Jon Ureña's Blog, page 6
March 1, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 10 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
A barrage of light assaulted my eyes. I blinked like a newborn. The center of my vision filled with humming fluorescent lamps. I tilted my head. Behind a desk sat a man in his fifties, mustached and jowled, clad in a police uniform.
I lay sprawled on a metal bench, the armrest bruising into my cheekbone as a makeshift pillow. A scratchy blanket covered my nakedness.
The policeman stood, circled the desk, and bent over me. His lips carved syllables, words shattering against my face. He waited for speech, but my brain had severed its wires to my vocal cords. I clawed back the names of objects and sounds, slow as a toddler fitting blocks into holes.
The officer arched his brows, then teetered on his tiptoes.
“Were you born half-brained?” He cocked his head right. “Sure no one cracked his skull?”
“No visible injury,” said another voice. “Maybe an old trauma.”
“Or he’s a psych ward runner.”
I pushed aside the hair veiling one eye. My hand trembled. A young cop, chin wounded by two razor nicks, materialized at my left and offered a T-shirt and trousers—faded donations moth-rotted in storage. I clutched them like alien artifacts.
The young cop snapped his fingers before my glazed eyes.
“Know where you are?”
I unfolded the shirt. Its chest logo had frayed into orange shreds.
“Motomiyacho Police Station,” the junior said.
The mustached cop rolled his eyes. “He read the badges.”
“Hitachi. Ibaraki Prefecture. Understand?”
I studied his pupils, hairline, nose, uniform collar, the metallic badge. My eye muscles buckled and dropped my gaze.
They led me to a bathroom. Locked inside, I dressed at the pace my stiffened joints allowed. My ligaments ached as if stretched gumlike on a rack. I avoided the gaunt stranger in the mirror.
Five minutes later, the police officers marched me to the station doors. Midmorning light slanted through dust-streaked windows.
“Got somewhere to go?” said the mustached cop.
“I’ll figure it out.”
He shook his head, and snorted.
“So you can talk.”
As he walked off, the junior cop appraised me with resignation. From his wallet, he slipped a 5000-yen note into my shirt pocket.
“Take care.”
* * *
For months, I swallowed hypnotics to smother the reasoning part of my brain. Sounds and voices slowed down, and the links between events frayed. On nights when the pill case emptied, I writhed in sweat-soaked sheets for hours. Chiseled memories—the forest clearing, the lagoon, the illuminated ocean, the woman—besieged me. Her sentences swarmed around my ears like gnats. The ghost of her mottled pink-and-white skin grazed mine, and those parts of my body stung like a rash. I choked.
After hours of rolling on the mattress, in the tar-pit of my mind floated—like the afterimage of the sun—the woman’s face, frozen in the expression I had provoked by betraying her. Even as I stretched out my arms, she floated far away.
She was talking to me.
Why didn’t you follow me to the city?
I had wanted to.
Then why am I alone down here?
Because I am weak. I am nobody. I was born to endure the decades of my life as the hollow shell of what a person ought to be, and those I encounter, I infect with gray. You chose the wrong man. I never found the strength to obtain what I needed.
I sat up in bed and panted as if I’d fallen from a rooftop.
In the mornings, the echo lingered. That flute-like voice, the intermittent current of a brook, sounded in the distance. The flow carried words I had to fish out, and I longed to roam the streets until I recognized each syllable. In my apartment, on the street, in the workshop, the moment when I would hear the woman speaking from afar hovered on the verge of arrival. Whenever I strained my ears and scanned the surroundings for the crevice through which the voice poured, the current would cease, though in my mind the fading echo reverberated.
On the morning of the first anniversary of the day I met the woman, feverish surges overwhelmed me. My body screamed that a cancer was multiplying inside. Dizzy to the point of nausea, I knelt over the toilet bowl.
On the second anniversary, I anticipated the surges and stuffed myself with anxiolytics. They blocked my capacity to care about anything. I drifted in a void.
At the dawn of the third anniversary, clinging to the edge of my bed, I sensed the woman’s presence like a silhouette on the horizon. She called to me. While I dressed for work, chills raced down my spine. I planned to ignore them until they subsided, so I could plunge into the tar sea in which I dove every day. But I called the workshop and reported that I had awoken with a fever—something I had eaten.
Sitting in a train seat, I stared at my trembling knees. Every glance at the landscape sliding past the window tempted one of the plates of my mind to slip over another, and from the ensuing crack burst forth creatures belonging to savannas—creatures that would race through tall grass and scramble up trees. That forced to live in the world allotted to me, would perish. Yet I looked on.
The landscape evoked an absence. Some symphony that had once played without pause was now missing. Reality had lost its fundamental piece, and trembled like pillars on the verge of cracking and collapsing. The world—the obese beast that they upheld—gobbled and gobbled.
The image of toads perched atop the pillars at the entrance of a villa flickered. In the folds of the statues, grime had accumulated, and the paint had begun to flake off. Was I merely imagining those imperfections, or would I have discerned them years ago had I known how to truly look?
When I stepped off at Hitachi station, I followed the path while battling chills and dizziness. Dust-stained buildings unfolded before me, where decades of rain had darkened cascading streaks. Everywhere I looked, the colors had lost their vibrancy, merging into shades of gray. A man in his sixties, standing at the corner of a dwelling, surveyed the landscape as if he had lost his bearings. Passersby drifted like puppets and spoke as if following a script. Their organic masks confronted the vistas while in their minds they navigated through a gleaming technicolor scenery.
I arrived at the street where, on the opposite sidewalk, the passage to the woods would open. I straightened up on the familiar patch of pavement. To my right, three red-and-white vending machines were embedded in a concrete recess.
I lifted my head toward the opposite sidewalk and blinked until my vision cleared. Both buildings that had guarded the passage now appeared conjoined—the electronics store, with its facade of wooden planks, nestled against the rusted shed of the beige house. Not a single fissure betrayed that they had been built separately.
Three warehouse boys surged past me from both front and rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one casting a look of bewilderment my way, then extending his gaze toward the wooden plank on which I was fixed, unblinking.
I inched up to the facade until the tips of my sneakers brushed against the walnut-hued wood, which reeked of mold, and I could discern its grain and cracks. I closed my eyes. In the dim half-light of my mind, the passageway unfurled into a grassy path winding its way among the pines, flanked by ferns and a sea of clovers. I held my breath. I listened to the chirping of birds, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the fruits crashing against the leaf litter. In the background, in the chasm between sound and silence, her voice emerged.
I shuddered and my vision blurred. I dragged my legs to the electronics store. I pushed the door, triggering a digital chime. Inside, the air smelled of metallic casings and plastic cables. I hobbled between shelves, amid outlets, lamps, bulbs, and electronic devices whose purpose was a mystery to me. I trod on linoleum grimy with footprints, yet with every step, my feet expected to flatten grass. I beheld smoked glass and cardboard boxes where I should have seen wine-red tree trunks and a serpentine path.
The scent of pine invaded my nostrils, and the earth warped under the weight of the lagoon. Beyond the backdrop of this electronics store, beyond this rotting gray world, somewhere lay that ocean of crystalline water illuminated by a different sun. The abyss of that ocean, beneath tons upon tons of water, harbored another architecture, other creatures.
She had never told me her name. Didn’t need to. Her face and blotched-white skin had plastered the walls of my mind. Instead of blood, her voice flowed through my veins. She had offered me the only chance, and I had ruined it.
The shopkeeper approached as if a vagabond had wandered into his shop. The years had contorted the man into a wrinkled, gaunt parody. His back was hunched, his hair had turned gray.
He scrutinized me from head to toe.
“May I help you?”
Before I could even craft a response, the nucleus in the depths of my being, kilometers beneath the navigating consciousness, revealed to me that no bridge could ever convey the images and sounds trapped within me, that no effort would succeed in making others understand what truly mattered.
I had nothing to say. Not to him, not to anyone.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Since K Got Over Me” by The Clientele.
With this, three of my six novellas written and self-published ten years ago have been translated. The two others so far are Smile and Trash in a Ditch. You can check them out here.
A barrage of light assaulted my eyes. I blinked like a newborn. The center of my vision filled with humming fluorescent lamps. I tilted my head. Behind a desk sat a man in his fifties, mustached and jowled, clad in a police uniform.
I lay sprawled on a metal bench, the armrest bruising into my cheekbone as a makeshift pillow. A scratchy blanket covered my nakedness.
The policeman stood, circled the desk, and bent over me. His lips carved syllables, words shattering against my face. He waited for speech, but my brain had severed its wires to my vocal cords. I clawed back the names of objects and sounds, slow as a toddler fitting blocks into holes.
The officer arched his brows, then teetered on his tiptoes.
“Were you born half-brained?” He cocked his head right. “Sure no one cracked his skull?”
“No visible injury,” said another voice. “Maybe an old trauma.”
“Or he’s a psych ward runner.”
I pushed aside the hair veiling one eye. My hand trembled. A young cop, chin wounded by two razor nicks, materialized at my left and offered a T-shirt and trousers—faded donations moth-rotted in storage. I clutched them like alien artifacts.
The young cop snapped his fingers before my glazed eyes.
“Know where you are?”
I unfolded the shirt. Its chest logo had frayed into orange shreds.
“Motomiyacho Police Station,” the junior said.
The mustached cop rolled his eyes. “He read the badges.”
“Hitachi. Ibaraki Prefecture. Understand?”
I studied his pupils, hairline, nose, uniform collar, the metallic badge. My eye muscles buckled and dropped my gaze.
They led me to a bathroom. Locked inside, I dressed at the pace my stiffened joints allowed. My ligaments ached as if stretched gumlike on a rack. I avoided the gaunt stranger in the mirror.
Five minutes later, the police officers marched me to the station doors. Midmorning light slanted through dust-streaked windows.
“Got somewhere to go?” said the mustached cop.
“I’ll figure it out.”
He shook his head, and snorted.
“So you can talk.”
As he walked off, the junior cop appraised me with resignation. From his wallet, he slipped a 5000-yen note into my shirt pocket.
“Take care.”
* * *
For months, I swallowed hypnotics to smother the reasoning part of my brain. Sounds and voices slowed down, and the links between events frayed. On nights when the pill case emptied, I writhed in sweat-soaked sheets for hours. Chiseled memories—the forest clearing, the lagoon, the illuminated ocean, the woman—besieged me. Her sentences swarmed around my ears like gnats. The ghost of her mottled pink-and-white skin grazed mine, and those parts of my body stung like a rash. I choked.
After hours of rolling on the mattress, in the tar-pit of my mind floated—like the afterimage of the sun—the woman’s face, frozen in the expression I had provoked by betraying her. Even as I stretched out my arms, she floated far away.
She was talking to me.
Why didn’t you follow me to the city?
I had wanted to.
Then why am I alone down here?
Because I am weak. I am nobody. I was born to endure the decades of my life as the hollow shell of what a person ought to be, and those I encounter, I infect with gray. You chose the wrong man. I never found the strength to obtain what I needed.
I sat up in bed and panted as if I’d fallen from a rooftop.
In the mornings, the echo lingered. That flute-like voice, the intermittent current of a brook, sounded in the distance. The flow carried words I had to fish out, and I longed to roam the streets until I recognized each syllable. In my apartment, on the street, in the workshop, the moment when I would hear the woman speaking from afar hovered on the verge of arrival. Whenever I strained my ears and scanned the surroundings for the crevice through which the voice poured, the current would cease, though in my mind the fading echo reverberated.
On the morning of the first anniversary of the day I met the woman, feverish surges overwhelmed me. My body screamed that a cancer was multiplying inside. Dizzy to the point of nausea, I knelt over the toilet bowl.
On the second anniversary, I anticipated the surges and stuffed myself with anxiolytics. They blocked my capacity to care about anything. I drifted in a void.
At the dawn of the third anniversary, clinging to the edge of my bed, I sensed the woman’s presence like a silhouette on the horizon. She called to me. While I dressed for work, chills raced down my spine. I planned to ignore them until they subsided, so I could plunge into the tar sea in which I dove every day. But I called the workshop and reported that I had awoken with a fever—something I had eaten.
Sitting in a train seat, I stared at my trembling knees. Every glance at the landscape sliding past the window tempted one of the plates of my mind to slip over another, and from the ensuing crack burst forth creatures belonging to savannas—creatures that would race through tall grass and scramble up trees. That forced to live in the world allotted to me, would perish. Yet I looked on.
The landscape evoked an absence. Some symphony that had once played without pause was now missing. Reality had lost its fundamental piece, and trembled like pillars on the verge of cracking and collapsing. The world—the obese beast that they upheld—gobbled and gobbled.
The image of toads perched atop the pillars at the entrance of a villa flickered. In the folds of the statues, grime had accumulated, and the paint had begun to flake off. Was I merely imagining those imperfections, or would I have discerned them years ago had I known how to truly look?
When I stepped off at Hitachi station, I followed the path while battling chills and dizziness. Dust-stained buildings unfolded before me, where decades of rain had darkened cascading streaks. Everywhere I looked, the colors had lost their vibrancy, merging into shades of gray. A man in his sixties, standing at the corner of a dwelling, surveyed the landscape as if he had lost his bearings. Passersby drifted like puppets and spoke as if following a script. Their organic masks confronted the vistas while in their minds they navigated through a gleaming technicolor scenery.
I arrived at the street where, on the opposite sidewalk, the passage to the woods would open. I straightened up on the familiar patch of pavement. To my right, three red-and-white vending machines were embedded in a concrete recess.
I lifted my head toward the opposite sidewalk and blinked until my vision cleared. Both buildings that had guarded the passage now appeared conjoined—the electronics store, with its facade of wooden planks, nestled against the rusted shed of the beige house. Not a single fissure betrayed that they had been built separately.
Three warehouse boys surged past me from both front and rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one casting a look of bewilderment my way, then extending his gaze toward the wooden plank on which I was fixed, unblinking.
I inched up to the facade until the tips of my sneakers brushed against the walnut-hued wood, which reeked of mold, and I could discern its grain and cracks. I closed my eyes. In the dim half-light of my mind, the passageway unfurled into a grassy path winding its way among the pines, flanked by ferns and a sea of clovers. I held my breath. I listened to the chirping of birds, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the fruits crashing against the leaf litter. In the background, in the chasm between sound and silence, her voice emerged.
I shuddered and my vision blurred. I dragged my legs to the electronics store. I pushed the door, triggering a digital chime. Inside, the air smelled of metallic casings and plastic cables. I hobbled between shelves, amid outlets, lamps, bulbs, and electronic devices whose purpose was a mystery to me. I trod on linoleum grimy with footprints, yet with every step, my feet expected to flatten grass. I beheld smoked glass and cardboard boxes where I should have seen wine-red tree trunks and a serpentine path.
The scent of pine invaded my nostrils, and the earth warped under the weight of the lagoon. Beyond the backdrop of this electronics store, beyond this rotting gray world, somewhere lay that ocean of crystalline water illuminated by a different sun. The abyss of that ocean, beneath tons upon tons of water, harbored another architecture, other creatures.
She had never told me her name. Didn’t need to. Her face and blotched-white skin had plastered the walls of my mind. Instead of blood, her voice flowed through my veins. She had offered me the only chance, and I had ruined it.
The shopkeeper approached as if a vagabond had wandered into his shop. The years had contorted the man into a wrinkled, gaunt parody. His back was hunched, his hair had turned gray.
He scrutinized me from head to toe.
“May I help you?”
Before I could even craft a response, the nucleus in the depths of my being, kilometers beneath the navigating consciousness, revealed to me that no bridge could ever convey the images and sounds trapped within me, that no effort would succeed in making others understand what truly mattered.
I had nothing to say. Not to him, not to anyone.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Since K Got Over Me” by The Clientele.
With this, three of my six novellas written and self-published ten years ago have been translated. The two others so far are Smile and Trash in a Ditch. You can check them out here.
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 12 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
After finishing the excerpt, I placed those printouts on top of the first stack and aligned them absentmindedly as my mind returned from deep space, from that station overrun with a surging tide of shadows. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a dark well, peering into its murky depths, and wondering just how far the bottom lay.
Elena, sitting across from me in the rattan chair, leaned forward, shoulders rolled in, her hands planted on the table next to the empty glass. Engaged like an executive at a serious meeting. Her almond-blonde hair bunched up against the collar of her dark-brown jacket, that fit snugly against her figure and looked more like a cyberpunk gambeson than a piece of outdoor clothing. The edges of her metallic moth’s wings, which rested atop her gray sweatshirt, caught a faint sheen in the overcast light. In Elena’s face, above the high cheekbones and those reddened bags from tiredness and the nightmare of living, her pale blues focused on me with the intensity of a mountain lion. She was negotiating with a member of another species.
“Elena, did you pick these excerpts because they would allow us to discuss your innermost thoughts in a less direct way?”
“Maybe. You’ve read a lot into them. And you’ve been very patient. I appreciate that.”
“Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of a psychological condition.”
“Not necessarily. But if we’re still playing therapist and patient, do you want to know how bad mine get?”
I leaned back in my chair, which creaked; it had taken a battering from many a weary ass.
“Please.”
“Let’s start with the common ones. Knives and scissors? I avoid glancing at them, as I often get these vivid images of jamming their blades into my eyeballs. I see a bottle of bleach in the supermarket, and my mind whispers: ‘Buy this and drink it.’ When I see condoms lying in the street, I get the urge to lick them. Or else I picture myself bloated like a pregnant sow, full of diseased seed. I’ve gotten images of me slicing off my breasts and eating them. One time that my parents had dragged me to a relative’s house, this woman I was told to consider a cousin waltzed over all proud of the tiny human she had pushed out, and proffered that squishy, gurgling thing, expecting me to hold it in my arms. I thought her so reckless that I considered calling the authorities. I knew that if I held that baby, I’d be assaulted with images of me dropping it onto its malleable skull, that would cave in. I told her I didn’t like babies. Which is true. She got all flustered, said that I should change my mind, and scurried away. My parents were so embarrassed that they didn’t talk to me on the ride home. But that was a relief, given that I don’t know how to talk to them.”
Elena paused to give me time to formulate an adequate response to this barrage of graphic terrors. I stared at my empty glass. The last bits of coffee had hardened at the bottom in a clumpy film.
“Well.”
“Yeah, I would be at a loss too. I’ve always felt I couldn’t do anything about such thoughts. That I’ll have to endure these flashes of depravity and degradation until my heart stops or my brain melts. I never told my therapists about them, because I suspected I would have ended up in a psych ward, or heavily drugged. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t acted on the worst of those urges. Never so much hurt a fly. Well, I’ve killed mosquitoes. A couple of spiders as well, which I regret. I quite appreciate spiders.”
“You mean you acted on lesser of such intrusive urges?”
She sighed.
“You could say it’s all in my head, but my ability to restrain such impulses depends on my energy level and how attuned to reality I’m feeling at the moment. I still have enough control to keep the monster leashed. Usually. But once, I was holding a hard disk when my brain sent me a visual command to drop it. Next thing I knew, the hard disk was on the floor, broken. Another time, I had been struggling with insomnia for weeks, and existed in a surreal haze. Every few days, I forced myself to leave the house and sit at a nearby coffee shop. The barista placed my coffee on top of the pastry display counter, and when I went to pick it up by the saucer, a sequence flashed in my mind: my thumb flipping the cup over and the hot coffee splashing against the lap of the guy seated at the counter. An instant later, my thumb did exactly that. The guy, in his honor, was incredibly gracious. He smiled at me while patting the stains with a napkin. No harm no foul, he said. After he left, I stood there petrified. I hadn’t been able to prevent one of my intrusive impulses from taking over and puncturing the membrane that separates them from the world. Although I was out of it, exhausted from the moment I woke up, I couldn’t even pretend it had been an accident, because in the span between my thumb starting to move and it tilting the cup over, I felt as if I were watching a movie, aware of what would happen but powerless to stop it. I should have stayed at home; instead, I ruined an innocent man’s afternoon. Soon enough I stopped going to that coffee shop. I couldn’t stand how the barista looked at me.”
“I can’t deny you’re a bit of a public menace, but you have a heart. That guy should have asked for your number.”
Elena’s lips curved into a faint smile, but her drained eyes belonged to a soldier at the end of a day-long skirmish.
“Jon, I’m a danger to others, and to myself. I don’t have a driver’s license and will never drive mainly because I’d have to fight off the urge to veer into oncoming traffic, or accelerate and burst into a wall. I have to live in the world knowing I’m capable of doing things no sane, decent person would even imagine. The darkness inside me can burst out and hurt anyone at any time. As it relates to my Kirochka, while she might have some control over herself, she has none over the parasite. It’s wild and hungry, and it will feed when it needs to, using her body as a vessel to manifest itself in the world. You could say Kirochka’s biggest struggle isn’t against her parasite. It’s in resisting the urge to release the monster within and let it feast.”
“Are these your two sides? Elena the human, Elena the monster. Trying to coexist.”
“The disgust I feel at such intrusive thoughts could suggest that underneath the cancer there’s some healthy tissue. But how do I know if what I’m thinking comes from me or from another entity lurking in some recess of my brain? Does an uncontaminated me exist? Am I lying to myself, trying to avoid responsibility for parts of myself I dislike and can’t control? Should you be responsible for what you do while sleepwalking?” Her pale blues darted around. She shrugged. “The worst part is that I was born like this. With a broken nature. While other kids learned how to be around their peers, to share and take turns, to make friends and bond with people, I struggled to understand a nonsensical world. People were talking, laughing, crying, and I couldn’t tell why. The more the gap widened between me and everyone else, the less I wanted to try bridging it. Too much frustration, too little reward. So I retreated inside my head. I lived in a parallel universe that overlapped with this one. I could hear their words, I could see their actions, but I couldn’t connect to them. As I got older and my isolation deepened, my perception of people shifted from something that baffled me to something that disgusted me. Dangerous, unpredictable beasts that could turn on you in a heartbeat. And now here we are. I’m almost thirty and I’ve never had a friend.”
Elena’s words hung in the air like the reverberations of a funeral bell. I considered reaching for her hand, but I suspected she would have leaped from the chair and hightailed it out of Bar Palace.
“Do you think of your stories as vehicles to process the different facets of your darkness? Maybe ways of exorcising it?”
Her slim hand returned to her moth pendant, tracing its metallic edges.
“Are you asking if I consciously design my stories for therapeutic purposes? No.” Elena paused with her eyes unfocused and her lips parted, as if searching for the proper words. She shook her head, then snapped her gaze at me. “There’s a fundamental problem in discussing the artistic process. If you earned a degree for it and ended up working at a magazine writing articles on music, paintings, novels or whatever, well, you have to come up with bullshit that sounds good to justify the time, energy, and money spent learning about how to discuss things you didn’t create. While getting brainwashed. A valid approach to life if your goal is to win some friends and influence people, I suppose. Imagine all those professors perorating, day after day, year after year, in a language that would make the creator go: ‘What the fuck are these loons smoking?’ It makes me shudder. I swear, whole university departments could disappear overnight, and society would be better for it. You’re supposed to feel art. The texture, the tone, the rhythm. It should awaken the millions of years of beast inside you. It should remind you that you’re alive, and that you will die. That’s how you connect with the creator, not by dissecting their child, naming the parts, and then putting them on the scales to weigh them. If the artists had wanted to make a point, they’d have written a fucking essay. The conscious mind shouldn’t dare befoul art with its machinations; it should prostrate itself in awe, and be silent.”
“You’re not letting me off the hook.”
“No, I am. I don’t want to bury the conscious mind entirely, even though it should learn to rest away from the light. You need rationality during the editing phase. But if you tasked that part with producing the raw material, it would sit at the keyboard agonizing over every word, judging the pros and cons of a myriad options, quickly going insane. All the fun replaced by paralysis from self-judgment. It would produce a soulless, sterile pile of garbage. You don’t task a fish with flying, and you shouldn’t burden the conscious mind with anything other than classifying and criticizing. You have to venture into the dark places where that part fears to tread. Into the depths where monsters dwell. Only there will you find something that matters. But the deeper you descend, the more you will be tempted to give up. And what is the only tool at your disposal to endure that abyssal dark?”
“Madness.”
Elena’s pale blues glimmered as if a ray of sunlight had pierced through the clouds.
“Yeah, you need to be a little insane. Too much, and it will control you. But I’ve digressed. You wanted to know if my stories are meant to process and exorcise the darkness inside me. Writing is a compulsion. A form of psychological masturbation. If you want to be generous, you can consider it a dialogue with a sacred, hidden part of yourself. I don’t know why I write certain things or why they have to be that way. I don’t care either. You don’t choose the stories, they choose you. They demand to be told, clawing their way out through your fingertips until you’re left bleeding on the keyboard. I’m just honored that they chose me, someone so insignificant, someone with nothing to offer but devotion and the willingness to bleed, as their conduit to the world. And no, I’m not exorcising the monster by writing. If anything, I’m feeding it, and in return, the monster keeps me from spiraling. I was born with a hole in the bottom of my soul where my happiness and fulfillment drains. I can’t hold onto them no matter what I do. But words, they plug that hole, for as long as the tale lasts.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones.
After finishing the excerpt, I placed those printouts on top of the first stack and aligned them absentmindedly as my mind returned from deep space, from that station overrun with a surging tide of shadows. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a dark well, peering into its murky depths, and wondering just how far the bottom lay.
Elena, sitting across from me in the rattan chair, leaned forward, shoulders rolled in, her hands planted on the table next to the empty glass. Engaged like an executive at a serious meeting. Her almond-blonde hair bunched up against the collar of her dark-brown jacket, that fit snugly against her figure and looked more like a cyberpunk gambeson than a piece of outdoor clothing. The edges of her metallic moth’s wings, which rested atop her gray sweatshirt, caught a faint sheen in the overcast light. In Elena’s face, above the high cheekbones and those reddened bags from tiredness and the nightmare of living, her pale blues focused on me with the intensity of a mountain lion. She was negotiating with a member of another species.
“Elena, did you pick these excerpts because they would allow us to discuss your innermost thoughts in a less direct way?”
“Maybe. You’ve read a lot into them. And you’ve been very patient. I appreciate that.”
“Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of a psychological condition.”
“Not necessarily. But if we’re still playing therapist and patient, do you want to know how bad mine get?”
I leaned back in my chair, which creaked; it had taken a battering from many a weary ass.
“Please.”
“Let’s start with the common ones. Knives and scissors? I avoid glancing at them, as I often get these vivid images of jamming their blades into my eyeballs. I see a bottle of bleach in the supermarket, and my mind whispers: ‘Buy this and drink it.’ When I see condoms lying in the street, I get the urge to lick them. Or else I picture myself bloated like a pregnant sow, full of diseased seed. I’ve gotten images of me slicing off my breasts and eating them. One time that my parents had dragged me to a relative’s house, this woman I was told to consider a cousin waltzed over all proud of the tiny human she had pushed out, and proffered that squishy, gurgling thing, expecting me to hold it in my arms. I thought her so reckless that I considered calling the authorities. I knew that if I held that baby, I’d be assaulted with images of me dropping it onto its malleable skull, that would cave in. I told her I didn’t like babies. Which is true. She got all flustered, said that I should change my mind, and scurried away. My parents were so embarrassed that they didn’t talk to me on the ride home. But that was a relief, given that I don’t know how to talk to them.”
Elena paused to give me time to formulate an adequate response to this barrage of graphic terrors. I stared at my empty glass. The last bits of coffee had hardened at the bottom in a clumpy film.
“Well.”
“Yeah, I would be at a loss too. I’ve always felt I couldn’t do anything about such thoughts. That I’ll have to endure these flashes of depravity and degradation until my heart stops or my brain melts. I never told my therapists about them, because I suspected I would have ended up in a psych ward, or heavily drugged. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t acted on the worst of those urges. Never so much hurt a fly. Well, I’ve killed mosquitoes. A couple of spiders as well, which I regret. I quite appreciate spiders.”
“You mean you acted on lesser of such intrusive urges?”
She sighed.
“You could say it’s all in my head, but my ability to restrain such impulses depends on my energy level and how attuned to reality I’m feeling at the moment. I still have enough control to keep the monster leashed. Usually. But once, I was holding a hard disk when my brain sent me a visual command to drop it. Next thing I knew, the hard disk was on the floor, broken. Another time, I had been struggling with insomnia for weeks, and existed in a surreal haze. Every few days, I forced myself to leave the house and sit at a nearby coffee shop. The barista placed my coffee on top of the pastry display counter, and when I went to pick it up by the saucer, a sequence flashed in my mind: my thumb flipping the cup over and the hot coffee splashing against the lap of the guy seated at the counter. An instant later, my thumb did exactly that. The guy, in his honor, was incredibly gracious. He smiled at me while patting the stains with a napkin. No harm no foul, he said. After he left, I stood there petrified. I hadn’t been able to prevent one of my intrusive impulses from taking over and puncturing the membrane that separates them from the world. Although I was out of it, exhausted from the moment I woke up, I couldn’t even pretend it had been an accident, because in the span between my thumb starting to move and it tilting the cup over, I felt as if I were watching a movie, aware of what would happen but powerless to stop it. I should have stayed at home; instead, I ruined an innocent man’s afternoon. Soon enough I stopped going to that coffee shop. I couldn’t stand how the barista looked at me.”
“I can’t deny you’re a bit of a public menace, but you have a heart. That guy should have asked for your number.”
Elena’s lips curved into a faint smile, but her drained eyes belonged to a soldier at the end of a day-long skirmish.
“Jon, I’m a danger to others, and to myself. I don’t have a driver’s license and will never drive mainly because I’d have to fight off the urge to veer into oncoming traffic, or accelerate and burst into a wall. I have to live in the world knowing I’m capable of doing things no sane, decent person would even imagine. The darkness inside me can burst out and hurt anyone at any time. As it relates to my Kirochka, while she might have some control over herself, she has none over the parasite. It’s wild and hungry, and it will feed when it needs to, using her body as a vessel to manifest itself in the world. You could say Kirochka’s biggest struggle isn’t against her parasite. It’s in resisting the urge to release the monster within and let it feast.”
“Are these your two sides? Elena the human, Elena the monster. Trying to coexist.”
“The disgust I feel at such intrusive thoughts could suggest that underneath the cancer there’s some healthy tissue. But how do I know if what I’m thinking comes from me or from another entity lurking in some recess of my brain? Does an uncontaminated me exist? Am I lying to myself, trying to avoid responsibility for parts of myself I dislike and can’t control? Should you be responsible for what you do while sleepwalking?” Her pale blues darted around. She shrugged. “The worst part is that I was born like this. With a broken nature. While other kids learned how to be around their peers, to share and take turns, to make friends and bond with people, I struggled to understand a nonsensical world. People were talking, laughing, crying, and I couldn’t tell why. The more the gap widened between me and everyone else, the less I wanted to try bridging it. Too much frustration, too little reward. So I retreated inside my head. I lived in a parallel universe that overlapped with this one. I could hear their words, I could see their actions, but I couldn’t connect to them. As I got older and my isolation deepened, my perception of people shifted from something that baffled me to something that disgusted me. Dangerous, unpredictable beasts that could turn on you in a heartbeat. And now here we are. I’m almost thirty and I’ve never had a friend.”
Elena’s words hung in the air like the reverberations of a funeral bell. I considered reaching for her hand, but I suspected she would have leaped from the chair and hightailed it out of Bar Palace.
“Do you think of your stories as vehicles to process the different facets of your darkness? Maybe ways of exorcising it?”
Her slim hand returned to her moth pendant, tracing its metallic edges.
“Are you asking if I consciously design my stories for therapeutic purposes? No.” Elena paused with her eyes unfocused and her lips parted, as if searching for the proper words. She shook her head, then snapped her gaze at me. “There’s a fundamental problem in discussing the artistic process. If you earned a degree for it and ended up working at a magazine writing articles on music, paintings, novels or whatever, well, you have to come up with bullshit that sounds good to justify the time, energy, and money spent learning about how to discuss things you didn’t create. While getting brainwashed. A valid approach to life if your goal is to win some friends and influence people, I suppose. Imagine all those professors perorating, day after day, year after year, in a language that would make the creator go: ‘What the fuck are these loons smoking?’ It makes me shudder. I swear, whole university departments could disappear overnight, and society would be better for it. You’re supposed to feel art. The texture, the tone, the rhythm. It should awaken the millions of years of beast inside you. It should remind you that you’re alive, and that you will die. That’s how you connect with the creator, not by dissecting their child, naming the parts, and then putting them on the scales to weigh them. If the artists had wanted to make a point, they’d have written a fucking essay. The conscious mind shouldn’t dare befoul art with its machinations; it should prostrate itself in awe, and be silent.”
“You’re not letting me off the hook.”
“No, I am. I don’t want to bury the conscious mind entirely, even though it should learn to rest away from the light. You need rationality during the editing phase. But if you tasked that part with producing the raw material, it would sit at the keyboard agonizing over every word, judging the pros and cons of a myriad options, quickly going insane. All the fun replaced by paralysis from self-judgment. It would produce a soulless, sterile pile of garbage. You don’t task a fish with flying, and you shouldn’t burden the conscious mind with anything other than classifying and criticizing. You have to venture into the dark places where that part fears to tread. Into the depths where monsters dwell. Only there will you find something that matters. But the deeper you descend, the more you will be tempted to give up. And what is the only tool at your disposal to endure that abyssal dark?”
“Madness.”
Elena’s pale blues glimmered as if a ray of sunlight had pierced through the clouds.
“Yeah, you need to be a little insane. Too much, and it will control you. But I’ve digressed. You wanted to know if my stories are meant to process and exorcise the darkness inside me. Writing is a compulsion. A form of psychological masturbation. If you want to be generous, you can consider it a dialogue with a sacred, hidden part of yourself. I don’t know why I write certain things or why they have to be that way. I don’t care either. You don’t choose the stories, they choose you. They demand to be told, clawing their way out through your fingertips until you’re left bleeding on the keyboard. I’m just honored that they chose me, someone so insignificant, someone with nothing to offer but devotion and the willingness to bleed, as their conduit to the world. And no, I’m not exorcising the monster by writing. If anything, I’m feeding it, and in return, the monster keeps me from spiraling. I was born with a hole in the bottom of my soul where my happiness and fulfillment drains. I can’t hold onto them no matter what I do. But words, they plug that hole, for as long as the tale lasts.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones.
February 28, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 9 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
We rolled over grass, grinding sweat into each other’s skin as her tongue probed my mouth, and the part of my brain that thought it was in charge checked out. But sometimes my consciousness resurfaced and noted that while I kissed the woman’s breasts, I bit and tore at her flesh, digging deeper until I should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung. Instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of tendons or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, I sank my teeth into her back and gnawed off a piece. I shredded skin like ripping a hangnail. My mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down my throat. I craved the next mouthful of meat.
Lying beside the woman, I traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with my fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever I bit, I found white flesh without veins, arteries, organs, or bone. Even so, seconds after tearing off a chunk, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when I looked back, her body had stitched itself. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.
Once, I devoured her neck to the extent that I nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with my tongue, I chewed and swallowed, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. I ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot hanging loose. I shoved myself backward, driving my heels into the earth, and screamed. But when I dared to glance back at the woman, she stood upright on both legs, and my hand gripped air.
With her lower lip caught between mine and her nails gouging my back, memories flashed: a past where I’d never known this grass, this clearing, the lagoon, or the woman. A jailer hunting me to drag me back. It clawed me awake, forcing me to confront the grimy, stinking body I inhabited, to question the future that awaited me.
I pressed my eyelids into the woman’s mane. I wanted to whimper like an animal. That afternoon long ago, boarding the wrong train, daring to venture into the passage—I considered these my only strokes of luck, my wisest choices. But if I lost her, I’d spend my life haunted by memories of us sprawled on this grass, lips fused, skin pressed to molecular closeness.
Her face absorbed my anguish as if following a rehearsed script. The pale blond of her brows bled into her pink skin, and her hairline glistened with sweat. Saliva dampened the corners of her parted lips as she breathed like recovering from a marathon. Under her patchy-white skin sprawled a web of capillaries, circuitry proving life pulsed within.
I wanted to bite off her nose. To scoop out her eyes with my tongue and chew them. I’d hollow her face chunk by chunk until a crater of white meat gaped, framed by her hairline, ears, and jaw.
The woman fixed me with an animal gaze, stripped of the stratagems and counterattacks other people hid. I loved a creature who held her breath for dozens of minutes, who never ate or drank, who regenerated any body part in a blink. How had I deserved the privilege of knowing her?
I brushed the white blotch on her cheekbone.
“Why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Why did I find this clearing and get to love you? Why did you appear for me, someone this mediocre?”
The woman glanced away. She raised her hands between our faces, picking mud from under a nail.
“I was here. You chose to come.”
I remembered wandering Hitachi. The passage to the grassy path had lured me before I even looked up.
“When I found the passage, I knew I needed to lose myself alone in nature. For those minutes, I’d reclaim my freedom. Meeting you, talking to you, I realized I’d found what deserved my focus and energy. A real person in this hollow world where everyone’s guided by lies.”
The woman slid her nose along the bridge of mine. The question hovering, the one I daily forced underwater, overrode my preference for silence.
“Where did you come from?”
She flinched. Clamped a hand over my mouth, but I took her wrist and eased it away. Her flute-like voice trembled.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“Out of curiosity?”
“In case one day… you need to return.”
It struck her like a fist to the face. Her smile died, her features twisted. Tears welled. Her Adam’s apple bobbed.
A knife slit my heart.
The woman kissed me, and I wanted to forget I’d asked, but I pulled back until my vision framed her face. Tears from her right eye streaked that temple, dripping into grass; tears from the left rode her nose’s bridge.
I wanted to scream.
“How long is left?”
“Not long.”
“Months? Weeks?”
“I leave tonight.”
I clamped my arms around her as if to wring air from her lungs. She dug her nails into my shoulder blades.
“I asked because I needed to know,” I said. “Stay.”
“It doesn’t matter. You know I belong elsewhere.”
“Don’t say that. Who’s forcing you?”
“Who forces the moon to orbit? Who forces atoms into molecules? Now that you require explanations… I must go.”
Clutching her, I rolled onto my back and back again.
“You won’t leave. I won’t let go.”
Her tears speckled my corneas.
“You’ll blink and find yourself hugging air.”
“How could I return to that world? You’ve never seen its tarnished colors, its counterfeit emotions. What good would come of enduring there? I need to forget. I want no face and no voice but yours, here among these trees and water. The exit should seal. Why should we accept that happiness always slips away? As long as we stay in this clearing, no one will find us. No one will bother us again.”
The woman sat up, stretching her legs beside mine, and pulled me to face her. The tear-streaked glaze of her eyes slammed into my gut. She laid palms on my shoulders and opened her mouth, but I trampled her words.
“Would you rather stay?”
“You doubt it?”
“I don’t know how you think. I’m not sure you wanted me to get close.”
“I don’t want it to end either. But you can choose. Come with me. I’ll show you reality as it should’ve been. I’ll engulf you. You’ll never yearn for anything else again.”
When I stood, she mirrored me. Her bare feet stepped onto mine. I pressed my brow to hers, stroked her cheek. In my mind, a lighthouse beam sliced fog.
“Will you come?” she asked.
“I’ll follow.”
“Anywhere it leads? No matter what you have to leave behind?”
I mashed my lips to hers. Breaking away cost me.
“What choice remains? Breathing that rotten world’s air, surrounded by organic robots? I’ll follow. With luck, I’ll forget every minute wasted outside.”
She gripped my nape and kissed me like she’d devour me, suck out my guts. My mind dissolved. When I surfaced, she was leading me hand-in-hand toward the lagoon. Pebbles stuck to my soles. A white blotch spreading from her lower back covered half her right ass cheek. She advanced naked, holding my hand with her arm stretched behind her, as if the dress she’d worn when we met had been someone else’s shame to conceal. She waded into the fur of algae and mud, that snarled around her legs and waist, sealing every glimpse of the water it covered.
The winter-ocean chill numbed my legs and crotch, prickling my skin with gooseflesh. My muscles clenched, my lungs fought to hold air. Fleshy eel-like shapes brushed my legs under the algae.
The woman stopped and turned. She glowed like a child on Christmas morning, though wet trails crossed her cheeks. The algae fur grazed the curves of her breasts. She bear-hugged me. Compared to the water, her skin scalded.
I swallowed, jaw trembling.
“We’ll dive into darkness.”
Her laughter leaked.
“Feels that way.”
She pressed her forehead to mine. Each streak and fleck of blue, white, and green in her irises swelled like under a microscope. I could map every vein stamped in her sclerae.
She lowered her voice.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the only certainty I’ve had.”
She smiled. Dove backwards, yanking me under. Sound died. I expected an explosion of cold to overwhelm me, but I had plunged into water warm as if bathing in the woman’s liquefied remains. I opened my eyes to crystalline water. We sank spinning headfirst. Above our feet, a horizon of water bloomed, lit by a coin of light—a sun choked by clouds.
Liters of water fought to flood my nostrils. Our bodies should’ve floated, but we accelerated downwards. Amid bubbles spewing from our noses, the woman grinned, mouth wide. She locked her legs around my lower back and squeezed.
Crushing pressure was flattening me like a collapsed wall. My throat spasmed, urging me to inhale even though I’d drown my empty lungs.
I tried to slide my cheek over hers to catch her gaze, in case it convinced me to override my survival instinct, but she hid her face. She clung like a monkey to its mother. Did she understand she would kill me? Maybe she thought I, too, could hold my breath for minutes. Or had she planned to drown, dragging me down with her?
I stifled a convulsion. I wanted decades with her. If she’d chosen to drown, why would I live? We’d vanish into the depths, our entwined corpses rotting in the dark.
When I opened my mouth, liters flooded my stomach. As coughs wracked me, I breathed salty liquid that inflated my lungs. My vision blurred with red static. Needles stabbed behind my nose.
I kicked, thrashed. The woman slackened her leg-lock, slipped her grip. Her chest peeled from mine. As I flailed, her hands scrambled for purchase. I shoved her collarbones. We were drifting apart, but her hand, sliding down my left arm, snagged my watch, its buckle biting my wrist like it’d sever tendons.
My lungs threatened to rupture. My consciousness was snuffing out like a dying flame. I fumbled the watch clasp until it unlatched, then shoved her chest. We floated in opposite directions.
Her hand, at arm’s length, released my watch. Her face warped into the agony of someone shot by a loved one.
Below, as if an abyssal sun glowed, a bare mountain rose. Rockfaces were carved into steps; walls featured clusters of cubed buildings and towers. Stairways vanished into the mountain through inky black voids. Pacing the steps, roaming past the buildings, smeared figures of people milled about.
I kicked and paddled upward through crushing pressure. My shredded lungs irrigated my guts, bloating me.
My arms breached into air. Vision blackened like peering up from a well’s depths. I gagged and spewed water. Choking, convulsing, I staggered toward the shore while peeling algae from my skin. The water tugged my legs like a drain’s pull.
At the shore, I tripped and collapsed onto clattering pebbles. The ground shook. A rock-splitting quake boomed.
I rolled, muscles locking as I tried to rise. I sneezed, I spat water.
The lagoon clenched like a sphincter. It shrank to a sewer-mouth’s width. As I stood, the land contracted like a rug yanked taut.
The lagoon vanished, leaving a dwindling circle of trembling pebbles.
I ran into dusk, following the snaking path through pines that slid toward me. I stumbled through waving ferns, crashed into trunks, lurched at others. Canopies showered pine needles; low branches lashed my face. Trunks erupted, firing bark shapnel. Gusts whipped my soaked body as if the clearing inhaled. As I fought toward the exit, a force was sucking me, even my thoughts, toward the center, in a mute command to surrender.
The edges separating pines from grass blurred. The colors bled from the trees, plants and grass, shuddering towards my back into a myriad of frayed ends. My body stretched.
I sprinted toward the passage’s metal-plated mouth wedged between buildings, just meters ahead.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Pagan Poetry” by Björk.
These days, I eagerly drown.
We rolled over grass, grinding sweat into each other’s skin as her tongue probed my mouth, and the part of my brain that thought it was in charge checked out. But sometimes my consciousness resurfaced and noted that while I kissed the woman’s breasts, I bit and tore at her flesh, digging deeper until I should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung. Instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of tendons or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, I sank my teeth into her back and gnawed off a piece. I shredded skin like ripping a hangnail. My mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down my throat. I craved the next mouthful of meat.
Lying beside the woman, I traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with my fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever I bit, I found white flesh without veins, arteries, organs, or bone. Even so, seconds after tearing off a chunk, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when I looked back, her body had stitched itself. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.
Once, I devoured her neck to the extent that I nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with my tongue, I chewed and swallowed, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. I ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot hanging loose. I shoved myself backward, driving my heels into the earth, and screamed. But when I dared to glance back at the woman, she stood upright on both legs, and my hand gripped air.
With her lower lip caught between mine and her nails gouging my back, memories flashed: a past where I’d never known this grass, this clearing, the lagoon, or the woman. A jailer hunting me to drag me back. It clawed me awake, forcing me to confront the grimy, stinking body I inhabited, to question the future that awaited me.
I pressed my eyelids into the woman’s mane. I wanted to whimper like an animal. That afternoon long ago, boarding the wrong train, daring to venture into the passage—I considered these my only strokes of luck, my wisest choices. But if I lost her, I’d spend my life haunted by memories of us sprawled on this grass, lips fused, skin pressed to molecular closeness.
Her face absorbed my anguish as if following a rehearsed script. The pale blond of her brows bled into her pink skin, and her hairline glistened with sweat. Saliva dampened the corners of her parted lips as she breathed like recovering from a marathon. Under her patchy-white skin sprawled a web of capillaries, circuitry proving life pulsed within.
I wanted to bite off her nose. To scoop out her eyes with my tongue and chew them. I’d hollow her face chunk by chunk until a crater of white meat gaped, framed by her hairline, ears, and jaw.
The woman fixed me with an animal gaze, stripped of the stratagems and counterattacks other people hid. I loved a creature who held her breath for dozens of minutes, who never ate or drank, who regenerated any body part in a blink. How had I deserved the privilege of knowing her?
I brushed the white blotch on her cheekbone.
“Why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Why did I find this clearing and get to love you? Why did you appear for me, someone this mediocre?”
The woman glanced away. She raised her hands between our faces, picking mud from under a nail.
“I was here. You chose to come.”
I remembered wandering Hitachi. The passage to the grassy path had lured me before I even looked up.
“When I found the passage, I knew I needed to lose myself alone in nature. For those minutes, I’d reclaim my freedom. Meeting you, talking to you, I realized I’d found what deserved my focus and energy. A real person in this hollow world where everyone’s guided by lies.”
The woman slid her nose along the bridge of mine. The question hovering, the one I daily forced underwater, overrode my preference for silence.
“Where did you come from?”
She flinched. Clamped a hand over my mouth, but I took her wrist and eased it away. Her flute-like voice trembled.
“Does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“Out of curiosity?”
“In case one day… you need to return.”
It struck her like a fist to the face. Her smile died, her features twisted. Tears welled. Her Adam’s apple bobbed.
A knife slit my heart.
The woman kissed me, and I wanted to forget I’d asked, but I pulled back until my vision framed her face. Tears from her right eye streaked that temple, dripping into grass; tears from the left rode her nose’s bridge.
I wanted to scream.
“How long is left?”
“Not long.”
“Months? Weeks?”
“I leave tonight.”
I clamped my arms around her as if to wring air from her lungs. She dug her nails into my shoulder blades.
“I asked because I needed to know,” I said. “Stay.”
“It doesn’t matter. You know I belong elsewhere.”
“Don’t say that. Who’s forcing you?”
“Who forces the moon to orbit? Who forces atoms into molecules? Now that you require explanations… I must go.”
Clutching her, I rolled onto my back and back again.
“You won’t leave. I won’t let go.”
Her tears speckled my corneas.
“You’ll blink and find yourself hugging air.”
“How could I return to that world? You’ve never seen its tarnished colors, its counterfeit emotions. What good would come of enduring there? I need to forget. I want no face and no voice but yours, here among these trees and water. The exit should seal. Why should we accept that happiness always slips away? As long as we stay in this clearing, no one will find us. No one will bother us again.”
The woman sat up, stretching her legs beside mine, and pulled me to face her. The tear-streaked glaze of her eyes slammed into my gut. She laid palms on my shoulders and opened her mouth, but I trampled her words.
“Would you rather stay?”
“You doubt it?”
“I don’t know how you think. I’m not sure you wanted me to get close.”
“I don’t want it to end either. But you can choose. Come with me. I’ll show you reality as it should’ve been. I’ll engulf you. You’ll never yearn for anything else again.”
When I stood, she mirrored me. Her bare feet stepped onto mine. I pressed my brow to hers, stroked her cheek. In my mind, a lighthouse beam sliced fog.
“Will you come?” she asked.
“I’ll follow.”
“Anywhere it leads? No matter what you have to leave behind?”
I mashed my lips to hers. Breaking away cost me.
“What choice remains? Breathing that rotten world’s air, surrounded by organic robots? I’ll follow. With luck, I’ll forget every minute wasted outside.”
She gripped my nape and kissed me like she’d devour me, suck out my guts. My mind dissolved. When I surfaced, she was leading me hand-in-hand toward the lagoon. Pebbles stuck to my soles. A white blotch spreading from her lower back covered half her right ass cheek. She advanced naked, holding my hand with her arm stretched behind her, as if the dress she’d worn when we met had been someone else’s shame to conceal. She waded into the fur of algae and mud, that snarled around her legs and waist, sealing every glimpse of the water it covered.
The winter-ocean chill numbed my legs and crotch, prickling my skin with gooseflesh. My muscles clenched, my lungs fought to hold air. Fleshy eel-like shapes brushed my legs under the algae.
The woman stopped and turned. She glowed like a child on Christmas morning, though wet trails crossed her cheeks. The algae fur grazed the curves of her breasts. She bear-hugged me. Compared to the water, her skin scalded.
I swallowed, jaw trembling.
“We’ll dive into darkness.”
Her laughter leaked.
“Feels that way.”
She pressed her forehead to mine. Each streak and fleck of blue, white, and green in her irises swelled like under a microscope. I could map every vein stamped in her sclerae.
She lowered her voice.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the only certainty I’ve had.”
She smiled. Dove backwards, yanking me under. Sound died. I expected an explosion of cold to overwhelm me, but I had plunged into water warm as if bathing in the woman’s liquefied remains. I opened my eyes to crystalline water. We sank spinning headfirst. Above our feet, a horizon of water bloomed, lit by a coin of light—a sun choked by clouds.
Liters of water fought to flood my nostrils. Our bodies should’ve floated, but we accelerated downwards. Amid bubbles spewing from our noses, the woman grinned, mouth wide. She locked her legs around my lower back and squeezed.
Crushing pressure was flattening me like a collapsed wall. My throat spasmed, urging me to inhale even though I’d drown my empty lungs.
I tried to slide my cheek over hers to catch her gaze, in case it convinced me to override my survival instinct, but she hid her face. She clung like a monkey to its mother. Did she understand she would kill me? Maybe she thought I, too, could hold my breath for minutes. Or had she planned to drown, dragging me down with her?
I stifled a convulsion. I wanted decades with her. If she’d chosen to drown, why would I live? We’d vanish into the depths, our entwined corpses rotting in the dark.
When I opened my mouth, liters flooded my stomach. As coughs wracked me, I breathed salty liquid that inflated my lungs. My vision blurred with red static. Needles stabbed behind my nose.
I kicked, thrashed. The woman slackened her leg-lock, slipped her grip. Her chest peeled from mine. As I flailed, her hands scrambled for purchase. I shoved her collarbones. We were drifting apart, but her hand, sliding down my left arm, snagged my watch, its buckle biting my wrist like it’d sever tendons.
My lungs threatened to rupture. My consciousness was snuffing out like a dying flame. I fumbled the watch clasp until it unlatched, then shoved her chest. We floated in opposite directions.
Her hand, at arm’s length, released my watch. Her face warped into the agony of someone shot by a loved one.
Below, as if an abyssal sun glowed, a bare mountain rose. Rockfaces were carved into steps; walls featured clusters of cubed buildings and towers. Stairways vanished into the mountain through inky black voids. Pacing the steps, roaming past the buildings, smeared figures of people milled about.
I kicked and paddled upward through crushing pressure. My shredded lungs irrigated my guts, bloating me.
My arms breached into air. Vision blackened like peering up from a well’s depths. I gagged and spewed water. Choking, convulsing, I staggered toward the shore while peeling algae from my skin. The water tugged my legs like a drain’s pull.
At the shore, I tripped and collapsed onto clattering pebbles. The ground shook. A rock-splitting quake boomed.
I rolled, muscles locking as I tried to rise. I sneezed, I spat water.
The lagoon clenched like a sphincter. It shrank to a sewer-mouth’s width. As I stood, the land contracted like a rug yanked taut.
The lagoon vanished, leaving a dwindling circle of trembling pebbles.
I ran into dusk, following the snaking path through pines that slid toward me. I stumbled through waving ferns, crashed into trunks, lurched at others. Canopies showered pine needles; low branches lashed my face. Trunks erupted, firing bark shapnel. Gusts whipped my soaked body as if the clearing inhaled. As I fought toward the exit, a force was sucking me, even my thoughts, toward the center, in a mute command to surrender.
The edges separating pines from grass blurred. The colors bled from the trees, plants and grass, shuddering towards my back into a myriad of frayed ends. My body stretched.
I sprinted toward the passage’s metal-plated mouth wedged between buildings, just meters ahead.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Pagan Poetry” by Björk.
These days, I eagerly drown.
February 27, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 8 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I disembarked at Hitachi Station and retraced the pilgrimage. In yards fenced by cement walls or concrete blocks, whenever branches and leaves spoiled the silhouettes of trees, invisible humans would prune them into cones, into tiered clouds. On facades, years of rain had streaked grime into darkened veins. The distant murmur of traffic mingled with waves crashing against shore rocks. In a parking lot, dozens of workers’ cars crammed together, their owners pouring money into insurance and gasoline to maintain vehicles bought for commuting. Telephone and power lines etched straight and curved seams against the overcast sky, converging into a tangled loom at the street’s end. Each rusted shutter and iron gate bore rectangles of faded brightness where posters had been peeled away. Landscapes of a distant country I was visiting for the last time.
Goodbye to those strolling, returning from work, emerging from school in uniforms. Actors in a mediocre play repeating generation after generation. The residents had toiled lifetimes to end up owning one of these narrow two-story homes. As I walked the sidewalk, I glimpsed a man’s silhouette passing behind wooden planks fencing his garden patch, stepping one foot after another between his house’s facade and a row of potted plants. Any citizen accepted society’s humiliations—the acid of anxiety corroding their chest, bowing in reverence to those wielding power—only to grow old among gray walls. They pushed carts full of bills into a carnival prize machine, which spat back keychains.
What could I want from this charade? What did they want? They desired promotions to command underlings. They hoarded junk. Craving immortality, they birthed heirs, hoping to snare eyes on their fleeting lives. Instead, they wrenched fresh players onto a packed stage for a ceaseless drama of misery. We had sprouted by accident, our constructs scarcely holding. More disasters and wars loomed. But the faces passing by ignored it, or hid it. They clung to living by accident, just as life tasted of rot to me by accident.
Why waste my existence pretending, only to crumble into dust? Let them keep their costumes, their roles to obey, their ingrained lies propping up societies as if built on crystal toothpicks. Some accident would slice me down, or sickness gnaw me. If I outlived statistics, I’d earn care from someone who’d prefer me dead—feeding me, bathing me, wiping my ass. Let them rot in their charade. I had the forest and my woman. I’d rot as I pleased.
I paused under the metal awning of the passageway and turned, suspecting the world had melted to black. If only the inevitable future would crash today. Beyond the opposite sidewalk’s walls, beyond the warehouse and the cement facade with its vending machines, beyond office towers and malls, dawns would flare. Thick columns of black smoke would swell until luminous mushrooms erupted. Shockwaves would surge, disintegrating buildings into breaker tides of cement, brick, metal, and glass pulverized back to stardust. As fire-clouds bloomed on the horizon like blazing brains, dust tsunamis would roar toward the warehouse across the street—but I’d have retreated into the forest like a turtle tucking into its shell. Even if bombs burned this world to ash, the shockwaves would skid over the cloudy vault above the clearing. When the last ash settled, this world where we’d wasted energy, tears, arguments, and brawls would fade to gray waste. No intelligent species visiting these ruins, nor successors emerging from ash in eons, would grasp who we were.
How many days did I weave in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark? From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy. Night blackened to tar in minutes. I forgot which weekday dawned. I wanted to forget such concepts existed.
The woman had plunged into the lagoon to dive, and I sat on the pebbled shore when hunger twisted my guts. Outside this forest, I’d eaten by rote—breakfast, lunch, dinner—but now an evolutionary alarm installed eons ago in some aquatic ancestor shook me: eat or be consumed. I touched my sunken belly, once padded by fat folds. I had to leave.
I waited for the woman to surface, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. She submerged as casually as retreating to the bathroom. When she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against me as I peeled lichen patches from her skin.
I left the clearing in darkness, fingers grazing the promised pines, their bark’s roughness a brand that I knew. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Civilization neared. I crept, stifling breath. Emerging onto the deserted street, I blinked at the glare. I hurried past a lamppost’s island of light to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines, watchful of every shifting silhouette like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes.
Next time hunger speared me, I was kissing the woman, her legs entwined with mine. Hours of mounting dizziness spiked. I rolled onto my back, gasping. She nestled on my chest and stared as if waiting for me to dress my impressions in words. If I left this forest, I’d skulk amidst cement, metal, and glass—a raccoon tipping trash bins before darting back to the trees. Against such nakedness, what did this ache for food matter?
Memories of the outside resembled yellowed photos of another country, another era. Half the album’s pages were lost; luckily, I had forgotten what they used to contain.
Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke me. My guts clung like an old balloon. I sat up, hugged my knees. I felt faint. My body was imploding, a growing vacuum in my guts sucking the organs.
I glanced over my shoulder at the clearing’s exit. The path curved between pine pillars; in the distance, trunks and foliage narrowed the path, dissolving it in a green phosphorescence. I had to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machine hunched and disheveled like a fugitive.
Sheltering here had stripped society’s makeup. Due to the lack of contrast, I had tolerated its piercing thorns and scorching fire. How could I dare to go outside? I refused to breathe that air even if my starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into my core.
The woman looped her arms around my neck, forehead against my cheek.
“You need to eat.”
“I can last.”
“How long?”
“Until hunger stops my thoughts.”
“You don’t need to endure, dummy.”
Her face suggested ignorance of pain. I meant to say her name, but struck a void. I had her face, her eyes, the certainty that she knew whom I addressed.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I didn’t say you should.”
“I could hunt squirrels, birds. Some cultures eat spiders.”
“Feed from me.”
Her lips curved upward, as usually since I’d moved here. Would I recognize when she joked around?
“That’s… generous of you.”
The woman leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore a handful of white flesh. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had ripped the fibers. Blood pooled.
I froze.
She offered the chunk. Her parted teeth glistened wet. Numb, I let her fold my limp fingers around the meat, that resembled a block of ham. She arched expectant brows.
Saliva drowned my tongue. I yearned to savor that flesh as much as I longed to hold the woman in my arms and kiss her skin. I brought the piece to my mouth. I could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of my fingers gripping the chunk.
I pressed my lips to the soft flesh and grazed it with my teeth. Saliva spilled from the corner of my mouth, trickling down my chin. I clenched my jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of my tongue, but when my teeth split the meat, a shudder ripped through me. Before I could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded my mouth. I tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. I devoured the rest.
When I looked up, shame flooded me like someone caught chewing open-mouthed. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, spattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. I covered the hole with one hand, but the warm blood seeped through my fingers like soup.
The woman stroked my cheek.
“It’ll grow back.”
I tried to laugh, but a whimper escaped.
“I can’t live off eating you.”
“Do you eat so much you’ll swallow me whole?”
“Plus, I’d need to buy water bottles from the machine.”
The woman twisted in my arms until she lay on her back. She cupped one breast, and squeezed the nipple between thumb and forefinger. Thick milk oozed like honey.
If turning or shifting my posture made me face the clearing’s exit, I jerked my gaze away until the path blurred at the edge of my vision. A monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if I wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush and devour me. How had I entered and left this clearing without realizing it? Like exploring an abandoned asylum on a starless night.
Beyond this forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever these images and memories ambushed me, patches of my brain crackled with electricity. I wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach until they whitened.
I lost track of time. My beard scratched the woman’s skin like a rake. I pushed greasy strands from my eyes. My breath reeked like a cat’s. When the woman dozed, or dove underwater, I’d slink into the trees to squat over a hole. I scrubbed my teeth with leaves that smelled fresh, but the stench of my breath lingered, as if rot had wedged between my molars. I avoided breathing near her face. When I kissed her, she never flinched.
I dreamed my teeth crumbled. Awake, I sank them into the woman’s juicy flesh, but feared that a tooth might splinter, exposing the nerves.
My sweat dried to a film that fresh sweat soaked anew. I stank like a mange-riddled stray sleeping in a landfill. I envied the woman diving into frigid, muck-thick waters. I washed in the lagoon as if at a sink, but each handful of water teemed with algae, sludge, and wriggling microbes. I scrubbed my skin while suspecting that my pores filtered civilizations of bacteria. Even after washing myself, the stench of decay seared my nostrils—a reek that clung to me like leeches, that the woman maybe smelled all the time as if I sprayed it into her face.
Lying beside me, her chest rose and fell. Beneath her lids, her eyes darted. I’d spend my life watching her, but a bolt of pain struck. I dragged the anchor of years wasted in a world sliding into ruin. I wanted to believe we’d lie together forever, but I deceived myself by pretending that the rules spared this clearing. Like how on my first visits I’d known when to go home, another border neared. A matter of when. Knowing this rotted me like poison, and pain drowned my eyes. How would I exist elsewhere, without the woman? If I ever had the chance and it found me strong enough, I’d prune my past and every foray outside, so all I’d ever know included her.
I was kissing the inside of her thigh when my stench dizzyied me. I lifted my head, ashamed. Her eyes peered between the curves of her breasts—whether agreeing or staring because I’d stared, I didn’t know.
I rested my temple against her thigh.
“I wish I didn’t stink.”
“You could always bathe.”
“In stagnant water? I’d turn into a Petri dish of disease.”
“Am I one?”
“No filth sticks to you. Not even my stench. But if I plunged in that water for a second, I’d emerge a lichen-caked sludge-man, and never could I scrub off the grime.”
-----
Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky.
Isolating, self-sustaining, all-consuming.
I disembarked at Hitachi Station and retraced the pilgrimage. In yards fenced by cement walls or concrete blocks, whenever branches and leaves spoiled the silhouettes of trees, invisible humans would prune them into cones, into tiered clouds. On facades, years of rain had streaked grime into darkened veins. The distant murmur of traffic mingled with waves crashing against shore rocks. In a parking lot, dozens of workers’ cars crammed together, their owners pouring money into insurance and gasoline to maintain vehicles bought for commuting. Telephone and power lines etched straight and curved seams against the overcast sky, converging into a tangled loom at the street’s end. Each rusted shutter and iron gate bore rectangles of faded brightness where posters had been peeled away. Landscapes of a distant country I was visiting for the last time.
Goodbye to those strolling, returning from work, emerging from school in uniforms. Actors in a mediocre play repeating generation after generation. The residents had toiled lifetimes to end up owning one of these narrow two-story homes. As I walked the sidewalk, I glimpsed a man’s silhouette passing behind wooden planks fencing his garden patch, stepping one foot after another between his house’s facade and a row of potted plants. Any citizen accepted society’s humiliations—the acid of anxiety corroding their chest, bowing in reverence to those wielding power—only to grow old among gray walls. They pushed carts full of bills into a carnival prize machine, which spat back keychains.
What could I want from this charade? What did they want? They desired promotions to command underlings. They hoarded junk. Craving immortality, they birthed heirs, hoping to snare eyes on their fleeting lives. Instead, they wrenched fresh players onto a packed stage for a ceaseless drama of misery. We had sprouted by accident, our constructs scarcely holding. More disasters and wars loomed. But the faces passing by ignored it, or hid it. They clung to living by accident, just as life tasted of rot to me by accident.
Why waste my existence pretending, only to crumble into dust? Let them keep their costumes, their roles to obey, their ingrained lies propping up societies as if built on crystal toothpicks. Some accident would slice me down, or sickness gnaw me. If I outlived statistics, I’d earn care from someone who’d prefer me dead—feeding me, bathing me, wiping my ass. Let them rot in their charade. I had the forest and my woman. I’d rot as I pleased.
I paused under the metal awning of the passageway and turned, suspecting the world had melted to black. If only the inevitable future would crash today. Beyond the opposite sidewalk’s walls, beyond the warehouse and the cement facade with its vending machines, beyond office towers and malls, dawns would flare. Thick columns of black smoke would swell until luminous mushrooms erupted. Shockwaves would surge, disintegrating buildings into breaker tides of cement, brick, metal, and glass pulverized back to stardust. As fire-clouds bloomed on the horizon like blazing brains, dust tsunamis would roar toward the warehouse across the street—but I’d have retreated into the forest like a turtle tucking into its shell. Even if bombs burned this world to ash, the shockwaves would skid over the cloudy vault above the clearing. When the last ash settled, this world where we’d wasted energy, tears, arguments, and brawls would fade to gray waste. No intelligent species visiting these ruins, nor successors emerging from ash in eons, would grasp who we were.
How many days did I weave in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark? From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy. Night blackened to tar in minutes. I forgot which weekday dawned. I wanted to forget such concepts existed.
The woman had plunged into the lagoon to dive, and I sat on the pebbled shore when hunger twisted my guts. Outside this forest, I’d eaten by rote—breakfast, lunch, dinner—but now an evolutionary alarm installed eons ago in some aquatic ancestor shook me: eat or be consumed. I touched my sunken belly, once padded by fat folds. I had to leave.
I waited for the woman to surface, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. She submerged as casually as retreating to the bathroom. When she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against me as I peeled lichen patches from her skin.
I left the clearing in darkness, fingers grazing the promised pines, their bark’s roughness a brand that I knew. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Civilization neared. I crept, stifling breath. Emerging onto the deserted street, I blinked at the glare. I hurried past a lamppost’s island of light to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines, watchful of every shifting silhouette like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes.
Next time hunger speared me, I was kissing the woman, her legs entwined with mine. Hours of mounting dizziness spiked. I rolled onto my back, gasping. She nestled on my chest and stared as if waiting for me to dress my impressions in words. If I left this forest, I’d skulk amidst cement, metal, and glass—a raccoon tipping trash bins before darting back to the trees. Against such nakedness, what did this ache for food matter?
Memories of the outside resembled yellowed photos of another country, another era. Half the album’s pages were lost; luckily, I had forgotten what they used to contain.
Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke me. My guts clung like an old balloon. I sat up, hugged my knees. I felt faint. My body was imploding, a growing vacuum in my guts sucking the organs.
I glanced over my shoulder at the clearing’s exit. The path curved between pine pillars; in the distance, trunks and foliage narrowed the path, dissolving it in a green phosphorescence. I had to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machine hunched and disheveled like a fugitive.
Sheltering here had stripped society’s makeup. Due to the lack of contrast, I had tolerated its piercing thorns and scorching fire. How could I dare to go outside? I refused to breathe that air even if my starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into my core.
The woman looped her arms around my neck, forehead against my cheek.
“You need to eat.”
“I can last.”
“How long?”
“Until hunger stops my thoughts.”
“You don’t need to endure, dummy.”
Her face suggested ignorance of pain. I meant to say her name, but struck a void. I had her face, her eyes, the certainty that she knew whom I addressed.
“I don’t want to leave.”
“I didn’t say you should.”
“I could hunt squirrels, birds. Some cultures eat spiders.”
“Feed from me.”
Her lips curved upward, as usually since I’d moved here. Would I recognize when she joked around?
“That’s… generous of you.”
The woman leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore a handful of white flesh. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had ripped the fibers. Blood pooled.
I froze.
She offered the chunk. Her parted teeth glistened wet. Numb, I let her fold my limp fingers around the meat, that resembled a block of ham. She arched expectant brows.
Saliva drowned my tongue. I yearned to savor that flesh as much as I longed to hold the woman in my arms and kiss her skin. I brought the piece to my mouth. I could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of my fingers gripping the chunk.
I pressed my lips to the soft flesh and grazed it with my teeth. Saliva spilled from the corner of my mouth, trickling down my chin. I clenched my jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of my tongue, but when my teeth split the meat, a shudder ripped through me. Before I could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded my mouth. I tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. I devoured the rest.
When I looked up, shame flooded me like someone caught chewing open-mouthed. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, spattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. I covered the hole with one hand, but the warm blood seeped through my fingers like soup.
The woman stroked my cheek.
“It’ll grow back.”
I tried to laugh, but a whimper escaped.
“I can’t live off eating you.”
“Do you eat so much you’ll swallow me whole?”
“Plus, I’d need to buy water bottles from the machine.”
The woman twisted in my arms until she lay on her back. She cupped one breast, and squeezed the nipple between thumb and forefinger. Thick milk oozed like honey.
If turning or shifting my posture made me face the clearing’s exit, I jerked my gaze away until the path blurred at the edge of my vision. A monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if I wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush and devour me. How had I entered and left this clearing without realizing it? Like exploring an abandoned asylum on a starless night.
Beyond this forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever these images and memories ambushed me, patches of my brain crackled with electricity. I wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach until they whitened.
I lost track of time. My beard scratched the woman’s skin like a rake. I pushed greasy strands from my eyes. My breath reeked like a cat’s. When the woman dozed, or dove underwater, I’d slink into the trees to squat over a hole. I scrubbed my teeth with leaves that smelled fresh, but the stench of my breath lingered, as if rot had wedged between my molars. I avoided breathing near her face. When I kissed her, she never flinched.
I dreamed my teeth crumbled. Awake, I sank them into the woman’s juicy flesh, but feared that a tooth might splinter, exposing the nerves.
My sweat dried to a film that fresh sweat soaked anew. I stank like a mange-riddled stray sleeping in a landfill. I envied the woman diving into frigid, muck-thick waters. I washed in the lagoon as if at a sink, but each handful of water teemed with algae, sludge, and wriggling microbes. I scrubbed my skin while suspecting that my pores filtered civilizations of bacteria. Even after washing myself, the stench of decay seared my nostrils—a reek that clung to me like leeches, that the woman maybe smelled all the time as if I sprayed it into her face.
Lying beside me, her chest rose and fell. Beneath her lids, her eyes darted. I’d spend my life watching her, but a bolt of pain struck. I dragged the anchor of years wasted in a world sliding into ruin. I wanted to believe we’d lie together forever, but I deceived myself by pretending that the rules spared this clearing. Like how on my first visits I’d known when to go home, another border neared. A matter of when. Knowing this rotted me like poison, and pain drowned my eyes. How would I exist elsewhere, without the woman? If I ever had the chance and it found me strong enough, I’d prune my past and every foray outside, so all I’d ever know included her.
I was kissing the inside of her thigh when my stench dizzyied me. I lifted my head, ashamed. Her eyes peered between the curves of her breasts—whether agreeing or staring because I’d stared, I didn’t know.
I rested my temple against her thigh.
“I wish I didn’t stink.”
“You could always bathe.”
“In stagnant water? I’d turn into a Petri dish of disease.”
“Am I one?”
“No filth sticks to you. Not even my stench. But if I plunged in that water for a second, I’d emerge a lichen-caked sludge-man, and never could I scrub off the grime.”
-----
Author’s note: I originally wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky.
Isolating, self-sustaining, all-consuming.
February 26, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 11 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena lowered her head, unfocused her eyes, and fell silent. I resumed my reading. When Kirochka left the psychiatrist’s office, she obscured her face by pulling up the hoodie, and tucked her hands into her baggy sweatpants pockets. She hurried through the space station’s hallways and corridors. To distract herself from the stormclouds of shadows, which thickened as more people gathered around her, she took deep breaths and counted to four. A pulsating headache blurred the vision in her only functioning eye. Sweat coated her nape and soaked her hairline. The shadows kept insulting, fondling, scratching—their hatred seeping into her pores like an acid.
Talking to the psychiatrist made Kirochka nauseous. That woman would write a bestseller about this parasite, and to mine that vein, she would stretch Kirochka’s psyche until it snapped. The narrator was plagued by an exhaustion that neither ten hours of sleep nor days of isolation could cure. Even when she abstained from booze, as soon as she collapsed onto her bed, she passed out, and hours later woke up tired.
The military and the psychiatrist would fill Kirochka with platitudes and empty hope. Why did she waste her energy and endanger her fragile mind to serve as a pawn in their farce? Merely to protect their professional pride? They had no clue how the artifact worked, and they never would. They insisted that Kirochka contain her dark impulses while reminding herself that her second consciousness was deceiving her. She’d have to trust in a future where she would accept hosting a malignancy in her brain. But even if the scientists developed a cure, could it ever free her from the guilt that left her sweating and rolling in bed at night, groaning into her pillows as memories of irreparable damage flooded her?
Kirochka was panting. Her body insisted she find a bench to rest on. When her functioning eye met the world again, a passing mechanic gave a startled glance at her scars. The man’s shadow reached out to her, its fingers stretching toward her face. How long until she could board the maglev train? Her head was spinning, her bidimensional vision pulsing.
She spotted a bench and hobbled towards it as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. Kirochka’s leg muscles burned as she collapsed onto the cold bench. Sweat dripped from her face, splattering onto a metallic floor grimy with dust, footprints, and chewing gum. Down the corridor, groups of shadows drifted by in a ghostly procession.
The scarred woman. Do we really need to endure the sight of her roaming the hallways as we come and go? What a way to sour our day. They should cage her in a hole far from people. Check out that scarred flesh. If it had happened to me, I would want to be killed. How can she go on living knowing herself disfigured?
Kirochka ran her fingertips over the rough, calloused texture of the right side of her forehead, of her right cheek. She scratched at the scars that marked her neck. She forced herself to stand up and continue. The floor and the passersby’s legs swayed. Panting and drenched in sweat, she arrived at the maglev station and sank into a vacant bench at the far end of the platform. Someone approached the bench, about to sit down, but then abruptly stopped and hurried away.
Who is this monster? She’s hogging the only available seat. Why do the brass allow such a ruin to share our space? She should kill herself.
I pulled my shoulders in. As the sunlight waned, a chill seeped into every crack of the afternoon.
“Those disembodied voices are awfully cruel.”
“I’ll answer your implicit question,” Elena said. “That comes from years upon years of seeing people’s smiles drop shortly after meeting me. Of realizing how uncomfortable I make people just by existing near them. I’m generally terrible at reading others’ emotions, but that revulsion always came through loud and clear.”
“Your story brings up that such thoughts are intrusive.”
“And therefore not real? You can tell yourself over and over the world isn’t as nasty as you experience it, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling that way. Soon enough you’ll want to steer clear of people who ellicit such thoughts.” Elena pointed lazily at the stack of printouts. “You’re almost done.”
Kirochka’s heart hammered against her ribs. She shot a glare at the man, who was walking away towards the throng of passengers waiting for the train. Mechanics, pilots, military couples, a solitary guard, families with kids—some sitting, some standing. They hogged most spaces, they violated the silence with their screeches. Why did so many of them exist? Within the universe’s walls, a colony of spiders proliferated, pouring through every crack and skittering over surfaces in black currents. At such a relentless pace, which corner of the cosmos could escape the encroachment of the human scourge? On every virgin planet, one of their ships would plunge through the atmosphere and settle on its soil. Some moron would leave his footprints, plant a flag and declare, I own this. They would flood the landscapes with their machinery, their engines, their weapons. They would rape every forest and jungle, laying waste to ecosystems that had persisted in equilibrium for thousands, millions of years. The seas would turn gray with oil and plastic. Humans multiplied to multiply, each generation following the unconscious programming of a robot trapped in a maintenance cycle.
After the next therapy session, Kirochka hurried along the corridors leading back to her apartment, until her path was blocked by a pair of thin legs clad in black stockings. The narrator halted, expecting those legs to shuffle out of her way. Instead, that woman remained rooted to the spot while dozens of passersby and their shadowy bodyguards flowed around them like a river’s current.
Kirochka looked up. A woman confronted her with venomous hatred. Tears welled up in the corners of her slanted eyes. The woman lunged and spat in Kirochka’s face. Spittle splattered across her left cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. A clump of phlegm slid down her cheek.
She awoke to the sight of faces looming above her. Claws clutched her neck while a spiked phallus rammed into her vagina, ripping her apart from the inside. Kirochka screamed and thrashed about. She threw punches at faces so close that their warm breaths brushed against her skin, and when they recoiled, she lunged at one of the shadows, knocking it down. She pinned its arms under her knees and pummeled its skull with her crunching knuckles.
Unseen hands grabbed her by the hoodie and hurled her aside. She rolled until her shoulder slammed against a bench. As she scrambled to her feet, a kick burst her ribs into searing pain. Her lungs spasmed, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her vision blurred. Someone’s weight pressed down on her back, pushing her face against a cold, metallic floor marred by footprints.
A crowd surrounded them. A few meters away sat a man wearing blood-spattered maintenance coveralls. His right eye was shut and purple, and that eyebrow had swollen to the size of a golf ball. A reddish gash cut across the bridge of his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, soaking the lower half of his face and tinting his teeth, several of which were broken or missing. The man convulsed with sobs and whimpers while someone crouched beside him squeezed his shoulder.
Kirochka had awoken on a bench bordering a recreational area. In another life, she used to frequent these bars and dance floors to get drunk with fellow pilots.
A guard snapped handcuffs around Kirochka’s wrists and lifted her up by one arm. They carried her off to the district’s security station. She was locked in a cell, her hands still bound behind her back, until two military officers came to fetch her. They dragged her to a well-lit room and sat her down at a desk for interrogation. Her ribs throbbed, her back ached. What did she remember? Nothing. An unconscious part of her had veered from the direct route home, and when she woke up, she realized she was being raped the same way she’d recognize the taste of a lemon or the scent of gasoline. If nobody had yanked her off that maintenance man, she would have beaten him to death.
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.
Elena lowered her head, unfocused her eyes, and fell silent. I resumed my reading. When Kirochka left the psychiatrist’s office, she obscured her face by pulling up the hoodie, and tucked her hands into her baggy sweatpants pockets. She hurried through the space station’s hallways and corridors. To distract herself from the stormclouds of shadows, which thickened as more people gathered around her, she took deep breaths and counted to four. A pulsating headache blurred the vision in her only functioning eye. Sweat coated her nape and soaked her hairline. The shadows kept insulting, fondling, scratching—their hatred seeping into her pores like an acid.
Talking to the psychiatrist made Kirochka nauseous. That woman would write a bestseller about this parasite, and to mine that vein, she would stretch Kirochka’s psyche until it snapped. The narrator was plagued by an exhaustion that neither ten hours of sleep nor days of isolation could cure. Even when she abstained from booze, as soon as she collapsed onto her bed, she passed out, and hours later woke up tired.
The military and the psychiatrist would fill Kirochka with platitudes and empty hope. Why did she waste her energy and endanger her fragile mind to serve as a pawn in their farce? Merely to protect their professional pride? They had no clue how the artifact worked, and they never would. They insisted that Kirochka contain her dark impulses while reminding herself that her second consciousness was deceiving her. She’d have to trust in a future where she would accept hosting a malignancy in her brain. But even if the scientists developed a cure, could it ever free her from the guilt that left her sweating and rolling in bed at night, groaning into her pillows as memories of irreparable damage flooded her?
Kirochka was panting. Her body insisted she find a bench to rest on. When her functioning eye met the world again, a passing mechanic gave a startled glance at her scars. The man’s shadow reached out to her, its fingers stretching toward her face. How long until she could board the maglev train? Her head was spinning, her bidimensional vision pulsing.
She spotted a bench and hobbled towards it as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. Kirochka’s leg muscles burned as she collapsed onto the cold bench. Sweat dripped from her face, splattering onto a metallic floor grimy with dust, footprints, and chewing gum. Down the corridor, groups of shadows drifted by in a ghostly procession.
The scarred woman. Do we really need to endure the sight of her roaming the hallways as we come and go? What a way to sour our day. They should cage her in a hole far from people. Check out that scarred flesh. If it had happened to me, I would want to be killed. How can she go on living knowing herself disfigured?
Kirochka ran her fingertips over the rough, calloused texture of the right side of her forehead, of her right cheek. She scratched at the scars that marked her neck. She forced herself to stand up and continue. The floor and the passersby’s legs swayed. Panting and drenched in sweat, she arrived at the maglev station and sank into a vacant bench at the far end of the platform. Someone approached the bench, about to sit down, but then abruptly stopped and hurried away.
Who is this monster? She’s hogging the only available seat. Why do the brass allow such a ruin to share our space? She should kill herself.
I pulled my shoulders in. As the sunlight waned, a chill seeped into every crack of the afternoon.
“Those disembodied voices are awfully cruel.”
“I’ll answer your implicit question,” Elena said. “That comes from years upon years of seeing people’s smiles drop shortly after meeting me. Of realizing how uncomfortable I make people just by existing near them. I’m generally terrible at reading others’ emotions, but that revulsion always came through loud and clear.”
“Your story brings up that such thoughts are intrusive.”
“And therefore not real? You can tell yourself over and over the world isn’t as nasty as you experience it, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling that way. Soon enough you’ll want to steer clear of people who ellicit such thoughts.” Elena pointed lazily at the stack of printouts. “You’re almost done.”
Kirochka’s heart hammered against her ribs. She shot a glare at the man, who was walking away towards the throng of passengers waiting for the train. Mechanics, pilots, military couples, a solitary guard, families with kids—some sitting, some standing. They hogged most spaces, they violated the silence with their screeches. Why did so many of them exist? Within the universe’s walls, a colony of spiders proliferated, pouring through every crack and skittering over surfaces in black currents. At such a relentless pace, which corner of the cosmos could escape the encroachment of the human scourge? On every virgin planet, one of their ships would plunge through the atmosphere and settle on its soil. Some moron would leave his footprints, plant a flag and declare, I own this. They would flood the landscapes with their machinery, their engines, their weapons. They would rape every forest and jungle, laying waste to ecosystems that had persisted in equilibrium for thousands, millions of years. The seas would turn gray with oil and plastic. Humans multiplied to multiply, each generation following the unconscious programming of a robot trapped in a maintenance cycle.
After the next therapy session, Kirochka hurried along the corridors leading back to her apartment, until her path was blocked by a pair of thin legs clad in black stockings. The narrator halted, expecting those legs to shuffle out of her way. Instead, that woman remained rooted to the spot while dozens of passersby and their shadowy bodyguards flowed around them like a river’s current.
Kirochka looked up. A woman confronted her with venomous hatred. Tears welled up in the corners of her slanted eyes. The woman lunged and spat in Kirochka’s face. Spittle splattered across her left cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. A clump of phlegm slid down her cheek.
She awoke to the sight of faces looming above her. Claws clutched her neck while a spiked phallus rammed into her vagina, ripping her apart from the inside. Kirochka screamed and thrashed about. She threw punches at faces so close that their warm breaths brushed against her skin, and when they recoiled, she lunged at one of the shadows, knocking it down. She pinned its arms under her knees and pummeled its skull with her crunching knuckles.
Unseen hands grabbed her by the hoodie and hurled her aside. She rolled until her shoulder slammed against a bench. As she scrambled to her feet, a kick burst her ribs into searing pain. Her lungs spasmed, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her vision blurred. Someone’s weight pressed down on her back, pushing her face against a cold, metallic floor marred by footprints.
A crowd surrounded them. A few meters away sat a man wearing blood-spattered maintenance coveralls. His right eye was shut and purple, and that eyebrow had swollen to the size of a golf ball. A reddish gash cut across the bridge of his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, soaking the lower half of his face and tinting his teeth, several of which were broken or missing. The man convulsed with sobs and whimpers while someone crouched beside him squeezed his shoulder.
Kirochka had awoken on a bench bordering a recreational area. In another life, she used to frequent these bars and dance floors to get drunk with fellow pilots.
A guard snapped handcuffs around Kirochka’s wrists and lifted her up by one arm. They carried her off to the district’s security station. She was locked in a cell, her hands still bound behind her back, until two military officers came to fetch her. They dragged her to a well-lit room and sat her down at a desk for interrogation. Her ribs throbbed, her back ached. What did she remember? Nothing. An unconscious part of her had veered from the direct route home, and when she woke up, she realized she was being raped the same way she’d recognize the taste of a lemon or the scent of gasoline. If nobody had yanked her off that maintenance man, she would have beaten him to death.
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.
February 25, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 7 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I awoke in the dark room of my closed eyes. Birds chirped and trilled from every direction, as if perched on an invisible dome. My back pressed flat against the bed of grass, and a cool breeze brushed the soles of my feet. Against me lay another warm body, its chest rising and falling against mine, its breath heating my neck. I allowed myself to marvel at this for a few seconds before prickling with the reminder that I needed to find a job or I wouldn’t have enough to cover the rent.
The fingers resting on my shoulder curled, digging between the bony ridges. I opened my eyes and tilted my head as the woman lifted hers. Her pale-blue eyes met mine as if instead of sleeping, she had merely stretched a blink.
What could I possibly want from life except to wake to the gaze of this woman looking back? I needed to comb every strand of her honey-blonde hair with my fingers, glide my fingertips over the taut skin of her abdomen, feel her breasts yield and mold to my palms, bury my face in her neck or armpits and inhale the scent of a lagoon. Every passing minute brought me closer to the moment when I’d need to hold her in my arms, like a dolphin must surface or drown.
But I forced myself to sit up. The flattened grass sprang back and tickled my lower back. The woman wrapped a hand around my nape.
“Stay.”
“I wish I could.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Rather? Nothing. But I need to find a job.”
“Do you love it that much?”
Was she being sarcastic? Did she really not understand?
“Yes, I adore having a job steal my time, my thoughts, my energy, all so my bosses can sell someone else a product they’d survive without. It chokes me, playing a role I must uphold every moment, lest the master holding my leash drop me at the pound.”
“Then why do it?”
I tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear and traced the outline of the white blotch on her cheekbone.
“Maybe you don’t understand money, but out there you need it to exist. Plus, people find it natural to be handed a purpose. It saves them from thinking. Here, when you want to, you dive, talk to trees, lie in the grass. No one’s forced a society on you, and that’s one of the things I find most mesmerizing about you. You’re free from the worst humans have invented. But I belong to that outside world. To secure a good life, I’d need either stratospheric talent or the ability to ruthlessly manipulate others into handing over cash. I lack both. I must obey someone who’ll slip money into my bank account each month. And I’m glad you’re making that face. Glad you don’t get it.”
Leaving this forest felt like tearing metal from an industrial magnet. On the train back to my apartment, I yearned to jump off at the next stop and board one returning to Hitachi. Entering my apartment, sometimes after days away, felt like stepping into a summer home. I wandered the rooms suspecting the furniture had been rearranged, that someone had claimed the place and would brand me an intruder.
I compiled job listings from the internet. I sent my résumé even to postings that would reject me unless I lied during the interview. Each application meant leaping the same hurdle: I needed the money but loathed the routine it would condemn me to. Nerves. Cramps. Terror daily at finishing tasks on time, unsure if I could. I’d dread the next pit I’d stumble into, and to prepare myself, fueled by hair-pulling stress and coffee, I’d sacrifice some of my spare hours to research. The rest of my time would be reserved for rest, ensuring I was alert for incoming workloads. I would dream I was working, and after waking up at six, I’d drag myself to the job. I’d choke my thoughts and reactions to avoid appearing dispensable to the boss. Whenever an office drone included me in small talk, I’d spit out scripted lines, betraying my silence, and wonder if they saw through me. When I entered common areas, conversations would die. One day, a colleague I’d never spoken to might blurt their opinion of me. Corner plant. Zombie. Daily, my genetic intuition, the kind even citizens of a totalitarian regime feel, would needle me: We exist for a better fate.
So many hours and dignity sacrificed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. But what alternative was there? Live under the sky, eat rocks? Each passing minute edged me closer to needing another meal or drink—the unending struggle to exist that organic life had committed to, a struggle I’d signed up for through the unconscious decision to be born. A hollow existence stripped of color, that kept me busy to prevent me from questioning whether it was worth living.
At night, lying in my apartment bed, my mind churned. The woman’s absence ached like an amputated limb, but closing my eyes summoned her burning presence beside me. Though I needed sleep to stay focused on job hunting, she commandeered every checkpoint in my mind, deciding which thoughts passed and which jammed. Dozens of her details cycled, each flooding my veins like heroin. Her face, pupils dilating in the center of those pale-blue irises. Her flute-like voice pouring into my ears. Her honey-blonde mane shimmering under cloudy light. Her naked body, pale pink mottled with white patches. The dip of her abdomen between pelvic curves. Her breasts and neck trembling with spasms, lips parted and damp, bridged by a thread of saliva.
How did she hijack my thoughts until my life became a magnifying glass focused on her? I craved to chart every inch of her skin with my fingertips, map every discoloration. What would she think if she knew? She’d recoil. Yet I’d have installed cameras and mics in the clearing to capture every second, refusing to let those moments vanish into time and memory like a library torched.
Though one company called, they’d confused me with another interviewee they meant to reject. Of twenty applications, one led to an interview. I laundered a white shirt, black trousers, and a tie. That morning, I sat on a plastic chair outside an office door. A secretary would peer out and call my name eventually. Around me, men and one woman in monochrome outfits stared ahead like statues, or fiddled with phones. I avoided tapping the floor or shifting posture like a sleepless wreck hours into the night. Behind walls: muffled keystrokes, creaking chairs, voices cordially faking that enthusiasm tethered them to this office instead of their salary. But none of my rival applicants’ faces hinted they resented the poor script they performed like under penalty of breaching a contract.
If some lapse in judgement got me hired over these humans, I’d reenact the grueling routine: rising at six, trudging home drained at seven-thirty in the evening, fearing my mask might slip and reveal my disdain for having to obey in exchange for crumbs, disgust at forced small talk with strangers when talking wore me down. How would I balance that grind with the life I craved—secluding myself in the forest, grafting my skin to hers, forgetting that I had ever known the outside world? I’d lack energy to sustain both lives. The downfall from the time I had discovered the clearing until I lost my job proved it. I’d repeat that ending with new actors, or abandon the clearing and her.
I scratched a palm. One of my shoes tapped linoleum. Two expressionless men across the aisle watched me. I cleared my throat and leaned back. My pulse throbbed in my neck.
I wanted to slap every applicant. They waited to enter the office and kneel. Please, future boss, pay me enough to commute here and back, keep a roof, eat, and prop up the economy so the ruling party stays in power. Let me serve society. Assign me a purpose. Bury me in tasks to save me from thinking.
Had I become this? Someone terrorized by what moved and mattered, who agreed to neuter those feelings for shelter? I’d avoid anything that might spark new meanings, lest I question my enslavement. But at least I’d have a roof under which to age into a rotten shell, locked doors barring my inner self.
I closed my eyes. In my mind, I reached out to feel her skin against my fingertips. Of all humans I’d met, only she deserved to belong to the species. Daily she unveiled spectrums of light that life had hidden. If my future excluded her, why live?
I heard echoes of my name as if they had slipped into a dream. Through the ajar door, the secretary was peering out while holding my résumé. On its upper left corner, my photograph stared straight ahead with a cowlike expression.
I rose and followed her, stiff-legged. Inside, the secretary retreated to an adjacent room. Behind the desk sat a rugby-sized man in a suit and tie. His hair obeyed his comb’s orders. When he spoke and gestured to the chair, his teeth gleamed unnaturally white—nights spent with whitening strips.
I sank into the chair, head level with his chest. He scanned my résumé with a pen. Though he spoke, my brain refused to retain his questions, or my answers. Waves of unease coursed through me, threatening to erupt into nausea. Sweat trickled down my spine, pooled on my face, stung my eyes.
The man locked eyes with me, his mallet-like fist planted on the desk. Time to sell him the lie that I dreamed of laboring here, surrendering my life.
“I need someone to pay me enough monthly to cover food and the rent of my burrow. In exchange, I’ll do the bare minimum. The rest of the time I’ll pretend to work while resenting every hour wasted in the office—time better spent staring at my living room walls.”
The man shifted. Glanced away, scratched an ear. Took his time unknotting his frown.
“I don’t share your sense of humor.”
“I’m serious. Whether I work decides if I keep my apartment.”
The man drummed his knuckles and hunched over the desk. His eyes darted toward the typing noises next door.
“You have the wrong attitude for this office. Or any office.”
“You’re right.”
He shook his head, then shoved his chair back and pressed a button on his desk intercom. His voice hardened.
“Are you waiting to laugh and point at a hidden camera?”
“That would’ve been funny.”
The secretary peered out from the adjacent room. At her boss’ military-coded gesture, she opened the door and called the next applicant. The man fixed me with a squinted glare.
“You’re pulling stunts like this without an audience. I recommend you add a note about your mental health to the résumé. It’d speed things up. Now, out of my sight.”
I left the building like I’d just had an infected appendix removed. I had endured those humiliations for the last time.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National.
I awoke in the dark room of my closed eyes. Birds chirped and trilled from every direction, as if perched on an invisible dome. My back pressed flat against the bed of grass, and a cool breeze brushed the soles of my feet. Against me lay another warm body, its chest rising and falling against mine, its breath heating my neck. I allowed myself to marvel at this for a few seconds before prickling with the reminder that I needed to find a job or I wouldn’t have enough to cover the rent.
The fingers resting on my shoulder curled, digging between the bony ridges. I opened my eyes and tilted my head as the woman lifted hers. Her pale-blue eyes met mine as if instead of sleeping, she had merely stretched a blink.
What could I possibly want from life except to wake to the gaze of this woman looking back? I needed to comb every strand of her honey-blonde hair with my fingers, glide my fingertips over the taut skin of her abdomen, feel her breasts yield and mold to my palms, bury my face in her neck or armpits and inhale the scent of a lagoon. Every passing minute brought me closer to the moment when I’d need to hold her in my arms, like a dolphin must surface or drown.
But I forced myself to sit up. The flattened grass sprang back and tickled my lower back. The woman wrapped a hand around my nape.
“Stay.”
“I wish I could.”
“What would you rather do?”
“Rather? Nothing. But I need to find a job.”
“Do you love it that much?”
Was she being sarcastic? Did she really not understand?
“Yes, I adore having a job steal my time, my thoughts, my energy, all so my bosses can sell someone else a product they’d survive without. It chokes me, playing a role I must uphold every moment, lest the master holding my leash drop me at the pound.”
“Then why do it?”
I tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear and traced the outline of the white blotch on her cheekbone.
“Maybe you don’t understand money, but out there you need it to exist. Plus, people find it natural to be handed a purpose. It saves them from thinking. Here, when you want to, you dive, talk to trees, lie in the grass. No one’s forced a society on you, and that’s one of the things I find most mesmerizing about you. You’re free from the worst humans have invented. But I belong to that outside world. To secure a good life, I’d need either stratospheric talent or the ability to ruthlessly manipulate others into handing over cash. I lack both. I must obey someone who’ll slip money into my bank account each month. And I’m glad you’re making that face. Glad you don’t get it.”
Leaving this forest felt like tearing metal from an industrial magnet. On the train back to my apartment, I yearned to jump off at the next stop and board one returning to Hitachi. Entering my apartment, sometimes after days away, felt like stepping into a summer home. I wandered the rooms suspecting the furniture had been rearranged, that someone had claimed the place and would brand me an intruder.
I compiled job listings from the internet. I sent my résumé even to postings that would reject me unless I lied during the interview. Each application meant leaping the same hurdle: I needed the money but loathed the routine it would condemn me to. Nerves. Cramps. Terror daily at finishing tasks on time, unsure if I could. I’d dread the next pit I’d stumble into, and to prepare myself, fueled by hair-pulling stress and coffee, I’d sacrifice some of my spare hours to research. The rest of my time would be reserved for rest, ensuring I was alert for incoming workloads. I would dream I was working, and after waking up at six, I’d drag myself to the job. I’d choke my thoughts and reactions to avoid appearing dispensable to the boss. Whenever an office drone included me in small talk, I’d spit out scripted lines, betraying my silence, and wonder if they saw through me. When I entered common areas, conversations would die. One day, a colleague I’d never spoken to might blurt their opinion of me. Corner plant. Zombie. Daily, my genetic intuition, the kind even citizens of a totalitarian regime feel, would needle me: We exist for a better fate.
So many hours and dignity sacrificed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. But what alternative was there? Live under the sky, eat rocks? Each passing minute edged me closer to needing another meal or drink—the unending struggle to exist that organic life had committed to, a struggle I’d signed up for through the unconscious decision to be born. A hollow existence stripped of color, that kept me busy to prevent me from questioning whether it was worth living.
At night, lying in my apartment bed, my mind churned. The woman’s absence ached like an amputated limb, but closing my eyes summoned her burning presence beside me. Though I needed sleep to stay focused on job hunting, she commandeered every checkpoint in my mind, deciding which thoughts passed and which jammed. Dozens of her details cycled, each flooding my veins like heroin. Her face, pupils dilating in the center of those pale-blue irises. Her flute-like voice pouring into my ears. Her honey-blonde mane shimmering under cloudy light. Her naked body, pale pink mottled with white patches. The dip of her abdomen between pelvic curves. Her breasts and neck trembling with spasms, lips parted and damp, bridged by a thread of saliva.
How did she hijack my thoughts until my life became a magnifying glass focused on her? I craved to chart every inch of her skin with my fingertips, map every discoloration. What would she think if she knew? She’d recoil. Yet I’d have installed cameras and mics in the clearing to capture every second, refusing to let those moments vanish into time and memory like a library torched.
Though one company called, they’d confused me with another interviewee they meant to reject. Of twenty applications, one led to an interview. I laundered a white shirt, black trousers, and a tie. That morning, I sat on a plastic chair outside an office door. A secretary would peer out and call my name eventually. Around me, men and one woman in monochrome outfits stared ahead like statues, or fiddled with phones. I avoided tapping the floor or shifting posture like a sleepless wreck hours into the night. Behind walls: muffled keystrokes, creaking chairs, voices cordially faking that enthusiasm tethered them to this office instead of their salary. But none of my rival applicants’ faces hinted they resented the poor script they performed like under penalty of breaching a contract.
If some lapse in judgement got me hired over these humans, I’d reenact the grueling routine: rising at six, trudging home drained at seven-thirty in the evening, fearing my mask might slip and reveal my disdain for having to obey in exchange for crumbs, disgust at forced small talk with strangers when talking wore me down. How would I balance that grind with the life I craved—secluding myself in the forest, grafting my skin to hers, forgetting that I had ever known the outside world? I’d lack energy to sustain both lives. The downfall from the time I had discovered the clearing until I lost my job proved it. I’d repeat that ending with new actors, or abandon the clearing and her.
I scratched a palm. One of my shoes tapped linoleum. Two expressionless men across the aisle watched me. I cleared my throat and leaned back. My pulse throbbed in my neck.
I wanted to slap every applicant. They waited to enter the office and kneel. Please, future boss, pay me enough to commute here and back, keep a roof, eat, and prop up the economy so the ruling party stays in power. Let me serve society. Assign me a purpose. Bury me in tasks to save me from thinking.
Had I become this? Someone terrorized by what moved and mattered, who agreed to neuter those feelings for shelter? I’d avoid anything that might spark new meanings, lest I question my enslavement. But at least I’d have a roof under which to age into a rotten shell, locked doors barring my inner self.
I closed my eyes. In my mind, I reached out to feel her skin against my fingertips. Of all humans I’d met, only she deserved to belong to the species. Daily she unveiled spectrums of light that life had hidden. If my future excluded her, why live?
I heard echoes of my name as if they had slipped into a dream. Through the ajar door, the secretary was peering out while holding my résumé. On its upper left corner, my photograph stared straight ahead with a cowlike expression.
I rose and followed her, stiff-legged. Inside, the secretary retreated to an adjacent room. Behind the desk sat a rugby-sized man in a suit and tie. His hair obeyed his comb’s orders. When he spoke and gestured to the chair, his teeth gleamed unnaturally white—nights spent with whitening strips.
I sank into the chair, head level with his chest. He scanned my résumé with a pen. Though he spoke, my brain refused to retain his questions, or my answers. Waves of unease coursed through me, threatening to erupt into nausea. Sweat trickled down my spine, pooled on my face, stung my eyes.
The man locked eyes with me, his mallet-like fist planted on the desk. Time to sell him the lie that I dreamed of laboring here, surrendering my life.
“I need someone to pay me enough monthly to cover food and the rent of my burrow. In exchange, I’ll do the bare minimum. The rest of the time I’ll pretend to work while resenting every hour wasted in the office—time better spent staring at my living room walls.”
The man shifted. Glanced away, scratched an ear. Took his time unknotting his frown.
“I don’t share your sense of humor.”
“I’m serious. Whether I work decides if I keep my apartment.”
The man drummed his knuckles and hunched over the desk. His eyes darted toward the typing noises next door.
“You have the wrong attitude for this office. Or any office.”
“You’re right.”
He shook his head, then shoved his chair back and pressed a button on his desk intercom. His voice hardened.
“Are you waiting to laugh and point at a hidden camera?”
“That would’ve been funny.”
The secretary peered out from the adjacent room. At her boss’ military-coded gesture, she opened the door and called the next applicant. The man fixed me with a squinted glare.
“You’re pulling stunts like this without an audience. I recommend you add a note about your mental health to the résumé. It’d speed things up. Now, out of my sight.”
I left the building like I’d just had an infected appendix removed. I had endured those humiliations for the last time.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National.
February 24, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 6 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I took sick leave from the office for as long as they would tolerate it, and when I dragged myself back to work, I pretended to be recovering from the flu. I strategized how to use the accumulated vacation days I had never cashed in. In my former life, I would have spent those days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.
I endured a workday convinced it was Tuesday, but by the end, overhearing colleagues exchange weekend plans, I realized two days of holiday would follow.
The hours passed in blurred frames. Sweat beaded at my temples. I squirmed in my chair, skimming tasks as my brain burned and throbbed like an infected wound.
While rubbing my eyelids and breathing through clenched teeth, a presence stirred the air around me, now saturated with the scent of a perfume sampler. My supervisor. Her black mane, pulled into a ponytail, gleamed like a doll’s. She wore one of her white blouses, through whose fabric I glimpsed a black bra.
“Still sick?”
What could I say? Although I cleared my throat, I stayed silent, so she continued.
“You used to be the type who’d come to the office even when green with illness. Now you’re late, delaying tasks. You’re not here.”
I stared numbly into her eyes. Her looming beside me felt unreal—a scene from a low-budget TV show.
“Yes.”
She drummed on my desk with her pink nails, adorned with star and moon stickers.
“What’s wrong with you?”
None of your business. I owe you no explanations. If my performance displeases you, you know how to fix it. Otherwise, leave me alone.
“Nothing. Personal matters.”
Her plastered cordial smile slipped into the disdain beneath. She stiffened, and tilted her head slightly.
“We’re behind on this project, and I’m out of excuses. Take a breath and get to work, okay?”
Before I could reply, she glided to another wing of the office.
Outside the forest, I needed armor against the world—a beast sheathed in metal spikes. I’d forced myself to act like a servant of society, but among pines, beside her, my words and actions flowed unscripted. How could I not ache to shut my eyes and reopen them to find her lying beside me?
Our conversations revealed that any mention of the world beyond the clearing overwhelmed her. Half her replies twisted my questions, as if translated through another language. Thankfully, her madness flew under conscious radar. The clearing and its pines satisfied her; she craved no other lands. I admired her like nobility from an exotic realm, her customs endlessly fascinating.
The next morning, at the office, I organized tasks and fought to focus, but an invisible force tugged me away from the blinking cursor and sea of cubicles. Heatwaves drowned me. When I turned my head, the office quaked like during an earthquake.
I thought it was noon, but my wristwatch showed minutes to one. I stared at the back and black hair of the colleague across from me; the next moment, my supervisor materialized beside me, and the colleague’s chair sat empty, his screen saver dancing. She stood rigid while frowning at papers to avoid my gaze.
“Today.” Her tone implied she was sparing me insults. “Meet the deadlines. Your colleagues have enough on their plates.”
The rest of the day, I tracked the blur of her swinging ponytail through glass partitions and screens. Fifteen minutes before clock-out, when I’d be spared from bumping into my supervisor, I slipped away.
That night, I slept in fits. Pressure pulsed in my skull. Lying on my back, headlights streaking through blinds to cast geometric shapes on the ceiling, my eyes burned as if soaked in saltwater.
Before meeting my woman, I’d breeze through tasks and scavenge an hour to wander online. If I wasted the night sweating into my sheets, tomorrow I’d battle drooping eyelids. If I slept, the alarm would yank me awake, leaving just minutes to shower, dress, eat, and commute to the office, where I’d race deadlines. Every hour dictated its use. Daily, the minutes clamped my neck like tightening pliers. Yet at dawn, I’d show up at work and polish my overdue work, whatever the cost.
The next morning, I sat at my desk, and as the computer booted, my supervisor’s silhouette slid across the mosaic of glass toward my area. I straightened. She met a figure in the office center—a man around sixty, gray buzzcut, square glasses. Whenever he appeared, the baseball chatter died. My coworkers stiffened; their chairs fell silent. He entered a meeting room, leaving the door ajar.
I glanced over my shoulder. The supervisor marched toward me. Our eyes met; hers flicked away as if spotting a cockroach. Her heels clacked over keyboards and coughs. Stopping beside me, she fixed her gaze left of my monitor. Citrus perfume cascaded from her neck.
“To the meeting room.”
She tugged at a wrinkle in her skirt, then click-clacked away. She disappeared into the meeting room, from which the scraping of chairs and somber voices emerged.
The throbbing in my temples reddened my view of the cursor stranded on the spreadsheet. I gathered my notebook and pen, cleared the browser history, and shut down the computer. Ears taut, I fled the office.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.
I took sick leave from the office for as long as they would tolerate it, and when I dragged myself back to work, I pretended to be recovering from the flu. I strategized how to use the accumulated vacation days I had never cashed in. In my former life, I would have spent those days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.
I endured a workday convinced it was Tuesday, but by the end, overhearing colleagues exchange weekend plans, I realized two days of holiday would follow.
The hours passed in blurred frames. Sweat beaded at my temples. I squirmed in my chair, skimming tasks as my brain burned and throbbed like an infected wound.
While rubbing my eyelids and breathing through clenched teeth, a presence stirred the air around me, now saturated with the scent of a perfume sampler. My supervisor. Her black mane, pulled into a ponytail, gleamed like a doll’s. She wore one of her white blouses, through whose fabric I glimpsed a black bra.
“Still sick?”
What could I say? Although I cleared my throat, I stayed silent, so she continued.
“You used to be the type who’d come to the office even when green with illness. Now you’re late, delaying tasks. You’re not here.”
I stared numbly into her eyes. Her looming beside me felt unreal—a scene from a low-budget TV show.
“Yes.”
She drummed on my desk with her pink nails, adorned with star and moon stickers.
“What’s wrong with you?”
None of your business. I owe you no explanations. If my performance displeases you, you know how to fix it. Otherwise, leave me alone.
“Nothing. Personal matters.”
Her plastered cordial smile slipped into the disdain beneath. She stiffened, and tilted her head slightly.
“We’re behind on this project, and I’m out of excuses. Take a breath and get to work, okay?”
Before I could reply, she glided to another wing of the office.
Outside the forest, I needed armor against the world—a beast sheathed in metal spikes. I’d forced myself to act like a servant of society, but among pines, beside her, my words and actions flowed unscripted. How could I not ache to shut my eyes and reopen them to find her lying beside me?
Our conversations revealed that any mention of the world beyond the clearing overwhelmed her. Half her replies twisted my questions, as if translated through another language. Thankfully, her madness flew under conscious radar. The clearing and its pines satisfied her; she craved no other lands. I admired her like nobility from an exotic realm, her customs endlessly fascinating.
The next morning, at the office, I organized tasks and fought to focus, but an invisible force tugged me away from the blinking cursor and sea of cubicles. Heatwaves drowned me. When I turned my head, the office quaked like during an earthquake.
I thought it was noon, but my wristwatch showed minutes to one. I stared at the back and black hair of the colleague across from me; the next moment, my supervisor materialized beside me, and the colleague’s chair sat empty, his screen saver dancing. She stood rigid while frowning at papers to avoid my gaze.
“Today.” Her tone implied she was sparing me insults. “Meet the deadlines. Your colleagues have enough on their plates.”
The rest of the day, I tracked the blur of her swinging ponytail through glass partitions and screens. Fifteen minutes before clock-out, when I’d be spared from bumping into my supervisor, I slipped away.
That night, I slept in fits. Pressure pulsed in my skull. Lying on my back, headlights streaking through blinds to cast geometric shapes on the ceiling, my eyes burned as if soaked in saltwater.
Before meeting my woman, I’d breeze through tasks and scavenge an hour to wander online. If I wasted the night sweating into my sheets, tomorrow I’d battle drooping eyelids. If I slept, the alarm would yank me awake, leaving just minutes to shower, dress, eat, and commute to the office, where I’d race deadlines. Every hour dictated its use. Daily, the minutes clamped my neck like tightening pliers. Yet at dawn, I’d show up at work and polish my overdue work, whatever the cost.
The next morning, I sat at my desk, and as the computer booted, my supervisor’s silhouette slid across the mosaic of glass toward my area. I straightened. She met a figure in the office center—a man around sixty, gray buzzcut, square glasses. Whenever he appeared, the baseball chatter died. My coworkers stiffened; their chairs fell silent. He entered a meeting room, leaving the door ajar.
I glanced over my shoulder. The supervisor marched toward me. Our eyes met; hers flicked away as if spotting a cockroach. Her heels clacked over keyboards and coughs. Stopping beside me, she fixed her gaze left of my monitor. Citrus perfume cascaded from her neck.
“To the meeting room.”
She tugged at a wrinkle in her skirt, then click-clacked away. She disappeared into the meeting room, from which the scraping of chairs and somber voices emerged.
The throbbing in my temples reddened my view of the cursor stranded on the spreadsheet. I gathered my notebook and pen, cleared the browser history, and shut down the computer. Ears taut, I fled the office.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.
February 23, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 10 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.
The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.
The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.
The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.
She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.
The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.
The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.
I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.
“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”
“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”
“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”
“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”
“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”
“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”
I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.
The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.
Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.
Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.
I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.
“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”
Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.
“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”
“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”
“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.
I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.
The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.
The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.
The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.
She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.
The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.
The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.
I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.
“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”
“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”
“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”
“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”
“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”
“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”
I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.
The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.
Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.
Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.
I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.
“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”
Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.
“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”
“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”
“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.
February 20, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 5 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.
In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.
I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.
That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.
As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.
She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.
“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”
“I’ll talk with you.”
I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.
“Want to sit?”
She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.
I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.
Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.
Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?
I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.
My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?
I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?
I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.
Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.
Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.
“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You want me here?”
“In the morning?”
“I work.”
Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.
“Please.”
That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.
Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.
It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.
I called, asking for a supervisor.
“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”
I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.
I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.
The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.
I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.
In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.
I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.
That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.
As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.
She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.
“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”
“I’ll talk with you.”
I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.
“Want to sit?”
She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.
I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.
Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.
Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?
I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.
My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?
I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?
I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.
Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.
Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.
“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You want me here?”
“In the morning?”
“I work.”
Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.
“Please.”
That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.
Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.
It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.
I called, asking for a supervisor.
“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”
I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.
I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.
The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.
I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
February 19, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 9 (Fiction)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena gripped her glass of coffee, raised it to her lips, and tilted her head back. The remaining coffee sloshed as she guzzled it down to the sediment, a sludge that must have smelled of earthy, singed beans. She set the glass down with a hollow clink, then paused to swallow. Her tongue flicked across the surface of her lips and disappeared between them.
“I didn’t conclude my talk about the unnamed void. In case you’re still game to continue this tour of the netherworld.”
“If you’re willing to share, I’m willing to listen.”
“Alright. As the darkness fills every corner of your mind, as it eats away at everything that made life bearable, you spot a yellowing scrap of paper at the bottom of the abyss, so small you’d miss it if you didn’t squint. You lean to make out the words scribbled on its crumpled, dirty surface, and they read: ‘This is not temporary. This is not an anomaly. This is the true state of being.’ You integrate a realization that the majority of humanity has been spared: the void existed from the start, and only the evolved chemical balance, the lies your brain tells to keep you alive, had shielded you from confronting it. But my safeguards had failed. As if the Earth’s magnetosphere had collapsed, the solar winds had blasted away the atmosphere, and the planet had become exposed to a torrent of radiation. The void can never be vanquished; it can only be delayed. Down there, the notion that such a nightmare could end doesn’t make sense. The mocking voice repeats that this is how it’s always been and always will be. But you’ve escaped before. The only way out of that black hole is to hold on tight and wait until it spits you back out. Your mind has been reduced to a whirlwind of razor blades. Your body is made of lead. You retreat under the covers, curl into a fetal position, and await a new birth. You wait through the night. You wait through the morning. You wait through the afternoon. You wait through another night. Days pass, but you perceive them in increments: the space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat and the next. One day, the abyss feels shallower. The cold begins to thaw and the darkness retreats, dragging with it the voice repeating that you’re useless, rotten, unwanted, a cancer to all those close to you. Your inner theater lights up with a faint, fuzzy memory of sunlight. A song. A line from a book. A hand on yours. The brain’s machinery churns out its magic again. Inhibitors and disinhibitors toil overtime to rebuild the protective illusion. The veil of normalcy falls back in place, allowing you to resume the masquerade. It’s not a victory. You haven’t slain a dragon or stormed a castle; you survived yourself. You emerge from the underworld, your face smudged with ashes, your eyes haunted. Then you remember the voice that has been your lifeline. You reconnect with the artists that have seen through the cracks of the world, who helped you understand yourself, and made you hope to survive long enough to light your own candle in the dark.”
The breeze had grown colder as the sun struggled to pierce through a sheet of darkening gray overhead, the color of corroded silverware. Elena tucked her almond-blonde locks behind her ears, then rubbed her palms against the thighs of her jeans. After a quiet sigh, she continued.
“You may have noticed that my tolerance for bullshit is low, which is funny considering what we all swim through, which is liquid bullshit, from the moment our ears are developed enough to process the noise spouted from our parents’ mouths. That’s why we need to learn to distinguish the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves, or the raindrops pattering on a window, or the symphony of a band we like, or the voice of someone we love. To have a few sounds in our lives that break through the fog of bullshit to mean something.” Elena’s left hand drifted up to her sweatshirt and sought her metallic moth pendant, thumb and index fingers encircling the sculpted insect. “Sadly that is a precarious, temporary healing. Eventually, a shift of weather and a misfiring of synapses will drag me down to that dark place, to that ancient void waiting for me in the caverns of my mind, that reminds me that my joy has always been an illusion. Each cycle of darkness scraping precious matter from my brain that I will never recover. Until one day, that black hole will return and there won’t be enough of me left to claw my way back into the light. So there is no happy ending. Not in this life. My best answer to your original question, Jon, is that I’m not actively suicidal but I’d prefer not to exist. I’d rather be a book on a shelf than a living human.”
I pictured Elena as a child, alone in her darkened bedroom, huddled in a corner. Her knees hugged to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body trembling with each ragged sob. The tiny figure in a vast and uncaring world rocked back and forth while muttering to herself, “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” But no matter how fervently she wished, the world refused to let her slip away. It clung to her like a parasite, feeding off her misery. Meeting Elena meant brushing against a profound sorrow, to trace one’s fingertips along a fault line.
My throat felt dry and constricted, and my vocal cords struggled to produce words.
“Live for today, Elena. Keep going as long as you can, and keep enjoying what you love.”
She dipped her chin and furrowed her brow, her pale blues fixed on my eyes. A faint smile tugged at a corner of her mouth; she might as well have told me outright to come up with better lines.
“Sometimes I think Siobhan had it right. At least she knew what she wanted: oblivion, peace, whatever you want to call it. Me? I’m stuck in this loop of wanting to disappear while craving something to tether me here. Like my favorite songs, or…” She gestured vaguely at the printouts. “Or these words I keep bleeding. I’m a junkie who needs a fix to prevent her from falling apart. So yeah, the only question is whether anyone’s going to be there to drag me away from the edge when I finally give up. Right now, though, I’m here, in a fancy coffee shop, with a guy who has long eyelashes and a strange fascination with my stories, and who is probably a serial killer. That’s about as good as it can get for me.”
The fingers of Elena’s right hand fluttered in a wavy motion. Maybe she caught my glance, because she balled that hand into a tight fist before withdrawing it beneath the table. With her head bowed, her eyes skittered over the table.
“You didn’t ask me to spill that much of my guts,” she said in a hesitant voice. “It’s just that, well, I’m on edge. Not used to sharing my serious writing or talking about anything that matters. I also have a hard time filtering myself.” Elena took a deep breath. She lifted her gaze to meet mine, her pale blues searching. “Let’s talk about you for a change. What do you like to do, Jon?”
“Masturbate.”
Elena smirked, then chuckled dryly. She uncoiled as if my reply had released the built-up tension, and her eyes twinkled with a conspiratorial gleam like an imp about to propose mischief.
“Oh, samesies. I don’t know if I have a sexual orientation so much as plain perversion. Do you ever feel ashamed when you molest yourself?”
“I only feel ashamed when I don’t.”
She snorted and shook her head.
“What other hobbies have you developed to cope with the misery of existence, Jon? Writing’s one of them, right? We met at a writing course, after all.”
“I used to. For me.”
“How long ago, and why did you stop?”
“Ten years, when I realized my words would be useless.”
Elena’s eyes searched my face. My skin itched as if I’d been bathed in toxic goo, and now I could feel every cell’s molecular structure degrading.
“Maybe you should give it another shot, Jon, for the sake of the lonely, invisible man behind your bullshit.”
“I also like to listen to a woman telling me the most intimate, horrifying things.”
She lounged back in her rattan chair, her head cocked slightly as she scrutinized me.
“Now seriously. Why are you here, Jon?”
“Because of you.”
“I’m not asking why you’re sitting at this table. I’m asking why you’re here in the world. What is it that keeps you from walking into the ocean and swimming until you sink?”
“I’m addicted to the smell of your hair. Honey-scented shampoo, right?”
“Whatever’s there when I reach for the shelf. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m also a sucker for a pretty pair of eyes, especially if they’re full of pain.”
“If you don’t answer truthfully, I’ll have to go with my serial killer theory.”
“I’ll say it again: because of you. The story of your existence.”
Elena’s pale blues narrowed as she stared me down, trying to figure out the angle.
“What a sweet lie.”
“You’re my motivation to stay afloat. You’re that guiding star on a stormy sea at night. That’s all there is.”
She exhaled deeply through her nose.
“Please. I’ve been dumping my depressing shit on you. I thought it’d be harder to open up, and I was sure that once you realized what you’d gotten into, you’d run away screaming.”
“I’m not going to leave. I’m here for the long haul. Even if you tell me fuck off, I may pretend I didn’t hear it.”
“Fuck, you’re an idiot. Why the hell do you want to hang out with a miserable bitch like me? I’m not even that hot.”
“My loins disagree.”
“The monster might emerge if you stick around. I’m radiation’s daughter. I can’t stop hurting people.”
“Someone needs to be there to drag you away from the edge. One day you may look back and be glad you didn’t jump.”
Elena’s shoulders slumped.
“Being someone’s only tether to the world. That’s quite the sacrifice, Jon. I doubt you’d benefit much from it.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Her eyes bored into mine. She then hunched over, a loose almond-blonde lock spilling onto her forehead, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“Late at night, when I’m listening to my favorite music, there are fragile moments where I believe life may be worth living. Just to hear what she’ll create next, to feel whole if only through my headphones. But that’s pathetic, isn’t it? Clinging to life because of an artist who has no idea that I exist. Who would probably hate my guts if she met me.”
“Your everyday life can erode even your sense of what’s meaningful. Jobs in particular excel at that. Everything becomes an unwanted transaction. But art is worth sticking around for. If you feel understood at least by some artists’ work, that means you’re not alone. And I care about what you write.”
“Do you have any idea how terrifying you are to me, Jon? Having someone want to read the darkness that spills out of my mind. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of you understanding or not. Because if you do understand, then what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? And if you don’t… well, then we’re two strangers playing at connection in an overpriced coffee shop, aren’t we?”
“When it comes to my role, Elena: the next time you find yourself at the end of your rope, if you can’t reach me with your hand, send me a text message that just reads, ‘Siobhan.'”
Elena tried to beat me in a staring contest, but she broke away and looked down at the second stack of stapled printouts. She picked it up and tossed it in front of me, letting them land on top of the first set.
“Something about you sets off alarm bells in my head. It makes me feel like I could fall deep into that dark, fathomless place within you, never to emerge. A strange comfort, to say the least. Like discovering someone who looks at the same bleak landscape, who feels the same cold, uncaring winds. Who’s heard the same whispers in the dead of night. But I’m afraid if we get closer, that place inside of you will pull me in. So here’s to this distance between us and these small steps, Jon. Now quit fucking around and move onto the second exhibit of Elena’s Dark Carnival.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips.
Elena gripped her glass of coffee, raised it to her lips, and tilted her head back. The remaining coffee sloshed as she guzzled it down to the sediment, a sludge that must have smelled of earthy, singed beans. She set the glass down with a hollow clink, then paused to swallow. Her tongue flicked across the surface of her lips and disappeared between them.
“I didn’t conclude my talk about the unnamed void. In case you’re still game to continue this tour of the netherworld.”
“If you’re willing to share, I’m willing to listen.”
“Alright. As the darkness fills every corner of your mind, as it eats away at everything that made life bearable, you spot a yellowing scrap of paper at the bottom of the abyss, so small you’d miss it if you didn’t squint. You lean to make out the words scribbled on its crumpled, dirty surface, and they read: ‘This is not temporary. This is not an anomaly. This is the true state of being.’ You integrate a realization that the majority of humanity has been spared: the void existed from the start, and only the evolved chemical balance, the lies your brain tells to keep you alive, had shielded you from confronting it. But my safeguards had failed. As if the Earth’s magnetosphere had collapsed, the solar winds had blasted away the atmosphere, and the planet had become exposed to a torrent of radiation. The void can never be vanquished; it can only be delayed. Down there, the notion that such a nightmare could end doesn’t make sense. The mocking voice repeats that this is how it’s always been and always will be. But you’ve escaped before. The only way out of that black hole is to hold on tight and wait until it spits you back out. Your mind has been reduced to a whirlwind of razor blades. Your body is made of lead. You retreat under the covers, curl into a fetal position, and await a new birth. You wait through the night. You wait through the morning. You wait through the afternoon. You wait through another night. Days pass, but you perceive them in increments: the space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat and the next. One day, the abyss feels shallower. The cold begins to thaw and the darkness retreats, dragging with it the voice repeating that you’re useless, rotten, unwanted, a cancer to all those close to you. Your inner theater lights up with a faint, fuzzy memory of sunlight. A song. A line from a book. A hand on yours. The brain’s machinery churns out its magic again. Inhibitors and disinhibitors toil overtime to rebuild the protective illusion. The veil of normalcy falls back in place, allowing you to resume the masquerade. It’s not a victory. You haven’t slain a dragon or stormed a castle; you survived yourself. You emerge from the underworld, your face smudged with ashes, your eyes haunted. Then you remember the voice that has been your lifeline. You reconnect with the artists that have seen through the cracks of the world, who helped you understand yourself, and made you hope to survive long enough to light your own candle in the dark.”
The breeze had grown colder as the sun struggled to pierce through a sheet of darkening gray overhead, the color of corroded silverware. Elena tucked her almond-blonde locks behind her ears, then rubbed her palms against the thighs of her jeans. After a quiet sigh, she continued.
“You may have noticed that my tolerance for bullshit is low, which is funny considering what we all swim through, which is liquid bullshit, from the moment our ears are developed enough to process the noise spouted from our parents’ mouths. That’s why we need to learn to distinguish the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves, or the raindrops pattering on a window, or the symphony of a band we like, or the voice of someone we love. To have a few sounds in our lives that break through the fog of bullshit to mean something.” Elena’s left hand drifted up to her sweatshirt and sought her metallic moth pendant, thumb and index fingers encircling the sculpted insect. “Sadly that is a precarious, temporary healing. Eventually, a shift of weather and a misfiring of synapses will drag me down to that dark place, to that ancient void waiting for me in the caverns of my mind, that reminds me that my joy has always been an illusion. Each cycle of darkness scraping precious matter from my brain that I will never recover. Until one day, that black hole will return and there won’t be enough of me left to claw my way back into the light. So there is no happy ending. Not in this life. My best answer to your original question, Jon, is that I’m not actively suicidal but I’d prefer not to exist. I’d rather be a book on a shelf than a living human.”
I pictured Elena as a child, alone in her darkened bedroom, huddled in a corner. Her knees hugged to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body trembling with each ragged sob. The tiny figure in a vast and uncaring world rocked back and forth while muttering to herself, “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” But no matter how fervently she wished, the world refused to let her slip away. It clung to her like a parasite, feeding off her misery. Meeting Elena meant brushing against a profound sorrow, to trace one’s fingertips along a fault line.
My throat felt dry and constricted, and my vocal cords struggled to produce words.
“Live for today, Elena. Keep going as long as you can, and keep enjoying what you love.”
She dipped her chin and furrowed her brow, her pale blues fixed on my eyes. A faint smile tugged at a corner of her mouth; she might as well have told me outright to come up with better lines.
“Sometimes I think Siobhan had it right. At least she knew what she wanted: oblivion, peace, whatever you want to call it. Me? I’m stuck in this loop of wanting to disappear while craving something to tether me here. Like my favorite songs, or…” She gestured vaguely at the printouts. “Or these words I keep bleeding. I’m a junkie who needs a fix to prevent her from falling apart. So yeah, the only question is whether anyone’s going to be there to drag me away from the edge when I finally give up. Right now, though, I’m here, in a fancy coffee shop, with a guy who has long eyelashes and a strange fascination with my stories, and who is probably a serial killer. That’s about as good as it can get for me.”
The fingers of Elena’s right hand fluttered in a wavy motion. Maybe she caught my glance, because she balled that hand into a tight fist before withdrawing it beneath the table. With her head bowed, her eyes skittered over the table.
“You didn’t ask me to spill that much of my guts,” she said in a hesitant voice. “It’s just that, well, I’m on edge. Not used to sharing my serious writing or talking about anything that matters. I also have a hard time filtering myself.” Elena took a deep breath. She lifted her gaze to meet mine, her pale blues searching. “Let’s talk about you for a change. What do you like to do, Jon?”
“Masturbate.”
Elena smirked, then chuckled dryly. She uncoiled as if my reply had released the built-up tension, and her eyes twinkled with a conspiratorial gleam like an imp about to propose mischief.
“Oh, samesies. I don’t know if I have a sexual orientation so much as plain perversion. Do you ever feel ashamed when you molest yourself?”
“I only feel ashamed when I don’t.”
She snorted and shook her head.
“What other hobbies have you developed to cope with the misery of existence, Jon? Writing’s one of them, right? We met at a writing course, after all.”
“I used to. For me.”
“How long ago, and why did you stop?”
“Ten years, when I realized my words would be useless.”
Elena’s eyes searched my face. My skin itched as if I’d been bathed in toxic goo, and now I could feel every cell’s molecular structure degrading.
“Maybe you should give it another shot, Jon, for the sake of the lonely, invisible man behind your bullshit.”
“I also like to listen to a woman telling me the most intimate, horrifying things.”
She lounged back in her rattan chair, her head cocked slightly as she scrutinized me.
“Now seriously. Why are you here, Jon?”
“Because of you.”
“I’m not asking why you’re sitting at this table. I’m asking why you’re here in the world. What is it that keeps you from walking into the ocean and swimming until you sink?”
“I’m addicted to the smell of your hair. Honey-scented shampoo, right?”
“Whatever’s there when I reach for the shelf. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m also a sucker for a pretty pair of eyes, especially if they’re full of pain.”
“If you don’t answer truthfully, I’ll have to go with my serial killer theory.”
“I’ll say it again: because of you. The story of your existence.”
Elena’s pale blues narrowed as she stared me down, trying to figure out the angle.
“What a sweet lie.”
“You’re my motivation to stay afloat. You’re that guiding star on a stormy sea at night. That’s all there is.”
She exhaled deeply through her nose.
“Please. I’ve been dumping my depressing shit on you. I thought it’d be harder to open up, and I was sure that once you realized what you’d gotten into, you’d run away screaming.”
“I’m not going to leave. I’m here for the long haul. Even if you tell me fuck off, I may pretend I didn’t hear it.”
“Fuck, you’re an idiot. Why the hell do you want to hang out with a miserable bitch like me? I’m not even that hot.”
“My loins disagree.”
“The monster might emerge if you stick around. I’m radiation’s daughter. I can’t stop hurting people.”
“Someone needs to be there to drag you away from the edge. One day you may look back and be glad you didn’t jump.”
Elena’s shoulders slumped.
“Being someone’s only tether to the world. That’s quite the sacrifice, Jon. I doubt you’d benefit much from it.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Her eyes bored into mine. She then hunched over, a loose almond-blonde lock spilling onto her forehead, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“Late at night, when I’m listening to my favorite music, there are fragile moments where I believe life may be worth living. Just to hear what she’ll create next, to feel whole if only through my headphones. But that’s pathetic, isn’t it? Clinging to life because of an artist who has no idea that I exist. Who would probably hate my guts if she met me.”
“Your everyday life can erode even your sense of what’s meaningful. Jobs in particular excel at that. Everything becomes an unwanted transaction. But art is worth sticking around for. If you feel understood at least by some artists’ work, that means you’re not alone. And I care about what you write.”
“Do you have any idea how terrifying you are to me, Jon? Having someone want to read the darkness that spills out of my mind. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of you understanding or not. Because if you do understand, then what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? And if you don’t… well, then we’re two strangers playing at connection in an overpriced coffee shop, aren’t we?”
“When it comes to my role, Elena: the next time you find yourself at the end of your rope, if you can’t reach me with your hand, send me a text message that just reads, ‘Siobhan.'”
Elena tried to beat me in a staring contest, but she broke away and looked down at the second stack of stapled printouts. She picked it up and tossed it in front of me, letting them land on top of the first set.
“Something about you sets off alarm bells in my head. It makes me feel like I could fall deep into that dark, fathomless place within you, never to emerge. A strange comfort, to say the least. Like discovering someone who looks at the same bleak landscape, who feels the same cold, uncaring winds. Who’s heard the same whispers in the dead of night. But I’m afraid if we get closer, that place inside of you will pull me in. So here’s to this distance between us and these small steps, Jon. Now quit fucking around and move onto the second exhibit of Elena’s Dark Carnival.”
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Author’s note: today’s song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips.
