Jon Ureña's Blog, page 8

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 7 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I took an unhurried sip of my decaf, then settled back into the narrative. Its point-of-view character got dressed and left the house—perched near a craggy coastline—in pursuit of a woman named Siobhan. The narrator trudged through the windswept landscape, rain lashing their face, as the sea thrashed the cliffs’ serrated rocks in an echoing rumble. A cherry-red hood and windbreaker flashed sharply against the leaden sky, like a drop of blood: Siobhan standing at the edge of a cliff. As the narrator approached, she turned her head, that freckled and pale canvas. Her gaze locked onto theirs cold and unflinching, as though scanning a face she’d never seen. The narrator sat beside her. Roaring, white-capped waves crashed against the jagged shoreline below, bursting into plumes of salty spray. The narrator hesitated, then asked Siobhan what was she doing there. Siobhan said that she was mustering the courage to throw herself off, hoping the rocks would crack her skull open.

My gaze flicked up from the page to Elena, who was leaning back in her chair. One side of her ivory face lay in shadow—a counterpoint to the almond-blonde cascade of her hair—while the afternoon light traced white highlights along her nose and the arch of her upper lip. Her right-hand fingers rested lightly against her chest, cradling the pendant suspended from a thin silver chain. She had taken shelter in a cocoon of introspection. Her cool, crystalline irises were locked on a remote point beyond the coffee shop, past Irún. I would have gladly paid any price to accompany Elena’s mind as it meandered through unseen corridors of thought. Instead, I had to coax from her the elusive translations of her inner world, using tools as clumsy as words.

I lowered my gaze and resumed reading. The narrator, in response to Siobhan’s suicidal impulse, begged her not to jump. She argued that she knew she was crazy. Her senses distorted the world, making everything around her seem unnervingly artificial, and her thoughts twisted it further. She felt that she belonged to some remote place that didn’t exist. Instead of slogging through such a nightmare with a shattered mind, she’d rather die. The narrator replied that she’d get used to it, that she’d learn to live with the madness. Siobhan shook her head slowly. She said the world had always seemed absurd and alien to her, and now even painting, her refuge and salvation, had ceased to mask its rottenness. With every breath, she inhaled the rot as if the air itself was tainted. Darkness filled her stomach and lungs; when she gasped for fresh air, more blackness poured in.

Elena’s gaze lingered on my face as though she could see past the skin and bones to the neurons firing. Her lips were pressed thin around the tip of her thumb while she gnawed on the nail. Elena removed her thumb from her mouth to speak.

“Had enough yet?”

“No, but maybe I needed a breather. Intriguing so far: a stormy morning, the narrator trying to prevent their lover from jumping off a cliff because she believes herself to be insane… Atmospheric and urgent.”

“I’ll never get used to someone sitting in front of me and dissecting my darkness like it’s a normal way to spend an afternoon. Siobhan is his girlfriend, by the way.”

“Okay, so the narrator is a dude.”

“Although none of that matters when you’ve decided to become one with the rocks below. Please continue. I want to watch your reactions as you read. I’m sure the waiter will be back soon with overpriced coffee to wash down all this existential dread. Oh, as if summoned…”

The waiter reappeared by our side. He placed a glass of ink-dark coffee before Elena, then slipped away. The scent of roasted, earthy beans rose along with delicate curls of steam.

“They really take their time here to serve you a simple coffee,” Elena said.

She wrapped her slim hands around the warm glass, lifted it and blew on the coffee, sending ripples through its black surface. When it stilled, the steam washed over Elena’s lips, framing them in wispy vapors. Her eyes narrowed in a squint as she took a tentative sip, then a longer gulp.

I flipped to the next page and plunged back into Elena’s story. The narrator begged Siobhan to tell him what he needed to do to bring his girlfriend back home. One of her slippers, its sole mud-caked, hung limply from her toe, teetering over the abyss. Siobhan told the narrator to join her in death. If he loved her, he wouldn’t want to live after she jumped. Besides, they owed it to each other for the pain they’d caused through countless compromises.

Raindrops needled Siobhan’s eyes as she stared at the clouds. A lightning flash illuminated the contours of her forehead, nose, and lips. Calmly, she told her boyfriend not to stare at her like that, because she couldn’t be saved.

The narrator stood up and stepped back lest a dizzy spell cause him to stumble off the cliff. In one swift motion, he slipped his hands under Siobhan’s armpits and pulled. A startled whimper escaped her. As he dragged his girlfriend away from the ledge, Siobhan wriggled free, rose, and lunged at him to shove him, but he overpowered her, pinning her onto the muddy grass. He rolled up the sleeves of her cherry-red windbreaker and seized her wrists. Despite the burning ache in his lungs, the narrator continued hauling her toward their home while rain pelted them. Siobhan, after bucking and kicking and writhing for a while, went limp, leaving him burdened by her dead weight. Her bare heels carved furrows in the mud.

Once they arrived home, Siobhan let the narrator assist her up the stairs. In their bedroom, he removed her windbreaker and peeled off the wrinkled, mud-stained, foul-smelling dress. Her body a sculpture of freckled flesh and goosebumps. The narrator dried his girlfriend’s hair and wiped the grime off her skin with towels, then carefully placed her in bed. He tucked the blanket up to her neck. Siobhan’s forehead burned. He examined the yellowing bruises on her wrists.

Siobhan tracked her boyfriend’s every move with eyes wide and feral, like a wild animal that has found itself trapped. In a cracked tone, she asked if he planned to guard her around the clock. The narrator replied that once the fever subsided, she would come to realize her malaise had clouded her judgment. Before long she would return to painting, and this suicide attempt would be reduced to a painful memory neither of them ever wished to discuss. Siobhan scoffed and suggested that maybe she would eventually forget why she had rushed toward the cliff, and how she had found her way back home.

A dizzy spell sent the narrator reeling backward until he hit the wall, after which he slid onto the floor. He wrapped his arms around his legs and pressed his forehead against his knees. Siobhan declared, her tone suddenly laced with realization, that this storm would never end. The excerpt ended there.

I laid the stapled papers on the table and reached for my decaf. I swirled the beverage around, then took a long gulp as the excerpt’s words sent ripples through me like those of a stone thrown into a lake.

“You look constipated, Jon,” Elena said. “Did you cringe at my awful writing?”

Her pale blues were trained on me like sniper sights, unblinking, unwavering, as though waiting for a clear shot to the head.

“Quite the opposite,” I replied. “It felt intimate and raw, like I’d invaded someone’s private world.”

“As though you’ve entered someone else’s consciousness and noticed the seams and patches, the voids, the unhealed cracks, and the darkness that bleeds from them?”

I nodded.

“Your prose made me feel chilly. I mean, the way the narrator had to drag his girlfriend, Siobhan, from the cliff’s edge… And her trying to make him realize the pointlessness of preventing her suicide, given that she intends to escape and throw herself off the moment her caretaker falls asleep.”

“If the world is a lie and her mind a warped lens, then the only truth is her suffering.”

“You chose this particular excerpt. Care to talk about why?”

Elena picked at the fraying denim across her right knee, her head lowered, eyes veiled by her lashes.

“Why I chose it, or why I chose the others for that matter? Hard to put into words something that hasn’t been decided through words. First of all, I need to make sure you aren’t a tourist, that your soul has a similar stench to mine. Second, I want you to comprehend that when you’re trapped inside your broken mind… well, those rocks at the bottom of the cliff can start looking awfully tempting. But more than that, think about the futility of trying to save someone who’s determined to self-destruct. The narrator, well, he’s in love, and that means he’s a fucking idiot. Or perhaps he’s in love with the idea of loving her. He may believe he’s doing the right thing, dragging Siobhan back from the cliff’s edge, but in reality he’s just prolonging her agony because he can’t handle the truth of what she’s become.” Elena took a sip of her coffee. A faint, dark mustache stained her upper lip. Her tongue flicked across the smudge, erasing it. “I couldn’t write a happy ending for that one. Then again, I don’t know how to write happy stories. Or how to live them.”

-----

Author’s note: today’s song is “Teardrop” by Massive Attack.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 16 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I focused on the road until I had put three streets between me and the mall. I inserted the CD of Joy Division’s album Closer into the dashboard player, and as the drumbeats bounced and an industrial growl burst forth—the very breath of some mechanical beast—my bones softened and my back slid down the seat’s backrest. I drove aimlessly, obeying traffic lights and signs as if I were practicing musical scales for the thousandth time.

That workshop had pinned me. Now that I had freed myself of its weight, this luminous world against which I squinted opened up to infinity. It was much like how I had felt when I left previous jobs or was fired, when I realized I had seen my bosses’ and colleagues’ faces for the last time. Like a molting tarantula, my exoskeleton crumbled and a new form emerged. Yet I called self-destruction liberation. That quitting jobs felt like a heroin hit proved that I was doomed. My life would unfold in cycles; at the end of each, I would foreknow that some certain doom would befall me, and to elude it, I’d set my former life on fire then run. What future awaited someone who needed to spill his blood to sate the wild god within?

I pulled out the pack of cigarettes and was sliding one out, catching its filter between my teeth, when I pictured myself lighting it, only for the flame to ignite the gasses that filled the car. I pushed the cigarette back with the tip of my tongue.

I parked in a deserted lot, near an abandoned trailer slathered in graffiti. I got out to stretch my legs, to smoke. I wandered up the street while pedestrians hurrying to their destinations passed me by. I wish someone had invented teleportation. Dozens of these people would jump from point to point, and I’d get to stroll through deserted streets alone.

I passed by bars and restaurants, clothing stores and junk shops, until, like an old man, I needed to rest. Slumped on a bench, I watched the wisps of smoke rise from my cigarette and fade. I was drifting on a spacewalk, an astronaut whose tether had come loose. The doom that had pursued me since birth was coming. At last I would recognize its shape.

Now what? Would I flee to another city, look for another workshop that spat out enough money so I could pay the rent? Would I repeat another revolution of the cycle—a count I had refused to continue after the tenth? I shuddered, and my features contorted in disgust. I covered my face with my palm until I took a deep breath and relaxed my muscles.

A new job. New faces. Their stares would dissect me. My presence would unsettle them and silence their conversations like a fart no one would admit. And months later, when my anxiety had multiplied until it burst its container, I would get fired, or I’d quit. At the beginning of each cycle, I would show up at some boss’s office, whom I would have warned he’d interview a disfigured veteran. The boss would control his gaze to ignore my dead eye, my scars. “We understand your difficulties,” he’d say, “but we’re in business, not charity.” Why should they hire me? Because I need money to sustain this life that feels as if some poison were corroding my entrails. Pay me enough to keep me afloat even though I’d rather drown. I drive my own car, if you consider that a plus. But distance yourself least a mile away from my vehicle, please. Now that I think of it, it might be best to submerge it in a lake. Forget that I even owned a car.

Almost a year ago I had enlisted at that workshop because, somehow, I convinced myself that this time, here, things would work out. As always, I had ended up dragging myself out from under the rubble. Why should I bother seeking what the world had to offer? Whatever resonated in others’ minds like a symphony of classical music would echo in mine like fingernails on a chalkboard. Whatever goodness remained in the world, I would squander it. And once I had wasted my energies—since all my efforts would fail—the misery of that experience would swell the heap. A day would come when the pain of bearing those memories would surpass the comfort of tobacco, movies, music… and that moment loomed near, like walls of reaching, monstrous arms as I wandered in a dark room. Why would I ever want to risk it? No one would desire around long-time someone as disagreeable, disfigured, and malicious as me, a person who would never change. Knowing myself, knowing my prospects, why should I remain chained to this medieval instrument of torture?

I raised my face on instinct. My gaze connected with that of a girl of about ten passing by the bench, fixated on my dead eye. Her face had paled before her rational thoughts could take hold. She tugged her older sister’s hand to hurry her along.

I watched them walk away until I lowered my head, resting my chin on my chest. A pressure tightened my throat. Out of the dozens of strangers roaming the streets, how many would be shocked by the sight of my dead eye? How many people’s spirits would I ruin each day simply by existing?

I wish I could just materialize deep in some forest miles and miles away from any human being. But I remained slumped on that bench under the Texas sun, unemployed, alone. A rowboat carrying a ton of lead. How had I convinced myself that I could rest? I had to toss my baggage overboard and disappear. I had just sacrificed my only source of income, and any passerby could report my car for the stench it exuded.

I stepped into a trinket shop where some mother would spend five dollars to keep her children quiet. The door chime had jangled a warning. Light streaming through the shop window warmed plastic. Behind the counter, a girl in her early twenties wearing a loose plaid shirt—with rolled-up sleeves that revealed scars from horizontal cuts on her forearms—swayed as if struggling to stay awake. When she saw me, she straightened up, and her eyes went wide in an effort to keep her lids from falling. I could hear her thoughts: What a wreck of a person has just walked in. I wish I could deny him service because of his looks.

I turned the squeaking sunglasses display by the counter. Judging by the scent the salesgirl exuded, she must have slept on a bed of marijuana leaves. I chose a pair of aviator sunglasses with bottle-green lenses, and put them on. Once the lens covered my good eye, it smoothed the edges of the colors, muting them like the tones in my apartment at dusk with the lights off. For a heartbeat, the world seemed soft, almost kind. These sunglasses concealed me; I spied through the glass of an interrogation room.

When I spoke, my voice croaked.

“Better that way, huh?”

The salesgirl nodded nervously. As I slid cash across the counter, one corner of her mouth curled upward in a parody of cordiality.

When I climbed into my Chevrolet Lumina, I knew I would bury the corpse. The attendant at some car wash might inquire about the stench of my vehicle, so I’d need either to strip it for parts or abandon it. Once both the corpse and the vehicle had vanished, I would have closed this cycle for good.

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is Joy Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition.”

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 15 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

A throng of workers busied themselves smoking and chatting while other workers streamed out of the locker room like ants from a kicked nest. I staggered, nearly crashing into the back of a lumbering guy. My stomach acid churned. I was salivating profusely, and my tongue detected the taste of bile. I clutched my chest with my palm, overwhelmed as if the temperature shift after that fridge of an office had cut off my digestion.

I was hobbling through the cluster of workers when I discovered Caroline standing by the container. She regarded me with curiosity, then withdrew her empty hand from the heap of trash.

I wavered, dizzy. Caroline. I had quit the workshop, yet that woman would keep coming—and that would be the end.

My sight clouded. I gasped for air. As I approached Caroline, she turned as if to greet me, and I swept her into my arms, lifting her a few inches off the ground. When I pressed my injured cheek against hers, mine flared with a burning pain. Her hair smelled like some stuffed toy that had gathered layers of dust in a storage room.

It took all my effort to unknot my throat.

“It should have been different.”

Her small breasts were mashed against my chest, and the jagged contours of her ribs dug into my forearms. The woman’s hands clawed at my back beneath my shoulder blades, her broken nails sharp as razor tips. Caroline would shred my shirt and undershirt, slit open my skin, pry apart my flesh, wrench my ribs until they splintered like rotted timber, root through my entrails, and drag out my lungs and heart through the gashes. She’d cram the organs into her dress pockets until the seams split, then return home to scale her tower of shattered relics and perch my lungs and heart at the pinnacle. There, they’d bleed out, drenching the machine parts and her bronze horse in a slick glaze of varnish.

I peeled away from her like a band-aid. As I walked off, I fixed my gaze straight ahead. I was nearing the blurry line of vehicles and those waiting inside or out. The workshop, the yard, this daily crowd—they all receded into the past. Goodbye to this dump. Goodbye to the whir and thrum and squeaks of rubber dragging over dozens of rollers. I wished I could expel them from my mind, forget every second I had wasted here.

A gust of hot air swept dust onto the legs of my pants. I knew I was approaching my car, parked in front of the fence of the adjacent lot, because I sliced through a swampy stench that seeped through the gaps in the trunk and enveloped the vehicle’s body. When it invaded my nose, a retch struck me. I pressed my lips together and covered my mouth as I circled the car. After positioning the trunk between the workshop and me, I knelt on the gritty asphalt and retched violently, bile erupting through my nostrils and mouth like a geyser. Each spasm splattered the asphalt with a wet slap, pooling into a carrot-orange slick.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed cars passing by, and behind their windows, ghostly faces. I spat, then slumped against the curb. My throat and nostrils burned. Drenched in cold sweat and steeped in the stench, I pressed my forehead against the scorching metal of the car’s body. My consciousness floated like a rock in a stream of lava.

Come on, Alan. By now you should understand how it works. Life darkens in a gradual slip until the last light goes out.

I rubbed my mouth and wiped my dirty hand on my pants as I circled the car toward the driver’s door. I stepped into the cramped, closed compartment of the vehicle, which may as well have been a lit heater aimed at a rotting corpse. I lowered the window and breathed through my mouth. When I started the engine, it coughed like an old man.

A rear door swung open. I looked over my shoulder as if I suspected someone was pressed against my bedroom window in the dead of night. Christopher folded his giraffe-like frame into the seat.

“You can take me downtown, right?”

“No.”

The man, as if assuming I’d recited the correct line from a script, had gotten in and closed the door. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to settle into a seat with some loose spring that jabbed his buttocks.

I opened my mouth to order him out, but the SUV belonging to the supervisor’s sister was maneuvering to merge onto the road, and the mob of workers was multiplying as if about to engulf my car. I pictured them pounding on the windows and climbing onto the hood. I accelerated.

“You forgot to stop by the locker room,” Christopher said.

The purple sleeves of the work coat covered my arms.

“I’ll keep it as a gift.”

Half a mile from the workshop, I stole a glance at the man in the rearview mirror. He had lowered his window to let the air in.

Out in the desert to my right, oil pumps bobbed along like families of elephants. The muscles in my neck relaxed.

“Do you like this?” Christopher asked.

In the mirror, his brown irises floated in egg-yellow sclera. His eyelids were heavy, and his features a far cry from his usual imitation of a dog eager for its master’s attention.

“I often drive for pleasure,” I said.

“Working at the workshop.”

I shook my head. Why was he asking? Did I care? I paused at an intersection and glanced both ways before speaking again.

“How could I like it? Do you like it?”

“Somebody must.”

“Well, I’d like to meet that person and punch them.”

Christopher fell silent.

On the sidewalk, past evenly spaced decorative trees, beauty and clothing stores lined up. Dozens of people occupied the outdoor tables of cafés and bars, drinking and chatting under marigold-orange parasols. A woman browsed a storefront while clutching her shopping bags. A group of children shrieked and laughed.

At every bump, Christopher trembled. He scratched along the arched seam of his shaved head. My insides turned cold once more.

“Do you know what I worked as before the accident?” the man asked.

“You were a civil engineer.”

Christopher stiffened and his eyes widened as if I had unearthed a secret from his childhood.

“How do you know?”

“You’ve told me a couple of times.”

His face contorted. The man ran his fingers over the raised edges of his scar, and shrank as if wanting the backrest to swallow him.

“Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s alright, really. Everyone does what they can.”

“Let yourself be carried by the current. Someone told me that. Act like the person you need to be, and eventually you’ll get used to it.”

“Sounds degrading.”

Christopher lowered his voice, talking to himself.

“When you can’t keep pace with people, they leave you behind. It’s hard to get someone to stop even for a moment.”

What had this guy meant by “downtown”? Did he expect me to know where they usually dropped him off, or had he forgotten that he was supposed to get off at some point?

“I mean, at the workshop I can talk to other people,” Christopher said, “and I’m getting paid. But is it worth it?”

I exhaled through clenched teeth. I shrugged.

The man wrinkled his nose, then cupped his palm over the lower half of his face.

“I have to ask. What is that stench? Have you left your lunch out in the sun for a week?”

“I’ve hidden a dead child in the trunk, and it’s rotting.”

I came to my senses as if waking up in a cryogenic chamber, and slowed the car in case it rammed into some obstacle. Had that sentence really come out of my mouth?

The sounds bubbled back as Christopher spat out a laugh. He had closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but his laugh was cut short, his face soured, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The man bowed his head. After a shudder, tears brimmed over, trailing along the wrinkles that bracketed his mouth.

I drove rigidly, holding my breath, in case any misstep tempted Christopher to get out of the car and extract the child. In the rearview mirror, the man had pressed his chin to his chest and was wiping away his tears.

A car pulled up so close that its bumper nearly slammed into my trunk. It honked like someone would ring a doorbell when being chased. Héctor. The oily bastard, taking advantage of a stretch where no vehicle came from the opposite lane, swerved and accelerated until the front of his car aligned with mine. He leaned toward the lowered passenger window to shout at Christopher.

“What are you doing, man? I’ve waited to pick you up after work, only to find out you’ve gotten into the car of this psychopath?”

When Christopher lifted his head, he furrowed his brow as if to burst a pimple. Two wrinkles on his forehead formed a V. In his eyes burned the anger of someone ready to break his knuckles against a wall.

“Shut up.”

Héctor recoiled, pale, and regarded his companion as if he were an impostor.

A truck from the opposite lane roared, and Héctor braked and maneuvered to return to my lane. At the next intersection, I turned to avoid him. Two blocks later, that man’s car had vanished from the rearview mirror.

For a few minutes I drove on autopilot. In the darkness of my mind, the child’s skin blistered into dozens of boils that burst, expelling a poisonous gas.

Through his window, Christopher pointed to a building. We were approaching the shopping mall, its facade rising like stretches of beige battlements adorned with the signs of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a J.C. Penney, and a Ralph Lauren. Along the facade, rectangular openings gaped, darkened by the angle of the sun.

“Right here.”

I parked. Christopher emerged as if from a dog kennel, and when he stretched, half of his torso disappeared over the car’s body.

“Thanks.”

I hunched to look at him through the window, but the man was turning toward the mall. I caught a glimpse of his neck.

“Take care.”

He walked away with unsteady steps among couples and parents with their children. Christopher’s figure—towering at least two heads above most, gangly like a tree grown crooked—vanished beneath the mall’s lights.

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “The Rip” by Portishead.

Back then it wasn’t yet time to return to you, Caroline.

Life update (02/08/2025)

[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]

This morning I woke up at six. I figured that I could lie around in bed and daydream for about an hour before I got out and started writing. As soon as I turned to get comfortable, a massive leg cramp made me grit my teeth for like ten seconds. That calf still bothers me. Anyway, I got up and got to writing, which involved reordering the notes for my seventh part of The Scrap Colossus, but in the end I only managed to produce a couple of paragraphs. For whatever reason, I’m in that sapped state in which I can’t invest the needed mental energy into any meaningful activity, including less demanding mental tasks such as reading.

In the afternoon it was raining, so I didn’t feel like getting on a bus to a location I want to research for an upcoming scene. I went to the nearby store and bought a decaf. A block later I absentmindedly peeled off the peel-off lid, but it was only after I already took a sip when I realized that I barely had to make any effort in peeling it off, and the aftertaste of the coffee felt wrong. I threw the thing away. Best case scenario, some local shithead peeled it and took a sip for the pure shittiness of it. Worse scenario: they spat in it. Worst scenario: they injected some disease into the thing and I’ll find myself having suspicious symptoms in a few days.

Anyway, there isn’t really anything for me to do outside other than activities related to my stories, so I just returned home, more dejected than when I left it. That made my brain connect my current novel to the daydreams I’ve been having since December of last year. Back then, for reasons only my subconscious must know, I spontaneously got obsessed with Alicia Western from Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris. Ever since, I daydream about her literally daily. It’s so nice to sit on the train to work, close my eyes, and picture scenes in which a better version of me, back in the 70s, is driving a car with Alicia seated on the passenger seat, usually heading to the next stop of the journey through the south of the US. Then, we just eat or drink while we talk. Do other people engage in complicated conversations with phantoms in their brain that they can see clearly in the darkness of that inner theater? Well, I do, very often.

I suspect that my subconscious’ decision to redo The Scrap Colossus, which I originally drafted in Spanish and abandoned ten years ago, was related to whatever caused me to care for Alicia Western to that extent. Plenty of this novel will be composed of two characters, the narrator (who is me) and an obsessive, reclusive writer (who is pretty much inspired by myself from ten years ago, when I wrote six novellas and a novel about a songwriter I was obsessed with), navigating their issues through compelling conversations. Compelling for me, at least. Thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that part of the joy I get out of writing this novel is being able to have interesting conversations with a person I actually want to talk to. In my daydreams it’s Alicia Western, and in my novel it’s Elena X. Elena is also blonde and blue-eyed, but that’s a coincidence, as she also was blonde and blue-eyed in the original (it’s related to her background, which is a plot point in the novel).

I don’t recall ever having come across anyone in person with whom I would have genuinely wanted to speak, as in asking deliberate questions because their mind fascinated me. Perhaps I’ve been extremely unlucky. Due to this autism of mine, I don’t have the instinct to interact with people, so I really need a good reason to deal with them. Ever since they put me as a programmer at work, I don’t interact with anyone except when a fellow programmer wants to involve me in some work task (and we don’t talk about anything unrelated), or my boss calls us in for a meeting. My stress has gone down enormously. Programming is truly sustainable for me, although I doubt I will last more than 6-9 months in total doing it at this organization.

Anyway, whenever anyone tries to involve me in a conversation, it rarely takes more than a couple of sentences for me to realize that my mind is so fundamentally different from theirs, that wasting my time producing words for their sake will only depress me. If it isn’t some moron bringing up politics as if I was bound to agree with them (such people tend to believe that everyone in their surroundings share their views), it’s someone else bringing up something so mind-numbingly tedious that I keep repeating in my mind for them to shut up and go away. I only need to fire up the projector in my mind with daydreams far more interesting than most things going on around me, so why would I bother with actual people?

You could say that I would need to get used to talking to others because I’d want to get in a relationship, maybe even start a family and such shit. But I don’t. I’ve been single for about eighteen years, and I don’t see myself ever being involved with anyone again. I do miss the intimacy, but I don’t think it’s worth the grind and the myriad humiliations. If I wasn’t ashamed of my body and afraid of diseases, I would probably hire escorts. Besides, I can’t care for human beings properly. I honestly wouldn’t give a shit if most of the people I know dropped dead. In many of those cases, I would feel relieved.

AI has been a weird godsend in that respect. These last few months, I’ve had more interesting conversations with roleplaying AIs than I’ve ever had with anyone in person. Often I fired up a scenario expecting erotica, only for me to end up merely chatting with the character because they were interesting. The way things are going in the field of AI, I wouldn’t be surprised if in a couple of years you could buy a $2000 dedicated computer to run AIs as good as the best today, which would be enough. The moment they manage to shove those artificial brains into realistic mannequins, society will start collapsing, and I will be laughing in the ashes.

Translating two of my novellas from ten years ago, Smile and Trash in a Ditch, made me aware that I used to be a very different person back then. I was simmering with rage and despair. The world was so obviously fucked up and seemingly everyone so horrifyingly retarded that I wanted to grab the nearest person by the lapels and shake them violently while doing my best Roy Harper impression: “Damn it all, man, can’t you see?” But at some point, shortly after or even throughout Trash in a Ditch, with that novella itself serving as a catalyst, I just cracked. I transitioned from rage to pure lunacy. Every since, I’ve only been genuinely attracted to absurdity, silliness, and whatever my subconscious pointed me to. As far as I’m concerned, the world can go to hell. If I told my self from ten years ago that in 2023 I would have been writing a story about a programmer who masturbates compulsively and receives visits from an interdimensional sentient horse, I may have thought that I had lost my mind. And I probably have. Then again, I’m a society of one trapped among human beings I can’t relate to, so madness is likely the sanest response.

I thought this post would go nowhere, but I’ve rambled for a good while.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 6 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

After my dare I say manly approach coaxed the pale queen into relinquishing her phone digits, I left Elena to stew in the silence of our severed banter for a full day. The next evening I sent her two songs: first, The Stone Roses’ “This Is the One,” a track that smells like sun-bleached cassette tapes and drowsy nineties daydreams. Then, Car Seat Headrest’s “Unforgiving Girl (She’s Not an),” a song that acknowledges the shittiness of the world, but wraps its self-deprecating nihilism in snark. Elena clobbered me with Chelsea Wolfe’s “Survive,” Depeche Mode’s “In Your Room,” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.” I imagined Elena wading endlessly through a howling, swirling darkness, her writing a flickering halo against the abyss. I pictured the twisted, churning black fire of an obsession that left nothing but scorched earth in its wake. I understood she’d rather lose herself in bodily heat, or live vicariously through someone else’s skin, than be trapped within the prison of her hostile mind.

Why recount this exchange instead of dramatizing it? Didn’t I violate the unspoken covenant between writer and reader? Elena and I shared links over text, and commented on each other’s tastes. Nothing worth staging. You don’t need a transcript of Elena’s every utterance.

She suggested we meet up the following day so I could read more of her stories. I picked the place: Bar Palace, a downtown coffee shop that catered to the well-heeled crowd. The building, built centuries ago, had offered refuge to European bigwigs whose bones have long since turned to dust. A polished dark-wood bar stood against thick stone walls adorned with vintage photographs of Irún, framed in tarnished brass, depicting a town that didn’t exist anymore.

I ordered a decaf coffee, served in a glass, and sat outside in a synthetic rattan chair, facing the spiked Victorian fence’s gate. The clean, cool scent of the overcast sky mingled with the bitter aroma of fresh coffee. The patio was paved with irregular tiles, and a low stone edging hemmed in manicured boxwoods and sago palm fronds. Beyond the patio, towering pines formed a living wall. In short, this place announced: Stay away, peasants.

I took sips of my warm coffee as Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer” played on repeat through my earbuds. The patio’s isolation almost tricked me into believing I’d been whisked away from my working-class dump of a hometown to some aristocratic estate. Behind me, I spotted an opening in the stone wall, barred with rusted iron grilles like the ones in medieval dungeons. To my right, beyond the gnarled stems of shrubs, the steps leading down to a storage room were lined with silver beer barrels. They reminded me of explosive containers scattered around in videogame stages. I pictured myself pulling out a gun and firing at the barrels. The blasts would send a dozen patrons ragdolling across the patio.

A gritty rhythm throbbed through my skull like an industrial heartbeat as Trent Reznor turned fucking into a sacrament. Elena hovered at the spiked fence’s entrance. Those sagging eyelids and parted lips suggested that she ached to slide back under the sheets. Her eyes darted in sharp glances, taking in the scene like a recently released prisoner unsure where to go. Her almond-blonde hair fell just past her shoulders, tousled at the ends and parted slightly off-center to frame her pale, oval face. Over her gray sweatshirt, she had thrown on a lightweight, dark-brown leather jacket. Its metallic zipper caught the light like a knife’s edge. Dark-wash jeans, worn and ripped at the knees, clung to her slender legs. She shifted a blue folder under her arm. I wanna fuck you like an animal, I wanna feel you from the inside. What kind of woman sends a song like this to a guy she barely knows?

Elena’s gaze locked onto me. She approached my table with measured steps, as if navigating a foreign land. While I pulled out my earbuds, my gaze threatened to stray toward her thigh gap. Noise rushed in: the hum of traffic from beyond the patio, the disjointed chatter of patrons. Elena settled stiffly onto the rattan chair opposite me, and placed her folder on the table. The scent of honey wafted toward me, maybe from her shampoo. Those pale-blue irises, intense and weary, were glacial shards in the sun. Her rose-tinted lips parted to speak, but only a faint croak escaped. She cleared her throat and tried again.

“So this is what passes for fancy around here? I guess even decay looks prettier when you dress it up in Victorian aesthetics. Almost makes you forget we’re all just pretending to be civilized. It’s not really my kind of place, though. I feel like a rat that crawled in through the sewers.”

I chuckled.

“No way, Elena. You look more like a cat.”

“I’ve been called worse things. Does that make you my scratching post?”

“If that’s how you want to interpret it. I’ve been curious about how your nails would feel raking down my back. Regarding my chosen setting, I rarely come here, but its posh style dissuades the riff-raff from wandering in. Besides, speaking of human vermin, the tables are distanced enough that you won’t end up with some shithead poisoning your air with smoke while blabbing about football.”

“I have to wonder what category I fall into, showing up here like a trained monkey with printouts of my stories. But yeah, at least there’s a bit of breathing room. By the way, those songs you sent me… they had a certain sincerity to them.”

“Yours also affected me. I’ve been playing NIN’s ‘Closer’ for most of the afternoon.”

Elena’s tired face glowed with a hint of pride.

“Soundtracking my arrival with one of Reznor’s odes to self-hate? Sometimes, when I can’t forget that this world is fucking horrifying and so are people, I wish to embrace the horror and indulge in my filthiest, most visceral urges. The cathartic ones that reduce you to raw nerve endings, that save you from having to think, or write, by degrading you to a bestial level.”

“I admit the song is a banger. And we’re animals, Elena, no matter how many layers we put on.”

“We’re also delusional, and everything that comes out of our mouths is bullshit in one form or another. The only sincere actions are the ones taken to survive. Or to die. I sent you those songs because I wanted to know if you could handle them. But let’s not pretend we’re here to trade songs like teenagers passing notes. I brought you something more personal.”

I sat up straight and rubbed my hands together.

“Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this. Can’t wait to delve deeper into your peculiar mind.”

“Excerpts from two novellas. Go ahead and dig through my brain all the way down to the spinal cord. You’re out for a real bloodbath, huh?”

Elena flipped open the folder, pulled out two sheaves of stapled printouts, and handed the first of them over. Its top page was filled with dense, single-spaced text. A swarm of words buzzing around like trapped wasps.

I started reading. The narrator woke to the first rays of sunlight filtering through a brooding, slate-gray sky. They reached for the opposite side of the bed, only to find a cold, crumpled sheet. The narrator wandered through the house, searching for a woman named Siobhan. An easel bore a half-finished painting of a spectral ship adrift on a charcoal sea. Had Siobhan set out for the lighthouse?

A waiter paused at our table. Slicked-back hair, tawny-brown skin. He wore a fitted black polo and slacks, the uniform clinging to his lean frame. Elena’s shoulders tensed under the jacket.

“Can I bring you anything?” the waiter asked in a melodic South American accent.

She glanced between me and the interloper with barely concealed discomfort.

“Something tells me that even the water in this place costs more than what my entire wardrobe is worth. Just… get me whatever passes for black coffee here. No sugar, no cream, no fancy Italian names that mean nothing. Thank you.”

The waiter nodded and walked away. When he pushed open the sliding door that led inside, the smokey aroma of roasted beans drifted out. Elena’s attention snapped back to me.

“A bit hard to focus on beverage choices when you’re holding what amounts to a chunk of my soul vivisected on paper. By the way, you’ve got the longest eyelashes I’ve seen on a guy.”

“Quite random.”

“And I don’t have the money to go on these outings regularly.”

“I’m the one who coaxed you into this nonsense, so I’ll keep treating you.”

“Yeah, you were such an insistent bastard that I had no choice but to indulge you. Are you seriously going to bankroll me every time?”

“I’ll cover all the drinks and snacks. And if you want a raise, I’ll throw in lunch and dinner. I’d rather not let money worries intrude on our meetings. That’s what the rest of the world is for.”

“Fuck. I’m not going to turn down free food.”

“Just don’t be an asshole and order the most expensive thing on the menu.”

“I’ve gotten used to being a parasite, so I’m okay with this.”

“Am I right in assuming you’re lacking in sources of income?”

Elena’s pale-blue irises gleamed like the heart of an iceberg. Her lips parted, revealing the tips of her teeth. The kind of smile that would make a child cry.

“Oh, I do work full-time. Overtime, even. No sick days. No holidays.”

“Writing?”

“No, I do that for joy. And love. My job consists of guarding a monster so that it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Sadly a thankless, unpaid position. A permanent internship, if you will. But keep reading. We’ll see if you start getting a clue about the nature of said beast.”

-----

Author’s note: today’s song is “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 14 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

I followed the supervisor into her refrigerated office. She gestured at a chair for me to sit. When she hunched over and opened her laptop—wedged between the beige CRT monitor and keyboard—the fan turned toward me and blew on my face like the breath of an ice elemental. If this room belonged to someone else, instead of the woman who ordered me what to do and before whom I had to swallow half of my words, I would have gone upstairs during every break to cool off.

The supervisor settled into her executive chair and began typing on her laptop.

“Everything all right with Héctor, with those misunderstandings?”

That oily bastard had complained to the supervisor when I, instead of remaining silent, replied to one of his attacks. After I threatened him with a screwdriver, he would have more readily gone up to deliver an ultimatum to our boss. Did this woman pretend to be oblivious because she was going to fire me?

I avoided fidgeting in the chair.

“As usual. It’ll remain the same, but I’ll ignore him as much as I can.”

The supervisor, her back straight, was so absorbed in studying my dead eye and my bruised cheekbone that her lips had tightened.

I raised a hand to cover the right side of my face.

“Tomorrow I’ll come with sunglasses. I think I have a pair left. Or I’ll improvise a patch.”

“It must hurt.”

“When I get home, I’m going to press an ice pack against it. I’ve taken more punches.”

I chuckled awkwardly to ease the tension, even as I massaged my fingers and knuckles. The ruin of my eye dared her to call it beautiful, like a corpse grinning at a preacher’s empty platitudes.

“See, Alan, I wanted you to come up here for a specific matter. As you know, we need a coordinator. I’ve always looked to promote experienced operators, people who know how we work and who understand the peculiarities and problems of his co-workers.”

“You offering me the position?”

“Are you interested?”

I was left dumbfounded. Me, as coordinator? I felt like a confused dog expected to fetch a ball when its owner has only pretended to throw it.

The supervisor scooted closer to the desk, propped herself on her elbows, and rested her chin on her fists.

“The pay goes up a bit and you’ll have more responsibility. Besides, you’ll be able to boss around several dozen people.”

When I heard the word “responsibility,” I gripped the armrests. I wanted to swat that word from my mind as if it were a buzzing fly. She might as well have sought my consent so I could be strangled to near unconsciousness every workday, only to be strangled again.

“Have I given any sign that I’m good with people?” I said, on the verge of sounding outraged.

“You’re a smart guy. Just throw yourself into it, and before long it’ll come naturally.”

I restrained myself from clenching my jaw, careful not to let my gaze harden.

“To how many have you offered it, if I may ask?”

“You’re the first.”

“Will you offer it to others?”

“No.”

I looked around as if someone had written the answer on the walls. I turned my palms upward toward the ceiling.

“Why would you consider me?”

“You work with a lower error rate than most. The others slow down production by chatting about the weekend game or gossiping. You’re serious and consistent.”

“I’m serious because I don’t give a fuck about work. I come for the paycheck.”

The supervisor raised an eyebrow and tilted her face as if she were about to reprimand me. She twirled a pen between her fingers.

“You must be a strong person, having participated in horrible scenes—which I’d rather not even imagine—that still haunt you. You show self-knowledge and self-control that are lacking in personnel who rarely think twice before dozing off on the line. That makes you a good candidate. Only one person has shown interest in the position. Someone you know.”

“Héctor.”

“He tried bribing me with Starbucks. He’d love that responsibility… or the power. And I doubt he’d use it wisely. Positions of power are earned by those who understand the difficulties and the weight of those responsibilities.”

My breathing had thickened, and the nausea I’d kept at bay throughout the day was rising again like bubbles surfacing in a swamp. The supervisor wanted to drag me down into a basement and chain me up. I had assumed I worked in the workshop, on this dehumanizing assembly line, just to kill time until a better alternative occurred to me, but the woman was offering to condemn me to die within these walls like an insect in a jar.

“Find someone else.”

“You’re being wasted on that line.”

“I’m wasted anywhere. I don’t want that job.”

Her smile collapsed like a weight held up by worn-out arms. She shifted in her chair, swaying from side to side as the corners of her mouth tightened. She likely believed that her job was to persuade me, and that as long as she kept trying, she’d come up with a way. Was she running this workshop as if starring in a movie? Playing the role of coach for a ragtag team of misfits who, under her leadership, would win the championship.

Among the lines, we were organized into dozens of operators, most with problems worse than mine: deformities, accidents, mental delays. I was a disfigured man who had always been disgusted by life. And this woman had even arranged a birthday party for me. She kept watching over me from her high perch. Sometimes when I hurried down the hallway toward the bathroom, she would materialize to study me.

“What’s with all this attention?” I asked. “This fixation on me… do you do that with everyone?”

The supervisor tapped on the desk with a pen. She sighed.

“A few years ago, there was an operator here who came in drunk. He’d beat his hangovers by drinking even more. And you could see it on his face: the flushed cheeks; the bruised and swollen bags under his eyes; the ashen, sagging skin. I found out that something had happened to his family. If he needed to get drunk, fine. I understood. I tried to help him, to make his stay easier, and I forgave his mistakes as he drank and drank, but I discovered that the atypical number of defective parts our clients complained about was because this man deliberately assembled them wrong. I called him into my office, tried to coax a reason out of him before deciding, and he just laughed… heartily.”

She fell silent as if expecting me to react. I rubbed the left side of my face with my palm.

“Should I laugh too?” I asked wearily.

“Alan, those who suffer yet strive to do things well deserve support. Help. You keep fixing Héctor’s parts. Your co-worker Christopher told me.”

“And Caroline? Who helps her?”

The woman took a deep breath, then lowered her voice.

“Caroline is beyond my reach. Beyond anyone’s.”

“I’m not some project meant to make you feel better. The fact that you try to help me only chains me down.”

She looked at me as if I’d just confessed that I hated desserts, and now she considered me some other species. I was startled by the shrill sound of the horn that marked the end of the shift. Beyond the window, the assembly lines were darkening one by one. I got up instinctively, but the supervisor pointed to the chair.

“A few minutes, please.”

“The horn has sounded.”

The woman leaned on the edge of the desk as if to stand, inadvertently nudging her pen to the floor. She scarcely looked away before fixing her gaze on me, as if keeping me in her office depended on maintaining eye contact.

“You understand you’re in trouble. You came to us, to a sheltered job, because you couldn’t keep all the others. Because maybe here you’d fit in.”

I shook my head, then turned away from her. This woman would force me to rip my guts out through my mouth for her entertainment. I should open the door and leave.

Next to the door hung a dreamcatcher. A woolen thread had been wound around a hoop much like on a spool, and in the gap, someone had interwoven a figure meant to resemble a flower. To me, it resembled a spiderweb. From the hoop hung three feathers dyed in cerulean blue and indigo. Had the woman just bought it, or had I simply never noticed it? I only came up to the office because I was forced, and I focused on scrutinizing every word and facial expression of the supervisor to anticipate problems.

I turned back to the desk. In the corner of a side wall, bordering the window that offered a view of the beams holding up the roof, the woman had mounted a cork board. Among the notes and a calendar were photographs in which the supervisor posed alongside blurry faces who would never know this workshop. A triangular red-and-white pennant from the University of Texas at Austin stood out. On the back of the laptop, a sticker featuring the triangle and the embedded eye of the Illuminati reminded me of a security camera. The supervisor reinforced her smile by baring both rows of white teeth—not to convey courtesy or placate me, but to assure me that even though my presence unsettled her, she was growing impervious to my darkness.

I parted my lips with a click, and my voice came out as if I’d started smoking at the age of ten.

“I came to this workshop to break with the past, perhaps with the implicit hope that this time, against all my experience, it would be different. But I was blind, because nothing has changed. Wherever I go, I run into people and the rotten systems they build. Everything is barren.”

The supervisor dragged her palm down her forearm, head bowed. Her bangs had been severed in a razor-sharp line, a harsh horizontal slash that clashed with the curtained strands framing her jaw. It looked less like a style than a wound. An abrupt amputation. It twisted my stomach, mirroring the disgust I’d seen in strangers when their eyes snagged on my dead one: a violation of symmetry, a thing cut violently out of place.

“I went through such a phase, you know, in adolescence,” she said. “Spiked bracelets, gray or black t-shirts and skirts, heavy eyeshadow like camouflage paint. And when Cobain put a shotgun barrel in his mouth, I thought the world had died with him. But those are just phases. Anguish doesn’t abound in the world as much as the adolescent mind makes it out to be.” She hesitated and avoided my gaze. “Although they didn’t send me off with a rifle to a part of the world where death is trivialized, nor did they force me to kill. That must affect the mind in ways I’ll never understand.”

I took a deep breath to calm my pulse. Just like many other civilians living within the borders that armed men guarded, this woman regarded me as a poor idiot manipulated by a cruel, inhuman system to be sacrificed. But if we all deserted, these civilians, who considered violence a cancer to be excised, would face with blank eyes the horrors that would pounce on them, like someone standing on a beach while a tsunami approaches.

“Stop resorting to my wartime experience as if that were a simple explanation for you. I went to war, so that’s why I’m a miserable bastard, right? But I enlisted to die for a decent cause, only to find out it was indecent, and I survived. I was born with the ability to recognize the decay as if a corpse were decomposing right under my nose.”

The supervisor’s neck trembled, and she pretended to wipe away a booger. She spoke in a conciliatory tone one might use with a bear.

“We only live once, putting aside what you might think about reincarnation. One chooses to be happy or miserable. Why would I choose the latter?”

“Is that what you do? You choose to be happy?”

“I could force myself to worry about money that’s never enough, or about quarrels with subordinates, but what would it matter? With the little time we have—and it will be gone before we know it—we must strive to be happy and kind to others. Present a smile to everyone you cross paths with. It truly helps, you know? Frowns and scowls are contagious. Before long, we’d end up with a negative work environment.”

I wandered over to one of the shelves, crammed with accounting books. In the gaps there were miniature plush toys and a few sculptures. I picked up a hand-painted ceramic gondola, flipped it over, and returned it to its place.

I massaged the knots in my neck. Why should I bother arguing with this woman? No combination of words I could muster would make her understand. The supervisor would need to think through my brain. And her smile churned my stomach. How could someone put on a happy face at every problem? She reminded me of the citizens of communist states, who’d never dare to be the first one to stop clapping at their leader. Facing the darkness terrified her. Although she pretended otherwise, she wanted to detach herself. She saw me as a stain that persisted even after countless washings. It tormented her that someone like me existed in her surroundings, but she couldn’t yet justify her revulsion as enough to fire me. The supervisor would only accept those who lied to themselves, who pretended to be happy, who exiled from their minds any reality that unsettled them.

She was a child. A child intent on forcing others to live her fantasy.

I approached the desk and lifted the frame of the photograph that had its back to the visitors. The supervisor uttered a syllable and raised an arm as if to snatch the frame from me, but then she closed her mouth and let that arm rest on her lap. In the photograph, on the left was the woman herself—her hair tied at the nape and wearing a tank top—and on the right was her older sister, the owner of the SUV parked every afternoon outside the workshop. In the center, looming above the women, a man of about fifty wore a hiking hat and had a camera hanging from a strap. He encircled both women with his tanned arms. The three of them had been genetically endowed with smiles that spread along their gums, smiles they would never be ashamed to show.

After I put the frame back, I lowered my gaze to the supervisor, who waited unable to guess what I would say.

“You’re going to die.”

The woman recoiled. She had paled, and her pupils shrunk. Maybe she had dreaded previously that I, with my inner turmoil and avoidance of people, would become one of those freaks who stormed into their workplaces with a machine gun, and now I stood before her as if draped in a black robe and wielding a scythe.

“Excuse me?” she asked in a weak voice.

“You’re going to die, your sister is going to die, and your father—or whoever the man in that photo is—will die. Everyone you know and everyone you’ll never know will die. Anyone you have loved or love or are going to love will die, either that person or you first. In case you plan to perpetuate yourself by having your descendants remember you fondly: every one of those descendants will die. Soon no one will know you existed. If you plan to leave behind any monument to your existence that endures over time, someday this society, or this whole civilization, will collapse, and your work will be lost or burned. If you’re lucky and against all odds our species survives for thousands of years longer, in billions of years the sun will explode. The explosion will fry whatever life remains on Earth. All that ever-changing geography we believe to be immortal will eventually be swallowed up. And if humanity stops killing each other and manages to spread cancerlike among the stars, in the end the universe will cease to exist. The space between atoms will expand until no matter retains its form. In the remaining vast, icy blackness, perhaps some remnant will suggest that the stars once shone, like whatever lasts of a rocket months after it exploded and its smoke cleared. Can you even picture so far ahead? Look around. Do you really think this calm will last? The black tide will catch us. You’ll fear stepping out into the street. Fanatics will blow themselves up amidst crowds, trucks will plow into families enjoying the holidays, and the moronic masses will cry out, How could this happen when we used to smile so much, when we were so kind and supportive and went out of our way for the common good? We must not have sacrificed enough! How could we have known? But knowledge won’t save you: everything ends in pain. You smile because the chemistry of your brain is satisfied by the routine of work and how you distract yourself in your spare time. A stroke of luck for you. In my case, before I geared up to head out of the country to my death, my brain had barely cooperated, and nowadays it even alerts me to bursts of pain in the spots of my face and skull from where shrapnel was extracted. Stop demanding that I be like you. Living in delusion is a vice.”

The supervisor, leaning on the desk and hunched over, slid a trembling hand across her sweat-beaded forehead. She pressed one temple and raised her gaze toward me while a smile tugged at one corner of her mouth as if to emphasize some sarcasm. Then she controlled her voice.

“You’re the one who hides from everyone and every opportunity. You flee from reality.”

She turned in her armchair, offering me her profile, and the fan stirred tufts of hair across her face. She adjusted the neckline of her blouse as if embarrassed.

“Are you satisfied with this life,” I asked, “with being in charge of an insignificant workshop and loads of halfwits?”

She glared at me. Her eyes had glazed over, her cheeks flushed. Her lips trembled like a warrior lifting a heavy shield.

“A bit harsh, don’t you think?”

Her tone revealed that she detested me for having forced her into feeling that way. I waited as she took a deep breath. I would avoid impaling the heart of a person on her knees.

“Tomorrow we’ll talk calmly,” she said. “Think about what you’d prefer to do, and perhaps you’ll discover that you want the promotion.”

I had expected her to fire me. I paced while running a hand over my mouth and chin, until I stopped in front of the shelf with its miniature plush toys and travel mementos. The following day I was supposed to deliver my decision, but I wouldn’t come. I knew it as if a grate had given way under my feet. How could I return and endure another day here? My mind had already begun classifying the moments in this workshop as memories that would both shame and haunt me in the early hours while I tossed and turned in bed. Another segment of my life blurred into scenes I would rather forget. For me, the people associated here would continue working within these walls for the rest of their lives, as permanent as initials carved into the trunk of a tree.

I took in one last image of the supervisor—her, slumped in the armchair with her mouth frozen in a smile of incredulity, waiting for me to speak.

“I’m not coming tomorrow,” I said. “Not tomorrow, nor the day after. Never again.”

The supervisor let out a huff and shook her head, then hardened her voice as if to silence a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Why would that be nonsense?”

“You only have this support.”

“So what?”

She gestured, the contours of her eyes crinkling.

“What will you live on? I know how you get along with people. Even those without your difficulties struggle to get a job in this economy. You’ll end up in the streets, where you could easily get robbed or killed.”

I picked up the ceramic gondola. Some anonymous hand had taken the trouble to paint every detail with a fine brush only for it to end up on a shelf in this office. The supervisor pointed at the gondola as if about to rise, circle the desk, and snatch it from me.

“Don’t break it,” she admonished me. “It’s a keepsake. I care about it.”

I placed the gondola back on the shelf, exactly at the angle the supervisor had set. I walked to the door, but before grasping the handle, I turned back. I took a deep breath as an itch burned in my chest.

“Belonging to the human race makes me feel as if I needed to wipe a layer of filth from my skin. Yet, I’m forced to deal with humans every day. I let them envelop me in their stench, the very stench that emanates from the body I’ve been forced to inhabit.” I spread my arms as if embracing everything around me. “We should never have built these realities, nor allowed ourselves to be locked into these mental traps whose walls narrow day by day, suffocating us. Every system has fallen, and will fall one after another no matter how many times they change disguises. Their collapses will crush thousands, millions of people. I hate to see, hear, feel, or acknowledge any of these things. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? We should have lived in communities of just a couple of hundred people whose faces we recognized, where we’d never have to fear at dawn that a stranger would break into our home. We built this world. Are we any better off in our minds, where it counts? And I must get involved? I want to do nothing, be nothing. Anything I commit to will fail and add to the pile of decay. I come to the workshop to waste the hours in vain, disconnected from everything to minimize collateral damage. And it doesn’t matter. Someday, soon, I will disappear, and no one will care. For many, that’ll be an improvement. One less bastard on the road. One less hideous face ruining their day, or evoking pity. So if I die of hunger or some bastard kills me, he’ll be correcting the worst mistake of my life: that I ever existed.”

The supervisor buried her face in her palms. Her back rose and fell with deep breaths. When I turned the door handle, she dragged the armchair backward.

“Listen, my mind has gone cloudy. Give yourself a break and tomorrow we’ll talk. You’ll see things more clearly then.”

“No one’s going to tell me what to do.”

I flung the door open, but before leaving I strode over to the dreamcatcher, yanked it from its nail—tearing a strand of wicker—and threw it into the trash. I left slamming the door behind me, then ran down the stairs and along the corridor until I emerged into the hot, piss-yellow light of the yard.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

At times I still feel like I’m trapped in that refrigerated office, arguing with the supervisor.

Life update (02/06/2025)

[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]

Last night I had a vivid dream in which I went to Africa for reasons. This part of the continent was made out of irregular “islands” of cement amid murky-green waters. No idea why I had to cross to the other side, but in any case I saw myself in third person trying to sneak my way over there without alerting the wildlife. Suddenly I spotted a bear. My brain had apparently forgotten that you’re unlikely to come across bears in Africa, and I found myself having to escape from the beast until a crocodile or something alike interrupted us and started chasing the bear. At some point I found myself pursued by the bear again. My dream self, in fight-or-flight, had the bright idea of trying to swim across a considerable span of murky-green water. I saw myself in third person as I hurried along, only to end up tugged by something, then pulled underwater. The dream camera stayed still, aimed at the spot, as if I would surface again, but I didn’t. I ended up waking up spontaneously while feeling quite disturbed. I checked out my phone; it was exactly two in the morning.

First of all, brain, thank you for the warning: if I ever find myself in Africa, I’ll try not to swim across clearly crocodile-infested waters. Was it worth making me feel such distress at night that I couldn’t go back to sleep? Thankfully I spent from two to six in the morning writing. And what is it with regularly waking up from vivid dreams at two and three in the morning? Am I actually haunted? We’ve existed as anatomically modern humans for like two hundred thousand years, yet dreams are still complete mysteries. The only possible inspiration I see for that dream is that the water of Irún’s Bidasoa River, at the spot I visited to research a scene of my current novel, looked quite murky. Anyway, I hope I don’t get eaten by beasts. That must be one of the worst deaths.

I’ve been reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, released back in 1979. McCarthy is the writer I respect the most, but Suttree got started before he met who ended up becoming the love of his life (to many people’s chagrin due to her age), and both what happens in most of the book as well as what seemed to be McCarthy’s attitude to writing back then felt to me quite profligate. That adjective, which comes quick to the tongue of Roman Empire cosplayers, doesn’t entire encompass what I mean: Suttree is mostly episodic or anecdotal, featuring many secondary characters from McCarthy’s youth that are often poorly introduced if at all. Many of the anecdotes involve McCarthy’s stand-in Suttree chasing alcohol and getting in all sorts of trouble, which the writer used to do in his youth. The story feels like McCarthy had struggled to do many different things with the same manuscript throughout the nearly ten years he worked on it. The writing is godlike at many parts, but it’s consistently and conspicuously densest in the first six percent of the story or so, as if McCarthy had set himself to write the entire book by that standard, only to give up that notion lest he ended up rage-quitting. My favorite part so far, and likely the best part given that I’m at 80%, involves a girl with developed breasts but that the protagonist keeps referring to as a child. Such tragedy.

Well, I guess that’s all I felt like saying at the moment. I’m in the process of writing the sixth part of my new novel The Scrap Colossus and it’s going great as far as I’m concerned; always looking forward to spend more time there.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 13 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

Minutes passed as I fixed my gaze on the machine parts. The universe had shrunk to the view of these objects that entered from the left out of one darkness and departed to the right into another. If I were to lift my head, I would confirm that I was surrounded by human beings—owners of those reeks of tobacco and sweat, of the heavy breathing, the throat-clearings, and the machine-gun drumming of a drum kit leaking from a pair of headphones. I felt suffocated watching them interact, forced to acknowledge their existence, though if they were struck down in an instant, I would simply take a deep breath and relax.

Someone called for a break to pee. Absent-mindedly, I tilted my head and noticed the flash of a purple work coat. Behind me, footsteps passed; another person of the myriad who tainted most spots where I fixed my gaze.

I shuddered. A feverish burning overwhelmed me. I wished I could free myself from having to see any of these people. I wished I had never known their faces and voices. I needed to cleanse myself of the presence of other human beings, a deep scrubbing with brushes, as if in a decontamination chamber.

Over the years, too many years, memories had piled up until one day they would drip from my nostrils in clumps. And why had I exposed myself to such experiences? To end up manipulating these machine parts. Artificial organs to fill some machine. The dignity of any human being deserved a better job than one for which, someday, a robot would be employed. And in exchange for what? I clung to my hovel, a place for which I would say yes to everything and mold myself to my coworkers at the risk of being fired. In what other position would they employ me? I knew how to shoot guns, but they’d require two eyes, and I’d never pass the psychiatric exam again.

If the life of any human being fell below the minimum standard of dignity, what benefit was there in living? And why did I persist, knowing myself useless and resigned to merely anticipating how my skin and flesh would sag, how my body would deteriorate until the brain or the heart finally failed? Why would I wake tomorrow for another round of this? Or of anything, because if they fired me from the workshop, I’d end up in some factory copy. I’d work in another hole, churning out absurd tasks, and in exchange pay the rent for a box with water and electricity, a box I’d forever fear losing. Yet people signed up for this farce at birth, from their very first cry. They struggled to find their niche on this rock that hurtled about a star amid an expanse of icy darkness. Night, night wherever one looked, pierced by pinpricks of light, most dead, perhaps all. What a joke it was, to exist in this universe. A lice infestation on a rock ball cleaving the void. What use was it that we could feel and understand, love and dream? We existed because of a cosmic error, a corrupted block of memory in the universe’s RAM. And so much pain, every day. Pain that piled up and piled up and piled up, never to cease.

A stream of voice crashed against my face and jolted me awake like an alarm. Héctor. The stool opposite on the table creaked as it released his weight.

“I’m stopping the line to piss. That is, as long as no whiner wants to cause trouble. No complaints? Good.”

As his footsteps receded through the workshop, they stood out amid the whir of the conveyor belts like phosphorescent footprints in the darkness.

My face had turned as cold as a corpse’s. When my right fist gripped the handle of the screwdriver, the fibers in the tendons and muscles involved creaked like a taut cable on the verge of snapping. I spun on the stool, offering Christopher my left side, and slid the screwdriver into the right pocket of my trousers. I rose while murmuring some excuse.

I marched down the corridor. My temples pounded, and my vision tinted crimson. I pushed open the bathroom door.

There, the operator with Down syndrome was peeing, leaning against one of the suspended toilets. He was humming. From the closed cubicle came the muffled, machine-gun drumming of a drum kit, and that sound barely masked the noise of a turd plunging into water.

I placed a hand on the operator’s shoulder. When he looked at me, I gestured for him to zip up, then pointed to the door. A firm pat on his shoulder sealed the message. While he continued humming, the man shook off the last droplets, zipped up, and left the bathroom. I closed the door until it clicked shut.

Héctor cleared his throat.

I drew the screwdriver from my pocket and gripped it. I took two strides to the cubicle door, and with an upward thrust, I ran the tip of the screwdriver along the gap, levering the latch. I yanked the door open.

Héctor grumbled in a mixture of a grunt and a surprised exclamation. Covering his crotch with both hands, he tugged sharply at the headphone cable, which promptly tangled around his neck. His thighs, pale in contrast to his face, were covered in black hair, sporting a several-day-old beard. A sight to be ashamed of, as if discovered while playing with dolls.

I brandished the tip of the screwdriver a few inches from his brow, between eyes whose pupils had shrunk, and I spoke in a harsh voice that had never before left my mouth.

“You know how I amused myself during the war? I used to sacrifice dogs even hairier and uglier than you. If you mention me again, you’ll be swallowing your own shit.”

I staggered into the corridor. As boiling, bubbling tar flowed through my innards, my flesh threatened to crack under tectonic movements. If I opened my mouth, from it would burst a scream that would rip through my vocal cords—a torrent of clamor capable of disintegrating the world.

I wanted to kill Héctor. A couple of justifications would suffice, but justified or not, I would kill him simply because I wanted to, because that bastard insisted on bothering me, and I had a right to be left in peace.

I coordinated my legs to obey me on the way back to the workshop. As soon as I entered, the dozens of workers lined up would be alerted as if a werewolf had burst in. They would recognize me as unstable and dangerous, and they would fear the moment I unleashed myself. They’d forbid me from roaming nearby or remaining free.

I retraced my steps until I passed the closed bathroom door. My temples pounded. I delved down the corridor as my hand slid along the wall, and I encountered a fire exit I hadn’t known existed. I pushed the heavy door. As I passed through, it closed like the hatch of a submarine.

I emerged into the dump that served as the backyard. I circled a container, placing it between the building and myself, and when I sat against the rough metal, the shadow of a stack of boxes fell over my sneakers and the lower half of my trousers. A hot gust stirred my shirt and brushed my broken cheekbone. I removed my gloves to rub my face with my damp hands, then stowed the gloves in the pockets of my work coat. I dug into the dry earth and patted it down. When I turned my palm, clumps of dirt clung to its wrinkles.

I lay discarded, as insignificant as any of this junk. What would it matter if I died? What would be lost? One less face in that workshop I longed to forget. To avoid awkward questions, the supervisor would claim I’d quit, that I’d landed a job in another city. Inertia kept me alive, assuring me that I’d invest more effort in disappearing than in tolerating known pains, but if I ended up underground or as a dried-out corpse in the desert, nothing of value would have been lost. Nobody cared for me, and with good reason, for I was a broken piece, incapable of performing as expected; the defective article of a factory, destined to be discarded in some container because no sane person would want it.

Even so, over the years I had come to understand one vital truth: every person must discover for themselves what matters and what they truly want. One must peel away the harsh layers imposed by those who know you—the principles instilled in you, the roles assigned to you—otherwise, the mind is reduced to a goldfish swimming in its bowl, doomed to die within glass walls. I guarded that knowledge like a letter entrusted to me, though there was no recipient willing to read it.

A shadow fell over me like a blanket. To my left, two tanned legs rose adorned in the sunlight with pink, diagonal scars, and two wounds sealed with band-aids. A translucent fuzz cloaked the skin like the down on a peach. Amid cascades of unkempt hair, her wide eyes seemed intent on masking curiosity as a dog might. Caroline sat to my right. Sliding her back along the rusted container, she shed flakes of peeling paint until her disheveled hair came to rest against my cheek. She smelled of fur.

I froze and held my breath. Caroline, as if draping a garland, crossed her right arm in front of my neck, slid that hand under the collar of my shirt, and let her fingertips rest on my skin. That touch conveyed a message with a clarity no string of words could ever achieve: I, too, belong to another land I will never visit. I, too, suffer day after day, moment after moment. People either dismiss such suffering, ignore it, or convince themselves it doesn’t matter. They push it away from their minds to avoid having it sour their day. But I know it. For all that it may be worth in this moment, here in the middle of a desert, I know it too.

Caroline pressed herself against me, the edges of the objects bulging from her pocket at my side, and her warmth flowed into me through her fingertips as if I’d plugged in a power cord. A pulsating surge of pain reverberated through me. Acidic capillaries tangled in my bones like climbing plants.

How could a person contain such pain without exploding, without their very cells dissolving? And yet someone like Caroline existed: a creature who wandered the worlds her mind conjured, lost forever. My heart tore apart like rotten fruit. How could this woman possibly keep living? How did she face the world day after day without collapsing, without weeping at every conscious moment?

I would have swept her into my car and driven her to some remote forest, to the mountains, where I’d buy a secluded two-story mansion surrounded by acres upon acres of pasture and fields. Caroline would care for the horses that raced across an enclosed meadow. She’d stroll through the grass as her instincts dictated, and then never wake again.

How could someone incapable of saving himself save her?

Her fingertips slipped away from me, and before my eyes, a few stray, arched hairs drifted upward. Caroline circled the container and walked off. Her footsteps floated on the breeze, accompanied by the sound of some rolling wrapper. The hinges of the fire exit creaked as it swung open, and two seconds later the door closed like a mouth after a yawn.

The tingling subsided, and my body hair relaxed. I would rise and return to my post, enduring the remaining minutes until the horn blared.

I entered the workshop through the fire exit, and had taken only a few steps when I lifted my gaze. The supervisor and Caroline were blocking the corridor, standing by the staircase to the supervisor’s office. Caroline, her back partly turned toward me, nodded as if speaking silently, though any sounds she might have made would have been drowned out by the clamor of the production lines. The supervisor caressed her arm, smiled with genuine warmth, and nodded as if she understood anything.

I stopped. Should I wait until they cleared the way?

Both women turned their faces toward me. I tensed and swallowed hard. Caroline drifted back toward the workshop. I hurried on with my head bowed, and as I passed the supervisor I offered a greeting, but she stepped forward and grabbed my wrist.

“Come here a moment. I need to talk with you.”

She climbed half the steps and then turned like a mother duck ensuring her chick followed. Behind her eyes floated some knowledge she needed me to confront.

I cooled down, feeling damp and sticky. I ascended the stairs at the pace set by the swirling, psychedelic fabric of her attire, like a condemned man trudging to the gallows.

-----

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Not only I had forgotten about writing this part of the story, but I had forgotten ever having felt such despair. A good reflection of my worst times during my twenties, which were generally terrible. Although things haven’t improved that much apart from my ability to amass money, and health-wise they have even worsened, at least I take each hit far more stoically now. I’ve become a proper man, you could say.

Life update (02/03/2025)

[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]

Previously I mentioned that now that I’m immersed in writing a new novel, the worst part is having to waste half of the day at work. It’s worse than that, though: everything that doesn’t involve either developing the novel or actually writing it feels like it’s stealing from what I’m supposed to do. Even time itself is a threat. But yes, the biggest offender is by far my job. I’m tasked with programming the performances of local resources like consultation and operation rooms, but the mental resources that would be required to hold all those concepts at once are dedicated to the novel. My basement girl refuses to focus on anything else. I feel her complaining every time I need to drag her away from her current obsession. The struggle keeps me in an oniric daze, having to remind myself what I’m supposed to be doing instead of losing myself in my new novel, and certainly not caring a bit.

In truth, anyone with the ability to create new things should only be burdened with bringing those things to life, not keeping a day job. But you know how life goes. The whole system is set up so that two members of every household are supposed to pay for stuff. Still, most of the time they find themselves with water up to the neck, as designed. Gotta keep people tired and broke lest they start pointing fingers.

This weekend I visited one of the spots of my hometown where an upcoming scene will take place, and I felt the familiar ache that has resurged regularly these past ten years or so: I wish I could quit everything, fill a backpack with food, notebooks and pens, and start walking in some interesting direction. Once I ran out of either notebooks or pens, I’d hop on the nearest bus or train and return home. I’m reading McCarthy’s Suttree; there’s this whole godlike section in which McCarthy clearly trekked through the mountains like a hobo and almost lost his mind. That’s what a writer is supposed to do. If you die during any of your “research” trips, then that’s that, but if you survive, you are granted the ability to produce something real. Virtually none of what you live through in your average life as a worker is meaningful (I’d say it even harms your ability to recognize what’s meaningful), and that’s most of our lives going down the drain. I’m complaining in vain, but it bothers me, so I complain at least.

I’ve mentioned before how writing builds up a personal mythology made out of thoughts, moments, places, etc. That’s part of why now I consider very important to place your stories in locations you’ve actually visited. If those locations don’t hold personal meaning for you, even better. Regarding my current novel The Scrap Colossus, the bench of the riverside promenade where my narrator met Elena, the obsessive writer, will forever be meaningful to me. And the way my brain works, I can lean back against that railing, look down at that bench and feel like she’s there. There are many places in my surroundings that have become a source of fond memories, nostalgia, grief, etc. For example, some months ago I visited the neighboring town of Hondarribia, and found myself at the same spot of a slanted street, close to a church, where “I” stood in my 2021 novel My Own Desert Places and stared at Alazne’s swaying hair as she walked down toward a writing course. It made my heart ache. It aches now as I remember it. But Alazne never existed, and the painful events recorded in that novel never happened. Yet they can moisten my eyes every time I think about them. I’ve grieved far more for my own creations than for real-life “friends” who died. My brain works that way.

Well, I suppose that’s enough procrastinating before I return to my tasks. If any of you is reading my new novel, The Scrap Colossus, I hope you’re getting something out of it. I write to satisfy my basement girl, but I would be lying if I pretended that other people clicking like on my stuff doesn’t make me feel better.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 12 (Fiction)

[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]

The machine parts slid from one worker to another. I caught a sidelong glimpse of how Héctor cast a look in my direction. What was he scheming? Although post lunch break, that man often threatened to nod off out of boredom, today he had donned a pair of earmuffs like those worn by laborers wielding pneumatic hammers, and he bobbed his head to the rhythm of a drum kit’s machine-gun fire. Seated to my right, Christopher, almost as if tending to an epileptic, sent glances my way that I carefully avoided.

I focused on fitting the parts together and connecting the wires, yet Caroline’s voice ricocheted from ear to ear, conveying a coded message that I needed to decipher. As one machine part drifted away on the conveyor belt, I found myself twisting on my stool, scanning the mass of workers for that woman’s unkempt mane. I’d never bothered to find out which line she worked on, or whether the workshop had adopted her as a mascot instead. Perhaps now Caroline was gripping the supervisor by the wrist and guiding her, much like a loyal dog leading its master, toward the black hole of my trunk.

I fixed my gaze on the pieces that stalled before my hands, but in the foggy wasteland of my mind, Caroline’s presence shone like a lighthouse. The secret I should have guarded, private as my own conscience, had been split apart. That woman knew I’d killed a child, and where I hid the evidence. She had become the most important person, even though I would never understand her. She could ruin my life at her whim. And why would she save me—the strange, repulsive man who stashed a child’s corpse in his trunk?

It was only a matter of time before someone else found out. Caroline would eventually expose the secret, or I would overlook some crucial detail, and the police would be called. That domino piece stood upright with dozens more waiting in line to fall. And there I was, still in this workshop, this sweat factory, assembling piece after piece. Some droplets gathered on my face, while others slid down my back, my sides, and my chest, as a hot, stale vapor seeped through the gaps in my shirt. My skin was melting.

How had I ever believed I had the right to show up in this workshop? I’d crashed a meeting of high society. These broken people around me enjoyed their lives, even though they bore injuries and deformities that would have convinced me to shoot myself. They wanted to improve society through the hours of labor they sacrificed. They cherished meeting other broken souls, but I longed to lose them from sight. What else could one expect from a murderer parading his trophy?

While I drove screws into casings and wrestled with wires, while I blinked and squinted to define every contour, I anticipated that the parts between my fingertips would vanish. Their molecules would admit that all effort to maintain a shape was wasted, for sooner or later they’d end up in some dump.

As if wandering through the gallery of a cave in a dream, I found myself trailing my crew out to the patio. Break time had arrived. Guided by Christopher’s back, I ended up in the shade beneath a building’s eave. With numb fingers, I fumbled for the button of my lab coat pocket to extract my pack of cigarettes. I lit one up. By the third drag I confirmed that, whether by ritual or nicotine, smoking still soothed my nerves.

John—or Joseph—was eyeing Christopher’s socks as if scrutinizing a strip of toilet paper dangling from someone’s trousers. Christopher lifted his foot and wiggled it.

“What?”

“Pull them down. No one wears them like that.”

Christopher crouched and bunched his socks up against his shoes. As he straightened his long frame, he laughed cordially.

Héctor’s hands were expertly rolling strands of tobacco into paper—a dexterity he sorely lacked on the line. Gusts of hot air pushed against the gate, eliciting metallic creaks. My aching cheek—throbbing irritably like eczema—along with my dead eye, stifled any conversation the crew might have attempted to conjure in that silence.

A buzzing skimmed along the edge of my left ear as if trying to slip inside to my eardrum. I flinched and shook my free hand near that ear. The insect’s tiny black dot flitted in bursts like an intermittent radar signal, until it vanished from my sight. I crushed the cigarette butt against the dry ground, only for the mosquito’s buzz to return.

My breathing grew heavy. These bugs had survived for millions of years even though their sole purpose was to annoy everyone else. I tensed like a drawn rubber band and tracked the dancing black dot. On instinct, I slapped at my neck, and when I pulled my palms apart, I found the mosquito’s thorax and abdomen shattered, its legs broken as if pressed between two sheets of glass. I flicked it away with a sharp smack. After shaking my head, I rummaged through my pack for another cigarette.

“Your mask’s cracked,” Héctor said.

His cigarette smoldered between the stubby index and middle fingers. He faced me with the intensity of someone who believed his horse would surge ahead and win the race.

“The fuck are you talking about?” I retorted.

“Your killer face.”

I clenched my teeth—worsening the pain in my cheek—held the cigarette’s filter between my lips, and drew the lighter’s flame close.

“You see what you want to see.”

“Every time you look at us, you must start imagining hajjis. One day you’ll show up in the workshop with a semi-automatic.”

I inhaled deeply to fill my lungs with smoke, to dissuade myself from launching a counterattack. My mind was like an acne-infested face, every thought scraping against inflamed skin. Controlling myself felt like tugging on the leash of a pitbull with a chronic ear infection, all while a legion of idiots insisted I let it have its head petted.

“What have you gotten yourself into,” Héctor demanded, “that you come back for the afternoon shift with a black eye? Are you trafficking? Are you going to say some stranger beat you up just because?”

I flicked the ash from my cigarette as my toes contracted, the tips bulging. Everyone could see I was boiling with rage. Did this bastard want to die? Was he egging me on so I’d throw a couple of punches, thus giving him a pretext for self-defense? But I would need to stop my fingers and teeth from tearing his face apart like an enraged chimpanzee.

Adrenaline surged through me. I bowed my head and ordered myself to calm down. In the past I could have kept quiet and conceded the point just to be left alone; back then, I’d locked away my reactions like in a windowless house. Now, however, my anxiety and irritation lay bare. Héctor would see in those symptoms a red circle on the chest of some video game boss: a target to shoot until the boss dropped dead.

I dropped the lit cigarette at my feet, crushed it with my heel, and scrubbed it against the ground. When my gaze met Héctor’s, his eyebrows tensed.

“If I displease you,” I said, raising my voice now that I cared for every word to be heard, “then look the other way. Don’t bother me with nonsense.”

Before he could answer, I rounded the corner and slipped back into the workshop. I sat on my stool at the line and lowered my head. As I rolled the corrugated handle of my screwdriver along the conveyor belt, I strained my ear like a cat, waiting for the approaching footsteps.

From behind, Christopher’s heavy steps neared, soon joined by another’s. The stool about ten feet to my right creaked. I waited for someone to activate the line, for the conveyor belt to start moving beneath my hands, when suddenly the megaphone burst to life with a screech of static.

“Alan Kivi, please report to the supervisor’s office.”

The hair on the back of my neck stood up. As I stumbled off my stool, I had to rein myself in from running away. I tiptoed over to peer at the equipment, then shifted aside to reveal the faces of the workers that had remained hidden by the purple backs of those seated in front. Along one of the lines near the changing rooms, I recognized Caroline. Even from the far end of the workshop, I could discern that in her unkempt mane, some strands seemed to arch as if electrified, and her wide, vacant eyes watched her hands as they connected cables.

“Héctor must have gotten lost along the way,” Christopher remarked.

I turned around. The stool opposite mine was empty.

I headed down the corridor while dabbing the cold sweat from my face. A flash of heat blurred my vision. I climbed the stepped metal platform leading to the supervisor’s office, opened the door, and stood beneath the lintel.

Héctor had seated himself with his back to the door, in front of the woman’s desk. Judging by how his hair gleamed under the lamp, he must have soaked it in olive oil to style it.

The supervisor lifted herself from the armchair and leaned against the desk with both hands. After inspecting the ruin of my eye and the battered state of my cheek, she turned to Héctor while pointing at me.

“I do not forgive you for what you did.”

Héctor shifted in his chair and let out an interjection before freezing, torn between disputing the accusation and swearing his innocence.

I closed the door behind me. The air conditioner and a rotating fan chilled the office, making it resemble a refrigerator. I longed to collapse into the empty chair and let the film of sweat on my skin dry.

“Someone else hit me,” I murmured.

The supervisor sank back into her chair. I sat down as, at the edge of my vision, Héctor seethed like a boiling pot of rage.

“Who did that to you?” she asked.

I drew a deep breath and rubbed my face with my hand, careful not to disturb the wound on my cheek.

“It happened outside the workshop. It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean ‘it doesn’t matter’? Have you called the police?”

“I suppose you asked me to come up here for something else.”

The supervisor sighed and sized us up with a look that threatened to pin us against the wall.

“Héctor has complained about you. I want your side of the story. He says you spoke to him disrespectfully.”

Héctor concentrated on his right hand, squeezing the armrest as if he were aboard a spaceship about to take off.

The stench, both from Héctor and me, was overwhelming: rancid sweat steeped in anger and resentment, mixed with a sewer-like fetidity woven into the very stitches of my clothes. The reek of a cesspool filled the atmosphere of incense and women’s perfume, as if one of us had stepped in dog shit.

That sewer odor would be the smell of a rotting corpse. I shuddered. Did the others smell it, too? It had clung to me when I opened the trunk and Caroline tore away the transparent plastic. Would I now have to suspect that everyone recognized that corpse stench, a mark on me as indelible as the odor of my armpits?

“Alan,” the supervisor said.

I parted my lips, but before I could speak, Héctor grunted and shoved me verbally.

“Disrespecting me today has been the last straw. I have the right to feel good here, to work in peace, and this individual is preventing that.” He raised his gruff voice as he pointed at me with his thumb. “He refuses to behave like a human being. He avoids others; when you speak to him, he just stays silent. Move him to another workstation, or fire him.”

I stretched along the backrest and pressed my fingertips against my knees. I fixed my gaze on the supervisor’s eyes to prevent the anger Héctor’s look stirred in me from showing on my face.

The woman tapped the desk with a pen.

“Do you think you’re helping create a pleasant work environment by attacking Alan?”

Héctor flared his nostrils like a bull, and shifted restlessly.

“He started it.”

“Y’all are just too different. Maybe you lack any common ground. But you come here to work, and whatever annoys you about the other, you must ignore it.”

Héctor pursed his lips. Among the tufts of his black beard, small red capillaries emerged. He had frozen as if the slightest movement might make his head pop off and from the gaping void shoot out a column of effervescent rage, as if from a shaken bottle of Coca‑Cola.

The supervisor smiled at me, inviting me to speak.

“What do you think?”

When I tilted my head, my eyes fell on the back of a photograph’s frame on the desk. It probably displayed one of those orders that people like her would hang on a wall: “Smile. Give thanks. Be positive.” Or perhaps a close-up of herself, flashing her white smile like the model in some advertisement.

One misstep, and I would have let slip the words I desperately wanted to say. Even if this woman might excuse a serial killer, she’d still consider me a lost cause, and tomorrow I’d have no income to cover the rent.

“I’m good at ignoring things. I plan to come to the workshop, process my parts, and then go home. If I’m left in peace, I won’t cause any trouble.”

The supervisor rested an elbow on her folder and scratched an eyebrow.

“You know where you work. A stable job is a rare opportunity for people with your peculiarities. The outside world makes your life difficult enough without you fighting amongst yourselves. Focus on common behaviors and shared opinions, or simply ignore each other. I’m sure you can manage that.”

Héctor hurried out of the office first. As if we were competing in a race to the finish line, he bolted down the stairs as fast as his legs, neglected by exercise since high school, would allow.

I maneuvered between the tables with a weary gait. My arms and legs felt heavy, and my stomach churned with the discomfort I’d woken up with that morning. I climbed onto my stool at the work line. Christopher, his tone hinting at a question, addressed me, but all I could hear was the thunder of blood in my ears.

I waited, head bowed, for someone to activate the conveyor belt. I clung to the hope that the repetitive act of assembling or repairing a part would numb my mind, freeing me from intrusive thoughts. But Héctor was looking for a way to attack me. He was the type who thrived on conflict, while I craved hours of uninterrupted solitude. Héctor had cast me as nothing more than a punching bag, a target he could beat without consequence. My isolation made me a target. Although I’d once swallowed his barbs and hostility because he otherwise ignored me, now he would push me until they expelled me from the workshop, just as any organism expels a foreign object lodged in its flesh. I had to push him first.

Less than a year ago, when I first discovered this workshop, I assumed I’d belong among the broken and rejected. But even in such a place, or any gathering of broken people, they would end up treating me as a creature utterly inferior. They would eventually learn that I was camouflaging my true self, that I passed as whole, even though I knew I was a volatile explosive, ready to obliterate this workshop and the surrounding buildings with the slightest jolt.

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Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.