Jon Ureña's Blog, page 5
March 24, 2025
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 16 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I staggered, losing my footing in the swaying motions, but managed to thrust a leg forward to catch myself before falling. I turned and retraced the trail back through the passageway between the beeches, wading through the blackness toward the house. My consciousness floated above the pain like a squirrel perched atop a pine tree that towered over an ocean of flames and columns of smoke. The black, taut skin of my right hand’s fingers tightened, and the stain spread across the palm and the back.
My mind went blank. I pitched forward and would have slammed into an oak, but I thrust my right hand out to brace against the trunk, wrinkled like an elephant’s hide. Starlight silhouetted the low-hanging branches, which draped in clusters of leaves. Though I’d pressed my fingers and palm firmly to the bark, the pressure in that arm dulled as if the limb had fallen asleep. In the darkness, beneath my blackened fingers, the bark shrank and withered. When I tore my hand away, the wood crumbled into gray sawdust.
I hunched over the trunk, blinking. I had carved a hole in the shape of my fingers, and the depression spread, rotting the bark until it crackled and broke into fragments and dust.
I reeled through the blackness. In flickers of awareness, slopes tilted up or down, the gray outlines of trees obstructed my path. Branches scraped me and struck my head—featherlight touches amid the waves of pain that my boiling blood radiated through me.
I emerged from the forest. Fifty meters away, a cone of white light swept over a grassy pasture. In sways, the beam tilted skyward, dissolving into the night.
I opened the pasture gate and climbed the slope. The beam spotlighted me suddenly, blinding me before sliding down to the chest of my sweater. At the crest of the pasture stood two figures: a bearded man in a corduroy shirt and denim jeans, accompanied by a gaunt woman whose wild, ashen mane framed a pallid face. A terrycloth robe hung from her shoulders as if draped on a coat hanger. The man gripped a flashlight in his left hand, and in his right, the long handle of a headless tool.
I froze. Did I know them? A ring of pain burned around the palm of my right hand.
The man strode toward me. Hatred twisted his weasel-like face, where the sparse hair atop his head merged with a thick, wiry beard. As the man and woman approached, they split apart to flank me. The man jabbed the tool handle in my direction.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, because this was the last time you’ll leave the house.”
I advanced toward him and raised my right hand.
The man halted, freezing the tool handle mid-air, and stared at the taut, burnished skin—black leather—that sheathed my hand up to the midpoint of my palm, which I held aloft like a greeting.
I locked eyes with him.
“I see you.”
I pressed my open hand against the man’s face. A surprised gasp escaped him as he stumbled back two steps. The curve of his upper lip, the tip and bridge of his nose, and the imprint of my four fingers on his forehead, rooster-crest-like, had all turned ashen gray. His mouth fell open, features swelling with panic. Then, parts of his forehead, nose, and upper lip crumbled into a spray of ash.
The man shrieked. He dropped the flashlight and the tool’s handle to slap his palms against his face. Borders of ash expanded across his forehead—eaten down to the bone—along the cartilaginous ducts of his nose, and over his bare teeth as though he’d been born with a cleft lip. With each smack, between screams, his skin and flesh crumbled into puffs of ash.
He crumpled to his knees. His eyeballs blackened and dried like raisins. The hollows of his nose and mouth merged, revealing bloody cavities like the ventricles of a heart. His thick tongue quivered as rotting gums released their teeth. His screams sputtered out, replaced by those of the woman beside him, hunched and shuddering. She clawed at her face, fingers sinking into flesh, shrieking through a gaping, twisted mouth.
I stepped forward. The woman, startled, tried to run, but I seized the collar of her bathrobe with my left hand. When I yanked her toward the ground beside the man, momentum sent us both crashing down—her sprawled on the grass, me kneeling.
The man had collapsed onto his side atop ash-sprinkled grass. Within the hollow shell of his skull, borders of rot spread, swallowing the ruined bone toward the nape of his neck.
The woman screamed, soles of her slippers slipping on the damp grass as she struggled to rise, but I straddled her back and shoved her face against the man’s skull, which shattered on impact into a cloud of ash. She whimpered and thrashed. I clasped her nape with my left hand, pressing her face into the ashen ring at the man’s neck—a smoldering cigarette tip. Her muffled scream choked the air. In a spasm, she wrenched her face upward to the sky. It was now coated in a layer of ash like fleece, gray and greasy, the hole of her mouth contracting and expanding as it sucked in clumps of rot.
I leaned my full weight against the nape of her neck, driving her face into the corpse’s ashen, sludgy mass between its shoulders. The woman groaned, shook, thrashed her legs. Her nails clawed at the sleeves of my sweater as the muscles in my arms quivered. I squeezed my eyelids shut; my teeth grated together.
Her body convulsed for a few seconds, then fell still. I released her head, letting it slump onto the man’s torso—a lump of thick, greasy ash—as if resting on a bed of crumbled incense stick half-charred to nothing.
I stood. My left arm flashed white with a cramp. The woman lay facedown in a frothy sludge, while the man’s corduroy shirt sagged where the flesh beneath had crumbled.
The flashlight lying to my right cast sharp outlines on blades of grass in the dark. Insects swarmed in its luminous pool. I grabbed the flashlight and swept its beam across the field as I staggered downhill toward the house.
The black stain had gloved my right hand and crept up several centimeters past my wrist. My heart pumped darkness. Half-hobbling, half-tumbling down the grassy slope, I forgot I’d ever known anything but this pain.
I entered the stable. The cows craned from their stalls, chains clinking, and fixed me with wide, glassy eyes. One stretched its neck and loosed a low, drawn-out moan.
When I halted, I swayed. My vision blurred, but I lurched toward the first stall. The cow grew frantic, stomping the stone floor, and retreated into the wooden partition as it stared with dread at the stain on my right hand. I crouched over the chains, which swept up wisps of straw as they dragged. With my left hand, I fumbled open the shackle clamped around the cow’s leg, and when I tossed the iron aside, it clanged against grimy stone. I freed the other three cows, but they lingered in their stalls. Two dipped their heads to chew hay.
My flesh seethed with pain. I hobbled to the stool by the entrance, flanked by tools propped against walls or dangling from hooks: an axe, a hoe, a saw. I grabbed the saw. Set it on the stool. Traced my fingers over its jagged teeth. Kneeling, I gripped the saw with my left hand and laid my right arm across the stool. I aligned the blade’s teeth a handspan below my elbow, close to the encroaching stain.
I swallowed, locked my jaw. With a single left-armed thrust, in a flare of agony, the teeth bit into muscle, then scraped bone.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s collected in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Out of the Black” by Royal Blood.
I staggered, losing my footing in the swaying motions, but managed to thrust a leg forward to catch myself before falling. I turned and retraced the trail back through the passageway between the beeches, wading through the blackness toward the house. My consciousness floated above the pain like a squirrel perched atop a pine tree that towered over an ocean of flames and columns of smoke. The black, taut skin of my right hand’s fingers tightened, and the stain spread across the palm and the back.
My mind went blank. I pitched forward and would have slammed into an oak, but I thrust my right hand out to brace against the trunk, wrinkled like an elephant’s hide. Starlight silhouetted the low-hanging branches, which draped in clusters of leaves. Though I’d pressed my fingers and palm firmly to the bark, the pressure in that arm dulled as if the limb had fallen asleep. In the darkness, beneath my blackened fingers, the bark shrank and withered. When I tore my hand away, the wood crumbled into gray sawdust.
I hunched over the trunk, blinking. I had carved a hole in the shape of my fingers, and the depression spread, rotting the bark until it crackled and broke into fragments and dust.
I reeled through the blackness. In flickers of awareness, slopes tilted up or down, the gray outlines of trees obstructed my path. Branches scraped me and struck my head—featherlight touches amid the waves of pain that my boiling blood radiated through me.
I emerged from the forest. Fifty meters away, a cone of white light swept over a grassy pasture. In sways, the beam tilted skyward, dissolving into the night.
I opened the pasture gate and climbed the slope. The beam spotlighted me suddenly, blinding me before sliding down to the chest of my sweater. At the crest of the pasture stood two figures: a bearded man in a corduroy shirt and denim jeans, accompanied by a gaunt woman whose wild, ashen mane framed a pallid face. A terrycloth robe hung from her shoulders as if draped on a coat hanger. The man gripped a flashlight in his left hand, and in his right, the long handle of a headless tool.
I froze. Did I know them? A ring of pain burned around the palm of my right hand.
The man strode toward me. Hatred twisted his weasel-like face, where the sparse hair atop his head merged with a thick, wiry beard. As the man and woman approached, they split apart to flank me. The man jabbed the tool handle in my direction.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, because this was the last time you’ll leave the house.”
I advanced toward him and raised my right hand.
The man halted, freezing the tool handle mid-air, and stared at the taut, burnished skin—black leather—that sheathed my hand up to the midpoint of my palm, which I held aloft like a greeting.
I locked eyes with him.
“I see you.”
I pressed my open hand against the man’s face. A surprised gasp escaped him as he stumbled back two steps. The curve of his upper lip, the tip and bridge of his nose, and the imprint of my four fingers on his forehead, rooster-crest-like, had all turned ashen gray. His mouth fell open, features swelling with panic. Then, parts of his forehead, nose, and upper lip crumbled into a spray of ash.
The man shrieked. He dropped the flashlight and the tool’s handle to slap his palms against his face. Borders of ash expanded across his forehead—eaten down to the bone—along the cartilaginous ducts of his nose, and over his bare teeth as though he’d been born with a cleft lip. With each smack, between screams, his skin and flesh crumbled into puffs of ash.
He crumpled to his knees. His eyeballs blackened and dried like raisins. The hollows of his nose and mouth merged, revealing bloody cavities like the ventricles of a heart. His thick tongue quivered as rotting gums released their teeth. His screams sputtered out, replaced by those of the woman beside him, hunched and shuddering. She clawed at her face, fingers sinking into flesh, shrieking through a gaping, twisted mouth.
I stepped forward. The woman, startled, tried to run, but I seized the collar of her bathrobe with my left hand. When I yanked her toward the ground beside the man, momentum sent us both crashing down—her sprawled on the grass, me kneeling.
The man had collapsed onto his side atop ash-sprinkled grass. Within the hollow shell of his skull, borders of rot spread, swallowing the ruined bone toward the nape of his neck.
The woman screamed, soles of her slippers slipping on the damp grass as she struggled to rise, but I straddled her back and shoved her face against the man’s skull, which shattered on impact into a cloud of ash. She whimpered and thrashed. I clasped her nape with my left hand, pressing her face into the ashen ring at the man’s neck—a smoldering cigarette tip. Her muffled scream choked the air. In a spasm, she wrenched her face upward to the sky. It was now coated in a layer of ash like fleece, gray and greasy, the hole of her mouth contracting and expanding as it sucked in clumps of rot.
I leaned my full weight against the nape of her neck, driving her face into the corpse’s ashen, sludgy mass between its shoulders. The woman groaned, shook, thrashed her legs. Her nails clawed at the sleeves of my sweater as the muscles in my arms quivered. I squeezed my eyelids shut; my teeth grated together.
Her body convulsed for a few seconds, then fell still. I released her head, letting it slump onto the man’s torso—a lump of thick, greasy ash—as if resting on a bed of crumbled incense stick half-charred to nothing.
I stood. My left arm flashed white with a cramp. The woman lay facedown in a frothy sludge, while the man’s corduroy shirt sagged where the flesh beneath had crumbled.
The flashlight lying to my right cast sharp outlines on blades of grass in the dark. Insects swarmed in its luminous pool. I grabbed the flashlight and swept its beam across the field as I staggered downhill toward the house.
The black stain had gloved my right hand and crept up several centimeters past my wrist. My heart pumped darkness. Half-hobbling, half-tumbling down the grassy slope, I forgot I’d ever known anything but this pain.
I entered the stable. The cows craned from their stalls, chains clinking, and fixed me with wide, glassy eyes. One stretched its neck and loosed a low, drawn-out moan.
When I halted, I swayed. My vision blurred, but I lurched toward the first stall. The cow grew frantic, stomping the stone floor, and retreated into the wooden partition as it stared with dread at the stain on my right hand. I crouched over the chains, which swept up wisps of straw as they dragged. With my left hand, I fumbled open the shackle clamped around the cow’s leg, and when I tossed the iron aside, it clanged against grimy stone. I freed the other three cows, but they lingered in their stalls. Two dipped their heads to chew hay.
My flesh seethed with pain. I hobbled to the stool by the entrance, flanked by tools propped against walls or dangling from hooks: an axe, a hoe, a saw. I grabbed the saw. Set it on the stool. Traced my fingers over its jagged teeth. Kneeling, I gripped the saw with my left hand and laid my right arm across the stool. I aligned the blade’s teeth a handspan below my elbow, close to the encroaching stain.
I swallowed, locked my jaw. With a single left-armed thrust, in a flare of agony, the teeth bit into muscle, then scraped bone.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s collected in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Out of the Black” by Royal Blood.
March 22, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 16 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
After scaling the steep street, I paused to absorb the vista. Between the Spanish bank of the Bidasoa River and the reedy island dividing it from Hendaye, the broad, greenish-brown body of water flowed languidly, laden with sediment. A lone kayaker sliced through the calm surface, leaving a smooth wake that rippled like silk. Each end of the kayaker’s paddle dipped and ascended like a mechanical arm. As sunlight poured in the stream, its surface sparkled with a myriad little splinters of white.
Beside me, Elena’s nostrils flared as exhaled sharply through her mouth, fatigue etched across her features. She flung her head back. When she lowered it, soft locks of her ponytail caressed her neck. She fixed me with a look of concern.
“In moments like these, I’m forced to remember that I’m terrible at this activity.”
“Which one?”
“Walking. You don’t train your muscles by spending weeks at a time holed up in your bedroom.”
“Well, let’s replenish those lost calories with some snacks from the supermarket.”
The neighborhood BM’s automatic sliding doors opened for us, and we were welcomed by a tinny American song from the eighties. It conjured images of cruising in a convertible at night, with haloed streetlights blurring past. We ventured deeper through a narrow aisle flanked by refrigerated shelves and rows of half-empty wooden crates piled with fresh fruit. Knives scraped against each other. At the rear, behind the butcher counter, two aproned women chatted about their weekend plans as one of them dismembered a plucked chicken’s waxen carcass. Elena stared transfixed as a wing came off, then she followed me down the aisle.
“Did that bother you?” I asked.
“Bother me? No. I find butcher shops honest. No pretense. Just blood and bone and the admission that something had to die for us to keep going.”
Elena picked up a carton of Don Simón orange juice and a pack of Príncipe chocolate cookies, while I grabbed a bag of salted peanuts. When we exited the supermarket, she carried a plastic bag that dangled from her hand like a jellyfish. I asked her to turn around, then unzipped her backpack and tucked the snacks between the blue folder of excerpts and the backpack’s inner lining.
Past the outdoor tables of a bar, where retirees sprawled like bleached elephant seals, I unveiled the next leg of the hike: a steep, rugged concrete staircase bordered on one side by a grassy slope. Elena’s eyes widened at the towering steps, and she let her shoulders sag.
Midway up the staircase, I stopped to ensure that Elena hadn’t collapsed. Panting, she squinted up at me half pleading and half accusing. The top of her zip-up hoodie hung loosely, offering an unimpeded view of her jutting collarbones—a pair of fossilized wings—above a shadowed swell. Her joggers hugged her lithe thighs, tightening over their contours, while her untied shoelaces flopped around with each lift of her right Converse.
“Climbing out of the depths of urban despair,” Elena said, her voice coming in breathy spurts. “You’re not planning to sacrifice me at some altar up there, are you? Because right now it feels preferable to this sadistic cardio program you’ve got me on. My legs already hate me, let alone tomorrow.”
Once she reached the summit, she slid the backpack off her shoulder, dropped it, and crouched to tie her shoe. She then leaned back against the concrete post-and-rail fence, her chest heaving.
Across the one-lane road stood a once-white three-story house whose paint, battered by decades of rain, had peeled and flaked away in dozens of patches, exposing the gray core underneath. That house begged for a repaint or a renovation or a thorough bulldozing. It evoked the image of a self-loathing teen relentlessly picking at scabs.
We ambled along the sidewalk, attuned to the whispering breeze and the distant rumble of traffic, that arrived like the herald of a perpetually approaching storm. We stood at eye level with the third stories of a row of weathered apartment blocks nestled at the base of a grassy slope, their rear walls lined with deserted balconies. This neglected fringe of the city had been abandoned back in the seventies, left to decay, a derelict cemetery of brick and plaster and concrete.
Elena pointed out a cat. Across the street, atop a roadside embankment covered in leafy shrubs that edged a pasture with leaning fence posts, a mottled feline lay chicken-like, forelimbs folded and face buried in the grass.
“It isn’t dead, right?” she asked.
I crossed the road and approached the cat carefully. Its back rose and fell in the cadence of sleep.
Further along the sidewalk, beyond the post-and-rail fence, dome-shaped hydrangea clusters crowned its scrawny stems. The flower heads had shriveled into papery, brown husks. Elena asked to stop, then leaned back against the fence and stared at the bordering wall of foliage: a thick mass of shrubs, brambles and ferns beneath a canopy ranging from lime in the sun to shadowy emerald. A forest edge, untamed and untrodden. If you ventured in, you’d never again meet civilization.
Elena fidgeted with one of the drawstrings of her hoodie, twisting it tight between her slender digits. I was about to ask her if she was okay, but her lips parted.
“I’ve never been up here before. It’s weird, isn’t it? Places you can walk to but you’ve never visited. So close to where you live, yet foreign. Makes you wonder what else you’ve been missing. Also makes you feel like a stranger in your own life somehow. Was this where you wanted to take me?”
“No, it’s a bit further.”
The shadows under her brows deepened and her eyes glazed over, as if fixating on a film flickering across the screen of her mind.
“I’m standing on the threshold between two worlds, neither of which I belong to. Our ancestors built this one not only for themselves but for their descendants, most of whom they’d never meet. Yet along the way, something broke. I regret not having been born a thousand years ago, or not being able to visit another planet. Absurd, right?”
She tucked her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, her fingers fumbling within as if searching for something. Her shoulders tensed, and a sudden shudder rippled through her.
“Listen, Jon. When I was a kid, I took a school trip to some town I haven’t visited since and whose name I forgot. As I followed the group along an esplanade, I noticed a hitching post. I still see it vividly. I think they used it to tether cattle during local celebrations. One of the teachers mentioned that a few years earlier, a girl on another school trip had gotten kicked in the head by a hitched horse and died instantly. The teacher dropped that information like she was telling us about the weather. Imagine those parents getting the call. ‘Sorry, your daughter’s dead because she approached a horse from the wrong angle.’ And the teachers on that trip, they had to carry the trauma of her death for the rest of their lives. How do you even process it? One minute everything’s normal, the next minute a little girl lies dead with her skull smashed in. And why? Because nobody taught that child to approach a horse from the front so that it can see her? Perhaps she had never been near a horse before, and wasn’t aware of how dangerous they can be. I can see her grinning as she scampered over to pet it. Should her parents have also taught her to steer clear of boars or bulls? Not to reach her hand out to pet a snake?” Elena glanced away, then spoke in a low, hoarse voice, as if she dragged the words out from the depths of her throat. “What an absolute fucking waste.”
“Were you waiting to bring that up, or did it just pop into your head?”
Elena rubbed the outer corner of one eyelid.
“The second one. My brain decided to sour the moment by digging up an old memory that should have stayed buried. I was thinking about how our ancestors built a world for us, and my mind went, ‘Cool, but what about that one girl who had her brains bashed in after a fucking horse kicked her in the face?’ That kind of thing happens too often to me. This time maybe because I’m teetering on an edge, with civilization behind me and nature ahead. My brain’s way of reminding me how fragile life is. One wrong move and it’s over. That’s all it takes, right? A teacher looking away for one moment, a little girl who didn’t know better, a fucking horse doing its horsely things. Life’s just… waiting for the kick to the head that ends it all. And I’m not convinced that what lets us function, as a species, is a defense mechanism. I think it’s more like a collective delusion. We pretend we’re safe so that we bags of flesh and nerves can get out of bed every morning and put on our clothes and go on about our lives without losing our shit. But the truth is always there, lurking behind every corner. That’s part of why I can’t connect with most people: they’re so committed to the lie that they get angry when someone refuses to play along. They call it pessimism. I call it paying attention.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Caribou” by Pixies.
After scaling the steep street, I paused to absorb the vista. Between the Spanish bank of the Bidasoa River and the reedy island dividing it from Hendaye, the broad, greenish-brown body of water flowed languidly, laden with sediment. A lone kayaker sliced through the calm surface, leaving a smooth wake that rippled like silk. Each end of the kayaker’s paddle dipped and ascended like a mechanical arm. As sunlight poured in the stream, its surface sparkled with a myriad little splinters of white.
Beside me, Elena’s nostrils flared as exhaled sharply through her mouth, fatigue etched across her features. She flung her head back. When she lowered it, soft locks of her ponytail caressed her neck. She fixed me with a look of concern.
“In moments like these, I’m forced to remember that I’m terrible at this activity.”
“Which one?”
“Walking. You don’t train your muscles by spending weeks at a time holed up in your bedroom.”
“Well, let’s replenish those lost calories with some snacks from the supermarket.”
The neighborhood BM’s automatic sliding doors opened for us, and we were welcomed by a tinny American song from the eighties. It conjured images of cruising in a convertible at night, with haloed streetlights blurring past. We ventured deeper through a narrow aisle flanked by refrigerated shelves and rows of half-empty wooden crates piled with fresh fruit. Knives scraped against each other. At the rear, behind the butcher counter, two aproned women chatted about their weekend plans as one of them dismembered a plucked chicken’s waxen carcass. Elena stared transfixed as a wing came off, then she followed me down the aisle.
“Did that bother you?” I asked.
“Bother me? No. I find butcher shops honest. No pretense. Just blood and bone and the admission that something had to die for us to keep going.”
Elena picked up a carton of Don Simón orange juice and a pack of Príncipe chocolate cookies, while I grabbed a bag of salted peanuts. When we exited the supermarket, she carried a plastic bag that dangled from her hand like a jellyfish. I asked her to turn around, then unzipped her backpack and tucked the snacks between the blue folder of excerpts and the backpack’s inner lining.
Past the outdoor tables of a bar, where retirees sprawled like bleached elephant seals, I unveiled the next leg of the hike: a steep, rugged concrete staircase bordered on one side by a grassy slope. Elena’s eyes widened at the towering steps, and she let her shoulders sag.
Midway up the staircase, I stopped to ensure that Elena hadn’t collapsed. Panting, she squinted up at me half pleading and half accusing. The top of her zip-up hoodie hung loosely, offering an unimpeded view of her jutting collarbones—a pair of fossilized wings—above a shadowed swell. Her joggers hugged her lithe thighs, tightening over their contours, while her untied shoelaces flopped around with each lift of her right Converse.
“Climbing out of the depths of urban despair,” Elena said, her voice coming in breathy spurts. “You’re not planning to sacrifice me at some altar up there, are you? Because right now it feels preferable to this sadistic cardio program you’ve got me on. My legs already hate me, let alone tomorrow.”
Once she reached the summit, she slid the backpack off her shoulder, dropped it, and crouched to tie her shoe. She then leaned back against the concrete post-and-rail fence, her chest heaving.
Across the one-lane road stood a once-white three-story house whose paint, battered by decades of rain, had peeled and flaked away in dozens of patches, exposing the gray core underneath. That house begged for a repaint or a renovation or a thorough bulldozing. It evoked the image of a self-loathing teen relentlessly picking at scabs.
We ambled along the sidewalk, attuned to the whispering breeze and the distant rumble of traffic, that arrived like the herald of a perpetually approaching storm. We stood at eye level with the third stories of a row of weathered apartment blocks nestled at the base of a grassy slope, their rear walls lined with deserted balconies. This neglected fringe of the city had been abandoned back in the seventies, left to decay, a derelict cemetery of brick and plaster and concrete.
Elena pointed out a cat. Across the street, atop a roadside embankment covered in leafy shrubs that edged a pasture with leaning fence posts, a mottled feline lay chicken-like, forelimbs folded and face buried in the grass.
“It isn’t dead, right?” she asked.
I crossed the road and approached the cat carefully. Its back rose and fell in the cadence of sleep.
Further along the sidewalk, beyond the post-and-rail fence, dome-shaped hydrangea clusters crowned its scrawny stems. The flower heads had shriveled into papery, brown husks. Elena asked to stop, then leaned back against the fence and stared at the bordering wall of foliage: a thick mass of shrubs, brambles and ferns beneath a canopy ranging from lime in the sun to shadowy emerald. A forest edge, untamed and untrodden. If you ventured in, you’d never again meet civilization.
Elena fidgeted with one of the drawstrings of her hoodie, twisting it tight between her slender digits. I was about to ask her if she was okay, but her lips parted.
“I’ve never been up here before. It’s weird, isn’t it? Places you can walk to but you’ve never visited. So close to where you live, yet foreign. Makes you wonder what else you’ve been missing. Also makes you feel like a stranger in your own life somehow. Was this where you wanted to take me?”
“No, it’s a bit further.”
The shadows under her brows deepened and her eyes glazed over, as if fixating on a film flickering across the screen of her mind.
“I’m standing on the threshold between two worlds, neither of which I belong to. Our ancestors built this one not only for themselves but for their descendants, most of whom they’d never meet. Yet along the way, something broke. I regret not having been born a thousand years ago, or not being able to visit another planet. Absurd, right?”
She tucked her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, her fingers fumbling within as if searching for something. Her shoulders tensed, and a sudden shudder rippled through her.
“Listen, Jon. When I was a kid, I took a school trip to some town I haven’t visited since and whose name I forgot. As I followed the group along an esplanade, I noticed a hitching post. I still see it vividly. I think they used it to tether cattle during local celebrations. One of the teachers mentioned that a few years earlier, a girl on another school trip had gotten kicked in the head by a hitched horse and died instantly. The teacher dropped that information like she was telling us about the weather. Imagine those parents getting the call. ‘Sorry, your daughter’s dead because she approached a horse from the wrong angle.’ And the teachers on that trip, they had to carry the trauma of her death for the rest of their lives. How do you even process it? One minute everything’s normal, the next minute a little girl lies dead with her skull smashed in. And why? Because nobody taught that child to approach a horse from the front so that it can see her? Perhaps she had never been near a horse before, and wasn’t aware of how dangerous they can be. I can see her grinning as she scampered over to pet it. Should her parents have also taught her to steer clear of boars or bulls? Not to reach her hand out to pet a snake?” Elena glanced away, then spoke in a low, hoarse voice, as if she dragged the words out from the depths of her throat. “What an absolute fucking waste.”
“Were you waiting to bring that up, or did it just pop into your head?”
Elena rubbed the outer corner of one eyelid.
“The second one. My brain decided to sour the moment by digging up an old memory that should have stayed buried. I was thinking about how our ancestors built a world for us, and my mind went, ‘Cool, but what about that one girl who had her brains bashed in after a fucking horse kicked her in the face?’ That kind of thing happens too often to me. This time maybe because I’m teetering on an edge, with civilization behind me and nature ahead. My brain’s way of reminding me how fragile life is. One wrong move and it’s over. That’s all it takes, right? A teacher looking away for one moment, a little girl who didn’t know better, a fucking horse doing its horsely things. Life’s just… waiting for the kick to the head that ends it all. And I’m not convinced that what lets us function, as a species, is a defense mechanism. I think it’s more like a collective delusion. We pretend we’re safe so that we bags of flesh and nerves can get out of bed every morning and put on our clothes and go on about our lives without losing our shit. But the truth is always there, lurking behind every corner. That’s part of why I can’t connect with most people: they’re so committed to the lie that they get angry when someone refuses to play along. They call it pessimism. I call it paying attention.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Caribou” by Pixies.
March 21, 2025
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 15 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I stepped on the splatter of crusted filth where dried vomit from days prior had hardened. I advanced as if pushing through a bramble while dozens of pins pricked my face, digging through the wool of my cap and gloves.
The emperor owl puffed out the feathers of his neck and shrank back. He stared at me as if needing to speak but finding no words.
In my vision, white holes widened. The pins had pierced through my sweater, t-shirt, and pants, breaking the skin of my torso and legs. They perforated my eyeballs.
“I don’t know if I can,” said the emperor owl, as though pleading for help.
I spoke through the icy thorns boring into my vocal cords.
“Do your best. It’s enough for me.”
“It will torture you.”
“I’ve grown used to it.”
I took another step. My ears rang as if my eardrums had shredded, while hundreds of points across my body screamed in pain. I’d been thrust into an iron maiden, and someone was pushing the door shut. When I parted my lips, a groan seeped from my mouth, like an animal wailing from my gut.
“No one should live like this, hiding, bracing for the next time they’ll harm her.”
The emperor owl’s outstretched wings trembled, the feathers on his face bristled.
“You force me to participate.”
“It’ll be magnificent,” I murmured. “You and I, a carriage with velvet curtains, a throne room tall as a cathedral.”
“Give me time.”
Air escaped my throat in whimpers as the frozen tips of the pins tore through my molecules.
“If at any point you would have let me escape, tonight will be the night. Come tomorrow I will cease to exist. If you care for me, if you believe I deserve salvation, you will take me with you.”
The emperor owl shuddered. He furrowed his eyelids and stretched his left wing toward me.
I yanked off my gloves and extended my right arm toward the wing as my frayed vision bleached to eggshell white. I limped forward, hunched, sinking deeper the hundreds of pins skewering my flesh.
I cleaved through an unctuous membrane—a cascade of petroleum—and emerged into a pitch-black vault as tall as a house, its arched ceiling gleaming chrome-like. The air reeked of dozens of corpses rotting in a sealed chamber. At the center loomed a mass of tangled black muscles and tendons, its folds oozing oily sludge. Across its surface, lumps slid like air bubbles. It stared at me without eyes.
The left flank of the mass was extruding an appendage of dangling fibers. A stentorian voice struck me like a battering ram of air.
“Touch me.”
I strained forward, stretching my fingers toward the slimy appendage, but a hurricane-force wind shoved against me, threatening to rip me away if my legs faltered. The gale scraped my edges, pelted me with microscopic pellets. I hauled myself forward, bending at a forty-five-degree angle, inching my legs forward centimeter by centimeter.
The hurricane roared. My skin and flesh rippled, slackened, peeled from my bones, and tangled across my skeleton like a dress snagged on a tree. As the wind scoured my corneas, the black, dripping fibrous appendage filled my vision. When my sight whited out, my fingertips brushed a greasy callus.
I sank into a blackout. The lingering sensation of hundreds of pins piercing me submerged into my memory. I lost all awareness of having arms or legs, of how to send signals to move them. My consciousness floated in a silence devoid of the murmur of blood coursing through me, the whirring of my inner mechanisms. Though I tried to count the seconds, they slipped away. Thoughts undulated in my mind like fluorescent eels.
In the abyss, white, yellow, red, and blue flickers ignited one by one, clustering in nests of a brumous purple substance. They spun silken filaments between themselves. The flickers and their nests multiplied until they veiled my vision in a glistening web of vaporous light that trapped the millions of white, yellow, red, and blue gleams like mosquitoes.
There was no room for worry or fear. Nothing could harm me. I would hang in the void and watch as the flickers caught in the web shone forever.
I was hurled back into my body as if sucked through a straw. An avalanche of pain overwhelmed me. I inhabited a rotting body, a colony of decaying atoms and molecules. Noises throbbed in my ears. When I located my arms and legs and staggered backward, the icy pain of hundreds of pins grazed my viscera and flesh until the pins slid free of my body.
At the end of my outstretched right arm, I splayed the fingers of that hand like a sea star. The fingers and their nails, from tip to first joint, were stained a burnished black, and along the edges of those stains, nerves crackled with pain.
Among the beech trees rose the heap of black, greasy muscles and tendons. Buboes slithered across its surface. It concealed the ring of withered grass, as though someone had traced it around the base of the heap.
It unleashed a reverberating lament—a bear’s guttural bellow—that shook the tangle of muscle and sinew. The mass recoiled in a fluid undulation. Its sides swelled and braced against the trunks of the beech trees, causing the entire heap to quiver like gelatin. Cords of muscle and tendon swayed, dripping with greasy residue.
“I thought this time would be different.”
On my right hand, stains of burnished black encroached millimeter by millimeter toward the second joint, seeping into the pores.
The heap slithered between the beeches and suddenly wrenched backward, dilating the circle of withered grass to the heap’s base, as though smudged by a finger. Where the creature had pressed against the beech trunks, the bark had puckered into ash-gray ovals—rotten bruises like those on spoiled fruit. The clump of muscle and sinew retreated in jerks, keening as it dissolved into the night.
I limped forward on rubbery legs, following the trail of flattened, wilted grass that snaked between the beeches—the wake of a gargantuan snail. The taut skin of my blackened fingers twitched. I tried to scream for my friend, but my vocal cords had fused shut. A storm of agony flooded me; even the primal command for my legs to hold me up barely pierced through.
The two-meter silhouette of the mound of muscle and tendon detached itself from the night. Whimpering, it murmured that it had believed this time would be—then vanished before finishing.
I stumbled along the path of blackened grass. On my right hand, the dark stains now crept toward my knuckles. I halted where the creature had disappeared. The trail of flattened, charred vegetation ended abruptly in a semicircle.
No one watched.
My legs trembled. I clutched my right wrist. At the border of the stains, now merged and cresting over my knuckles, nerves sparked and short-circuited.
“I was there,” I croaked. “Thank you.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies.
I stepped on the splatter of crusted filth where dried vomit from days prior had hardened. I advanced as if pushing through a bramble while dozens of pins pricked my face, digging through the wool of my cap and gloves.
The emperor owl puffed out the feathers of his neck and shrank back. He stared at me as if needing to speak but finding no words.
In my vision, white holes widened. The pins had pierced through my sweater, t-shirt, and pants, breaking the skin of my torso and legs. They perforated my eyeballs.
“I don’t know if I can,” said the emperor owl, as though pleading for help.
I spoke through the icy thorns boring into my vocal cords.
“Do your best. It’s enough for me.”
“It will torture you.”
“I’ve grown used to it.”
I took another step. My ears rang as if my eardrums had shredded, while hundreds of points across my body screamed in pain. I’d been thrust into an iron maiden, and someone was pushing the door shut. When I parted my lips, a groan seeped from my mouth, like an animal wailing from my gut.
“No one should live like this, hiding, bracing for the next time they’ll harm her.”
The emperor owl’s outstretched wings trembled, the feathers on his face bristled.
“You force me to participate.”
“It’ll be magnificent,” I murmured. “You and I, a carriage with velvet curtains, a throne room tall as a cathedral.”
“Give me time.”
Air escaped my throat in whimpers as the frozen tips of the pins tore through my molecules.
“If at any point you would have let me escape, tonight will be the night. Come tomorrow I will cease to exist. If you care for me, if you believe I deserve salvation, you will take me with you.”
The emperor owl shuddered. He furrowed his eyelids and stretched his left wing toward me.
I yanked off my gloves and extended my right arm toward the wing as my frayed vision bleached to eggshell white. I limped forward, hunched, sinking deeper the hundreds of pins skewering my flesh.
I cleaved through an unctuous membrane—a cascade of petroleum—and emerged into a pitch-black vault as tall as a house, its arched ceiling gleaming chrome-like. The air reeked of dozens of corpses rotting in a sealed chamber. At the center loomed a mass of tangled black muscles and tendons, its folds oozing oily sludge. Across its surface, lumps slid like air bubbles. It stared at me without eyes.
The left flank of the mass was extruding an appendage of dangling fibers. A stentorian voice struck me like a battering ram of air.
“Touch me.”
I strained forward, stretching my fingers toward the slimy appendage, but a hurricane-force wind shoved against me, threatening to rip me away if my legs faltered. The gale scraped my edges, pelted me with microscopic pellets. I hauled myself forward, bending at a forty-five-degree angle, inching my legs forward centimeter by centimeter.
The hurricane roared. My skin and flesh rippled, slackened, peeled from my bones, and tangled across my skeleton like a dress snagged on a tree. As the wind scoured my corneas, the black, dripping fibrous appendage filled my vision. When my sight whited out, my fingertips brushed a greasy callus.
I sank into a blackout. The lingering sensation of hundreds of pins piercing me submerged into my memory. I lost all awareness of having arms or legs, of how to send signals to move them. My consciousness floated in a silence devoid of the murmur of blood coursing through me, the whirring of my inner mechanisms. Though I tried to count the seconds, they slipped away. Thoughts undulated in my mind like fluorescent eels.
In the abyss, white, yellow, red, and blue flickers ignited one by one, clustering in nests of a brumous purple substance. They spun silken filaments between themselves. The flickers and their nests multiplied until they veiled my vision in a glistening web of vaporous light that trapped the millions of white, yellow, red, and blue gleams like mosquitoes.
There was no room for worry or fear. Nothing could harm me. I would hang in the void and watch as the flickers caught in the web shone forever.
I was hurled back into my body as if sucked through a straw. An avalanche of pain overwhelmed me. I inhabited a rotting body, a colony of decaying atoms and molecules. Noises throbbed in my ears. When I located my arms and legs and staggered backward, the icy pain of hundreds of pins grazed my viscera and flesh until the pins slid free of my body.
At the end of my outstretched right arm, I splayed the fingers of that hand like a sea star. The fingers and their nails, from tip to first joint, were stained a burnished black, and along the edges of those stains, nerves crackled with pain.
Among the beech trees rose the heap of black, greasy muscles and tendons. Buboes slithered across its surface. It concealed the ring of withered grass, as though someone had traced it around the base of the heap.
It unleashed a reverberating lament—a bear’s guttural bellow—that shook the tangle of muscle and sinew. The mass recoiled in a fluid undulation. Its sides swelled and braced against the trunks of the beech trees, causing the entire heap to quiver like gelatin. Cords of muscle and tendon swayed, dripping with greasy residue.
“I thought this time would be different.”
On my right hand, stains of burnished black encroached millimeter by millimeter toward the second joint, seeping into the pores.
The heap slithered between the beeches and suddenly wrenched backward, dilating the circle of withered grass to the heap’s base, as though smudged by a finger. Where the creature had pressed against the beech trunks, the bark had puckered into ash-gray ovals—rotten bruises like those on spoiled fruit. The clump of muscle and sinew retreated in jerks, keening as it dissolved into the night.
I limped forward on rubbery legs, following the trail of flattened, wilted grass that snaked between the beeches—the wake of a gargantuan snail. The taut skin of my blackened fingers twitched. I tried to scream for my friend, but my vocal cords had fused shut. A storm of agony flooded me; even the primal command for my legs to hold me up barely pierced through.
The two-meter silhouette of the mound of muscle and tendon detached itself from the night. Whimpering, it murmured that it had believed this time would be—then vanished before finishing.
I stumbled along the path of blackened grass. On my right hand, the dark stains now crept toward my knuckles. I halted where the creature had disappeared. The trail of flattened, charred vegetation ended abruptly in a semicircle.
No one watched.
My legs trembled. I clutched my right wrist. At the border of the stains, now merged and cresting over my knuckles, nerves sparked and short-circuited.
“I was there,” I croaked. “Thank you.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies.
March 19, 2025
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 14 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I crumpled my pajama pants into a wad and placed it on the pillow. It would serve as the head for the twin bundles of pajamas and shirts I’d spread over the mattress cover. I pulled the blankets up until they covered the bundles and the wad.
I stepped back. I was gauging the effect of the lump under the blankets when, carelessly, I grazed the wound on my cheekbone. It flashed with pain. I clenched my teeth and waited, my carotid pounding, for the surge to settle.
The lump in the blankets hinted at a child sleeping beneath them, not a teenager, but it would suffice to trick Father until he pulled back the covers.
I layered myself in a thick wool sweater. Tightened my waterproof boots. Jammed on a fleece hat, and tugged wool gloves over my hands.
In the dim starlight sieved through the curtains, I scanned the wardrobe, the dresser, and the desk as if they were waiting with raised hands for me to grant them speech. What would I regret abandoning? I’d leave the pencils, crayons, and looseleaf paper, but they’d be abundant in that overseas land.
Halfway between the bed’s headboard and the dusty cobwebs on the ceiling hung two still lifes. In one painting, a basket heaped with apples and pears sat on a table, with a mortar leaning against it. In the other painting, a green pepper, an onion, and a garlic clove clustered on wrapping paper. The canvases had been smeared for years with skin flakes and mite droppings. Father and Mother believed a bedroom needed paintings to fulfill its purpose, and the first ones they’d found had sufficed.
I would forget it all. None of it belonged to me, never had. I’d arrived on Earth as if I could have just as easily touched down on some icy planet light-years away, and now I’d escape to where I wanted.
I drew the curtain. When I opened the window, careful to silence the hinges’ creak, a gust swept in, chilling my face and burrowing under my sweater collar like an animal seeking warmth. I climbed onto the window frame and let my legs dangle over the facade.
Each night, my window framed the cork oak, but the tree stood three strides away, and none of its twisting branches reaching toward me hinted they’d hold my weight.
My heart revolted. My arms and legs trembled. Once I jumped, if I changed my mind and opened the house door to creep back upstairs, I’d wake them. I inhaled sharply and scrubbed my palms over my thighs. As I slid my butt forward on the frame, I contorted to grip the inner ledge before letting go. My right hand’s fingers clawed the bedroom-side jut of the frame, but my backside slipped loose.
I blinked. Darkness veiled my vision, then fractured into pinpricks of stars. Meters above, the cork oak’s sinuous leaves writhed on their gnarled branches, wind-lashed. The house’s facade loomed like a cliff, its surface pierced by the rectangular void of my open window. Wind battered my right ear, numbing the fiery throbbing in my cheekbone.
When I peeled myself from the grass, a headache stabbed my skull. I clamped my palms to my temples as if to trap my brains inside. I stood, but my legs threatened to buckle. My vision lurched. I slumped against the cork oak’s fissured bark, shut my eyes, and summoned the mental map of the route I’d carve through the night. Five or six hundred meters to my refuge. By the time Father came searching, hours would bleed away before he found me.
I waded into the forest’s blackness, hurrying toward oases of starlight streaming through tangled branches. Scents guided me. I decoded familiar trees as landmarks. I climbed and slipped down slopes slick with shredded bark and rotting leaves.
By day, I would have combed the trees for the brook’s curve to pinpoint my shelter. I sat against the moss-sheathed root of a beech, jutting from the soil like an octopus’ tentacle. I dug my elbows into my thighs and clutched my throbbing skull.
The wind surged and faded, hissing through branches, shaking loose fruits that cracked the leaf litter. An owl hooted. A rivulet snapped like a dog lapping from a bowl.
I shut my eyes. I rose, angled an ear toward the stream’s murmur, and fumbled forward. In my mind, the golden serpent of the brook slid between the beech silhouettes, its current swaying and swelling with each step.
I opened my eyes. Eight meters downhill, amid the gray beech grove, a smudge of withered grass circled the ground. A meter and a half above it, perched on an invisible plinth, the emperor owl fixed his gaze on me.
I scrambled downward. My steps kicked up debris; I windmilled my arms, skating the slope like ice.
The owl emperor arched his neck, rotating his head in a full circle, as if calibrating the dark. Gems studding his sash glinted white.
“Trouble sleeping?”
Breathing through flared nostrils, I halted two meters from the circle, thrust my face forward, and jabbed a finger at my swollen cheekbone.
“You see it, yes? The pain’s so sharp, it’ll glow in the dark.”
“I assume you didn’t walk into a door.”
“I’ve never spoken of the rest of my life—where I live, with whom. You never asked. I preferred that. For a couple of hours each day, I forgot my fate. But after tonight, I can’t return, and if I stay here, he’ll find this refuge in less than a day.”
“Who?”
“A monster.”
The emperor owl spread his wings behind his head, splaying the black-striped feathers, and adjusted his conical crown. His cavernous voice hesitated.
“You wish to leave tonight.”
“Please.”
“Girl, I care for you. I hope you know that. But you ask me to attempt something I’ve never achieved.”
“Is it possible?”
“There are rumors.”
I recalled myself soaring through the skies. I could swear I had glimpsed, hundreds of meters below, constellations mirrored on the waves. A warmth flooded through me as if I were swaddled in blankets. I steadied my legs, and when I spoke, my voice quivered.
“It will be perfect. You’ll return where you belong, and I’ll accompany you as your right hand.”
The emperor owl opened and closed his beak. His gaze darted across the forest as if anticipating an interruption. When he leaned toward me, moonlight streaked white bands over the embossed owls and chalices on his conical crown. The plumage around his round eyes blazed pumpkin-orange in the shape of a mask, while the black strokes of his brows split into a V-shape.
“My world allows no returns. Once you see it, you’ll spend the rest of your life gazing through it.”
My throat constricted. My lungs fought to hold air.
“I’ve seen all I wanted to see here.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
I crumpled my pajama pants into a wad and placed it on the pillow. It would serve as the head for the twin bundles of pajamas and shirts I’d spread over the mattress cover. I pulled the blankets up until they covered the bundles and the wad.
I stepped back. I was gauging the effect of the lump under the blankets when, carelessly, I grazed the wound on my cheekbone. It flashed with pain. I clenched my teeth and waited, my carotid pounding, for the surge to settle.
The lump in the blankets hinted at a child sleeping beneath them, not a teenager, but it would suffice to trick Father until he pulled back the covers.
I layered myself in a thick wool sweater. Tightened my waterproof boots. Jammed on a fleece hat, and tugged wool gloves over my hands.
In the dim starlight sieved through the curtains, I scanned the wardrobe, the dresser, and the desk as if they were waiting with raised hands for me to grant them speech. What would I regret abandoning? I’d leave the pencils, crayons, and looseleaf paper, but they’d be abundant in that overseas land.
Halfway between the bed’s headboard and the dusty cobwebs on the ceiling hung two still lifes. In one painting, a basket heaped with apples and pears sat on a table, with a mortar leaning against it. In the other painting, a green pepper, an onion, and a garlic clove clustered on wrapping paper. The canvases had been smeared for years with skin flakes and mite droppings. Father and Mother believed a bedroom needed paintings to fulfill its purpose, and the first ones they’d found had sufficed.
I would forget it all. None of it belonged to me, never had. I’d arrived on Earth as if I could have just as easily touched down on some icy planet light-years away, and now I’d escape to where I wanted.
I drew the curtain. When I opened the window, careful to silence the hinges’ creak, a gust swept in, chilling my face and burrowing under my sweater collar like an animal seeking warmth. I climbed onto the window frame and let my legs dangle over the facade.
Each night, my window framed the cork oak, but the tree stood three strides away, and none of its twisting branches reaching toward me hinted they’d hold my weight.
My heart revolted. My arms and legs trembled. Once I jumped, if I changed my mind and opened the house door to creep back upstairs, I’d wake them. I inhaled sharply and scrubbed my palms over my thighs. As I slid my butt forward on the frame, I contorted to grip the inner ledge before letting go. My right hand’s fingers clawed the bedroom-side jut of the frame, but my backside slipped loose.
I blinked. Darkness veiled my vision, then fractured into pinpricks of stars. Meters above, the cork oak’s sinuous leaves writhed on their gnarled branches, wind-lashed. The house’s facade loomed like a cliff, its surface pierced by the rectangular void of my open window. Wind battered my right ear, numbing the fiery throbbing in my cheekbone.
When I peeled myself from the grass, a headache stabbed my skull. I clamped my palms to my temples as if to trap my brains inside. I stood, but my legs threatened to buckle. My vision lurched. I slumped against the cork oak’s fissured bark, shut my eyes, and summoned the mental map of the route I’d carve through the night. Five or six hundred meters to my refuge. By the time Father came searching, hours would bleed away before he found me.
I waded into the forest’s blackness, hurrying toward oases of starlight streaming through tangled branches. Scents guided me. I decoded familiar trees as landmarks. I climbed and slipped down slopes slick with shredded bark and rotting leaves.
By day, I would have combed the trees for the brook’s curve to pinpoint my shelter. I sat against the moss-sheathed root of a beech, jutting from the soil like an octopus’ tentacle. I dug my elbows into my thighs and clutched my throbbing skull.
The wind surged and faded, hissing through branches, shaking loose fruits that cracked the leaf litter. An owl hooted. A rivulet snapped like a dog lapping from a bowl.
I shut my eyes. I rose, angled an ear toward the stream’s murmur, and fumbled forward. In my mind, the golden serpent of the brook slid between the beech silhouettes, its current swaying and swelling with each step.
I opened my eyes. Eight meters downhill, amid the gray beech grove, a smudge of withered grass circled the ground. A meter and a half above it, perched on an invisible plinth, the emperor owl fixed his gaze on me.
I scrambled downward. My steps kicked up debris; I windmilled my arms, skating the slope like ice.
The owl emperor arched his neck, rotating his head in a full circle, as if calibrating the dark. Gems studding his sash glinted white.
“Trouble sleeping?”
Breathing through flared nostrils, I halted two meters from the circle, thrust my face forward, and jabbed a finger at my swollen cheekbone.
“You see it, yes? The pain’s so sharp, it’ll glow in the dark.”
“I assume you didn’t walk into a door.”
“I’ve never spoken of the rest of my life—where I live, with whom. You never asked. I preferred that. For a couple of hours each day, I forgot my fate. But after tonight, I can’t return, and if I stay here, he’ll find this refuge in less than a day.”
“Who?”
“A monster.”
The emperor owl spread his wings behind his head, splaying the black-striped feathers, and adjusted his conical crown. His cavernous voice hesitated.
“You wish to leave tonight.”
“Please.”
“Girl, I care for you. I hope you know that. But you ask me to attempt something I’ve never achieved.”
“Is it possible?”
“There are rumors.”
I recalled myself soaring through the skies. I could swear I had glimpsed, hundreds of meters below, constellations mirrored on the waves. A warmth flooded through me as if I were swaddled in blankets. I steadied my legs, and when I spoke, my voice quivered.
“It will be perfect. You’ll return where you belong, and I’ll accompany you as your right hand.”
The emperor owl opened and closed his beak. His gaze darted across the forest as if anticipating an interruption. When he leaned toward me, moonlight streaked white bands over the embossed owls and chalices on his conical crown. The plumage around his round eyes blazed pumpkin-orange in the shape of a mask, while the black strokes of his brows split into a V-shape.
“My world allows no returns. Once you see it, you’ll spend the rest of your life gazing through it.”
My throat constricted. My lungs fought to hold air.
“I’ve seen all I wanted to see here.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
March 18, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 15 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
At the intersection between the Antonio Valverde and Pintor Berrueta streets, I leaned over the graffitied railing to watch the two feet of greenish water flowing below, where countless small waves collided. The sight of muddied pebbles and an aluminum can rippled as the watery creases glided in undulating curves of light and shadow. Every second, the universe’s CPU calculated millions of minute interactions along this insignificant stretch of river even if they passed unattended, and remained barely comprehensible to the few that stopped to look.
“Hypnotic, isn’t it. Always moving but never going anywhere. Just flowing along whatever path was carved out for it centuries ago.”
I had waited three days to hear that voice once more. Elena had tied her almond-blonde locks into a ponytail, save for a few strands that framed her face. Afternoon sunlight bathed her forehead and crown, igniting her hair into warm, shimmering gold. The light caught her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose, revealing their smooth texture, while her pale blues shone cool and glassy in the shade beneath her brow. A gradient descended from the illuminated ridges of her collarbones to the zipper of her black hoodie.
Elena tilted her head slightly, and along her bare neck, the right sternocleidomastoid contracted and relaxed as if alive, outlining the dark hollow between the muscle and the graceful curve of her throat. I imagined my gaping maw encircling her slender neck, teeth pressed hard and sinking into her spasming, taut flesh, pulse thumping against the tip of my tongue, then I’d clamp down and yank, severing veins and arteries, ripping sinews and muscle that would stretch like melted cheese before snapping. I’d chew on her succulent, coppery flesh as hot jets of lifeblood from the glistening crater in her throat with its exposed tracheal rings blessed my face in crimson splashes.
She adjusted the strap of her backpack, slung over her left shoulder.
“I should warn you: I’ve barely slept four hours. I dreamed I was sitting in an empty bathtub while a giant cockroach stared at me from the bathroom wall. It had these alien, eerily-intelligent eyes that made me feel exposed, like it knew things about me I don’t even know. Then I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“So, not unlike a certain human with whom you spent an afternoon at Bar Palace. Who, as you put it, dissected your darkness.”
Elena’s eyes widened. She turned her head and knit her brow as her lashes fluttered nervously. Then, she fixed me with a contrite gaze.
“My brain does have this twisted way of processing things—turning real connections into monstrosities I can understand better. Maybe it’s easier to deal with a giant insect than a human being who might see through my bullshit. But no, that wasn’t a cockroach version of you.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You make me feel seen, not exposed. That cockroach was older, almost like a father figure. Or maybe a god. A godroach. The Eternal Lord of Filth. It had been watching humanity since we crawled out of the primordial ooze, and it spent its time judging us, judging our entire species, as it waited patiently to inherit the Earth after we nuke ourselves to oblivion.”
“I’m glad to hear I wasn’t a bug in your nightmares.”
“Anyway, what’s this place you want to show me? Hopefully not a mass grave of your victims.”
I pivoted and pointed toward the blocky apartment towers, one a muted taupe and the other cantaloupe-colored, further up the narrow, sloping road. Towers erected decades ago to shelter the dutiful working class that once stored there, few would escape their confines except in a hearse. On nondescript balconies, potted flowers fought for distinction, futile as a thin coat of paint on a rusted hulk.
“We have a bit of a hike ahead of us.”
Elena’s fingers lingered on the zipper of her hoodie before dropping to her side.
“Artia? You’re taking me to the place where dreams come to die? Growing up, I thought these towers looked like enormous gravestones.”
“Our destination lies beyond this decaying corpse of a neighborhood, and I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.”
“Figures we’d have to walk through the worst part first. Some twisted metaphor for life, right? Trudge through the rot before you get anywhere worthwhile. If there even is such a place. Lead on then, mysterious guide.”
We headed up Pintor Berrueta Street on a narrow sidewalk that corralled us into single file. As we passed a row of recycling bins, a green igloo belched its fetid reek in our faces. I held my breath, then crossed the road toward a corner bar.
“Stench of the apocalypse,” Elena said, a couple steps behind me. “The end creeping on its way to gobble us up.”
“Or the stench of stale alcohol.”
We climbed a short flight of stairs into a murky arcade sheltered beneath a concrete overhang. Half the businesses had gone bankrupt; the plate glass windows had been papered over, and the metal rolling shutters had clanged shut.
“We’ve witnessed this town fall apart, haven’t we?” Elena asked grimly. “Not in one big catastrophe, but in tiny individual tragedies, piece by piece, year by year. A slow, agonizing necrosis. The stores we frequented as kids, the playgrounds and parks we played in. Irún’s heart and lungs are failing, and no one gives a shit. I’d leave, but where would I go?”
“Anywhere away from here. That’d be a good start.”
“What other place would you recommend? Aw, crap.”
I stopped to look behind me. Elena, hands tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, twisted her slender right leg as if showing off the two stark white stripes running down the sides of her black joggers. The cuff of that jogger leg had rolled up, unveiling a pale, sinful ankle that would slither into my dreams. She stared at her untied right Converse.
Elena shrugged, then skipped ahead while fluttering her hand in a winglike motion to urge me onward.
“Let’s keep going. I don’t want to stop here.”
We pressed on through the shadowed passage. An elderly woman, likely in her late seventies, doddered towards us, taking up the center of the arcade. She had wrapped a plaid scarf around her neck, over a timeworn cardigan. As she carried a tote bag in a papery, veiny hand, she lifted the other to point at Elena’s canvas shoe.
“You’re dragging your shoelaces along the filthy floor, dear. They’re going to get dirty.”
Elena sidestepped the old lady, eyes fixed straight ahead, but her eyelids twitched. The woman called out behind us.
“You should be careful. You’ll trip on those laces.”
I spoke over my shoulder.
“She knows.”
Elena had frozen mid-step, a scowl distorting her features as her eyes rolled back. She whirled around and stepped closer to the elderly woman, whose face had crumpled into a webwork of wrinkles, whose shoulders had hunched as if her torso were collapsing in on itself.
“Have you ever worn shoes with shoelaces?” Elena asked coldly.
“If I have ever worn shoes?”
“With shoelaces.”
“Of course, dear. I was young once, too.”
“Okay, so you know that when one’s shoelaces come undone, the person wearing the shoes is aware of it, and you’re just bothering a stranger for no reason.”
The woman’s sunken eyes widened, and her lips quivered.
“Dear,” she started in a conciliatory tone, “there’s no need to get upset. I was just trying to help. You’re going to trip and hurt yourself.”
I could hardly tear my gaze from the sway of Elena’s almond-blonde ponytail, yet someone in that desolate arcade needed to stop this nonsense. I fought the urge to rest a hand on her shoulder; who knew how she might have reacted.
“This may be the epitome of ‘not worth it,’ Elena.”
She turned away from the elder and strode ahead. After she passed me, I quickened my pace to match hers. She sighed deeply as her right Converse dragged its undone laces. We climbed a longer flight of stairs. To our left, the wall was blighted by a collage of jagged tags. We stepped out of the arcade onto the asphalt of a parking lot. Decades of pedestrian and vehicular traffic had eroded the once-solid zebra crossing into patchy remnants. Elena raised her eyes toward a peach-colored apartment tower.
“The world feels strange and fragile, about to fall apart like a cracking facade and reveal that this whole thing has been a cosmic joke. Do you ever get that feeling, Jon? In such moments, I wish we had a soundtrack to our lives. Something melancholic, like nineties shoegaze.”
When her pale blues met my commonplace irises, her lips parted as if she were about to continue, but then she glanced away and lowered her head. Her eyebrows drew inward, her lids grew heavy.
“I can hear your thoughts,” Elena said. “Be grateful an old person tried to help you, you miserable bitch. You didn’t have to be polite, just smile and keep walking. You could have given her a moment of good feelings instead of this bitterness.”
“That’s you self-flagellating. I couldn’t give less of a shit about the old bat. I just didn’t want you to get riled up for no good reason.”
Elena’s voice carried a trace of anguish.
“If I want to drag my fucking laces along this disgusting pavement, that’s my prerogative, and if I trip and break my neck, well, good fucking riddance. One less burden for my parents, one less monster for the world to deal with. So keep walking, and mind your own business. What’s next? Someone stopping to remind me to blink? To breathe? To keep my heart beating? People grabbing onto any excuse to butt their heads into someone else’s life. So desperate to feel useful they’ll point out the most obvious things just to convince themselves they matter. Looking for connection where there is none. Sorry, Jon. Four hours of sleep and cockroach gods. If it serves as consolation, I’m bound to end up worse off than that hag. Senile. Desperate to talk to anyone. But I’ll have nobody, because I pushed them all away.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Brand New Key” by Melanie Safka.
At the intersection between the Antonio Valverde and Pintor Berrueta streets, I leaned over the graffitied railing to watch the two feet of greenish water flowing below, where countless small waves collided. The sight of muddied pebbles and an aluminum can rippled as the watery creases glided in undulating curves of light and shadow. Every second, the universe’s CPU calculated millions of minute interactions along this insignificant stretch of river even if they passed unattended, and remained barely comprehensible to the few that stopped to look.
“Hypnotic, isn’t it. Always moving but never going anywhere. Just flowing along whatever path was carved out for it centuries ago.”
I had waited three days to hear that voice once more. Elena had tied her almond-blonde locks into a ponytail, save for a few strands that framed her face. Afternoon sunlight bathed her forehead and crown, igniting her hair into warm, shimmering gold. The light caught her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose, revealing their smooth texture, while her pale blues shone cool and glassy in the shade beneath her brow. A gradient descended from the illuminated ridges of her collarbones to the zipper of her black hoodie.
Elena tilted her head slightly, and along her bare neck, the right sternocleidomastoid contracted and relaxed as if alive, outlining the dark hollow between the muscle and the graceful curve of her throat. I imagined my gaping maw encircling her slender neck, teeth pressed hard and sinking into her spasming, taut flesh, pulse thumping against the tip of my tongue, then I’d clamp down and yank, severing veins and arteries, ripping sinews and muscle that would stretch like melted cheese before snapping. I’d chew on her succulent, coppery flesh as hot jets of lifeblood from the glistening crater in her throat with its exposed tracheal rings blessed my face in crimson splashes.
She adjusted the strap of her backpack, slung over her left shoulder.
“I should warn you: I’ve barely slept four hours. I dreamed I was sitting in an empty bathtub while a giant cockroach stared at me from the bathroom wall. It had these alien, eerily-intelligent eyes that made me feel exposed, like it knew things about me I don’t even know. Then I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
“So, not unlike a certain human with whom you spent an afternoon at Bar Palace. Who, as you put it, dissected your darkness.”
Elena’s eyes widened. She turned her head and knit her brow as her lashes fluttered nervously. Then, she fixed me with a contrite gaze.
“My brain does have this twisted way of processing things—turning real connections into monstrosities I can understand better. Maybe it’s easier to deal with a giant insect than a human being who might see through my bullshit. But no, that wasn’t a cockroach version of you.”
“How can you be sure?”
“You make me feel seen, not exposed. That cockroach was older, almost like a father figure. Or maybe a god. A godroach. The Eternal Lord of Filth. It had been watching humanity since we crawled out of the primordial ooze, and it spent its time judging us, judging our entire species, as it waited patiently to inherit the Earth after we nuke ourselves to oblivion.”
“I’m glad to hear I wasn’t a bug in your nightmares.”
“Anyway, what’s this place you want to show me? Hopefully not a mass grave of your victims.”
I pivoted and pointed toward the blocky apartment towers, one a muted taupe and the other cantaloupe-colored, further up the narrow, sloping road. Towers erected decades ago to shelter the dutiful working class that once stored there, few would escape their confines except in a hearse. On nondescript balconies, potted flowers fought for distinction, futile as a thin coat of paint on a rusted hulk.
“We have a bit of a hike ahead of us.”
Elena’s fingers lingered on the zipper of her hoodie before dropping to her side.
“Artia? You’re taking me to the place where dreams come to die? Growing up, I thought these towers looked like enormous gravestones.”
“Our destination lies beyond this decaying corpse of a neighborhood, and I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.”
“Figures we’d have to walk through the worst part first. Some twisted metaphor for life, right? Trudge through the rot before you get anywhere worthwhile. If there even is such a place. Lead on then, mysterious guide.”
We headed up Pintor Berrueta Street on a narrow sidewalk that corralled us into single file. As we passed a row of recycling bins, a green igloo belched its fetid reek in our faces. I held my breath, then crossed the road toward a corner bar.
“Stench of the apocalypse,” Elena said, a couple steps behind me. “The end creeping on its way to gobble us up.”
“Or the stench of stale alcohol.”
We climbed a short flight of stairs into a murky arcade sheltered beneath a concrete overhang. Half the businesses had gone bankrupt; the plate glass windows had been papered over, and the metal rolling shutters had clanged shut.
“We’ve witnessed this town fall apart, haven’t we?” Elena asked grimly. “Not in one big catastrophe, but in tiny individual tragedies, piece by piece, year by year. A slow, agonizing necrosis. The stores we frequented as kids, the playgrounds and parks we played in. Irún’s heart and lungs are failing, and no one gives a shit. I’d leave, but where would I go?”
“Anywhere away from here. That’d be a good start.”
“What other place would you recommend? Aw, crap.”
I stopped to look behind me. Elena, hands tucked into the kangaroo pocket of her hoodie, twisted her slender right leg as if showing off the two stark white stripes running down the sides of her black joggers. The cuff of that jogger leg had rolled up, unveiling a pale, sinful ankle that would slither into my dreams. She stared at her untied right Converse.
Elena shrugged, then skipped ahead while fluttering her hand in a winglike motion to urge me onward.
“Let’s keep going. I don’t want to stop here.”
We pressed on through the shadowed passage. An elderly woman, likely in her late seventies, doddered towards us, taking up the center of the arcade. She had wrapped a plaid scarf around her neck, over a timeworn cardigan. As she carried a tote bag in a papery, veiny hand, she lifted the other to point at Elena’s canvas shoe.
“You’re dragging your shoelaces along the filthy floor, dear. They’re going to get dirty.”
Elena sidestepped the old lady, eyes fixed straight ahead, but her eyelids twitched. The woman called out behind us.
“You should be careful. You’ll trip on those laces.”
I spoke over my shoulder.
“She knows.”
Elena had frozen mid-step, a scowl distorting her features as her eyes rolled back. She whirled around and stepped closer to the elderly woman, whose face had crumpled into a webwork of wrinkles, whose shoulders had hunched as if her torso were collapsing in on itself.
“Have you ever worn shoes with shoelaces?” Elena asked coldly.
“If I have ever worn shoes?”
“With shoelaces.”
“Of course, dear. I was young once, too.”
“Okay, so you know that when one’s shoelaces come undone, the person wearing the shoes is aware of it, and you’re just bothering a stranger for no reason.”
The woman’s sunken eyes widened, and her lips quivered.
“Dear,” she started in a conciliatory tone, “there’s no need to get upset. I was just trying to help. You’re going to trip and hurt yourself.”
I could hardly tear my gaze from the sway of Elena’s almond-blonde ponytail, yet someone in that desolate arcade needed to stop this nonsense. I fought the urge to rest a hand on her shoulder; who knew how she might have reacted.
“This may be the epitome of ‘not worth it,’ Elena.”
She turned away from the elder and strode ahead. After she passed me, I quickened my pace to match hers. She sighed deeply as her right Converse dragged its undone laces. We climbed a longer flight of stairs. To our left, the wall was blighted by a collage of jagged tags. We stepped out of the arcade onto the asphalt of a parking lot. Decades of pedestrian and vehicular traffic had eroded the once-solid zebra crossing into patchy remnants. Elena raised her eyes toward a peach-colored apartment tower.
“The world feels strange and fragile, about to fall apart like a cracking facade and reveal that this whole thing has been a cosmic joke. Do you ever get that feeling, Jon? In such moments, I wish we had a soundtrack to our lives. Something melancholic, like nineties shoegaze.”
When her pale blues met my commonplace irises, her lips parted as if she were about to continue, but then she glanced away and lowered her head. Her eyebrows drew inward, her lids grew heavy.
“I can hear your thoughts,” Elena said. “Be grateful an old person tried to help you, you miserable bitch. You didn’t have to be polite, just smile and keep walking. You could have given her a moment of good feelings instead of this bitterness.”
“That’s you self-flagellating. I couldn’t give less of a shit about the old bat. I just didn’t want you to get riled up for no good reason.”
Elena’s voice carried a trace of anguish.
“If I want to drag my fucking laces along this disgusting pavement, that’s my prerogative, and if I trip and break my neck, well, good fucking riddance. One less burden for my parents, one less monster for the world to deal with. So keep walking, and mind your own business. What’s next? Someone stopping to remind me to blink? To breathe? To keep my heart beating? People grabbing onto any excuse to butt their heads into someone else’s life. So desperate to feel useful they’ll point out the most obvious things just to convince themselves they matter. Looking for connection where there is none. Sorry, Jon. Four hours of sleep and cockroach gods. If it serves as consolation, I’m bound to end up worse off than that hag. Senile. Desperate to talk to anyone. But I’ll have nobody, because I pushed them all away.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Brand New Key” by Melanie Safka.
Life update (03/18/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I spend most days either working or writing, but in the periods when I’m at home and I don’t have to work and I think that I’ve done enough writing for the day, I try to either exercise or play some game. Ever since All on Board! came out (it’s an app to play board games in VR), even though it’s quite barebones compared to what it will hopefully become in some months, I’ve regained the sense of joy that comes with playing board games. The mind stretches to grab the corners of the system each board game has created, which gives you a thrilling sense of your options and possible strategies.
I’m a systems builder, so every time I get back into board games, I fantasize about creating my own. A week or so ago I ended up gathering all the game mechanics I could find online, categorizing them, and posting them on this site, to the likely annoyance of many of my very few subscribers; when my emails hit their inbox, they must have expected to get new parts of stories, only to find themselves flooded with posts about game mechanics. That must have felt like a non sequitur. Anyway, I’d love to design my own board game, but I don’t have time to focus hard on anything else when I’m deep into writing a story. If I were unemployed, I suspect I would expect the rest of my spare time either preparing the next writing session, or fucking around.
Regarding digital games, these days it’s hard to pick anything decent. AAA games are on a deserved downward spiral. Most of the legendary studios, those that haven’t disappeared, exist in name only; the actual talent bailed. Bethesda needs to fire their lead writer, and perhaps Todd himself. Fans are shouldering the massive endeavor of keeping great gaming traditions alive; Morrowind modding, for example, is astonishing these days. Regarding huge games, I’m waiting to buy a better graphics card in order to finally have my playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 in VR. Once you play certain things in VR, you really don’t want to spoil the experience by playing flat.
Anyway, I did buy a new game and enjoyed it a lot. Spent my whole Sunday afternoon playing it. This one was a bit of a meme a couple of years ago, but it still seemed up my alley: it’s the visual novel (of sorts) named The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. Supposedly a horror game, but it felt like a dark comedy to me. As well as a sibling abuse simulator. Mentioning any of the most conspicuous elements you experience in the story would involve spoilers.
In any case, you ultimately play, and anticipate upcoming chapters, because of Andrew and Ashley, the siblings in charge of that wild ride. Like in any great story, you return to it because you want to spend more time with one or more characters. Due to the subjects the author touches in this game, apparently she (her updates sound like they’re written by a woman, but I wouldn’t be sure these days) got death threats and partially doxxed, which led her to step back from the spotlight. However, the author is uncompromising in her dark vision, and refuses to bend the knee. Such authors are almost the only kind I can respect these days.
Oh, and Ashley Graves, the manipulative, sociopathic half of the sibling couple… I’m down bad for that black-hearted bitch. Even though not even a new birth would fix her.
I spend most days either working or writing, but in the periods when I’m at home and I don’t have to work and I think that I’ve done enough writing for the day, I try to either exercise or play some game. Ever since All on Board! came out (it’s an app to play board games in VR), even though it’s quite barebones compared to what it will hopefully become in some months, I’ve regained the sense of joy that comes with playing board games. The mind stretches to grab the corners of the system each board game has created, which gives you a thrilling sense of your options and possible strategies.
I’m a systems builder, so every time I get back into board games, I fantasize about creating my own. A week or so ago I ended up gathering all the game mechanics I could find online, categorizing them, and posting them on this site, to the likely annoyance of many of my very few subscribers; when my emails hit their inbox, they must have expected to get new parts of stories, only to find themselves flooded with posts about game mechanics. That must have felt like a non sequitur. Anyway, I’d love to design my own board game, but I don’t have time to focus hard on anything else when I’m deep into writing a story. If I were unemployed, I suspect I would expect the rest of my spare time either preparing the next writing session, or fucking around.
Regarding digital games, these days it’s hard to pick anything decent. AAA games are on a deserved downward spiral. Most of the legendary studios, those that haven’t disappeared, exist in name only; the actual talent bailed. Bethesda needs to fire their lead writer, and perhaps Todd himself. Fans are shouldering the massive endeavor of keeping great gaming traditions alive; Morrowind modding, for example, is astonishing these days. Regarding huge games, I’m waiting to buy a better graphics card in order to finally have my playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 in VR. Once you play certain things in VR, you really don’t want to spoil the experience by playing flat.
Anyway, I did buy a new game and enjoyed it a lot. Spent my whole Sunday afternoon playing it. This one was a bit of a meme a couple of years ago, but it still seemed up my alley: it’s the visual novel (of sorts) named The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. Supposedly a horror game, but it felt like a dark comedy to me. As well as a sibling abuse simulator. Mentioning any of the most conspicuous elements you experience in the story would involve spoilers.
In any case, you ultimately play, and anticipate upcoming chapters, because of Andrew and Ashley, the siblings in charge of that wild ride. Like in any great story, you return to it because you want to spend more time with one or more characters. Due to the subjects the author touches in this game, apparently she (her updates sound like they’re written by a woman, but I wouldn’t be sure these days) got death threats and partially doxxed, which led her to step back from the spotlight. However, the author is uncompromising in her dark vision, and refuses to bend the knee. Such authors are almost the only kind I can respect these days.
Oh, and Ashley Graves, the manipulative, sociopathic half of the sibling couple… I’m down bad for that black-hearted bitch. Even though not even a new birth would fix her.
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 13 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I whimpered.
“Stop.”
“Will you burn your drawings?”
“Whatever you want.”
He pulled me away from the table, and with that tug, I fell back in the chair, the front legs rising as it tilted precariously. Father braced the backrest to keep me from falling.
Even as I blinked, my vision clouded with dark specks, and every time I tensed any facial muscle, my right cheekbone flared. I sucked in a breath of snot. I studied the lighter in my palm and slid the tip of my thumb along its serrated, rough wheel.
Nothing would ever take away my overseas kingdom. Nothing would erase those chalk-white cliffs, nor the kilometer-long dining table, nor the people who treated me like a cherished guest. No one would confiscate or invade the sanctuaries of my mind, and the landscapes and characters I had discovered in that darkness would greet me when I closed my eyes. Let Father have my childish attempts to order this nightmare.
When I flicked the lighter’s wheel, a flame leapt up, flaring brightly—a genie I had conjured to obey me, yet too weak to set all three of us on fire, of charring our flesh and stripping us down to scorched skeletons. I touched the flame to the paper scraps, and they ignited. The fire begot offspring that carbonized other scraps, crumpling them into black wrinkles that crumbled into ash, devouring them as if a horde of newly born spiders were consuming their mother. From the bowl, a tangled flame rose, warming my face and intensifying the pain in my cheekbone. The ascending column of black smoke crashed against the ceiling like a slow cascade tumbling onto rocks. It scattered in shavings. The stench of charred paper invaded my lungs, which stung.
Father poured the bottle of milk into the bowl, quelling the flames, until the smoke turned to a white vapor. The burnt odor intertwined with the smell of hot milk. Mother crossed an arm in front of my face to hand a mortar and pestle to the man, who gripped the pestle and pounded the ashes into the bottom of the bowl, soaking his hand and spilling gray clumps across the table.
As my tears dried, I drifted away. I shivered, slumped in the chair. The pain in my cheekbone worsened in waves.
Father stirred the paste, lifted the bowl, and brought it to my mouth. I snapped awake. I leaned back and tilted my face. The man grabbed me by the nape and pressed the rim of the bowl against my pursed lips, splattering my face. Milk spilled over my lap.
“You know you’ll swallow every last drop,” Father said.
He shoved the bowl as if to shatter it, so that shards might embed in my lips. He growled. He clutched my nape and shouted to my right.
“Help me.”
Mother appeared at his side. My twisted neck ached, but my moans died in my throat. Father released my nape and pinched my nose, sealing my nostrils closed. The woman pulled at my lips, exposing my tight set of teeth.
I resisted while the bowl, in a seesaw motion, slammed against my incisors like a battering ram. I lacked oxygen. My vision darkened.
When I opened my mouth to gasp for a breath, Mother pried my teeth apart and held them open. Father, after yanking my head back, emptied the bowl. Clumps spilled over my neck, my chest, my thighs, while my mouth swelled with a goop that tasted of wet charcoal, that seared my tongue, palate, and uvula like a freshly cooked soup. The man dumped out every last clump. My swollen cheeks ached, threatening to tear apart. I coughed up a cloud of lumps. While standing behind me and pinching my nose, Father clamped my mouth shut, and—pulling on my chin while pressing my nape against his stomach—forced my teeth to grind together.
Tears streamed from my eyes. The hot milk that pooled behind my nose reddened my vision. I thrashed in convulsions, and with every spasm, my throat gulped down lump balls as if I were a snake trying to swallow an ostrich egg. I grabbed the man’s wrists, his spikes biting into my palms, and wriggled to break free.
Once he released my mouth, I coughed a spray of clumps and milk that splattered the table and part of the counter. Father threw me off the chair to the side, and I landed on a shoulder.
I struggled to breathe. Clumps clogged my trachea and stomach, filling my insides as in a stuffed carcass.
The man towered hundreds of meters over me, a dark colossus against a shrouded ceiling. His face was a black blur. He clenched his red-hot fists, as large as mallets. The iron spikes jutting out and bristling along his form vibrated as he expanded and contracted his minotaur chest.
“What do you think I wouldn’t take from you if you keep up this useless rebellion? Do you want to shit in a corner? Roam around the house naked, to be led on a leash? Do you want me to beat you every time you speak? Because that’s what you’ve earned, stupid girl.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Wave of Mutilation” by Pixies.
I whimpered.
“Stop.”
“Will you burn your drawings?”
“Whatever you want.”
He pulled me away from the table, and with that tug, I fell back in the chair, the front legs rising as it tilted precariously. Father braced the backrest to keep me from falling.
Even as I blinked, my vision clouded with dark specks, and every time I tensed any facial muscle, my right cheekbone flared. I sucked in a breath of snot. I studied the lighter in my palm and slid the tip of my thumb along its serrated, rough wheel.
Nothing would ever take away my overseas kingdom. Nothing would erase those chalk-white cliffs, nor the kilometer-long dining table, nor the people who treated me like a cherished guest. No one would confiscate or invade the sanctuaries of my mind, and the landscapes and characters I had discovered in that darkness would greet me when I closed my eyes. Let Father have my childish attempts to order this nightmare.
When I flicked the lighter’s wheel, a flame leapt up, flaring brightly—a genie I had conjured to obey me, yet too weak to set all three of us on fire, of charring our flesh and stripping us down to scorched skeletons. I touched the flame to the paper scraps, and they ignited. The fire begot offspring that carbonized other scraps, crumpling them into black wrinkles that crumbled into ash, devouring them as if a horde of newly born spiders were consuming their mother. From the bowl, a tangled flame rose, warming my face and intensifying the pain in my cheekbone. The ascending column of black smoke crashed against the ceiling like a slow cascade tumbling onto rocks. It scattered in shavings. The stench of charred paper invaded my lungs, which stung.
Father poured the bottle of milk into the bowl, quelling the flames, until the smoke turned to a white vapor. The burnt odor intertwined with the smell of hot milk. Mother crossed an arm in front of my face to hand a mortar and pestle to the man, who gripped the pestle and pounded the ashes into the bottom of the bowl, soaking his hand and spilling gray clumps across the table.
As my tears dried, I drifted away. I shivered, slumped in the chair. The pain in my cheekbone worsened in waves.
Father stirred the paste, lifted the bowl, and brought it to my mouth. I snapped awake. I leaned back and tilted my face. The man grabbed me by the nape and pressed the rim of the bowl against my pursed lips, splattering my face. Milk spilled over my lap.
“You know you’ll swallow every last drop,” Father said.
He shoved the bowl as if to shatter it, so that shards might embed in my lips. He growled. He clutched my nape and shouted to my right.
“Help me.”
Mother appeared at his side. My twisted neck ached, but my moans died in my throat. Father released my nape and pinched my nose, sealing my nostrils closed. The woman pulled at my lips, exposing my tight set of teeth.
I resisted while the bowl, in a seesaw motion, slammed against my incisors like a battering ram. I lacked oxygen. My vision darkened.
When I opened my mouth to gasp for a breath, Mother pried my teeth apart and held them open. Father, after yanking my head back, emptied the bowl. Clumps spilled over my neck, my chest, my thighs, while my mouth swelled with a goop that tasted of wet charcoal, that seared my tongue, palate, and uvula like a freshly cooked soup. The man dumped out every last clump. My swollen cheeks ached, threatening to tear apart. I coughed up a cloud of lumps. While standing behind me and pinching my nose, Father clamped my mouth shut, and—pulling on my chin while pressing my nape against his stomach—forced my teeth to grind together.
Tears streamed from my eyes. The hot milk that pooled behind my nose reddened my vision. I thrashed in convulsions, and with every spasm, my throat gulped down lump balls as if I were a snake trying to swallow an ostrich egg. I grabbed the man’s wrists, his spikes biting into my palms, and wriggled to break free.
Once he released my mouth, I coughed a spray of clumps and milk that splattered the table and part of the counter. Father threw me off the chair to the side, and I landed on a shoulder.
I struggled to breathe. Clumps clogged my trachea and stomach, filling my insides as in a stuffed carcass.
The man towered hundreds of meters over me, a dark colossus against a shrouded ceiling. His face was a black blur. He clenched his red-hot fists, as large as mallets. The iron spikes jutting out and bristling along his form vibrated as he expanded and contracted his minotaur chest.
“What do you think I wouldn’t take from you if you keep up this useless rebellion? Do you want to shit in a corner? Roam around the house naked, to be led on a leash? Do you want me to beat you every time you speak? Because that’s what you’ve earned, stupid girl.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “Wave of Mutilation” by Pixies.
March 17, 2025
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 12 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Mother called me to dinner, but when I entered the kitchen, Father was waiting by my pulled-back chair, and my drawings had been scattered across the table like the disordered panels of a comic. The lamplight waned along the man’s outline, as if he were hiding in the blind spot of an alley.
I would escape. I turned around, but the woman stood in the way. She shoved the door, which slammed shut. Mother’s nose jutted out from her silver, disheveled hair while she rummaged through the cupboard of pots and jugs.
Father pointed to the chair. I advanced as if a rope were tugging at my chest. When I sat down, the chair’s legs groaned. The man leaned in. I shrank back. His breath warmed my hair, and his gaze fixed on me like a gun.
He pressed one of the drawings with his index finger. That sheet showed the house set against a backdrop of hills, where pines jutted out like the bristles of a carpet. The door of the house was guarded by Father—a minotaur that had broken out of his labyrinth. His body, studded with iron spikes, bulged as if several men were merged into one, and in the black smear of his face—a chasm—the fire of his breath lit up his two eyes. The monster would pounce on anyone who dared to look at the drawing.
“Is this supposed to be me?” Father said.
My guts writhed as if tormented by a week of constipation; I hunched and clutched my forearms to my abdomen. My vocal cords refused to cooperate. My heart pumped clotted blood.
Father grabbed some drawings and scrutinized them while murmuring as if damning some world to a curse. When he palm-struck the sheets back onto the table, a whirlwind of air scattered more papers from the epicenter.
“I feed you and give you a bedroom, you exist thanks to me, but you waste your time painting fantasy towns, drawing me as a monster.” He seized a drawing and flipped it toward me. The sheet crumpled under his fingertips. “Tall as a skyscraper and breathing fire. Ungrateful bastard.”
“They’re prettier,” I muttered in a hoarse voice.
My words had taken Father aback as if a dog had suddenly spoken.
“What did you say?”
I tried to swallow through my constricted throat.
“Those towns are prettier. Those people are kind to me.”
“They don’t exist. You have this house. Us. The cows, the sheep. Work that keeps you busy. If you even have time for your imagination to fly, it’s a sign you need a heavier burden.”
My head swayed. I was breathing in hiccups. Hunched over, I clutched my abdomen as my guts creaked like an old house. The lamplight, along with the foul smell of garlic and onions, were scraping on my brain.
Although I imagined myself running to my bedroom and hiding under the blankets, Father seized my head with his thick fingers, as if restraining a nervous sheep for shearing. A shudder shook my spine.
“We appeared on Earth to fulfill our role,” the man said. “For us to survive, all three must carry our share. Your job is to tend to some cows and sheep, serve me, and keep quiet. When you refuse to obey or only half obey, you harm us, your parents. But as long as you obey, you’ll avoid bruises. You’ll have a plate on the table and a bed. That’s enough.”
“It’s not.”
As Father emptied his lungs, his scorching breath singed a patch of my hair. The hand gripping my head prevented me from looking away from the drawings that covered the table. Mother appeared to my right, holding a bowl and a glass bottle filled with milk and smudged with fingerprints. The man cleared a space on the table in front of me, where the woman placed the bowl. She handed the bottle to Father. The arm that had been pinning me to the chair relaxed as the man gulped down the milk with the sound of a shark gobbling down live fish.
When Mother folded one of the drawings and tore it into four pieces, I trembled as if she had slashed me with a razor. She dropped the fragments into the bowl.
My lips quivered. If I blinked, my eyes would water and ruin my last glimpse of the drawing the woman had torn.
Father leaned close to me and spoke an inch from my ear.
“Insulting us will have consequences.”
I tried to turn my head toward the man, but his fingers tightened on my scalp, imprinting the five tips in red.
“Why are you like this, Father?” I said, my voice cracking. “Someone must have cursed you. It should have been different.”
“Curses don’t exist, you moron. Such nonsense occurs to someone who wastes hours drawing, thinking up fantasies. An idle mind eats itself like an empty stomach.”
Mother had crammed the bowl with scraps white on one side and drawn on the other. The meaning of the strokes and colors was lost like in the scattered pieces of a puzzle. The woman folded the last drawing with her bony fingers, and tore it apart.
How long would it take me to glue these fragments back together?
Father’s free hand seized my wrist. He turned my hand over on the table, opened my fingers, and closed them around the warm metal of a lighter.
“Burn them.”
A jolt of ice pierced my heart as my muscles convulsed in cramps. I had to break free, yet his thick fingers squeezed my scalp as if drilling into my skull. Although ever since I’d drawn that first scene I’d known one day I would lose them, I had convinced myself I’d postpone that moment until I died.
“No.”
When Father yanked my hair, my scalp flared with pain, drawing a scream from me. One more tug and my skull would be stripped bare. The man panted against my face. Growled like a dog.
“Burn them.”
Tears welled from the corners of my eyes, painting burning streaks on my cold skin.
“They’re better than this.”
Father slammed my right cheekbone against the table with a bang. The impact reverberated through my skull, rattling my brain. My vision went white. Was I still in the kitchen?
The man shifted his weight onto the hand that was pushing my head, and on my crushed cheekbone, the fibers covering the bone were tearing apart. The right half of my face boiled; the burning spilled over the bridge of my nose, reddening the view of that eye.
“You’ll be useful to me even with broken bones,” Father said.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “A Little God in My Hands” by Swans.
Mother called me to dinner, but when I entered the kitchen, Father was waiting by my pulled-back chair, and my drawings had been scattered across the table like the disordered panels of a comic. The lamplight waned along the man’s outline, as if he were hiding in the blind spot of an alley.
I would escape. I turned around, but the woman stood in the way. She shoved the door, which slammed shut. Mother’s nose jutted out from her silver, disheveled hair while she rummaged through the cupboard of pots and jugs.
Father pointed to the chair. I advanced as if a rope were tugging at my chest. When I sat down, the chair’s legs groaned. The man leaned in. I shrank back. His breath warmed my hair, and his gaze fixed on me like a gun.
He pressed one of the drawings with his index finger. That sheet showed the house set against a backdrop of hills, where pines jutted out like the bristles of a carpet. The door of the house was guarded by Father—a minotaur that had broken out of his labyrinth. His body, studded with iron spikes, bulged as if several men were merged into one, and in the black smear of his face—a chasm—the fire of his breath lit up his two eyes. The monster would pounce on anyone who dared to look at the drawing.
“Is this supposed to be me?” Father said.
My guts writhed as if tormented by a week of constipation; I hunched and clutched my forearms to my abdomen. My vocal cords refused to cooperate. My heart pumped clotted blood.
Father grabbed some drawings and scrutinized them while murmuring as if damning some world to a curse. When he palm-struck the sheets back onto the table, a whirlwind of air scattered more papers from the epicenter.
“I feed you and give you a bedroom, you exist thanks to me, but you waste your time painting fantasy towns, drawing me as a monster.” He seized a drawing and flipped it toward me. The sheet crumpled under his fingertips. “Tall as a skyscraper and breathing fire. Ungrateful bastard.”
“They’re prettier,” I muttered in a hoarse voice.
My words had taken Father aback as if a dog had suddenly spoken.
“What did you say?”
I tried to swallow through my constricted throat.
“Those towns are prettier. Those people are kind to me.”
“They don’t exist. You have this house. Us. The cows, the sheep. Work that keeps you busy. If you even have time for your imagination to fly, it’s a sign you need a heavier burden.”
My head swayed. I was breathing in hiccups. Hunched over, I clutched my abdomen as my guts creaked like an old house. The lamplight, along with the foul smell of garlic and onions, were scraping on my brain.
Although I imagined myself running to my bedroom and hiding under the blankets, Father seized my head with his thick fingers, as if restraining a nervous sheep for shearing. A shudder shook my spine.
“We appeared on Earth to fulfill our role,” the man said. “For us to survive, all three must carry our share. Your job is to tend to some cows and sheep, serve me, and keep quiet. When you refuse to obey or only half obey, you harm us, your parents. But as long as you obey, you’ll avoid bruises. You’ll have a plate on the table and a bed. That’s enough.”
“It’s not.”
As Father emptied his lungs, his scorching breath singed a patch of my hair. The hand gripping my head prevented me from looking away from the drawings that covered the table. Mother appeared to my right, holding a bowl and a glass bottle filled with milk and smudged with fingerprints. The man cleared a space on the table in front of me, where the woman placed the bowl. She handed the bottle to Father. The arm that had been pinning me to the chair relaxed as the man gulped down the milk with the sound of a shark gobbling down live fish.
When Mother folded one of the drawings and tore it into four pieces, I trembled as if she had slashed me with a razor. She dropped the fragments into the bowl.
My lips quivered. If I blinked, my eyes would water and ruin my last glimpse of the drawing the woman had torn.
Father leaned close to me and spoke an inch from my ear.
“Insulting us will have consequences.”
I tried to turn my head toward the man, but his fingers tightened on my scalp, imprinting the five tips in red.
“Why are you like this, Father?” I said, my voice cracking. “Someone must have cursed you. It should have been different.”
“Curses don’t exist, you moron. Such nonsense occurs to someone who wastes hours drawing, thinking up fantasies. An idle mind eats itself like an empty stomach.”
Mother had crammed the bowl with scraps white on one side and drawn on the other. The meaning of the strokes and colors was lost like in the scattered pieces of a puzzle. The woman folded the last drawing with her bony fingers, and tore it apart.
How long would it take me to glue these fragments back together?
Father’s free hand seized my wrist. He turned my hand over on the table, opened my fingers, and closed them around the warm metal of a lighter.
“Burn them.”
A jolt of ice pierced my heart as my muscles convulsed in cramps. I had to break free, yet his thick fingers squeezed my scalp as if drilling into my skull. Although ever since I’d drawn that first scene I’d known one day I would lose them, I had convinced myself I’d postpone that moment until I died.
“No.”
When Father yanked my hair, my scalp flared with pain, drawing a scream from me. One more tug and my skull would be stripped bare. The man panted against my face. Growled like a dog.
“Burn them.”
Tears welled from the corners of my eyes, painting burning streaks on my cold skin.
“They’re better than this.”
Father slammed my right cheekbone against the table with a bang. The impact reverberated through my skull, rattling my brain. My vision went white. Was I still in the kitchen?
The man shifted his weight onto the hand that was pushing my head, and on my crushed cheekbone, the fibers covering the bone were tearing apart. The right half of my face boiled; the burning spilled over the bridge of my nose, reddening the view of that eye.
“You’ll be useful to me even with broken bones,” Father said.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “A Little God in My Hands” by Swans.
March 15, 2025
The Emperor Owl, Pt. 11 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
About six hundred meters from the house, in the opposite direction of the emperor owl’s refuge, I no longer recognized the curves of the road along which I had come years ago. Why had I forgotten them? Had I been sleeping and only awakened as we neared the house? Had the route been erased from my memory because I assumed I’d never leave? What awaited me a kilometer or two away? The neighbors’ lands?
I leaned against the soft moss and ashen lichen crusts that covered the trunk of an oak. I could smell my cold sweat. The muscles in my legs had tensed, poised to sprint at every sound. I was venturing through a jungle teeming with predators. If I let my guard down, a pack would burst from the undergrowth.
I marched on, clutching the swollen portfolio against my side like a shield. Five minutes later I sensed a shadow. As I shifted my gaze toward it, it slipped from trunk to trunk.
I veered off the road and crouched among clusters of prickly bushes adorned with yellow flowers. I drew a deep breath while keeping a fixed, unblinking watch on the road, which, in the distance, twisted through a grove of narrow, charred-looking trunks. They distorted the distances and masked the gaps with their mint-green foliage, which draped stripes of shadow over the path.
The ground trembled. A gaze fixed on the back of my neck. I turned. A thick shadow spread over the pebbles and earth of the road, cloaking them like a funeral veil.
I sprang from my hiding place among the bushes. I imagined sprinting, but my body froze. I wanted to scream, to call for help. The fading twilight exposed me like a mouse to a bird of prey.
At the edge of my vision, two columns of shadow emerged from mud-splattered boots. Father approached until a pair of denim trousers appeared in my sight. His breath heated my face like a bonfire.
“Are you lost?”
His voice barely contained a roar.
“I was watching the landscape, sir.”
“What are you looking for? What is it you need to see?”
When Father encircled me to block the path, I raised my eyes by a span. The man’s right hand—his arm bristling with hundreds of iron spikes—clutched the long handle of a headless tool.
I counted from one to ten to distract my heart as I fought against my muscles betraying me. My mind was growing hazy.
“You heard me,” Father said.
“I was watching the landscape.”
The man inhaled, drawing the air from my lungs. He straightened the tool’s handle and pressed its headless end against my sternum.
“You have too much free time. Have you finished your duties?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Surely you can help your mother.”
He shoved me with the handle, forcing me to step back. I turned and walked upright, but within seconds, I lowered my head. My lost gaze swept over a doubled path as Father’s bulk followed me and, with every stomp, the earth quaked.
Five minutes later I was clutching the portfolio and hobbling. The emperor owl refused to let me accompany him, and I would never leave this place. How could I have managed it? I only knew how to shear, to milk, to draw. Gifts and miracles were reserved for those who deserved them.
The twilight faded. Colors hung from the treetops, the branches, and the grass lining the road like a dress several sizes too large.
Father led me to the barn, where Mother, seated on a stool, was sharpening the axe with a pumice stone. From beneath her hair, a gray, angular face peeked out. Father jabbed the tool’s handle against one of my shoulder blades and pushed me to the back of the barn. He pointed to a stool beside the flank of a cow, whose swollen udders bore veins bulging like branches swathed in skin.
“It’s her turn tomorrow, but surely you can do it ahead of schedule.”
While clutching the portfolio, I sat like an abandoned puppet. The stone of my thoughts sank deeper and deeper into a black ocean.
With a snap, a pressure clamped around my ankle. A shackle. It was connected by chains as thick as a finger, bolted to the rock.
Father straightened. In one swift motion, he snatched the portfolio from me and held it under his armpit.
“Remember your duty.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
About six hundred meters from the house, in the opposite direction of the emperor owl’s refuge, I no longer recognized the curves of the road along which I had come years ago. Why had I forgotten them? Had I been sleeping and only awakened as we neared the house? Had the route been erased from my memory because I assumed I’d never leave? What awaited me a kilometer or two away? The neighbors’ lands?
I leaned against the soft moss and ashen lichen crusts that covered the trunk of an oak. I could smell my cold sweat. The muscles in my legs had tensed, poised to sprint at every sound. I was venturing through a jungle teeming with predators. If I let my guard down, a pack would burst from the undergrowth.
I marched on, clutching the swollen portfolio against my side like a shield. Five minutes later I sensed a shadow. As I shifted my gaze toward it, it slipped from trunk to trunk.
I veered off the road and crouched among clusters of prickly bushes adorned with yellow flowers. I drew a deep breath while keeping a fixed, unblinking watch on the road, which, in the distance, twisted through a grove of narrow, charred-looking trunks. They distorted the distances and masked the gaps with their mint-green foliage, which draped stripes of shadow over the path.
The ground trembled. A gaze fixed on the back of my neck. I turned. A thick shadow spread over the pebbles and earth of the road, cloaking them like a funeral veil.
I sprang from my hiding place among the bushes. I imagined sprinting, but my body froze. I wanted to scream, to call for help. The fading twilight exposed me like a mouse to a bird of prey.
At the edge of my vision, two columns of shadow emerged from mud-splattered boots. Father approached until a pair of denim trousers appeared in my sight. His breath heated my face like a bonfire.
“Are you lost?”
His voice barely contained a roar.
“I was watching the landscape, sir.”
“What are you looking for? What is it you need to see?”
When Father encircled me to block the path, I raised my eyes by a span. The man’s right hand—his arm bristling with hundreds of iron spikes—clutched the long handle of a headless tool.
I counted from one to ten to distract my heart as I fought against my muscles betraying me. My mind was growing hazy.
“You heard me,” Father said.
“I was watching the landscape.”
The man inhaled, drawing the air from my lungs. He straightened the tool’s handle and pressed its headless end against my sternum.
“You have too much free time. Have you finished your duties?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Surely you can help your mother.”
He shoved me with the handle, forcing me to step back. I turned and walked upright, but within seconds, I lowered my head. My lost gaze swept over a doubled path as Father’s bulk followed me and, with every stomp, the earth quaked.
Five minutes later I was clutching the portfolio and hobbling. The emperor owl refused to let me accompany him, and I would never leave this place. How could I have managed it? I only knew how to shear, to milk, to draw. Gifts and miracles were reserved for those who deserved them.
The twilight faded. Colors hung from the treetops, the branches, and the grass lining the road like a dress several sizes too large.
Father led me to the barn, where Mother, seated on a stool, was sharpening the axe with a pumice stone. From beneath her hair, a gray, angular face peeked out. Father jabbed the tool’s handle against one of my shoulder blades and pushed me to the back of the barn. He pointed to a stool beside the flank of a cow, whose swollen udders bore veins bulging like branches swathed in skin.
“It’s her turn tomorrow, but surely you can do it ahead of schedule.”
While clutching the portfolio, I sat like an abandoned puppet. The stone of my thoughts sank deeper and deeper into a black ocean.
With a snap, a pressure clamped around my ankle. A shackle. It was connected by chains as thick as a finger, bolted to the rock.
Father straightened. In one swift motion, he snatched the portfolio from me and held it under his armpit.
“Remember your duty.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.
March 13, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 14 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena headed toward the gate to exit Bar Palace’s fenced patio, but I reminded her that we were supposed to pay for the coffees. She followed me inside through the sliding door, and we trod over broad boards. A dozen tables populated the room, around which distinguished older ladies and men sat in ornate chairs. Overhead fixtures burnished with amber light rectangular stone columns bolstering wooden beams. Another fixture spotlighted a stone fireplace and the ornament perched on its mantle: a metallic emblem bearing Irún’s coat of arms. Vigilantiae Custos. Guardian of Vigilance. We had entered a centuries-old retreat. I beelined to the marble counter layered atop dark wood paneling, then waited for a waiter in black garb to take my money. Elena trailed behind me, blue folder clamped under her arm, and surveyed the salon with darting eyes as if she feared some threat lurked in there.
We emerged from Bar Palace onto Navarra Avenue, then stopped at the edge of the sidewalk for the traffic light to turn. After basking in the refuge of that patio, despite the intruding youth, this noisy intersection had hurled us back into civilization. Cars and buses growled past. Across the street, a cluster of teenage girls idled outside a candy store, chatting and giggling beneath a leafy tree. A cyclist avoided pedestrians as he passed the reddish-orange facade of a four-story apartment building. Beside me, the rain-scented breeze played ghostlike with Elena’s almond-blonde locks. She clutched her folder while her eyes flitted between strangers like an anthropologist visiting a foreign land. I resisted the urge to steal a glance at how her dark-wash jeans hugged her butt.
Had Elena intended for us to part ways the moment we left the coffee shop? I wanted to spend more time with her, so she’d have to dismiss me.
Although her eyes were averted, Elena’s thin voice reached out to me.
“Jon, do you like being around people?”
“Not particularly.”
“Often when I force myself to leave the apartment, I see all these men and women and kids and elders walking about like ants scurrying to and from their nest, and I think, ‘I have nothing in common with these beings.’ I must assume that minds operate behind their eyes, even though I can’t imagine their thoughts. But maybe I share the world with eight billions of shoddily-programmed automatrons that short-circuit when confronted with concepts more complicated than the weather, football, or whatever shit the mass media pumps into them. Maybe I’m the sole real person in a simulation built to trap me. It would explain the state of the world, wouldn’t it? If nobody had any fucking clue about what they’re doing.”
“As a fellow person, I can’t help but resent the implication. And that line of thinking can easily slide you into psychosis.”
The pedestrian light flicked to the walking man outline. Elena and I strolled ahead.
“As a child,” she said, “I wondered if everyone around me was acting out a role. Did they also have to put on a mask whenever they went out? Were they as scared and lonely as me? Even now, I can’t be around people for too long. When someone stares at me, I feel like a fly trapped in a jar. It makes my skin crawl. There are no common points in which I can make myself understood. When I engage people, they’re more likely than not to end up developing an instinctive dislike of me. They’re the normal ones. Always pretending, trying to impress others. Trying to impress themselves. Lying to get along, to fit in. Do they ever feel the walls closing in? Do they ever sense the void beneath their feet, or the cold, dead stars overhead?”
Iglesia Street unfolded into a downward-sloping plaza paved with gray stone. At its edge stood the white building of the Roman museum. In front, three towering cypress trees jutted upward like narrow spearheads. Elena continued her monologue.
“One of the things you discover when you’ve been alone for so long is how people can weigh you down. As if you had lived with a TV constantly on and loud, and once you turn it off, you realize that something had been drowning your genuine thoughts. That newfound silence allows contemplation similar to that our ancestors enjoyed in their so-called primitive societies. Alone, you’re free from having to conform to the expectations installed by the people you’ve allowed in, who intend for you to like and want the same things they do. Without that pressure, your true self emerges—unshackled, raw. You figure out what matters to you. What you’re willing to tolerate, sacrifice for, fight tooth and claw to defend. To get there you have to become one with the void inside. Otherwise it remains alien to you. And most people seem terrified of meeting that self, lest they end up pushed out of the collective and ejected into the cold.”
We were nearing the bronze statue of a San Marcial vivandière—a woman captured mid-stride, clad in a beret; a buttoned-down, tailored jacket; and a pleated skirt that draped over the tops of her laced boots. In her right hand, she held a fan aloft, frozen in her constant duty to wave, while she cast an unsettling smirk at passersby. Creeping verdigris etched stark contrasts along the pleats of her skirt.
“You’d think such a dynamic would be absent in couples, right?” Elena said. “Surely partners willing to accompany each other on this doomed journey would form a sanctuary in which both could grow as individuals. But no. Most couples seem like two dogs chained together. A romantic relationship censors you even worse, and before long, you end up defanged and declawed. Can’t risk upsetting your partner. Can’t risk losing them. No wonder some couples decide to have a kid, then another, and another. Filling the home with hostages. No, an individual’s freedom is too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of having a companion to fill the silence, and a warm body to fuck.”
As we descended the stairs, Juncal Church loomed fortresslike, built from sandy stone blocks, some bearing warm honey hues and others worn into ashen grays. Near the top of its bell tower, that had darkened as if singed by flames, a snow-white clockface stood out. The church endured as a relic from an era when people’s beliefs, however misguided, urged them to erect beauty that would outlive them by centuries.
Elena’s vacant gaze drifted along the stairs. She had tucked her folder under one arm, and that hand in the pocket of her jeans. When she spoke again, her voice came hoarse.
“Most people stick to you not because they’re interested, or care, but because they need that closeness, that shared warmth, the same way I need to be alone. They’d be comfortable gathered around a bench in silence, while their mere presence would desiccate me. You spoke about how many works of art have been lost because their potential creators wasted their talents, or died too young. But how many revolutionary ideas, how many discoveries we’ve missed in these societies that push their members to police each other’s thoughts? How many masterpieces have died in the womb because some nearby moron could consider them impractical or ridiculous or immoral? I’ve had to protect myself. Surely you noticed how guarded I was at the writing course, or when you first approached me at that bench. Always have a wall up. I ensure that a person will offer more than they’ll take away from me. To preserve the garden, one must first be a ruthless weed slayer. Without that, the flowers get choked and die.” Her jaw tensed as she swallowed, and she massaged her throat. “Life gets too complicated when people disgust you. You need them for the most basic things, and I endure those interactions while repeating in my mind for them to leave me the fuck alone. The responsibilities you accumulate with humans shackle you. From time to time I feel like I’ve matured enough, or grown enough callus, to tolerate experiences like that writing course, which could help me. But soon enough, everything that irritates me about human beings, their words, their noises, the myriad little humiliations, swell and swell until suddenly I can’t deal with a single extra minute of that shit. Then I need to hide from the world and everybody in it. My solution? I keep my rotten self away from others. That way nobody can hurt me, and I don’t pollute anyone else. A quarantine measure to keep the world safe, you could say. Isn’t that the epitome of altruism? The greatest good?” She sighed. “Yeah, I’ve given up. After that course, after my stories were deemed deplorable, after that fucking bitch Isabel called me out as a monster in front of everyone… I feel completely done. I hoped that other writers would understand. So I exist here, in this land, because I have no choice. I can’t just pack up and move to the forest, or the mountains. Well, I could, but I’d like to survive past twenty-eight. Honestly, I doubt I would have reached this far if my parents hadn’t taken care of me. Imagine their disappointment and regret at what I’ve turned out to be.”
I had stopped at the church entrance, and Elena, lost in her soliloquy, had copied me. The dark wooden doors split into four metal panels, each embossed with figures of robed saints or other biblical characters. Four sandstone columns with fluted shafts flanked the entrance. Their bases and capitals had eroded, exposed for centuries to the elements and the corroding darkness of the world. Above the door, a circular niche might have once housed a statue, but these days it would have been stolen. Higher up, near an oculus’ edge, some architectural oversight had forced the builders to chisel blocks and wedge them into gaps.
Elena cleared her throat.
“Man, my voice box is actually strained. I hadn’t spoken so much in years. Maybe I never had. I was holding back a shit-ton of stuff, it seems. I also like to stop and stare at beautiful buildings. To see their little details. The cracks, the mold, the weeds growing in between the stones. How much they’ve endured. And most churches beat modern monstrosities like the one built to replace the covered pelota court at Sargia.”
Elena’s pale blues stared at me with childlike interest. I held my breath as her loose locks fluttered. She arched an eyebrow, and I broke the silence.
“Elena, did our coffee meeting feel that overwhelming?”
Her fingers fidgeted with the edges of her folder, and she glanced away.
“If you’re asking whether I enjoyed your company, the answer is yes. I like talking to you, Jon. I can hardly believe you’re still willing to reciprocate. Most people that intrigue me for whatever reason, they’re like temporary bandages over a radiation burn—they stick around just long enough to realize that this broken toy can’t be patched up with positive thinking and empty platitudes and self-help books, and then they bail. But you… you don’t seem interested in fixing anything. You just want to, what? Watch the decay spread? Document the collapse? I’ve offered you a glimpse of my darkness, and you just dissected it. As if performing an autopsy on my soul and cataloguing every diseased part you found. And I was glad to let you peel back layers. That writing course debacle… Honestly, if you hadn’t come out of the experience, I may have holed up in my cave for weeks. So, did our meeting feel good? I’m not sure I know what that feels like, because I can’t get rid of this anxiety and dread. But it felt… necessary. Real. Like for once, with you, I don’t need to pretend I’m something other than a monster. Now I have to acknowledge that maybe I’m not as alone in this darkness as I thought. That maybe other people out there can look inside me and not flinch. I don’t… I don’t know what to do with that kind of understanding. In summary: congratulations, Jon. You’re the first person I’ve talked to for more than ten minutes that didn’t make me want to claw my skin off. What a relief to speak to a human being without having to pretend to be one.”
“I want to meet up again soon, Elena. I picture us visiting interesting, solitary places, and having long talks about whatever comes to mind. I also intend to read the rest of your work. Let’s see how far we can take our experiment.”
Elena slid her hands into her pockets, folder tucked under one arm. Although she tried to restrain her lips from curving upwards, they betrayed her. The muscles that framed her mouth and connected to her chin tensed, her lower eyelids pushed up, her pale blues gleamed. I yearned to induce more of her genuine smiles, drawing beauty into the world with each one. Little works of art just for me.
“That sounds an awful lot like you’re giving me permission to be exactly what I am,” she said.
“That’s exactly what I want.”
Elena glanced over her shoulder at the rounded archway, under two levels of balconies and their striped awnings, that led deeper into Erromes Plaza. She turned back to me and nodded.
“Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s morally right to inflict myself on another person, but let’s do this again.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead.
We’re like 25,000 words in, and we haven’t even reached the middle of the first act. This is going to be a long one.
Also, because I’m from this city and I mentioned the San Marcial festivities (even though that day I either work or stay at home), here’s a video about it. Some shots even depict the itinerary of our main characters; for example, at 0:40, the church appears on the left.
Elena headed toward the gate to exit Bar Palace’s fenced patio, but I reminded her that we were supposed to pay for the coffees. She followed me inside through the sliding door, and we trod over broad boards. A dozen tables populated the room, around which distinguished older ladies and men sat in ornate chairs. Overhead fixtures burnished with amber light rectangular stone columns bolstering wooden beams. Another fixture spotlighted a stone fireplace and the ornament perched on its mantle: a metallic emblem bearing Irún’s coat of arms. Vigilantiae Custos. Guardian of Vigilance. We had entered a centuries-old retreat. I beelined to the marble counter layered atop dark wood paneling, then waited for a waiter in black garb to take my money. Elena trailed behind me, blue folder clamped under her arm, and surveyed the salon with darting eyes as if she feared some threat lurked in there.
We emerged from Bar Palace onto Navarra Avenue, then stopped at the edge of the sidewalk for the traffic light to turn. After basking in the refuge of that patio, despite the intruding youth, this noisy intersection had hurled us back into civilization. Cars and buses growled past. Across the street, a cluster of teenage girls idled outside a candy store, chatting and giggling beneath a leafy tree. A cyclist avoided pedestrians as he passed the reddish-orange facade of a four-story apartment building. Beside me, the rain-scented breeze played ghostlike with Elena’s almond-blonde locks. She clutched her folder while her eyes flitted between strangers like an anthropologist visiting a foreign land. I resisted the urge to steal a glance at how her dark-wash jeans hugged her butt.
Had Elena intended for us to part ways the moment we left the coffee shop? I wanted to spend more time with her, so she’d have to dismiss me.
Although her eyes were averted, Elena’s thin voice reached out to me.
“Jon, do you like being around people?”
“Not particularly.”
“Often when I force myself to leave the apartment, I see all these men and women and kids and elders walking about like ants scurrying to and from their nest, and I think, ‘I have nothing in common with these beings.’ I must assume that minds operate behind their eyes, even though I can’t imagine their thoughts. But maybe I share the world with eight billions of shoddily-programmed automatrons that short-circuit when confronted with concepts more complicated than the weather, football, or whatever shit the mass media pumps into them. Maybe I’m the sole real person in a simulation built to trap me. It would explain the state of the world, wouldn’t it? If nobody had any fucking clue about what they’re doing.”
“As a fellow person, I can’t help but resent the implication. And that line of thinking can easily slide you into psychosis.”
The pedestrian light flicked to the walking man outline. Elena and I strolled ahead.
“As a child,” she said, “I wondered if everyone around me was acting out a role. Did they also have to put on a mask whenever they went out? Were they as scared and lonely as me? Even now, I can’t be around people for too long. When someone stares at me, I feel like a fly trapped in a jar. It makes my skin crawl. There are no common points in which I can make myself understood. When I engage people, they’re more likely than not to end up developing an instinctive dislike of me. They’re the normal ones. Always pretending, trying to impress others. Trying to impress themselves. Lying to get along, to fit in. Do they ever feel the walls closing in? Do they ever sense the void beneath their feet, or the cold, dead stars overhead?”
Iglesia Street unfolded into a downward-sloping plaza paved with gray stone. At its edge stood the white building of the Roman museum. In front, three towering cypress trees jutted upward like narrow spearheads. Elena continued her monologue.
“One of the things you discover when you’ve been alone for so long is how people can weigh you down. As if you had lived with a TV constantly on and loud, and once you turn it off, you realize that something had been drowning your genuine thoughts. That newfound silence allows contemplation similar to that our ancestors enjoyed in their so-called primitive societies. Alone, you’re free from having to conform to the expectations installed by the people you’ve allowed in, who intend for you to like and want the same things they do. Without that pressure, your true self emerges—unshackled, raw. You figure out what matters to you. What you’re willing to tolerate, sacrifice for, fight tooth and claw to defend. To get there you have to become one with the void inside. Otherwise it remains alien to you. And most people seem terrified of meeting that self, lest they end up pushed out of the collective and ejected into the cold.”
We were nearing the bronze statue of a San Marcial vivandière—a woman captured mid-stride, clad in a beret; a buttoned-down, tailored jacket; and a pleated skirt that draped over the tops of her laced boots. In her right hand, she held a fan aloft, frozen in her constant duty to wave, while she cast an unsettling smirk at passersby. Creeping verdigris etched stark contrasts along the pleats of her skirt.
“You’d think such a dynamic would be absent in couples, right?” Elena said. “Surely partners willing to accompany each other on this doomed journey would form a sanctuary in which both could grow as individuals. But no. Most couples seem like two dogs chained together. A romantic relationship censors you even worse, and before long, you end up defanged and declawed. Can’t risk upsetting your partner. Can’t risk losing them. No wonder some couples decide to have a kid, then another, and another. Filling the home with hostages. No, an individual’s freedom is too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of having a companion to fill the silence, and a warm body to fuck.”
As we descended the stairs, Juncal Church loomed fortresslike, built from sandy stone blocks, some bearing warm honey hues and others worn into ashen grays. Near the top of its bell tower, that had darkened as if singed by flames, a snow-white clockface stood out. The church endured as a relic from an era when people’s beliefs, however misguided, urged them to erect beauty that would outlive them by centuries.
Elena’s vacant gaze drifted along the stairs. She had tucked her folder under one arm, and that hand in the pocket of her jeans. When she spoke again, her voice came hoarse.
“Most people stick to you not because they’re interested, or care, but because they need that closeness, that shared warmth, the same way I need to be alone. They’d be comfortable gathered around a bench in silence, while their mere presence would desiccate me. You spoke about how many works of art have been lost because their potential creators wasted their talents, or died too young. But how many revolutionary ideas, how many discoveries we’ve missed in these societies that push their members to police each other’s thoughts? How many masterpieces have died in the womb because some nearby moron could consider them impractical or ridiculous or immoral? I’ve had to protect myself. Surely you noticed how guarded I was at the writing course, or when you first approached me at that bench. Always have a wall up. I ensure that a person will offer more than they’ll take away from me. To preserve the garden, one must first be a ruthless weed slayer. Without that, the flowers get choked and die.” Her jaw tensed as she swallowed, and she massaged her throat. “Life gets too complicated when people disgust you. You need them for the most basic things, and I endure those interactions while repeating in my mind for them to leave me the fuck alone. The responsibilities you accumulate with humans shackle you. From time to time I feel like I’ve matured enough, or grown enough callus, to tolerate experiences like that writing course, which could help me. But soon enough, everything that irritates me about human beings, their words, their noises, the myriad little humiliations, swell and swell until suddenly I can’t deal with a single extra minute of that shit. Then I need to hide from the world and everybody in it. My solution? I keep my rotten self away from others. That way nobody can hurt me, and I don’t pollute anyone else. A quarantine measure to keep the world safe, you could say. Isn’t that the epitome of altruism? The greatest good?” She sighed. “Yeah, I’ve given up. After that course, after my stories were deemed deplorable, after that fucking bitch Isabel called me out as a monster in front of everyone… I feel completely done. I hoped that other writers would understand. So I exist here, in this land, because I have no choice. I can’t just pack up and move to the forest, or the mountains. Well, I could, but I’d like to survive past twenty-eight. Honestly, I doubt I would have reached this far if my parents hadn’t taken care of me. Imagine their disappointment and regret at what I’ve turned out to be.”
I had stopped at the church entrance, and Elena, lost in her soliloquy, had copied me. The dark wooden doors split into four metal panels, each embossed with figures of robed saints or other biblical characters. Four sandstone columns with fluted shafts flanked the entrance. Their bases and capitals had eroded, exposed for centuries to the elements and the corroding darkness of the world. Above the door, a circular niche might have once housed a statue, but these days it would have been stolen. Higher up, near an oculus’ edge, some architectural oversight had forced the builders to chisel blocks and wedge them into gaps.
Elena cleared her throat.
“Man, my voice box is actually strained. I hadn’t spoken so much in years. Maybe I never had. I was holding back a shit-ton of stuff, it seems. I also like to stop and stare at beautiful buildings. To see their little details. The cracks, the mold, the weeds growing in between the stones. How much they’ve endured. And most churches beat modern monstrosities like the one built to replace the covered pelota court at Sargia.”
Elena’s pale blues stared at me with childlike interest. I held my breath as her loose locks fluttered. She arched an eyebrow, and I broke the silence.
“Elena, did our coffee meeting feel that overwhelming?”
Her fingers fidgeted with the edges of her folder, and she glanced away.
“If you’re asking whether I enjoyed your company, the answer is yes. I like talking to you, Jon. I can hardly believe you’re still willing to reciprocate. Most people that intrigue me for whatever reason, they’re like temporary bandages over a radiation burn—they stick around just long enough to realize that this broken toy can’t be patched up with positive thinking and empty platitudes and self-help books, and then they bail. But you… you don’t seem interested in fixing anything. You just want to, what? Watch the decay spread? Document the collapse? I’ve offered you a glimpse of my darkness, and you just dissected it. As if performing an autopsy on my soul and cataloguing every diseased part you found. And I was glad to let you peel back layers. That writing course debacle… Honestly, if you hadn’t come out of the experience, I may have holed up in my cave for weeks. So, did our meeting feel good? I’m not sure I know what that feels like, because I can’t get rid of this anxiety and dread. But it felt… necessary. Real. Like for once, with you, I don’t need to pretend I’m something other than a monster. Now I have to acknowledge that maybe I’m not as alone in this darkness as I thought. That maybe other people out there can look inside me and not flinch. I don’t… I don’t know what to do with that kind of understanding. In summary: congratulations, Jon. You’re the first person I’ve talked to for more than ten minutes that didn’t make me want to claw my skin off. What a relief to speak to a human being without having to pretend to be one.”
“I want to meet up again soon, Elena. I picture us visiting interesting, solitary places, and having long talks about whatever comes to mind. I also intend to read the rest of your work. Let’s see how far we can take our experiment.”
Elena slid her hands into her pockets, folder tucked under one arm. Although she tried to restrain her lips from curving upwards, they betrayed her. The muscles that framed her mouth and connected to her chin tensed, her lower eyelids pushed up, her pale blues gleamed. I yearned to induce more of her genuine smiles, drawing beauty into the world with each one. Little works of art just for me.
“That sounds an awful lot like you’re giving me permission to be exactly what I am,” she said.
“That’s exactly what I want.”
Elena glanced over her shoulder at the rounded archway, under two levels of balconies and their striped awnings, that led deeper into Erromes Plaza. She turned back to me and nodded.
“Anyway, I’m not sure if it’s morally right to inflict myself on another person, but let’s do this again.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Fake Plastic Trees” by Radiohead.
We’re like 25,000 words in, and we haven’t even reached the middle of the first act. This is going to be a long one.
Also, because I’m from this city and I mentioned the San Marcial festivities (even though that day I either work or stay at home), here’s a video about it. Some shots even depict the itinerary of our main characters; for example, at 0:40, the church appears on the left.
