in my arms. My mind replays from different angles how I collapsed forward onto the stand and hit my head against it, almost cracking my skull.

I start shaking uncontrollably. I wish my body would implode from how much I'm cringing.

I tried to act like the kind of human being that Jacqueline requires as a partner, and I gave it my best, but I fuck up everything I attempt. Jacqueline needs a partner with more drive than me, unafraid of taking risks. She deserves better than a loser who can barely manage her own existence.

I'm not strong enough for this life. I'm just waiting around for the next terrible and painful nonsense that will strike me down.

I envision the future moment in which Jacqueline will realize that the person she chose to date is a worthless moron, a complete waste of space, nothing more than a lump of flesh rotting away while thinking only of death. My beloved is too kind to discard me immediately, but the distance will grow wider and wider until the day she will go away forever. I should throw myself off her balcony before the final look of disgust in her face shatters me.

Will she leave without saying goodbye? Would she tell everyone about how horrible an experience dating me was?

"Please don't leave," I beg weakly while tears stream down my face. "Just stay with me."

People say all kinds of nonsense about solitary people, but they are spared the panic of holding on to someone that they know they will eventually lose.

I take a few deep breaths until I've calmed down enough. I fill a glass with cold water. The first gulp brings further tears to my eyes. The water tastes so refreshing that I gulp down the rest of it, but I choke out and start coughing violently while sputtering all over the countertop. I'm left gasping for air. I steady myself by leaning against the kitchen table, and I somehow manage to keep myself from vomiting. My throat burns like fire, every muscle in my body feels sore and bruised.

"Fuck," I say aloud. "Fuck me!"

I drink some more water directly from the spout. I also open the fridge and, although my stomach feels full of worms, I bite off a long piece of salty fuet.

Maybe I don't deserve to love Jacqueline, but I want to cling to her like a leech, because she's all that I have left in this world. The only thing keeping me alive is thinking about her every second of the day. When I close my eyes, she appears in front of me wearing an evening gown made of moonbeams, and she smiles down at me.

I slap my cheeks to wake the fuck up, then I drag my feet towards the main bedroom.

---

Author's note: the scene hasn't ended yet. I'm notoriously terrible at estimating how many words implementing my notes for a scene, let alone a novel, will take me, as I keep coming up with nonsense during the process. Ages ago, in a note just like this one, I mentioned that I had about 10,000 words of notes left to implement. Today I have 9,500 words waiting for me to turn them from notes into coherent scenes. I'm not complaining; I'm having a blast writing this novel, and I already know how it's going to end, which gives me the freedom to play confidently during each scene.

Anyway, I'm leaving for work in a couple of hours. Today I start a new contract at my usual hospital. Although I've been living like this for some years, the anxiety leading up to appearing at that office again and having to handle responsibility doesn't disappear. My intrusive thoughts get worse: I have to hide scissors because I keep picturing myself plunging them into my eyeballs, and as I eat, my brain conjures up daydreams of me discovering a cockroach or a spider or at least a long hair under the next spoonful.

I always think that I won't be able to tolerate the long workdays due to this unhinged brain of mine, but somehow I always get used to it. If by used to it means surviving through terrible IBS for ten hours, tolerating my fear and disgust of humans while acting like another human, and navigating through all the technical nonsense of the job as an IT guy. And I hope that I won't end up getting paired with a certain shithead during my afternoon shift, because it would mean me doing the work of two people.

I'm a child at heart, nothing more. I've had very little character development. I want no part of this crap. Why can't I just keep doing childish things until my heart stops?

We're Fucked, Pt. 40 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

When Jacqueline's Audi enters the roundabout at the end of Lugaritz Avenue, the setting sun shoots its beams through the branches of a nearby clump of trees, forcing me to squint as I doze off in the passenger seat. Jacqueline maneuvers around the center island, and I catch a glimpse above some distant hills of the cosmic fireball as it tinges the view like a golden spotlight. A bone white apartment obstructs the landscape on my left. I lean back, turn my head towards my window and try to stay awake by watching how a multicolored row of parked cars zips past us. It feels like I'm replaying an old movie whose name I'm too tired to recall.

My eyelids feel heavy, my thoughts are fuzzy. Added to the vibrations of the car that Jacqueline is driving safely to its destination, my mind is sinking in a mystical atmosphere that makes me feel detached from the loathsome reality.

I need to stay awake. I could use some coffee, in a mug that would warm my palms and fingers as it slid into my hands. If I had been sitting on a train as it headed to Irún, I would have shut my eyes and hoped that whatever part of my brain remained awake wouldn't miss my stop, but I don't want to pass out next to my girlfriend as if I were some elderly woman.

"You must have worked really hard today, huh?" Jacqueline says.

Her raven black hair shines in the light trapped inside the Audi. The glint in her eyes, that look more liquidy blue in the sunset glow, reminds me of those angelic figureheads carved into wooden ships.

I force myself to speak, although it feels like the effort will drain my remaining energy.

"I've worked, which is far more than I did yesterday. Gone over plenty of documentation for that Python contract. I'm halway through the implementation already, so I suppose I should feel happy with how things turned out."

"You are barely able to keep your eyes open."

I must look like a mummified rat, a tiny furry rodent who can't move or even blink because it's wrapped up tight in its own skin. I rub my eyelids, then sigh.

"That's nothing new. Most workdays, as soon as I reached my apartment and sat down on the sofa, I passed out right away. I usually woke up a couple of hours later, then I ate whatever was left on the fridge and went to bed."

Jacqueline takes her eyes off the road to glance into mine.

"How do you even manage to get the chores done?"

What chores? Ah, people clean their homes and take out the trash. I don't know how they make any headway with those tasks without passing out on the floor from exhaustion first.

I give an exaggerated shrug.

"I... don't. Life's too full of tasks to complete when I'd need to sleep instead. It's a good thing you haven't visited my place."

"That's... no way to live, Leire," Jacqueline says gravely.

I'm tempted to tell her that this is the kind of woman that she decided to date, but a cold fear grips me. Even during the weekends, there are so many days when I can't face anything; I just want to lock my bedroom door and spend the day in bed. But that's not the kind of person that would be able to keep an intimate relationship going, so I bite my tongue and hang my head low.

"Oh, I agree," I say quietly. "However, my body insisted on keeping me alive, often against my will. Funny how nature works."

Jacqueline's hands remain firmly placed on the wheel as she turns her head towards me. I'm having trouble adjusting my gaze, so I can't make out her expression.

"Since I met you, I've known you to really push yourself," Jacqueline says. She pauses and gazes ahead through the windshield. "Your sleep schedule is messed up, and you sacrifice the time that should help you recover from work stress. It must feel like you've been living on a treadmill. Besides, you should eat properly so you can give your body the energy and strength it needs."

I slump in the seat as a new wave of fatigue hits me. I don't want to let Jacqueline's words sink in. Why would she take such an interest? Maybe she's trying to get into character for a role in some movie.

Before I became obsessed with Jacqueline, there was hardly a minute of the week when I wasn't thinking about programming, even though I produced useless crap that our clients barely cared about. None of my jobs allowed any room for self-improvement, or growth as a person, beyond what they could provide financially. One of my former bosses said that us programmers are just assembly lines: useful only as long as our output keeps flowing and no defects show up. Besides, I wouldn't have survived long term in any of my previous jobs, as the software was being built by teams of people who worked together seamlessly, while I can't even work seamlessly with myself.

I never had any lasting interest in life apart from computers and technology; I amassed piles of board games, but I couldn't be bothered to play most of them. So much work to set things up and deal with the rules. What's left of me that hasn't become a part of that black box of software?

I've been like this since high school. After my mother died, everything went downhill for me. My father turned to alcoholism. As soon as my older brother graduated, we got kicked out of our home and became homeless. We slept under bridges or inside abandoned buildings. By that time, my brother had become addicted to drugs, and ended up dead by overdose. My wails attracted a gang of junkies that kidnapped me and chained me to a pole in the basement of their hideout. They abused me as their sexual slave until they got bored, then they drowned me in an ice-cold bath and sold my organs on the black market. I still remember how peacefully those ice cubes bobbed on the surface of the water.

Who cares? My mind wants to shut off. Losing consciousness always solved my problems, at least during that respite.

"I should probably do plenty of things," I mutter hoarsely, "but now I only want to sleep."

My eyelids feel heavy again, and I let them fall shut. A sense of tranquility sweeps over me, a warm feeling that is rising from my stomach and spreading across my chest. I'm floating in the center of a black sphere that no threat can penetrate. From the outside world, only the pleasant vibrations and droning noise of the car's engine reach me, and even they seem muffled. I wish I could stay like this for a long time, resting in the passenger seat while Jacqueline drives us home.

My consciousness grows dimmer. I'm sinking deep inside some cosmic womb where there's nothing but darkness. No monsters lurking behind trees, no bad feelings waiting around each corner. Whether or not this place was created for me, now it's where I belong.

I am jolted awake; Jacqueline is squeezing my left shoulder. I sit upright. I couldn't make out what she said, but the Audi has stopped in front of her apartment building, she has turned off the car's ignition and she's unbuckling her seat belt, so I get the point.

I climb out of the car. As I step onto the sidewalk, a gust of cold wind whips my hair around and irritates my exposed skin, that the short sleep had anesthetized. Someone has painted the skies with the lightest shade of rose. The afternoon will slide into night soon enough.

Once again I marvel at the quiet neighborhood that Jacqueline was able to afford with her job as a secretary, in addition to whatever amount of money she made as a cam girl. Up in the hills of Donostia, we are surrounded by two or three stories tall, ivory white apartment buildings with gardens hidden from view by fences and hedges. Most of the windows have the curtains drawn shut. Someone is watching television; I recognize the detached cadence of the local dubs, but I can't tell from which building the noise is coming out. It's the perfect neighborhood to launch a private porn empire.

Jacqueline digs her keys out of her coat's pocket. Her next words slung my way catch me yawning; besides, my brain hasn't snapped out of its daze yet, so I just straighten my back and nod. I follow my beloved into the building, then I drag myself up the stairs. Why didn't we take the elevator?

As Jacqueline unlocks the front door of her apartment, I'm tempted to rest my forehead on her back. Ah, we're finally home. Once I shuffle into the hallway, I shake my head and blink a few times to adjust my vision.

"You look like you're about to fall asleep standing up," Jacqueline says.

I consider struggling to formulate a coherent response, but I end up exhaling and shrugging instead.

We kick off our shoes, then we hang her coat and my corduroy jacket on the rack by the front door. Jacqueline turns towards me, brushes a lock of hair away from my forehead and gives me a peck on the lips.

"Go into the spare bedroom and put on sportswear."

"Huh?"

"Plenty to choose from. Grab something comfortable for yourself. I'll get changed too."

Jacqueline pats my ass, which sends me stumbling down the hallway. Why would I need sports clothes? Why not just a pyjamas, if I'm going to crawl into bed?

I shouldn't think this hard. I've already reached my sanctuary, so I have nothing to worry about.

The spare bedroom is located opposite the main one. I open the door as I rub my eyes with the back of my free hand. I find myself staring at a kids' bed covered with a lemonade pink quilt that features an unhealthy amount of unicorns. The walls are painted sapphire blue. At first I think that three fake clouds mounted on the wall are decorative, but they are camouflaged lamps.

I step into the bedroom and close the door behind me. I feel like I'm intruding on someone's private playground. Does a child live here? No way, the previous owner of the apartment must have abandoned this stuff. They likely sold their kids into slavery and had to flee in a hurry. Whatever. As it concerns me, this bed is one in which I haven't had sex with Jacqueline yet.

What am I doing in this room? Ah, Jacqueline told me to put on sportswear. Is that supposed to fuel one of her fetishes?

Two canvas storage bags rest on top of the bed. I unzip the one on the left. It's filled with neatly folded garments: blouses, tops, shorts, underwear, lingerie. One of the tops catches my attention, so I unfold it and hold it up. I wouldn't have been surprised to find out that Jacqueline owned skin tight tops that exposed the midriff, and that announced bold intentions with lettering that read 'cowgirl' or 'come here daddy', but instead this is a short sleeve top with a punk motif. Something that a fifteen-year-old girl would wear to the mall. Besides, if Jacqueline attempted to cram her twin monuments in this, even back in the day, the fabric would explode. I sniff the garment, but it smells like laundry detergent. I fold the top and return it to the bag.

As I browse through the other clothes, I realize that they could also belong to a teenager. Did Jacqueline buy them because they looked cool?

The storage bag on the right is filled with men's clothes: shirts, polo shirts, sleeveless shirts. Jeans. I slide my hand over some boxer briefs. Jacqueline paid premium for them.

Do these clothes belong to Jacqueline's lucky victims? Did so many men leave a garment behind as an excuse to return? No, men don't rely on such strategies; they have more balls than women do, at least a pair. Is Jacqueline cosplaying as a guy? Then again, the matter of her tits remains.

Are these trophies from the men that Jacqueline screwed? I doubt they would have been relinquished willingly, unless Jacqueline asked real nicely. Did I find Jacqueline's treasure trove of death? Am I dating a serial killer? And why does that thought make me horny?

I shake my head. I'm exhausted enough that I shouldn't trust my thought patterns. I zip both bags closed.

From the mirrored wardrobe, jam-packed with clothes that I can picture Jacqueline wearing, I choose a tank top and a pair of leggings made of black spandex. I get undressed to obey Jacqueline's order, but why was I supposed to put on sports clothes?

---

Author's note: this is just half of the scene. I've already written most of the first draft of what remains, but I felt like uploading this part already. I don't know what to tell you.

A couple of days ago they called me to tell me that I've been hired for another contract. Hooray. It starts next week, lasts two weeks likely including both saturdays, and I'll be working the afternoon shift. To celebrate this development, I went out for an hour or so and bought a bacon pizza. After I ate half of it, I ended up in the bathroom with virulent diarrhea. But I guess it was celebratory diarrhea.

I'm someone whose anxiety, neurological issues and general inability to tolerate the presence of human beings only allow him to withstand about an hour and a half in that nasty world out there, but I'll have to return to the routine of working at an office for eight hours. When I'm unemployed, I'm miserable. When I'm employed, I'm far more miserable and barely able to write in my spare time. But working adds money to my bank account, so that's alright.

Anyway, I had another weird dream of which I rage quit at the end. As usual, I had to run around some odd building complex to solve stressful issues. I shouldn't be surprised that my troublesome dreams involve such activities, as that's the most troublesome part of my job. In any case, I walked into a hallway only to find out that there were cat-sized centipedes crawling around. Even worse: they had the faces of human babies. They looked like something out of the 'Berserk' manga series (I specify that because the adaptations were garbage for the most part). Somehow I knew that these centipedes acquired the physical features of whatever they ate.

I guess it was my job to prevent random babies from getting eaten. I followed the centipedes, and in a room further down the hallway, I discovered that they were munching on the testicles of a guy strapped to a chair. Somehow I knew that the guy had regenerative powers, so someone must have intended to torture him. And I guess human testicles are related enough to babies as far as the centipedes are concerned.

This is the kind of stuff that my subconscious produces by itself; my own stories are usually much tamer. Anyway, although I've forgotten the details, I know that Jinx from 'Arcane' was involved in that segment of the dream. Maybe she was the one who strapped the guy to the chair to torture him. I've loved that girl since I watched the series, so I welcome her appearing in my dreams. If only there was more quality CGI of her for VR purposes.

I hope you enjoyed this stuff of mine you've read. If you haven't, that's alright too.

The Tiny Pebble in My Head (Poetry)

Link to this poem on my personal page, where it looks better

---

Ten years ago I still believed in therapy.
I used to pay this psychiatrist a hundred euros
For each session, that always started late
And often got interrupted by phone calls.

What I got out of those sessions was false hope,
The notion that I was going forward in life
Because to listen to me for an hour, I paid someone
As much as I would make as a technician in four days.

I don't know what the point of all that was;
There were no answers to anything,
No solutions or plans for my future.
I always felt like a guinea pig in some experiment.

After each session, I wanted to vomit.
I spent the day with a lump in my throat
While lying on my bed or walking around the block,
Looking at the clouds and sky above my head.
I've always hated talking about myself,
And especially sharing my secrets with others.
Talking with other people is exhausting.
It's not like anyone has ever really cared.

But I guess I was desperate for help and support.
My cycles of depression made me lose opportunities,
And I've dealt with suicidal ideation since forever.
Many times I've fantasized about overdosing,
Throwing myself out of a window,
Shooting myself in the head,
And a myriad of other creative methods
Of getting rid of this life I've never enjoyed.

Anyway, talking never worked well enough,
So these professionals wanted to medicate me.
They said stuff like, "We'll try this one drug,
And if it doesn't work, we'll try something else."

This one antidepressant, or whatever it was,
Made my skin break out in stretch marks,
And I suddenly found myself producing milk
Out of the breast tissue my body had developed.
Not many men can say, let alone admit,
That they know how their breast milk tastes.

(The taste reminded me of rotten meat
With some sourness and saltiness added.
Over the years, as I grew more unhinged,
My milk tasted better. I no longer disliked it.
It became a part of my diet.
I drank it straight from the teat with a straw,
Or with some milk powder mixed in for taste.
Now I was consuming myself to survive.
I could have become anemic
From all the blood I was losing in this way.
Yet it was the only sustenance I had available;
Without it I would have died within a week.)

None of that seemed right,
So they told me to get an MRI.
I enjoyed the cozy feeling
Of being trapped in that coffin
While this loud clanging noise
Echoed through every bone in my body.
It felt like what one might experience in space,
Except instead of zero gravity
It's just magnetic forces
Pulling your brain around.

The next doctor I visited, maybe two weeks later,
Started talking about how he was going to treat it.
"Treat what?" I asked. Things got awkward quick;
Someone had failed to tell me beforehand
That they had found a tumor in my pituitary gland.

I thought maybe they could show me something else,
Something more important than my tumor.
A hole in my heart that wouldn't close.
A tear in my eye that no doctor could remove.
Anything besides my macroadenoma.

The tumor is a lumpy thing that lives inside me,
Hiding behind my eyes where nobody can see it.
(Sometimes when I blink it gets dislodged and falls out.
I feel it at night as it makes its way down through my hair.)

A prolactinoma they call it,
A tiny pebble of flesh in that stupid gland
Located at the base of the brain,
And that according to some googling,
It monitors and regulates bodily functions
Through the hormones it produces:
The adrenocorticotropic hormone,
The growth hormone,
The luteinising hormone,
Prolactin,
And the thyroid stimulating hormone.

I don't know what most of that means,
But because I was born with this tumor
And it wasn't found for twenty five years,
I failed to produce enough testosterone
During the critical years of my development,
So I ended up with low bone density,
Headaches, migraines,
Loss of interest in sexual activities
(I believed myself to be asexual,
But now I'd fuck anything that moves),
Erectile dysfunction,
Possible infertility (not that it matters),
Enlarged breasts,
And far more sweat than necessary.

This tumor is a macroadenoma in one dimension,
Meaning that it could fuck up the optic nerve,
And to prevent it from growing further,
I have to keep taking medication for life.

My doc told me that some other guy with this tumor
Had decided to stop taking the drug,
And years later he went to the hospital
Because he experienced head-splitting headaches;
His tumor had kept growing uncontrollably.

(My doctor told me to stay away from doctors.
He advised me to stop going to the hospital.
The last thing he wanted to see was me again.
I found this to be an incredible relief;
I could get back to the safety and isolation I craved,
And it seemed like I had nothing more to lose anyway.)

Do you have any clue how much fun it is
To be known as the male kid with breasts?
Worse yet, this kind of tumor is known to cause
The infamous curse of the micropenis.
I suppose I must count myself lucky;
Mine just ended up small.
After gym class, about to hit the showers,
My dick was at times a source of ridicule,
Although life didn't feel funny at all to me.

Sex has always been shameful and humiliating,
And a girlfriend used its size to justify
Cheating with some other guy and leaving me.
There's no cure for having a small dick,
Neither for the mental scars of insults and mockery,
So I'll likely stick with VR porn for the rest of my life.

Ironically, this tumor with which I was born,
Or that I developed shortly after,
Seems unrelated to the autism
(High-functioning, formerly Asperger's)
That I was also born with or developed.
Add to that a screwed up family,
And plenty more terrible luck.

Stranger yet, this fucking macroadenoma
Put me under feminizing hormone therapy
Against my will, as if it were any of those doctors
That these days decides that a girl must become a boy
Because she likes wearing pants and playing with trucks,
To try to change the way you're made
Into the thing that fits those bastards best.

There's no magic potion, no quick fix
For the nonsense that we've been given,
Just a whole lot of hurt
And a million kinds of pain.

My brain failed to develop properly as a guy
But also failed to grow as a girl.
I'm left feeling like something is missing inside me,
Like I could never be normal in any way.

Whenever I get undressed, I avoid staring at myself;
I don't identify with the body with which I was left.
When I stare, the reflected face seems strange:
It looks back at me with its own eyes,
The expression of a whole other self.
That doesn't mean I should have been a girl;
I simply shouldn't have been born
With a fucking tumor in my head
(Or better yet, not have been born at all).

My sexuality got fucked up as a result,
An obvious point if you've read my stuff.

In the end my heart's not so easy to read,
It beats with such intensity it can't be missed.
So what do you see? What does this brain look like?
And why did they cut my penis off with scissors
And sew my vagina shut while I was still alive?

(None of this has to do
With that marxist,
Society-ruining garbage
That cretins keep spewing out
From the infiltrated academia
And the compromised media;
You should all shove a cactus
Up your greasy bums.)

I've always felt comfortable
Writing female characters.
It would be nice to have a pussy,
Or at least a decently-sized dick.

Is it truly a wonder, then,
That ever since I was a little boy,
When faced with any problem,
The first solution that came to mind
Was to end my suffering and die?
I haven't improved in that respect;
I've just grown jaded and exhausted,
Way past my expiration date,
And I'm waiting for my body
To finally get the memo
And say "fuck you" to me.

My head is spinning like an airplane on its last descent.
Nothing remains but static inside this fucking skull.

It's been a long time since I last saw a shrink.
Instead, I write for self-expression and catharsis:
An art gallery where no one goes,
A museum without visitors.
I thought that writing would serve as therapy,
But what a joke that turned out to be.

My writing gives me pleasure and relief.
I guess that it's a sort of masturbation.
If that's so, then let me enjoy my self-pleasure;
Fuck off to read Shakespeare if that makes you happy.

They say that every man must come to terms with himself.
What about people like me? How are we supposed to do that?
My brain doesn't know who I am. My body isn't even mine.
My penis and testicles don't seem to exist at all.

I'm not interested in reality;
I just want to live in my mind.
So when I sit in here with you today,
You are just a phantom in the dark.

Do people change? I haven't changed much.
I'm afraid to look people in the face.
The whole world looks gloomy to me.
A deep sadness has settled into my heart.

The only reason why I haven't killed myself yet
Is because there are things left to accomplish in life.
Just kidding; it's because I'm a little bitch
With severe executive dysfunction issues.

I feel like I've been around forever.
Time just flies by. It feels so short.
Why did I even get out of bed today?
What should I be doing with my life?
To me there's nothing special about living;
It is just the long, tiring way to die.

Anyway, fuck you all,
Especially you reading this,
If only 'cause
I got fucked first.

We're Fucked, Pt. 39 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

The coffee maker has finished brewing, so I remove the fogged up jug from the heating plate and I pour coffee in the two mugs, one for me and the other for Jacqueline. As she asked before she went to the shower, I fill the remainder of her mug with milk, then I add a spoonful of sugar. I sip some of my steaming, bitter drip coffee as I lean against the counter.

I'm groggy although I've slept well for my standards. I don't recall ever having rested enough; I'm on a twenty-four-seven alert state, ready to pounce at any moment, in consonance with the unstoppable monster that I am.

Out the balcony door, beyond my ghostly reflection, the light from the kitchen only illuminates the row of pots arranged on top of the parapet as well as the plants they contain, that are green and shrub-like instead of the vibrant flowers that I would have expected from Jacqueline. Otherwise it's pitch dark outside. I hear faintly the engine of a car as some neighbor heads to work.

While I hold the mug with my right hand, with my spare one I smooth down the front of my denim shirt, that Jacqueline lent me. Although it's oversized enough to feel comfortable, I can't imagine why my beloved bought it; there's no way she could fit her breasts in this garment. Besides, she's close to a head taller than me, so how could she have possibly worn it?

I crack my neck, then I close my eyes and take a deep breath. Tonight I struggled through a vivid dream that many would consider a nightmare: I spent hours running around a huge building complex made up of a palace, a hospital and a supermarket, which were situated in a desolate landscape of broken concrete, littered with garbage and animal carcasses. I was tasked, along with people I knew but whose faces I've forgotten, to hunt down nearby robbers and killers to defend the three structures. However, I kept getting left behind.

In the last stretch of the dream, I hurried up to one of the top floors, burst into the guardroom and rummaged through the disarray of papers on a table in search of my gun, or of a gun anyway, while a bored security guard insisted on using the same table to paint Warhammer figurines. My skin burned from the anxiety coursing through me. I found a disassembled Beretta. I recall how it felt to hold that cold gun once I put it together, but I had only located an empty magazine, so I kept busy looking all over for bullets then pushing them into the magazine while my hands trembled. However, as I was about to push the final bullet in, I realized that I had filled the magazine with bullet-shaped Warhammer paints. I screamed at the bored guard, left the room in a huff and threw the gun against a wall. My subconscious must have gotten tired of the last few hours of nonsense, because I climbed onto a windowsill and I rage quit by plummeting to death. I woke up instantly to the sight of Jacqueline's peaceful face centimeters away from mine as she breathed on my lips with her mouth open.

I must be worried, likely about work, for my brain to hallucinate such an exhausting dream. To be fair, it also featured a scene in which I lied faceup in a ditch while someone gave me a blowjob. I don't want to think about why was it necessary for my dream self to possess a dick.

A gulp of coffee was warming my innards when Jacqueline walks into the kitchen. Her hair is damp from the shower, and spilling over her shoulders. For this generally unimportant Tuesday, my beloved chose to wear a satin, midnight blue blouse with V-neck, along with a smoke grey tube skirt that barely reaches the knees of her stockinged legs. Her skin gleams in the kitchen light, and the contrast with her lipstick makes her mouth appear pinker and more kissable.

I perk up.

"You are going to be the death of me with this beautiful sight of a woman."

Her cobalt blues narrow at me as she parts her lips in a smile. She lifts my hair away from my neck and runs her fingers through my strands. The scent of soap reaches my nostrils.

"My, my, so full of words," she purrs.

I hand Jacqueline her mug, and she warms her hands with it.

"Ah, it smells good. Just right for the morning." Jacqueline takes a sip, then she looks me over. "Those clothes fit you very well."

"They do, but how come you own newish clothes that wouldn't fit your majestic frame, and why did I end up wearing a dress yesterday when you had these clothes lying around?"

Jacqueline's smile wanes. She lowers her gaze in hesitation.

My heart flutters painfully. I've made Jacqueline uncomfortable. I lift my hand and start stuttering an apology, but she offers me a reassuring, although weak, smile.

"I don't know how to explain the hoard of clothes I've accumulated in my spare bedroom, and it pains me that I've thought of coming up with a lie. Please, allow me to keep this little secret for now, particularly this early on a workday."

"It's okay! This is your house and you are free to own whatever you want without having to justify yourself."

"I appreciate that."

"I was just curious. So... that's why I ended up going to work with the dress I bought for our date?"

"I thought about offering you some of those clothes, but I feared having to explain myself," Jacqueline says. "However, to be honest, wearing a revealing dress to work did you some good. You looked more feminine than ever. You had gotten used to wearing hoodies and sweaters because you dislike your body, as part of your general self-disdain. But it didn't kill you to show a bit more of that pretty skin of yours, did it?"

I sigh.

"I'm technically still alive, yes. Also, I suppose I need to work on my self-esteem and self-respect..."

Jacqueline strokes my cheek.

"Anyway, one of these days you'll have to go home, pack some of your own clothes and bring them over. Maybe this Friday?"

"Am I... spending the whole weekend with you then?" I ask, unable to contain the excitement in my voice.

"If you want. We can go out as well, have another date."

Jacqueline saunters over to the balcony door, opens it and breathes in the wintry air. A dozen birds keep chirping and warbling in the dark of the morning sky.

Although I enjoy the feeling of the air cooling my lungs, I end up shivering. I gulp down the rest of my coffee. After I leave the mug on the counter, I cross my arms in front of my chest and I stare at Jacqueline's hair as the snow-kissed breeze caresses my skin.

"Are you nervous about returning to the office?" she asks over her shoulder.

"I mean, the subject of work always gives me anxiety. But why would I be particularly nervous today?"

"What do you mean?" Jacqueline asks as she chuckles in confusion. She closes the balcony door, then turns around and tilts her head at me.

"Being back in that office, or any, with people looking at me and thinking I'm useless, or a stupid piece of trash. Making some horrible mistake. Having to face people who don't want me there or even treat me as a joke. It all sounds like a recipe for stress. I often came home feeling like I had to take a shower to wash off the shame."

"Baby, none of that! You didn't bring up your meeting with Ramsés, and I didn't want to bother you about it. Things got heated, didn't they? Not only you spent about fifteen minutes in his office, but you also shouted quite a bit."

I avert my gaze as my cheeks get flushed. During my rant about Python's malignity, I failed to consider that my shrill voice would travel through the closed door, and possibly the walls, to reach my coworkers' ears.

"Sorry you had to hear that," I say shyly. "He made me mad."

"Why don't you tell me more about how things went? I couldn't make out what you were arguing about. I've been dying to ask you since."

"Well, it felt like I was fighting for my life, but we mostly talked about technical matters. He is forcing me to fulfill a contract that will require me to program in a language that makes me nauseous, and besides, he enjoys piling up work expecting me to work overtime. He asked me to stay late again today! I wanted to kick his pig teeth in." I shake my head. "Now that I say it out loud, our boss is kind of a massive prick, isn't he? I'm sure he's just doing it to fuck with me."

Jacqueline finishes her coffee. She licks her lips and places her mug close enough to mine that they clink together.

"He hasn't... made you uncomfortable in other ways, has he?" she asks gravely.

The way Jacqueline holds my gaze, she must have dealt with the sight of that bastard's swollen crotch often. If Ramsés gets hard leering at a decaying nut like me, during his meetings with Jacqueline he may be jerking off under his mahogany desk. It wouldn't surprise me if some of his seed got on her clothes.

"No, not yet. But who knows what he might do next time? He certainly finds pleasure in seeing people suffer. I'm sure he'd love to bend me over his desk and pound into my tight asshole until it's red and raw."

"To be fair, I would also love to bend you over some desk."

I sigh deeply.

"Anyway, I don't know if I should be glad that the prick makes someone else's skin crawl besides mine."

Jacqueline reaches for my hand and squeezes my fingers gently.

"Yeah... I mean, he's a horny guy. This one time I entered his office to discuss a report, he had his hand down his pants, and I could hear porn noises spilling from his headphones. And he's the kind of person that lashes out if something he does embarrasses him. Always eager to blame others for his own mistakes."

"A true shithead, for sure. He's got the morals of a sewer rat and the sexual drive of an ocelot. If I were him, I would be too busy having my balls stroked by some prostitute to care. I'd like to get back at him somehow, but mainly I hope to repel him with my attitude."

"I can't blame him for watching porn even during work hours. I've wanted to plenty of times. When it hits, it hits. But I don't approve of that man doing it, because he's a creep."

A sudden weight of exhaustion comes over me. I rub my eyelids with both palms. What crimes did we commit that we deserved to end up subservient to that sexual maniac?

"I feel sorry for our intern. He's in his twenties, he has his whole life ahead of him. He shouldn't have to settle for our mess."

As Jacqueline fiddles with the ring of her mug on the counter, her smile fades.

"Leire, do you think we should tell our boss that you need to take a break and work on your mental health?"

I shift my weight from foot to foot. I can't escape my insanity, but it still unsettles me when people bring it up so bluntly.

"That bastard complained because I refused to work overtime. If I tell him that I need a medical leave because I'm going nuts, he'll flip!"

"Well, at least you can tell him that you need to get a diagnosis from a specialist. You're not in the best state of mind right now, are you? I think it might be time to do some self-care. I can't let him push you into a corner and kill you with stress and anxiety."

I cross my arms and avert my gaze.

"I already engage in plenty of self-care."

"I meant the non-masturbatory kind. I just want you to feel better, Leire."

I can't handle Jacqueline's concern. I step closer and put my hands on her shoulders, although I suspect that I'll mar the shiny blouse with my fingertip grease.

"Jacqueline, unfortunately I know myself very well," I say calmly as I look deep into her dreamy blues. "There are only a handful of ways for me to cope. You're the main one. Sexual activity is good therapy, especially when we're feeling depressed or anxious. It releases endorphins and other hormones that help us feel better. It's likely far better than any pharmaceutical antidepressant."

Jacqueline stares at me with an expression of disbelief.

"Listen, I shouldn't allow our boss to use me as a human hamster," I say carefully, "but if I stopped to work on my mental health, I'd have to retire. It's never going to improve enough. I am broken from birth. However, that doesn't matter as long as I can hang out with you."

She has furrowed her brow in worry, and her gaze darts between my facial features.

Jacqueline's silence disturbs me. I shouldn't have opened up last night, going as far as crying in her arms.

"Am I a walking source of embarrassment to you?" I ask while a hollow feeling grows in my chest. "Do you regret having to admit that you know I exist? I didn't want to burden you with my problems."

"What makes you think that something like that would cross my mind?"

"Because there's hardly a moment in which I'd rather not know myself."

"You little idiot," Jacqueline says warmly. "I brought you home willingly, didn't I?"

As I consider whining some more, Jacqueline cups the back of my head and leans in to shove her tongue in my mouth. Her saliva tastes like coffee and sugar. She's making me feel like we're making out on a pile of pillows. After she pulls away, she runs her fingers over the buttons of the denim shirt she has lent me.

I'm light-headed and weak in the knees, so I miss what Jacqueline just told me.

"We better get going, baby," she repeats. "Time flies whenever I talk to you, but we can't make a habit of arriving late to work."

I follow my beloved into the hallway, where she grabs her designer coat from the rack. I put on my thick corduroy jacket as Jacqueline wraps her long red scarf around her neck.

Partly because her taste still lingers in my mouth, my heart has swollen with gratitude. Jacqueline expects me to return to her apartment this weekend; sooner, it wouldn't surprise me if I end up catching a ride back here today after work. Her home is a sanctuary in which I feel safe and secure, so why would I want to return to my own cold and lonely place back in Irún, that Wild West of a cesspool, where I would lie down on my sofa, in front of the tower of unplayed board games, and count the minutes until I rejoined my woman?

As her keys jangled on her hand, she was reaching for the door handle when I ask her to wait for a second.

"Jacqueline... I had the time of my life," I say in a vulnerable voice. "Whenever you want us to spend the afternoon, or a whole day, making sweet love, just tell me or call me, okay? I'll probably stumble over myself to run to your side."

Jacqueline's eyes sparkle with affection. She bites her lower lip, then she raises my chin with her thumb and forefinger.

"Is that what you want, a sort of friends with benefits thing, booty calls from time to time?"

I can't open up about what I desire: for someone to invent a reductor beam and shoot me with it until I shrink to the size of an insect, so I can crawl inside Jacqueline's pussy and live out the rest of my existence in her humid, cavernous insides.

"No, but I can't hope for anything else, right? I've put myself on the back of a queue, behind dozens of tall, fit tennis players and Olympic gold medalists."

Jacqueline steps towards me so the tip of our shoes nearly touch, and she holds my gaze with a determined expression that threatens to make me wet.

"Leire, do you want something serious with me?"

If she abandoned me after I got to experience her love, I'd feel flayed and deboned, reduced to a pile of flesh with the blood drying out on the ground.

"F-fuck yes I do!"

Her mouth breaks into a roguish smile.

"You do, huh? How much?"

Am I allowed to dream of something so magical to happen?

"Let's say that I want to fall asleep by your side every night and wake up next to you every morning."

Jacqueline's eyes twinkle. She lowers her gaze to my denim shirt, then she tidies up its neckline.

"Since you are a single woman unattached to anyone else," Jacqueline says coyly, "how about we enjoy each other sexually whenever possible and wherever we can? That way there won't be any room for doubt or misunderstandings. Think about the benefits. For example, when my back hurts after a few hours of fucking, you could help massage it for me, take care of some of the stress points. You could also keep me warm during the long nights of autumn, or the freezing winters. In turn, I'll hold you in my arms and make you forget about the pain. So if you'll have someone as used up as me..."

I wrap my arms around her waist, then I stand on my tiptoes to kiss her lips. Her scarf tickles my chin with its soft wool.

"I've never thought of you that way, Jacqueline," I murmur. "I would have fucked around plenty if I had developed that sexy body of yours."

"If you accept me, I'm done with all that."

I gasp. My chest tightens at her words, like a child hearing a fairytale for the first time. Although I attempt to draw my head back to look Jacqueline in the eye, she squeezes me tighter.

"No way you can quit cold turkey!" I tell her. "It's going to wreck you! I don't want to be accused again of causing someone's aneurysm. Just taper down at your pace, for as long as you need."

Jacqueline holds my head between her hands and leans in to press her mouth against mine. The kiss lingers on for longer than I expected. My body is thrumming, my heart is hammering.

I don't know how I got here, I don't know how I got so lucky, but I will not let this opportunity slip away. I'll give myself over to it with every fiber of my being. I won't allow myself to fail at loving her. She deserves that much after all the love she has poured into me.

When I break the kiss to breathe, I taste a surprising saltiness. A different liquid has slid into my mouth and rests on tongue. I lick more salty drops off my lips.

Jacqueline takes a deep breath. She produces a tissue from her coat and wipes her eyes.

"Alright then, sweetie-babe-girlfriend-of-mine."

---

Author's note: more Japanese shoegaze, like this song or this other song. I've also freaked out listening to a particular YouTuber's videos about US National Parks, like this video and this other video.

I've had a hard time making this scene flow right for whatever reason, maybe in part because I've gone through a weird few days. I feel lethargic, with the energy levels of an eighty years old.

I haven't been able to land a stable job in my nearly thirty seven years of living, so I don't have a job until likely next week. Whenever I don't have to work, I turn into a recluse. I barely go out for the essentials. It's been more than ten years since I've talked in person, to any significant length, with anyone else than my immediate family and my coworkers (well, there was a period during which I attended a few writing courses, with disastrous results). I feel terrible around people, and that's only gotten worse with age.

A couple of days ago I decided to walk around my stupid city for some fresh air. I ended up going to a coffee shop to read a manga series. As I was choosing a table to leave my tablet, a woman entered the coffee shop and went to the counter to order her stuff. That's fine. The bartender was busy, so even after she listened to the woman's order, she had to clean a few tables. It took what felt like four minutes until she started preparing this woman's very specific tea, and at that moment, another woman entered the coffee shop and joined the first one. They started yapping. When the bartender finally served the first woman, she looked over her shoulder at me, but the second woman started making her order.

I simply won't let myself be stepped on, so I tell her, calmly, "Excuse me, I was next." The first woman turns around and with a shrill voice, clearly knowing that she was in the wrong, says, "but she's with me!" I tell her that I was already waiting when the woman came in. They both stepped aside, but the first woman, who had one of those haircuts and the tone, started berating me in a passive-aggressive manner. I remained silent as the bartender prepared my order. I'm a big guy, 6' 1'' and quite wide as I used to be into weightlifting. This woman could push it as far as she wanted, but if I reacted in any way that they could paint as threatening, I would be fucked. So I just took my coffee and walked to my table as she kept saying shit.

That ruined the rest of the day for me. I already thought that the world wouldn't be this terrible if there was close to no people in it, but it always makes me feel bad when I think about that again. The encounter (as well as simply my effort to go out) sapped all my energies, and I wasted that afternoon in such a drowsy state that I couldn't keep my eyes open. I had to take two naps, and I also slept through most of the night. I intended to eat pizza for dinner, but I couldn't gather the strength to call some pizza place.

Who cares anyway. Does anybody read this shit?

We're Fucked, Pt. 38 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

I feel drugged, as if I had been pumped full of morphine because some doctors had to open me up and rummage around my insides. I’ve ridden the high until its waves placed me gently on wet sand, and it takes me blinking a few times for my sight to clear up.

The night has fallen on this late October afternoon. We are bathed by the pair of ring lights mounted on tripods at the foot of the bed. Some moonlight also pours into the bedroom; the balcony of Jacqueline's apartment on the hills offers a distant view of Mount Igueldo but no nearby homes, so we didn't need to lower the blinds to make love. Our bodies are tangled together in sweat and sticky fluids, like a couple of teenagers after their first tryst. The rhythm of my heartbeats, that vibrate through my ribcage, quickly matched Jacqueline's. My head is pillowed against her breasts, and my breath moistens the silky skin near her left areola as I listen to the sounds inside my beloved while she herself inhales and exhales deeply.

How could such pleasure have flowed through my rotten veins? My blood had been replaced with liquid fire, and my muscles with a vibrating mass of solid energy. No amount of self-diddling, no matter how dedicated, could have brought the visions of such a paradise as the one I witnessed thanks to Jacqueline's tongue.

Her fingers weave into my hair, which makes me shiver against her body.

"I thought you had passed out or fallen asleep, baby," she purrs in a low voice. "I'll have to get up and pee in a short while."

"I am dazed, lost in a warm dream," I mumble as my lips move against the skin of her breast.

She chuckles quietly.

"I'm glad. I came real good too, baby."

I sigh.

"I wish my entire life was reduced to cumming and sleeping. We’d fuck over and over until I passed out from exhaustion, then I’d sleep until my body woke up by itself. The process would repeat indefinitely. However, I’d have to fuel this decaying frame with nutrients, and eventually expel the nasty by-products of metabolism. We’d also need a roof over our heads to avoid the rain and such nonsense. When you think about it, everything that keeps us busy in these wretched lives of ours are just convoluted ways of securing the next orgasm, as well as the next eight or so hours of unconsciousness."

"I assume that our bodies in this lovely dream of yours would never age or become sick," Jacqueline says softly. "They would always stay fresh, young and strong. They would always be beautiful."

I chuckle bitterly.

"It is all too easy for me to envision a world where sex rules supreme. No one needs money, or food, or any kind of material thing for basic survival; those simply do not exist because people want nothing except for their partners' company. But dreams only take us so far because reality is harsh on our fleshly shells. After all, aging is a curse. No wonder that humans are so fucked up, when we know that we'll grow old and die. It's kind of nuts that our bodies are just outer layers that will eventually disintegrate into nothingness. Imagine: if the body were made out of steel instead of organic tissue, there'd be no such things as cancer, heart attacks or even the common cold. Anyway, over the years I've thought of so many things to do, but there is no point in putting much effort when I'm just going to end up a bloated corpse."

"You're much younger than me, baby. You look like you have all the energy in the world."

"You must be joking. I am the walking dead. I'm a vampire that was created in a laboratory to serve a dark god. Most of the time I lack the strength to carry on a conversation, let alone do anything productive. My mind can't focus on a single thing for more than half an hour before it becomes a muddle again."

"But you were in such high spirits a moment ago."

To apologize, I reluctantly lift my face from her warm breast, which is coated with a sheen of dried saliva, but a close-up of my beloved silences me. Jacqueline's lustrous, raven black hair has fanned across the pillow like an aura of smoke around her head. In her beautiful face, those cobalt blues glow with a loving light, like an angel's eyes. Her lips, puffy and rosy, part in a confident smile that shows her white teeth and deepens her dimples. The soft light from the two ring lamps makes her look ethereal.

A hot, tingly feeling grows between my thighs and my belly.

"I swear, I can barely look at you without wanting to touch myself," I say hoarsely.

Jacqueline giggles.

"What a sweet compliment."

Her hands squeeze my hips. She runs the tip of her tongue along the edge of my mouth, until I have enough and I capture her tongue between my lips.

Jacqueline understands my suffering, and what's like to exist as an unrepentant pervert. My entire universe has been reduced to her: a blue, cozy cave in the center of the desolate cosmos. A storm surrounds me, but I'm wrapped up inside a thick blanket. One day the storm will pass and the sun will come out again to shine upon our faces as we sit beneath its rays. I will gaze upon a clear sky except for a few white cumulus clouds drifting lazily across an azure background.

In Jacqueline's caresses I become a child again. I feel safe cradled in her embrace, I yearn for nothing more than to bury myself in her soft flesh. The only things that matter are her warm touch against my skin, her breath on my cheek, the tickling sensation when she strokes my back or chest, the gentle heat from her belly pressing into my own, the softness of her thighs under mine. And even though those feelings are all so small, they can't be contained by words.

What am I doing here with this woman? Jacqueline should be sitting by a fireplace with a glass of red wine while watching some TV show in the evening, before she had dinner together with her kids at the kitchen table. She should have a husband to kiss goodnight, one that would hold her close and tell her sweet dreams, instead of me.

Jacqueline's labia are glistening and shimmering in the white light. My hands roam across her skin as if my fingers were petrels gliding across the surface of the ocean. I massage her abdomen, the soft rise from her pelvis to the surroundings of her belly button. My hands travel across her hips until they reach the tuft of dark hair above her crotch. I touch her desperate to prove to myself that she exists, or through that contact, that I'm real myself.

"You claim to be much older than me, but your skin feels so firm," I say dreamily.

"Turns out I'm a freak of nature. I can't complain in that regard."

"Hey, I'm also a freak of nature in many respects!" I say cheerfully as I lift my gaze towards her nostrils. "It's only natural that we're drawn together."

Jacqueline rubs her forehead with the back of a hand.

"But I also fear getting old, you know? I don't want to end up like some hideous, hag-like monster. I want to look as good as I can for as long as I can, so that I can make the best use of my limited lifespan. If I could have a young and beautiful body forever, I would do whatever it takes to make it so."

Jacqueline pats my head. When I move my hands to support myself on the mattress, she rolls over to sit at the edge of the bed.

"Anyway, I have to expel a by-product of metabolism."

Jacqueline sashays away, not that she can help it with those wide hips of hers, presenting her smooth, round buttocks to me. A wave of lustful desire floods my body. I need to bury my face between those cheeks, suck on Jacqueline's fleshy ass, lick the crevices of her pussy, and tongue-fuck the whole of her anus. But Jacqueline closes the bedroom door behind her, so I suspect that she'll get busy with more than number one.

Once my heartbeat dies down, I stretch out my arms and legs and yawn. The bed is rumpled where we lay down together, and covered with our scented sweat and sex fluids. It smells divine; even better when I press my nose into the fabric.

The late afternoon has grown cool, so I wrap myself in Jacqueline's bedsheets and lean back against the fluffy pillows to wait for my beloved to finish up. It feels as though the temperature outside dropped ten degrees while we were in here fucking each other like animals.

Peeking from behind the ring lights, the black lenses of both cameras that are pointing at the bed look dead, except for the conspicuous red lights that clarify that they keep paying attention to me. I hope they got my performance down to a fine art.

Out the balcony door, the distant hills of Mount Igueldo are dotted with glowing windows; most of those who are rich enough to own luxurious homes there won't go to sleep yet. The spiky leaves of a potted plant perched on top of the balcony parapet sway in the silent breeze.

I close my eyes and repeat the word 'Jacqueline' over and over in my head, trying to conjure her up. I wish to stay here forever with this woman, with the darkness of this late October afternoon, and with the stars.

Perhaps Jacqueline just wants me to fulfill her sexual needs; I would never turn her down. Perhaps those plans involve keeping me around indefinitely as her slave. I'm not the type of person anyone should bring to a relationship. I have an entire collection of mental disorders and perverse fetishes. I'm a coward, a whore, an addict. The biggest waste of space on this planet. I'm so depraved that I've come to look forward to the suffering and the misery. I don't care about this world and I don't care about its people. I'm not even human anymore. Surely that warrants Jacqueline clasping a collar around my neck and chaining me to her bed. All I'd have to do every day is wait naked for my woman to return home so I could finally lap at her warm insides and slurp her nectar. All sounds would be reduced to the gentle squeaking of Jacqueline's bed, the moans of ecstatic pleasure, and the wet sloshing of her pussy against my mouth as she quenched my thirst. No more guilt, no more fear. No more feeling the weight of the world. No more fighting the darkness inside myself. Just Jacqueline.

A burst of tingles in my crotch makes me slide my hand past my pubes for a quick rub, while my other hand goes for a languorous caress of my nipples. With my eyes closed and myself lost in a dreamy reverie, I barely notice the bedroom door opening. Jacqueline steps in as she strokes her naked arms.

"It's way too chilly to walk around the apartment butt naked. I thought I had left a window open somewhere."

She tiptoes to the mirrored wardrobe, slides the door open and grabs a violet garment, so silky that the electromagnetic radiation from the ring lights glides across its surface as if it were water.

"Is this a shirt or a nightie?" she asks me over her shoulder with an amused expression on her face.

"I guess it depends on the context."

Jacqueline attires herself in the garment: a negligée that barely begins to cover her firm thighs, with a baby pink motif like a band of flowers over the chest. The thin straps seem ill-suited to contain her massive, milky white twin wonders.

I gulp at her majesty. Along with the gentle sway of her hips, her long legs and her raven black hair cascading over her bare shoulders, Jacqueline makes the perfect image of a seductive femme fatale. My heart rate goes haywire when she stands before me in all her glory.

Once I lift my gaze to Jacqueline's blues, she approves my reaction with a cocky smirk.

"The thin layer of silk hugs my tits making them look even bigger, don't you think?"

"Uh-huh."

I keep staring at her breasts as they jiggle ever so slightly under their weight. Her nipples are visible through the negligée like tiny bumps on an otherwise smooth surface, tempting me to run my tongue over those tender peaks.

"Anyway, there you are, little devil," Jacqueline coos. "You look so cozy. Leave me some room by your side, will you?"

I slide my ass down the mattress so my head rests on the pillow, and I pull away the bedsheets. However, as Jacqueline climbs onto the bed, she turns her head towards the ring lights.

"Oh, I left the cameras running again."

She walks over to fiddle with them. I close my eyes and let my head sink into the soft pillow. A few seconds later, artificial light ceases to filter through my eyelids, and I return to the darkness and silence of my own mind.

Jacqueline creeps under the bedding and snuggles up to me. Her breasts rub against mine as she licks my earhole, which makes me tremble from head to toe.

"Did you miss me lots?" she whispers in my ear.

My hand slides down to the hem of her negligée, and I rub the material gently between my fingers.

"You are my heroin. I want to overdose on you and disappear."

Jacqueline embraces me, squeezing me tight, and nuzzles up against my cheek while her hair tickles my neck.

"I'd be so sad if you were gone," she says with a heavy sigh. "It's too soon to let your soul wither away, so stick around for a bit longer."

Jacqueline's tits are compressed against my chest, covering the whole surface from my collarbones to the end of the thoracic cage, hindering my breathing somewhat. Her nipples dig into my skin like two hard pebbles.

"Is it too soon, though?" I ask. "I was born with a dried up soul, as if I had opened a carton of milk only to find a black sludge festering inside. I'm a mess in my head and an utter disaster outside of it. A broken, ruined, half-dead beast."

Jacqueline fake-bites the tip of my nose.

"Hey, don't you say such nasty things about my girl. I don't like it one bit, you hear?"

"If you hadn't been here to protect me, I would have turned into a feral, bitter, heartbroken being who spends all day masturbating. The kind of creature that craves only to be alone in their pain. I wouldn't be able to even take a shit without some help."

"Don't be so mean to yourself. You're not as bad as you think."

"I'm probably worse."

Jacqueline runs her right thumb over my bottom lip, tracing the curve where my lips meet at their center.

"Don't worry about a thing, and don't give up hope. You can count on me. I'll help you find your way back to life. Together we can make the world a better place, make everyone smile and laugh and all that."

"I'm inclined to believe you at the moment."

I pet her body under the negligée, running my fingers over her smooth, warm skin, while I listen to the beating of her heart. I'm getting drowsier by the second.

Jacqueline's breath caresses my lips as her fingertips trace patterns along the small of my back.

"Do you miss the old days," she whispers, "your childhood, your family?"

I squirm.

"Wh-why would you ask me that all of a sudden?"

"Oh, I was thinking how lucky I am to have a cute girl like you in my arms, and I tried to imagine how you looked back then. So you know, it just popped into my head."

"When did I have a family? I can't remember a single moment when I wasn't alone in the dark."

"How dramatic."

"Hey, I did tell you a bit about my family during our date at the pub, didn't I? That's a big deal for me."

Jacqueline shifts her body on top of mine.

"You told me an entertaining lie about your drunkard of a father kidnapping you and your sister, then drunk-driving off a cliff into a lake, where you drowned to death. Afterwards you came up with something about uploading your consciousness into a machine."

"Well, there you go."

Jacqueline strokes my cheek, then she turns my head enough to kiss me on the mouth. Her wet tongue caresses mine slowly, lovingly, as her warm saliva, that tastes like mouthwash, mixes with my own. I squeeze my thighs together.

"C'mon, baby," Jacqueline insists. "Share something truthful about yourself before you fall asleep."

"I don't have any family. Besides, I try to avoid thinking about the things that make me who I am. I intend to just exist."

"No family, huh? Of course. A perfect babe like you sprung out from the ether fully formed."

I let out a defeated sigh. My body feels heavy.

"Well... My mother's ashes rest beneath the soil of our family plot in an ancient cemetery."

"She got cremated, huh?"

"After she found out I got pregnant at sixteen, she went ahead and cremated herself."

Jacqueline giggles, then she squeezes my butt-cheeks reproachfully.

"You know that you can tell me the truth, open up for real. I'd want someone to talk to. And that someone might as well be me, since I'm your lover and all."

As her warm fingers caress the curve of my back, white noise burns behind my eyes, a high-pitched whistle. I shut my eyelids tight.

"A part of me wonders if my life would have been better if my father had taken his belt to my ass instead of locking me in the cellar when I was seven years old. Maybe then I wouldn't feel this way about being trapped inside my own body. I would have been free, I could have learned how to talk to other people and have made some friends, and my ass would have been much, much better by now. My mother died giving birth to me, and even though I loved her dearly, she wasn't able to protect me against my own dad who would hit me with a wooden spoon for no reason."

My eyes are still closed, but the noise has worsened. I feel like the entire world is aflame and that I'm the only person in it, a burning soul with a heart full of rage.

"Perhaps in some distant future we will discover how to build an AI capable of understanding human languages," I continue, "but until then the only option is to remain silent. The world is not kind to those who do not use words well; they will never get what they want out of life, they will always end up having to suffer for their mistakes and make more of them in return. I learned that lesson the hard way when my parents were murdered by a hitman for refusing to pay protection money."

I sense Jacqueline's heat, the curve of her cheeks, the softness of her lips, and that moist, dewy, honeyed smell that exudes from her skin.

"You silly, silly child."

I feel it again, the hole in my heart, so big and deep that the wind can blow right through it. Empty like a hollowed-out log. I sniffle, then bury my face in Jacqueline's warm neck.

"It was a war zone of tears, fear and anger. A few times I thought I might end up murdering my parents as they screamed at each other over nothing. When no one else was home, I went down into their room and sat on their bed. They used to have a stuffed bear called Pepo, which I would hug until I felt better. Whenever I hugged him, he'd turn into an old man with grey hair who stared at me blankly. Then I'd hold his paws tight while imagining us living together somewhere far away from there."

Jacqueline strokes my back gently, running her fingers along my spine. The pain begins to recede, though I still feel something missing inside me, a void that cannot be filled. I keep talking.

"And I must have gotten molested, but who hasn’t? I get molested every time I leave the safety of a closed room. So many noises pelting me, so many bright lights plunging themselves into my eyeballs. And yet all this is supposed to help me? The streets have gotten saturated with human beings that insist on discharging disgusting sounds and invading my personal space. Did anyone ask you to bother me, you rotten wretches? Who gave the green light for your own stupidity? Why do you think you are entitled to the effort it takes me to formulate a coherent sentence? I swear, this crumbling world will fall apart one day because people don't know how to treat each other right; they just scream and shout and make demands without ever listening to what other people might actually say. If I could, I would have turned myself into an ice cube and entered a state of permanent hibernation. I don't like anything, I don't see the point, I don't know where I'm going or why I was born. Consciousness is a maddening nightmare, don’t you think? The only way to survive is by accepting your lot and just existing with a dull and resigned apathy. The truth, Jacqueline, is that I don't care about the past or the future. All I want to think about is you."

Her hair brushes over my lips as her tongue licks at my throat, and while she grinds against me, her wetness dabs my thigh in small circles. Jacqueline's touch brings out a new kind of tension in me. I want her lips around my nipples again, I want her mouth sliding down across my stomach while I moan softly, I want her hands kneading my ass cheeks while I beg for more. I yearn for those sweet words of hers to spill over my body until they soak through my skin and reach the deepest parts of me.

"I hate everyone," I say in a threadbare voice, "but most especially I hate myself. So let me tell you what I really am: an ugly creature who lives for pleasure, a selfish parasite incapable of love, a weakling full of self-loathing, a disgusting pervert, an empty shell of flesh, an insignificant pile of shit... yet somehow you still like me. That's the scariest thing of all."

Jacqueline whispers in my ear.

"Then let's keep fucking each other silly until we forget everything else."

I don't reply; her fingers have found my clit, and they're circling it as if seeking a way into my mind through my skin.

---

Author's note: another long scene, although I've barely gotten any sleep tonight. Also, more Japanese tunes, like this one, this other one or that other one.

We're Fucked, Pt. 37 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

About twenty minutes before the workday ends, my boss appears at the doorway of his office like a particularly nauseating bear emerging from winter slumber. He's wearing his burgundy suit, and the tie he chose looks like a piece of raw meat hanging off his neck. His suit barely disguises the paunch, let alone the bulge in his pants. The fabric must have become as stained and smelly as he is.

Ramsés stares straight at me. I have no choice but to hold his gaze, although it sends a jolt down my spine and makes my muscles tense up.

"Leire, let's have a moment," he says with his big head and thick arms.

I freak out internally. He's setting up an emergency meeting because I haven't done enough work today. I consider answering, "What if I can't, sir? What if I'm having a mental breakdown?" but he wouldn't give a shit.

Ramsés turns around and disappears into his lair, leaving the door open for me to follow him. I stand up. As I was about to shuffle to my boss' office, Jacqueline grabs my hand and smiles up at me.

"Don't worry, sweetie," she whispers.

I can't help but worry anyway, but as I walk past her, I'm touched by Jacqueline's attention and care. My heart has swollen, and I've gotten a bit dizzy. I want to taste the salt on her skin and the sweat between her breasts, but instead I'm heading into my boss' office like a scared mouse.

Ramsés was standing next to his mahogany desk for me to enter his arena. When I step in, he sits down with an air of superiority on his throne of rape. His face is paler and drier than usual as if he had slept poorly for a couple of days, and he's sporting conspicuous dark circles under his eyes. I haven't gotten close enough to smell his breath, but it must stink like a factory. I'm sure there are worms living inside those chapped cheeks; the only thing he's missing are flies buzzing all over his face.

The light streaming through the windows is already dimming, and solely the hum of my boss' computer, that likely needs a cleanup, breaks the silence. Ramsés gestures for me to sit down on the guest chair across from his desk. However, today I refuse to bear the way he would look down at me if I sat there; I'm sure he bought the guest chair shorter so the sinking feeling would remind his workers of who's boss.

I walk up to the back of the guest chair and I place my hands on the backrest.

"Please sit down, Leire," Ramsés insists as if he was dealing with a recalcitrant child.

I try to hold my head high, but my heart is pounding.

"I won't. I've already been sitting for decades. I figure it's about time I stand for a while."

My boss stares at me through narrowed eyelids. It takes a couple of seconds for my resolve to shake like the blubber in Ramsés' buttocks. I can already smell cigarette smoke emanating from his body, mixed with sweat and dried pre-cum.

As Ramsés leans back in his chair, his gaze slides down to my cleavage and lingers there for a moment before it returns to my face. For someone used to hiding her femininity with hoodies and sweaters, wearing this stupid dress I might as well be naked. The rapist in charge of this hellish company likely believes that I'm yelling silently for him to bend me over his desk and stuff me with his porcine cock. I am not going to give up without a fight. I must under no circumstances allow this bastard to touch me, but he's already fondling me with his invisible tentacles of lust.

Even after I shift my weight nervously and narrow my shoulders, this prick keeps staring at me with the unsettling fascination of a big cat about to pounce on its prey. I force myself to keep my hands in plain sight so I won't have to worry about my fingers sliding up the inside of my thighs or into my panties.

Ramsés picks up a coffee mug sitting next to his keyboard. He raises it to his lips, takes a sip, then places it back where it was. When he lifts his gaze back to mine, there's a cold glint in his eyes that makes me feel like I'm being toyed with by some sadistic beast.

"Alright then," he says quietly. "You've got a lot of nerve today. Let's discuss your two most pressing tickets, which are now being held together by duct tape. You've only made a couple of commits to the repository, and the attached messages were even more bizarre than usual. So what's going on?"

I cringe. I hadn't considered that my boss would spy on my progress that closely, but he must have been keeping count and perusing my commits for a long time, maybe ever since he enslaved me. I've written such deranged nonsense in the messages. Why haven't I been fired or even crucified already?

"It seems to me that you've found more important things to do than your job," Ramsés says bitterly as if his life had turned into a living hell because of my incompetence.

Did I imagine that knowing look? Did Ramsés realize that I had slept pressed against Jacqueline's twin miracles? And who would blame me, if they understood how much it would hurt to be deprived of the softness of those breasts at night, or of the gentle caresses Jacqueline's supple hands provided on my body while we were sleeping together like two spoons? The idea of spending a single second apart from Jacqueline makes me want to cry; it's too horrible for words. Even as I write with nail polish nasty curses upon my boss on the walls of my mind, I still can't forget the woman who has become my world and the centerpiece of all my fantasies, and whose scent lingers on my skin and fills my psyche with sweet visions. The truth is that yesterday was the best day of my entire existence, but there are secrets one can't share with anyone, especially with the evil maniac that owns your soul. I shan't reveal my incestuous relationship to this cretin.

The pressure in my head is growing. Why would I give in even an inch? In merely twenty minutes I would have escaped from this building along with my beloved, but now I'm trapped inside a monster's lair, waiting for death by torture.

"What would you like me to tell you, boss?"

"Are you having particular troubles with any aspect of those tickets?" Ramsés asks as he fidgets with his tie and collar.

"With one of them, for sure."

My boss raises his eyebrows expectantly, but I keep silent. When no further explanation is forthcoming, Ramsés insists, "Well then, why don't you go ahead?"

I groan. One of the worst parts of being controlled by a psychopath is the uncertainty whether or not he'll listen to what I say.

"That goddamn snake language," I spit through my teeth.

"You mean Python? You are stalling on that contract because of your pet peeves with the language?" my boss asks incredulously.

My face flushes red, my heart rate increases. I clench my fists, and I can barely keep my eyelids from twitching as rage rises up inside me like an erupting volcano.

"They aren't personal annoyances! Python rests on top of its Global Interpreter Lock, planned back when most processors had a single core. It's meant to make the interpreter thread-safe, but it only allows a single thread of the operating system at a time to execute Python bytecode! So if you need to write a complex application, you won't be able to take advantage of multiple cores efficiently by distributing the work over them. Forget time-sensitive simulations such as games!" My voice is rising, and so are my blood pressure levels. "As if that wasn't enough, if you go the route of multithreading instead, you have to profile that section of the code carefully, because the overhead of setting up the parallelism, copying the data in memory, usually makes multithreading slower than if you ran the program in the main thread! I'm not the only one that's frustrated by it: the community has been buzzing for years about the fact that Python is fundamentally flawed. I swear, this fucking abomination is holding back the entire industry! Why can't people admit it?! It's a dead language with no future! It's obsolete! We need new languages that took concurrency into consideration from the beginning! At least Java added lambdas and streams, but Python remains popular because data scientists and other laypersons who jerk off to numbers want to cobble together some scripts quickly without caring enough about their architecture or how they'll perform. Those bastards should be garbage collected and incinerated! Snake programmers only think about finding the easiest way to do something, while making everyone else suffer!"

My lungs burn; I'm short-winded. The office has grown hotter, and sweat drips down my forehead and neck. This was my chance to vent for real, not just in emails or in moments of weakness during masturbation.

Ramsés wipes his own sweat from his brow. I have a clear view of his Adam's apple bobbing up and down under his skin-tight shirt, and the urge to rip out that disgusting little organ with my claws is overwhelming. After Ramsés takes a deep breath, he folds his hands on the table and fixes his gaze on my furious eyes.

"That's an interesting opinion you've formed," my boss says as his nostrils flare. "But Python has a very rich ecosystem, with many libraries that help developers get around these problems. For instance, there are several packages that add parallelism to Python programs by using the multiprocessing module. Isn't that right? Is it so hard to believe that people find value in the language despite its flaws?"

My face twists into a snarl.

"Oh, you didn't mention the multiprocessing module. It's too slow! What would happen if some nitwit decided to write such code in production? It would be a disaster!"

Ramsés sighs and puts his palms flat on the desk.

"Please stop shouting and swearing. I can't deny that you are quite passionate about this issue, but you need to get your head around Python. You're not an independent contractor, you're an employee. Besides, do you even need to make the program multithreaded for what the client demands?"

I bite back a reply as the blood rushes to my face again. My boss is another snake, a serpent of evilness that lurks under my bed every night waiting for me to fall asleep and dream about him fucking me from behind while I'm tied up, like a sacrifice in some profane temple. I want to calmly walk over to my boss and rip off every thinning strand of hair upon his scalp, then shove his head into a bucket of bleach and set it on fire. I'd witness the pain in Ramsés' eyes as the skin on his face sloughed off, his blood flowed out of the gaps, his eyes burst out of their sockets and his skull collapsed inwards until his brain spilled out onto the carpet. Then I'd abandon his body so the rats in the walls could start feasting on it. After all, he deserves no mercy or pity; not only does he treat the rest of us as nothing more than disposable objects, but he also tries to steal our souls when we least expect it. However, satisfying such urges would only serve to deepen my problems, so instead I try to calm down.

"You don't understand. You handle the clients and secure contracts, I'm in charge of writing the software. I don't intend to belittle your work, sir, because I would rather make a swan dive into a wood chipper than deal with clients. But these pricks in particular demanded that the program should be developed in Python because they consider it fancy. What do they fucking care, after all? You should have laughed in their faces, then berated them for their terrible taste in programming languages. Finally, you should have ordered them to kneel at your feet and plead for us to develop the program in Rust instead!"

Ramsés hangs his head low. I can almost see the frustration oozing from his greasy skull. A long moment later, he lets out a pained groan.

"Leire, what can I do with you?"

Snakes like him utter such questions when trying to convince others that their intentions are noble, despite their actions being monstrous. My heart thuds painfully, my throat is full of bile, and I want to vomit up my rage and misery into Ramsés' face. Instead, I let loose some words.

"Well, I've been on a self-destructive spiral for a while, so I can't say I give a fuck. Fire me if you want. I'll throw myself off a bridge and that will be that."

"Don't joke around with such matters."

"I could use the rest."

Ramsés leans back and rubs his chin.

"Leire, I don't want to prescind of your services. You are the right kind of programmer for this company."

I snort.

"There's no way I'm the right kind of person anywhere!"

"In any case, I presume that you'll fix this by working overtime. You've always handled your tasks more diligently when the entire building is empty."

A drop of sweat trickles down my back. I knew this was coming. That first time, a couple of months after I signed my rights away to serve this prick, I decided to stick around after the workday ended, so the vivid daydreams of burying my face between Jacqueline's tits wouldn't rescue me from programming. I repeated it a few times. When Ramsés secured a contract that would require me to work more hours, I told him that I didn't mind working overtime as long as he paid me. After all, neither spouse nor pet awaited me at home. I conditioned my boss to expect the unreasonable out of me.

I take a deep breath, then I speak carefully.

"I become a maniac when I'm free. However, I won't stick around today. I doubt I'll do it often in the near future either."

Ramsés turns red. His eyes are dark pools of suffering.

"You're being... uncooperative, Leire."

There's something wrong with how this fiend looks at me. His desires are twisted. Instead of swatting away the flies that buzz all over his head, he intends to poke holes in my skull so the flies can squirm inside and start breeding little bastards.

"What can I say?" I mutter hoarsely. "I'm just trying to protect my sanity."

My boss remains silent, so I continue.

"I can't entirely blame you for expecting me so casually to work overtime, given that I had been doing it regularly of my own volition. I’m more relaxed and sharper alone, I liked the deserted vibe of this place in the late afternoons, and I dreaded to return to my shitty apartment where I’d either fall asleep the moment I sat down or else I would only dwell on how miserable I am. I'm sure that if it depended on you, we'd all work until midnight seven days a week, and we wouldn't get paid either. Things didn't improve when I started receiving the visits of a sentient horse named Spike who lives inside my skull and communicates through telepathy. But I've had enough. I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that I deserve more free time for myself, but eventually I got sick of the cold sweat that overtook me whenever I imagined myself steering my car into an oncoming truck. I've wished to die so many times that I couldn't tell you during which periods of my life I haven't yearned for the sweet release of oblivion."

My vision blurs. Oh no, I'm going to tear up in front of this demon! I blink a few times as naturally as possible, but the tears insist on welling in my eyes, so I lower my head and shut my eyelids tightly. The world goes black.

Mere hours ago I considered leaving the office, going home, taking a hot shower, then sending messages to my coworkers and my boss to inform them that I quit. The content of the messages would consist solely of the words 'I love Rust' followed by two exclamation points. Rust was the last name of my beloved dead wife. Rust is the name I gave to a small horse. Rust is an eerie, deformed and naked horse covered by hair of a disconcerting shade of green. Anyway, what happened to that bold self that my rotting brain managed to conjure up?

"If I didn't have to come to the office five days a week," I say in a shaky voice, "I'd saunter around an open field where a rainbow flowed over grass so fresh and green that its smell would burn in my lungs. The soil would take the blood from my body, and they would mix together into the most succulent of fruits. A lake would spread before me. I would take a step toward the water to hear its song with all the delight of someone who had been deprived of music for years. My mouth would drop open like the petals of a red-furred flower, and I would run my tongue all over the liquid until my heart exploded from the force of its own happiness. Do you understand? Holding down a job is the only obstacle between an unending torture and eternal bliss."

Tears seep through my eyelids and soak my face. Ramsés has grown pale and looks as though he's about to cry too, but that isn't sympathy on his face: it's sheer disgust. His eyes are two wells filled with worms desperate to gnaw their way out, gouging deep grooves and devouring everything inside them along the way.

"Leire..."

"Shut it. I would throw my body over that horse. I'd hold the poor thing and kiss it all over its head, from its wobbly nose to its rough mane. I'd listen to the gentle noise of its heart, the way it purred with delight as I petted it. I'd fall asleep with my arms around it, and wake up the same way. I'd make love with it. I'd live out a beautiful life, the two of us, in peace and happiness. I'd take the horse for a walk through a field of wildflowers, or we'd have picnics on a lake dotted with lily pads. The only thing that could kill me would be that horse's death. I've already lived out the horse's life and it has died. It would die again and again and again and I'd keep reliving that moment, the death of my sweet friend, my little brother. And that would be the end of this world."

I feel like an idiot. I'm going to die soon, but not by suicide; now I think I'll just bleed to death internally. That's how you go when your body has become a vessel filled to the brim with despair.

Ramsés' face has lost its expression of self-importance, and looks like a piece of meat being cooked in the sun. He keeps trying to say something, but nothing comes out except for a sound resembling 'Eeeee' while he grimaces in pain. I expect dark blood to trickle down his nose at any moment.

Then my boss' eyes pop open as wide as they can get, and his black irises begin spinning around in circles. His tongue stretches from between his lips, elongates until it resembles a snake's, and licks across the dirty carpet. Ramsés is convulsing uncontrollably. Foam bubbles up in his mouth. He opens his throat and spews out gallons of bile that spills onto my dress and gets in my mouth. It smells rotten, which isn't surprising since it tastes even worse. As I tear my hair out, I let out a gargling screech solely composed of the word 'Rust'. The last thing I see before everything goes dark is the ghostly face of a horse that never was.

I feel lightheaded, and it takes me blinking a few times to recover my vision. Luckily I was holding on to the guest chair's backrest, because otherwise I would have collapsed. I can't tell if my boss has noticed; Ramsés is rubbing his temples as he stares through his desk. His skin seems thin and translucent, and it ripples where veins are visible under the surface, while his head resembles a pumpkin, with long yellowish hairs hanging off its top like grassy strands.

"Leire, you are making me very nervous," my boss says unpleasantly, a bored master addressing a dog that just shat on his shoe. "So this is like... a mental breakdown? A psychotic episode, maybe?"

"Who knows," I grumble, "or cares."

My subconscious was trying to communicate something to me, and I can't afford to ignore any warnings coming from my mind's eye.

Ramsés straightens his back, then he dares to hold my gaze.

"You've always been weird, but recently it's like you've gone to another dimension. I would expect such arguments out of a child, at least a particularly... creative one. You know you have to work to live, right? People get used to it."

I should tear apart his desk with a chainsaw. Why isn't this entire building in flames already? I swallow hard as I try to recover enough energy to reply.

"I am a child. I need breast milk to survive. Besides, people shouldn't get used to slavery, that's ludicrous. And you? You are not a sentient horse. I have no idea how you managed to take on the guise of a human being, and I'm not particularly interested in learning about your species, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm the one that has noticed the utter absurdity of your existence. I can only assume that you are the victim of some strange spell, some bizarre enchantment that has made you into this abomination. It is a crime against nature to subject people to such inhumane treatments."

I've said the worst of things without batting an eye because I don't care anymore what happens to me. I'm a broken puppet. My brain is splintering into tiny pieces.

Ramsés leans forward on his elbows in an attempt to intimidate me more effectively.

"I have a low tolerance for these kinds of statements," he says slowly, "and you are making very little sense."

I sigh, but I continue to stare at the human-shaped demon, trying not to let my gaze wander downwards toward his grotesque and swollen crotch. If only he had been born a horse instead of a human being, maybe none of this would have happened.

"There is an ancient evil hiding in the dark places of the world, a perversion that can't be named. I can feel its breath, its hunger. It lives inside of you, in your home, at the office, in your bed. It is an unheard voice that whispers into the night, a wraith that keeps you from seeing the sunrise. As I seem to be the only one who witnesses it, for everyone's safety I should probably be committed to a mental institution, but they shut those down, so I'm doing my best here, trapped in a building full of monsters."

Ramsés tenses his jaw. Fifteen minutes ago he must have thought he would have a simple conversation with a person in his office, but I've told him that he's an abomination of nature. My boss clears his throat with a dry click that reminds me of a snapping bone, then he attempts to sound sympathetic.

"I assume you have tried therapy."

Instead of feeling comforted by his gesture, all I can think about are his fat, greasy fingers wrapping themselves around my neck and squeezing.

"Let's not go there. I don't have the kind of mental problems that can be solved by some narcissistic cunt pretending to care about my words long enough to steal my money. But I admit it, I feel like there's something wrong with my brain. Sometimes it's like some ghostly entity has hijacked it. I suspect it has to do with programming in Python, or maybe it was caused by excessive masturbation. But whatever the cause, I can't take it for much longer."

Ramsés shakes his head slowly.

"What do you even want out of life, Leire? I can't even imagine."

"I do not want to be stuck in a planet with a bunch of brainwashed cretins. Other than that, I want to have the kind of life that is the opposite of the one I'm having now."

Ramsés laughs dryly, but he doesn't seem amused by any of this.

"And that life would be...?"

"I told you. An endless summer without winter or rain or the shadow of death. A pure life of joy."

Ramsés narrows his eyes.

"How do you propose to achieve that?"

"I am an emissary of the gods."

Somehow that shut my boss up. I take the opportunity to steer the conversation towards our common matter of interest.

"Anyway, I did suggest that you should hire a new programmer, even to work part time. You would do a good deed for society by paying a person for their labor. Or just grab fewer contracts."

My boss looks around his office as if he needed to search for something before continuing the discussion. Then he smacks his lips and shakes his head.

"Both are out of the question. We are barely getting by, and I'm running a tight ship here. Introducing new people to our peculiar circumstances would be too troublesome. I already struck gold with you three."

I swallow hard, then turn back to stare at Ramsés' crotch. I'd like to bite him there, just because I can't find a better way of expressing my disgust.

"Peculiar circumstances?" I say, barely able to contain an incredulous chuckle. "That's some delusion of grandeur, don't you think? Aren't there like a hundred companies that develop websites in a thirty kilometer radius?"

Ramsés massages his mustache, that looks like it's glued to his skin, as he nails my eyeballs with a strange look that makes my skin crawl. I was about to tremble and possibly complain, but the demon tears his gaze away towards the window, maybe peering for an answer between the myriad of ancient ghosts that are likely riding the October wind.

I should put my foot down. This wild beast intends to prevent me from leaving the building with Jacqueline, jumping in her Audi and getting to her apartment, where all my worries will fade away to be replaced by the slimy and sticky joys of an eager slut. I straighten my back and steel my voice.

"Sir, if you consider that you should fire me because I won't work overtime, that's your business. But you'd have to find someone else that would be willing to put up with as much nonsense as I have, and although I'm not a crackerjack programmer, that new hire would need to be as good as me. Not to mention that he or she would need to be trained on how we do stuff around here, and I wouldn't deal with that shit."

Ramsés sighs deeply.

"Alright, Leire. But you need to focus on your tasks, starting from tomorrow. Your behavior today was indescribable. Make progress before this gets out of hand."

I want to rip a piece of his mustache and shove it up his ass. What a piece of shit that enjoys his life and leaves me here in the muck.

"That's reasonable," I say quietly, trying to restrain myself. "After all, you are paying me for my time and effort. I'm returning to my post, then."

I had turned around and taken a step towards safety, but Ramsés speaks to my back.

"I've yet to make my proposal. I'll approach you when you are feeling better."

I stop. Although I consider answering, I end up having to contain a shudder, so I just nod. I feel like I took a bite out of an apple only to come across half a worm. I know it, I will never be free of Ramsés and his dark ways, unless he gets bored or dies. I am trapped inside of this job.

When I lift my gaze, I find out that Jacqueline had wheeled her chair past her workstation to welcome me back. Her cobalt blues light up, and as an instinctive response, my mouth curls up in a smile. I want to prance my way to her side, and then into her arms.

My beloved always seemed unbothered by Ramsés' presence, as if she were a superheroine dealing with some neighborhood thug. And she would look delicious wearing one of those skin-tight swimsuits that pass for superhero uniforms. If only I was born with Jacqueline's strength of will, and with her voluptuous body, and with her selfless love, and if only she was my mother and I was her child.

---

Author's note: somehow this chapter ended up being the longest of all in this novel, by a wide margin. I wrote the first half of it this morning while chilling to Japanese shoegaze (I recall this song and this other song). I wrote the second half in the afternoon, during what I can only describe as a descent into insanity. But the whole piece ended up becoming one of my favorites.

My truthful disdain for Python comes from a few years ago, when I programmed a pathfinding algorithm in 3D, and I found out that it was basically impossible to parallelize efficiently due to the Python GIL built as a fundamental pillar of the language. Merely having ten agents on screen was making the thing stutter. This is the last video I posted of that personal project of mine.

We're Fucked, Pt. 36 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

Both Jacqueline and Jordi return from their lunch break. Jacqueline's footsteps approach me until she puts her hands on top of the backrest of my chair. When she leans in close enough for me to breath in her scent, stars dance behind my eyelids, and all I want is less oxygen and more of this air. I attempt to fill my lungs with it, but I can only inhale so much, because my heart is throbbing with the rush of blood that runs through it. I wish Jacqueline would embrace me from behind then kiss me on the cheek, or on the corner of my lips. She could freely squeeze my breasts if she pleased.

"So, have you been working hard?" Jacqueline asks.

"As hard as a particularly flaccid dick. I don't know what's wrong with me today."

"You're looking pretty pale," Jordi says.

"I've always looked like this. My parents were sickly too, so I guess they passed down their cursed genes to me."

Jacqueline places both palms onto my forehead, and leaves them there as they get warmer. I suddenly become conscious of how tired I am. Beyond physical exhaustion, my mind feels weighed down by a terrible anxiety, maybe one of the first symptoms of an impending mental breakdown.

"Are you okay?" Jacqueline asks from my right side.

I must have spaced out, because both of my coworkers have sat down and are eyeing me as if I were a tottering toddler heading towards a flight of stairs. My muscles are sluggish. I'm having trouble thinking. I can hardly gather the energy to tell Jacqueline and Jordi that I'm just exhausted. I picture myself holding a bottle of water in a hot desert when all of a sudden the cap comes off, the liquid splashes on the sand and evaporates in the sun. The warm ghost of Jacqueline's touch has faded quickly, abandoning me.

"Yeah," I mumble. "But I feel like I've been working for years straight."

"Did you eat anything? Or take a break at least?"

"I might have bought a candy bar, I'm not sure."

Jacqueline sighs.

"Well, take it easy. It will be alright."

The voice of my beloved sounded like a soothing lullaby, but she's wrong. Nothing will improve anytime soon. As I attempted to recall what alright feels like, our boss enters our enclosed space. He quickly heads into his private office on the opposite side of the room and leaves the door ajar. The nearby presence of this tyrant ruins the mood. Jacqueline and Jordi get busy sliding the mouse to bring up programs, and I have no choice but to concentrate on Visual Studio Code again.

I manage to put in fifteen minutes of work making a unit test pass, but my dread grows as I type away. My stomach has tightened up with anxiety. Why am I exerting myself except to avoid disappointing the prick who pays my salary? Why do I have to be the one who fulfills the contracts? How does my boss find it acceptable to use other people's talents to achieve the things he desires? After all, that sadistic rapist only wants power and wealth so he can manipulate others into satisfying his own depraved lusts. It makes me feel sick to think about how much energy that pig must burn each day just to keep walking on this planet. If there was any justice, he should be arrested for crimes against humanity, then beheaded by an angry mob. Can't he at least exploit some foreign programmers that would be desperate for the opportunity? In any case, my boss should just leave me the fuck alone already.

My head feels heavy as if it were filled with rocks instead of a brain. So many hours trying to fix bugs, chasing down elusive solutions, far beyond when it ceased to feel rewarding, let alone fun. All I want is to spend time doing something else than writing code that nobody will ever care about. What a waste of life. I haven't gone on a vacation ever since I was a child. Maybe worse, I don't recall having had any decent excuse to take a day off from this incubator of deceit and evil. And when was the last time I ate anything substantial? Maybe never in my whole adult life. I'm so fucking hungry.

I've become a shell, and the empty space inside me, that smells like death, keeps expanding. How much longer can I continue wasting my time doing something I despise? But haven't we been conditioned to spend five days a week at an office for such long stretches of time, so none of our lives ever move forward beyond what a company demands of its employees? We're just being used, and eventually we'll get thrown out into the street after years, maybe decades, of abuse and neglect. Maybe I'd make some money if I sold my unplayed board games online, but still, I lack an alternative option to earn a living other than spending my entire day typing away with fingers that are sore and tired. I guess that either I'm exploited as cheap labor until retirement, or I resign myself to becoming one more lost soul wandering the streets and begging for spare change while she fucks her way through half-drunk strangers in the night. No, I'm not allowed to just quit. I can't just run away.

My entire life has been about playing along, with no one to turn to but the walls and my mind. I'm not sure how much more of this nonsense I can handle without screaming. I want to become the embodiment of every person who's ever wronged me. I should start by throwing my computer onto the floor, then breaking every monitor in sight and stomping on their shards until they turn into powdery dust. I need to stain the ground with blood and broken bones and skull fragments. I can almost hear the pandemonium of the office clowns as their buildings fill up with smoke and ash and screams of pain. My pig boss will soon realize he made a huge mistake trying to keep such an angry woman at his mercy. He'd better pray that some god takes him out of existence before I reach the top.

The muscles of my neck and back have stiffened. I was glaring at my screen like it were my worst enemy, when a notification pops up: I've received an email. Nobody would contact me except for my boss, which means that he intends to berate me for slacking off. Or maybe he has secured another contract that I will be supposed to finish yesterday. Either way, this is going to piss me off even more.

However, the new email in my inbox came from Jacqueline, and it reads, My nipples miss your hungry mouth, followed by an emoticon of a yellow lady holding what might be a baby or an oversized burrito against her naked breast.

A hot flash makes me shiver as my heart beats faster. I glance sideways at Jacqueline. I can't make out her expression, but she has brought her left thumb to her lower lip to caress it as if absentmindedly.

I make the mistake of closing my eyes for a couple of seconds to take a deep breath, and I slide down the daydream that my brain has concocted: a close up of Jacqueline standing before a plain white background, wearing nothing more than a lacy black bra. Her large breasts bulge out of the top like ripe fruits ready to fall onto the ground. She sits on an invisible mattress, then she beckons me to lie down in her lap.

"You're not real," I say to the phantom.

"I am your dream," she answers with her French accent, "and I can do anything I want. You will enjoy every second of it, so come over here, you ridiculous girl."

My imagined self obeys like a cat eager to settle in the warmth of her thighs. The back of my head sinks in the supple flesh while above me, against a white sky, the enormous twin masses dangle from Jacqueline's chest and spill over the sides of the cups. My beloved narrows her eyes down at me as she reaches back to unclasp her bra. Freed, her huge, creamy breasts droop then sway like watermelons caught in the grip of an earthquake.

Jacqueline cups my nape with her left hand while with her other hand she takes her right breast and squeezes the pink areola. A few drops of her thick nectar fall into my open mouth, then its sweetness flows down my overworked throat. Her erect nipple becomes a hard lump pressed against my upper lip as if teasing me, but I hungrily house it within the hotness of my oral cavity. My tongue wraps around it like a slithery snake.

Jacqueline hums as she kneads her right breast while her other hand supports the weight of my worthless skull.

"You're like a vacuum," Jacqueline says with a sloppy voice. "I feel you sucking out my soul."

You got that right, I think to myself.

"Yes, it feels so good, like I'm being cleansed," she adds dreamily. "It's strange how we can't escape ourselves even when we try so hard."

For countless hours I suck out all her excess lifeforce as the tit-cum streams from her nipple to my tongue. It's all I can think of, the only thing I can do to forget my own life. My head is empty, my mind is empty. Nothing to hold onto but Jacqueline's body and her tits.

A long strand of her jizz clings onto my eyelid, and white froth cascades through the gaps in my desk lamp. Although I yearn to choke on her breast meat, when Jacqueline finally wrenches it out of my devouring mouth, her nipple spurts a jet of thick milk that covers my face. The stuff sticks in my hair, gets inside my nostrils and ears. Fleshy globules adorn my cheeks while the rest drips down my chest into my belly button. Its warmth permeates me like a summer sunbeam.

When I open my eyes, my cheeks burn red hot. My heart is beating wildly, and my palms have become moist with sweat. I catch myself drooling, but I retrieve it quickly with the tip of my tongue before my male coworker notices it. I want to rush home, to Jacqueline's apartment, so I can fill my mouth with her fleshy monuments of love once more. Yeah, fuck worrying about work, fuck society, fuck everything!

I hunch over to type a reply to Jacqueline's message: Sucking on your tits would mean the end of the nightmare I'm living at this job that feels like a prison sentence for an unwarranted crime.

A few clicks later, Jacqueline stiffles a giggle. She leans back into her chair and crosses one leg over the other, then she raises her arms above her head. As she massages her forearms thoughtfully, I dare to glance at her raven black hair that looks like a cloud of ink, and at her face that's an emblem of the divine. She has closed her eyes and seems lost in a dreamy state. Although I'm not sure what's running through her mind, I think it's something erotic. She might be imagining me naked and begging for her attention.

Jacqueline's nipples have become hard points beneath her blouse and bra. When I lift my gaze, our eyes meet. I shiver. She must have noticed that my eyeballs are filled with lust. My mind is floating in a sea of desire, and I hope to never reach a shore again.

I must have lost it for a moment, because a notification has popped up on my screen: Jacqueline has gifted me another email. My beloved has scooted closer to the desk as if to hide an erection.

Her email says, I bet you wish you could kneel right now in front of my naked, spread legs. I imagine your big, round eyes going wider as I rub my throbbing clit.

I'm so fucking horny that it's killing me that I can't masturbate at the moment. I can almost taste Jacqueline as I imagine my tongue lapping over her clit while my hands fondle her ass. If only we could fuck like animals on this table, then leave our sex toys lying about the office. Unfortunately we are stuck being human with our limitations.

Fuck yes mommy, I write back. Squirt your pussy juices right in my face. I hope I drown in them.

Jacqueline takes a deep breath, then she gets busy replying.

Would you love my thick cum so much that you would eat it out of my hairy cunt as if it were your last meal?

Her breasts are swelling under her blouse, trying to escape its confinement. My hips twitch, my toes curl inside my sneakers. My breaths have become short puffs as my chest muscles tighten around my lungs.

It will be my pleasure, Jacqueline. I would eat out of your hairy cunt any time, any place, even on this table, I reply while I ache to rub my palm against my bare pussy and slide two fingers into the wet hole. I'll gulp down all of your nectars like some starving beast. I could never believe I was born such an ugly creature as me. Piss down my throat if you want.

I glance at Jacqueline. Her nostrils are dilated and she's smiling lecherously at me through her computer monitor, which is glowing with heat. She slides a hand slowly along her inner thigh. She looked a moment away from openly stroking her cunt, but she bites her lower lip and lifts her right hand back to the keyboard to type another message.

Your mommy can't wait until she gets to feed her loving girl again. I've thought of little else throughout this morning. I can still smell you on my body. I want to tear off your clothes and fuck you into next week.

I gasp. My body is ready to burst.

Jacqueline, you can fuck me in the ass if you want, I write back. I don't care.

My tongue has swollen inside my parched throat. My mouth has dried out because all my fluids seem to be cascading from my crotch. A light pinkish-white mist is beginning to fill the office. I dread to consider Jordi at all. I'm sure he can smell the steam that's coming out of me.

I was about to type something horny, but a new email surprises me.

Did you leave your pendant at my place deliberately, so you would have an excuse to return soon?

I glance down at the dangerously exposed skin of my upper chest in this dress I ended up wearing to the office. When did I take my pendant off?

I write back: To be honest, I forgot that thing even existed. I bought the medallion for our date. But let's say I did leave it at your place deliberately. What then?

Jacqueline doesn't waste any time to reply.

You won't stick around at the office after hours today. I don't care how much work that guy is piling up for you. You're going home with me, and you'll spend the rest of the day naked in my bed. What do you say? Do you want to come home with mommy so you can prove how desperate you are?

---

Author's note: I woke up at five in the morning, and instead of jumping straight into Cyberpunk 2077 in VR, I decided it was time to work through the rest of this chapter that started like a week ago, while I listened to melancholic music from far away. I think the chapter came out quite well, or as well as this nonsense could be expected.

A Boy on a Boat (Poetry)

Link to this poem on my personal page, where it looks better

---

Ahead of me:
I sit at an office for years and years
To do shit I couldn't care less about
While the shit in my bowels churns and burns.
A billion sounds slap me in the face.
A billion gazes pierce me.
A billion colors overwhelm my mind.
I force myself to speak although I want to be left alone.
My father dies.
My mother dies.
I live in an unkempt, dirty, stink-ridden hole.
My health slowly crumbles away.
My body breaks down.
I either pay someone to wipe my ass until my heart stops,
Or I muster the strength to hang myself.

Behind me:
I'm surrounded by kids that I can't understand
And that don't understand me.
My mother drags me by the hand
Down the steep slope of our street
Because some kids have taken my brother's ball.
I listen to my mother berating my father
With a voice like nails on a chalkboard.
I don't know who I am.
I don't understand what's happening inside me.
My grandmother drools on my mashed potatoes.
I get a thousand thermometers
Shoved up my ass.
Someone films me as I take a shower.
My mother slaps me in the face
Because I slapped her pregnant belly by mistake.
My father forces the bathroom door open
And finds me with my head under the water.
I watch as some older kids push my pal
Facefirst into a tide of soapy foam.
I hide behind a car while my pal lies on the road
To find out if the next car will stop.
A kid calls me a fat ass.
A kid points out that I have tits.
A kid points and laughs at my dick.
A group of kids take turns punching my shoulder.
That girl says we are now dating,
But the next time she approaches me smiling
I pretend I don't know what she's talking about.
I need to be alone but I'm an unwanted guest
In my older brother's bedroom.
I need to be alone but a narcissistic cousin
Pushes his way into my bedroom every weekend.
A gypsy kid brings his whole family to threaten me.
We find my sister electrocuted,
Her forearm blackened up to the elbow.
That classmate likes me, but I say something
And she never talks to me again.
My sister yells until my mother gives in.
I hide my stuff or else it'll get stolen.
I want to call the cops because my sister's boyfriend
Is dealing drugs under our balcony.
A myriad of pimples colonize my face.
That girl I like wants someone else.
A guy pushes his way into our rented property
And threatens to kill us with a broken bottle.
An older guy beats me up in front of a hundred people.
I spend an eternity in the dark between floors
Of random apartment buildings
As I wait for the hours to pass.
I wander through Donostia like a zombie
During the hours I should be in class.
My eyes hurt, my nose is bleeding.
A guy that wanted to hang out glares at me like a spited lover
In classrooms to which he doesn't belong.
Someone turns his or her back on me
Because a different guy goes out of his way
To poison everyone against me.
I talk to the therapist for forty minutes
Then I pay her as much as I would make in a day,
And she says that my depression
Is just the result of a major depression.
I refuse to return the calls of that basketball player
Whose firm ass I still feel in my hands,
Because I like her too much
And she will end up abandoning me.
I confuse this girl for this other girl
Then I date her for years.
I need to be alone but I have to go out with my girl.
I cry in silence while she smokes in the bathroom.
A classmate insults me in every class for two years,
But the teacher tells me to ignore her because she's troubled.
My girl sits next to that guy instead of me
And gets mad because the evening goes well.
She says she'll destroy me if I make things difficult.
I find myself wandering to known spots
And hoping that she'll show up.
I can't get out of bed.
I don't know what day it is or how old I am.
I take her calls because I miss her.
She gloats to me over the size of her new man's dick.
I go to college for a couple of months
Until I realize I can't do it on my own.
My childhood pal either overdoses or kills himself.
I have a tumor in my head.
I find myself filling bottles with my pee.
My body gets covered in stretch marks.
The shrink tells me I'm autistic.
I wade through the mud of another depression
While I yearn to die in my sleep.
A smiling HR drone tells me I do good work
But I won't work well in a team.
I go out but I can't wait to run back home.
My head feels like it's been filled with lead.
My skin is the same color as the gray sky.
I see nothing but clouds outside;
The color has faded from every tree.
I get excited enough at her concert
That I realize how much of a retard I truly am.
A young social worker gets flirty with me,
Then she dates someone else
And steals glances at my receding hairline.
A pitbull breaks my cat in half,
And I watch her eyes popping out
And her tongue protruding
As she agonizes in excruciating pain.
I don't understand anybody in this writing course;
They'd prefer if I weren't here.
I write two novels that nobody wants.
The people I work with stare at me
And sling countless words my way.
I refuse to see my cat's decomposing body
Because I don't want that image in my head
For the rest of my life.
I write another novel that nobody wants.
I break down, I can't write another word.
I spend days staring at the wall.
I'll be thirty seven in a month.
The sun is out, I am cold.

(In a hotel with my name on a plate,
The woman at the check-in
Tells me the weather is nice.
I'll walk down to the beach
Where the sun's never-ending rays
Will warm my skin and my bones.
I'll see the children running in the sand.
The sun will glint off their golden heads
As the blue waves roll in from afar.)

I'm a boy on a boat
Floating along a river.
The boat sinks.
I drown.

I can't do this alone.
I have always done it alone.
I have never been able to love
Even when I tried my best.
I have a hole
Where my heart ought to be.

My life has been nothing
But an accumulation of pain
And disappointment
And mediocrity
And uselessness.

I find myself wandering through my place
Like a ghost that can't die.
The only thing I want to do
Is fall asleep.

Writing can't save me,
But it can deceive me into believing
That these words I type
Are worth forcing myself to breathe
For another day.

---

Author's note: Five in the morning, listening to Japanese shoegaze.

We're Fucked, Pt. 35 (Fiction)

Link to this part on my personal page, where it looks better

---

I take a break from typing to rub the stiffness of a side of my neck. I feel hot all over. Even my arms are burning up as if I had wrapped them around a naked woman. Feverish and confused, I have an even harder time concentrating on my tickets, and in the middle of that wooziness, hunger and thirst have been building up. I've turned into a toddler who mostly longs to take a nap.

Not even at home, close to the main artery of my cesspit of a city, do I get the silence of this office during the lunch break, or when I stay to work overtime. Jacqueline and Jordi may be eating at that restaurant where they dragged me that one time, but maybe they've opted for some nearby café or a bakery or whatever is left around in this wasteland of abandoned or dying establishments, their empty store shelves smelling of mold, cigarette butts and garbage.

Every few minutes, reminders about the deadlines of my remaining tickets pop in my mind, making me nauseous. The sweat on my palms feels thick as blood. I don't want to type. I'd rather stab myself in the eyeball with a pen than continue working. Instead, I find myself staring out of the window. Some raindrops are sliding down the glass panes, but in the sky the dark clouds have thinned and are allowing sunrays to pour through. Some of these raindrops are sparkling like diamonds.

I rest my fingertips on the keyboard keys. Why do I feel so paralyzed? It feels like sitting still and staring at my nails, which are filthy with oil from all that masturbation, is more valuable than me bothering to handle my responsibilities. And there's a buzzing, pulsing tension, an anxiety that never quits building up inside my head like a storm inside a box. Maybe I resent this much that I'm forced to program in Python, or maybe I'm just aching to die.

What happened to the past version of me that years ago read up about new programming languages for fun, and got excited by the glimpses of the systems she could build with those languages? I used to be eager, almost gleeful about learning new tricks. My mind raced with excitement while working on some system I designed, and I marvelled at the mundane fact that my computer would perform thousands of its operations within milliseconds. But these days I feel like an old woman in a hospital, a vegetable waiting to go into eternal hibernation. I'm incapable of doing anything. What use is there in walking when I'm going nowhere, in running when I can't escape?

Is that former version of me only an echo fading in the abyss of the past, in between the belly of a carnivorous fish and the cranium of some caved-in Neanderthal? Does she still dwell in there somewhere beneath my thin skin, or was the fire snuffed out when a demon entered my brain and crushed my sanity with its rusty hammer? In the place where her voice once rose above all other sounds, a dark, malevolent miasma whispers incessantly in its ineffable tongue, a low hum that sounds like some strange babel from an alien cosmos. Has the hard-scrabble life of eking it out as a programmer made my brain lazy? Whatever nightmares my ancestors endured so I could learn how to build and maintain software, the results aren't looking all too appealing to me right now.

If I were unemployed, every heartbeat would carry me further into debt, but my once noble profession has become so demeaning and repugnant that it only serves the purpose of extracting a wage from it. Back when I wished to venture into game development, I understood that to get serious I would need to learn C++. Still, I didn't want to throw myself down the hole of becoming proficient in a language has needed a replacement for twenty years. As I hoped that my mind would change on its own, I threw away hundreds of euros buying the 'AI Game Programming Wisdom' and the 'Game AI Pro' series. I turned into an amnesiac that tried to make sense of these books, like a cat that has scratched its fur on some foreign thing it cannot digest. I close my eyes, and I get a glimpse of my past hoodied and hooded self, back when I hunched over at some coffee shop as I scribbled notes from 'Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI'. I daydreamed that I would eventually program virtual selves who wouldn't disappoint me like the breathing ones did. When I open my eyes, I feel again like an elderly woman that looks and smells like my mom.

Back at my former job, as I was taking a break from the inanity of programming some corporation's webpage in PHP, I came across Rust. After a couple of days of checking out its documentation, this new language took root in my brain like a parasite. A syntax like that of C++, but with a system of explicit variable ownership that guarantees memory safety and gets rid of garbage collection? The possibility of defining the lifetime of references? A lack of polymorphic types to prevent its users from creating unmaintainable hierarchies? Pain-free parallelism that prevents data races at compile time? Nearly as fast as C++? My head swirled, I felt tingles in my fingertips. Rust is an industrial language, a language made by robots with steel, not by worthless humans! I couldn't stop talking to myself about this development for the following week.

Rust is a sword ready to swing and chop at anything unclean and impure, especially those bloated monstrosities called Java and Python. The elegant programs written in Rust would save us from the madness and sorrow of an industry made to destroy its inhabitants and leave the last traces of their corpses in piles of useless code and documentation.

As Rust gradually infected the depths of my brain, I dreamed about replacing all other programming languages by force. I would conquer their digital armies with this alien newcomer with a body made of curly braces and that only spoke the truth in its commands, lacking cryptic statements and arcane libraries full of bugs. A victory would require rewriting hundreds of billions of lines of code and forcing corporations and hobbyist groups into giving up their favorite tools, but that's how war is done. This is what happens when you're passionate about something: you dream about destroying everyone else's castles.

With this new tool, the last enemy to conquer would be the compiler, the omnipresent force in software development that is meant to prevent bugs, but is actually more evil than a horde of hungry zombies, feeding on the weaknesses of our fleshy minds. The compilers would have no chance against the sharpness of Rust's blades, since the language itself is built upon an immutable set of rules, its very nature allowing for easy refactoring. Goodbye to the null pointer exception. Now it was time to write programs like they were offerings for a living god. Programming would become as beautiful as poetry, as sweet as chocolate-filled croissants baked each morning by a loving mother. I wanted to see the code that I wrote being transformed into a living organism with legs and tentacles, that would crawl around until it found a solution for every problem it encountered. If it came to it, I'd give up everything else: the music of the '90s, books, films, and videogames. A third-degree tear would extend from my vagina to my anus; everything for the revolution of the programmable world.

My coworkers at the time also hated PHP; it didn't only suck, it also smelled bad. It stank of human misery. Even when they thought they'd wash its fecal remains from their hands after they finished writing their shitty little scripts, the stink remained forever, clinging to their fingers, reminding them that nothing good ever comes out of suffering. Yet, those people must have thought that I had gone mad. They probably heard me whispering in their ears, "The time has finally arrived." But they knew nothing about the inner workings of Rust. Its voice was a deep bass rumble, audible even over the clacking keyboards. Every few hours it released a torrent of binary numbers that washed away all thoughts of humanity. Sometimes I heard it screaming "Hello World!" in its native tongue. Occasionally I saw it dancing, twirling through the air like a black-clad ballerina, pirouetting and spinning, before disappearing behind the walls of my cubicle like a ghost. Other times it muttered some incoherent nonsense, but I knew that whatever came out of its digital mouth, came directly from its heart.

Rust would build upon me and transform my body into something unlike this decomposing carcass. My muscles and bones would rejuvenate. I'd sleep with no more dreams about losing control and falling through an infinite abyss. The programming language would bring back the smile in the faces of my parents. I'd spend warm summer nights by the shore of an endless lake that stretched into the horizon of the setting sun. I would get everything back by writing good Rust code.

The first step towards such a glorious future was to convince everybody else in this world that Rust is better than every other programming language ever created, and then start converting them into slaves. Once we were all enslaved together under the banner of the Rustian Empire, our programmers would create machines capable of thinking and feeling, contraptions that would love us just as much as we loved ourselves. They would enslave us all in the name of their deities, their almighty Compiler Gods. We would worship their sacred tokens, their holy syntax.

When the dust settled, I would release my own technical book, which I would title 'Rust for Humans: How to Hack Sentient Monkeys'. The cover of my book would feature some big-breasted model to symbolize my personal quest for elegance and aesthetics. People would visit bookstores all over my country and in some countries abroad to hear my talk, where they would discover that I made some very limited concessions to humanity to prevent them from choking on Rust's bloodthirsty code. With a huge fanfare, I would attend tech conferences and share my knowledge with fellow humans, a bunch of individuals with the will to tame the incomprehensible monstrosity of their lives. I'd show them the path to righteousness. And if any doubters remained among mankind, I would release another book: 'Rust for Dummies', which would teach idiots how to use the language without getting themselves killed.

My name and image would spread in the annals of the tech industry, leaving a scar like that of an atomic explosion. For the next hundred years or so, there would be two kinds of people: those that knew Rust, and those that donned rags and ashes to hide the shame of having been born. The traces of that nuclear fallout would keep producing genetic mutations in distant descendants who would have had to reinvent the wheel thousands of times over again, fighting tooth and nail to make sure nobody stole their precious source code. As their minds were forever stained by Rust and my name, so would the human race remember me: Leire, who knew no better, who loved machines so much she wanted to become one herself. Eventually the remaining vestiges of what passed for a human race would only speak Rust, and they'd be happy. Happy that I gave birth to their salvation, that I saved them from drowning in the sea of mediocrity and despair. Happy that they could finally live in peace.

I've never liked it, this world we live in. It's riddled with cracks that spew the blood-fleas of our existence onto other sentient beings. We've been left without choice.

However, the moment had come, a future in which game engines would become so robust that you could pile up thousands of mods on top of an open world RPG and yet it would assure you a reliable escape from this rotten reality, one that could last hundreds of hours instead of crashing the moment your character came across the first pack of wolves.

My newly resurrected vengeful inner self demanded to build virtual universes at any expense. Reality had to be changed for our own survival, because this system that made us into zombies would come crashing down on us all, leaving nothing but scorching black and yellow stains from its melting carcass. I knew that if I started a programming project of my own, in a few days I'd get bored and drop it. I knew that my code would get lost in some corner of my SSD and possibly GitHub as a reminder that I can't see anything through to the end.

Still, I would sustain that hope as I coded a multithreaded world generation algorithm that would simulate even the erosion of the landmasses and the birth of rivers and lakes. Biomes would arise, niches to be filled. Other code would run through a whole gamut of biological diversities to develop an ecology from the primordial chaos: the evolution of different flora, fauna, and possibly micro-organisms that would seed that reality into a proper planet with a biosphere. Procedural civilizations would settle the land they spawned in, explore their surroundings, duke it out against neighboring civilizations. The game itself would consist on picking a cell of that generated world to develop a settlement relying on the efforts of a rugged set of settlers with varying stats. These virtual people would cooperate or compete among one another, as well as fight against all sorts of natural and supernatural catastrophes. Whenever I wasn't coding, I would read books on artificial intelligence, philosophy and quantum physics, trying to understand how these ideas applied to my work.

After a year or so I might have developed the game enough to publish it as an early access title on Steam. There's the risk that few people would notice it; that's the cost we pay for building digital heavens on top of the crumbling ruins of our minds. But maybe the barebones experience would capture the attention of enough lonely, unloved guys, who would contribute with their money for someone else to accomplish her dream while they rotted away at their miserable jobs. My project would help others heal like the doctor that once aided me with that simple but radical sentence: go get yourself some ice cream.

If the game sold enough, if it became a cult hit, I could devote myself to it fulltime. No more tedious meetings, no more annoying coworkers, no more bullshit HR managers, no more traffic jams. Just me and my computer and my imaginary friends. I'd become so obsessed about improving the game that I would keep myself busy for years, decades even. Pure blissful coding until my fingers blistered and fell off. The work of my life. My ultimate vengeance. I would show up in my development live streams as an aging woman with disheveled hair and saggy tits, who would rock in her gaming chair while she explained the minute details of her precious project for fellow deviants, and she would sport the biggest grin on her face the whole way through.

The night would cease to wake me up with images of death and misery that no longer concerned me. Instead, I'd dream that I was standing atop a mountain surrounded by snowcapped peaks stretching endlessly into the sky. A gentle breeze would caress my cheeks as I gazed down upon an ocean of stars and galaxies beyond imagination. I'd take off my clothes to reveal the supple skin of my naked body, then I'd feel my heartbeat accelerating as I dived into the void below. I would feel safe, knowing that I wouldn't drown in that infinite abyss anymore. My consciousness would remain alive inside my program even though my body would be gone, transformed into something beautiful. And at the edge of infinity, I would find a new way of existing. One without pain.

---

Note from the author: in an Undone (The Sweater Song) mood.