Jon Ureña's Blog, page 8
February 23, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 10 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.
The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.
The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.
The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.
She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.
The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.
The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.
I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.
“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”
“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”
“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”
“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”
“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”
“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”
I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.
The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.
Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.
Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.
I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.
“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”
Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.
“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”
“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”
“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.
I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.
The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.
The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.
The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.
She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.
The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.
The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.
I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.
“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”
“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”
“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”
“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”
“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”
“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”
I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.
The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.
Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.
Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.
I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.
“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”
Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.
“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”
“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”
“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.
February 20, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 5 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.
In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.
I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.
That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.
As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.
She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.
“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”
“I’ll talk with you.”
I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.
“Want to sit?”
She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.
I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.
Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.
Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?
I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.
My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?
I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?
I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.
Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.
Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.
“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You want me here?”
“In the morning?”
“I work.”
Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.
“Please.”
That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.
Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.
It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.
I called, asking for a supervisor.
“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”
I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.
I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.
The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.
I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.
In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.
I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.
That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.
As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.
She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.
“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”
“I’ll talk with you.”
I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.
“Want to sit?”
She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.
I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.
Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.
Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?
I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.
My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?
I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?
I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.
Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.
Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.
“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
“You want me here?”
“In the morning?”
“I work.”
Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.
“Please.”
That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.
Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.
It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.
I called, asking for a supervisor.
“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”
I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.
I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.
The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.
I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
February 19, 2025
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 9 (Fiction)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Elena gripped her glass of coffee, raised it to her lips, and tilted her head back. The remaining coffee sloshed as she guzzled it down to the sediment, a sludge that must have smelled of earthy, singed beans. She set the glass down with a hollow clink, then paused to swallow. Her tongue flicked across the surface of her lips and disappeared between them.
“I didn’t conclude my talk about the unnamed void. In case you’re still game to continue this tour of the netherworld.”
“If you’re willing to share, I’m willing to listen.”
“Alright. As the darkness fills every corner of your mind, as it eats away at everything that made life bearable, you spot a yellowing scrap of paper at the bottom of the abyss, so small you’d miss it if you didn’t squint. You lean to make out the words scribbled on its crumpled, dirty surface, and they read: ‘This is not temporary. This is not an anomaly. This is the true state of being.’ You integrate a realization that the majority of humanity has been spared: the void existed from the start, and only the evolved chemical balance, the lies your brain tells to keep you alive, had shielded you from confronting it. But my safeguards had failed. As if the Earth’s magnetosphere had collapsed, the solar winds had blasted away the atmosphere, and the planet had become exposed to a torrent of radiation. The void can never be vanquished; it can only be delayed. Down there, the notion that such a nightmare could end doesn’t make sense. The mocking voice repeats that this is how it’s always been and always will be. But you’ve escaped before. The only way out of that black hole is to hold on tight and wait until it spits you back out. Your mind has been reduced to a whirlwind of razor blades. Your body is made of lead. You retreat under the covers, curl into a fetal position, and await a new birth. You wait through the night. You wait through the morning. You wait through the afternoon. You wait through another night. Days pass, but you perceive them in increments: the space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat and the next. One day, the abyss feels shallower. The cold begins to thaw and the darkness retreats, dragging with it the voice repeating that you’re useless, rotten, unwanted, a cancer to all those close to you. Your inner theater lights up with a faint, fuzzy memory of sunlight. A song. A line from a book. A hand on yours. The brain’s machinery churns out its magic again. Inhibitors and disinhibitors toil overtime to rebuild the protective illusion. The veil of normalcy falls back in place, allowing you to resume the masquerade. It’s not a victory. You haven’t slain a dragon or stormed a castle; you survived yourself. You emerge from the underworld, your face smudged with ashes, your eyes haunted. Then you remember the voice that has been your lifeline. You reconnect with the artists that have seen through the cracks of the world, who helped you understand yourself, and made you hope to survive long enough to light your own candle in the dark.”
The breeze had grown colder as the sun struggled to pierce through a sheet of darkening gray overhead, the color of corroded silverware. Elena tucked her almond-blonde locks behind her ears, then rubbed her palms against the thighs of her jeans. After a quiet sigh, she continued.
“You may have noticed that my tolerance for bullshit is low, which is funny considering what we all swim through, which is liquid bullshit, from the moment our ears are developed enough to process the noise spouted from our parents’ mouths. That’s why we need to learn to distinguish the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves, or the raindrops pattering on a window, or the symphony of a band we like, or the voice of someone we love. To have a few sounds in our lives that break through the fog of bullshit to mean something.” Elena’s left hand drifted up to her sweatshirt and sought her metallic moth pendant, thumb and index fingers encircling the sculpted insect. “Sadly that is a precarious, temporary healing. Eventually, a shift of weather and a misfiring of synapses will drag me down to that dark place, to that ancient void waiting for me in the caverns of my mind, that reminds me that my joy has always been an illusion. Each cycle of darkness scraping precious matter from my brain that I will never recover. Until one day, that black hole will return and there won’t be enough of me left to claw my way back into the light. So there is no happy ending. Not in this life. My best answer to your original question, Jon, is that I’m not actively suicidal but I’d prefer not to exist. I’d rather be a book on a shelf than a living human.”
I pictured Elena as a child, alone in her darkened bedroom, huddled in a corner. Her knees hugged to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body trembling with each ragged sob. The tiny figure in a vast and uncaring world rocked back and forth while muttering to herself, “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” But no matter how fervently she wished, the world refused to let her slip away. It clung to her like a parasite, feeding off her misery. Meeting Elena meant brushing against a profound sorrow, to trace one’s fingertips along a fault line.
My throat felt dry and constricted, and my vocal cords struggled to produce words.
“Live for today, Elena. Keep going as long as you can, and keep enjoying what you love.”
She dipped her chin and furrowed her brow, her pale blues fixed on my eyes. A faint smile tugged at a corner of her mouth; she might as well have told me outright to come up with better lines.
“Sometimes I think Siobhan had it right. At least she knew what she wanted: oblivion, peace, whatever you want to call it. Me? I’m stuck in this loop of wanting to disappear while craving something to tether me here. Like my favorite songs, or…” She gestured vaguely at the printouts. “Or these words I keep bleeding. I’m a junkie who needs a fix to prevent her from falling apart. So yeah, the only question is whether anyone’s going to be there to drag me away from the edge when I finally give up. Right now, though, I’m here, in a fancy coffee shop, with a guy who has long eyelashes and a strange fascination with my stories, and who is probably a serial killer. That’s about as good as it can get for me.”
The fingers of Elena’s right hand fluttered in a wavy motion. Maybe she caught my glance, because she balled that hand into a tight fist before withdrawing it beneath the table. With her head bowed, her eyes skittered over the table.
“You didn’t ask me to spill that much of my guts,” she said in a hesitant voice. “It’s just that, well, I’m on edge. Not used to sharing my serious writing or talking about anything that matters. I also have a hard time filtering myself.” Elena took a deep breath. She lifted her gaze to meet mine, her pale blues searching. “Let’s talk about you for a change. What do you like to do, Jon?”
“Masturbate.”
Elena smirked, then chuckled dryly. She uncoiled as if my reply had released the built-up tension, and her eyes twinkled with a conspiratorial gleam like an imp about to propose mischief.
“Oh, samesies. I don’t know if I have a sexual orientation so much as plain perversion. Do you ever feel ashamed when you molest yourself?”
“I only feel ashamed when I don’t.”
She snorted and shook her head.
“What other hobbies have you developed to cope with the misery of existence, Jon? Writing’s one of them, right? We met at a writing course, after all.”
“I used to. For me.”
“How long ago, and why did you stop?”
“Ten years, when I realized my words would be useless.”
Elena’s eyes searched my face. My skin itched as if I’d been bathed in toxic goo, and now I could feel every cell’s molecular structure degrading.
“Maybe you should give it another shot, Jon, for the sake of the lonely, invisible man behind your bullshit.”
“I also like to listen to a woman telling me the most intimate, horrifying things.”
She lounged back in her rattan chair, her head cocked slightly as she scrutinized me.
“Now seriously. Why are you here, Jon?”
“Because of you.”
“I’m not asking why you’re sitting at this table. I’m asking why you’re here in the world. What is it that keeps you from walking into the ocean and swimming until you sink?”
“I’m addicted to the smell of your hair. Honey-scented shampoo, right?”
“Whatever’s there when I reach for the shelf. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m also a sucker for a pretty pair of eyes, especially if they’re full of pain.”
“If you don’t answer truthfully, I’ll have to go with my serial killer theory.”
“I’ll say it again: because of you. The story of your existence.”
Elena’s pale blues narrowed as she stared me down, trying to figure out the angle.
“What a sweet lie.”
“You’re my motivation to stay afloat. You’re that guiding star on a stormy sea at night. That’s all there is.”
She exhaled deeply through her nose.
“Please. I’ve been dumping my depressing shit on you. I thought it’d be harder to open up, and I was sure that once you realized what you’d gotten into, you’d run away screaming.”
“I’m not going to leave. I’m here for the long haul. Even if you tell me fuck off, I may pretend I didn’t hear it.”
“Fuck, you’re an idiot. Why the hell do you want to hang out with a miserable bitch like me? I’m not even that hot.”
“My loins disagree.”
“The monster might emerge if you stick around. I’m radiation’s daughter. I can’t stop hurting people.”
“Someone needs to be there to drag you away from the edge. One day you may look back and be glad you didn’t jump.”
Elena’s shoulders slumped.
“Being someone’s only tether to the world. That’s quite the sacrifice, Jon. I doubt you’d benefit much from it.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Her eyes bored into mine. She then hunched over, a loose almond-blonde lock spilling onto her forehead, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“Late at night, when I’m listening to my favorite music, there are fragile moments where I believe life may be worth living. Just to hear what she’ll create next, to feel whole if only through my headphones. But that’s pathetic, isn’t it? Clinging to life because of an artist who has no idea that I exist. Who would probably hate my guts if she met me.”
“Your everyday life can erode even your sense of what’s meaningful. Jobs in particular excel at that. Everything becomes an unwanted transaction. But art is worth sticking around for. If you feel understood at least by some artists’ work, that means you’re not alone. And I care about what you write.”
“Do you have any idea how terrifying you are to me, Jon? Having someone want to read the darkness that spills out of my mind. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of you understanding or not. Because if you do understand, then what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? And if you don’t… well, then we’re two strangers playing at connection in an overpriced coffee shop, aren’t we?”
“When it comes to my role, Elena: the next time you find yourself at the end of your rope, if you can’t reach me with your hand, send me a text message that just reads, ‘Siobhan.'”
Elena tried to beat me in a staring contest, but she broke away and looked down at the second stack of stapled printouts. She picked it up and tossed it in front of me, letting them land on top of the first set.
“Something about you sets off alarm bells in my head. It makes me feel like I could fall deep into that dark, fathomless place within you, never to emerge. A strange comfort, to say the least. Like discovering someone who looks at the same bleak landscape, who feels the same cold, uncaring winds. Who’s heard the same whispers in the dead of night. But I’m afraid if we get closer, that place inside of you will pull me in. So here’s to this distance between us and these small steps, Jon. Now quit fucking around and move onto the second exhibit of Elena’s Dark Carnival.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips.
Elena gripped her glass of coffee, raised it to her lips, and tilted her head back. The remaining coffee sloshed as she guzzled it down to the sediment, a sludge that must have smelled of earthy, singed beans. She set the glass down with a hollow clink, then paused to swallow. Her tongue flicked across the surface of her lips and disappeared between them.
“I didn’t conclude my talk about the unnamed void. In case you’re still game to continue this tour of the netherworld.”
“If you’re willing to share, I’m willing to listen.”
“Alright. As the darkness fills every corner of your mind, as it eats away at everything that made life bearable, you spot a yellowing scrap of paper at the bottom of the abyss, so small you’d miss it if you didn’t squint. You lean to make out the words scribbled on its crumpled, dirty surface, and they read: ‘This is not temporary. This is not an anomaly. This is the true state of being.’ You integrate a realization that the majority of humanity has been spared: the void existed from the start, and only the evolved chemical balance, the lies your brain tells to keep you alive, had shielded you from confronting it. But my safeguards had failed. As if the Earth’s magnetosphere had collapsed, the solar winds had blasted away the atmosphere, and the planet had become exposed to a torrent of radiation. The void can never be vanquished; it can only be delayed. Down there, the notion that such a nightmare could end doesn’t make sense. The mocking voice repeats that this is how it’s always been and always will be. But you’ve escaped before. The only way out of that black hole is to hold on tight and wait until it spits you back out. Your mind has been reduced to a whirlwind of razor blades. Your body is made of lead. You retreat under the covers, curl into a fetal position, and await a new birth. You wait through the night. You wait through the morning. You wait through the afternoon. You wait through another night. Days pass, but you perceive them in increments: the space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat and the next. One day, the abyss feels shallower. The cold begins to thaw and the darkness retreats, dragging with it the voice repeating that you’re useless, rotten, unwanted, a cancer to all those close to you. Your inner theater lights up with a faint, fuzzy memory of sunlight. A song. A line from a book. A hand on yours. The brain’s machinery churns out its magic again. Inhibitors and disinhibitors toil overtime to rebuild the protective illusion. The veil of normalcy falls back in place, allowing you to resume the masquerade. It’s not a victory. You haven’t slain a dragon or stormed a castle; you survived yourself. You emerge from the underworld, your face smudged with ashes, your eyes haunted. Then you remember the voice that has been your lifeline. You reconnect with the artists that have seen through the cracks of the world, who helped you understand yourself, and made you hope to survive long enough to light your own candle in the dark.”
The breeze had grown colder as the sun struggled to pierce through a sheet of darkening gray overhead, the color of corroded silverware. Elena tucked her almond-blonde locks behind her ears, then rubbed her palms against the thighs of her jeans. After a quiet sigh, she continued.
“You may have noticed that my tolerance for bullshit is low, which is funny considering what we all swim through, which is liquid bullshit, from the moment our ears are developed enough to process the noise spouted from our parents’ mouths. That’s why we need to learn to distinguish the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves, or the raindrops pattering on a window, or the symphony of a band we like, or the voice of someone we love. To have a few sounds in our lives that break through the fog of bullshit to mean something.” Elena’s left hand drifted up to her sweatshirt and sought her metallic moth pendant, thumb and index fingers encircling the sculpted insect. “Sadly that is a precarious, temporary healing. Eventually, a shift of weather and a misfiring of synapses will drag me down to that dark place, to that ancient void waiting for me in the caverns of my mind, that reminds me that my joy has always been an illusion. Each cycle of darkness scraping precious matter from my brain that I will never recover. Until one day, that black hole will return and there won’t be enough of me left to claw my way back into the light. So there is no happy ending. Not in this life. My best answer to your original question, Jon, is that I’m not actively suicidal but I’d prefer not to exist. I’d rather be a book on a shelf than a living human.”
I pictured Elena as a child, alone in her darkened bedroom, huddled in a corner. Her knees hugged to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body trembling with each ragged sob. The tiny figure in a vast and uncaring world rocked back and forth while muttering to herself, “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” But no matter how fervently she wished, the world refused to let her slip away. It clung to her like a parasite, feeding off her misery. Meeting Elena meant brushing against a profound sorrow, to trace one’s fingertips along a fault line.
My throat felt dry and constricted, and my vocal cords struggled to produce words.
“Live for today, Elena. Keep going as long as you can, and keep enjoying what you love.”
She dipped her chin and furrowed her brow, her pale blues fixed on my eyes. A faint smile tugged at a corner of her mouth; she might as well have told me outright to come up with better lines.
“Sometimes I think Siobhan had it right. At least she knew what she wanted: oblivion, peace, whatever you want to call it. Me? I’m stuck in this loop of wanting to disappear while craving something to tether me here. Like my favorite songs, or…” She gestured vaguely at the printouts. “Or these words I keep bleeding. I’m a junkie who needs a fix to prevent her from falling apart. So yeah, the only question is whether anyone’s going to be there to drag me away from the edge when I finally give up. Right now, though, I’m here, in a fancy coffee shop, with a guy who has long eyelashes and a strange fascination with my stories, and who is probably a serial killer. That’s about as good as it can get for me.”
The fingers of Elena’s right hand fluttered in a wavy motion. Maybe she caught my glance, because she balled that hand into a tight fist before withdrawing it beneath the table. With her head bowed, her eyes skittered over the table.
“You didn’t ask me to spill that much of my guts,” she said in a hesitant voice. “It’s just that, well, I’m on edge. Not used to sharing my serious writing or talking about anything that matters. I also have a hard time filtering myself.” Elena took a deep breath. She lifted her gaze to meet mine, her pale blues searching. “Let’s talk about you for a change. What do you like to do, Jon?”
“Masturbate.”
Elena smirked, then chuckled dryly. She uncoiled as if my reply had released the built-up tension, and her eyes twinkled with a conspiratorial gleam like an imp about to propose mischief.
“Oh, samesies. I don’t know if I have a sexual orientation so much as plain perversion. Do you ever feel ashamed when you molest yourself?”
“I only feel ashamed when I don’t.”
She snorted and shook her head.
“What other hobbies have you developed to cope with the misery of existence, Jon? Writing’s one of them, right? We met at a writing course, after all.”
“I used to. For me.”
“How long ago, and why did you stop?”
“Ten years, when I realized my words would be useless.”
Elena’s eyes searched my face. My skin itched as if I’d been bathed in toxic goo, and now I could feel every cell’s molecular structure degrading.
“Maybe you should give it another shot, Jon, for the sake of the lonely, invisible man behind your bullshit.”
“I also like to listen to a woman telling me the most intimate, horrifying things.”
She lounged back in her rattan chair, her head cocked slightly as she scrutinized me.
“Now seriously. Why are you here, Jon?”
“Because of you.”
“I’m not asking why you’re sitting at this table. I’m asking why you’re here in the world. What is it that keeps you from walking into the ocean and swimming until you sink?”
“I’m addicted to the smell of your hair. Honey-scented shampoo, right?”
“Whatever’s there when I reach for the shelf. And you know that’s not what I meant.”
“I’m also a sucker for a pretty pair of eyes, especially if they’re full of pain.”
“If you don’t answer truthfully, I’ll have to go with my serial killer theory.”
“I’ll say it again: because of you. The story of your existence.”
Elena’s pale blues narrowed as she stared me down, trying to figure out the angle.
“What a sweet lie.”
“You’re my motivation to stay afloat. You’re that guiding star on a stormy sea at night. That’s all there is.”
She exhaled deeply through her nose.
“Please. I’ve been dumping my depressing shit on you. I thought it’d be harder to open up, and I was sure that once you realized what you’d gotten into, you’d run away screaming.”
“I’m not going to leave. I’m here for the long haul. Even if you tell me fuck off, I may pretend I didn’t hear it.”
“Fuck, you’re an idiot. Why the hell do you want to hang out with a miserable bitch like me? I’m not even that hot.”
“My loins disagree.”
“The monster might emerge if you stick around. I’m radiation’s daughter. I can’t stop hurting people.”
“Someone needs to be there to drag you away from the edge. One day you may look back and be glad you didn’t jump.”
Elena’s shoulders slumped.
“Being someone’s only tether to the world. That’s quite the sacrifice, Jon. I doubt you’d benefit much from it.”
“That’s for me to decide.”
Her eyes bored into mine. She then hunched over, a loose almond-blonde lock spilling onto her forehead, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.
“Late at night, when I’m listening to my favorite music, there are fragile moments where I believe life may be worth living. Just to hear what she’ll create next, to feel whole if only through my headphones. But that’s pathetic, isn’t it? Clinging to life because of an artist who has no idea that I exist. Who would probably hate my guts if she met me.”
“Your everyday life can erode even your sense of what’s meaningful. Jobs in particular excel at that. Everything becomes an unwanted transaction. But art is worth sticking around for. If you feel understood at least by some artists’ work, that means you’re not alone. And I care about what you write.”
“Do you have any idea how terrifying you are to me, Jon? Having someone want to read the darkness that spills out of my mind. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of you understanding or not. Because if you do understand, then what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? And if you don’t… well, then we’re two strangers playing at connection in an overpriced coffee shop, aren’t we?”
“When it comes to my role, Elena: the next time you find yourself at the end of your rope, if you can’t reach me with your hand, send me a text message that just reads, ‘Siobhan.'”
Elena tried to beat me in a staring contest, but she broke away and looked down at the second stack of stapled printouts. She picked it up and tossed it in front of me, letting them land on top of the first set.
“Something about you sets off alarm bells in my head. It makes me feel like I could fall deep into that dark, fathomless place within you, never to emerge. A strange comfort, to say the least. Like discovering someone who looks at the same bleak landscape, who feels the same cold, uncaring winds. Who’s heard the same whispers in the dead of night. But I’m afraid if we get closer, that place inside of you will pull me in. So here’s to this distance between us and these small steps, Jon. Now quit fucking around and move onto the second exhibit of Elena’s Dark Carnival.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips.
Life update (02/19/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
Recently I found out about an intriguing Norwegian songwriter named Aurora Aksnes. Her general demeanour as well as clear stimming when performing live made me suspect she was autistic, which she apparently has confirmed herself. I’ve been reflecting on the autistic artists that end up floating to the top.
Apart from Aurora Aksnes, I know of other songwriters that have spoken about being autistic: Björk Guðmundsdóttir (I’ve never retained any of her songs, so I can’t link to anything in particular), Claire Elise Boucher (AKA Grimes, one of Elon Musk’s many exes, Musk himself being autistic), and Ladyhawke (I barely know anything about her, but that song is cool enough). I’ve suspected for many years that Joanna Newsom is also autistic.
To make it as an artist, you need luck, connections, a winning personality, and preferably an attractive physical form. Most autists are doomed when it comes to connections and winning personalities, to the extent that they eat into their luck. That leaves whatever remains of luck, as well as the attractive physical form. Given that men are more likely than women to elevate others professionally because they’re hot, that makes it far, far more likely than any autistic artist that makes it out of obscurity will be a woman that at her peak was very attractive, in some cases drop-dead gorgeous. That’s certainly the case for all those female songwriters mentioned. If I recall correctly, Joanna Newsom herself (I say herself because she may as well be a god as far as I’m concerned) didn’t intend to perform in public. She recorded her songs with a Fisher Price recorder, then passed her tapes to her friends. One of those friends went to a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy concert and gave him the tape, which led to Newsom getting a recording contract with Drag City. It probably also led to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy wanting to bang Newsom really, really bad (she wrote the song “Go Long” mainly about him). Anyway, I naturally connect more with autistic artists than with those who aren’t, which makes me regret that the vast majority of them are lingering in absolute obscurity.
About ten years ago, when I was working on my Serious Six, the novellas I sent around hoping to get published, I met regularly with a group of local autists, so I got to know like fifteen or twenty of them. I believe I met three autistic women in total, but there were some troubling commonalities: all the female autists were in relationships with neurotypical men who were, by the women’s own admission, very accommodating. All the autistic men save for two were single. The tales of those two, well, they’d make you want to be single. Their partners seemed to recriminate most aspects of their nature, and had them running on a treadmill to counter their shortcomings. Both of them seemed to be on edge and generally miserable all the time.
I also realized that there is a huge schism among autists: there are those whose peculiarities have been embraced and nurtured by their parents and close ones, then there are those whose natures have been repressed to pass for normal. I’m in the latter group. The autists in the first group are far happier, freer, and often obnoxious. Autists, of course, can be extremely obnoxious; I recall having been that way at different points of my life. Those of the repressed group not only are generally guarded and somber, but can deal with lots of self-hate and even trauma. Many of them don’t make it far in life, as in they step out of life at some point of the journey.
Of course there’s the general ignorance about autism, mainly thanks to the media. I recall the admin worker that many years ago had to assess my disability level asking me how come if autism is a developmental disorder, I still struggle with it as an adult. Who’s the retard here? Then there are those that believe autists to be math geniuses with perfect memories. In reality, autists are more likely than not to have tremendous issues with abstraction, and regarding math, many end up with some level of dyscalculia. Some idiots mention Rain man even today; Hoffman’s performance was based on a single guy who wasn’t even autistic: he was born without a corpus callosum.
Also, autism is caused by an atypical pruning of neural connections during development, which leads to idiosyncratic neurological processing. They proved that the differences between the neural activations between autists are larger than between those who aren’t autistic, nevermind how large those differences are between autists and those who aren’t autistic. That makes it hard to generalize about autists, although they are generally extremely sensitive (both emotionally and to sensory input), more likely to suffer from gut issues, also more likely to suffer from OCD and ADHD (I have the OCD comorbidity, which comes with intrusive thoughts and heightened obsessions). Also weird stuff like prosopagnosia, which I have, and consists on being unable to properly register a face. It’s so bad that I can’t tell if I ever saw again one of the girls I dated even though we lived close, because I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her on the street. When I worked as a technician and had to interact with nurses and doctors, it was common for me to enter a room, talk to someone, walk away to do something, and then realize I had no clue whom I had just talked to.
I got to thinking about autism in general because the protagonist of the novel I’m writing at the moment, The Scrap Colossus, is a female autist to whom I’ve assigned the authorship of the six novellas I wrote back in the day. But as I work on the notes, I’m having a hard time pretending that Elena, being an attractive woman, would have had that much issue getting those novellas published. Perhaps that’s bitterness talking through me. Since I was a child, I’ve felt cursed in that respect: no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anybody to pay any attention to what mattered to me. It seems there’s no further point I wanted to make about that other than saying it.
Anyway, I’ve got a scene to finish, so bye.
Recently I found out about an intriguing Norwegian songwriter named Aurora Aksnes. Her general demeanour as well as clear stimming when performing live made me suspect she was autistic, which she apparently has confirmed herself. I’ve been reflecting on the autistic artists that end up floating to the top.
Apart from Aurora Aksnes, I know of other songwriters that have spoken about being autistic: Björk Guðmundsdóttir (I’ve never retained any of her songs, so I can’t link to anything in particular), Claire Elise Boucher (AKA Grimes, one of Elon Musk’s many exes, Musk himself being autistic), and Ladyhawke (I barely know anything about her, but that song is cool enough). I’ve suspected for many years that Joanna Newsom is also autistic.
To make it as an artist, you need luck, connections, a winning personality, and preferably an attractive physical form. Most autists are doomed when it comes to connections and winning personalities, to the extent that they eat into their luck. That leaves whatever remains of luck, as well as the attractive physical form. Given that men are more likely than women to elevate others professionally because they’re hot, that makes it far, far more likely than any autistic artist that makes it out of obscurity will be a woman that at her peak was very attractive, in some cases drop-dead gorgeous. That’s certainly the case for all those female songwriters mentioned. If I recall correctly, Joanna Newsom herself (I say herself because she may as well be a god as far as I’m concerned) didn’t intend to perform in public. She recorded her songs with a Fisher Price recorder, then passed her tapes to her friends. One of those friends went to a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy concert and gave him the tape, which led to Newsom getting a recording contract with Drag City. It probably also led to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy wanting to bang Newsom really, really bad (she wrote the song “Go Long” mainly about him). Anyway, I naturally connect more with autistic artists than with those who aren’t, which makes me regret that the vast majority of them are lingering in absolute obscurity.
About ten years ago, when I was working on my Serious Six, the novellas I sent around hoping to get published, I met regularly with a group of local autists, so I got to know like fifteen or twenty of them. I believe I met three autistic women in total, but there were some troubling commonalities: all the female autists were in relationships with neurotypical men who were, by the women’s own admission, very accommodating. All the autistic men save for two were single. The tales of those two, well, they’d make you want to be single. Their partners seemed to recriminate most aspects of their nature, and had them running on a treadmill to counter their shortcomings. Both of them seemed to be on edge and generally miserable all the time.
I also realized that there is a huge schism among autists: there are those whose peculiarities have been embraced and nurtured by their parents and close ones, then there are those whose natures have been repressed to pass for normal. I’m in the latter group. The autists in the first group are far happier, freer, and often obnoxious. Autists, of course, can be extremely obnoxious; I recall having been that way at different points of my life. Those of the repressed group not only are generally guarded and somber, but can deal with lots of self-hate and even trauma. Many of them don’t make it far in life, as in they step out of life at some point of the journey.
Of course there’s the general ignorance about autism, mainly thanks to the media. I recall the admin worker that many years ago had to assess my disability level asking me how come if autism is a developmental disorder, I still struggle with it as an adult. Who’s the retard here? Then there are those that believe autists to be math geniuses with perfect memories. In reality, autists are more likely than not to have tremendous issues with abstraction, and regarding math, many end up with some level of dyscalculia. Some idiots mention Rain man even today; Hoffman’s performance was based on a single guy who wasn’t even autistic: he was born without a corpus callosum.
Also, autism is caused by an atypical pruning of neural connections during development, which leads to idiosyncratic neurological processing. They proved that the differences between the neural activations between autists are larger than between those who aren’t autistic, nevermind how large those differences are between autists and those who aren’t autistic. That makes it hard to generalize about autists, although they are generally extremely sensitive (both emotionally and to sensory input), more likely to suffer from gut issues, also more likely to suffer from OCD and ADHD (I have the OCD comorbidity, which comes with intrusive thoughts and heightened obsessions). Also weird stuff like prosopagnosia, which I have, and consists on being unable to properly register a face. It’s so bad that I can’t tell if I ever saw again one of the girls I dated even though we lived close, because I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her on the street. When I worked as a technician and had to interact with nurses and doctors, it was common for me to enter a room, talk to someone, walk away to do something, and then realize I had no clue whom I had just talked to.
I got to thinking about autism in general because the protagonist of the novel I’m writing at the moment, The Scrap Colossus, is a female autist to whom I’ve assigned the authorship of the six novellas I wrote back in the day. But as I work on the notes, I’m having a hard time pretending that Elena, being an attractive woman, would have had that much issue getting those novellas published. Perhaps that’s bitterness talking through me. Since I was a child, I’ve felt cursed in that respect: no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anybody to pay any attention to what mattered to me. It seems there’s no further point I wanted to make about that other than saying it.
Anyway, I’ve got a scene to finish, so bye.
The Drowned City, Pt. 4 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
On Sunday, I awoke clinging to the image of the winding path through the pines, but the morning light dissolved the sway of branches and leaves. Before I could shake off the grogginess and reason clearly, I arrived at the station and boarded the train to Hitachi. When I exited the station, I mimicked the wandering that had led me to the passageway. An emotion magnitudes greater than any I had known guided me toward that spot, as birds recognize magnetic north.
I reached the point on the street where days earlier I had glanced up at the passageway on the opposite sidewalk. To my right stood the three white-and-red vending machines embedded into the cement building. I bought a water bottle. To calm myself, I sipped it while pressing my free hand against my side to keep it from trembling.
A delivery van passed. Two men in warehouse overalls overtook me. One stared ahead; the other’s gaze swept the pavement a hand’s breadth from his feet. An elderly man walked the opposite sidewalk, passing rusted sheds and an electronics store.
None of them had noticed the passageway. To me, the vision in the half-light—the path of trampled grass, the palm-like fronds of ferns flanking it, the clover field the path bisected—invited admiration, like a centuries-old fresco in a museum.
I crossed the sidewalk and entered the path’s curves. Beneath my soles crunched a layer of leaves and pine needles. An electric current heightened my fingertips and sharpened my awareness. Butterflies of light and shadow fluttered over pine trunks split by vertical grooves. Twisted branches, meters above the path, were cloaked in emerald-green moss hanging in fringes. Ferns and clover sprouted from the gaps of a stump, its structure barely protruding with splintered shards. Between two pines glistened the hammock of a spiderweb. Its owner, as large as my palm, swayed on the net as a breeze billowed it.
The grass thickened, a sign fewer feet had trodden here, and I pushed aside the fern fronds draping the path. In minutes, the lagoon would come into view. I hunched forward as if to arrive fractions of a second sooner, placing each heel down only to immediately lift it again.
Itches flared across my body, as if trapped in a room with an invisible mosquito. I had climbed to the peak of a snow-covered slope, fastened my skis, and now had to hurtle down at breakneck speed. What would I say to the woman, and how would she reply? What combination of words would seize her pale-blue gaze and draw out her voice?
I emerged into the clearing as rings of static constricted my vision. I exhaled. Beside the swampy lagoon waited the moss-upholstered rock, worn by decades of people sitting, where the woman had been the afternoon I met her. The clearing smelled of wet fur and stagnant water.
Of course, the woman was absent. I’d have needed luck for her to come on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I should be content just to have met her. This clearing remained, though her absence dominated it.
I sat on the rock, settling into the plush moss to occupy her ghost’s space. I filled my lungs with the air that might have filled hers. Leaves swayed in a mausoleum silence, where no sound muzzled the cacophony of inner voices passing judgment.
I hunched. My gaze fell to the pebbles around the lagoon, the scattered pine needles. A pain pierced my heart. Perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, I would return to this clearing in my daydreams and replay our conversation. I’d chastise myself for idiotic phrases, insert clever remarks that years later would occur to me. In my imagination, before saying goodbye, I’d ask for her phone number or propose another meeting.
The lagoon’s surface bulged into a green tumor, outlining a figure. The coat of algae and mud sloughed off, revealing the woman’s honey-blonde hair, and her face. Streams of water flowed over her eyelids, nose, and cheekbones, crossing the mottled patches of discoloration. She advanced toward the shore as if her legs cleaved air. Green foam stained her soaked dress, which clung to her shoulders and molded her breasts. With each step, the skirt, plastered to her thighs, wrinkled like a second skin, her bare feet imprinting wet marks on the shore’s pebbles. She noticed me as she brushed off lichen flakes stuck to her shin.
When I regained my senses, I flushed as if caught hiding in her closet to spy while she undressed. I stood and retreated a few steps toward the clearing’s exit. I forced myself to meet her gaze as my temples burned.
She eyed me like we’d bumped into each other in the living room of a shared home.
“You can sit there if you want.”
I didn’t know if I shook my head, though I’d meant to. I gestured toward the rock as if offering my train seat.
When she sat, her dress slapped wetly. Water trickled down the rock’s sides. She gathered her honey-blonde mane into a fist, wrung it, and water gushed from the darkened strands. Some slid from her scalp, circumvented her eyes, traced her jawline, and fell. Her skin, mottled with irregular patches, reminded me of a leopard trapped by a hunter for a zoo.
“Did you miss this forest?” she asked.
I straightened. My vision blurred as if recovering from a blow to the head.
“I needed to see you.”
I expected her face to show discomfort, even terror, but whatever raced through her mind halted before reaching her facial muscles.
“Why?”
“I had never met anyone like you.”
She nodded and rested one hand over the other in her lap.
I’d admitted it—the words had left my mouth without needing to unlock gates or lower a drawbridge.
“I had to see you again. You, whose name I don’t know, to whom I’m nobody. It should bother you. Does it?”
She shook her head. Contorting as if stretching, she adjusted the back of her dress.
“I enjoy talking to someone.”
My throat tightened. A pulse throbbed in my neck like a muscle tic as I fought the smile tugging my lips. I wanted to hear every word she’d share, uncover every detail of her life.
“How do you spend your time? Beyond swimming, I can’t picture you outside this park, this forest.”
“What do you think the answer is?”
“Do you wake early to trudge to an office and waste hours on nonsense?”
“I don’t need to do any of that. Whenever you come here, you’ll find me.”
Her lack of expression might have meant she’d forgotten, or never learned, that people use gestures to communicate. Beyond the mottling, she belonged to another race. A lifetime of rejection might have taught her to avoid others. She’d bond with the lagoon she dove in and the encircling pines. Perhaps she welcomed this conversation as if we were exotic creatures separated by zoo glass.
“Who do you live with?” I said. “I assume you don’t work. Does the state pay for your home?”
I cringed at my hunger for every scrap of information. I imagined her scowling, sharpening her tone, rebuking my impertinence.
“Before you came, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time.”
I crouched on the shore’s pebbles, leveling my face with hers. Meeting her gaze—those pale-blue eyes flecked with white and green—sent electricity from my nape to my toes. No one else had interested me because no one else deserved it. Here sat a real person, not someone playing a role society had drilled into them.
“Do you want to know anything about me?” I asked.
“Tell me.”
“No, I’m asking. Are you interested?”
“In what?”
“Where I live, how I spend my time, what I like.”
She tilted her head, her gaze dancing across the trees as if weighing whether another human was worth knowing.
“Does it matter?”
My legs protested. I sat and leaned a forearm on my knees.
“I don’t know. There’s little to say. Little I care about.”
I searched for some nugget to share, but my past spread like a muddy expanse. I spoke before realizing it.
“My childhood was boring and miserable—the tedious kind. I went to university expecting the promised camaraderie. A week after graduating, I’d forgotten my professors’ and classmates’ faces. I’m on my second job. Since childhood, I’ve waited for some passion to seize me, something I’d crave to spend hours on unpaid. But for years, I’ve walked straight ahead down a gray hallway. When I paused, invisible hands shoved my back. I suspected that somewhere—behind walls, a door, an inaccessible wing—a luminous world existed. Meanwhile, I experienced a plastic, flavorless reality. I blamed myself. The world’s data filters through my distorting brain. I live like acting in a disjointed play during a fever dream. I followed instructions, excelled at them, but found only hollowness. I assumed someday I’d stumble upon why I bothered.”
I elongated a silence. Droplets slid down the woman’s forehead. She glanced away but soon locked eyes with me again, awaiting direction.
I inhaled as my cheeks burned.
“But let’s talk about you. What do you enjoy?”
“What?”
“What do you like to do?”
Her damp hair dripped onto her soaked dress. She laid her palms on her thighs, fingers relaxed. She stared unblinking, whick kept my eyes from wandering to the curves her dress hugged.
I shifted, thirsting to draw out her words.
“What satisfies you? What do you do whenever you can?”
“I come here. I swim.”
Her irises quivered within their orbits, pupils dilating and contracting. She studied my face like a beast’s cub encountering a human.
I listened to her breath mingle with the hiss of branches and occasional thud of fruit falling into rot.
“Give me your hand.”
She raised her left hand, palm down. Cloudy droplets swelled on her fingertips. I crawled forward and clasped her hand between mine. It was cold and wet, like something left overnight in a bucket of water. Chalk-white patches mapped her veins. The hairless arm, smooth as if waxed, showed no goosebumps, no tremors.
“Aren’t you dying of cold?” I asked.
“I’m not dying of anything.”
I squeezed her hand, warming it. She lifted her gaze to mine and curved her lips slightly. I brought our joined hands to her face, tracing with our fingers the mottled patch spanning half her cheekbone and jaw. I swallowed.
“Does it bother you?”
“It tickles.”
“Having these patches. Being different.”
She shook her head.
“I am who I should be.”
I glided my fingertips over her hand’s back, shifting pliant skin. I outlined a patch. Light carved white curves along her knuckles’ wrinkles. Her nails, segmented by microscopic ridges like pine bark, held mud under their edges. I turned her hand over. Water and cold had puckered her fingertips and creased her palm, aging it. I traced every line, imagining their formation from her birth to this moment, when I could touch them.
“I think I’ll return soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
Dizziness struck.
“I work.”
“In the evening?”
How could I focus at the office, counting hours until I returned? But my mouth dried, and the details of her face and the forest’s silence sharpened as if I’d shed nearsightedness and earplugs. I longed to transport myself to the moment tomorrow when I would descend the office stairs and realize that instead of spending the rest of the day resting in order to perform well at work the next day, I would meet the woman in this clearing where no one dared to venture. A smile surfaced unbidden. She lowered her gaze to my lips as if they were another pair of eyes.
“Will I find you,” I said, “like you promised?”
“Whenever you come.”
Reluctantly, I released her hand and stood. How did I know to leave? My wristwatch warned of dinnertime. The canopy of branches etched a granite-gray sky, and the same half-light that had greeted me upon entering the passage enveloped us.
I stepped forward, half-raising my arms to embrace her, but stopped even though my heart pounded like a radar nearing its target. I wanted to hold her, balance her warmth with mine, imprint the feel of her soaked dress and the body beneath until tomorrow. I’d just met her. What if she’d tolerated my touch only to avoid conflict?
I bid goodbye with a smile she returned. I promised we’d meet tomorrow. As I walked away, she raised a hand and waved. I left the clearing and quickened my pace to overcome the urge to run back to her side.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.
On Sunday, I awoke clinging to the image of the winding path through the pines, but the morning light dissolved the sway of branches and leaves. Before I could shake off the grogginess and reason clearly, I arrived at the station and boarded the train to Hitachi. When I exited the station, I mimicked the wandering that had led me to the passageway. An emotion magnitudes greater than any I had known guided me toward that spot, as birds recognize magnetic north.
I reached the point on the street where days earlier I had glanced up at the passageway on the opposite sidewalk. To my right stood the three white-and-red vending machines embedded into the cement building. I bought a water bottle. To calm myself, I sipped it while pressing my free hand against my side to keep it from trembling.
A delivery van passed. Two men in warehouse overalls overtook me. One stared ahead; the other’s gaze swept the pavement a hand’s breadth from his feet. An elderly man walked the opposite sidewalk, passing rusted sheds and an electronics store.
None of them had noticed the passageway. To me, the vision in the half-light—the path of trampled grass, the palm-like fronds of ferns flanking it, the clover field the path bisected—invited admiration, like a centuries-old fresco in a museum.
I crossed the sidewalk and entered the path’s curves. Beneath my soles crunched a layer of leaves and pine needles. An electric current heightened my fingertips and sharpened my awareness. Butterflies of light and shadow fluttered over pine trunks split by vertical grooves. Twisted branches, meters above the path, were cloaked in emerald-green moss hanging in fringes. Ferns and clover sprouted from the gaps of a stump, its structure barely protruding with splintered shards. Between two pines glistened the hammock of a spiderweb. Its owner, as large as my palm, swayed on the net as a breeze billowed it.
The grass thickened, a sign fewer feet had trodden here, and I pushed aside the fern fronds draping the path. In minutes, the lagoon would come into view. I hunched forward as if to arrive fractions of a second sooner, placing each heel down only to immediately lift it again.
Itches flared across my body, as if trapped in a room with an invisible mosquito. I had climbed to the peak of a snow-covered slope, fastened my skis, and now had to hurtle down at breakneck speed. What would I say to the woman, and how would she reply? What combination of words would seize her pale-blue gaze and draw out her voice?
I emerged into the clearing as rings of static constricted my vision. I exhaled. Beside the swampy lagoon waited the moss-upholstered rock, worn by decades of people sitting, where the woman had been the afternoon I met her. The clearing smelled of wet fur and stagnant water.
Of course, the woman was absent. I’d have needed luck for her to come on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I should be content just to have met her. This clearing remained, though her absence dominated it.
I sat on the rock, settling into the plush moss to occupy her ghost’s space. I filled my lungs with the air that might have filled hers. Leaves swayed in a mausoleum silence, where no sound muzzled the cacophony of inner voices passing judgment.
I hunched. My gaze fell to the pebbles around the lagoon, the scattered pine needles. A pain pierced my heart. Perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, I would return to this clearing in my daydreams and replay our conversation. I’d chastise myself for idiotic phrases, insert clever remarks that years later would occur to me. In my imagination, before saying goodbye, I’d ask for her phone number or propose another meeting.
The lagoon’s surface bulged into a green tumor, outlining a figure. The coat of algae and mud sloughed off, revealing the woman’s honey-blonde hair, and her face. Streams of water flowed over her eyelids, nose, and cheekbones, crossing the mottled patches of discoloration. She advanced toward the shore as if her legs cleaved air. Green foam stained her soaked dress, which clung to her shoulders and molded her breasts. With each step, the skirt, plastered to her thighs, wrinkled like a second skin, her bare feet imprinting wet marks on the shore’s pebbles. She noticed me as she brushed off lichen flakes stuck to her shin.
When I regained my senses, I flushed as if caught hiding in her closet to spy while she undressed. I stood and retreated a few steps toward the clearing’s exit. I forced myself to meet her gaze as my temples burned.
She eyed me like we’d bumped into each other in the living room of a shared home.
“You can sit there if you want.”
I didn’t know if I shook my head, though I’d meant to. I gestured toward the rock as if offering my train seat.
When she sat, her dress slapped wetly. Water trickled down the rock’s sides. She gathered her honey-blonde mane into a fist, wrung it, and water gushed from the darkened strands. Some slid from her scalp, circumvented her eyes, traced her jawline, and fell. Her skin, mottled with irregular patches, reminded me of a leopard trapped by a hunter for a zoo.
“Did you miss this forest?” she asked.
I straightened. My vision blurred as if recovering from a blow to the head.
“I needed to see you.”
I expected her face to show discomfort, even terror, but whatever raced through her mind halted before reaching her facial muscles.
“Why?”
“I had never met anyone like you.”
She nodded and rested one hand over the other in her lap.
I’d admitted it—the words had left my mouth without needing to unlock gates or lower a drawbridge.
“I had to see you again. You, whose name I don’t know, to whom I’m nobody. It should bother you. Does it?”
She shook her head. Contorting as if stretching, she adjusted the back of her dress.
“I enjoy talking to someone.”
My throat tightened. A pulse throbbed in my neck like a muscle tic as I fought the smile tugging my lips. I wanted to hear every word she’d share, uncover every detail of her life.
“How do you spend your time? Beyond swimming, I can’t picture you outside this park, this forest.”
“What do you think the answer is?”
“Do you wake early to trudge to an office and waste hours on nonsense?”
“I don’t need to do any of that. Whenever you come here, you’ll find me.”
Her lack of expression might have meant she’d forgotten, or never learned, that people use gestures to communicate. Beyond the mottling, she belonged to another race. A lifetime of rejection might have taught her to avoid others. She’d bond with the lagoon she dove in and the encircling pines. Perhaps she welcomed this conversation as if we were exotic creatures separated by zoo glass.
“Who do you live with?” I said. “I assume you don’t work. Does the state pay for your home?”
I cringed at my hunger for every scrap of information. I imagined her scowling, sharpening her tone, rebuking my impertinence.
“Before you came, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time.”
I crouched on the shore’s pebbles, leveling my face with hers. Meeting her gaze—those pale-blue eyes flecked with white and green—sent electricity from my nape to my toes. No one else had interested me because no one else deserved it. Here sat a real person, not someone playing a role society had drilled into them.
“Do you want to know anything about me?” I asked.
“Tell me.”
“No, I’m asking. Are you interested?”
“In what?”
“Where I live, how I spend my time, what I like.”
She tilted her head, her gaze dancing across the trees as if weighing whether another human was worth knowing.
“Does it matter?”
My legs protested. I sat and leaned a forearm on my knees.
“I don’t know. There’s little to say. Little I care about.”
I searched for some nugget to share, but my past spread like a muddy expanse. I spoke before realizing it.
“My childhood was boring and miserable—the tedious kind. I went to university expecting the promised camaraderie. A week after graduating, I’d forgotten my professors’ and classmates’ faces. I’m on my second job. Since childhood, I’ve waited for some passion to seize me, something I’d crave to spend hours on unpaid. But for years, I’ve walked straight ahead down a gray hallway. When I paused, invisible hands shoved my back. I suspected that somewhere—behind walls, a door, an inaccessible wing—a luminous world existed. Meanwhile, I experienced a plastic, flavorless reality. I blamed myself. The world’s data filters through my distorting brain. I live like acting in a disjointed play during a fever dream. I followed instructions, excelled at them, but found only hollowness. I assumed someday I’d stumble upon why I bothered.”
I elongated a silence. Droplets slid down the woman’s forehead. She glanced away but soon locked eyes with me again, awaiting direction.
I inhaled as my cheeks burned.
“But let’s talk about you. What do you enjoy?”
“What?”
“What do you like to do?”
Her damp hair dripped onto her soaked dress. She laid her palms on her thighs, fingers relaxed. She stared unblinking, whick kept my eyes from wandering to the curves her dress hugged.
I shifted, thirsting to draw out her words.
“What satisfies you? What do you do whenever you can?”
“I come here. I swim.”
Her irises quivered within their orbits, pupils dilating and contracting. She studied my face like a beast’s cub encountering a human.
I listened to her breath mingle with the hiss of branches and occasional thud of fruit falling into rot.
“Give me your hand.”
She raised her left hand, palm down. Cloudy droplets swelled on her fingertips. I crawled forward and clasped her hand between mine. It was cold and wet, like something left overnight in a bucket of water. Chalk-white patches mapped her veins. The hairless arm, smooth as if waxed, showed no goosebumps, no tremors.
“Aren’t you dying of cold?” I asked.
“I’m not dying of anything.”
I squeezed her hand, warming it. She lifted her gaze to mine and curved her lips slightly. I brought our joined hands to her face, tracing with our fingers the mottled patch spanning half her cheekbone and jaw. I swallowed.
“Does it bother you?”
“It tickles.”
“Having these patches. Being different.”
She shook her head.
“I am who I should be.”
I glided my fingertips over her hand’s back, shifting pliant skin. I outlined a patch. Light carved white curves along her knuckles’ wrinkles. Her nails, segmented by microscopic ridges like pine bark, held mud under their edges. I turned her hand over. Water and cold had puckered her fingertips and creased her palm, aging it. I traced every line, imagining their formation from her birth to this moment, when I could touch them.
“I think I’ll return soon.”
“Tomorrow?”
Dizziness struck.
“I work.”
“In the evening?”
How could I focus at the office, counting hours until I returned? But my mouth dried, and the details of her face and the forest’s silence sharpened as if I’d shed nearsightedness and earplugs. I longed to transport myself to the moment tomorrow when I would descend the office stairs and realize that instead of spending the rest of the day resting in order to perform well at work the next day, I would meet the woman in this clearing where no one dared to venture. A smile surfaced unbidden. She lowered her gaze to my lips as if they were another pair of eyes.
“Will I find you,” I said, “like you promised?”
“Whenever you come.”
Reluctantly, I released her hand and stood. How did I know to leave? My wristwatch warned of dinnertime. The canopy of branches etched a granite-gray sky, and the same half-light that had greeted me upon entering the passage enveloped us.
I stepped forward, half-raising my arms to embrace her, but stopped even though my heart pounded like a radar nearing its target. I wanted to hold her, balance her warmth with mine, imprint the feel of her soaked dress and the body beneath until tomorrow. I’d just met her. What if she’d tolerated my touch only to avoid conflict?
I bid goodbye with a smile she returned. I promised we’d meet tomorrow. As I walked away, she raised a hand and waved. I left the clearing and quickened my pace to overcome the urge to run back to her side.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.
February 18, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 3 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The following morning, I repeatedly jolted awake at my office corner, my dead gaze drifting between the lines of a report as the monitor’s glow washed over me. Seconds earlier, I had inhabited another body. Standing before the passageway to the park, I stepped in. Every trace of cement, glass, and metal vanished behind trunks, branches, and leaves. Air swollen with oxygen refreshed me. I followed a path that flickered white along its sinuous turns. The voice of the woman echoed in my head, fragments of sentences she might have spoken to me. Her hair, gleaming with water, fell over one shoulder, soaking and darkening her embroidered dress. Even in memory, I refused to look away.
Seated at my computer, hours passed while I remained stuck on the report. The monitor’s glare dulled my mind. I lost track of what I was working on, and before I could focus enough to progress a few lines, my attention plummeted like someone trying to climb a cliff with numb arms.
My skin grew clammy; my armpits and hairline soaked. My vision blurred. I tore my eyes from the screen and swiveled my chair to clear my head. Rows of fluorescent lights striped the ceiling like luminous zebra crossings. The view: a dense mass of desks and workers with black hair and white shirts, the space compressed until every pocket of air was squeezed out.
The remaining hours to surrender to my tasks slipped away, the obligation to finish them pricking like a knife tip at my neck, but the images in my mind chained me. I wanted to belong among those pines, to sit by the lagoon and speak with that woman, while the office echoed with squawking voices and clattering keyboards. When I fought to concentrate, someone fidgeted in their creaking chair. Someone squeezed past desks and chairs. Phones rang insistently until their owners returned. Pairs of employees chatted about news or baseball games.
In my drowsy vigilance, I monitored who stood, who crossed the office to take a call or piss. I spied reflections in the glass partitions, in the framed artwork, in the monitors. The lenses of a pair of glasses burned two white holes into the blurry oval of a face. I recognized a colleague’s tank top and swinging ponytail. Another’s clacking heels to the printer and back. Another’s limping hunch. I had never looked any of them in the eye.
Sometimes, a supervisor’s specter slid across glass. In my mind, I sketched a map of the office, tracking the supervisor’s blip as it weaved between desks and pillars. If they approached, I’d feign fascination with the report filling my screen.
During two or three breaks, I splashed my face in the bathroom and breathed deeply. Back at my desk, my mind retreated into images of the forest, the lagoon, and the woman—spheres of light peeking through fog. A leaden tedium crushed me: day after day of absurd labor. My mind had found a crack and, like a caged animal, it strained to slip through.
At lunch, I devoured my sandwich and rushed back to my computer. I rubbed my eyelids. Exhaustion clung to me like glue. Resisting the next report, I searched online for the Hitachi map. From a bird’s-eye view, I pinpointed the station I’d stopped at, an inch from the coast. I traced the streets I’d wandered until I located the neighborhood with the passageway. The map showed an electronics shop to the right of the path and a cluster of homes and sheds to the left, but the buildings appeared glued together.
I blinked, absorbed. I felt like I was tossing in bed late at night, enduring hypnagogic hallucinations. The office crowd returned after a break, their laughs and shouts snapping me awake. Was the map outdated? To let the passageway open into the clearing, the buildings should’ve been spaced far enough for the forest to nestle in.
Thirty minutes after lunch, an urge seized me to scour the internet for traces of the woman. Without a name or leads, where would I start? I might as well have met her decades ago, when payphones dotted the streets.
Fifteen minutes before the workday ended, I burned them checking my watch every few moments. I fled the office with my head bowed. At the station, I paced the platform a dozen times, striding several meters forward, pivoting on my heels, and retracing my steps. The minutes monitored by my wristwatch seemed frozen.
I approached the ticket machine and hovered my index finger over the button to print my return ticket. What if I bought a ticket to Hitachi? I’d leap the tracks to the opposite platform and return to the forest. I had to go—as if bound by a second job, with a contract so sacred that refusing would summon a lawyer to my apartment by morning.
My heart raced. My mind cycled images: the sinuous path through pines, the woman on a rock in the clearing, wringing a soaked strand of hair. The white blotches on her skin shimmered like watery reflections.
That woman, her figure pulsing with light, breathed the air of this cardboard world. I felt her presence like a second heart grown inside me and forgotten in the clearing, still tethered to my chest by kilometers of vibrant tendon.
She hid from others; I’d trespass her peace. Yet I craved to go like a diabetic needing insulin. I wanted to see her face, speak to her, hear whatever she’d share. I fixated on my desire, but why would she care about me? My life shuttled between apartment and office, trapped in a job that unraveled me. I returned home only to rest and repeat.
I crumpled the handkerchief in my pocket. She’d know I returned for her. Would she call me a stalker, phone the police? That she’d spoken to me felt like betting on a rigged race. My brain deceived itself to survive in a bubble of fantasy, but tomorrow I’d have to blast through two days’ overdue tasks while images of the passageway and woman yanked me like a hook in my cheek. If I retraced my steps and found her, how would I focus? I’d pile up overdue work. The acid of anxiety would corrode my insides.
I pressed the button for a ticket back to my apartment. To quell the nausea rising in my gut, I slumped on a bench, palms pressed to my eyes. Minutes later, the loudspeaker announced my train. The platform trembled. As the train braked, I uncovered my eyes and boarded, head low. Once the train lurched forward, my anxiety spiked. I imagined pulling the emergency brake.
I had met a beautiful woman who intrigued me, who spoke like a person instead of one of the million clones populating this world. Was that enough to make me feel like I'd betray a sacred pact by refusing to run to her side? For today at least, the encounter had shattered my gray routine. A routine I’d drown in for years—yet my survival depended on finishing my tasks.
That evening, and into the night, my mind would recreate her and invent conversations, daydreams swelling my skull until no other thought would fit. No matter how many scenes I conjured, scripting every word, would my stubborn fantasies lead to a radiant present?
How wrong I’d been to linger in the clearing when I spotted that woman. I should’ve abandoned the forest before she finished lifting her hand.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Runaway” by Aurora Aksnes (who apparently, confirmed by her, is a fellow autist).
This is the first story, I believe, in which I tackled autistic obsession, a subject I have struggled with all my life. During my first couple of internships, my brain kept tugging me away from my tasks to the stories I was supposed to be working on instead, or at least to learn more writing techniques (I gobbled up books on writing back then). I ached every time I tried to focus on my job. I won’t get into how insane it feels to me that people who can bring new “things” into life are shackled at menial jobs, which programming websites felt most of the time (these days they’re almost trivial due to artificial intelligence; I doubt many programmers are going to get hired in the future).
I’m going even deeper into autistic obsession in my ongoing novel The Scrap Colossus, whose protagonist Elena is autistic, although I doubt I’ll mention it explicitly.
The following morning, I repeatedly jolted awake at my office corner, my dead gaze drifting between the lines of a report as the monitor’s glow washed over me. Seconds earlier, I had inhabited another body. Standing before the passageway to the park, I stepped in. Every trace of cement, glass, and metal vanished behind trunks, branches, and leaves. Air swollen with oxygen refreshed me. I followed a path that flickered white along its sinuous turns. The voice of the woman echoed in my head, fragments of sentences she might have spoken to me. Her hair, gleaming with water, fell over one shoulder, soaking and darkening her embroidered dress. Even in memory, I refused to look away.
Seated at my computer, hours passed while I remained stuck on the report. The monitor’s glare dulled my mind. I lost track of what I was working on, and before I could focus enough to progress a few lines, my attention plummeted like someone trying to climb a cliff with numb arms.
My skin grew clammy; my armpits and hairline soaked. My vision blurred. I tore my eyes from the screen and swiveled my chair to clear my head. Rows of fluorescent lights striped the ceiling like luminous zebra crossings. The view: a dense mass of desks and workers with black hair and white shirts, the space compressed until every pocket of air was squeezed out.
The remaining hours to surrender to my tasks slipped away, the obligation to finish them pricking like a knife tip at my neck, but the images in my mind chained me. I wanted to belong among those pines, to sit by the lagoon and speak with that woman, while the office echoed with squawking voices and clattering keyboards. When I fought to concentrate, someone fidgeted in their creaking chair. Someone squeezed past desks and chairs. Phones rang insistently until their owners returned. Pairs of employees chatted about news or baseball games.
In my drowsy vigilance, I monitored who stood, who crossed the office to take a call or piss. I spied reflections in the glass partitions, in the framed artwork, in the monitors. The lenses of a pair of glasses burned two white holes into the blurry oval of a face. I recognized a colleague’s tank top and swinging ponytail. Another’s clacking heels to the printer and back. Another’s limping hunch. I had never looked any of them in the eye.
Sometimes, a supervisor’s specter slid across glass. In my mind, I sketched a map of the office, tracking the supervisor’s blip as it weaved between desks and pillars. If they approached, I’d feign fascination with the report filling my screen.
During two or three breaks, I splashed my face in the bathroom and breathed deeply. Back at my desk, my mind retreated into images of the forest, the lagoon, and the woman—spheres of light peeking through fog. A leaden tedium crushed me: day after day of absurd labor. My mind had found a crack and, like a caged animal, it strained to slip through.
At lunch, I devoured my sandwich and rushed back to my computer. I rubbed my eyelids. Exhaustion clung to me like glue. Resisting the next report, I searched online for the Hitachi map. From a bird’s-eye view, I pinpointed the station I’d stopped at, an inch from the coast. I traced the streets I’d wandered until I located the neighborhood with the passageway. The map showed an electronics shop to the right of the path and a cluster of homes and sheds to the left, but the buildings appeared glued together.
I blinked, absorbed. I felt like I was tossing in bed late at night, enduring hypnagogic hallucinations. The office crowd returned after a break, their laughs and shouts snapping me awake. Was the map outdated? To let the passageway open into the clearing, the buildings should’ve been spaced far enough for the forest to nestle in.
Thirty minutes after lunch, an urge seized me to scour the internet for traces of the woman. Without a name or leads, where would I start? I might as well have met her decades ago, when payphones dotted the streets.
Fifteen minutes before the workday ended, I burned them checking my watch every few moments. I fled the office with my head bowed. At the station, I paced the platform a dozen times, striding several meters forward, pivoting on my heels, and retracing my steps. The minutes monitored by my wristwatch seemed frozen.
I approached the ticket machine and hovered my index finger over the button to print my return ticket. What if I bought a ticket to Hitachi? I’d leap the tracks to the opposite platform and return to the forest. I had to go—as if bound by a second job, with a contract so sacred that refusing would summon a lawyer to my apartment by morning.
My heart raced. My mind cycled images: the sinuous path through pines, the woman on a rock in the clearing, wringing a soaked strand of hair. The white blotches on her skin shimmered like watery reflections.
That woman, her figure pulsing with light, breathed the air of this cardboard world. I felt her presence like a second heart grown inside me and forgotten in the clearing, still tethered to my chest by kilometers of vibrant tendon.
She hid from others; I’d trespass her peace. Yet I craved to go like a diabetic needing insulin. I wanted to see her face, speak to her, hear whatever she’d share. I fixated on my desire, but why would she care about me? My life shuttled between apartment and office, trapped in a job that unraveled me. I returned home only to rest and repeat.
I crumpled the handkerchief in my pocket. She’d know I returned for her. Would she call me a stalker, phone the police? That she’d spoken to me felt like betting on a rigged race. My brain deceived itself to survive in a bubble of fantasy, but tomorrow I’d have to blast through two days’ overdue tasks while images of the passageway and woman yanked me like a hook in my cheek. If I retraced my steps and found her, how would I focus? I’d pile up overdue work. The acid of anxiety would corrode my insides.
I pressed the button for a ticket back to my apartment. To quell the nausea rising in my gut, I slumped on a bench, palms pressed to my eyes. Minutes later, the loudspeaker announced my train. The platform trembled. As the train braked, I uncovered my eyes and boarded, head low. Once the train lurched forward, my anxiety spiked. I imagined pulling the emergency brake.
I had met a beautiful woman who intrigued me, who spoke like a person instead of one of the million clones populating this world. Was that enough to make me feel like I'd betray a sacred pact by refusing to run to her side? For today at least, the encounter had shattered my gray routine. A routine I’d drown in for years—yet my survival depended on finishing my tasks.
That evening, and into the night, my mind would recreate her and invent conversations, daydreams swelling my skull until no other thought would fit. No matter how many scenes I conjured, scripting every word, would my stubborn fantasies lead to a radiant present?
How wrong I’d been to linger in the clearing when I spotted that woman. I should’ve abandoned the forest before she finished lifting her hand.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Runaway” by Aurora Aksnes (who apparently, confirmed by her, is a fellow autist).
This is the first story, I believe, in which I tackled autistic obsession, a subject I have struggled with all my life. During my first couple of internships, my brain kept tugging me away from my tasks to the stories I was supposed to be working on instead, or at least to learn more writing techniques (I gobbled up books on writing back then). I ached every time I tried to focus on my job. I won’t get into how insane it feels to me that people who can bring new “things” into life are shackled at menial jobs, which programming websites felt most of the time (these days they’re almost trivial due to artificial intelligence; I doubt many programmers are going to get hired in the future).
I’m going even deeper into autistic obsession in my ongoing novel The Scrap Colossus, whose protagonist Elena is autistic, although I doubt I’ll mention it explicitly.
February 17, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The woman intertwined her gaze with mine. She raised her right palm from the rock to greet me. I froze as if the slightest tremor might dislodge the camouflage my skin had conjured. She might have been addressing someone else whose line of sight I’d trespassed into, but her gaze held mine and waited. My words had jammed in the rusted gears of some ancient machine. I said hello in a voice like sawdust. When sensation returned to my legs, I turned and retraced my steps.
“You’ve only just arrived,” said the woman in a fluting voice.
I stopped and offered her my profile.
“I came to be alone. This park seems designed for that.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“You must’ve come for the same reason. And you were here first—I’m the intruder.”
“Am I bothering you?”
I’d assumed so and readied a lie, but the tension in my muscles, the knots in my gut that usually urged me to flee, were absent. I stepped toward the pebbles fringing the lagoon. In the silence, they crunched like snapping bones. The water lay hidden beneath a pelt of algae, a mesh of lichen where insects glinted.
I’d trespassed into this secluded park, ventured to its core, and now, rooted at the lagoon’s edge, I blocked the woman’s view. I tainted the air passing through my lungs. Before my arrival, this clearing had endured as a sanctuary, a natural oasis she’d have cherished, its secret guarded. I’d ruined it.
“I stole your peace.”
“It’s good to speak sometimes.”
I scratched my nape.
“I suppose.”
Her gaze drifted to the grass at her bare feet as she finger-combed a damp strand crossing her collarbone. On her other arm, a droplet slid down to the blue veins of her wrist. An urge gripped me—like craving chocolate after a sugar crash—to unravel details about her, though most days I floated adrift, indifferent to whether life’s incomprehensible currents might stagnate.
She’d posed a silent question, granting me time to order my thoughts. I cleared my throat.
“You’re lucky the city preserved this park. They’re scarce where I live.”
“What replaces them?”
“Apartment blocks, shops. Fascinating varieties of concrete.”
She nodded, and isolated another wet strand.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
“I never wander far.”
“I’d do the same.” I hurried to raise a palm. “But you found it first.”
“It belongs to whoever finds it.”
I chuckled, and the desperation to please her shamed me as if I had turned into a child stranded in a tree, needing an adult’s help to descend. The folder under my arm grew heavy. I set it on the pebbles. My eyes scanned the clearing for the woman’s belongings, maybe a purse, but she’d brought nothing beyond her meditative stillness. My gaze swung back to her, magnetized, as if she were a ruby glinting in dust. I needed to modulate my attention, or I’d scare her off.
“You can stare,” she said, “if you’re curious.”
My heart jolted. I felt like apologizing. How many people saw straight through me? I held her gaze in a silent vow of harmlessness.
Though a stranger had stumbled upon her in the park’s depths, the woman’s face stayed serene as if I were just another chirping bird. Honey-blond strands arched rebelliously over her forehead. Narrow brows melted into translucent pink skin above eyes whose irises, perhaps born green, had been conquered by pale blue, compressing the original hue against her pupils. The bluish shadows beneath her eyes resembled smudged makeup. Chapped lips, cracked by cold, had split into notches. Across her face, neck, and arms, plaster-white patches lay like peeled paint.
I observed the blotch spanning her brow to the right cheekbone. She’d hate others noticing. Hate herself. She’d anticipate questions she’d rather not hear. She had come on a weekday, and probably spent hours here. Unemployed. Alone, no book for distraction. Marooned with her thoughts amid trees and silence.
She smoothed a damp strand. Her gaze slid from my face to my shoes.
“Do you live nearby?” I asked. “Unless you mind me asking.”
“Close enough.”
“The locals must treasure this place like they’d planted it. Tourists would ruin it.”
She shook her head.
“No one comes.”
“I’m not surprised. They pass by, right? I came here to kill time, but most people would have headed to a bar. I needed some time alone.”
“I’m always alone.”
She’d said it flatly, like stating the time. Her patches exiled her; I at least warranted pretense before being sidelined. Every mirror stabbed her with flaws. Friends’ calls would have dwindled to monthly guilt offerings. Only the trees’ stillness remained, herself as sole company unable to abandon her.
I sat on the pebbles, my back protesting, and gripped my shins.
“What’s your name?”
“Depends who asks.”
“You must prefer one.”
“Call me what you need.”
I pressed my palms together, bowing slightly.
“I guard my privacy too. No offense meant.”
A branch rattled in the foliage. She tilted her head. The thicket seethed with shadows and cloud-filtered light. Her neck had stiffened, and for a moment I thought her ears, peeking through strands, would have pivoted toward the noise.
She lowered her gaze to the grass, and parted her lips.
“Over the years, I’ve had many names pinned on me. Names that flirted with meaning but never quite captured my whole. Language alone is too limited to understand one another; no word can encapsulate what I am—or what you are.”
I fell silent. She was accustomed to speaking only in soliloquies—her inner voice the sole interpreter of her untranslatable thoughts—yet now, she had opened a door for me.
“How do you refer to yourself?”
“The images in my head suffice.”
“What should I call you?”
“Who’d you speak of me to?”
I turned pale and grew cold, as if someone with a knife had accosted me in an alley. Eyes fixed on me, waiting for my response—just like when my office colleagues, discussing their weekend ski getaway, either trying to include me or to make fun of me, grilled me with questions: “Have you made plans with your friends?” In the few seconds they granted me to answer, I weighed the myriad lies I’d told for years to a blur of faces, and I was eager to concoct any story that might divert them from the truth: human beings—their customs, their impulses, their tastes—terrified me, and I longed to free myself from their presence like a rabbit crouched among the grass in a field where rabid dogs prowled.
But this woman sought solitude. I wanted to keep the forest, the clearing, and the woman a secret—a refuge that had survived among walls of concrete and metal closing in on every patch of green. I had been entrusted with that responsibility, and I would protect them.
“I won’t speak of you to anyone.”
“You see my face,” she said. “You hear my voice. No name holds the myriad details they contain.”
I waited, lips parted, eager to listen to any words that would flow out of her mouth. Today I’d steered our talk, but any other day, I may have heard her in the distance, woven into wind and birdsong.
“You mentioned killing time,” she said. “For what?”
I checked my watch.
“I took the wrong route—” A shiver struck. “Crap, I’ve missed my train, and I’ll have to run to catch the next one. Thank you for reminding me.”
She nodded. I grabbed my folder, stood up, and brushed the grit off my pants. My heart raced. I’d sprint sweat-soaked, praying to reach the platform in time. Otherwise, I’d be forced to wait another forty-five minutes.
“I’ve enjoyed this. Meeting you. Keep the silence.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
In case the dialogue seemed shoddy to you… yeah, I’d say the dialogue is the worst part of this story. The protagonist is an awkward loner and the woman is, well, something else. I don’t remember much of the story in that regard other than the fact that back then I wished I knew how to make the dialogue less awkward.
The woman intertwined her gaze with mine. She raised her right palm from the rock to greet me. I froze as if the slightest tremor might dislodge the camouflage my skin had conjured. She might have been addressing someone else whose line of sight I’d trespassed into, but her gaze held mine and waited. My words had jammed in the rusted gears of some ancient machine. I said hello in a voice like sawdust. When sensation returned to my legs, I turned and retraced my steps.
“You’ve only just arrived,” said the woman in a fluting voice.
I stopped and offered her my profile.
“I came to be alone. This park seems designed for that.”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“You must’ve come for the same reason. And you were here first—I’m the intruder.”
“Am I bothering you?”
I’d assumed so and readied a lie, but the tension in my muscles, the knots in my gut that usually urged me to flee, were absent. I stepped toward the pebbles fringing the lagoon. In the silence, they crunched like snapping bones. The water lay hidden beneath a pelt of algae, a mesh of lichen where insects glinted.
I’d trespassed into this secluded park, ventured to its core, and now, rooted at the lagoon’s edge, I blocked the woman’s view. I tainted the air passing through my lungs. Before my arrival, this clearing had endured as a sanctuary, a natural oasis she’d have cherished, its secret guarded. I’d ruined it.
“I stole your peace.”
“It’s good to speak sometimes.”
I scratched my nape.
“I suppose.”
Her gaze drifted to the grass at her bare feet as she finger-combed a damp strand crossing her collarbone. On her other arm, a droplet slid down to the blue veins of her wrist. An urge gripped me—like craving chocolate after a sugar crash—to unravel details about her, though most days I floated adrift, indifferent to whether life’s incomprehensible currents might stagnate.
She’d posed a silent question, granting me time to order my thoughts. I cleared my throat.
“You’re lucky the city preserved this park. They’re scarce where I live.”
“What replaces them?”
“Apartment blocks, shops. Fascinating varieties of concrete.”
She nodded, and isolated another wet strand.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
“I never wander far.”
“I’d do the same.” I hurried to raise a palm. “But you found it first.”
“It belongs to whoever finds it.”
I chuckled, and the desperation to please her shamed me as if I had turned into a child stranded in a tree, needing an adult’s help to descend. The folder under my arm grew heavy. I set it on the pebbles. My eyes scanned the clearing for the woman’s belongings, maybe a purse, but she’d brought nothing beyond her meditative stillness. My gaze swung back to her, magnetized, as if she were a ruby glinting in dust. I needed to modulate my attention, or I’d scare her off.
“You can stare,” she said, “if you’re curious.”
My heart jolted. I felt like apologizing. How many people saw straight through me? I held her gaze in a silent vow of harmlessness.
Though a stranger had stumbled upon her in the park’s depths, the woman’s face stayed serene as if I were just another chirping bird. Honey-blond strands arched rebelliously over her forehead. Narrow brows melted into translucent pink skin above eyes whose irises, perhaps born green, had been conquered by pale blue, compressing the original hue against her pupils. The bluish shadows beneath her eyes resembled smudged makeup. Chapped lips, cracked by cold, had split into notches. Across her face, neck, and arms, plaster-white patches lay like peeled paint.
I observed the blotch spanning her brow to the right cheekbone. She’d hate others noticing. Hate herself. She’d anticipate questions she’d rather not hear. She had come on a weekday, and probably spent hours here. Unemployed. Alone, no book for distraction. Marooned with her thoughts amid trees and silence.
She smoothed a damp strand. Her gaze slid from my face to my shoes.
“Do you live nearby?” I asked. “Unless you mind me asking.”
“Close enough.”
“The locals must treasure this place like they’d planted it. Tourists would ruin it.”
She shook her head.
“No one comes.”
“I’m not surprised. They pass by, right? I came here to kill time, but most people would have headed to a bar. I needed some time alone.”
“I’m always alone.”
She’d said it flatly, like stating the time. Her patches exiled her; I at least warranted pretense before being sidelined. Every mirror stabbed her with flaws. Friends’ calls would have dwindled to monthly guilt offerings. Only the trees’ stillness remained, herself as sole company unable to abandon her.
I sat on the pebbles, my back protesting, and gripped my shins.
“What’s your name?”
“Depends who asks.”
“You must prefer one.”
“Call me what you need.”
I pressed my palms together, bowing slightly.
“I guard my privacy too. No offense meant.”
A branch rattled in the foliage. She tilted her head. The thicket seethed with shadows and cloud-filtered light. Her neck had stiffened, and for a moment I thought her ears, peeking through strands, would have pivoted toward the noise.
She lowered her gaze to the grass, and parted her lips.
“Over the years, I’ve had many names pinned on me. Names that flirted with meaning but never quite captured my whole. Language alone is too limited to understand one another; no word can encapsulate what I am—or what you are.”
I fell silent. She was accustomed to speaking only in soliloquies—her inner voice the sole interpreter of her untranslatable thoughts—yet now, she had opened a door for me.
“How do you refer to yourself?”
“The images in my head suffice.”
“What should I call you?”
“Who’d you speak of me to?”
I turned pale and grew cold, as if someone with a knife had accosted me in an alley. Eyes fixed on me, waiting for my response—just like when my office colleagues, discussing their weekend ski getaway, either trying to include me or to make fun of me, grilled me with questions: “Have you made plans with your friends?” In the few seconds they granted me to answer, I weighed the myriad lies I’d told for years to a blur of faces, and I was eager to concoct any story that might divert them from the truth: human beings—their customs, their impulses, their tastes—terrified me, and I longed to free myself from their presence like a rabbit crouched among the grass in a field where rabid dogs prowled.
But this woman sought solitude. I wanted to keep the forest, the clearing, and the woman a secret—a refuge that had survived among walls of concrete and metal closing in on every patch of green. I had been entrusted with that responsibility, and I would protect them.
“I won’t speak of you to anyone.”
“You see my face,” she said. “You hear my voice. No name holds the myriad details they contain.”
I waited, lips parted, eager to listen to any words that would flow out of her mouth. Today I’d steered our talk, but any other day, I may have heard her in the distance, woven into wind and birdsong.
“You mentioned killing time,” she said. “For what?”
I checked my watch.
“I took the wrong route—” A shiver struck. “Crap, I’ve missed my train, and I’ll have to run to catch the next one. Thank you for reminding me.”
She nodded. I grabbed my folder, stood up, and brushed the grit off my pants. My heart raced. I’d sprint sweat-soaked, praying to reach the platform in time. Otherwise, I’d be forced to wait another forty-five minutes.
“I’ve enjoyed this. Meeting you. Keep the silence.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
In case the dialogue seemed shoddy to you… yeah, I’d say the dialogue is the worst part of this story. The protagonist is an awkward loner and the woman is, well, something else. I don’t remember much of the story in that regard other than the fact that back then I wished I knew how to make the dialogue less awkward.
February 15, 2025
The Drowned City, Pt. 1 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Through the train window flowed a blurry stream of single-family homes, their walls topped by conifers pruned into cloud-like shapes. As I yawned and dug a fingertip into my tear duct, two toad statues splashed green across the cement-and-asphalt vista. They perched on pillars marking the gate of a villa. Seconds after the train had passed them, their green lingered.
The headphones poured a deluge into my ears, a barrage of thunder. The soundtrack accompanied the queue of white cars and vans waiting at a railroad crossing, a woman trudging down the parallel road’s center laden with bags, and utility poles stretching cables over rooftops every dozen meters. To the left glided the occasional two-story cubic building, its facade blackened in streaks where years of rain had trickled. The train descended into a cement-walled trench with a grid-like pattern.
I slumped into the seat and blinked. Was I witnessing unfamiliar landscapes, or did my exhaustion—cracking my mind like an old rubber band—prevent me linking these views to my memories? I could have swapped this procession of villas and gray buildings for any within kilometers, yet I’d never noticed those crouching toad statues, green as amusement park props, poised as if to leap.
The train stopped at a station. Doors hissed open. When I stood, the work folder resting on my thigh slid to the floor. I scrambled to grab it and slipped through the doors just before they closed.
Hitachi. A city I’d never visited. On the route map, Hitachi lay as many stops from the office as my apartment did, but in the opposite direction.
As I wandered the station, I raked my scalp with fingernails but stopped short of tugging. Images of leaving the office and boarding the train had dissolved into a lagoon of identical memories. All day my eyelids had weighed anchors; three coffees barely kept me conscious. Why be surprised if, half-somnambulant as I lived, I’d boarded the wrong platform?
The next return train would arrive in forty-five minutes. The journey home would take twice as long. I’d eat dinner perched on my bed, sleep, and rise early to squeeze into another train bound for work.
The PA system’s echoes pierced my headphones’ wall of rain and thunder. A buoyant, game-show-host voice announced departures, arrivals, and safety protocols.
I drifted to the station’s far end. Before a glass wall stood metallic benches mimicking geometric shapes. A woman in a fitted suit pressed her phone to her ear while staring through her reflection. Two middle-aged men with hiking backpacks sat slouched on a bench. Trudging past, I glimpsed a strip of gray-clouded sky and ocean rising beyond. As I circled the benches, I realized the people had vanished. I collapsed onto a backless metal block.
Serpentine foam coiled around pillars of an elevated highway; waves slid in white ripples before dissolving against a beach’s gray stones. Plastic debris littered the shore. Cars materialized at one edge of the glass and vanished at the other. Beyond the beach sprawled a puzzle of single-story villas and gardens. No movement betrayed inhabitants.
I rubbed my face, numbed by fatigue. My limbs hung heavy as a school backpack. I’d tripped myself again, for the umpteenth time. Some presence within me loathed me, waited for weakened defenses to sabotage me. How it benefited, I didn’t know. Maybe it thought I deserved it.
Sitting forty-five minutes only to sit another ninety disgusted me. Days limped by in cycles of sitting and battling tedium—that dreadful crawl of minutes—until I earned a pause.
I stood and stretched. Exiting the station, I aimed for the overpass stairs leading downtown, but above the station roof loomed office towers and elaborate mall complexes. I envisioned streams of shoppers hauling bags, and white-shirted office workers. I’d exceeded my daily tolerance for people.
Walking away, I sought any appealing route. To my left, walled gardens bristled with pruned shrubs and trees; to my right, the station’s gray metal blocks striped with sky-reflecting windows. Passing a house half-painted green and beige, I found a dirt parking lot and an ocean band leveled with the horizon. For dozens of meters I walked past clusters of cars awaiting commuters.
My headphones sustained a wall of rain and thunder—a window to some parallel dimension silencing this world’s incursions. These telephone and power poles with their catenary cables arcing over the sidewalks, the two-story buildings housing ground-floor shops—they belonged to an immersive film powerless to touch me. Restaurants, a dentist, a costume shop streamed by as poles and wires multiplied. Beyond a hotel, I hurried through an intersection clotted with white-and-gray cars and truck hulks.
Wherever I looked, I’d missed by hundredths of a second how someone filled voids with this scenery. Every raised wall, every cleared path herded me onward.
In gravel stretches between houses, veins of green clung to facades and cement walls. Some residents kept pruned trees in bathroom-sized gardens, planters bordering sidewalks. Faded paint on buildings’ bases had eroded to bare cement. Bricks and concrete blocks supported AC units. In one entryway, two spindly shrubs—trimmed into stepped shapes—huddled against walls like doormen clearing passage.
I stopped before a row of vending machines nestled in a cement wall’s alcove. Alongside soda and water, one sold canned coffee, another whisky bottles.
Why had I stopped? Did I want a drink?
A presence pressed my back like a giant eye focusing on me. Across the narrow road stood two beige homes with corroded metal sheds. To their right hung an electronics store sign on rain-darkened wooden planks. And between the buildings, a metal sheet roofed a passage. The sidewalk beyond yielded to a path of flattened grass. I hunched and glimpsed ferns crowding the shadowed trail.
I glanced for witnesses. In a nearby lot, a man unloaded packages from a van parked inside a warehouse.
I crossed the road and hurried into the passageway as if sheltering from rain, crunching pine needles and twigs underfoot. It smelled of damp vegetation. To either side, a clover field faded into gloom.
I removed my headphones and switched off the player. A breeze hissed. As I pressed on, the darkness lifted. Hangar-ceiling-like light fell. The pillars ahead resolved into striated, wine-red pines soaring three or four stories. Scraggly trees filled gaps between them with effervescent green.
I followed the path, gaze turned to a granite-gray sky. Its light blurred leaves that a breeze stirred. Birds with sky-blue bodies and navy heads trilled from treetops. I climbed grassy slopes between ferns and plants that spilled onto the path, grazing my pants and arms. Leaves fluttered down like glowing snowflakes.
The forest thickened. Trunk columns alternated with shifting green patches in the undergrowth. Overhead, layers of branches choked the remaining white gaps.
I emerged into a clearing: grass and fern clusters like paused explosions. A swampy pond spanned half the space, its scum-coated surface feeding the encircling pines’ roots. By the bank, a moss-patched boulder—lounger-sized—bore an ethnic European woman in a white dress embroidered like a tablecloth, with circle sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Her pale-pink skin suggested years of avoiding the sun. Blotches mottled her skin as if splashed by color-burning liquid. Wet golden locks darkened her dress’s shoulders to her chest. Her bare feet, soles creased, clung with grass blades.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Alison” by Slowdive.
This is the second of my Serious Six, the novellas I wrote back when I believed that if I did it well enough and insisted on sending them around, someone would want to publish them. It didn’t happen. Chronologically, the previously translated novellas Smile and Trash in a Ditch were the third and sixth respectively.
A few years before I wrote this novella, I exhausted my very limited energies as a programmer, working a 9-to-5 at a business park that demanded plenty of commute time. Back then, I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with autism nor had my pituitary gland tumor detected. I tried to pass as normal while constantly punishing myself because I couldn’t manage to do what seemingly came so easily to others. My hormones were out of whack due to the pituitary issues, and kept me in mental states similar to those of a woman during pregnancy and lactation (TMI: I also lactated). Anyway, I kept passing out on the train and the moment I returned home. I felt like I was sleepwalking everywhere. More often than not, when I stared at an approaching train, I fantasized about jumping onto the tracks.
One of those days, instead of getting on the right train, I ended up taking the one that led in the opposite direction. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, for a good while I stared at the views in an oniric state that prevented me from figuring out if I didn’t recognize those vistas or if my brain was out of whack. Once I realized the mess I had gotten myself in, I sat alone at an isolated train station about forty kilometers into the depths of my province, a town I had never visited. I remember a middle-aged woman approaching me and asking me a question in Basque; I’m from a border town where you’re extremely unlikely to be asked anything in Basque. Hell, these days you can’t even understand what a third of the population are saying.
Eventually my subconscious urged me to write this strange story, in which a perpetually tired salaryman found a sanctuary of nature, along with a strange woman, amidst cement and decay. This whole thing was like a fever dream. Because I hadn’t chosen most of the details, it took me years to come to grips with what that whole story was about, as well as the identity of the woman.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. It’s very different from Smile and Trash in a Ditch.
Through the train window flowed a blurry stream of single-family homes, their walls topped by conifers pruned into cloud-like shapes. As I yawned and dug a fingertip into my tear duct, two toad statues splashed green across the cement-and-asphalt vista. They perched on pillars marking the gate of a villa. Seconds after the train had passed them, their green lingered.
The headphones poured a deluge into my ears, a barrage of thunder. The soundtrack accompanied the queue of white cars and vans waiting at a railroad crossing, a woman trudging down the parallel road’s center laden with bags, and utility poles stretching cables over rooftops every dozen meters. To the left glided the occasional two-story cubic building, its facade blackened in streaks where years of rain had trickled. The train descended into a cement-walled trench with a grid-like pattern.
I slumped into the seat and blinked. Was I witnessing unfamiliar landscapes, or did my exhaustion—cracking my mind like an old rubber band—prevent me linking these views to my memories? I could have swapped this procession of villas and gray buildings for any within kilometers, yet I’d never noticed those crouching toad statues, green as amusement park props, poised as if to leap.
The train stopped at a station. Doors hissed open. When I stood, the work folder resting on my thigh slid to the floor. I scrambled to grab it and slipped through the doors just before they closed.
Hitachi. A city I’d never visited. On the route map, Hitachi lay as many stops from the office as my apartment did, but in the opposite direction.
As I wandered the station, I raked my scalp with fingernails but stopped short of tugging. Images of leaving the office and boarding the train had dissolved into a lagoon of identical memories. All day my eyelids had weighed anchors; three coffees barely kept me conscious. Why be surprised if, half-somnambulant as I lived, I’d boarded the wrong platform?
The next return train would arrive in forty-five minutes. The journey home would take twice as long. I’d eat dinner perched on my bed, sleep, and rise early to squeeze into another train bound for work.
The PA system’s echoes pierced my headphones’ wall of rain and thunder. A buoyant, game-show-host voice announced departures, arrivals, and safety protocols.
I drifted to the station’s far end. Before a glass wall stood metallic benches mimicking geometric shapes. A woman in a fitted suit pressed her phone to her ear while staring through her reflection. Two middle-aged men with hiking backpacks sat slouched on a bench. Trudging past, I glimpsed a strip of gray-clouded sky and ocean rising beyond. As I circled the benches, I realized the people had vanished. I collapsed onto a backless metal block.
Serpentine foam coiled around pillars of an elevated highway; waves slid in white ripples before dissolving against a beach’s gray stones. Plastic debris littered the shore. Cars materialized at one edge of the glass and vanished at the other. Beyond the beach sprawled a puzzle of single-story villas and gardens. No movement betrayed inhabitants.
I rubbed my face, numbed by fatigue. My limbs hung heavy as a school backpack. I’d tripped myself again, for the umpteenth time. Some presence within me loathed me, waited for weakened defenses to sabotage me. How it benefited, I didn’t know. Maybe it thought I deserved it.
Sitting forty-five minutes only to sit another ninety disgusted me. Days limped by in cycles of sitting and battling tedium—that dreadful crawl of minutes—until I earned a pause.
I stood and stretched. Exiting the station, I aimed for the overpass stairs leading downtown, but above the station roof loomed office towers and elaborate mall complexes. I envisioned streams of shoppers hauling bags, and white-shirted office workers. I’d exceeded my daily tolerance for people.
Walking away, I sought any appealing route. To my left, walled gardens bristled with pruned shrubs and trees; to my right, the station’s gray metal blocks striped with sky-reflecting windows. Passing a house half-painted green and beige, I found a dirt parking lot and an ocean band leveled with the horizon. For dozens of meters I walked past clusters of cars awaiting commuters.
My headphones sustained a wall of rain and thunder—a window to some parallel dimension silencing this world’s incursions. These telephone and power poles with their catenary cables arcing over the sidewalks, the two-story buildings housing ground-floor shops—they belonged to an immersive film powerless to touch me. Restaurants, a dentist, a costume shop streamed by as poles and wires multiplied. Beyond a hotel, I hurried through an intersection clotted with white-and-gray cars and truck hulks.
Wherever I looked, I’d missed by hundredths of a second how someone filled voids with this scenery. Every raised wall, every cleared path herded me onward.
In gravel stretches between houses, veins of green clung to facades and cement walls. Some residents kept pruned trees in bathroom-sized gardens, planters bordering sidewalks. Faded paint on buildings’ bases had eroded to bare cement. Bricks and concrete blocks supported AC units. In one entryway, two spindly shrubs—trimmed into stepped shapes—huddled against walls like doormen clearing passage.
I stopped before a row of vending machines nestled in a cement wall’s alcove. Alongside soda and water, one sold canned coffee, another whisky bottles.
Why had I stopped? Did I want a drink?
A presence pressed my back like a giant eye focusing on me. Across the narrow road stood two beige homes with corroded metal sheds. To their right hung an electronics store sign on rain-darkened wooden planks. And between the buildings, a metal sheet roofed a passage. The sidewalk beyond yielded to a path of flattened grass. I hunched and glimpsed ferns crowding the shadowed trail.
I glanced for witnesses. In a nearby lot, a man unloaded packages from a van parked inside a warehouse.
I crossed the road and hurried into the passageway as if sheltering from rain, crunching pine needles and twigs underfoot. It smelled of damp vegetation. To either side, a clover field faded into gloom.
I removed my headphones and switched off the player. A breeze hissed. As I pressed on, the darkness lifted. Hangar-ceiling-like light fell. The pillars ahead resolved into striated, wine-red pines soaring three or four stories. Scraggly trees filled gaps between them with effervescent green.
I followed the path, gaze turned to a granite-gray sky. Its light blurred leaves that a breeze stirred. Birds with sky-blue bodies and navy heads trilled from treetops. I climbed grassy slopes between ferns and plants that spilled onto the path, grazing my pants and arms. Leaves fluttered down like glowing snowflakes.
The forest thickened. Trunk columns alternated with shifting green patches in the undergrowth. Overhead, layers of branches choked the remaining white gaps.
I emerged into a clearing: grass and fern clusters like paused explosions. A swampy pond spanned half the space, its scum-coated surface feeding the encircling pines’ roots. By the bank, a moss-patched boulder—lounger-sized—bore an ethnic European woman in a white dress embroidered like a tablecloth, with circle sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Her pale-pink skin suggested years of avoiding the sun. Blotches mottled her skin as if splashed by color-burning liquid. Wet golden locks darkened her dress’s shoulders to her chest. Her bare feet, soles creased, clung with grass blades.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.
Today’s song is “Alison” by Slowdive.
This is the second of my Serious Six, the novellas I wrote back when I believed that if I did it well enough and insisted on sending them around, someone would want to publish them. It didn’t happen. Chronologically, the previously translated novellas Smile and Trash in a Ditch were the third and sixth respectively.
A few years before I wrote this novella, I exhausted my very limited energies as a programmer, working a 9-to-5 at a business park that demanded plenty of commute time. Back then, I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with autism nor had my pituitary gland tumor detected. I tried to pass as normal while constantly punishing myself because I couldn’t manage to do what seemingly came so easily to others. My hormones were out of whack due to the pituitary issues, and kept me in mental states similar to those of a woman during pregnancy and lactation (TMI: I also lactated). Anyway, I kept passing out on the train and the moment I returned home. I felt like I was sleepwalking everywhere. More often than not, when I stared at an approaching train, I fantasized about jumping onto the tracks.
One of those days, instead of getting on the right train, I ended up taking the one that led in the opposite direction. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, for a good while I stared at the views in an oniric state that prevented me from figuring out if I didn’t recognize those vistas or if my brain was out of whack. Once I realized the mess I had gotten myself in, I sat alone at an isolated train station about forty kilometers into the depths of my province, a town I had never visited. I remember a middle-aged woman approaching me and asking me a question in Basque; I’m from a border town where you’re extremely unlikely to be asked anything in Basque. Hell, these days you can’t even understand what a third of the population are saying.
Eventually my subconscious urged me to write this strange story, in which a perpetually tired salaryman found a sanctuary of nature, along with a strange woman, amidst cement and decay. This whole thing was like a fever dream. Because I hadn’t chosen most of the details, it took me years to come to grips with what that whole story was about, as well as the identity of the woman.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. It’s very different from Smile and Trash in a Ditch.
The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 8 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
At the end of a chain with interlocking oval rings, a silver, antiqued pendant rested on the chest of Elena’s gray sweatshirt. Shaped like a moth with outstretched wings, it was engraved with intricate vein patterns and mirrored, trapezoidal marks. The moth’s abdomen segmented into tiers of carefully sculpted rings. In place of a thorax, a three-dimensional human skull stared through blackened eye sockets. An anonymous artisan had carved a tiny cavity to serve as the nose. This metallic moth evoked the design of an ancient aircraft, belonging to a civilization that leapt from worshipping nature to soaring through the skies, aiming for the stars.
I pointed at Elena’s necklace.
“That pendant you kept fiddling with… a striking piece of jewelry.”
She lifted it from her chest and held it up to admire it. Her fingers traced the moth’s wings as though caressing a lover.
“A gift from myself to myself, bought from a small business in England. Genus Cosmia, family Noctuidae.”
“You sure? There’s a family of moths whose thorax markings resemble a human skull. Death’s-head hawkmoths, I think they’re called. You know, like in The Silence of the Lambs.”
Elena narrowed her eyes at me. She opened her mouth with a smacking sound.
“Are you an expert in lepidopterology, questioning the taxonomy of my own damn pendant? Well, excuse me, master entomologist. I prefer to think of it as a Cosmia moth, if you don’t mind. I wear it to ward off idiots.”
“I’m guessing it’s not a hundred percent effective.”
Elena dipped her chin slightly and half-smiled while spearing me with her icy blues. Loose almond-blonde strands cascading near her cheeks framed her pale, oval face. She let the pendant drop onto her sweatshirt.
“Maybe not strong enough to repel the worst of them.”
“I didn’t mean to trigger an identity crisis for that cute, ominous moth of yours.”
“Hey, I understand them. They’ll keep flying into a flame over and over until their wings turn to ash. Like all of us who can’t stop destroying ourselves for something beautiful we can never reach. Funny how a piece of jewelry can carry the weight of one’s fucked-up existence.”
I emptied my glass, then set it on the table calmly. A breeze stirred the sago palms, making their fronds tremble.
“Can’t help but think that Siobhan is a fictionalized version of you, who also feels rotten and alienated. Are you suicidal?”
Elena leaned back in her rattan chair, arms crossed as she gazed upward at a sky that had turned a dull slate-gray, like a battleship’s hull. The air hung heavy with the scent of impending rain.
“Closing the blinds on a never-ending night… The ultimate expression of individualism, of a person’s sovereignty over themselves. I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years, but I usually feel like I’m seventy. Tired from the moment I wake up. I’m like a milk bottle forgotten in the back of a fridge for too long. If you open it, the stench of the curdled, rancid mess inside will tell you to dump it down the drain. Hell, throw out the bottle too. And how could I be surprised? Unless you belong to some lucky breed, this world will beat the shit out of you. It’ll leave you bruised and bloodied on a sidewalk, and if you dare to stand up and ask why, it’ll kick you in the stomach. That I still experience joy from time to time, despite the decay and misery, is a fucking miracle.”
“Have you ever found yourself that gone? About to jump, whatever form that leap would take?”
Elena wrapped her fingers around her glass of coffee and stared into its black surface like a scryer. Her voice came from a distant, hollow place.
“I wish I could do anything to prevent it, but one day my oldest friend will return for its next uninvited visit. Maybe it will find me, like other times, curled in bed. A hole will open in my brain. I will feel its edges expanding, reaching out to the corners of my mind. A murky, ravenous void devouring everything that makes life bearable. Its gravity deforming space-time, causing the bed and the apartment and the building and the planet itself to warp toward its blackness, one light after another winking out. I will find myself holding onto the bedclothes even though I know that once again the void will gobble me down, and inside of that pitch-black pit, the things I used to love will become as appealing as a pile of dead insects. Then the echoing mockery, speaking with the voice of those who have hurt me, of those I have hurt. Hey, you waste. Hey, you monster. All the ways you kept busy, all those words you wielded and songs you listened to, did you think they could stop me from finding you again? What are you but a scared little girl bawling for her mother?”
I swallowed. My throat felt as though I’d gulped sand. Elena’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. She ran her fingers through her almond-blonde hair, disturbing its arrangement.
“Then the emptiness. A bottomless, sucking nothing that makes you want to crawl out of your skin. The only way to feel anything other than the void’s cold would be to tear the flesh off your bones. To bite your tongue until it comes off and blood fills your mouth. To gouge your eyes out. Pain is always real, always true. But even then, you would remain trapped inside your skull. A ghost haunting the ruins of a mind. Nothing to hold onto except the idea of it all ending. Then you find yourself with a knife pressed against a pulsing artery. Sitting on the floor of your bathroom, the tiles cold and hard against the soles of your feet, staring at a bottle of pills. Standing at the edge of a bridge, watching the cars pass below. Facing an approaching train and wondering if your legs will obey when you order them to leap. Unafraid of death but terrified of the pain that leads up to it, even as you tell yourself that the momentary suffering will lead to permanent silence, to a sleep so deep that the alarm clock of life will never jolt you again.”
Elena fell silent. Wispy blonde locks escaped around her temples, partially shadowing her pale blues as they fixed on me. Her lips trembled as if she were fighting to hold back a smile, but they betrayed her, curving into a slight grin that barely parted at the center, that dimpled her cheeks, and framed her mouth with black parentheses. Her smile looked like a jagged crack across the bone-white surface of a ceramic mask that hid a terrible visage. I reached for my glass to take another sip of decaf, but the bitter beverage was gone.
“So, to answer your question, Jon: yes, I’ve been that far gone. And I’ll be there again. I’m one day away from becoming Siobhan. I’ve never had someone to pull me back, I’ve never even had anyone tell me, ‘It’s going to pass,’ or ‘You’re not alone.’ So I’ve always had to claw my way out. And I can’t say that I backed away from the abyss because of some grand realization about how life is wonderful, or that I’d miss out on the taste of coffee, or the sound of a good song. I didn’t jump because I’m a fucking coward. Afraid of pain. Of the knife’s cold bite. Of waking up in the hospital with a tube shoved down my throat. Of the train only cutting me in half. Of the rocks only breaking my spine or my pelvis, leaving me crippled and helpless, to drown when the tide rises. Maybe that’s the worst thing: not being strong enough to take your own life. Not brave enough to die.”
A chill rippled down my spine, leaving a wake of goosebumps along my forearms. I couldn’t peel my gaze off the creature in front of me. I felt like I’d stumbled into a secret chamber where the world was stripped of pretenses and lies, and only the raw, pulsating heart of things remained.
Elena’s eyes, unblinking and intense—the pale blue of a sky filtered by a thin layer of smog, of an alien world’s sun, of loneliness—drilled through flesh and bone to reach the deepest part of me.
“There it is again,” Elena said, “that constipated expression. Maybe you shouldn’t ask girls about suicide before their coffees have cooled.”
“Thank you for trusting me with that. I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”
“If I had shuffled off this shitty Earth, it would have been such a loss, huh?”
“There would be an emptiness where someone who brought beauty into the world used to exist. No more stories from you, no more of your thoughts, no more of your voice.”
“You think that’s what I do, bring beauty? I’m just a nutcase with an overactive imagination. Listen, Jon: my final revenge against the world will be a feeble fart in the dark. Or a shit stain. People who knew me in person will pretend to be sad for a week, maybe less, and then on to the next thing.” Elena sighed, and shifted in her chair. “If this is the point where you stand up and tell me that I’m too fucked in the head and too much of a lost cause, I’ll understand. Hell, I’d bail on me if I could.”
“No, I’m just glad I can sit here and listen to what you have to say.”
“A front-row seat to the freak show. Maybe you’re just glad you still have a chance to get laid. But hey, this emotional leper has survived for twenty-eight years. I might live to a hundred. They’ll have to stick me in a sarcophagus along with a warning not to open it ever.”
-----
Author's note: today’s song is “No Surprises” by Radiohead.
At the end of a chain with interlocking oval rings, a silver, antiqued pendant rested on the chest of Elena’s gray sweatshirt. Shaped like a moth with outstretched wings, it was engraved with intricate vein patterns and mirrored, trapezoidal marks. The moth’s abdomen segmented into tiers of carefully sculpted rings. In place of a thorax, a three-dimensional human skull stared through blackened eye sockets. An anonymous artisan had carved a tiny cavity to serve as the nose. This metallic moth evoked the design of an ancient aircraft, belonging to a civilization that leapt from worshipping nature to soaring through the skies, aiming for the stars.
I pointed at Elena’s necklace.
“That pendant you kept fiddling with… a striking piece of jewelry.”
She lifted it from her chest and held it up to admire it. Her fingers traced the moth’s wings as though caressing a lover.
“A gift from myself to myself, bought from a small business in England. Genus Cosmia, family Noctuidae.”
“You sure? There’s a family of moths whose thorax markings resemble a human skull. Death’s-head hawkmoths, I think they’re called. You know, like in The Silence of the Lambs.”
Elena narrowed her eyes at me. She opened her mouth with a smacking sound.
“Are you an expert in lepidopterology, questioning the taxonomy of my own damn pendant? Well, excuse me, master entomologist. I prefer to think of it as a Cosmia moth, if you don’t mind. I wear it to ward off idiots.”
“I’m guessing it’s not a hundred percent effective.”
Elena dipped her chin slightly and half-smiled while spearing me with her icy blues. Loose almond-blonde strands cascading near her cheeks framed her pale, oval face. She let the pendant drop onto her sweatshirt.
“Maybe not strong enough to repel the worst of them.”
“I didn’t mean to trigger an identity crisis for that cute, ominous moth of yours.”
“Hey, I understand them. They’ll keep flying into a flame over and over until their wings turn to ash. Like all of us who can’t stop destroying ourselves for something beautiful we can never reach. Funny how a piece of jewelry can carry the weight of one’s fucked-up existence.”
I emptied my glass, then set it on the table calmly. A breeze stirred the sago palms, making their fronds tremble.
“Can’t help but think that Siobhan is a fictionalized version of you, who also feels rotten and alienated. Are you suicidal?”
Elena leaned back in her rattan chair, arms crossed as she gazed upward at a sky that had turned a dull slate-gray, like a battleship’s hull. The air hung heavy with the scent of impending rain.
“Closing the blinds on a never-ending night… The ultimate expression of individualism, of a person’s sovereignty over themselves. I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years, but I usually feel like I’m seventy. Tired from the moment I wake up. I’m like a milk bottle forgotten in the back of a fridge for too long. If you open it, the stench of the curdled, rancid mess inside will tell you to dump it down the drain. Hell, throw out the bottle too. And how could I be surprised? Unless you belong to some lucky breed, this world will beat the shit out of you. It’ll leave you bruised and bloodied on a sidewalk, and if you dare to stand up and ask why, it’ll kick you in the stomach. That I still experience joy from time to time, despite the decay and misery, is a fucking miracle.”
“Have you ever found yourself that gone? About to jump, whatever form that leap would take?”
Elena wrapped her fingers around her glass of coffee and stared into its black surface like a scryer. Her voice came from a distant, hollow place.
“I wish I could do anything to prevent it, but one day my oldest friend will return for its next uninvited visit. Maybe it will find me, like other times, curled in bed. A hole will open in my brain. I will feel its edges expanding, reaching out to the corners of my mind. A murky, ravenous void devouring everything that makes life bearable. Its gravity deforming space-time, causing the bed and the apartment and the building and the planet itself to warp toward its blackness, one light after another winking out. I will find myself holding onto the bedclothes even though I know that once again the void will gobble me down, and inside of that pitch-black pit, the things I used to love will become as appealing as a pile of dead insects. Then the echoing mockery, speaking with the voice of those who have hurt me, of those I have hurt. Hey, you waste. Hey, you monster. All the ways you kept busy, all those words you wielded and songs you listened to, did you think they could stop me from finding you again? What are you but a scared little girl bawling for her mother?”
I swallowed. My throat felt as though I’d gulped sand. Elena’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. She ran her fingers through her almond-blonde hair, disturbing its arrangement.
“Then the emptiness. A bottomless, sucking nothing that makes you want to crawl out of your skin. The only way to feel anything other than the void’s cold would be to tear the flesh off your bones. To bite your tongue until it comes off and blood fills your mouth. To gouge your eyes out. Pain is always real, always true. But even then, you would remain trapped inside your skull. A ghost haunting the ruins of a mind. Nothing to hold onto except the idea of it all ending. Then you find yourself with a knife pressed against a pulsing artery. Sitting on the floor of your bathroom, the tiles cold and hard against the soles of your feet, staring at a bottle of pills. Standing at the edge of a bridge, watching the cars pass below. Facing an approaching train and wondering if your legs will obey when you order them to leap. Unafraid of death but terrified of the pain that leads up to it, even as you tell yourself that the momentary suffering will lead to permanent silence, to a sleep so deep that the alarm clock of life will never jolt you again.”
Elena fell silent. Wispy blonde locks escaped around her temples, partially shadowing her pale blues as they fixed on me. Her lips trembled as if she were fighting to hold back a smile, but they betrayed her, curving into a slight grin that barely parted at the center, that dimpled her cheeks, and framed her mouth with black parentheses. Her smile looked like a jagged crack across the bone-white surface of a ceramic mask that hid a terrible visage. I reached for my glass to take another sip of decaf, but the bitter beverage was gone.
“So, to answer your question, Jon: yes, I’ve been that far gone. And I’ll be there again. I’m one day away from becoming Siobhan. I’ve never had someone to pull me back, I’ve never even had anyone tell me, ‘It’s going to pass,’ or ‘You’re not alone.’ So I’ve always had to claw my way out. And I can’t say that I backed away from the abyss because of some grand realization about how life is wonderful, or that I’d miss out on the taste of coffee, or the sound of a good song. I didn’t jump because I’m a fucking coward. Afraid of pain. Of the knife’s cold bite. Of waking up in the hospital with a tube shoved down my throat. Of the train only cutting me in half. Of the rocks only breaking my spine or my pelvis, leaving me crippled and helpless, to drown when the tide rises. Maybe that’s the worst thing: not being strong enough to take your own life. Not brave enough to die.”
A chill rippled down my spine, leaving a wake of goosebumps along my forearms. I couldn’t peel my gaze off the creature in front of me. I felt like I’d stumbled into a secret chamber where the world was stripped of pretenses and lies, and only the raw, pulsating heart of things remained.
Elena’s eyes, unblinking and intense—the pale blue of a sky filtered by a thin layer of smog, of an alien world’s sun, of loneliness—drilled through flesh and bone to reach the deepest part of me.
“There it is again,” Elena said, “that constipated expression. Maybe you shouldn’t ask girls about suicide before their coffees have cooled.”
“Thank you for trusting me with that. I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”
“If I had shuffled off this shitty Earth, it would have been such a loss, huh?”
“There would be an emptiness where someone who brought beauty into the world used to exist. No more stories from you, no more of your thoughts, no more of your voice.”
“You think that’s what I do, bring beauty? I’m just a nutcase with an overactive imagination. Listen, Jon: my final revenge against the world will be a feeble fart in the dark. Or a shit stain. People who knew me in person will pretend to be sad for a week, maybe less, and then on to the next thing.” Elena sighed, and shifted in her chair. “If this is the point where you stand up and tell me that I’m too fucked in the head and too much of a lost cause, I’ll understand. Hell, I’d bail on me if I could.”
“No, I’m just glad I can sit here and listen to what you have to say.”
“A front-row seat to the freak show. Maybe you’re just glad you still have a chance to get laid. But hey, this emotional leper has survived for twenty-eight years. I might live to a hundred. They’ll have to stick me in a sarcophagus along with a warning not to open it ever.”
-----
Author's note: today’s song is “No Surprises” by Radiohead.
February 14, 2025
Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 19 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I interposed a city block between my car and the police station. I wound through the streets like Pac-Man in a maze. Scanning for patrol cars, I tracked vehicles crossing my path and those in my lane. I anticipated sirens erupting from the engine whine. The two times a cruiser appeared, I hunched behind the wheel, looped the block like a roundabout, and resumed my route.
I veered toward the mall. The engine’s backfires—smoker’s coughs—drew pedestrians’ stares. When I reached the mall’s street, I parallel-parked in reverse, trunk facing the plaza, wedging my car between a Hyundai Sonata and a delivery van where two workers unloaded food crates.
My heart raced. My Adam’s apple lodged in my throat as if I teetered on a cliff’s edge. Vision blurred red at the edges. Leaving the engine running, I circled to the trunk, keyed the lock, and lifted the lid. A stench assaulted me—the defense spray of some cephalopodan cosmic abomination. I held my breath as I hauled out the corpse, stepped back, and set the dripping bundle on the pavement.
I uncovered the child by tearing through the plastic. It was like peeling a bandage from a festering wound—wet, sucking sounds accompanied the separation, as strands of viscous slime stretched away from the greenish, blistered skin. With every shred of plastic I discarded, pale worms tumbled out, writhing atop splatters of filth like mutilated figures. The corpse’s crumpled form expanded like a soaked sponge, while beneath it spread a widening pool of putrid fluid clotted with clumps of sodden soil.
Shouts erupted. I straightened to face the arc of a crowd resembling a parting school of fish before a shark. Their soap, shampoo, and aftershave scents, of this dozen of people who had taken showers and readied for work or to go shopping, formed a levee against the rot. A gallery of horrified faces glistened in the sun. A woman shielded a sobbing girl’s eyes and fled. A bug-eyed man alternated between gaping at the boy and me. A deliveryman insulted and shoved me, then stumbled aside to vomit.
I pointed at the corpse.
“That boy belongs to you.”
Some retreated; others replaced them. A man and a pair of teens dialed phones, eager to share the news with the police. Others aimed their phones horizontally or vertically to shoot their flashes or record. Each electronic imitation of a camera’s shutter click made me yearn to hide. My legs itched to run. Our ruin—the boy’s and mine—would flood screens nationwide, tethering my existence to these images forever.
The scream-weary left, leaving flushed faces demanding answers or hurling insults. A few smiled at their phones as if gifted a bonus. Strange people who needed to prove they’d been here and witnessed this.
I faced the lenses, let the flashes blind me. Let them see. Let it sear those lives that depended on convincing themselves that aberrations like the boy and myself didn’t exist, that nobody would run over a child and then parade its rotting corpse. Let this knowledge fester in their minds like the memories of shame, defeat, loss.
Darkness enveloped them like a net. Taught since childhood that light banishes horrors, they had forgotten the truth: our universe’s dark web, speckled with glowing motes and smears, teemed with monsters waiting for the day we forgot their forms and ceased to understand them.
Here I stand. I exist.
The crowd stirred. Two black officers, same ones from the station, shouldered through, ordering dispersal. They emerged like boxers entering a ring. Before the corpse lying in a pool of its own juices, one of the officers recoiled, the other covered his mouth.
I lunged toward the asphalt. The coffee-haired officer drew his pistol, but as he shouted “Stop!”, I ducked beneath the roofline, slid into the car, and hit the gas. Swerving through screeching traffic, I rocketed down the street. In the rearview, those shrinking officers piled into their cruiser. They activated the police lights.
The rear wheels of my car skidded on the curves while the cops’ siren howled from side to side like a giant in pursuit. I weaved through the vehicles, rigid in my seat, blood roaring in my eardrums. I was racing against the clock along the dirt roads of an oil field.
As we sped toward an intersection, another patrol car showed up in the perpendicular lane. Behind the windshield, both officers craned their necks. They flicked on their lights and sirens and surged into the chase.
Five blocks later, three patrol cars crowded my rearview mirror. The officers’ faces and the darkened lenses of their sunglasses loomed through the glare sweeping across their windshields. One cop pressed a two-way radio to his mouth. As we raced past, cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups veered aside like panicked animals, while herds of pedestrians scrambled across crosswalks as though fleeing an advancing torrent of lava.
Four patrol cars. Red and blue lights flooded my cabin. Voices barked through megaphones, ordering me to stop, their commands shattered by bursts of static. They kept shouting even though they knew I’d refuse.
On the deserted asphalt straights, a patrol car would surge forward, slamming its bumper’s edge into my trunk, trying to spin my car like a top, but I wrestled the wheel, keeping it straight. Through the curves, I skidded sideways. The vial filled with shrapnel, dangling from a string tied to the rearview mirror, swung at forty-five-degree angles—left, then right—mirroring how my torso lurched toward the door or the gearstick. The chassis groaned; my seat shuddered. Acrid smoke that reeked of scorched rubber streamed in through the window, masking the lingering stench of rot, the ghost of a corpse.
I merged into the route I took every afternoon on my way home. Why not? I entered the street where, three hundred yards ahead, five days a week, I would turn to park in front of my apartment building. Down the street, a photorealistic mural painted on the face of a cliff depicted a strip of road narrowing toward the horizon, where the asphalt rippled and the silhouettes of cars, pedestrians, signs, and traffic lights seethed together like food sizzling in a skillet.
I pictured myself swerving, parking in front of the building, and sprinting upstairs—my lungs searing—all the way to my apartment. The roar of policemen shoving one another up the stairs in a chaotic stampede would grow louder. I’d rip out a sheet of notebook paper, hastily write “sorry for the mess” in ballpoint pen, and set the sheet on the entryway table, next to the jumble of old keys and coins.
My fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone numb. My arms had stiffened into rigidity. The car was about to slam into the painted backdrop hurtling toward me. For a quarter-mile, the road snaked through manicured grass before emptying into a parking lot that encircled single-story buildings—structures resembling houses torn loose by a flood and deposited miles away, alongside a Mexican restaurant and a Jack in the Box. Behind them, a towering pillar bore the Chevron gas station logo, reaching skyward. Once I collided with that photorealistic panorama, the car’s frame would crumple like an accordion, my flesh and bones would shatter, and blood would jet under pressure from every orifice and gash.
But the car sliced through the mirage and continued down the street. The serpentine road lashed like a whip until it yielded to the parking lot. The Mexican restaurant and the Jack in the Box, behind whose windows shadowy figures shifted, slid past my left, unveiling the gas station they had concealed. There, a woman angled the nozzle of a gasoline pump toward her car’s fuel tank. The pillar swept across my window like an opaque band in a scanner’s pass.
Along both sidewalks, new shops lined the streets, their display windows alive with flickering glimmers. Pedestrians halted or turned to follow the commotion of the chase. A couple—the boy seated on a bench, the girl perched on his lap—craned their necks and tensed as if to stand. A woman pushing a stroller swiftly veered off, pressing herself against a building entrance. Two men in suits, one silver-haired and the other with a jet-black goatee, shook their heads as they watched the fabric of order unravel.
Stabs of light pierced through the darkness, and now that I sharpened my gaze, I could glimpse the lines linking those stabs, hinting at shapes. Patterns to decipher.
The speedometer needle quivered, the shrapnel vial swayed, the engine roared and backfired, and I laughed and laughed. A world was being born for me.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “3 Legged Animals” by Califone.
I interposed a city block between my car and the police station. I wound through the streets like Pac-Man in a maze. Scanning for patrol cars, I tracked vehicles crossing my path and those in my lane. I anticipated sirens erupting from the engine whine. The two times a cruiser appeared, I hunched behind the wheel, looped the block like a roundabout, and resumed my route.
I veered toward the mall. The engine’s backfires—smoker’s coughs—drew pedestrians’ stares. When I reached the mall’s street, I parallel-parked in reverse, trunk facing the plaza, wedging my car between a Hyundai Sonata and a delivery van where two workers unloaded food crates.
My heart raced. My Adam’s apple lodged in my throat as if I teetered on a cliff’s edge. Vision blurred red at the edges. Leaving the engine running, I circled to the trunk, keyed the lock, and lifted the lid. A stench assaulted me—the defense spray of some cephalopodan cosmic abomination. I held my breath as I hauled out the corpse, stepped back, and set the dripping bundle on the pavement.
I uncovered the child by tearing through the plastic. It was like peeling a bandage from a festering wound—wet, sucking sounds accompanied the separation, as strands of viscous slime stretched away from the greenish, blistered skin. With every shred of plastic I discarded, pale worms tumbled out, writhing atop splatters of filth like mutilated figures. The corpse’s crumpled form expanded like a soaked sponge, while beneath it spread a widening pool of putrid fluid clotted with clumps of sodden soil.
Shouts erupted. I straightened to face the arc of a crowd resembling a parting school of fish before a shark. Their soap, shampoo, and aftershave scents, of this dozen of people who had taken showers and readied for work or to go shopping, formed a levee against the rot. A gallery of horrified faces glistened in the sun. A woman shielded a sobbing girl’s eyes and fled. A bug-eyed man alternated between gaping at the boy and me. A deliveryman insulted and shoved me, then stumbled aside to vomit.
I pointed at the corpse.
“That boy belongs to you.”
Some retreated; others replaced them. A man and a pair of teens dialed phones, eager to share the news with the police. Others aimed their phones horizontally or vertically to shoot their flashes or record. Each electronic imitation of a camera’s shutter click made me yearn to hide. My legs itched to run. Our ruin—the boy’s and mine—would flood screens nationwide, tethering my existence to these images forever.
The scream-weary left, leaving flushed faces demanding answers or hurling insults. A few smiled at their phones as if gifted a bonus. Strange people who needed to prove they’d been here and witnessed this.
I faced the lenses, let the flashes blind me. Let them see. Let it sear those lives that depended on convincing themselves that aberrations like the boy and myself didn’t exist, that nobody would run over a child and then parade its rotting corpse. Let this knowledge fester in their minds like the memories of shame, defeat, loss.
Darkness enveloped them like a net. Taught since childhood that light banishes horrors, they had forgotten the truth: our universe’s dark web, speckled with glowing motes and smears, teemed with monsters waiting for the day we forgot their forms and ceased to understand them.
Here I stand. I exist.
The crowd stirred. Two black officers, same ones from the station, shouldered through, ordering dispersal. They emerged like boxers entering a ring. Before the corpse lying in a pool of its own juices, one of the officers recoiled, the other covered his mouth.
I lunged toward the asphalt. The coffee-haired officer drew his pistol, but as he shouted “Stop!”, I ducked beneath the roofline, slid into the car, and hit the gas. Swerving through screeching traffic, I rocketed down the street. In the rearview, those shrinking officers piled into their cruiser. They activated the police lights.
The rear wheels of my car skidded on the curves while the cops’ siren howled from side to side like a giant in pursuit. I weaved through the vehicles, rigid in my seat, blood roaring in my eardrums. I was racing against the clock along the dirt roads of an oil field.
As we sped toward an intersection, another patrol car showed up in the perpendicular lane. Behind the windshield, both officers craned their necks. They flicked on their lights and sirens and surged into the chase.
Five blocks later, three patrol cars crowded my rearview mirror. The officers’ faces and the darkened lenses of their sunglasses loomed through the glare sweeping across their windshields. One cop pressed a two-way radio to his mouth. As we raced past, cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups veered aside like panicked animals, while herds of pedestrians scrambled across crosswalks as though fleeing an advancing torrent of lava.
Four patrol cars. Red and blue lights flooded my cabin. Voices barked through megaphones, ordering me to stop, their commands shattered by bursts of static. They kept shouting even though they knew I’d refuse.
On the deserted asphalt straights, a patrol car would surge forward, slamming its bumper’s edge into my trunk, trying to spin my car like a top, but I wrestled the wheel, keeping it straight. Through the curves, I skidded sideways. The vial filled with shrapnel, dangling from a string tied to the rearview mirror, swung at forty-five-degree angles—left, then right—mirroring how my torso lurched toward the door or the gearstick. The chassis groaned; my seat shuddered. Acrid smoke that reeked of scorched rubber streamed in through the window, masking the lingering stench of rot, the ghost of a corpse.
I merged into the route I took every afternoon on my way home. Why not? I entered the street where, three hundred yards ahead, five days a week, I would turn to park in front of my apartment building. Down the street, a photorealistic mural painted on the face of a cliff depicted a strip of road narrowing toward the horizon, where the asphalt rippled and the silhouettes of cars, pedestrians, signs, and traffic lights seethed together like food sizzling in a skillet.
I pictured myself swerving, parking in front of the building, and sprinting upstairs—my lungs searing—all the way to my apartment. The roar of policemen shoving one another up the stairs in a chaotic stampede would grow louder. I’d rip out a sheet of notebook paper, hastily write “sorry for the mess” in ballpoint pen, and set the sheet on the entryway table, next to the jumble of old keys and coins.
My fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone numb. My arms had stiffened into rigidity. The car was about to slam into the painted backdrop hurtling toward me. For a quarter-mile, the road snaked through manicured grass before emptying into a parking lot that encircled single-story buildings—structures resembling houses torn loose by a flood and deposited miles away, alongside a Mexican restaurant and a Jack in the Box. Behind them, a towering pillar bore the Chevron gas station logo, reaching skyward. Once I collided with that photorealistic panorama, the car’s frame would crumple like an accordion, my flesh and bones would shatter, and blood would jet under pressure from every orifice and gash.
But the car sliced through the mirage and continued down the street. The serpentine road lashed like a whip until it yielded to the parking lot. The Mexican restaurant and the Jack in the Box, behind whose windows shadowy figures shifted, slid past my left, unveiling the gas station they had concealed. There, a woman angled the nozzle of a gasoline pump toward her car’s fuel tank. The pillar swept across my window like an opaque band in a scanner’s pass.
Along both sidewalks, new shops lined the streets, their display windows alive with flickering glimmers. Pedestrians halted or turned to follow the commotion of the chase. A couple—the boy seated on a bench, the girl perched on his lap—craned their necks and tensed as if to stand. A woman pushing a stroller swiftly veered off, pressing herself against a building entrance. Two men in suits, one silver-haired and the other with a jet-black goatee, shook their heads as they watched the fabric of order unravel.
Stabs of light pierced through the darkness, and now that I sharpened my gaze, I could glimpse the lines linking those stabs, hinting at shapes. Patterns to decipher.
The speedometer needle quivered, the shrapnel vial swayed, the engine roared and backfired, and I laughed and laughed. A world was being born for me.
THE END
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is “3 Legged Animals” by Califone.
