Jon Ureña's Blog, page 67

My Own Desert Places, Pt. 5 (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal page, where it looks better

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After Ainhoa leaves, I get back into what's supposed to be my home from now on, but when I close the front door behind me and I stand in the eerily silent and darkened interior, I feel unwelcome. Without thinking, I'm holding my hand over my injured ribs. Every breath can bring me pain if I'm careless, and twisting my body is off limits. That means that I can't tidy up the papers, newspapers, framed photos and other random objects that for some reason have fallen off their shelves and tables.
I shuffle into the living room on my way to a sofa, and I nearly step on the pieces of a vase that had crashed against the floor. The mess gives the impression that someone broke in and fucked shit up just to make the owner's life more difficult. When I sit wearily on the sofa, its cushions accommodate me comfortably. At some point I will need to buy the painkillers they prescribed me, and also press some ice against my ribcage. In any case, as I take deep, careful breaths, I appreciate that I finally have time for myself, to think, to plan how to put in practice why I occupied Asier's body to begin with. I have wasted enough time away from Alazne, and I have no clue what she has been doing in the meantime.
As I close my legs casually, I squeeze something in between my thighs, which hurts. I own a whole new set of genitals with which I have no idea what to do. My self-image remains that of a woman. I have to acquaint myself with the self I will offer to the world.
It takes me a while to walk around until I find a bathroom. The vase that held the toothbrushes has fallen to the floor. I steel myself to face the mirror, and when Asier's manly features stare back at me, it feels surreal. Beneath the thick, brown hair with some greys, three stitches hold together the wound where Asier hit his head against the steering wheel. It will take quite a while to heal properly, and I can't imagine what Alazne will think if I approach her like this. Also, the strong facial features, including a prominent jaw, feel gross to me, the opposite of the delicate female features that I'm attracted to.
I lift up my shirt to reveal a hairy, muscular body with a flat stomach. I suppose I don't look bad for a guy of higher than average height in his late thirties. I squeeze my nipples to see if I can feel anything, but no, they're just... there. As arousing as scratching my belly. It's a shame. I still recall from back when I was alive as a girl how I loved to play with my nipples while I masturbated. I guess I have to give that up as well.
It feels like it's getting chillier by the minute, but I can't be sure. I find it hard to focus my thoughts. The concussion may be at fault, or merely the fact that I'm alive again when I shouldn't. In any case, I want to find out what kind of equipment this Asier guy was hiding in his pants. I unbuckle my belt to pull them down.
This new penis of mine seems big enough that even as woman inside I won't be embarrassed if someone else gazes upon it. I touch it gingerly, which feels pleasant. I heft its weight, swing it from side to side, run my fingers over the smooth skin and trace the veins along its length. I rub its head gently against my stomach, enjoying this newfound sensory stimulation. My penis, now rigid, points upwards as it grows in size.
I'm getting all heated up. I may as well sit down on the toilet and find out how masturbating feels on the other side. I have to do this carefully; it would be embarrassing to unload it too soon. After some careful stroking, I find a rhythm that feels good. Something about the tension in my groin and the tingling in my balls seems familiar, even if I haven't felt it before. I'm getting pretty excited now, and my other hand wanders down to fondle my wrinkly sacs. The stretching skin tingles against my fingers as I wank with long, strong strokes.
I can't hold it much longer. With a series of quick, short strokes, I bring myself over the edge and spurt out a few ropes of semen. It doesn't have much force behind it, but that's probably because my entire body is tensing up and writhing in ecstasy. The feeling seems to go on forever. Finally I relax with a gasp as my girl cock goes flaccid in my hand.
I wheeze although my injured ribs hurt. Man, it was worth it. Nothing in my two decades as a ghost could compare with orgasming for a few seconds. I don't want to ever go back to being a shadow. I have become more powerful than the average ghost: I have achieved a full body orgasm. I am transformed and ready to take on the world of the living. I will fully embrace my decently-sized futa cock rather than hide it, even though the rest of my body doesn't fit my ideal, and I just hope that Alazne will share my enthusiasm for this monster.
My body has recovered from the orgasm, but the hairs on my arms remain standing up, and the enveloping cold against my sweaty skin makes me shiver. My head turns to my left by instinct. The shower curtain is bulging as if someone was standing against it from behind. Or was that its natural shape? Nope, it's definitely moving.
My heart pounds in my chest and a cold sweat breaks out all over me. The curtain bulges further, and I sit up rigidly on the toilet while I keep my eyes open in case whatever is causing this phenomenon gets any closer. I squeeze my flaccid dick between my thighs.
Suddenly the curtain falls limply, then sways for a bit until it reaches an equilibrium. What the hell just happened? I'm dizzy enough that I may have imagined it.
I'm also starving. Ghosts don't starve. My living brain produces the image of a tuna sandwich, and my mouth floods with saliva. I can almost taste the saltiness on my tongue. Living people need to eat, or their body starts shutting down.
I trot over naked to the kitchen and frown at the mess on the floor. The cupboard doors are open and various boxes of cereal, bags of bread and other essentials have been thrown onto the floor. What kind of savage leaves this mess for other people to tidy up?
Unfortunately I don't find tuna, but the ham in the fridge looks amazing enough. As I'm preparing myself a sandwich, I hear something rattling inside one of the counters. I stare at it, paralyzed. A drawer bursts open and a few forks and spoons fall and hit the floor loudly.
I hold my breath in the sudden silence. I hadn't been alive in quite a while, but drawers don't just open by themselves. No, I'm not that confused. There's no mistaking this chilly atmosphere, nor the feeling of being watched. Not merely watched, glared at.
"Do I seriously have a fucking ghost roommate?" I blurt out.
As if to confirm it or annoy me further, two of the hanging cabinets open and close themselves violently. I gesture with my hands for the ghost to calm down, and I barely catch a glimpse of a fork before it flies from the ground and hits me in the chest. I groan and turn away.
"Hey, my ribs are fucked up enough! Chill!"
I step back until I rest my lower back against the cold dining table. I realize that I'm naked in front of a ghost stranger, who happens to be a poltergeist virtuoso. No, it can't be a stranger. A ghost this angry and who can poltergeist this effortlessly was likely tormenting Asier maybe from the moment he moved in. Is it because people are dumb and they built a community right next to a graveyard?
I gesticulate my peaceful intentions towards my invisible, sudden roommate who is likely standing in front of me, apparently pissed off.
"First off, pal, I know that as a ghost it must be fun to throw shit around knowing that one of the breathing idiots is going to have to pick it up, but it just happens that it isn't funny at all when you end up on the other side. And I can't even bend over, because my ribs--"
Something I don't get to see hits my right thigh, and I protect my genitals by pure instinct. I can tell that was aimed at my balls. This ghost is dangerous.
"I'll cover up my shameful nakedness, I swear! Listen to me for a minute!"
I was about to continue when I shut up. I just heard a female voice saying something to my face. She must have screamed it, and it sounded furious. It's really hard to understand ghostspeak from a living body.
"I'll share with you some classified information that likely won't ever leave my lips again. You knew this guy, Asier, but he's dead," I say in a serious tone. "I was on a bus when the idiot invaded our lane and ended up crashing against the highway divider. He hit his head hard enough that his soul got ejected. He could have returned, but he chose to move on to the beyond, the cowardly bastard. And I happened to be a ghost who can possess others as easily as you can poltergeist shit up. So yeah, I'm now occupying this bastard's body! Asier is no more."
Like it had been coated in camo material, I only spot that a spoon was hovering near me when it falls to the floor as if the ghost had dropped it.
"Yeah, that's right," I add. "It seems you were angry at this Asier guy. I can't blame you, but he can't bother you anymore. And you and I can get to know each other, become friends, all that. Believe me, I know how lonely it gets as a ghost. I'll figure out some way for me to understand you. Maybe with a ouija board."
I think this ghost just wailed, loud enough that it reached the level of someone muttering. She must be crying her eyes out.
"I know, I know," I say. "My name is Irene, by the way. I'm a woman, or was. Now I'm a woman with a penis. It's my new superpower."

Turns out that dressing your living self gets complicated when you feel as if your ribs are trying to kill you whenever you fail to keep your body straight. In the end, though, I have covered my privates, which my ghostly roommate must appreciate, and I finally prepare myself some dinner without invisible objects launching themselves at me. Along the way I keep making comments to keep the ghost entertained; I know how annoying it gets when breathing people go on about their day while ignoring you.
After I maneuver around the obstacle course that the living room's floor had turned into, objects that I likely won't pick up until my ribs heal, I sit down carefully on the sofa to eat my ham sandwich. I can tell that the ghost has followed me. She barely waits to push towards me a framed photo that had fallen on the ground.
"You want me to look at it, right?" I say, and lean towards it.
In the photo, this Asier prick is posing next to a slavic-looking woman in her early twenties. She has smooth, sunflower-colored hair, slightly slanted emerald eyes and a beautifully shaped mouth that makes my crotch tingle.
"What a smokeshow," I say while I remember that I haven't had sex in twenty years. "Is that one of the many women this Asier bastard cheated on his sweet ex-fiancée with?"
The ghost pushes the photo a bit further towards me as if wanting me to realize something.
"Wait, are you telling me that's you?! Ah, I can't hear you if you are saying yes. Push that pen off the table if that's you in the picture, or else--"
The pen flies off the table.
"I see. Now it makes sense why he would keep your picture around. You were probably one of the last people to see him alive, except for his killer. I'm trying to lighten the mood, by the way, because nobody killed him except himself. He admitted to me that he had veered into our lane deliberately. I guess he got real tired of what a gigantic piece of shit he was. Can you believe that he cheated on his ex-fiancée with at least twenty women? She visited me in the hospital. That poor lady will never get over it."
I feel that my invisible roommate stares at me as she stands next to the framed photo.
"What?" I ask. "I'm not going to feel sorry for him. He was a coward. And you have kept busy destroying his stuff. Listen to this: when I told him that he still could return to his body and live for some more years, he almost crapped himself, then ran away. I bet he had been hit with flashbacks about not only the hurt he caused to women who loved him, but also about how bad you tormented him."
I laugh way too hard for my ribs, and I end up groaning and crossing my free arm over my chest, as if that would help. When the pain subsides, I ogle at the gorgeous slavic woman in the photo.
"You looked so delicious... Wait a second, you were alive when the picture was taken! How did you die?"
I hear nothing, not even the slight whispers that come your way when a ghost is screaming at you.
"Maybe... Maybe you committed suicide?" I suggest. "But your eyes tell me that you didn't. They suggest that you were full of life and that you were taken from this world before your time. Oh, how I wish you could talk and tell me what happened to you. You're probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, with or without clothes," I mutter as I keep staring at her frozen face. "Listen, me asking you questions that don't have yes or no answers will only frustrate you. I'll buy a ouija board. How does that sound to you? They probably sell them on Amazon. I'll figure out this exact address and then have some breathing person send me my order."
I haven't finished the sandwich, but the sooner I order that ouija board, the sooner I'll get to communicate properly with my sensual roommate. I walk out of the living room to explore the rest of the house, looking for Asier's bedroom or his office.
"I bet this guy had a computer. Everyone has a computer these days. Back when I killed myself, the internet had barely started becoming a thing, and computers were still hella expensive."
I recognize Asier's bedroom not only because it has a king size bed, but also because the room is in worse disarray than the rest of the house, to the extent that a big wardrobe has tipped over and is resting against an exercise bench. A computer sits on a desk next to the bed. Unfortunately, there are pens lodged in the monitor as if the ghost had been playing darts with it. I sigh, then sit down wearily on the bed.
"It's alright, I'll go to some public library to order whatever I need."
I consider whether I should buy a new monitor, but I don't know if the rest of the computer even works, and the ghost might destroy my monitor on a whim. That's assuming that I have enough money to begin with.
I rest my head on the pillows. The bed feels so comfortable and inviting, even though there are random books and Blu-Ray cases lying on it. Why does my body weigh more now, and why is my brain threatening to shut off? My eyes are even fighting against my will to close by themselves. Is this a haunting, have I been poisoned?
"Oh, I think I'm sleepy," I say, relieved. "This body needs to visit the dreamworld. I haven't enjoyed sleeping since I possessed this prick, because they pumped me full of drugs."
I shut my eyes, and begin to drift off to sleep. Then I remember my ghost roommate. She's still here; I can sense her presence by how much the room has cooled.
"Sorry, but I need to sleep for a few hours. I know it can get super boring whenever breathing people go unconscious and there's nothing else with which to distract yourself."
I can't imagine how angry and distraught this ghost must have felt these past few days, not knowing if the target of her anger would ever return home. I go through the effort of walking to the living room and switching on the television so the ghost at least has something to watch.
"I'm sorry, I don't know yet which channels you prefer. We'll figure that out when I get that board. For now, I hope that's enough. I'll go take a piss and then try to rest. You are more than welcome to sleep next to me every night if you want. It will probably give me sweet dreams."

My Own Desert Places, Pt. 4 (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

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After two decades as a ghost, I forgot how much physical pain hurts. The living brain inside this body I'm possessing had been engrossed in preserving its sanity, until some nurses pumped me full of medicine that made me as docile and serene as a particularly stupid barn animal. The times they have nursed my body has passed in a blur, and I finally start coming back to my senses. I am lying in a bed located in some observation box belonging to the emergency department of this big hospital.
As I roll my eyes to check my surroundings, a realization hits me: I haven't had to make any effort to keep myself glued to this body. That sounds good until I understand that I can't escape from it either. I'm overwhelmed by a sickly claustrophobia. This decaying mass of bones and flesh is anchoring me to a location, and I will constantly have to drag it around. As my physical heart beats against my bruised ribcage, I figure that this is the price to pay for others to see me and listen to me. Because those damn ghosts don't give a shit except about themselves. No, they don't even care about themselves. Bunch of rotten nihilists... Whatever. If it gets bad enough I'll just kill myself. Suicide solves most problems in this world.
I drift in and out of lucidity. At one point my gaze falls on some guy sitting in front of a computer that the department likely uses to monitor my vital signs, or go through my patient history. The guy is wearing a white lab coat, and he seems as disturbed at getting my attention as I am that someone can see me, but he excuses himself saying that he just works with the computers and has nothing to do with everything else going on in the department.
However, the next stranger that stops close to my bed isn't wearing any kind of hospital uniform. It's a woman in her maybe mid thirties and who stares down at me intensely with naked resentment. Her black hair is cut chin-length, her skin is pale. Mostly her eyes stand out: they're cognac-colored and the sadness in them is nearly overwhelming.
When my gaze slides down, I feel ashamed, as if I found myself meeting a foreign dignitary and my broken self should represent a whole society. She's wearing a pendant of basil green, glistening jewels, which attracts my gaze to the cleavage of a pleated, V-neck blouse made of a white fabric that makes me want to run my fingers over it. She has tucked the blouse into a black, flared skirt that barely reaches her knees. As if the sight had allowed the animal instincts of this brain to push their way through, I notice the woman's perfume, which is enveloping me: a mix of citrus and jasmine. I haven't smelled an aroma this strong, and this arousing, in nearly twenty years. I wonder what she smells like when she takes off her clothes.
A burst of tingles slides down from my guts to my crotch, and something solid, that shouldn't be there, twitches.
"Ah... Hi?" I try through my dry, foul-tasting mouth.
Apparently speaking to the woman was a bad idea, because she averts her gaze and frowns.
"Why would you still have me as your emergency contact, Asier?"
Shit, she knows this body I'm occupying.
"Maybe because I'm too lazy to change it? Wait, are you really there? This is a real person I'm speaking to, right?"
She turns to look at me again, her face now sporting a tiny hint of concern.
"Yes, Asier, I am really here."
My throat hurts when I talk. Who knows if it's due to the accident or to whatever garbage of which they've pumped me full. I just know that it hurts, along with plenty of other spots of this rotting body. How do living people tolerate such pains while retaining their sanity?
"That's good. I've mostly gone through a series of hallucinations in the last however long I've been here. So, what's your deal? Do we know each other?"
She gives me a strange look, a mixture of pity and guilt, with a healthy dose of you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me.
"The doctor... He mentioned that you didn't seem to know your personal details. The extent of it... I thought it was preposterous."
"I'm pretty sure they haven't asked me anything," I say, somehow convinced. "I just recall a sequence of masked faces touching me all over and drugging me."
She turns away as her face twists in anger. I suppose it's towards me.
"Do you remember me at all?" she asks in an accusatory tone.
"Sorry, I don't. As far as I know, I have met you for the first time."
"You don't remember anything?"
"It's all a blur. I feel like I'm on a steady stream of alcohol, except not really. Seriously, I know how to speak, how to breathe and all that basic stuff, but I have no memory of anything resembling a previous existence of mine. It's quite troublesome, I'm sure."
The woman studies my expression with her trembling eyeballs.
"You don't even sound like yourself..." she mutters.
"Not manly enough?"
"No, it's not that. It's just... I don't know what to make of you."
"Is it a bad thing?"
"You can't even remember anything of yourself, let alone of me!"
I wait for the woman's jaw to relax, and for her breath to steady.
"I sense we have some history," I say calmly. "I'm sorry I can't remember any of it. Let's start from the beginning, then. I seem to be Asier. What's your name?"
"It's Ainhoa," she says as she turns away. "Damn it, I can't..."
"Well, Ainhoa, you seem like you have untapped depths, and you are quite beautiful. I'd offer you my hand to shake, but I have had my poor hand rejected recently, and I don't think my heart would be able to take it at the moment. Those paramedics are savages."
She glares at me for a while, then she smiles faintly.
"Please, don't try to kiss my ass. It makes me feel sick, independently of whether you remember me at the moment."
"Yeah, this lack of memories thing doesn't feel like it's going to go away," I say, but I contain myself from chuckling nervously. "Still, I need it to be clear, if only to understand why you seem to dislike me so much. What were we to each other?"
"We started as friends. Good friends. And we became something else. The last thing I was to you, if you thought of me that way, was your ex-fiancée."
"Oh crap, that serious, huh?" I shrink a bit under the resentment this Ainhoa is focusing on me. "I get the sense that I fucked it up somehow."
"Yes, you did," Ainhoa says in a hollow voice.
A doctor enters the room. She's a blonde woman in her thirties, with a friendly face and a bright white coat.
"Ah, you're awake! You had us worried for a moment there! How do you feel?"
"A little dizzy," I say. "Light-headed. And the pain is making me regret this whole living thing."
The doctor chuckles. I wasn't kidding, though.
"Yeah, you'll have to get the injuries treated. You were punched in the face by one of your friends, and thrown down some stairs. You could consider yourself lucky not to have broken any bones."
"I'm... quite sure I was in an accident," I correct her, although I don't sound very convinced. "I crashed my car into a bus or something like that."
"The bus driver avoided a collision. You were found in your car with a concussion and your face covered in blood. I was testing your memory."
"... Are you sure you are a doctor?"
As the carefree doctor waves her hand and laughs softly, the ex-fiancée turns around with a somber expression and disappears behind a curtain.
The doctor goes on about treatment stuff, but I can't get Ainhoa out of my head. Particularly the resentment she focused on me, which didn't match her gentle face. Before I jumped into Asier's body, I didn't bother weighing the pros and cons of kidnapping someone else's recently deceased corpse, but to be fair I didn't have time to waste before necrosis set in. I ventured into this new stage of my existence like someone who had found someone else's discarded clothes. From now on, I fear, I'm going to get dragged down by everything this Asier guy has done, and everyone to whom he has tied himself. I already feel sorry for Ainhoa, but I don't want to bother with any of it.

At some point I fell asleep, and the next time Ainhoa appears close to my bed, I can't tell whether only a couple of hours have passed or a day.
"It seems they can't find anybody else in your life that would care about your predicament," Ainhoa says with barely contained self-satisfaction.
"They found some people, but they didn't care?"
Ainhoa sighs, deflated.
"No, they can't find anyone. But the people that care about you would have found out by now, right? Your phone broke during the crash, so that is for sure part of it. Still, I figured that people manage to locate their loved ones in cases like this."
"Well, I don't know who my loved ones are, or if I have any."
"That's... just sad."
From the way Ainhoa's lower lip trembles, it doesn't take a genius to tell she is about to shed some tears.
"Don't cry," I say while I smile softly. "I'm sure I don't deserve it. I feel that whatever I did to you was real bad."
Ainhoa sniffs and rubs her eyes.
"None of it makes sense. How you treated me back then, how you kept hurting me afterwards... Suddenly you lose your memory and now you are gentle with me. Maybe in a couple of days you will recover every last bit of your former self, and you will return to being a complete bastard."
"Can you tell me, please, what the hell did I do to you? I'm dying here."
Ainhoa laughs humorlessly.
"Are you sure you want to know? What if it's not in your interest to remember, or even if it is, the memories are buried so deep down that they might not be fully accurate?"
"Whatever it was, I need to know where we stand."
She shakes her head.
"Somehow this is even worse. You get to forget, and have been freed from whatever guilt you retained from how you hurt me. You are getting away with it all over again."
"No, I'm not. I can feel it in me, the guilt and the shame. I don't know what I did to you but I know that it must have been bad. Very bad."
I have plenty of guilt and shame stored for a rainy day, so I don't have to act. Ainhoa shakes her head slowly as she purses her lips.
"Hey, you can punch me if you want," I continue, "if it will make you feel better. I'll tell the nurses that I fell down some stairs."
A tear runs down her cheek, but she covers her face and turns away from me to walk over to the window.
"I would never hurt you. Even after what you left inside me, which will remain there for the rest of my life, I am not the kind of person who hurts others like you did."
"For the love of everything good in this damned world of the living, will you please, Ainhoa, tell me what on earth did I do for you to hate this guy I'm supposed to be?"
"Until you remember, it's nothing to do with you. It's everything to do with me."
I'm losing my cool.
"What the fuck does that even mean?"
When she turns her head to glare at me, the sun beats down on her, giving her a halo.
"Alright, I'll tell you. It's real simple, happens all over the world, all the time. You cheated on me with everyone you could. At least six women that I found out about, two of whom I talked to. Does this jolt your memory?"
I lie there speechless.
"Great, I'm glad you're finally letting your guard down and listening," Ainhoa says in a raspy voice, as if her previous revelation scratched her throat on the way out.
I look down towards the sheets that cover my torso.
"... Was I really that much of a piece of shit? Oh, man, what the fuck was wrong with me?"
Ainhoa walks closer and takes a seat on a stool next to the bed. She rests her left forearm on her right knee, closes her eyes and sighs.
"You weren't always like that. When I met you, you were funny, and kind, and charismatic. I fell in love with you quickly."
I have to force myself to hold this ex-fiancée's gentle gaze.
"If I was that much of a bastard, I must have been cheating on you even back then."
She shoots me a glance as if to figure out if I mocked her.
"Maybe you were. I don't know. But I do know I've never felt that strongly about anyone in my life, and when you ended it, it destroyed me. My friends tried to cheer me up, I went out a lot, got wasted every night. Still does not quite compare..."
Tears roll down her face as she looks down towards her lap.
"Hey now," I say nervously. "Was I worth you caring so much about me? Have some self-respect, Ainhoa. Cheaters are the scum of the world. There's nothing worse than destroying the trust of the person you are supposed to love, except for maybe stabbing them literally, as in killing them. And I'm not entirely sure if that's worse."
"I am so sorry."
"It's not your fault. I'm sorry that I ruined your life. You truly should stab me. It may make you feel better."
She laughs through the tears.
"So... please tell me you got over me," I say sheepishly.
"I wish I could say that. But I'm not sure if I ever will. I did meet a guy who isn't an asshole like you. Married him a year later, and now we have a one and a half years old daughter. You already knew that, though... But for a while you are someone new."
That lifts a bit of the weight in my heart. I take one of Ainhoa's hands, which feels so wonderfully warm and soft in mine, and I grin at her.
"That's wonderful. Being able to create new life like that... I'm happy for you."

Ainhoa agreed to drive me to the address listed on my identity document, as soon as I received the medical discharge. She had shared her worry that the next time she saw me I would have recovered my memories, so I would have returned to being the cheating bastard to whom she was used. Of course, I didn't recover any damn memory, because that shitty human being disappeared into the beyond.
I wait for Ainhoa in the emergency department, next to troubled people who are waiting for the busy employees to treat their wounds. I start this new life with barely anything else than the guy's clothes, his keychain, his wallet and around a hundred twenty euros.
The world and everybody around me have shrunk since I possessed this corpse. I can see the top of most people's heads, and I find myself looking down at the women. At first, confused, I thought I must have been standing on a stool, but I guess that Asier was this damn tall. I could squish most people easily.
Someone has stopped in front of me. It's Ainhoa, wearing a lovely blouse and a knee-length skirt. She looks beautiful, but then again she's the first living woman who has paid so much attention to me in around twenty years.
She smiles cautiously. When I smile back she understands that I'm the amnesiac son of a gun she's come to appreciate.
"Hi, Ainhoa."
"Hi back to you. You recovered quite fast for how bad the crash must have been to turn you into a decent person."
I wonder if she had practiced that line.
"I can't disagree with you on that. It's amazing what living bodies can come back from."
Ainhoa nods, then gestures for me to exit the building.
"Shall we go, then? We have a twenty five minutes ride ahead of us."
As I was walking out, though, something invisible hits my nose, and the suddenness of the pain and the previously non-existent obstacle makes me stumble backwards. As I hold my breath I notice that the glass door is trembling. Ainhoa is staring at me surprised and worried.
"Ah, right," I say as I rub my nose. "People are supposed to open doors to reach the other side. Even transparent ones."
Ainhoa approaches me and puts a hand on my shoulder. This Asier bastard hurt her so bad, but she still cares for me.
"Asier, you cannot be alright. I was surprised at how fast they let you go, given that you haven't recovered your memory! Maybe you suffered permanent brain damage. We should talk to--"
I shake one hand dismissively.
"I suffered a bad enough concussion to eject this body's ghost, that's all. If you had gotten into such an accident you would understand it as well. I'll be fine! Let's get going, I want to check out my place. Really, you don't have to worry about me. I'll go to the doctor again if I start feeling worse all of a sudden."
Ainhoa observes me, then sighs.
"Fine. But we're heading straight there. No sightseeing. And rest for a few days when you get home."
"Got it."

Along the way to Hondarribia, where this bastardly guy lived, we barely speak, and I'm too absorbed by how bright the scenery looks. During my years as a ghost I forgot that the world isn't supposed to look faded and grey. When I turn my head towards Ainhoa, who is focused on driving, I'm touched by how much she must have loved me. The body I'm inhabiting was supposed to marry her and take care of her forever. But now she has to bear a rotten weight for the rest of her life.
"Listen, Ainhoa..." I begin, and I have to swallow to clear my throat. "I hope I never recover my memories. Still, this body of mine is responsible for the trail of destruction that it left on its wake. Maybe at some point I thought it would be better to cut ties with the mess I made, turn tail and run away into the beyond. But I'm someone else now, and I think I understand. You either endure the pain and get the chance to love, or you get to forget pain but also never love anyone ever again."
Ainhoa blushes as she alternates between glancing at me and following the road.
"Asier, I'm not sure that's the appropriate lesson for what has happened to you, and what you did to me. I'm married, I have a daughter..."
"Yeah, I know, and I actually didn't mean it like that. But you are still in love with me. Life's a mess."
Both of us remain silent for the rest of the trip.

I had walked around Hondarribia plenty of times during my couple of decades as a ghost, but I had never roamed through the outskirts where this Asier guy lived. It's a small community enclosed by ivy-covered walls, and adjoined to a graveyard of all places, which I thought was a nice touch. On the other side of the road opens the rolling countryside common to this province. Once Ainhoa finds the way into the community, she drives around a column of neatly arranged two-story homes. There are cars parked in front of a couple of the houses, but otherwise the silence suggests that the buildings are deserted.
Once we get out of the car near the house that apparently belongs to me, I grow giddy.
"Damn, this place looks like three to four times as big as I would have expected. How the hell can I afford it? Do I have a job that good?"
Ainhoa seems impressed as well. I guess Asier bought this house in the last couple of years.
"Well, you inherited a good chunk of your assets. I don't want to get into that, but I think you can afford this place without much hassle."
Both of Asier's parents may be dead, though, or if one of them still lives, he or she doesn't have the kind of relationship that causes them to figure out I suffered a serious car accident, to appear suddenly and force me to deal with another stranger's close bond. I have already gotten tangled emotionally in Ainhoa's predicament, but I have reached my limit.
As I hold the keychain they found in Asier's pants, a keychain that hopefully belongs to him, I approach the front door of this home I have stolen from a dead man.
"This may take a while," I say as I try one key after the other.
Once I finally find the correct key, I was about to open the door when I notice that Ainhoa is standing behind me with a guilty look on her face as she wrings her hands.
"Ah, you want to figure out whether I live with someone," I say with a smile. "I'm curious as well. Let's find out, then."
I turn the key and open the door. I have barely stepped into the foyer when a cold sensation runs down my spine. It feels like I have wandered into a mausoleum.
"This doesn't feel inviting at all!" I say, disappointed. "And what's with all the mess?"
From my position I can see most of the furniture of the spacious living room. It looks about twenty years old, and I guess it came with the house. But the main problem is the papers, magazines, books and a couple of framed photos strewn about, as if the area had suffered an earthquake since the last time Asier came home.
"What the hell...?" I ask out loud in a thin voice, but then I raise it to address whoever might inhabit this place. "Hey, is anyone home? I'm supposed to live here too!"
Nobody answers. Focusing my hearing allows me to listen to the singing birds outside. I turn to Ainhoa.
"I guess I've been a lonely bastard ever since I fucked things up with you."
Ainhoa averts her gaze and bites her lower lip.
"I... should go," she says as she begins to turn towards the exit. "Remember to rest properly, Asier."
"Of course. Thank you for everything. Take good care of yourself, and of your family."
Once we step outside, she lowers her head and addresses me without looking me in the eyes.
"If you remain like this... call me from time to time so we can catch up. Is that alright?"
I smile. The more I speak to her, the more I want to hug and comfort her.
"Of course it is. I look forward to meeting you again."
She drives away, leaving the community through the gate, while I wave her goodbye. How am I going to call her, though, when I don't know her number?

My Own Desert Places, Pt. 3 (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

Like other days at this hour, I'm sitting on the living room sofa in Alazne's apartment and checking out the time remaining until my girl returns home from work. I daydream that I stand up and walk up to her, and that she, wearily, takes her street clothes off and finds comfort in my loving arms. Of course, in my daydreams Alazne can see me and talk to me, and in them I'm also alive.
I finally hear Alazne's steps as she approaches the front door. Her key enters the lock. However, she unlocks the door with frantic, urgent movements, which puts me on edge. Even worse, Alazne steps in, closes the door behind her and slides down the wooden frame until her ass hits the floor. She must have been containing her tears, because she cries silently in constant streams while her vacant eyes look straight ahead.
"What can I do now...?" she murmurs to herself. "I can't do anything. I don't know how to do anything else."
I must have remained paralyzed for half a minute. I run up to Alazne, crouch in front of her and put my ghostly hands on her shoulders.
"What's wrong? What happened?" I ask, distraught, as if she could hear me.
Alazne continues crying quietly for about five minutes, then she says 'please' as if begging to an invisible presence different than myself. She repeats it a few more times in silence, merely moving her lips. Suddenly she stands up, passing through me, and walks up to the living room sofa. She lets herself fall forward to bury her face in a pillow. For the next half an hour Alazne's shoulders tremble as she cries in silence, except for the few times she whimpers like a child.
I have been kneeling next to her head. I can't even see her face, as her hair is hiding the facial features that she isn't pressing against the pillow.
Something must have happened at work. The most reasonable conclusion is that she has lost it. She has been fired because she isn't easy to get along with, likely brings down the mood of everyone around her, and maybe she's a shitty worker as well. I don't care whether or not she deserved to lose her job, though, because I don't want to see my Alazne like this. I fear that she has hit her limit, and she has nobody to calm her down.
Suddenly, Alazne stops crying. Her eyes are still red and puffy, but they have dried up. She sits straight up on the sofa and stares at the opposite wall as if she has figured out a solution. She rushes to her bedroom and sits in front of her desktop computer. A couple of minutes later she changes her status on the local employment services as available. She attempts to search for administrative jobs in the area, but she gives up, and her Google searches turn creative: 'what is the most painless way to kill oneself', 'I hate my life', 'how to commit suicide without pain', 'I need to die'.
As I sit next to Alazne, I witness her falling down the rabbit hole through several websites and forums. She considers pills and alcohol, as well as which of the varieties of pills would do the trick, but she dislikes the possibility of her body betraying her by vomiting the deadly mix. Then she gets fascinated by the idea of hanging herself. She browses through a variety of noose pictures as if she were stalking online models. Along the way I'm losing my mind out of worry, fear and impotence. Eventually Alazne shuts off her computer, curls up on the bed in a fetal position and falls asleep.
What should have been a nap turns into seven hours. Alazne wakes up in the middle of the night confused and groggy. Her stomach gurgles, and she shambles to the kitchen to prepare herself some food. When she looks into the refrigerator, she grimaces. It's full of rotten food that should have been thrown out a couple of days ago. Alazne can't stand the stench, and decides to order a pizza instead. However, it's midnight.

To be honest, I was surprised that she could keep a job to begin with. I love Alazne, but she's the kind of plain-looking woman with whom men wouldn't bother, she's very withdrawn and lacks a natural instinct to interact with others. She doesn't have the faintest hobby that would cause random men on the streets or public places to approach her even because they mistook her for someone else. She's sliding down quicker and quicker towards dying alone. It would be fine if she had accepted it, but it clearly hurts her down to her bones.
It seems Alazne has saved up enough money to avoid searching for a job immediately. Or maybe she has ceased to care. For the next couple of days she barely did anything but masturbate. On the third she made a rope out of her sheet, then tied one end around a doorknob. She lied face down some distance away from the door, she wrapped the other end of the sheet-rope around her throat and then she twisted her body in a new form of yoga, testing which positions would allow her to choke to death even if she fell unconscious.
The fourth day she visited her parents' graves, and cried.
Throughout all this I felt as if I would have vomited several times a day, if I still had a working digestive system. But at one point, as I was staring at Alazne's purpling face while her DIY suicide device strangled her, I though, well, if this is what you truly want, Alazne, then come over here. Abandon that painful body and join me in the wasteland of the afterlife. But I picture her soul being squished out of her recently deceased body only to immediately dissolve into light. And I know that Alazne would also be miserable in the afterlife. Maybe she would travel for a couple of years without having to worry about money, and lacking a brain that clinical depression had hijacked would help a bit, but decades tolerating the afterlife bring all new varieties of despair.
I keep watching Alazne from the afterlife. I daydream about being alive and saving my beloved, while she attempts half-heartedly to die. Still, Alazne's track record suggests that she would fail at killing herself the same way she failed at everything else.

Through some of the documents Alazne brought home, I learned that she intended to ride her unemployment benefits until she couldn't justify staying home any longer. She grew addicted to new series, and even started reading novels again, which I had only seen her do twice since the day I heard her play guitar and I chose to haunt her apartment. After she seemed to relax a bit, my daydreams transformed into me being alive, having a very well-paying job and allowing my Alazne to remain a housewife. What a life that would be, saved from the nightmarish stress of pointless jobs, bastardly bosses, shitty coworkers, as well as having to worry constantly about making enough money to pay the bills. The more I replayed that daydream the more excited I became, and I would have masturbated if I could. It felt like the best gift to give your girlfriend, one for which my imagined version of Alazne loved me forever and ever. The daydreams became so vivid that I almost believed they were real, which wasn't much of a stretch because I spent most of my time in a trance anyway.

Once it became clear that Alazne had climbed out of her hole and now she was merely depressed, I got bored of lying on her sofa and watching anime. I wanted to get out for a bit. I considered myself something of a guardian angel, although I couldn't protect Alazne in any way, but I needed a break.
Early in the morning, a couple of hours before Alazne wakes up these days, I leave her apartment to wander aimlessly through the city. However, when I spot a bunch of people getting on a bus to Donostia, I figure that I may as well join them. I find a free seat. I close my eyes and listen to the conversations around me while I let my mind drift.
After we pass Rentería, the bus gets gradually more crowded. At one point a wave of nausea shakes me from head to toe only to realize that some teenager had the gall to sit on my seat. I jump out to the cramped space between the seats. The teenager complains about having been overwhelmed by a sudden cold. These people have no manners.
Speaking of lacking manners, around five minutes later our bus nearly crashes with a car that swerved into our lane. In the confusion, around five vehicles end up hitting each other. Our bus stops, as it couldn't maneuver out of the way, and only a narrow corridor of free space allows the cars behind us to continue in the direction of Donostia. Plenty of the passengers gather to look out of the windows on one side of the bus towards the car that had invaded our lane. It had crashed bad against the highway divider. Some of the occupants of the cars involved in the accident have left their vehicles and are walking around with their phones glued to their faces, likely calling 112. An ambulance will arrive in a few minutes.
"That guy drove into our lane deliberately, didn't he?" a middle-aged woman next to me says.
"One of those kamikaze drivers," a younger man says.
"Stupid bastard," a third person says.
"Should we do something?" the middle-aged woman asks, then looks around for possible fire extinguishers or first-aid kits.
"What's there to do?" an old man who had been dozing off says. "Let the professionals handle it."
Fancying myself something of a professional, I jump through the bus' body onto the tarmac and approach the car that had gotten squished against the divider. Smoke is rising from its crumpled front. The car is a fresh-looking, dark green Škoda. As I walk around the car to the driver's door, I see that a couple of guys are tending to whoever was stupid enough to drive into our lane.
The driver is a man in maybe his late thirties, with a thick head of dark brown hair and some greys. His face is covered in blood from an injury on his forehead. He's slouched in his seat, restrained by the belt. His eyes are glazed over and he seems to have passed out. Given how crushed the front of the car has gotten, I wouldn't be surprised if his legs were fucked.
"We shouldn't move him, right?" one of the men that had approached the car to help says.
"We should get his seat belt off him first," the other guy says, "and then we can decide what to do."
The first guy struggles with the seat belt until it retracts with a snap, and the injured man slumps forward.
"Shit," the guy who was struggling with the seat belt says.
He leans into the car to feel for a pulse.
"I can't find it... Yeah, it's very faint."
I move around to the side window to observe the driver's face. He has a strong facial structure, with a broad forehead and an angular jaw. His hairline is starting to recede, but the gray hairs strike me as stress related. His eyebrows are thick, framed by long eyelashes that seem out of place on a man his age. I suppose that he's handsome enough if you are into dudes.
One of the concerned men gets busy speaking with his insurance company. As I hang out with them, I casually turn towards the noise of a big vehicle driving off past the accident, and I realize that my bus is leaving without me. I take a couple of steps forward and raise my hand, but then I drop my arm and feel stupid. Oh well. I can leave in any of the cars currently stuck, or in the ambulance that will end up arriving. It will probably carry the wounded to the hospital in Donostia, and from there it's a relatively short walk downhill to the train station.
The ambulance comes a surprisingly short time later. A couple of paramedics, wearing their bright yellow and navy blue vests, come out carrying a stretcher. The kamikaze driver hasn't regained consciousness, and he has pissed himself. Maybe even shat himself, considering the stench.
The driver wasn't trapped in his crumpled vehicle, because the paramedics drag him out and flop him down onto the stretcher. They quickly realize that things ain't looking good for the injured fella, and they would be even more worried if they had my perspective, because as the paramedics begin to perform CPR, I witness the guy's spirit slowly and awkwardly leaving the body like a butterfly coming out of its cocoon. He remains tethered to his mortal frame by thin threads of soul.
The driver's ghost stands up and realizes he's staring at his unconscious self. Once he starts looking around he's shocked to find me standing next to him, and in turn I'm shocked that someone can see me, as I had grown comfortable in my invisibility. The guy gets scared for a moment; likely the first ghost he's seen. But then he examines his hands only to realize that they've become as shadowy as my whole being.
"What's up?" I ask cordially.
"I... I'm dead?" he laments, coming to grips with his predicament.
"Sort of, yeah. Isn't that what you wanted by driving into our lane?"
He holds his head in his hands and shakes it slowly.
"No, I... I was distracted, I think. I've had a lot to worry about. I shouldn't have taken the car. Or maybe... Maybe I did it deliberately."
"Life is complicated like that, I suppose."
We stare at each other.
"Have you come to guide me through the afterlife?" he asks in a thin voice. "Are you an angel?"
I burst out laughing, a guttural laugh that shakes my whole frame. I step closer to the guy and tap his shoulder animatedly.
"An angel!" I repeat in a high-pitched voice. "Ah, that's so good! You know, I've been having a shitty week, worried out of my mind, but you just made my day. Me, an angel. What a nice guy. What's your name?"
"A-Asier," the guy answers, and his face suggests he doesn't find our interaction humorous. "So why are you here?"
"I can't be here, or what? Why are you here?" his question had annoyed me, but I give the guy a break. "I had taken the bus to Donostia, and you almost crashed into us. You could have killed me, you know? Sorry, a bad ghost joke. I should go easier on the newbies."
"Ghost joke...?"
"My point is that your accident stopped traffic, so I got out because I was curious. You don't stop being curious because you are dead, you know? Well, you grow tired of everything after the first few years, I guess... But you can get interested in other stuff, particularly if it distracts you from your worries. I'm sure you had things like that when you were fully alive."
"I'm sorry, fully alive...?"
I point at the threads coming out of his ghostly frame and that remain connected to the body.
"You don't know this, of course, but those threads mean that you can still return to your fleshy vessel. I'm sure the wounds are going to hurt like a motherfucker, but that kind of pain is something reserved for the living. A badge of honor, you could say."
Asier looks around, even up, as if he was expecting someone else to show up.
"What's wrong?" I ask.
"I mean, who is in charge of this?" he asks nervously. "Who is running this... underworld?"
"Why the hell would there be anyone running it? What a stupid question. Did you expect a king of the afterlife or something like that? When the spacecrafts get out there, do they need to go meet the space king? Wait, I'm not entirely sure that makes sense, but you are making huge assumptions here."
"I'm making assumptions? You are the one making all these things out to be simple. This is the afterlife."
"Hey, this plane is more of the same, I guess. Just much lonelier."
Asier covers his face with his hands.
"So... now what do I do?"
"I told you, you can return to your body. See those threads? It's not entirely over yet. Those paramedics are frantically crushing your ribcage with their CPR thing, but at least you won't die ahead of time. You can reclaim your previous life, see your friends, your wife or whatever. Because you won't get to interact with them properly once you are dead, as you can imagine! You have to consider it. There's a whole--"
"Fuck that."
I'm stunned.
"Huh?"
"What happens if I don't reclaim my body and I just move on to the afterlife, or whatever you call it?"
"Are you serious? As a ghost, this is like spitting in my face, you know? You can just return. You have no idea how dreary this afterlife can get."
Asier looks down at his body and the couple of paramedics compressing his chest rhythmically. A grimace twists his shadowy face, as if he had become overwhelmed by a bad memory. He retreats slowly, and then turns and begins running down the highway.
"No! I don't want more of that!"
"H-hey!"
The threads that kept him tethered to his body snap, and immediately Asier's ghost brightens up as if a potent flashlight had focused on him. Before I know it, he's gone.
"We are losing him," one of the paramedics, a young woman, says.
I haven't closed my mouth when I turn towards the corpse. The paramedics are now possibly breaking the ribs of an empty vessel.
I go cold, and for a very long second I can't hear anything at all. That man's body isn't entirely dead. It remains in a sweet spot like no body that I have ever come across. When I possess someone, that feeling of getting licked all over, and how I get pushed out of the body eventually, happen because the body's inhabitant resists the intruder. But in the corpse lying in front of me there's nobody home. An empty house with all the furniture in place.
Something akin to hope shakes me. Can I truly return to that world for much longer than the average ouija session? I should be able to, right? I feel that I'm missing many of the ramifications of what I'm steeling myself to try, but Alazne's crying face flashes in my mind. If I have a body, I can wipe your tears. That's it. I'm coming, baby.
I turn around and I fall backwards into the body. As soon as I feel myself inside of it, I trigger my ghostly power, then an insane burst of pain squeezes a scream out of my throat. My chest feels as if a bull charged into it. A tremendous pulsating headache makes me want to tear my brain apart. My guts feel all wrong, and beneath, my crotch is all wet and there's something muddy filling the space between my ass cheeks.
I open my eyes to find two people's faces staring down at me. One is a fit woman in her mid twenties, and the other a big guy with a goatee. Both are paramedics. The guy puts a hand on my cheek and shines a bright light into my eyes, worsening my headache.
"Alright, he's back. Let's lift him."
Next thing I know, I'm lying on the stretcher inside the ambulance, which is tearing along the highway towards Donostia as its siren blares.
I reach with my manly hand towards the young female paramedic's vest, and grab it. She's confused for a moment, but then she pats my forearm.
"It fucking hurts!" I shout while tears jump from my eyes. "Ah, it hurts so bad!"
For the remainder of our trip, I keep laughing hysterically.

My Own Desert Places, Pt. 2 (GPT-3 fueled shorts)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

Iñaki is gone. Now I understand that the old miserable bastard had wormed his way into becoming my friend. My only friend. But the traitorous fiend went and disappeared into the great beyond, abandoning me.
For a couple of days I walked aimlessly through the surrounding cities, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do. I had so much to talk about, so many concerns to voice out loud, but nobody would want to listen to me. For now, while my beloved Alazne is at work, I have decided to travel around. If I spot some living person getting into a taxi, I sneak in, no matter where the passenger was headed. And I also board trains with the purpose of stopping at specific cities. I've come to appreciate rambling around Donostia again, which was the main reason why I chose to settle in this area after I visited every country in Europe during the previous decade. But even returning to some of my old habits isn't erasing my anxiety. I had allowed myself to rely on someone. Now he's gone, and I am alone.
I used to believe that dying had been a blessing. I was discovering places that I could never find the time, resources and strength to visit back when I was alive, because I would need the money to support myself, temporary homes to crash at, and I had to fear that someone would assault me, rape me, kill me. As a newbie ghost, my then seemingly endless curiosity led me farther than I would have ever thought possible for me. But eventually the sights grew similar, and a feeling of disconnect crept into me. I was traversing a dead world, series of memories unrelated to me, because I could never influence them nor make myself noticed in any significant way. I got to learn about and even care about some breathing people, but there's a limit to how many human stories you can witness before they become stale.
Back then I was what others call a newbie ghost. Through dying, I had been transported into a parallel world full of possibilities. I couldn't understand how virtually every other ghost I came across pitied me, or didn't want to give me the time of the day. I felt like a teenager all over again, failing to get why all the adults replied with varieties of 'you'll understand when you are older'. But now I get it, for sure. It's all the same, you do little else than pile up regrets and disappointments, and you end up isolating yourself to avoid losing your mind entirely. Who knows for how long we will remain damned, and an insane ghost is a sorry, embarrassing sight.
Even now, sitting on the edge of a roof with a panorama of nighttime Donostia, it feels like a faded picture from another era. I have to suppress the urges to try to scratch people and throw objects, which I have never managed to do, because pushing a vase off a table at least would confirm that I retain some power in this world.
Losing myself in the streets, often less than a meter away from people if I can't avoid them, doesn't improve anything. It's just gray, washed out shit everywhere, and those breathing, decaying people cannot see me, cannot hear me. It gets so tiresome. No wonder some ghosts just retreat to an abandoned refuge and become recluses. May as well waste the afterlife in some decaying ruin, because nothing holds any meaning. You can't form any ties to the world from which you came, and other ghosts are unreliable. Even worse, once you are dead you can't force yourself to die again.
How could I have been so stupid as to let myself rely on someone else? I always told myself that I just interacted with other ghosts because I needed to kill time. But I have never learned my lesson. Although I lost others along the way, I ended up falling for it again. I find myself needing to share some opinion or realization, and I wish for someone to look back at me and acknowledge that I still exist.
I'm bound to lose everyone in the end. It's just the way things are. But what is there to do in this empty plane when you can't connect with anyone who matters, and you are damned to witness the world pass you by?
And there's Alazne. I fell in love with someone who is oblivious to my existence. How could I recognize that it's indeed love? I never felt it back when I was alive. Maybe I'm just obsessed. But no matter how I refer to this need, the fact is that I have to return to her place over and over so I can be around her, watch her, listen to her. When I stop pitying myself, she's all I can think about. I can feel my obsession growing whenever I visit her apartment. It's only a matter of time before I completely crack, especially because the more time passes the lonelier I am.
I can be honest with myself. It isn't love. No matter how much Alazne occupies my mind, and how justified I feel in spying her, it can't be love when she doesn't even know I exist. Me wanting to caress her, make love to her, make her think about me as much as I think about her, is pure selfishness. After all, love is for the living. It's tied to time, to future plans, to creating a family and passing on the genes. When you can't care about any of that, nor connect with anyone, you wouldn't be able to form a personal relationship. What do I have in common with those who still breathe, with their mad rush to fulfill goals? All I know is about remaining a witness to the decay and eventual oblivion of it all.
Still, knowing won't stop me. If on one side I can only look forward to roaming through a wasteland until the end of time, and on the other I can satisfy my needs by stalking my miserable woman, I'm choosing the option that will make me feel better. After all, nobody can judge me any longer.

Alazne continues sliding slowly along her downwards spiral. She doesn't use makeup, but she spends a few minutes every day studying the damages that approaching thirty has inflicted on her pretty face, or what looks like a pretty face for someone in love. She hates her dead-end job in an office doing boring shit that she hasn't mentioned, and I haven't been interested in following her there. She browses the internet idly, and her masturbatory habits barely pause her depression for as long as the orgasm lasts. Still, when she gathers enough energy to grab her guitar and lose herself in an hour or more of playing other people's songs, she gets a taste of how her life could have been if she hadn't been dragged down by the rest of herself. She has tried to write a few songs of her own, but she grew frustrated and loudly declared that she didn't have any talent.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling masochistic, I try to touch her gently. Put all my energies into it. Alazne never feels it. If she wanted to, she could walk right through me, and she would never know I was there. Now that Iñaki is gone, I also spend most nights with her, lying sideways and staring at her sleeping face. When I try to lick her drool with my ghostly tongue, my efforts pass through the molecules. I want to cry, but nothing comes out.

As I roam around I find myself looking out for other ghosts. I can't deny to myself that I want some company, of any shadow who might want to look back at me. There's the usual groups of ghosts who follow each other even though they don't have enough to say; still, getting separated could mean losing their pals for a long time. Ghost children enjoy their time in the playgrounds, crashing birthday parties, trying to appear in group photos. Some of the naturally talented ghost kids befriend toddlers or even older children, until those breathing kids lose the ability to peer into their beyond. Personally I don't know why anyone would go through the pain of befriending one of the living, if they will inevitably forget you. Some adult ghosts join reunions and convince themselves that they are involved in these strangers' lives. And the saddest ghosts sit on empty stools at bars, or on empty benches at parks, and gaze longingly at young couples.
One of those nights I was staring at Alazne's relaxed face as she was lost in a dreamworld. I miss being able to fall asleep, for my brain to produce a crazy hallucination that would grant me a parenthesis from the horrid world outside. When I stop to think about it, life as a ghost is like one of those nights I used to endure while alive, in which I managed to sleep for an hour or so and the rest I would roll around wishing to die.
In any case, I couldn't deal with having Alazne so close and yet being unable to fondle her, so I hit the darkened streets in search of some entertainment. In the third bar of the night I spot a female ghost that is sitting at one of the empty tables in the back. She acknowledges me for a moment, then she looks back down and loses herself in her own worry, regret, resentment and all that garbage.
I sit on a stool at the bar, although shortly after a living customer approaches me and I get out of the way before he sits through me. I want to have a conversation with that female ghost. I can't make out all the details in the shadowy blur to which she's been reduced, but she has waist-length, disheveled hair, and she's wearing a nightgown. I approach her nervously.
"Ah... If you don't mind, I'll sit with you."
She offers me a vacant stare. I sit down next to her as I try to ignore the awful smell of the room, or that the walls are covered in writings and drawings by drunken patrons. The ghost woman is silent.
"So... What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?" I ask nervously.
She looks down and opens her right hand, revealing a small pill bottle. Likely she had been holding it the day of her death. I never understood how, for example, some clothes ended up dying along with us, so we are spared the embarrassment of spending an eternity naked. I wish I had been a Pharaoh. Maybe I would be riding through the afterlife in a chariot.
"I'm having a rough night," I continue. "The usual for all of us, huh? And I thought it would be nice to have a chat."
She attempts to drop the contents of the bottle in her ghostly mouth.
"Hey, those are prescription," I raise my voice in protest to stop her from swallowing the pills.
I reach for the bottle. She makes no effort to prevent me from taking it, likely because it's now empty, and in the process I feel her cold skin. Her body seems so fragile and small.
"Did I ask you to bother me?" the ghostly woman asks with disdain.
She has dark bags under her eyes, and her nose is bleeding somehow. But despite the decay, she's still beautiful.
"You should take better care of yourself," I say. "What's your name?"
"You wouldn't know it."
"I might. I've been around here for a long time. I may know your family."
I'm allowing words to leave my mouth without thinking. I just want to talk to someone who can answer back.
"Carmen," she says finally. "My name is Carmen."
"I'm Irene," I say as I offer my hand to shake. She merely stares at me with pained resentment.
"I guess I'll have to repeat myself. Why are you bothering me, Irene?"
I attempt to smile, but end up avoiding her gaze.
"I'm lonely. Isn't that your case as well? I try to talk to those breathing bastards, but none of them cares."
"They do care. It's most of what they do. And they happily live their lives away."
"Well, I'm not one of those ghosts who can move stuff or appear for the living. I can only possess some of them, in limited circumstances. So they can't listen to my troubles."
"And you thought that I would care about whatever you are going through?" the woman asks mockingly. "Why on earth would I wish to speak with you?"
"You are troubled, aren't you?" I reply too eagerly. "You can tell me everything that's hurting. If you just let me in..."
Carmen's face becomes livid with rage.
"You are pathetic," she snaps. "I don't need ghosts to listen to me. I've survived on my own without any help."
"You haven't survived, and neither have I. You can't call it surviving when we can't die any further. And I also killed myself, you know? At the time I thought I had good enough reasons. We can get along, lessen each other's pain... Isn't it what this is all about?"
"Fuck you. I'm calling the police." She pulls out her phone. I guess she also died holding it. She pushes a sequence of buttons, then lifts the phone to her face. "Hello, I'd like to report a stalker."
I have never come across such a thing as a ghostly police force, nor ghost phones that worked, so this woman is likely nuts.
"If you don't want to talk to me, that's fine," I say in a low voice. "But I mean it, you know? I'll listen to whatever, and you can listen back. Please."
Carmen looks down at her phone. After a few seconds of staring, she raises it to her ear and says: "Hello, my name is Carmen. I'd like to report..."
"Carmen, please let me in. I'm begging you."
She throws her phone across the room in frustration. It passes through several people.
"You're just angry, Carmen," I say in a conciliatory tone. "I know. I'm here for you."
She turns her head away from me, refusing to make eye contact. Her breaths are rhythmic and forceful, as if she's trying to avoid crying.
"Until recently I had a friend," I continue. "I also thought I didn't need others, but that's because it hurts too much when they leave. We are lying to ourselves. Just someone being able to listen to us can change everything. I want to be that person for you."
I inch closer to Carmen and extend my hand out to touch hers. She clenches that hand into a fist.
"I don't give a shit about your problems," she mutters. "Nobody does. Whether you are hurting or not, it makes no difference. You are already gone. You don't matter. Where do you think we are, idiot? This is our punishment."
Although I have felt like shit for many years, I haven't approached the rage and bitterness evident in Carmen's voice.
"Whatever this place is, we can make the best of it," I reply carefully. "We can still communicate if we want. Or do you believe that you deserve to spend the rest of possibly eternity in pain?"
She glares at me, maybe contemplating how to kill me. Although I'm a ghost, I can feel fear. I wouldn't be surprised if my body was shaking visibly.
Carmen exhales and closes her eyes.
"Shut the fuck up," she says, exhausted. "You don't know a damn thing. Just go away."
"I won't. I'll stay right here in silence, possibly for an hour or a couple. If you want to share something, I'll listen."
"I don't have anything to fucking say."
"Okay, that's fine. I'll just share my thoughts, and if you have something to add, great."
Carmen groans, then stands up forcefully. She kicks through our table an empty beer bottle, and it sails through the air until it crashes against a living person's back.
"Hey!" a middle-aged guy who looks like a tourist exclaims. "That hurt! Who the hell threw that bottle!"
Carmen glares at me and walks away. I feel hollow. I lower my head, but I don't have to follow this ghost woman's movements to know that likely I won't see her around for a while, and when I do, she will consider me an enemy.
I takes me around half an hour to gather the strength to stand up and leave the bar. I want to return to Alazne's cramped apartment, to her likely warm bed, where I can close my ghostly eyes and daydream of living together with the woman I love, of marrying her, of spending the rest of my limited life watching her grow old. But as I shamble along the street, I can't bear it any longer and I fall to my knees. I ball my hands into fists and I let out a guttural wail. I wish to do nothing else for as long as this consciousness of mine remains than to scream my heart out, knowing that nobody would listen to me nor comfort me. Like an abandoned baby left to die in a sewer.
"Nobody will love you, you know that?"
A man's raspy voice says this to me. I shake my head and rub my eyes.
"You don't love yourself either," the voice continues.
I open my eyes. Some old, homeless-looking ghost is staring down at me. The kind that mutter to themselves and that I ignore in case they direct their stream of crazy towards me.
"What is it to you?" I ask in a hollow voice.
"You're a ghost. You have no right to live in this world, let alone try to form connections."
I definitely feel now that I don't have the right to do what I want. I narrow my eyes.
"So what? You've never done anything wrong?"
"I lived a good, clean life. But ever since I died, I've been doomed to wander this city. I was never able to move on to the great beyond. My spirit is trapped, just like you."
He continues staring at me with those soulless eyes. He seems to be waiting for me to ask more questions. I stand up and wipe my eyes in case some ghostly tears remain.
"Nobody cares about your problems," I say, and walk away.

My Own Desert Places, Pt. 1 (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

I love Alazne, and I have grown beyond caring about the damage it will cause me to admit it. I love her pale, freckled face, those big hazel eyes that always seem minutes away from tearing up. I love her soft voice, and how intimate feel those few instances in which she speaks to herself at home while she's conscious. I always yearn for the next time she will get undressed, rest her guitar on her thigh and play for a couple of hours, caring very little about the neighbors. I love how she sits on a stool under a warm shower and pleasures herself for twenty minutes. I love how she spits on her toilet paper before she wipes her ass. I love lying in bed next to her naked body and admiring the pink skin of her nipples or her pussy from a few centimeters away. I love when she returns exhausted from another meaningless day in the office and she collapses onto her wrinkled sheets. I love how she breaks her silence sometimes to admit to nobody that she wants to die. I love how she mumbles in her sleep, and how some nights she barely gets an hour of respite and spends the rest rolling around, half of the time crying. But I hate that I will never get her to look into my eyes. I will never hold her in my arms, nor drink the pain away from her mouth.
Today was one of those days in which I can't bear it. I exit her place and walk the kilometers-long path to my pal Iñaki's dilapidated home to spend the night. I don't bother taking the train today; walking it off will do me some good. As soon as I leave the populated streets behind I feel my anxiety washing away. Iñaki's place has been abandoned for maybe a hundred years. The guy hates opening up about his past, and I like people who don't talk much anyway.
Close to nighttime I reach the half-ruined front of his house, all those busted windows and graffitied walls. As I walk through the doorless doorway I spot Iñaki standing in the middle of what remains of his living room, if one can still call it that. He's staring down at the open pages of a yellowed, piss-stained hardcover novel. He must have read the same words hundreds of times, but I guess it's better than following the spiders and cockroaches.
Seeing him cheers me up. He always listens. I can't say that about most people.
"What's up?" I ask. "Haven't seen you in what, like a week and a half?"
"Seems like forever, doesn't it?" Iñaki shrugs. "I don't know how you can stand living with one of them."
Carefully, I lower myself onto the ruins of the sofa until it holds whatever passes for my weight.
"Yeah, you would hate it. And I didn't enjoy all those others, to be honest. They were more like distractions. But this woman... she's the one."
Iñaki turns from his book to look at me. I recognize his exhausted expression in the shadowy frame.
"Has she brought someone else over to her place?" he asks.
"Well... not just someone. She brought her soulmate."
Iñaki chuckles, although it sounds like wood creaking.
"I think that only about one in millions would willingly bring one of us in. And those are crazy."
"Her music called me. She wasn't just playing, she was pleading to the uncaring world. It's just too bad that I can't give it to her..."
Iñaki wanders out of the room. I listen to his erratic footsteps. He likes to do this kind of shit, he gets fed up with the company that quick and needs to release his anxiety. I don't mind.
He returns a few minutes later.
"And how long do you plan on staying with her?"
"Until I disappear, like I should have done."
Iñaki takes a seat next to me. The stars must have aligned.
"Does she hear you at all?" he asks with a hint of sadness. "Sense you at least?"
"I need to yell very loud for that, and she has never understood the words. I don't like confusing her, she has enough on her plate. She already thinks that she's this close to losing it."
"I don't understand your types. Then why do you stay with someone who doesn't care nor can sense you?"
Why do I stay? Maybe because I retained some shred of hope, or because Alazne's all I have now. Hope of what? There's nothing better coming. There can't be. We can't even look forward to the changes in our decaying bodies. And I have no clue if they ever recovered my corpse.
"Sometimes... it gets too much," escapes from my mouth.
Iñaki sighs deeply.
"I understand. Knowing that all this will come to an end one day, and you will never see any of your favorites again. It makes it even worse that you don't know when it's coming."
My friend stands up from the ruined sofa and wanders out of the room once more. I'll give him some time to cool down. But I should have caught this guy on one of his silent days, because my anxiety remains strong, and the old weight, the black mass, is pulling me towards the ground.

Around one in the morning, a van parks on the overgrown yard, maybe twenty meters away from the ruined front of this house. I stand on the doorway as three excited guys wearing coats start unloading a bunch of strange equipment.
"What the fuck are they doing?" I ask out loud.
Iñaki is standing next to me.
"Those idiots again. They scouted my place a few days ago."
"And what exactly are they doing?"
"They blabbered all about it. Some ghost hunting garbage, for that internet thing."
I roll my eyes. I know all about the internet, but Iñaki hates computers. My Alazne loves wasting her time online, and I usually stand behind her as she watches YouTube videos, browses Reddit, or touches herself. I still don't know why she bothers going incognito for the porn sites. It's not like anybody enters her apartment.
In five minutes, the three idiots from the van have gathered their electronic equipment on the nasty floor of the living room. As one of them unpacks something that resembles a video game console, he kicks Iñaki's open book. The guy turns and notices that it's a book instead of some ghostly shit, but then he complains about the piss stains. He kicks the book again towards a corner, causing the hardcover to close. Iñaki narrows his eyes. If he could control his powers properly, he would probably poltergeist the crap out of him.
I walk up to the ghost hunter and yell in his ear.
"Get the fuck out of here, punk!"
He flinches and turns towards me. I take a step back, as I don't want his face that close.
"Did you guys hear that?" the ghost hunter asks, concerned. "It was like a whisper."
"I'm pissed off, that's who I am! You want some of this?"
The other two idiots listen in silence for some seconds, then shake their heads.
"No, I didn't get that," one of them says. "But this place is promising. Let's get rolling."
The three of them have set up a camera on a tripod, and are unpacking stuff that looks like a mixer, a cassette recorder, and a bunch of wires. Also a couple of handheld cameras. They're talking about frequencies or some equally boring shit. One of the guys is fiddling with his camera's settings, another one takes out his phone.
I would have expected Iñaki to curse at them and then walk off either to the second floor or the basement, but he has crossed his arms and is staring at the intruders as if evaluating their performance.
"Yep, this should do it," says the ghost hunter who placed the camera on the tripod, as he checks the screen of his phone.
They mess with the wires and the cassette recorder until they seem to be done. They look at each other and nod while they smile in satisfaction.
"Let's do a test recording," one of them says, and presses some buttons on the device.
"Alright, if there's any ghost in here, please speak into this recorder. It should be able to catch your voice if you speak loud enough or put enough energy into it. Say whatever you want."
I look at Iñaki in case he wants to try. He remains still, with his eyes narrowed. Maybe it would embarrass him. I lean in towards the recorder and shout some insults. After twenty seconds or so, one of the guys replays the content.
"You hear that? It sounds like a girl."
"Can't quite catch what she's saying, though."
"A girl ghost."
"I'm fully grown," I say.
They listen to the recording a couple more times. Content, they try recording again.
"We heard you!" one of the guys says into the recorder. "Please talk to us some more. What's your name? Are you lost? Do you know you are dead?"
It amuses me enough, so I talk into the device again.
"I'm Irene. I would prefer to pretend I don't know I'm dead, because my demise was pathetic. It happened around twenty years--"
They interrupt me by stopping the recording. They listen to it. I can't hear clearly enough, but as the guys do, they lift their heads and stare at each other.
"You heard that, right? She said 'mommy'. She must be looking for her mom."
"Oh god. That's so sad," one says while the others nod in agreement.
I stomp on the dirty floor.
"There was nothing close to that word in my sentences!"
For five minutes, the ghost hunters walk around Iñaki's ruined place while they call out to a little girl. I keep insulting them, but they only hear whispers. They say they are going to post this recording online.
"I hope the comment section rips you guys a new one," I mutter.
Iñaki grunts loudly, which terrifies the ghost hunters. One of them suggests they should leave. What a bunch of pansies. Oh well, it was a good enough night. But the guys decide to stay and instead ask more questions with their cassette thing while they point at it with their cameras.
As the guy holding the recorder is about to interrogate us, one of the others pats him on the shoulder.
"That sounded like a demon. Maybe it's a demon pretending to be a little girl."
The guy with the recorder seems troubled. His gaze darts between his friends and the corners of the room. He stops the device.
"Should leave this place?" he asks. "I'm getting really bad vibes all of a sudden. Like we are messing with something evil."
"I would punch you if I could," I say.
"We already brought over our stuff," the third ghost hunter says, and snatches the audio recorder. "Let's get some more evidence."
He asks for whoever grunted to speak to them. I was going to try recording my voice again, but to my surprise, Iñaki steps forward and speaks loudly, with a grave voice.
"Here I am."
When the guys listen to the recording, they are amazed.
"You heard that? It said 'I am', or something like that."
"Here I am," suggests another.
"Let's get more. What's your name?"
"Iñaki."
"That was a name, wasn't it?" one of the guys says.
"Was it Íñigo?" says another.
"How old are you? When did you die?" asks the guy with the recorder.
Iñaki leans in so his mouth almost touches the recorder. He speaks so resoundingly that it sends chills down my non-existent spine. There must be ghost magic involved.
"Basement."
"What was that?" the guys say.
When they record again, Iñaki, irritated, insists.
"Go to the basement."
After the ghost hunters listen to the recording, they all confirm that they understood loud and clear. For a couple of minutes they compare how the hair on their arms has stood up.
"Will you move on?" I ask them, annoyed. "People get chills and their arm hair stands up when ghosts are around. You don't have to keep repeating it."
The ghost hunters are too excited to pay attention to me, and they can't hear me anyway.
"Let's go, to the basement!" one of them exclaims.
They descend the half-ruined, dusty stairs to the lower floor. I follow them. Iñaki is sticking close, but he seems even more somber than usual.
"Hey, are you that sick of these idiots that you are planning on trapping them somehow?" I ask him.
He gives me a funny look.
"Why would I want them dead?"
"Because you can't stand them. They remind you of the fact that you're dead."
"Being dead reminds me that I'm dead. The boredom and resentment of having so much free time and no way to affect the world reminds me that I'm dead."
I lack a witty answer to that, so we descend to the basement.
"It's so dark..." one of the ghost hunters grumbles, "and cold."
"How else did you expect a basement in a ruined house to be?" I ask.
"Do you feel that?" asks another. "The temperature has dropped."
"You bunch of cookie-cutter bastards," I tell them.
They ignore me and start setting up their gadgets, some of which they carry on their belts. One guy shines a flashlight here and there, looking for something to catch.
I turn to look at Iñaki, but he's no longer standing behind me. Instead he's half-crouched near a corner of the basement as if waiting at the starting line of a race. It looks wrong on such a lanky ghost. He bursts into a sprint that disturbs some dust. The ghost hunters turn towards the sound. Iñaki had put all his effort into the run, and his footsteps had broken into the realm of the fools whose hearts still beat.
"Those were footsteps!" one of the ghost hunters says while he records the general area of the sounds.
"As if someone sprinted," another adds.
"Where are you?" asks the third as he sweeps the space with his flashlight.
Iñaki's sprint had taken him to the opposite corner of the basement, and there he hides, unseen.
One of the ghost hunters tries to follow Iñaki's path along, hoping to catch some evidence, and he suddenly stops and crouches towards a yellowed newspaper on the floor. He lifts it. Whatever he finds under it startles him.
"Oh shit, a ouija board!" The ghost hunter's voice trembles as he holds the board. "This explains everything!"
"What the hell is it supposed to explain?" I ask.
"They must have summoned the ghosts," a ghost hunter says as he shakes his head. "Some idiots that didn't know what they were doing."
"Some kids, probably," the previous ghost hunter adds.
Iñaki has returned to my side.
"How come you own a ouija board now?" I ask him.
"It was some kids. They came to drink down here, act tough and have sex. They ended up fleeing, but left that behind."
"What a mess. Watch out, these bastards will end up conjuring a demon."
The ghost hunters are stupid enough to gather around the ouija board and dare each other to try talking to us. I sigh, but this is my entertainment for the night.
The three so-called ghost hunters join fingers on the planchette. Iñaki and I haven't even approached them when one of the guys gasps and lifts his index fingers off the small wooden board.
"There's someone writing!" he says, spooked. "It's moving!"
"Hey, keep your fingers on the planchette!"
Both me and Iñaki walk up to tower over their shoulders. The planchette is motionless.
"If you don't help them move it, Iñaki," I say, "they'll get bored and leave. Is that what you wanted?"
Iñaki remains silent. He bends his long legs so that his hand can reach the planchette. He concentrates as he nudges the small board to make it spell out something. H-E-L-P.
The ghost hunters freak out for a moment, then laugh nervously.
"You are still recording, right?"
"I think so!" another ghost hunter answers as he fiddles with his handheld camera.
I want to crouch next to the planchette and spell out FUCK OFF, but I have never been any good at moving stuff on the plane of the living. And although some ghosts insist that you can train for these abilities, I never had to train for mine. I don't want to put in the effort anyway.
I feel like joking around. I turn towards Iñaki's shadowy face before I have thought of what to say, but the determined look in his eyes unsettles me.
"I need your help, Irene," he says.
"With what?"
"Take one of these guys."
"Excuse me?!"
I nearly jump back. It felt like he was demanding me to shove a knife into my eye, if I had been able to interact with physical objects for the last couple of decades. The very thought makes me dizzy.
"Hey, don't joke around with that. I have told you how it feels! You can scare these idiots with anything else."
Iñaki steps closer and places his hands on my shoulders. It feels cold and nebulous. One never gets used to another ghost touching you, even as a ghost.
"I remember your vivid description. But do it for me, just this time. Because this is it. The end of my plan."
"What plan?"
"My plan to make it right."
"Iñaki, I don't want to help. Look at you, you are nothing but a rotten soul."
"Yes, sure. That's why you come by so often. To gape at a miserable, bitter ghost."
"It's better than television."
"You come by because you don't want to be reminded that you will never be alive anymore, and you remain among the damned because you haven't come to terms with it."
My ghostly eyelids twitch. I want to turn around and leave, but I get the feeling that Iñaki would force me to stay.
"I came by for your stories, and that's all," I mutter. "Stop hitting below the belt."
"Look at me. Look at what I am. No light, no body to speak of. No one would ever know. And you will forget me too, in the end."
"I'm sure you were a miserable bastard even when you could breathe."
"And that's why you'll help me."
I close my eyes and try to calm down. Iñaki truly wants this for whatever reason, and he has never been as forthcoming with me.
"Let's get this over with. It better be important."
As the ghost hunters wonder out loud how come the talkative ghost has abandoned them, I jump-crouch into one of the idiots as if I were cannonballing into a pool. Possessing a breathing human is the worst feeling in the world. The person's soul engulfs yours, touches you all over as if it were a thousand greasy tongues, and the more you spend in the body, the more insisting the licking becomes. In the past it made me so angry that I started beating up the people who had come to figure out why my vessel was rolling around on the floor of the supermarket.
I can hear Iñaki to my left, even though I'm trying to get used to looking through someone else's eyeballs.
"You can talk and move the guy's body, right?" He sounds impressed. "To be honest, I thought you had been lying."
"L-lying?!" I blurt out through a stranger's wet mouth. "Who do you take me for?!"
"I apologize," Iñaki says.
In front of me, seated on the dirty floor, the remaining two ghost hunters are trembling as they stare at me wide-eyed.
"Jokin, what's wrong?"
"I think… I feel…" this so called Jokin whispers through his body I'm possessing, because I was distracted.
When I take the control away from him, my eyes roll to the back of my head, and the body becomes limp for a moment. I feel as if I were sliding through goo filled with pubes.
I glare at the two idiots.
"There's no Jokin here any longer," I mumble, showering them with spittle as my lips twitch. "Only the devil."
The two ghost hunters scream. I'm sure they'll scramble to their feet and run away, but they seem to fear that the moment they turn around, I'm going to pounce on them. I may.
"Irene!" Iñaki shouts. "I didn't want to give them a scare! Please, listen. You need to convince them to break through a section of the wall behind you. That's why I wanted you to suffer this uncomfortable process. Turn around. It's a reddish stretch that looks like the bricks don't belong, that they were put together by someone who didn't quite know what he was doing."
I look over my shoulder as my possessed hands tremble. I can't see shit, but this Jokin guy had left his flashlight on the floor next to him. I pick it up, switch it on and light up the dusty wall. I spot the reddish bricks immediately. They look as if some mold had grown on that specific area.
The other two ghost hunters are talking to me when I turn towards them again. I haven't paid attention to what they were saying.
"Hey, I was kidding about being the devil," I say while drooling. "Typical ghost joke. You must be new at this, huh?"
To his credit, one of the ghost hunters hasn't peed himself. He's holding his handheld towards me while staring at his possessed friend.
"Y-you want our help? So you can finally rest in peace? You better not be joking around, Jokin!"
"I'm getting mad with all the licking," I groan. "Listen to me, you pair of cocksu--... Do you see the wall behind me? That spot with the distinct bricks? I need you to break through them for whatever reason. There must be something behind, I'm guessing."
"Y-you want us to break a part of the wall?"
"Am I talking into a recorder here?"
"Because you left something inside?"
"I mean, probably! Go ahead and get to kicking or punching or hitting it with something. If you refuse, when I abandon your friend's body I will follow you home, and for the rest of your life I will witness how you touch yourself."
The two idiots, excited and scared, run over themselves to reach that dodgy spot of the wall. When one pushes the bricks, they shift slightly. He takes off his shoe and starts hitting them hard. The dust makes him cough.
I stand up with this wobbly body, but I trip and nearly faceplant. The ghost hunters are distracted, which preserves my dignity. I stumble towards them to oversee their efforts.
"You are lacking in power! Puny humans!" I scream through their friend's mouth. I also drop his flashlight, but pick it up in time to shine it directly at their faces.
"A-are you gonna help us or what?" one of them dares to say.
He has guts, so I shrug.
"Let's trade places. I'll be on the left and you on the right! Go!"
We hit the bricks with more intent. This Jokin guy will have to visit the hospital to get his knuckles fixed. Serves him right for being alive.
As we continue damaging our precious fingers, the bricks start crumbling, and soon their pieces pile up into the cavity. One of the ghost hunters shines his flashlight at the newly formed hole, and the three of us are hit at once with the old, stale stink of a dead body.
"Oh crap!" shouts one of the ghost hunters.
He reaches towards a trash bag that even these morons would realize it contains the remains of a previously living creature.
I had assumed that we had found Iñaki's corpse, that he had been murdered and sealed inside the wall, and that was why he had remained nearby and turned into such a miserable bastard. But the almost mummified corpse that the ghost hunter has revealed carefully is far too small. About the size of a toddler.
Because I got distracted, I was pushed out of this Jokin's body. I return to being a regular ghost, while Jokin falls on his ass and breaks into coughing.
"You wanted us to find this child, didn't you?!" the ghost hunter lighting the hole says over his shoulder, but he notices that Jokin has returned to being himself. "The ghost left!"
"Because we managed to help him," the man handling the trash bag and its contents says solemnly, in a self-satisfied tone.
He takes the trash bag out of the hole and places it on the floor ceremonially. Then he straightens his back and searches his coat until he finds the phone.
"We need to call the police. Maybe this proves a murder or something."
"Finally, some evidence!" the other ghost hunter says excitedly as he pats Jokin on the back. The previously possessed guy looks traumatized and keeps whining about his bloodied hand.
I don't understand. I turn around to locate Iñaki, only to realize that he was standing behind me. He's looking down with sadness in his eyes at the toddler-sized, mummified corpse.
"Iñaki, what..." I begin.
"That's my daughter," he says in the thinnest voice.
At first I thought I was imagining it, and the ghost hunters moving around and talking are distracting me as well, but I can't deny it any longer: Iñaki's form is brightening to the extent that I can't consider him a shadow anymore. He observes his own hands as if he just noticed he had them. I can barely tell apart his features when he faces me, holds my gaze and smiles.
"I enjoyed having you around," he says.
"What... What the hell...?"
Iñaki vanishes. Nothing remains, not even a hint of him having existed.

A Poor Player (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

As I rest against the worn desk of my office, I hear the clickety clack of my secretary's typewriter right outside the thin wall. In a short while, someone I know will enter my business, head to my office and reveal that they need my skills to save them from their troubles, which will always seem far simpler than the tangled mess they would end up becoming. And even the times I have wished with all my heart to stay away from all of it, the people involved wouldn't let me be until I forced myself to endure through it all again.
I have closed my eyes to try to control my breathing, but I hear the tapping of heels approaching my secretary's desk. I wouldn't forget that rhythm in a thousand lifetimes. Then I hear her muffled voice as she introduces herself to my secretary, Doris. Seconds later, the door to my office opens. It's a woman in her late twenties wearing sunglasses and dressed in a black flared dress. She walks inside and closes the door behind her. As she stares with black holes for eyes, as dark as her own, she smiles, parting her painted lips.
"Hello," she says.
Betty again. The old rollercoaster. The first impression always jumpstarts my heart, no matter how long I've known her. Every man dreams of having a such a woman concentrating her attention on them. She knows it, and and how to use it.
"Hey," I say. "What can I do for you?"
She sits down in the leather chair in front of my desk and crosses her legs. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail. Although in the following days I will learn to hate her all over again, I missed her long, painted fingernails, her shiny, straight black hair, and how she handles herself on her high-heeled shoes.
She takes off her sunglasses, which belonged to her mother, and her dark eyes meet mine.
"Mr. Fairfax, I want you to find my husband," she says. "He left me last weekend and I need you to find him."
Fairfax's Finest, a private investigation company I own and run, has been built thanks to solving cases that the police couldn't or wouldn't. I'm known as the best in town. Then again, I can't be proud about it, can I? Anyone with my knowledge would ace every case, would know them by heart even if they wished to forget them.
I want to take a deep breath, but I contain myself.
"Sure, I will find whoever needs finding," I answer with my raspy, weary voice. "Work with people I'd rather avoid, dredge up the past, and poke around the lives of others. Usual state of affairs. You have caught me a bit more worn down than usual, so I feel like asking something new, Betty MacDougall. How often do you feel as if someone is staring at you, someone you don't ever get to see?"
For a second her pleasant, calculated smile wavers. She has asked herself how come I know her name. Then again, she came looking for the best.
"Never," she answers, her voice flat. "Should I? Who has been spying on dear old me, Mr. Fairfax?"
"You might want to ask that question to yourself, madam," I say. "You came to me for a reason. You wouldn't be here if you hadn't heard of my work."
She ponders that for a second.
"True," Betty answers. "I can pay for the best, which is the level of skill I require. My husband, poor old Roy, is a troubled man. Suffers from chronic melancholia, you see, and any little misunderstanding might trigger him to simply run away from those who love him. It just happens that he's good at hiding, and this time, in his confusion, he has left with something that doesn't belong to him."
Good old Roy is hiding in Whitstable, and he has indeed fled with something that didn't belong to him. It just happens that it didn't belong to Betty either.
"What has this thief of yours stolen from you?" I ask, barely performing my part.
"He's not a thief, he's my husband. And the missing item is a music box. He took it with him."
"What's so special about it?"
"It belonged to my mother," she explains bitterly. "The person I loved the most and whom I will never get back. I'm not sure why Roy took the box from me. Maybe he wanted a memento of our relationship. To be honest, it might be the case that he has already lost it along the way, the silly bugger. However, I won't give up on either."
"Of course you shouldn't."
"I'll pay you to find him and retrieve the music box. You can charge extra to prioritize it." She challenges me with her stare. "Roy tied my hands, I'm afraid. I don't think I have any other choice but to deal with this nonsense."
She opens her purse and takes out a thick wad of bank notes. She peels off a few so new they aren't even creased, handing them over to me.
I briefly examine the money, even though I have already held these very same notes. Of course Betty is so carefree about money, given that she never worked hard to earn it. Well, I suppose that she does consider it working hard, in her peculiar way.
"You handle a small fortune very casually, Betty MacDougall."
"It's only money. In the scheme of things, it isn't that important."
"That's true, but I would imagine that someone who never had enough wouldn't throw it around so much."
"Oh, I'm not worried about it. I have more than enough, even for my simple lifestyle. And I make sure to put some aside for a rainy day. It isn't raining anyway."
I can almost see her eyes narrowing as she declares this last bit.
I cross my arms and hold Betty's stare with the blankest expression on my face. I'm not reacting to her charms, and if there's anything my dear old Betty hates is not being able to play people like an instrument.
"Few would call your lifestyle simple, Mrs. MacDougall, if they knew about it."
She smiles, the cold grin I know best.
"You'd be surprised, Mr. Fairfax, about what some people have and others don't."
"I wouldn't be surprised about anything. That's a experience that I miss. I am aware that you could pay for anything in this town and it wouldn't affect your finances."
Her eyes narrow.
"You have my attention, Mr. F. Are you going to tell me that you did preliminary research on someone you didn't know was going to walk through your door?"
I take a breath and lean into her personal space. Her face is so expressive when she's annoyed. I open my palm to reveal a silver crucifix on a heavy chain.
"Do you recognize this?"
For a brief moment I wonder if she will try to snatch it out of my hand. But she's too smart for that. Her eyes narrow again as she looks at the silver cross pretending to see it for the first time.
"Should I know any random crucifix that many of the people in this wretched town happen to own?" she says with an amused yet dismissive tone.
"This isn't your average crucifix, darling. It has a history that goes far beyond this old town."
"I really don't have time for riddles, Mr. Fairfax. I can see why you come with such recommendations if you manage to unnerve even your clients in such a manner. But I have more important things to do than play a guessing game with you."
I smile. All I have left is to either be swept by the current or indulge myself.
"The man that last owned it was an eccentric to say the least. He was also an infamous murderer of many young women, along with being a pimp. He used to lure women with promises of work as a model, dancer and the like. Those ladies had come into America and quickly fell into such debt that they felt forced to prostitute themselves. In return, he got them addicted to various drugs and abused them to his heart's content."
Betty's face doesn't change from its annoyance, except for the briefest of flickers in her eyes. As if she's trying very hard to not let me see something.
"A veritable monster, and an uncouth subject for small talk."
"But that's history now," I continue. "This crucifix was found in a bathroom stall with prints all over it. In another room of that floor, the police kept busy handling the poisoned corpse of the man that the crucifix had belonged to."
"So?" she says with a grunt. "Another dreary tale in this boring world."
"One of his whores ended up in prison for his murder. Lord knows she had enough cause, and she had already attacked him with a knife before. It just happened that the prints on this crucifix didn't match those of the woman who now rots in jail."
"So?" Betty repeats. Nobody would be able to read her expression even if they knew.
"She's innocent. We've never been able to figure out who the real murderer was, but we know it wasn't her. Still, I couldn't pin it on anyone."
"Do you make a show of trying to solve previous cases by framing for murder your new clients, Mr. Fairfax? I suppose it must have worked one time or another."
I smile at Betty as the familiar warmth spreads through my chest.
"This is evidence that you murdered someone, and that none but your victims knew what you are capable of."
"I'm capable of a lot, that's for sure. The world deals in proof, though. Surely you know that, investigator."
"I'm fairly certain that you can't bluff your way out of this one."
She sits there in silence for a minute or two, staring at the crucifix. Then she smiles. It's a dark smile that makes my blood run cold. A power of hers, one you never become immune to.
"You are playing a strange game," Betty says. "I wonder what your connections in the police would think of you accusing random young women without any proof. If this is a prank, you are boring me, but if you are as serious as you pretend, you're going to regret making me into your enemy, Mr. Fairfax."
"In polite society, to kill me you would need to catch me sleeping, because I wouldn't taste any of your food nor let your lips near mine."
She laughs.
"Ah, the toll it takes. Is that it? You are confusing me with any other beautiful, young woman of the many cases you have dealt with, one that made you learn to look over your shoulder. After all, we pay people like you to endure what we don't want to bother ourselves with."
I shush her, which breaks her practiced charm. The holes show for a brief second what lies inside. I point at the ceiling and look up, then back down to Betty's haunting eyes.
"It's getting stronger. You feel it now? The chill of the gaze upon you."
"No," she says, intrigued, "What do you mean?"
"There is a presence." I take a deep breath and step away from her towards the window. "There always has been. And yet you have never been able to notice it. Even a woman as cunning as yourself."
I turn my back on her, but she calls out to me. I look over my shoulder. I want to witness as much as her as I get to see, after all.
"Mr. Fairfax..." she says, trailing off. She shakes her head slowly. "You are a man full of surprises. First the crucifix, now talk about some invisible presence watching us. Are you a man of God by chance?"
"No. It's not a god, at least none of the ones we know. This presence is real, and it demands something from me. From us."
I turn back around. Her eyes look at me from head to toe and then they dart over to the door of my office as if someone else is going to enter.
"Oh, you are a strange one," Betty says, "A charmer and a mad man. A deadly combination."
I yearn for the pain.
"You have a birthmark on your left inner thigh. It has the faint shape of a dove."
Her eyes widen and her hands fly to her lap in case I had been looking up her dress. To her credit, she does an admirable impression of someone who is merely embarrassed. Then she steels herself.
"I didn't take you for such a dirty man that you would violate with your eyes a woman whom you have barely met." Betty's voice alternates between sounding flattered and creeped out. "Any of my lovers must have spoken to you, and at length, it seems. Is it that as an investigator you feel obligated to learn every private detail, no matter how little it concerns you?"
"Nobody has spoken to me about you, not yet. I found out about your birthmark while staring at it from so close that I could tickle your inner thigh with my nose. Many times I have traced the contour of that little dove with my tongue as the pungent aroma of your oven-hot, butter-smooth insides warmed my face."
A silence overcomes Betty, and I don't pressure her to answer.
"I feel dirty now," she answers in a low voice while avoiding my gaze.
"You have nothing to apologize for. Your body is a temple, and some of us have been dedicated to worshipping at the altar of your smell."
She sputters a quiet laugh.
"Are you hoping for me to stay quite a bit longer, in case you want to scratch behind an inner thigh or two?" she asks while challenging me with a seductive look.
"I will always be here. That's the only thing I can count on."
I continue to stand in silence and Betty stares, trying to read my thoughts with the look in my eyes.
"How many other women have you said this to?" she asks me, semi-seriously.
"You'd be surprised. You have been performing such exhilarating deeds, Betty, without feeling anyone looking over your shoulder. That's what fascinates me the most about all of you."
Betty is confused, and that troubles her. A woman like her needs to control the situation. If any of her potential puppets escape from their threads, they can run around cutting other puppets free.
"And how many of them have you fallen in love with?" she asks.
"There's the average man's love, and there's what you ignite in others. You are a whirlwind, Mrs. MacDougall. The main producer of hopeless infatuation."
She does not thank me for my words. She stands up from her chair and walks up towards me with a haughty strut in her hips. She won't blink.
"I have had enough of empty games, Mr. Fairfax. You do know too much about me and you won't reveal how. I can't make you unlearn, and I need your services. Will you accept the plentiful amount I will pay you for your uncanny abilities, or have I merely wasted my precious time?"
Before I know it, her hands move slowly up my chest and towards my collar. Her slim fingers begin to pull at the knot of my tie as her dark eyes capture my gaze. Her fingers slide down the silk fabric until they reach the top button of my black business shirt.
"Hmm, now this is in the way," she says as if speaking to herself.
"I can see how it would be bothersome."
"Well, I could just tear it off you..." she says with a little more force.
"If I were to help you, that is, as I have many times."
She clenches her jaw and pouts, narrowing her eyes at me. Then she stops with the seductress act and drops her hands to her side.
"Let's end this fantasy. Despite whatever you have been told about me, by sources I assure you I would be glad to learn about, I have never met you before the moment I walked into your office. Treat me as such for now. Until we get to know each other better, that is, in the course of your investigation."
I raise my hand to close my thumb and index fingers around her perfect chin. Her eyebrows twitch.
"I would accept your money, which would quickly lead me to figure out where your so called husband Roy Morris is hiding in fear. While I would stake out the place, you would insist of making one of your houses my base of operations for the time being. You would present yourself to me with some of your finest sets of lace lingeries, which along with your voluptuous body and your delicious smell would drive most men wild. It would only take a couple of glasses of whiskey for me to submit to you, and more often than not I would only pretend that I needed the motivation, even though I would have signed into your seduction from the very moment you walked into my office. I would enjoy your smell, your touch, the feel of your body in my arms, the embrace of your insides gripping me tight. I would want nothing more. And you have made an art of sucking cock, Mrs. MacDougall. Many would sacrifice their entire lives to die in your warm insides again."
Betty blushes, her chin still caught in my fingers.
"And ever since the first time," I continue, the weariness evident in my voice. "I haven't been able to blame you about any of it. Not the string of powerful men whom you seduced and discarded, some into a very early grave, only after their properties managed to end up in your hands. Someone invented you. Maybe the overseer, the invisible presence. Maybe that gaze only enjoys you, although not to the extent that I have done, and the rest of it is window dressing. And you would keep performing through every stage of our journey, not knowing you have done it over and over. It's just that this one time, as in a few other cases, I am not remotely in the mood of dancing to the tune."
A smile twists my lips. I don't like smiling; just not my style. It must look so wrong on my hard face.
"But I enjoy the irony of having you," I add, "the master of puppets, dance to a puppet master that you will never be able to sense."
I have broken her. I can tell, even if she doesn't understand half of what I'm saying. A crack in her facade, one that is slowly spreading further and further. She looks up at me, my fingers still wrapped around her chin. Her face twist into a grimace.
"You must be the best in town," she begins in such a low voice that could pass for a whisper, "able to worm your way into any person's mind through words alone. The weak would open up to you, give up all their secrets. It's just too bad that I'm only made out of secrets, Mr. Fairfax. Nothing else sustains me. You won't be able to dismantle me with your tricks."
I release my grip from her chin, and I can see the color starting to return to her face. Before she turns her back on me, she opens her mouth to say something else, and then closes it again.
"Write us a happy ending this time, Betty," I demand. "Because otherwise we will head into a wall."
For a second, Betty looks like she's going to face me and make another snide remark, but she resorts to speaking over her shoulder.
"I will not talk further until you either accept my case or refuse it. And only one of those options will keep me in your office any longer."
I snort.
"I accept, then. You've got yourself a detective."
She finally turns towards me, first with a winner's smile, head held high, about to strut towards me with the grace of a dancer. But something in my expression tells her that neither of us will benefit from my decision.
"You will first listen to the information you need about my husband," Betty says firmly. "You have been acting too strange for me to start wagging my bank notes around."
"As you wish," I sigh, walking over to my desk and picking up the bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
"No thank you. I'm not supposed to drink," she replies.
I pour myself a double serving of the brown liquid and swish it around in the glass, sucking it up through my teeth as its fine texture touches my taste buds. Then I rest on the edge of my desk again, facing my old flame.
"I want to prevent you from wasting your enchanting saliva, Mrs. MacDougall. Your supposed husband, Roy Morris, that naïve painter that had the misfortune of falling in love with you, or with your charms anyway, put two and two together and is hiding for his life. That musical box contains the proof of how you acquired your last house and two cars, as well as a significant increase of money in one of your bank accounts. The poor idiot is way over his head, as he doesn't understand how many men you control. Just once, I became one of them."
A wicked expression crosses Betty's face.
"You're a liar and an idiot, Mr. Fairfax. No man could resist my charms that easily. You're a weakling, scared of what might have happened with me."
"What you have done to others, more like it. No, I have never been afraid, just disappointed."
I take out the crucifix again, and when I hold it up, Betty widens her nostrils and clenches her teeth.
"In a couple of days you would have tangled me into having two innocent men killed," I say. "You would have made sure that I remained satisfied and pliable. We are way too easy to manipulate, as you well know. And it would have taken me three more days of mayhem until I correlated the prints we took from this crucifix to those you left on a bottle. At first I would have never taken you to be so strong and ruthless that even a murderous pimp, the owner of the biggest prostitution ring in town, would have danced to your tune, but from then on, even as I performed my role I have never underestimated you. And although any kiss could imprint your poison on my skin, I have never had enough of you."
Before I finish speaking, Betty searches her purse. She takes out her Browning pocket pistol, then holds it as if she were revealing a winning hand.
"Don't ever play cards, Mr. Fairfax. You don't know when to stop talking."
I cross my arms.
"Are you going to shoot me in my office, Betty?"
"You don't get to call me by my first name."
"I prefer to call you by what you really are. A killer. Someone who kills people for money. It's alright, though. You are made this way."
I place the crucifix back inside my chest pocket. I smile warmly, and it creeps Betty out.
"Instead of ruining yourself ahead of time, let's enjoy ourselves," I suggest. "I'll go get my car. I will drive us to our favorite restaurant. We will get to forget about runaway husbands, mobsters, prostitutes, and our inevitable ends."
Betty's hand is trembling. She's too intelligent to kill a man in a place where even if she murdered my secretary on her way out, she would be caught in a day. But no man had ever gotten into her head like I have. We always had such an effect on each other.
"You never stop, do you?" she mutters between her teeth. "You still think you can charm your way out of this."
"I haven't been able to charm my way out of any of these nightmares."
I step forward, and as a reflex, Betty lifts her hand holding the Browning, pointing it towards me. Even when I sense her about to squeeze the trigger, I make no effort to slap the pistol away, grab her wrist or step out of the way. The hot lead flattens against the right part of my chest, punching my ribs, tearing through my lung. I should have fallen to the floor, but I don't. I have missed this pain.
I cough out blood. It'll get harder and harder to breathe.
I hear my office door opening, and my secretary, Doris, peeks her head in. She wouldn't have suspected a potential client attempting to murder me. She has no clue yet what kind of devil she let through. Doris sees me standing with my hand on my bloodied chest while a woman points a gun at me. She screams like a schoolgirl.
I smile while I drool blood.
"It's okay, Doris," I say. "You can close the door now."
Before my loyal Doris decides between rushing towards Betty in a futile attempt or closing the door and fleeing, Betty flips her pocket pistol towards her. The second bullet leaves the gun and flies straight into the forehead of my secretary.
"I'm sorry about this, Doris," I say before her dead body could even tumble to the floor.
Betty is breathing hard, and stares at the corpse for a moment before turning sharply towards me.
"You're the one who should be apologizing. A man who can't keep his mouth shut is a sorry sight."
Even though I have done nothing but unsettle Betty this time, she doesn't anticipate me striding towards her to close the distance. When she moves her gun-holding arm to point at me, I grab her wrist right next to my ear. With my free hand I cup the back of her head. I have always loved the feeling of her silky, lustrous hair against my skin.
"Shut me up like you love to do."
I press my bloodied lips against her red ones, and invade the wet insides of her mouth with my rough tongue. I bite her upper lip with my teeth, and she winces. I keep on savoring the taste of her blood as it goes down my throat. Her Browning falls to the floor with a loud thud, and then her fingers tighten around my shoulders hard enough to hurt. I have ached for the pain she doles out.
Betty is no longer gripping my shoulders to push me away, she's holding on to me. Her tongue isn't hiding from mine, and instead caresses it with a rhythm we've never had to agree on. I feel a shiver run through Betty's body. She doesn't pull away even when more of my blood than saliva flows into her mouth.
"Darling," she whispers.
I look deep into her dark, unknowing eyes, and into her depraved soul. I have learned to savor the times when our souls connect so intimately. In this moment, everything is perfect. I embrace the cycles of humiliation, the madness of performing for a play that none of the other actors know how it ends. If every blue moon I get to face my Betty again, I shall dance to the end of time.
My lungs have filled with blood. My legs are failing me. I don't want to cough into her mouth, so I pull our lips apart. Betty tries to follow my tongue with hers, but I turn her head, hug her tight and then sink my teeth into the firm flesh of her neck.
She moans in pain. I drag her down to the ground. She shivers more than struggles against my chest. I bite through the thick skin, fat and gristle, and then gritting my teeth with a final push through the squishy sounds, I feel them pierce flesh, nerves, muscles and blood vessels. The blood is gushing into my mouth, and I'm swallowing as fast as I can.
Her body convulses as her moans turn into gurgling. I'm still sucking on the hole I've created when I hear the faint sounds of police sirens approaching outside. I have neighbors, after all. But we'll both be gone when they arrive.
Betty and I, we endure for the pain. The pain we get to feel, the pain we cause to others.
I want a last look as my heart fails. Dark red blood oozes out of Betty's mouth and her nostrils. Her eyes flutter as she stares at me with intensity. She doesn't have long. It's alright. It's a good way to die.
I lick the side of Betty's face, just above the blood welling out of her ear. Even if I could speak, she wouldn't hear me anymore with the blood that's now clogging her ear canals and getting into the ear drums. The light fades in her eyes before my own heart goes out.
You haven't pulled your gaze away, haven't you? I knew you wouldn't, no matter how grim it gets. Whatever you are, whatever your role has been in all of this, you witness me getting sent back to the starting line of each journey, and you follow it to the end. I am way past raging in vain. This time I wasn't rebelling: I needed to refill. Thank you for giving me my old lady again. In a short while the world will go black, and I'll get back to work.

---

Some notes about how this story came to be:

-As I was looking through my archive of notes for what I could want to write later, I came across the concept for a short story I had passed over plenty of times before, and that originally came to my mind some years ago: that of a private investigator who knows he's in some fictional world, and who has had to relive the same twenty or so cases over and over again, maybe when someone reads or watches his stories. I don't know why he had to be a private investigator, but it seemed cool, and I needed something to do this morning. I finished it late at work in the afternoon.
-I prompted that the protagonist started in the typical setting of a private investigator. GPT-3 came up with the tapping of heels about to enter his office. That brought to my mind the whole femme fatale thing, so I quickly put together a background in which she wanted to use the private investigator to hunt down someone who could destroy her whole criminal empire, whatever kind of evidence the guy actually had. I also found intriguing the fact that the protagonist was well aware, and had lived through, all the deceit she had to offer.
-Actually, it was GPT-3 who came up with Betty's excuse of her intending to hire the protagonist to find her husband. It was through that that I set up the rest of the background.
-GPT-3's line "She opens her purse and takes out a thick wad of bank notes. She peels off a few so new they aren't even creased, handing them over to me" gave me a good sense of the kind of power the protagonist was dealing with.
-GPT came up verbatim with "I take a breath and lean into her personal space. Her face is so expressive when she's annoyed. I open my palm to reveal a silver crucifix on a heavy chain", therefore creating the whole subplot of the pimp and his crucifix. GPT-3 also came up with most of 'The man that last owned it was an eccentric to say the least. He was also an infamous murderer of many young women, along with being a pimp. He used to lure women with promises of work as a model, dancer and the like. Those ladies had come into America and quickly fell into such debt that they felt forced to prostitute themselves. In return, he got them addicted to various drugs and abused them to his heart's content', although I edited it significantly.
-I like the idea of the protagonist flaunting the evidence that eventually would set the chain of events that would cause Betty's demise, if the protagonist went along with the plot.
-I don't know how the "reader" or "experiencer" of the story, whom the protagonist senses as an invisible presence, actually checks out the repeated events that the protagonist lives through. But the protagonist doesn't know either.
-I love getting into sexual stuff when GPT-3 is on the other line, because it's great witnessing the AI squirm and in general deal with it while retaining its dignity.
-The lines 'You have nothing to apologize for. Your body is a temple, and some of us have been dedicated to worshipping at the altar of your smell' were entirely GPT-3's. I love the creative bastard.
-Betty getting handsy with the protagonist to manipulate him was GPT-3's deal, and also Betty getting annoyed that she wasn't getting a proper response.
-The lines 'I lick the side of Betty's face, just above the blood welling out of her ear. Even if I could speak, she wouldn't me anymore with the blood that's now clogging her ear canals and getting into the ear drums' were GPT-3's almost entirely.

My Strange Friend From Far Away (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

I sink into the cold blackness as I take deep breaths of pure oxygen. Above, beyond the silence that surround and protects me, the storm must be grumbling, its wind lashing, its rain stinging. That means most people won't venture out. They will remain in their warm, safe homes, and I will sink further into the watery void of this lake, as isolated and free as an astronaut with her tether cut off.
At this depth, the water above me is dark as a room without windows. I don't feel anything but a uniform cold, I don't hear anything but the pressure in my ears and the steady sound of my breathing. I am so far below the surface of the water that my body doesn't even register the sensation of sinking deeper. I close my eyes, but the darkness doesn't change. My mind is still here, somewhere. It knows something is going on outside, and it has decided to stay awake for just a little longer.
When the black waters light up, I first think I have imagined it. The pressure of something heavy plunging into the water from above and coursing through it creates a current that pushes me away, then it feels like something has slapped the water from underneath, forcing me to drift away in a bubble moving up. The weighty object strikes the bottom of the lake, and the trepidation of the impact vibrates through my bones.
I snap out of it, of my solitude and calmness, as if I had fallen from a bed. Something big has crashed into the lake, and has stopped so close to me that the waters still rock me back and forth as the lake returns to its equilibrium.
I dive further down. It wasn't a person nor an animal, and it sank way too fast for a boat, not to mention that I was the only one on the lake during this stormy afternoon. And the object didn't just sink, it had hit the lake with force. So it must have been a flying vehicle, or a projectile. It didn't feel as huge as a regular plane, even a single engine aircraft. And any helicopter pilot would have avoided flying during such weather even in an emergency.
My ears pop as I try to ignore the cold and swim down to the seabed. The water feels murky and thick, but I can't see anything. I just feel around for any large piece of metal that could have come off an aircraft. My hands just find dirty sand and bits of dead plants.
I was about to give up and rise quickly to the lake's surface with the buoyancy compensator, but my back touches a solid object. I turn and slide my hands carefully along its curved, hot surface. It feels metallic. I wish I had bothered to bring my flashlight for this dive, but today I was craving nothing but darkness. The shape reminds me of satellite. As I follow its shape to figure out how big it is, I figure it approaches the size of a van. Are regular satellites supposed to be this big? As my heartbeat increases, I probe the surface hoping to find the junctures of some hatch. Instead, what I feel is just a smooth metallic surface. No door, no crevices. Not even any rivets to speak of.
A nearby turbulence kicks up sand that hits the exposed skin of my face. I close my eyes as a reflex, and when I open them again the darkness of the bottom of the lake has brightened as if I had huddled close to a fireplace for warmth. A hole has opened on the surface of this vehicle-like object, and amber-colored, liquid-like light is flowing out of it. I can't help but be drawn to this light, and as I approach it I realize that it's not coming from a point source, but rather from the inside surface of the craft. I hold on to the edge of the opening to float closer and take a peek. The interior is empty like a drained egg shell except for the presence of a young woman maybe in her early twenties, wearing a gray, skin tight jumpsuit. Her waist long, scarlet hair floats in the murky water as if I was looking at a still photo of the woman falling. Her eyes are closed in her expresionless face, but she's hugging what at first glance looks like a metallic shoebox.
Either the woman is dead or will be soon. She must be unconscious and drowning. She doesn't seem to be injured, but unless I drag her to the surface with me, she's a goner. I want to help her - I'm not made of stone after all - but I don't want to sacrifice myself for her either. However, I always bring the redundant scuba system. Enough air to get to the surface in an emergency.
I try to grab the woman by her jumpsuit, but it's way too tight, so I end up grabbing her by the throat, just long enough that I can pull her out of the crashed aircraft. She is very much dead weight. Will she prove too heavy to carry to the surface? I can't hesitate. Even if this woman is a stranger, for the rest of my life I would have to bear the burden of having failed her, of having allowed her to die in the cold dark.
I reposition the woman so I can embrace her from the back before I start kicking my legs to ascend, press and hold the nozzle of the redundant breathing apparatus against her mouth, and as I swim towards the surface of the lake unsafely quick, what reaches us of the light that escapes from the downed craft shows me that the metallic box has slipped from the unconscious woman's grip. It falls in slow motion towards the sandy bottom.
I'm too anxious to count the time it takes me to reach the surface of the lake. At some point I feel like I'm dragging a corpse. When I finally emerge to the stormy afternoon that had awaited me outside of this watery sanctuary, the dark cloud that had covered the sky is yet to move, and it seems closer. The wind has picked up, its violent gusts are rocking my little boat nearby. The rain drops are huge and they hurt as they hit the exposed skin of my face.
I want to stop and check on the redheaded woman, whose troublingly pale face remains expressionless, but if she's drowning, I won't be able to perform CPR nor breathe into her mouth while floating on the water. I need to lift her to my boat.
I dive in again and, with a strong kick of my legs and hands, propel us both to the boat. I don't know whether she is still breathing or not when I lay her on the floor of my boat. I can't stop shivering, my teeth are clattering, and my fingers are numb.
The woman's drenched, scarlet hair is stuck to her face as if she was trying to hide. I cannot see her eyes. I move the strands so I reveal her nose and mouth. I prepare my hands on the woman's chest to start CPR, but when I lower my ear to her nose to check for breathing, which I didn't expect to find, the warmth of the breath coming out of her nostrils caresses my cheek. I find myself paralyzed. That's impossible. She must have been breathing while she floated in the flooded craft. I check her slender neck for a pulse, but there's none. And yet, she's breathing. I stare at her face in disbelief, ceasing to breathe myself for a few seconds.

The rain is beating down in unrelenting fury as I pull the boat onto the shore and push it far enough from the water that it won't be swamped. As I struggle to drag the woman's dead weight towards my cabin, the soaked ground keeps sucking my swimfins. I take them out and leave them there. Although half of the woman's back is caked in mud, I gently lay her on the mattress I have been sleeping on for the past three years. Then I wheel my heater so it will warm her. In case I was losing my mind, I check her breathing again. She's still taking air in as if she was sleeping peacefully.
I want to take the woman's skin tight jumpsuit off and check for wounds. However, I would need her full cooperation, and I don't find any zipper on it. I can't figure out how she even put it on.
I end up wiping the mud from her body with a wet washcloth, then throw a blanket over her and place another against the back of her head as a pillow.
After I have undressed and dried myself, I warm my dinner in the microwave and then wearily sit down in front of the woman to eat as I observe her. She hasn't moved a centimeter. She's so pale as if she had been injured in the crash and lost too much blood for her body to survive. And yet she looks to me otherwise as healthy as they come.

The sun, that hadn't been strong enough to pierce the cloud cover of this storm, has already set when I realize that at some point I dozed off on the chair. When I open my eyes, the woman is sitting up straight on my mattress and is staring at me without blinking, expressionless. Her eyes are of a red color almost as vivid as her hair.
I want to ask her all the usual questions, but I get the sense she won't answer. Still, I try.
"How do you feel?"
Her gaze remains fixed on me. We hold each other's gaze as the hair on my arms raises. Seconds later, the woman looks around with precise movements as if scanning the room for something, or checking out her surroundings. She must not have found what she was looking for, because she turns her head to stare at me again.
"Do you have a name?" I ask, breaking the silence.
Her red eyes blink once, then twice, as if thinking about the question. Then she opens her mouth slightly and breathes out a quiet hiss. I shiver. Was that an attempt at a word, in a language I wouldn't understand, or did this woman seriously hiss at me like a predator?
"Did you just hiss at me?" My voice trembles slightly, although I attempt a smile. "That's not an answer."
She lowers her gaze, still silent, and turns to look out the window, then at my belongings that lay on the floor, and then she looks back at me. Her eyes hold a cunning sparkle, like that of an uncaged beast in the wilderness who had finally come across his prey.
"I'm wondering whether it is an issue of you not understanding me, not being able to speak, or not wishing to," I say, as I figure it is a good idea to be as clear as possible with this stranger. "Can you confirm whether you understand me?"
She narrows her shoulders a bit in what I initially take for a shrug, but I can't be sure. I'm exhausted. Before I went out for a dive this afternoon I had expected to go to sleep as soon as I returned, and my body it asking me to. But I have no clue what to do with this stranger.
"Okay then." I let out a sigh. "I'll think of a name to call you, given that you are unlikely to give me one. How about... Alice?"
I don't know why I said that. It just came out, and it seems to catch her attention. She stares at me with her piercing gaze, before nodding a single, terse nod.
"Nice to meet you, Alice. I'm Lena." I hold my hand towards her as a gesture of friendship. She merely stares down at it. I pull back my hand awkwardly. "So, I'll take that as a no on the hand shaking. Do you need anything? I can get you something to eat, or a blanket perhaps? It's a bit cold in here."
Water, to start with. Who would be allergic to water? I turn to the sink, grab a nearby glass that I had drank from before I set off for a bit of diving today. I don't remember if I cleaned it. In any case, I fill it with water. As soon as I turn towards the stranger again, her piercing, unblinking stare makes me shiver. It feels like turning back towards a cat to realize that it likely had been staring at you for a couple of minutes even though you didn't feel it. In the case of this stranger who can breathe underwater, I feel the intelligence behind her silence as if she was scanning the contents of my brain.
I hand her the glass of water, and she eagerly takes it from me. She gulps it down in an instant as if she was dying of thirst. She lowers the glass from her face, and I notice a faint gleam of moisture along the rim of her lips.
As I get the sense the stranger doesn't know what to do with the glass, I take it from her hands carefully and return it to the counter. "I'll get you some more later."
"Water..." The woman's face twists up for a moment, as if she was struggling to find the words. "I need water."
I'm shocked, although I hide it behind my relaxed expression. It felt as if I had heard a random animal speaking.
"I see. Don't worry, I'll get you all you need. If you aren't injured, which seems to be the case, you can get some whenever you want. Feel at home, and all that."
This time I bring her a water bottle. As she gulps down most of it at once, I sit down on the carpet with a glass of water myself.
"You know, I love that you understand and can speak my language to whatever extent. I can't imagine what happened, how you ended up at the bottom of the lake, but I'm glad I could help. My good deed of this month, I guess."
"You saved me?" The woman asks with a surprise that seems to be genuine.
I snap my head back. What's the last thing this woman remembers? Surely plummeting inside that aircraft of hers. Did she fall unconscious before an accident happened?
"Yeah. Your craft sank to the bottom of the lake. I happened to be diving down there at the time. Gave me quite a scare. I took you out, wiped the mud from your jumpsuit, all that."
"Why did... why did you save me? You don't know me. You don't know who I am."
I clear my throat, and respond carefully.
"Well... I couldn't just leave you there to die. It's against my nature."
The woman is quiet for a while. Then she speaks up with a sigh: "Thank you. I won't forget it."
"Neither will I."
She gets up from my dirty matress and moves towards the entrance. I think that she's going to leave as if I had never met her, but she stands in front of the window and pulls the curtain away to gaze through the hard rain towards the lake.
"You know," I start, although I'm not sure why, "I used to love rain. It's not that I don't like rain now, but... there was a certainty in the world back then when I was a kid, you know? As certain as all childhoods are. When it rained, you knew it'd clear up. Not always, perhaps, but it usually did. Now all I see is pain in every drop."
I'm looking at her back. I can't see her expression.
"Pain?" she asks. "Where do you see pain in the rain?"
"I don't know. Listen, I figure the you I'm seeing is a disguise I can't begin to understand. My first impression is that you would need to look plainer, because a pretty woman attracts enough attention on her own. But what I truly want to say is that no matter where you came from, or why you did, I hope your people and mine can be civil with each other, because all the killing we inflict upon ourselves is more than enough. I don't know if there's someone out there waiting for you, but if I can help you reach them, you can tell me."
She doesn't respond. She seems to be deep in thoughts. Then, she clears her throat and turns around to face me. I can see the rain water dripping from her waist length hair.
"I don't know why I'm here," she says. "I don't know why I'm here, but I want to stay here, because you are kind."
I don't know how to take her words.
"Does it bother you that I know? Is it a bad thing that I do?" I ask.
"Not at all. Not at all," she replies. "I've never met anyone that knows. I have to thank you for not sounding flabbergasted."
"I wouldn't have expected you to be so polite, but I'm so glad. There's no harm in me knowing, you see. We are both intelligent creatures. I hope at least you consider me that. So we can both behave like civilized people."
"We can," she answers. "Lena, I need to return to the bottom of that lake."
"Ah... It's not safe," I say before I remember that this stranger can breathe underwater.
"I know," she says. "But this is important."
I can read the worry in her red eyes.
"I mean, it's night out. Can it wait until tomorrow morning?"
Her face softens. "Of course."
"We can search for the wreckage in the morning light. It's not like we are going to get much light down there, but... I have never dived this late. I couldn't guarantee it'd go right."
The woman nods.
"Thank you."
"Ah, can I ask you something else?"
"Shoot."
I bite my lip.
"I quite like the name I gave you. Alice... But now you can tell me your actual name. If you use those, that is."
She shakes her head. "I'm sticking with Alice. It's the name you gave me, I'll always answer to it."
I nod.
"Alright then... I suppose we should get some rest for tonight. I'm afraid my place is as shabby as you can see. I don't need much. But you can sleep on my mattress. I'll go grab a few pillows and sleep on the floor for the night."
"That's not necessary," she says. "We can share the mattress together. Two people would fit, right? I mean, we're about the same height and size."
"Well... That'll be fine."
After we flip the mud-stained mattress, the woman sits down on it then scoots over towards the wall to leave space for me. I've never had another person in my cabin, let alone share a bed with one. I'm getting dizzy.
"I'm... going to pee first. Just lie down, I'll return in a moment."
As I leave the room for what I chose to consider my study, I grab an empty plastic bottle. Once I enter the study, I close the door behind me, pull my pants and underwear down and press the mouth of the bottle so most of my pee goes inside. I'm more careful than usual this time. My heart is racing. After I have finished, I sigh and try to relax.
When I returned to the main room, I half expected the woman to be gone. I can't look her in the eye even though she's staring at me. I turn off the light. Once I lay down next to her, we both wrap the blanket around ourselves. I'm as stiff as a board.
"Alice..." I start with a thin voice. "Is it beautiful out there?"
"Quite."
I close my eyes.
"Ah... That's good."
The rain lashes the window as I slowly drift to sleep. This strange woman's warmth feels good next to me, and I hope she doesn't mind my cold feet. I fall asleep tangled in a mess of thoughts. My dreams are dark and empty.

When I wake up it's still black outside, and I'm exhausted as if I have barely dozed off for a nap. No alarm dragged me from my dreams. Why did I wake up?
The woman isn't warming the bed next to me. She's standing in front of the window and looking towards the lake, except that this time she hasn't pulled the curtain away. For a moment I think she's naked, until my brain realizes she's still wearing her tight jumpsuit. I can tell by the wrinkles that she isn't wearing anything underneath.
"Alice?" I call out in a meek voice.
I hear then over the background sound of the rain and the wind the whoop whoop of a helicopter nearby. My first thought is that they must be nuts to hover over the lake in this weather. Then I figure that the only reason why they would be out here during the night and under the rain must be related to the woman whose back I'm staring at. I get up and wrap the blanket around my shoulders. After rubbing sleep out of my eyes, I approach the woman. I'm reluctant to move the curtains, but I make out two helicopters whose searchlights are brightening something on the surface of the lake. And there's movement on the waters as well, an inflatable boat.
"They're looking for you," I tell her as if she were stupid.
Her gaze doesn't break away from the intruders and her face remains expresionless except for a tension in her eyebrows. Then I remember that we were supposed to dive to the bottom of the lake first thing in the morning.
"Damn it, you wanted to return to your craft. No, you wanted to retrieve something. That box, was it?"
The woman turns her face towards me and nods.
"Did you bring it with you when you saved me?", she asks with a neutral tone.
A bitter taste fills my mouth.
"Sorry, I... I saw how you were hugging it against your chest. When I grabbed you to swim to the surface, it slipped from your hands. It must be resting at the bottom of the lake."
Her face becomes even more expressionless, as if she was pulling away from me.
"We can't go out there, Alice," I say. "It must be the military, or some secret branch of the government. They probably have reached your craft already, and this cabin of mine is the only one along the shore. They will come to figure out if I know anything, and I'm sure that they won't need a warrant to enter. If they find you... For starters, I'm sure I won't ever see you again. Nobody else will ever see you again outside of whatever hole they'll throw you into."
I'm sure she's considering the repercussions of being seen, as she just stands still and slowly blinks.
"The soldiers now have what they want from you..." I continue in a low voice. "Or at least they know where it is. But they must know enough about the kind of craft your people use to understand that it was carrying someone. They must think you have reached the shore and are hiding, or making your way somewhere. I'm sure they will look for days and bother the locals. We need to leave."
I go on to explain that I have a car parked behind the cabin, and will drive her to a safe place. She just nods as I speak.
"There's a town nearby," I say as I look around the room to figure out where I left the keys. I haven't driven for a week. "I'm sure the military will look around there as well, but at least we won't have a target painted on us as we do now remaining in this cabin. From then on we'll figure out what to do."
I grab my torch, which I left on top of the battery charger, and shortly after I find the car keys under a candlestick. I turn to face the woman. She remains expressionless, but there is definitely life in her eyes now.
"Come on then," I say, gesturing her to follow me to the door. "Let's get out of here. You really can't allow those people to take you."
"I have no choice," she says, turning her head to look at the lake one last time. "But they will find me anyway."
"That's defeatist talk."
I walk to the back door with the woman slowly following after me. I open it for her and gesture her to walk in front. The cold, hard rain hits my face, and I can barely see anything in front. I don't want to risk turning on my torch now. Before I turn to beeline towards the parked car that I can't see, I hear the back door close behind me. A dark shape is moving around there, and I quickly try to turn on the torch, but a strong blow sinks into my stomach. I gasp for breath. I can feel the air crushed out of my lungs as I fall to the ground. I roll into the grass in an attempt to get away from my attacker. Hearing the sound of feet pattering on the grass, I try to stand up before some heavy foot crushes my skull.
"Not her." A harsh male voice says close by.
I hear a buzzing sound, then glimpse a blue arc of light on a device that someone is holding. A taser. They have missed. A few big men are moving around between me and Alice, who is retreating slowly towards the house.
Although I'm coughing my lungs out and the rain is making it hard for me to take deep breaths, I stagger towards the backs of those men.
"Hey! She hasn't done anything to you!" I try to say, then someone lands a heavy kick on my side and I fall into a puddle, where my face ends up covered by the muddy water. I can't see anything when I open my eyes. I try to get up, but a heavy boot crushes my back. Before I can formulate any thought, I feel something gripped around my neck.
They are going to kill me. Just because I happened to be at the lake when the craft fell, just because I rescued the strange woman, these government people will end my life. That's how it is.
The world lights up, and for a moment I think that I've been shot in the head. I'm bathed in light. So are the military men standing around, as well as Alice, who is keeping away closer to my cabin. Then I hear the helicopter rotors and realize that its searchlight is pointed straight at us. Someone is shouting, although I can't tell apart much between the rain and the pain.
A woman wearking a shiny blue suit is advancing towards the men. No, not another woman, it's Alice. Her jumpsuit has changed. She stands between me and the agents, and then I really see her for the first time. An scaled, reddish arm reaches out and grabs the nearest man by the neck, lifting him up without any effort. His feet are swinging in the air, and then he is thrown against the ground. They all draw their weapons and point them at the strange woman, but they don't fire.
"Back away from him," a voice from above says over a loudspeaker, "Or we will open fire."
The woman looks at me for a moment, and I can only stare back in awe. Her face is purple like a bruise, the teeth inside her open maw sharp like a shark's. She has retained the bright red eyes, although none of the hair.
Alice hisses like a snake as she swings one leg forward. The agents open fire, but she has already leaped over their heads and landed behind them. She grabs by the arm the man who had gripped something around my neck to kill me. She swings him around like a flail, his own pistol flying out of his hand and into the air. She lets go of the agent and he crashes into his fellows, knocking two of them to the ground.
"Run!" she screams, although it comes out as a bark.
I do not need to be told twice, and I sprint away from the cabin as fast as I can. From behind me come the bursts of automatic fire, as well as the increasing whoop whoop of the second helicopter. However, as I spot the treeline in the dark, I stop. If I flee through the woods, I will never see Alice again. I will never know what happened to her, although due to her isolation, separated from her people and hunted down by an organization that would hide this night even from the rest of us, I would always regret not having been able to act, even if trying wouldn't change a thing.
I stand and watch as the cabin door is ripped off by a burst of fire, shortly before the wooden walls are torn to pieces. My heart sinks as I watch agents pour into the building, before the loudspeaker spouts an order.
"Do not kill the alien on sight!"
A few agents trail out of the building without noticing my figure in the darkness. The panicked voice of one of the soldiers reaches me as they scatter as if retreating.
"She's called in!"
Instead of regrouping, the military guys flee into the woods. One of them, who is wearing night vision goggles, briefly looks my way before ignoring me as if I were a random deer. I don't understand. My torso and neck hurt, and I taste blood. I stagger towards the back door of the cabin, but then I spot Alice, a reddish and purple figure a bit taller than before and whose shiny skin resembles metallic scales, walking slowly towards me while holding a small, phone like device in her raised hand.
"You..." I begin, but I double over to cough first. "You made it."
"So did you, Lena."
As I struggle to stand upright, I try to focus my gaze so I can register her new facial features, her almond-like red eyes enlarged towards the sides of her head, the thin, almost sculpted protuberance of the nose, and a maw with protruding teeth. The helicopters are swinging their searchlights wildly while they maneuver away from the cabin. And as I frame both of the vehicles in my vision, a new craft pops up around a hundred feet above them as if it had teleported there. It's metallic cylinder the size of a football field, and in each of its ends flare a blurry, fire-like light that changes colors between red, orange and green.
I feel Alice close to me. She has stopped by my side. As she raises her scaly hand to touch my arm, the enormous spacecraft projects a liquid light that blankets the whole area. No, not the whole area, it precisely encompasses the helicopters, me and Alice, as well as the treeline. Then I feel myself lifted as by a giant. Me and Alice are floating towards the bottom of the cylindrical craft. Both helicopters screech and groan while getting compressed slowly as if caught in a hydraulic press. Although a wave of vertigo overwhelms me, I need to look down towards the ground. That's when I spot all the military men that had tried to flee through the woods. They are floating in the direction of the craft, but they are struggling as if they could hold on to something.
I must have passed out. Next thing I know I'm standing up from a sterile-looking floor, like that of an operating room. People are moving and shouting around me. My head is spinning.
To my left, a man wearing a camo outfit decked in accessories, who in this room looks as if he came from a costume party, is screaming in terror. I don't understand why, but then I notice that strange metallic appendages coming from the celing, which gives the impression of being made out of complicated machinery, have restrained the man's arms and legs. The appendages tug him and he sails through the empty space of the room until he lands on a table that wouldn't be out of place in any operating room I had seen before. As the man, who is crying like a child, looks on, strangely shaped, seemingly autonomous and sharp devices come up from the sides of the table and then tear the man apart in a bloodbath. Only when his head is severed he stops screaming, and his eyes keep moving for a few seconds.
Someone shoves me as if I was in the way. Other men are being restrained and pulled into the line of operating tables. As ear shattering screams fill the room, the growing spill of blood is falling down inconspicuous drains on the floor. I spot various people with metallic, scaly skin either standing near the operation tables, or grabbing detached limbs and moving them somewhere else. Then I feel something cold and metallic gripping my own limbs with such a strength as if I had fallen into industrial machinery. I fly backwards, then land heavily on my injured back.
In the periphery of my vision I sense the operating tools that are going to butcher me, but I can't tear my gaze away from the sight in front of me: the curved wall of this large room is covered in little alcoves closed with a transparent material. They display human heads, human torsos, human limbs, human genitals. Some flayed, some dissected. Most of the faces look back towards me in shock, their expressions frozen. Men, women, children.
The tools never dismember me nor behead me. Around me the strange people are arguing loudly in a language my vocal cords would never be able to reproduce. Then to my left, next to the table, appears a purple face that I recognize, two large, red eyes that look down towards me with intelligence and warmth.
"Can you swim in the dark, Lena?"
I open my mouth to speak, but my throat is closed and my eyes are watering. I blink a few times, as I want to look at Alice for the last time.

I am falling. Above me, the football field sized, cylindrical craft hovers like a blimp against the black clouds. The rain lashes sideways against me, the wind screeches in my ears. The craft gets smaller and smaller.
I crash against a surface, but I don't die. Instead I become engulfed by cold, black waters which cut me off from all sounds but my heartbeat, and separate me from the wild storm above. I sink in slow motion until I can't tell if I have stopped.
I am hurting. My mouth tastes metallic. A wave of anguish is shaking my insides. I close my eyes tight and for a moment I wish to fall asleep.
I kick my legs and swim.

An Unspoiled Heart (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

My heart beats even louder than when I made the breakthrough that led me to this experiment, to being seated on a public bench on a tuesday afternoon with a wide view of the bustling, chaotic city, along with all its nonsense that I usually avoid as much as I can. There's heavy traffic on the road, as this is one of the main streets, and plenty of people are walking to and fro, living their stupid lives that have little to do with science and advancing mankind. I power up my tablet, which I built myself from scratch, and I point its scanner towards one of the cars waiting for a traffic light to turn green.
I have a clear enough view of the vehicle for the scanner of my device to hit it properly, and when it hits, the car's properties are listed on the screen of my device. The AI, which I trained myself, quickly translates the DNA-like properties into readable stuff. It lists the car's body's color in hexadecimals, that approach a pure red. Other properties reveal that the tires are worn down. There's a link to the universe entry for its driver, but I'm not interested in the guy yet. On my tablet I edit the hexadecimals for the color and change it to blue. As soon as I save my modification, in the real world the color has instantly turned a lovely shade of blue. A couple of passerbies stop and stare at the car as if they believe they have suddenly lost their minds, or at least that the car has some modern means of changing the color of its body on the fly. No matter. The world's inhabitants except for myself and a few deceased geniuses are all peasants. Their minds will adapt to the changing realities as if they were being dragged by a current.
The light turns green, and the modified car crosses the intersection. The driver hasn't noticed anything. I quickly change the properties of two of its tires so they blow up in unison. The car screeches to a stop in the middle of the street, and the driver gets out of it and, confused, stares at his tires. I imagine he will notice the color change soon enough. Hopefully he's a car freak, and I have just stolen a small thing from him: now one of his babies has been hexed, its properties changed by some unknown force. But nobody else in the history of mankind has found out what I painstakingly worked to discover: that the universe is built just like a video game. Maybe it is a video game, not that it would mean much to me given that I was born inside of it. Once you can read the properties of everything and you have developed the means to alter them, you are de facto the king of this world. Of the whole universe.
I get up from the bench and leave towards the park. The streets are mine. I take a deep breath and close my eyes, feeling the late afternoon sun on my face. When I open my eyes, my gaze falls on the large crowd gathered on the grass. Some have sat down in groups to eat, others are running around, some are walking their dogs.
I orient the scanner of my tablet towards a tall guy that is playing frisbee, and I read his properties. I change the colors of his clothing, as well as of his hair and of the frisbee he's playing with. The guy's skin turns white by itself as his pitiful brain struggles to integrate my interference. He looks down at his now purple t-shirt and the bright green frisbee, and he begins to yell with fear. The crowd turns towards him and his shrill screams, and soon everybody is gaping at the guy as he jumps up and down while pointing at his clothes and the frisbee. I can't stop giggling, but I walk a bit further from the scene even though none of these idiots would ever realize I was involved.
I try out several more experiments. I turn a cyclist's clothes into polka-dots, make a young woman's dress flow like water, turn a kid's balloon into a bewilderingly complex equation. The results are always the same: people's reactions are stupefaction, fear, and panic. I'm having so much fun that I don't take into account the time, and by the time I feel my phone buzzing in my pocket it's too late: I've missed my train. That's alright, though. The tablet that I have built from scratch should be able to help me in any situation.
I walk around for a bit until I find a luxurious-looking apartment building. I approach the main door and I scan it to reveal its properties. The lock's mechanism should be easy to manipulate, and in a couple of seconds I open the door as if I owned the key. I saunter through the foyer when I notice that there's a security guard up ahead.
"I don't recall seeing you before," the guy says. He must be wondering if someone gave me a key, or if I know any of the residents.
"You never had, no. But I will come and go from this place as much as I want from now on," I say cheerfully.
As he, confused, gets up from his chair to walk towards me, I scan him to test if he's as easy to manipulate as a lock. I try to alter his thoughts. There are entries for his relationships with other entities of this world, as well as the beliefs he holds regarding them. I find a recent entry for myself. I change his perception so that he sees me as a maintenance worker, there to fix some broken pipes in the apartment building. Someone he has met before.
"Alright, go ahead," the guy says as he returns to his desk.
"Wait a second, did you forget I'm the maintenance worker?" I ask him.
"I... I suppose I did."
"And you're the security guard here?"
"Yes," he replies, still confused.
I chuckle. I am able to change reality and the minds of people by writing in a device. That's the kind of power I'm going to use in this world. Man, I'm glad I'm me.
I was kind of pressed on time as the gorilla approached me, and maintenance worker was the first thing that came to mind. I'll change it some time later to him recognizing me as a long time resident. And I will proceed now to check out my new place. Giddy as a child about to receive a present, I walk up the stairs to the first floor. I don't have any particular preference, so I move up to the first apartment door I come across and with my device I scan the door. Through its linked entities I check out the properties of what I will face beyond the door. I see five people and two cats, all milling about their living space. The door's lock has some pretty complex properties in comparison with the entrance's lock, but I easily manage to bypass it.
I open the door and enter the apartment. There are two people linked with the living room up ahead. Before I show myself as a stranger to them, I check out their properties, I add myself as a related entity, and I alter the beliefs of those two people to recognize me as the new owner of their apartment.
It's a couple in their forties. When they notice me they look distraught, as if they had been caught doing something bad, or failed to do something important.
"What are you still doing here?" I ask them.
"We... We..." the man stammers. He looks dazed.
"You already knew I was going to move in, right?"
As he struggles to put his thoughts together, I quickly check the couple's properties. I add in that they have had a few conversations with me before, in which they had informed me that they were moving out. I wonder how they are going to react, given that I haven't added any entry about whatever place they could move into.
"You are moving in already?" the woman asks, horrified. "We were supposed to have more time!"
I don't appreciate her tone, so I immediately alter their beliefs again.
"You packed up some belongings yesterday and sold this apartment to me for a low price," I tell them. "You were very happy with the quick hassle-free sale."
This time they look much more relieved at this information.
"Just out of curiosity," I ask, "were are you moving to?"
"Oh, that house we just bought in the countryside," the woman answers with a smile. "We'll have our own garden and enough space for animals."
"That's wonderful," I reply with a nod.
Interesting. Did her brain rush in to fill the holes with some delusion?
"Well, give me a tour of the place, will you?" I ask. "I want to check out the rooms."
The couple looks at each other.
"He's the owner now," the woman says to him. "What could it hurt?"
"If he wants a tour, we might as well give him one," the man answers.
"Oh, good," she says with a smile. "Follow me, sir."
The woman stands up and walks away, the man following her. The two of them show me around their apartment. I look at the rooms with a critical eye, realizing just how much I can change. The closets are packed full of clothes, and the kitchen has a lot of food stocked inside it. Apparently all the furniture came with the changes I made.
In one of the bedrooms are the couple's three kids, a guy in his early twenties and a couple of teenagers, one a maybe fourteen years old male and the other a maybe seventeen years old female. Two cats are lazing around on the bed. The three kids are playing some game on a console.
"What's up?" I ask. "What are you playing?"
"It's a game with cubes," the teenage boy answers. "You build towers and bridges and fight off enemies."
"It's a dumb kids game," the girl laughs.
"Alright. Do you know who I am?" I ask.
The fourteen year old kid looks me over, then glances at his parents.
"The landlord?"
I am quick to edit this one kid's properties on my tablet.
"I'm your new dad."
The boy's eyes widen as his mouth drops open. The three kids all react with different levels of surprise and intrigue as I sit down on the ground with them. I have erased even the entries for his parents on this fourteen years old's properties.
"What is he talking about, Matty?" the girl asks.
"I don't know," Matty answers as he massages his temple. "But he's my dad now."
The two cats stretch and get off the bed, one of them walking over to me. I reach out and pet it as I look at the kids. I can already tell this is going to be fun.
The girl teenager as well as the young adult stand up and address their actual parents.
"What the hell is going on? Who is this guy?" the girl asks. "This is a joke, right?"
"He's our new dad," Matty answers happily. "Right, dad?"
"That's right, kid," I answer.
I'm quick to add to their parents the belief that they willingly sold all three of their children to me.
"You didn't even bother explaining to your kids that you had sold them to me?" I ask the couple as I look over my shoulder. "You are as irresponsible as they come, huh?"
"I wanted to explain, but you didn't even let me get a word in edgeways!" the mother complains. "Besides, I'm pretty sure they got the idea as soon as you walked in."
"What!?" the teenage girl screams.
"What the hell is this? If this is a joke, it's a nasty one, mom!" the young adult says with a shaky voice.
The mother stutters.
"You know how your father lost his job last month? Well, things have been really hard for us... We had to choose between food or the mortgage..."
That's some interesting improv, I think. I check her updated beliefs on the tablet. She already had an entry for her husband losing her job, and I guess her brain put two and two together.
"So you decided to sell us off as slaves?" the daughter screams.
"Slaves is a harsh word," I interject. "Your routine won't change much, it's just that I'll be the one in charge now."
Both the girl and the young adult, who I guess is a bit more infantile than his age would suggest, start crying. The girl also hugs the teenage boy, who looks unfazed about this whole thing.
They're trying my patience.
"Listen, I'll let you play games all day if you want. You won't even have to go to school, okay? So don't start crying."
"Yeah!" the teenage boy smiles.
"How are you so happy about this?" the girl says in a mixture of anger and sadness.
"It's a lot to take in, but you'll like it," I say, then hold the girl's gaze sternly. "However, as the new order of things, you need to establish to your former parents how much you hate how they have wronged you."
"What?" the young adult asks with a trembling voice. "What are you asking her to do, exactly?"
I go over her properties on the tablet. There's a whole group of entries for her emotional state. I pump up her rage.
"You hate what they did to you," I say to the teen. "So vent your anger."
The teen looks at her father, then jumps to her feet, launches herself at the man and hits him on the chest with all her strength. The two cats run over themselves to escape the bedroom.
"You're a monster!" the teenage girl screams as she hits her dad again and again. Although her older brother tries to hold her back, she breaks free and continues hitting her father. The mother, who had been wasting time screaming in terror, moves forward to intercede, but I scan her properties and increase the woman's weight by ten times. Her legs buckle under her, and she struggles on the floor as if a wall had fallen over her. The woman can only weep as she watches her daughter beat her husband to a pulp. The teenage boy is too scared and weak to help, but then again his former parents are now strangers to him.
The girl's older brother picks her up while she cries and screams incoherently, and he drags her away from their unconscious former father. With his free hand he takes out a phone from one of his pockets.
"What are you doing?" I ask.
"I'm calling the police. You can't get away with this."
I change the young man's properties to include an unwavering loyalty towards me, then change his opinion on calling the police to a very negative one. With a trembling hand, he returns his phone to the pocket.
"I... I don't know what I was thinking," he says, frightened.
The teenage girl is panting and crying, but she alternates between looking at me and my tablet as if she's figured out something is wrong.
"What did you do to my brother?" the sister asks.
"He's fine. I just made him a little more obedient. He's your obedient servant if you want him to be. Now, you were beating your dad pretty badly. Shouldn't I punish you for doing something nasty?"
"I... I don't understand."
"What's not to understand?" I say. "You hate me because I changed your parents, your weakling of a little brother, as well as yourself. You beat up your dad because of it, which resulted in him being hurt pretty badly. You're going to be punished for what you did. Or you can join me and become a goddess among insects."
"I... I don't want to be a monster," the girl says, crying harder.
Her properties reveal that the previous rage has subsided naturally. Her former father isn't moving, and blood keeps pouring from his ears. The mother cries while struggling on the ground like a beached whale.
For a new trick, I test whether I can paste the properties I had saved on the device into a present object. I scan a book they left on a table, then I paste the properties of a shotgun. As soon as I save my changes, the shotgun appears with the same small imperfections as those of the shotgun I originally copied.
"Look at that, how nice," I say, then look at the teenage girl. "Go ahead and grab it."
The teenage girl grabs the weapon before she even bothers to think about it. It's heavy, but she holds it up.
"Do you know how to work it?" I ask.
"My dad's a hunter," the girl says, then glances at her unconscious, possibly already dead father. "I can work it."
"Good, because you're going to be hunting your family now. Go ahead and shoot your mother in the head."
"What?"
"She's a monster now. Go ahead and shoot her in the head."
"I... can't," the girl says.
"There are two ways this can go, and only one of them has you walking out of here," I say. "Either you prove you're a bad enough girl to follow my orders, or you're not, and you get killed. What's your name, anyway?"
"Jane," the girl answers with a raspy voice.
"Old fashioned, but it will do. Nice meeting you, Jane. Now shoot your stupid mother in the head."
She looks at me, then lowers the shotgun. "I can't."
I'm about to browse her properties when I stop myself. Why am I hesitating? I'm surprised to realize that I don't want to modify her. She is holding a device of destruction that could end me in a moment, as well as everything I have worked towards, and yet I want this wild-eyed teenage girl to make the choice.
"One... two..."
I begin counting as I read in her properties that she's quickly working herself up to the task. When I get to five she aims the shotgun at her mother's head and shoots her. I got a glimpse of the horror in the woman's face, before her skull explodes into a bloody mess that even dirties my pants.
"Good," I say. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
"No... sir."
"Sir? Oh, you're trying to be polite? That is cute. You can drop the politeness now, Jane. You know, I didn't have to convince you properly to execute your own mother. Is it because they sold you guys into slavery?"
"Yes," Jane says.
"You are something else, huh? Why don't you make sure that the traitor you had as a former dad is properly dead from the vicious beating you gave him?"
"Yes, sir," Jane says.
I watch as she stomps on her father's head until his skull shatters. I think that if he hadn't been dead from the beating before, he probably is now.
"Good. You hungry?" I ask. "Let's order some pizza or something."
The young adult, now loyal as a zombie, is staring blankly at the remains of his parents, while the teenage boy, who knows me to be his dad, is however cowering against a corner, I guess because of the murders. I kick the teenage boy, knocking him off his spot.
"You. Did I catch your name?"
"M-M-Matty," he says with a thin voice.
"Hello, Matty. Now, you're probably scared because not only are you in the presence of a genius, but also of a killer."
"Y-Yes."
I sigh, then turn to my favorite daughter.
"What do you think about this cowardly little brother of yours, Jane?"
"He annoys me," Jane replies.
"Has he always annoyed you, or is this a new development?"
"I've always found him annoying."
She moves forward, then raises her bloodied foot as if she's about to crush her little brother's skull as well. As the teenage boy screams, I grab the girl and drag her away.
"Did I suggest you to murder your little brother? You have issues!" I shout.
"You did not," Jane says, frowning as holds my gaze.
"Right. You're not eating or sleeping or anything until you apologize to your brother."
The girl stares at her brother awkwardly, before speaking.
"I'm... sorry, Matt."
I rub my hands while grinning. Oh, this is going to be fun indeed. The boy is probably going to wet himself out of fear. I kneel next to him and bonk him in the head.
"So, Matty. Do you have a girlfriend?" I ask.
"N-no."
"Ah. Shame. You're a good looking kid, you could easily get one. Anyway, I'm a bit tired already, not to mention hungry! You, the oldest, pass me your phone. I need to look up some pizza place."
The young adult reaches into his pocket, then silently hands me his phone. As I begin to browse the internet for some nearby pizza place, Jane walks up to me.
"Can we get something else? I can't stand pizza."
I frown at her.
"Pizza is an art form."
"Can we get Chinese instead?"
"Listen, I'll order pizza. If you don't want any, there's plenty of food in the fridge. Now, sit down over there and don't move," I say.
Jane walks away angrily, scowling as she sits next to her little brother, who is still shaking in fear. At last I find a place that delivers, and call them up. I order a large pepperoni pizza along with sodas.
"Alright, a large with pepperoni, and soda for four. Do any of you want anything else?"
"Can you get chicken nuggets?" Matt asks in a small, quiet voice.
"Chocolate chip pancakes," Jane asks.
"Meatballs," the young adult says.
"A bunch of goofballs is what you are."
I shake my head. I do order some chicken nuggets, though.
A bit later I check out the properties of the two corpses belonging to these kid's parents, and I erase them. They simply disappear. Curiously, their spilled blood transformed into different entities, but I erase those as well. Later on, me and my new kids gather in the living room. The order comes in fifteen minutes. I watch as the kids dig in, happily eating away. Jane has gotten over her dislike of pizza, which couldn't have been that strong. The two cats keep walking around with their ears perked up, only to stop at times and stare intently at me with curiosity and confusion. One of them ends up enjoying some pepperoni.
Once I've gotten my fill, as I watch the kids I toy with my tablet just in case I come up with something interesting to do. But the sun has already set. How will I handle these kids after they finish their dinner?
"So, kids..."
"...Yes?" Matt asks.
"I need to think of something fun for you guys to do... Any requests?"
"PlayStation."
"Nah, I'm not really into video games," I say. "They are for the puny who can't make their own video games out of real life."
Matt goes quiet. For about half an hour or so I make small talk, mostly with Janey, but even I yawn a couple of times.
"Can we just go to bed?" Matt asks.
"Yeah, I'm exhausted," Jane says.
I stand up.
"Alright then. Let's get going."
We all head out of the living room. It seems that the room where the kids had been playing on the console before is Matty's. We leave the fourteen years old there. The young adult, whatever his name is, disappears into another room. Jane leads me to her own room, and then she quickly flops under her blue bed covers.
"Goodnight, sir," she says.
Standing there, looking down at this savage creature, an alien tenderness bursts in my heart. She's unlike all those others, isn't she? That faceless throng of noise and stink that fills the streets. Something pure has survived in this teenager. A little miracle.
I stroke gently her soft hair.
"You are a good girl, Janey," I whisper. "I look forward to being your daddy. I will show you many curious and magical things."
She closes her eyes, and in the darkened room I see her face relax.
Although I retreat to the doorway, I am not eager to tear myself away from the pleasant view. For many years I have lived and worked in that shacky garage, unbecoming of someone like me. None of those empty-headed academicians considered my research viable. A madman, they even called me. I was always aiming at a target that none of them could see. I could have given up entirely. I did give up on most of my previous hopes and motivations, except for anger and resentment. Those kept me afloat. But this warmth in my heart is a new phenomenon that I'm eager to explore. Life is full of surprises, and some are even pleasant. I smile at last and turn to let Jane sleep, closing the door behind me.

A mom this time (GPT-3 fueled short)

Link for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

As I wake up, my instincts tell me that everything has changed again, as I have learned to expect for the last two years. I inhabit a new body. It feels lighter, except for the excess pressure on my chest. As I sit up in a stranger's bed, my long hair caresses my neck. It takes a glance down to realize that indeed I seem to be a woman today. A particularly gifted one. And my hands suggest that I'm maybe in my thirties.
I sigh, and get up from the bed. I'm alone in a master bedroom, but someone has slept beside this body. I may have a boyfriend, or be married. Another one of those days.
I open the bedroom door carefully and scout the surroundings. A hallway leads to five other rooms. A second floor. And I hear voices coming from downstairs, young ones. Shit, this woman may have kids.
I descend the stairs. The living room is connected to the kitchen, and two high school aged kids are seated on the kitchen table, eating breakfast. The boy shoots me a look between worry and confusion.
"Are you okay, mom?"
"I'm fine, honey," I reply in a higher voice than would have come naturally from me. I should have gotten used to acting at this point.
"I can't even remember the last time we came in when you were still asleep," the girl says. She has long bangs and an evasive gaze.
"Are you sure you aren't sick or anything?" insists the boy.
I contain a sigh. I grab the box of cereals from the counter, as well as the milk, and sit next to the girl.
"I'm the good old mom you used to know, I assure you."
"You are still wearing your pyjamas, though."
I eat a spoonful of crunchy cereals, which helps erase the stale taste of this strange mouth's saliva.
"Do you have a problem with my pyjamas or something, kid?"
"No, it's just that..."
"Enough with the questions already!" I say in an exasperated tone.
The boy shuts up and turns to his bowl of corn flakes. This body has a maternal mean streak, or maybe it's just me being annoyed. These days only rarely I care to avoid wrecking the lives of these bodies I end up inhabiting without having any say in the matter. By the end of the day, or even earlier if I get too tired, I'll be gone, and wake up in some other stranger's life. Who cares about these two bozos. I'm sure they are as average as they look.
The girl's gaze rests on my cheek, but when I turn my head towards her, she nervously pretends she wasn't staring, and starts fidgeting with her long black hair.
"Hey, whatever your name is..." I start, but catch myself. "I mean, are you okay, honey? You seem troubled."
She turns to me with a blank expression and nods slowly.
"Are you sure?" I prod at her. If she starts crying now, I'm not sure how to handle it.
She bites her lips and fiddles with the spoon, turning it around and around. Then, without looking at me, she mutters:
"But what are we going to do about dad...?"
"Something happened with dad? What's that?"
She looks at me and opens her mouth to speak, but then she closes it. To my left, the boy lets out a noise of incredulity.
"I knew something was wrong with you, mom! You are in shock or something, right? Maybe you should go back to bed."
"Hush, Kyle," I say. "Your sister has something to say, and you are going to listen."
"Kyle?" the boy asks confused, but the girl interrupts him with a teary voice.
"How long will it take for dad to find another job in this economy?"
The boy stares at his sister, then he sinks the spoon in his cereal as if to drown it. He looks up at me, defiance in his eyes.
"So what, will we stay with you now?" he asks.
"Don't you live here already?" I ask, caring very little.
"Dad says he can't find anything in this town!" the girl says. "So we would have to move! But I don't want to move! I have my friends here! Glenn doesn't want to move either, do you Glenn?"
"Shut up, Carla," the boy mumbles, almost inaudible.
Carla starts crying, and the boy throws a hostile look at her.
You pour some more milk in your bowl. So this body is divorced or something. Maybe a break of some sort. In any case the kids seem to prefer to stay with their dad. Am I not good enough? The cheek to come crying to me about it. I'm sure I have an awesome, well-paying job myself.
"Why don't you just live here with me then? I seem to have plenty of rooms."
Both of them look at me in wonder, while Glenn studies my face.
"I can't tell if that's a joke, mom."
"Why would it be a joke, honey? Is my house not good enough for you brats?"
"Doesn't your boyfriend hate having other people's childen in his place?" the boy asks bitterly.
"I see, I guess I can't afford this place on my own. Is my boyfriend loaded or something? And where is he now, anyway...?"
The kids exchange meaningful glances, then the girl speaks.
"Mom, you know how you are sometimes... confused..."
"I am not confused, I'm in full possession of my senses," I say indignantly.
"Mom, have you forgotten? The doctors said... that you'd have to take those pills..."
The atmosphere at the table grows tense.
"I'm somewhat crazy, then." I shrug. "Well, whatever. I suppose this boyfriend of mine is at work, right? And I sneak my two brats in so I can feed them before they leave for school?"
"Uh... That's one way of looking at it, I guess."
"Wait a second, so I divorced this father of yours and came to live with a boyfriend, and because he wouldn't accept my kids, I gave up on you two?"
"I wouldn't say you gave up on us," the boy says, "I know you love us. It's just, you like your boyfriend better than us."
"I sound like scum."
The girl glares at her brother for a moment, before turning to me with kind eyes. "Glenn, dear, don't say that. I'm sure that isn't true."
"Whatever, Carla," he says as he stands up from the table.
I motion for him to sit down, and apparently I've done it more confidently than the owner of this body tends to, because the boy obeys.
"Listen to me, kids," I say with a serious tone. "I'm sure I love you both quite a bit. You came out of me, tearing me apart in the process. I feel a significant wind coming out from down there. I better love you after such carnage, or else I will regret the consequences for the rest of my life. Glenn, you seem tough, and I like your name. Carla, you need to believe in yourself a bit more. You aren't exactly pretty, more on the average to ugly side, but it's all about faking confidence. If the world rejects you, you reject it back, then shit on everybody. You know what I mean, Carla? You can't go through this horrible life apologizing for being alive."
The kids are confused. Carla looks as if I've told her something she can use, but doesn't know what to do with the information.
"I-It's like I don't know you at all, mom..." the girl says.
"Yeah, yeah. I know quite a bit about how messy this life can be. One day you are working freelance from home in your boxers and one leg on the table, and the next time you go to sleep your consciousness jumps into another body, one after the other, and rarely returns to your own. Two years of such garbage. It's a metaphor, you see, but the point is that you need to learn how to adapt to the chaos of this life. You never know who you are going to meet, what burdens you are going to have to bear, or whether you are going to wake up as a girl next to some horny dude who won't ask your permission to fuck you. And the worst is that you enjoy it quite a bit. But it's because the body gets aroused by itself!" I pound on the table next to my bowl. It takes me a few seconds for my heart to calm down, then I sigh. "The point I'm trying to make is that I'm sure you look pretty good without your clothes on, Carla, and that way people can look down at your body instead of at your face."
"Mom, you are talking to Carla as if she was a grown up," the boy pleads with me. "Why do you have to be so mean? She doesn't like being talked to that way."
I squint my eyes at him and frown.
"You little shit. You dare to tell me how to speak with your sister? I'll shove a cactus up your ass. The thorns will come out of your mouth."
Not knowing how to react, Glenn retreats to the fridge and grabs a carton of orange juice.
"Don't you dare pour that for your sister! I've told you that I don't want her drinking sugary drinks. She becomes hyperactive as hell." I stand up, grab the carton from his hands and put it back in the fridge. As soon as I look back at this Glenn's face, I realize that I expected another kid's face to stare back. What was that other kid's name again...? "She's already nervous about going to school today. You really need to help her out."
Carla chuckles against her hand.
"You are really pretty when you are angry, mom."
"I feel quite pretty alright, although I haven't come across a mirror. And these look fantastic, don't they? I have become quite knowledgeable about sizes. Can you believe that the both of you used to suckle on them? How can we even talk these days, look at one another in the eye, knowing that some time ago you were sucking milk from my breasts? It must be so embarrassing for you."
"For you too," Carla says. "We've never heard you speak that much before."
I pick up the newspaper on the kitchen table, and start reading the front page.
"Is there any particular reason why you are reading the paper upside-down?" Carla asks.
I put the newspaper down. It was yesterday's edition anyway.
"Everything is upside down in this world, honey. Haven't you noticed? What sense does it make that someone forced another person to exist only for them to look average to ugly? Isn't that a cruelty for which one should hold a permanent grudge?"
"You aren't ugly," Carla says with a kind expression, and puts her hand on my shoulder.
"I was talking about you, though. Carla, do you like your life?"
"Mom..."
"Well, do ya, punk?"
"Yes. I do," she says, with a firm nod.
"As you should," I say, patting her head. "You don't want to ruin that face of yours further, you know."
I turn towards Glenn, whose expression suggests he's having a Vietnam flashback.
"And you, Glenn, what's going on in your life, huh?"
He turns redder than any of his shirts I have ever seen, but to be fair I have only seen one.
"Nothing," he says, and lowers his head.
"That's good to hear, buddy. Are you hitting anything yet?"
Glenn narrows his shoulders.
"What are you implying?"
"I'm implying you should hit something, like a baseball or a punching bag. It's called exercise. It makes your body feel better, and there's evidence to suggest it releases endorphins, thus making you happy. A lot happier than you seem to be, at least."
"I do sports!"
"Yeah, I can tell. I have seen plenty of naked men in these last couple of years. Don't ever have sex with anyone without permission, you hear?"
Carla laughs. Hey, I am serious! That's a shitty thing to do to someone! But anyway...
"I digress," I say, then hold Glenn's gaze so intensely that he shivers. "You don't want to grow up too fast. It's not worth it. Trust me."
Glenn averts his gaze down to the table.
"I still endure through nightmares what seems like every night," I say, and although I try to control my voice, it trembles. "Sometimes someone holds me or wakes me up, and it's always a stranger's arms. You expect to wake up to security and comfort, but I open my eyes to a new nightmare. Do you understand what I mean?"
"I get it," Carla says, then places her palm on my shoulder.
I smile, knowing she means well, and her words seem to flow directly into my ears and into my brain, causing tears to form in my eyes.
"I'm so sorry about your dad," I say.
"Thanks," she replies, her eyes shining.
"You can be so beautiful under the right light, Carla. Don't you want to give your mommy a kiss?"
She opens her arms for a hug, and I embrace her tightly.
"Don't worry, I won't let anything happen to you," I whisper in her ear. "I want you to do something for me. Take this as... maternal advice, if you will."
"Sure," she says.
"Don't get angry at people. Not even the guy who is mistreating you. Be kind to everyone, and... you can change people that way."
She pats my back. I release her from my grasp, and she nods.
"Yeah... but you know what?" Carla says, "Not everyone is worthy of trust."
I stare at her, taken aback at her bluntness. My words have not changed her attitude at all. I sigh, but chuckle.
"That's true," I mutter. "And if you get them to think you are some meek creature, they won't see it coming until you have already plunged a knife into their eye."
She grins, and I smile. I really love this new girl.
"Mom, we have to go," Carla says.
"Okay honey."
Glenn avoids looking at me as he retrieves his backpack, which he had rested against the back of a nearby sofa. He gives me a short wave and attempts to turn to leave, but I rush over to him, force the kid to turn around and I embrace him tightly.
"I'm sorry," I say, "I'm so sorry. I love you."
"I know, mom," he mutters.
He stands stiffly in my embrace for a moment before he returns the hug a bit.
"You feel your mommy's big, welcoming breasts pressing themselves against you?" I say softly in his ear. "Replicating that with a new girl who isn't related to you is your sole goal in life, my dear boy. As soon as possible, too. You don't want to go through the dreadful decades that await you regretting that you didn't have sex with some big breasted high schooler."
"Ew, mom!" he says, then attempts to free himself.
"We have to leave, mom," Carla reminds me.
I refuse to let my new son go.
"Nothing of that fake disgust, boy. Something deep inside you yearns to return to those days in which I cradled you in my arms and you tightened your lips around my hardened nipples."
"Mom!"
"Also, you're a teenage boy, and my body's natural curves are really starting to bother you. You want me. I can see it. Don't worry, I'll be gentle. Bring this up again the next time we are alone."
"Mom!" he exclaims, even more disgusted and angry.
He manages to escape from me, and Carla grabs him by the arm and drags him out of the house. I wave at them as they leave.
They have been gone for a few seconds when I finally lower my arm, and a wave of anguish washes over me. The tears burn. I will never gaze upon these two children of mine again. Isn't that the height of cruelty?
As I walk up the stairs and return to the master bedroom to undress myself, I struggle to loosen my throat, to contain the sobbing. That ugly girl's warm smile still brightens my heart, and the feeling of that boy's strong arms still lingers around my borrowed, soft body. Indeed, this world is cruel, but it is also beautiful.

Nobody came home. By five in the afternoon I get so sleepy that I lie down on this stranger's bed to take a nap. Shortly after, another jump separates me from her family.
I awake under the late afternoon light, which filters through my eyelids. My consciousness teeters in a body that is slowly regaining its senses. I hear the sound of waves slowly licking the coast, I feel cold sand under the bare skin of my torso and legs.
"I'm home," I mutter.
There is no answer.

A pleasant friday afternoon at the literature club (GPT-3 fueled short)

Lik for this short on my personal blog, where it looks better

---

I enter my sanctuary, our club, as I struggle to prevent the trash food I've bought from falling all over. After I close the door behind me, I stop for a moment to look at my friends, the other three members of the literature club, who are illuminated by the afternoon light pouring from the windows. To the left of the empty seat reserved for me is Lydia, the small, bespectacled and hyperactive girl obsessed with the mysterious. On the other side of the table awaits the blonde beauty Kumeko, and to her right her childhood friend, and only published writer of our club, Hibiki.
I leave the food on the table. Lydia is quick to open a bag of chips and stuff her mouth with a handful. When I sit on the empty seat, the tiredness of this whole week of exams drags me towards the ground. But today is another blessed friday, and we'll enjoy our club time for a couple of hours.
"Well then, who is presenting a text today?" I ask.
"The winner of the Literature Club contest will present their work!" Kumeko announces as she pats her childhood friend on the arm, and she doesn't notice him blushing. "It's the third story by Hibiki, entitled 'The Lost Girl'."
"Oh? That sounds interesting." I say.
"Yes, I think so too. It's about a young girl who is lost in the forest, and she meets a boy who helps her find her way home."
I shush her.
"Hey, no spoilers! Let the man read!"
Hibiki clears his throat, and as he holds his printed story, he stands up and begins to read it.
"There once was a young boy who grew up in a small village. The boy lived with his mother and father, and had two younger twin brothers. One day, when the boy was sixteen years old, he and his family took a trip to the forest. They set up a campsite by a lake, and went swimming. The next day, the boy went to explore the forest. As he was walking he heard a low growl. He looked behind him, but he couldn't find the source of the growl. As he continued walking, the growl grew louder, and he began to run, and soon he found himself at the edge of a meadow filled with flowers. He stopped running and took a deep breath, enjoying the beautiful sight of such vibrant life. Then, as he was admiring the flowers, he heard the growl again. His heart pounding in terror, he began to run through the meadow. As he was running, he tripped over a rock and fell, hitting his head on another rock. He began to bleed from the head and passed out in the middle of the field. Luckily, a group of dwarves happened to be passing by. They saw the boy as he lay motionless and bleeding, and picked him up. The dwarves brought him home and nursed him back to health. After a week, the boy regained consciousness. He found himself lying on a bed in a strange house. He saw a group of dwarves standing around his bed. One of the dwarves spoke up. 'Where do you come from?' The boy was startled, not expecting to hear any English, let alone perfect English. 'W-What? Where am I?' 'You're in the Dwarven Kingdom of Karst.'"
"I like the sudden appearance of dwarves in a non-dwarf related story," I say while I munch on some licorice. "A subversion of expectations or something."
Hibiki nods.
"Go on," I say.
"Not much else to say. He spends the week in the dwarven kingdom, and eventually goes back to his village."
Hibiki looks over at us, and then puts down the paper he was reading from. He sits back as we stare at him in silence.
"What, that's it?" Lydia asks in disbelief.
"Yeah. That's it," Hibiki says with a sigh.
"That's horrible!" she shouts in frustration, "You spent an entire week and couldn't come up with anything proper to write about?"
"Well, I was trying to stay true to the feel of a bedtime story. They don't all have grand plots."
Lydia crosses her arms in front of her chest to say something else, but I lean over the table.
"Wait a second, what's with the title? You called it 'The Lost Girl', right? There wasn't a girl anywhere in that plot! Did you read another story by mistake?"
Hibiki takes the paper from the table and looks at it.
"You see that? That's your problem right there," I point out. "You didn't even notice. If a reader can notice something that isn't there, your story has failed."
He crumples up the paper and tosses it over his shoulder. We hear a startled 'oinks' from behind us as a piggy-bank catches the wadded paper ball.
"You'll get over it soon, but I have to go now. See you guys later," Hibiki says as he stands up noisily.
Seated to Hibiki's left, his childhood friend Kumiko grabs the embarrassed kid's arm and pulls him down.
"Don't be ridiculous! It doesn't matter if we didn't like this story much, they can't be all winners! And you have to critique our stories too!"
"Can't it wait?" he asks.
"Yes," she says, "but no."
Kumiko gives him a serious look. He sighs and raises his eyebrows in defeat. He's not going to win against her stubbornness.
"Alright, alright, I'll stay," he says, throwing his hands up in the air.
Kumiko smiles and starts going through her bag to get her papers.
"I also wrote something. I was trying to stay in the fairytale theme. This one is a story about a princess who is captured by an evil dragon. There is no prince to save her, and she has to save herself."
"One of those post-modern retellings, I see," I say as I gulp down some soda.
"No, it is a story about a strong woman who can fight for her own honor," she responds, annoyed.
"I didn't mean any offense. I liked it."
"I have barely started telling it!" she says, then pouts.
"I meant that I liked the story in general. Continue."
She narrows her eyes, then nods and starts reading her work. Her bell-like voice is as pretty as her blonde hair and pale blue eyes.
"The sun had fallen, leaving me in a pitch black dungeon. I shivered in the frigid air. The cold stone floor felt as if it was sucking the heat out of my naked body; I felt so exposed and vulnerable. I was naked, and my clothes were not anywhere to be found. There was no furniture in the room either, save from a bucket full of water and an old moldy piece of bread."
"I liked the part about the nakedness," I say.
"Shut up, JP," she says, annoyed.
I smile. I have always had a weakness for pretty girls. That being said, I can admire a girl's mind and body without wanting to jump their bones. I don't know why they always think that we're going to do that to them.
"Where was I? Oh yes, I was shivering on the floor and trying not to starve to death," she says, giving me a dirty look.
"Is this a story, or some harrowing experience of yours?" I ask, then chuckle.
"It's a story I made up!" she says, annoyed.
"Continue."
She looks down and continues reading.
"I heard a fearsome growl and looked around to find the source. Above me was a giant black beast, curled up on itself like a cat. It had sharp yellow teeth, and blood red eyes that seemed to pierce my very being. I wanted to look away, but I felt hypnotized by its gaze. Then, it struck. It opened its maw and blew out hot air that smelled like rotten eggs. I blacked out. When I woke up, it was surrounded by several people wearing medieval clothing. It roared, and the people backed away in fear. The beast looked at me, then ran off into the forest. I had been rescued."
"You forgot to mention that she got rabies and died," I say.
"Shut up, JP!" she says, annoyed once again.
I have to point something out.
"Wasn't the idea that the princess saved herself in this one?"
"Oh yeah," she says, blushing.
"You're really bad at this."
"Shut up, JP!"
Both me and Lydia take some time to stop laughing.
"Wait, that's the end of the story?" I ask.
"Yeah," she says, clearly disappointed that I didn't like the ending.
"That sucks. You should go back and change it so the dragon gets killed or something."
She pauses for a moment, thinking about what I said.
"Yeah... that's not a bad idea."
"The princess should probably be the one to kill it. You know, because that was the point you intended to make with this whole thing, which you insisted on. You deliberately presented the story as capturing that post-modern angle, and then your text failed to reflect it."
"But it wasn't my fault!" she whines.
"Maybe not, but that's what you presented to us."
She pauses again, and I can tell that she's realizing that I'm right. She sighs in defeat.
"Yeah, you're absolutely right," she says. "I'll have to change it."
"We all make mistakes," I say with a smile. "As usual, though, we have trouble staying on target."
The remaining member of the club, our mostly delusional Lydia, chimes in as she pushes up the bridge of her glasses.
"I'm pretty sure you're the main reason for that, Jacob."
"How do you figure?" I ask. "Kumiko's the one who went on a tangent and forgot her own ending."
"You're distracting her. You do it all the time."
Lydia is just teasing me, as usual.
"Yeah, but it's okay. She'll get around to fixing it," I say with a smile.
Kumiko can't stop frowning at me as Lydia finally pulls out her own story. She seems more enthusiastic than usual about this new one.
"What subject are you obsessed with this week, Lydia?" I ask as I rest my face on my palm.
"I did some reading last night. Did you know that dark matter is all around us?"
"Um... sure?"
"Anyway, here it goes!" Lydia announces. "Title: 'The Cat in the Box', by Lydia Hirsch."
"Yes, we are aware of you, Lydia."
"There once was a cat named Mr. Whiskers. He was trapped inside a box. The box was also trapped inside a bigger box. There were three boxes all together. The big box, the medium-sized box, and the small box. They were all trapped inside each other, like a Russian Nesting Doll. 'Meow,' said the cat. 'I wish I could get out of here. I'm stuck in this small box. Oh no! There's a even smaller box inside of me, and I can't get out!' Mr. Whiskers looked very scared. He was afraid of getting trapped inside an even smaller box."
I hear Hibiki gulping.
"Somehow that makes me feel a pit in my stomach..." he says.
"Shhh! It gets better, trust me! Mr. Whiskers then saw a laser beam appear inside the small box. It started to move around, and Mr. Whiskers was very afraid of getting hit by the beam. But then, another cat named GutterCat came in and saved him! The two cats ran outside, escaping the boxes."
"Where did this cat GutterCat come from, and how did he find his way into that small box inside other boxes?" I ask incredulously.
"Who cares? The point is that the two cats lived happily ever after escaping those evil boxes. The end."
Lydia beams as she finishes her story. She looks around at our faces, which display a mixed response to her story.
"That was... ugh... an interesting story," I say, as I try to think of something nice to say about it.
"I thought it was incredible!" Lydia says excitedly. "When I grow up, I want to write stories just like that!"
"But you did write that one."
"Oh. Yeah..." she says, as her smile falters slightly.
"It was a nice try, but it needs work. For one thing, why did Mr. Whiskers speak perfect English? Also, how did he fit in the box? Did he just shrink himself somehow?"
"Well... It was a magical box," Lydia says in an almost inaudible voice. "You can do anything when you're a writer."
"Didn't you say recently that you wanted to start writing stories based on reality?" I say as I raise an eyebrow.
"Well... I can change reality," she says, now pouting. "If I could fit twenty bumblebees inside a teeny tiny bottle, then I can make a magical box that defies the laws of physics."
"Hell no. Writing isn't anarchy. There's no meaning if you don't follow at least some rules. If anything can happen, then nothing makes sense. Is that not the case?"
Lydia raises her hand as if she was in class.
"Yes, Lydia?" I ask.
"I have a problem with that. You said you want to write about the real world, but that's not true. Nobody writes about the real world. Writers have been doing fiction for thousands of years. Did Shakespeare write about the real world? No. That's why his plays are still around today. Did Tolkien write about the real world? No. That's why people are still obsessed with his work decades after he died."
"We might be aiming too high here, at least in regards to comparing ourselves with such writers. We seem to remain stuck at preschool level."
"Well at least I'm trying!" she exclaims.
"And that's all I'm asking for," I say, raising my hands. "You wrote about a magical box, really?"
"Yes!" she says, agitated. "I wanted to challenge myself."
"Writing about a magical box instead of the usual aliens, lost civilizations, bigfoot, underground complexes of tunnels that hold kidnapped and tortured children, and isolated islands of sin for the one percenters?"
"Yes, because I can do that too!" she says, raising her voice. "I just wanted to try something new. I always have my cat save the day, so I wanted to switch it up."
"Instead of your cat solving the mystery, now you wanted a new cat to save your own cat?" I laugh out loud.
"Stop making fun of me," she says, abashed. "At least I'm trying."
She mutters something to herself as she holds her story with her arms crossed.
"Don't get me wrong, Lydia," I start. "I love your stories. It's just that I get tired of suspending my disbelief week after week while listening to how your cat discovers alien life, or hunts down a bigfoot, or saves the children from the underground tunnels built by the military-industrial complex, or blows up some private island full of mostly naked underage girls."
"You think too highly of yourself, then," says Kumiko. She doesn't seem to have forgiven me for correcting her story before.
"What's that supposed to mean?" I ask with annoyance.
"You think you're the only one who has issues coming up with stories? I've had the same issues as you, except way worse. And let me tell you why," she says, her eyes flickering towards the black binder in front of her. She looks at it for a while, as if trying to remember something she wrote inside it.
"You... you don't have to tell me," I say. "If it's too personal, you don't have to."
She sighs. "It's not that personal. It's just. I've been working on this story for a long time now, and I still haven't finished it."
"Are you trying something seriously? What is it about?"
"It's about a girl and a guy who are good friends, almost like siblings. Over the years, they grow closer together and become romantically involved."
"I must say, I'm loving the sibling angle."
She gives me a look. "Well, they do grow up together. Together, they face all sorts of trials and tribulations. It's a story about growing up, really."
"A coming of age story?"
She seems to think for a moment, before nodding. "Yeah. You could say that. But it's not just for the main characters that things happen. It spans decades, so there's time for generations to pass and see change."
"One of those stories that try to feel the pulse of society during many decades, or something like that?"
She nods. "Sure. Something like that."
I stare at her. She stares at me. The room is quiet save for the occasional sound of pages flipping as Hibiki turns a bunch in front of him. After a while, Kumiko speaks up.
"So... you want to hear it?" she asks.
"Sure," I say. "Why not?"
Kumiko takes a deep breath, and begins to tell her story.
"Our tale starts in a hospital, with the birth of our two leads. I will speak now from the point of view of the protagonist... I'm born first, a crybaby but a strong one. You come out second, strong and silent. So strong and silent they think you're deaf, but it's just an act of defiance. We grow up with each other, inseparable. We do everything together. School, playtime, everything." Kumiko takes a deep breath. "For our eighteenth birthday we're given our choice of whatever car we want from the dealership down the road. I want the one that goes from zero to sixty in three seconds. You want the off-road SUV that can drive over practically anything. We fight over it for hours..." Kumiko begins to cry. "We... We fought all day. I didn't think we'd fight on our birthdays, so I didn't get you a present. I'm sorry, I tried to make it up to you later... But we fought all day, and in the end, we took the dealership. I went first, and when they handed me the keys to my new car, I said 'this is for you'. I handed them to you. I broke into tears immediately after, because I knew you'd hate it. You took the keys from my hand, and went to look at the car. I looked up about the car later, and saw that it costs almost twice as much as a house in our town. It was too late to give it back. You didn't say anything. But then, you didn't need to. I understood. I cried for our lost friendship, and never spoke to you again. The end."
Kumiko is sobbing heavily now. I struggle to say something. I walk around the table and I try to hug our blonde princess, but she pushes me away.
"No, no!" she screams. "Don't touch me! I'm disgusting! Just leave me alone! All of you, leave me alone! Leave me alone!"
I stand back. Kumiko pulls out a cigarette and a lighter. She struggles to light it with a trembling hand.
"Please stop her," I say to the others. "Tobacco has never been on her side."
At this point, the cigarette has caught fire.
"I'm sorry," she says, blowing out the flame. Slowly but surely, she stands up and heads towards the window. I stare in horror.
"You aren't thinking something crazy, are you, Kumiko...?"
"You, least of all, should call me crazy," she says coldly.
Then, she jumps out. Lydia, Hibiki and myself run to the window, only to catch that Kumiko has already landed on the grass a meter and a half below and is sprinting towards the gated entrance of our school.
"Kumiko!" I shout.
My blonde friend never looks back. After she disappears behind some trees, I shake my head and return to the table. We sit around in silence for a while, not knowing how to bring up this disgraceful event. Hibiki is wringing his hands.
"Hibiki..." I start, "you need to take good care of that girl."
"I don't know what to do!" he cries.
"Just keep being friendly with her. You're the only person she's got, you know."
He nods, his eyes red from crying. I feel a huge, dark pit in my stomach. What the hell have we done? We've pushed our only stable member to jump out of a window and attempt suicide. It's a miracle that she survived. But I'm not sure whether she did it for herself or for us.
I wipe the sweat from my forehead.
"Well, I guess I might as well read my own story. I did go through the trouble of writing it and all."
I walk over to the whiteboard and grab a marker from the edge of it. I then begin sketching out the plot of my story on the board, but shortly after I give up and I draw a huge dong. I return to my chair and sit down wearily.
"My story starts like this: the protagonist is some guy called JB who attends some high school or other. His life is generally fine, I guess, but what he loves to do the most is to attend the literature club that he's a member of. Maybe not the most important or prominent member, but a vital part of the whole, I'd say."
I pause my story to grab another pastry. As I do so, our headmaster comes in for his weekly meeting with the club. Apparently he's had some sort of announcement to make, but he forgot it. He leaves, and we hear his hurried footsteps fading away.
"Where was I? Ah, yes. It was a hard week for our protagonist, as he had to pass the most critical exams. But that's behind him already. We meet him on a friday as he enters his beloved literature club. He's bringing a bunch of trash food to fill the stomachs of his grateful friends. I haven't said anything about the other characters yet, but as secondary players we have Lydia Hirsch, a delusional girl who loves everything mysterious and who particularly adores her cat Mr. Whiskers. She's very much into writing stories that involve the aforementioned cat. Frankly, I'm a bit sick of the whole thing, but what can you do. This girl probably needs some therapeutic help, and it's likely that after this year of high school ends, I will never see her again. Would that be sad? Remains to be seen."
I pause my story again to eat some chips.
"What do you think of my story so far, Lydia?" I ask. "I particularly hope to hear your early opinion, for some reason."
"I like it, Jacob. Actually, it's really starting to come together. Hey, but I have an idea for your story."
"Oh no," I reply. "Not another one of your ideas."
"Yes, Jacob. Another one of my ideas." she says with a cheeky grin on her face.
"Fine, what is it?"
"You should make the protagonist's love interest a cat named Mr. Whiskers," she replies with a giggle.
I shoot her down immediately. "I'm not doing that."
"Come on, Jacob. Just think about it for two seconds."
I sigh in exasperation. "Fine, I'll think about it," I say, not meaning it in the slightest.
"That's all I ask," she says with a huge grin on her face.
"Alright, back to my story. We also have this guy called Hibiki. He's the soft spoken kind whose expression demands other people to believe that he is hiding some inner ocean of wisdom or whatever. Somehow he won a couple of awards from his previous stories, likely because the judges consider that stories in which little to nothing happens and the protagonists mope around are good stuff. This Hibiki is also madly in love with his childhood friend, a blonde, blue eyed beauty called Kumiko. However, Kumiko will never love him back, because she's into being abused by rough, older men."
Hibiki glares at me. "Jacob, that's enough."
"Do you have a problem with my story?" I say.
"No, but you know it's not true," he replies.
"How would I know, if you never tell me anything about it?"
"Jacob, there's no way..."
"Anyway, the remaining member of this fictional literature club is a beautiful princess called Kumiko. She's blonde, has pale blue eyes, and a soft body to die for. However, this princess was taken by the dragon of depression, and she'll need to save herself in this one, because no brave hero is heading off to slay her foe."
"Shut up, Jacob! You're being an asshole," Hibiki says.
I shush him, and he does shut up, but keeps glaring at me intensely.
"You know," I begin, "I used to love coming here. It was my happy place, where I got together with my good friends to goof off, write some bunch of nonsense and giggle as we read them out loud. But that's gone, isn't it?"
"Jacob, you're drunk," Lydia says with an understanding tone. "Go home, sleep it off, and apologize to everyone tomorrow."
I shake my head. "Apologize? There's nothing to apologize for. You all have been lying this whole time about everything, and I'm not gonna take it anymore."
"Lying about what?" Hibiki asks sharply.
"That this is even a real literature club," I say.
Now they're all staring at me with confusion and fear on their faces. Lydia asks, "Jacob, what do you mean by that?"
"You're all too scared to go out, meet people and make friends. You're just using this as an excuse not to."
"Jacob, that isn't true," Lydia says softly. "It really is a literature club."
"You keep telling yourself that, cat girl."
There's a moment of silence. I want to tear into my two remaining friends further, but I feel there's no use. And then comes the weariness, the exhaustion. The void in my chest is expanding.
I let my ass fall onto the chair.
"We are living in a fantasy. In a few weeks we will exit this clubroom for the very last time in our lives. Lydia, you will move out to the other side of the country for college, Kumiko will start working at her family store, and you will probably do something in the world outside, Hibiki, although I don't particularly care. Do you two understand what I mean?"
They both nod.
"We have already lived through our carefree years," I say with a thin voice. "Until now we could laugh with the utmost sincerity. But what awaits us in the coming decades? Do we have anything to look forward except for mounting responsibilities, increasing bills, and the pains and humiliations of our progressively decaying frames?" I stand up and continue, "Do you really want to live the rest of your life knowing there is no escape from reality?"
I don't give them the chance to answer. I'm not even sure what the answer is. I just need to believe in what I'm saying.
"We're all living a lie," I say, "but if we stand up together, we can change it."
My two remaining storytelling friends remain silent. They don't answer. They don't disagree.
I look at the ground. I feel empty inside. "I will stand up to the lies of this world all by myself," I say. "Good luck to you."
I leave the clubroom and close the door. A few seconds later I open the door, walk to my chair and sit down. Tears are streaming down Lydia's face, and her glasses have fogged up. Hibiki's face is all red and he makes no effort to clean the snot running down the sides of his lips.
"The end," I say. "Well, what do you think?"
"It was the most beautiful story I ever heard," says a voice behind me.
I turn around, and can't believe my eyes. There stands a princess straight out of a fairy tale. Her long, blonde hair glistens in the late afternoon light, and the blue pools of her irises remind me of beautiful dreams. Her eyes are red and puffy, as if she has been crying for an eternity.
"Kumiko?" I say. "It... it's been so long."
"I know," she says. "I just... I just wanted to say that... you were right. I was unhappy. I was so unhappy. My stepfather, he..."
Tears roll down her face. I have never seen her so sad in all the years I have known her. In a way, it's like seeing a stranger. I stand up and quickly walk up to her.
"It's OK," I say, grabbing her hand. "It's OK."
She looks into my eyes. "Do you remember... the day we met?"
"Yes," I say with a smile. "I saved you from the rain."
"Will you save me again?" she asks.
"Of course," I say, but it's already too late.
A gunshot rings out, echoing through the halls of the school. I squeeze Kumiko's hand and close my eyes, but the distant meowing is getting louder.