Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I drove toward the outskirts as the sun hid itself, painting the sky bubblegum pink and the horizon raspberry red. I sank into the night the way a frog might slowly cook in a simmering pot. I switched on the headlights. The amber pulses of the roadside reflectors split the road into parallel lines, while in the dusk the rectangular white signs floated. In the next lane, glowing orbs of light would appear and swell until the cars passed me with a whispery rush.
My left arm rested on the rolled-down window frame as I smoked, dragging on the cigarette again and again, flicking ash into the cooling wind. The vibrant guitar riffs followed one after the other sounding weary, the way they might at the end of a tour.
I took a shortcut skirting an oil field and used the strip of plastic—like police tape cordoning off restricted land—to guide me. The car’s wheels rolled over barren dirt.
Hidden, nestled in the night, there was no one around to bother me. To keep me company, I would have only the coyotes prowling around and other creatures that had been raised in the desert.
I parked on the shoulder of the track. The headlights shone on an oval of cracked, mummified dirt. They bathed some shrubs with branches like insect legs, and the shadows they cast arched over the fissures in the brown earth like bridges.
I unhooked a Modest Mouse CD from its case and slipped it into the player. When the first track started, I leaned back in my seat. Still except for my arm and lips, which moved together so I could inhale each drag, I listened to the guitar, bass, and drums. The dashboard clock and other indicators floated in the car’s darkness like bioluminescent fungi in a cavern. Out in the headlights’ cones, insects—tiny black dots—fluttered silently. Isaac Brock lisped about endless parking lots.
My neck, which had been stiff as bone the rest of the day, relaxed as if a pillow cradled the base of my skull. My back slid down the seat inch by inch. I bobbed my head in time with the melody, while filling my lungs with smoke.
Those dark expanses of desert convinced me that there wasn’t another soul for dozens of miles around. I confused the background noise of far-off traffic with some gust from a distant storm. Any occasional honk was just part of the night’s wildlife—herds of prehistoric beasts that, upon seeing me, would ignore me the way I would ignore an ant colony.
Here, alone, nothing could hurt me. No one could force on me tasks and principles that revolted me. My mind ran free, unbothered by prying looks or those compulsive conversations people insist on just to fill the silence—those efforts they make so that their fellow humans will confirm they exist. The complications that choked the rest of my time distracted me from why I needed to come to the desert in the first place. I lived to water this inner core I understood and valued, at the risk that the world might tear it apart the way an invading army burns the fields. Whenever I drove to work or back, maybe some of the pedestrians framed by my car windows had been born with a core, too, but had let it die. They’d suffocated it to tend what they were taught mattered.
Even in my apartment, these moments of solitude slipped away—my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps drummed the ceiling in the small hours, and in the apartment next door, a family argued and yelled in Spanish. The night in the desert gifted a hush that the society I was supposed to belong to had forgotten. Time and the world pressed on these moments like tons of water against a submersible, but while the night lasted, I escaped the toll life demanded. I was saved from the people who insisted I cater to them and speak, who believed I should be grateful for it. I was saved from their forcing me to celebrate what I rejected, from making me wear a smile—just one of the many ways humanity demanded I betray myself.
I listened to three Modest Mouse albums and one by Radiohead. They turned the darkness into a canvas on which melodies and lyrics painted a living picture. Those musicians had saved their virtues from oblivion, while their everyday lives—the ones everyone else gets entangled in—would be lost like a millennia-old civilization beneath the sands. The music rose like a red clover sprouting through dry, stony soil. Even between miles and miles of wasteland where real people were missing, some persistent individual had managed to create life.
I headed back. The silvery oval of the headlights traced out the cracks in the earth, inking them black.
Memories crept in: the people at the workshop, the responsibilities they had pinned on me, the conspiracies they’d drag me into. My supervisor had glanced at my file. Why? And all day, my coworkers—the strangers in the team they’d stuck me with—knew she’d eventually haul me into her office for that idiotic ritual. They kept me in the dark. If they hid one thing from me, they could ambush me on a hundred pretexts. When I let my guard down, they’d corner me, their eyes gleaming with a shared intent. The mere thought that at some point in recent days the supervisor had been thinking of me, evaluating me, horrified me—like coming home to find the lights on and someone roaming around inside.
My headlights washed a figure in silver. It had stepped into the road, crossing perpendicularly. It stood on two legs, its head barely rising above the hood of the car. Glimpsed in my vision, like the afterimage of staring at the sun, was a face drained of color and two eyes gazing at me in surprise.
My muscles clenched. I slammed the brake pedal, but the figure vanished beneath the horizon of the hood. With a thud, the chassis jolted. The car lurched once, twice, as though the right tires had rolled over a rock.
My back slammed against the seat. My left hand jerked the wheel. The car skidded diagonally off the path, snapped through the plastic strip marking the off-limits zone, and plunged several yards into the oil field. I yanked the handbrake.
The headlights shone through a dust cloud swirling with insects, as though I had kicked over a hive. The engine rattled with clanking metal that sounded like a loose part.
My hands were locked, gripping the wheel and the handbrake, knuckles going white. I was panting. The impact’s echo reverberated in my skull like a tolling bell, and then it faded.
Heat radiated through my body. I pried my hands off the wheel and the brake.
Some bit of fabric was burning. Two inches from my knee, I felt a spot on my thigh heat up. I slapped my pants and sent the lit cigarette flying, a streak of smoke floating in the glow of the dashboard for a moment. A tremor inside my skull muddled my thoughts. I rubbed at the hole in the pants and the stinging skin beneath. I swept my foot around the mat under the pedals, just in case the cigarette was still lit and, in a few minutes, might force me to deal with a car engulfed in flames.
I shoved the door open and staggered out. It felt like escaping the wreckage of a Humvee in a blackness so absolute it suggested I’d gone blind. Keeping one hand on the hot hood, I circled toward the bumper while touching the right side of my face with my free hand—the ridges of the scars on that cheek and near the corner of my eye. A thin membrane of skin covered the bone and the knotted tissue. Nothing had exploded peppering the car with shrapnel, but the smell in my nose stung like melting metal or explosives.
I cut across the left headlight’s cone. I crouched near the bumper, but the glare hid the spot right in front of me, so I twisted around to fish my phone out of a pocket. It lit up with the manufacturer’s logo animation. Once the icons showed, I rummaged through the menu for the flashlight, but the phone vibrated and spat out a distorted chirp that grated on my nerves like a whistle shrieking inches from my ear. The screen alerted me to four missed calls.
I switched on the flashlight app. The now-bright screen took a slice out of the night. The center of the bumper was caved in with a head-sized dent, shiny with blood. Thick drops dangled there like strands of phlegm, tapering off toward the parched ground.
I straightened and felt dizzy. The phone’s white glare lit the windshield, revealing the seats as though I’d just peeked into a house window at night. I staggered backward while pressing one palm over my mouth.
When my head cleared, I searched the ground along the side of the car toward the trunk. I followed the skid marks in the dirt, tracing the tire tread pattern until I reached a place where the tracks on the right side were speckled with blood, like splatters on ceramic. I moved on until the light fell upon a body sprawled there, barely three and a half feet tall. Was I looking at a coyote’s back?
I approached the way I would enter a house I was breaking into. I made out the back of a shirt, filthy with stains and caked mud. A stench of urine and dried feces slapped me in the face, so I pressed the back of a finger beneath my nose. The legs were tangled, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He wore pajama pants. Fine, wispy hair—like a baby’s—covered his head, and a few inches above the nape, a gaping wound had opened, matting what hair he had. Beneath the head, a dark red pool of blood had spread. Floating in it, like bits of food in vomit, were gray, wrinkled matter and curved fragments of bone.
My arms went limp at my sides. In the phone’s shaky beam, I saw the trail in the dirt behind him, where the tire tracks vanished into darkness. I rubbed my eyelids. My legs barely held me. Surely I’d made some mistake, and if I stood still, holding my breath, I would open my eyes to find myself back in the car, still driving toward the main road.
The distant traffic noise could easily pass for a windstorm. Silence was broken now and then by snapping sounds, like the crack of a twig in the brush.
I shook my head. I stepped over the child in a single stride and crouched to shine the light on him. His arms—pinned under his torso or splayed across it—were twisted and bent as if they had no bones left. A tire had left its tread across his shirt, right over his heart.
When I finally dared shine the light on his face, for a moment I saw an animal in clothes. Then I blinked. An albino face. A cleft lip forced the nose upward, breaking one nostril and twisting the bridge, like someone had hacked it with an axe. From the reddened gums, teeth jutted in different directions like kernels of corn. The eyes, half-closed and slanted, hinted at some mental disability, and his ears—large and sticking out—spread like satellite dishes.
I moved backward until the gloom blurred his features. If I took three or four steps more, the night would swallow the corpse as if it had never existed.
My head spun, my whole body hit by a feverish chill. A child. I had run over someone’s child.
When I lowered my gaze and held my breath, the background noise swelled as if someone had turned up its volume. The traffic, hundreds of yards to my right. I braced for the sound of an adult running this way, calling a name over and over. Footsteps, then some figure bursting out of the dark to find me standing a few yards from their child’s body. No matter if the child had dashed in front of my car when he must have seen the headlights, this person would only understand that I had killed him. Around here, they’d probably be armed if they came out at night.
I aimed the phone downward and covered the light with my palm. A thread of white glow leaked between my fingers. I waited two or three minutes. When a distant horn blasted across the plain, I pictured a man perched on a tower blowing a horn.
I wandered around. The dried-out earth crumbled under my soles. To my right lay a wide desert cut by a highway. To my left, whose depths I couldn’t gauge, oil pumps dotted the landscape. They would be creaking in rhythm as they siphoned.
While pressing my temples, I shook my head. I glanced back at the blackness hiding the body, and felt like scolding the child for having run blindly into the road.
“Where were you going? Did you even know where you’d end up?”
Bent over with my hands on my thighs, I thought: What should I do?
Of course I’d call the police. With a trembling hand, I exited the flashlight app and punched in 911, but my thumb froze over the call button.
Besides wanting to keep silent, how could I explain myself to the cops? The dispatcher would pry out every detail. I’d wait for a patrol car that might get lost for a few minutes before it arrived, headlights picking out my silhouette maybe fifteen feet away. Two officers would step out, a hand resting on their holsters, ready for any excuse to shoot. They’d blind me with their flashlights and zero in on my scars, on my dead eye. They’d ask why I’d driven down this road in the middle of the night—what was I up to, dealing drugs? Hiring prostitutes? They wouldn’t buy that I only came out here for solitude; they’d call it suspicious. I’d end up in the back of the cruiser on the way to the station, passing through rows of desks under fluorescent lights. My mind would recede into static. I’d be put against the height chart, and the bored officer running the camera would tell me: Look forward. Flash. Look right. Flash. From then on, anyone who Googled my name—any prospective employer—would discover I’d killed a child. A disabled child. Even the workshops would refuse to hire me. The radio stations, the TV news, everyone would know. I’d live in a glass cell riddled with eyes. A disturbed veteran who’d failed to rejoin normal life, like some feral child found years later and unable to speak. Someone who would grunt, eat out of a bowl on the floor, run around naked.
I paced, rubbing my face, tugging on a beard that wasn’t there. About thirty feet away, the car’s silvery headlights formed an oasis in the dark, and as I walked in circles, the car’s body either concealed or revealed the beam.
How could I leave the child behind? Whoever found him would see he’d been struck. If I brushed dirt over the tire marks, that alone would look suspicious—someone obviously tried to erase something. I’d have to hide any sign that suggested I hit the child and then covered it up.
I turned the phone’s flashlight back on and rushed toward the car as though I was running out of time. I opened the driver’s door, knelt on the seat, and stretched my right arm into the passenger seat, where I’d left my Coke and the food wrappers. Gone. I groped the floor mat under the dash, among cigarette ash, butts, and old wrappers. The plastic cup had spilled, but the lid was still on. I picked it up. It felt like there was about a quarter left inside.
Contorting as I got out, I set the phone and the cup on the hood. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Shirt in one hand, cup and phone in the other, I walked around to the front of the car and dropped to my knees at the dent in the bumper. I popped the plastic lid off with a snap, soaked the cuff of my shirt’s sleeve in the Coke, and under the phone’s beam, scrubbed the concave metal until every last crease shone spotless of blood.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago, contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.”
I have zero memory of having written this scene. Zero. That disturbs me. I don’t know if to produce the details contained, plenty of which impressed me (I can say that because it feels like someone else wrote them), I just used my imagination or instead references. I’m not sure if these days I would be able to write similar details. Where did you go, me from ten years ago?
I drove toward the outskirts as the sun hid itself, painting the sky bubblegum pink and the horizon raspberry red. I sank into the night the way a frog might slowly cook in a simmering pot. I switched on the headlights. The amber pulses of the roadside reflectors split the road into parallel lines, while in the dusk the rectangular white signs floated. In the next lane, glowing orbs of light would appear and swell until the cars passed me with a whispery rush.
My left arm rested on the rolled-down window frame as I smoked, dragging on the cigarette again and again, flicking ash into the cooling wind. The vibrant guitar riffs followed one after the other sounding weary, the way they might at the end of a tour.
I took a shortcut skirting an oil field and used the strip of plastic—like police tape cordoning off restricted land—to guide me. The car’s wheels rolled over barren dirt.
Hidden, nestled in the night, there was no one around to bother me. To keep me company, I would have only the coyotes prowling around and other creatures that had been raised in the desert.
I parked on the shoulder of the track. The headlights shone on an oval of cracked, mummified dirt. They bathed some shrubs with branches like insect legs, and the shadows they cast arched over the fissures in the brown earth like bridges.
I unhooked a Modest Mouse CD from its case and slipped it into the player. When the first track started, I leaned back in my seat. Still except for my arm and lips, which moved together so I could inhale each drag, I listened to the guitar, bass, and drums. The dashboard clock and other indicators floated in the car’s darkness like bioluminescent fungi in a cavern. Out in the headlights’ cones, insects—tiny black dots—fluttered silently. Isaac Brock lisped about endless parking lots.
My neck, which had been stiff as bone the rest of the day, relaxed as if a pillow cradled the base of my skull. My back slid down the seat inch by inch. I bobbed my head in time with the melody, while filling my lungs with smoke.
Those dark expanses of desert convinced me that there wasn’t another soul for dozens of miles around. I confused the background noise of far-off traffic with some gust from a distant storm. Any occasional honk was just part of the night’s wildlife—herds of prehistoric beasts that, upon seeing me, would ignore me the way I would ignore an ant colony.
Here, alone, nothing could hurt me. No one could force on me tasks and principles that revolted me. My mind ran free, unbothered by prying looks or those compulsive conversations people insist on just to fill the silence—those efforts they make so that their fellow humans will confirm they exist. The complications that choked the rest of my time distracted me from why I needed to come to the desert in the first place. I lived to water this inner core I understood and valued, at the risk that the world might tear it apart the way an invading army burns the fields. Whenever I drove to work or back, maybe some of the pedestrians framed by my car windows had been born with a core, too, but had let it die. They’d suffocated it to tend what they were taught mattered.
Even in my apartment, these moments of solitude slipped away—my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps drummed the ceiling in the small hours, and in the apartment next door, a family argued and yelled in Spanish. The night in the desert gifted a hush that the society I was supposed to belong to had forgotten. Time and the world pressed on these moments like tons of water against a submersible, but while the night lasted, I escaped the toll life demanded. I was saved from the people who insisted I cater to them and speak, who believed I should be grateful for it. I was saved from their forcing me to celebrate what I rejected, from making me wear a smile—just one of the many ways humanity demanded I betray myself.
I listened to three Modest Mouse albums and one by Radiohead. They turned the darkness into a canvas on which melodies and lyrics painted a living picture. Those musicians had saved their virtues from oblivion, while their everyday lives—the ones everyone else gets entangled in—would be lost like a millennia-old civilization beneath the sands. The music rose like a red clover sprouting through dry, stony soil. Even between miles and miles of wasteland where real people were missing, some persistent individual had managed to create life.
I headed back. The silvery oval of the headlights traced out the cracks in the earth, inking them black.
Memories crept in: the people at the workshop, the responsibilities they had pinned on me, the conspiracies they’d drag me into. My supervisor had glanced at my file. Why? And all day, my coworkers—the strangers in the team they’d stuck me with—knew she’d eventually haul me into her office for that idiotic ritual. They kept me in the dark. If they hid one thing from me, they could ambush me on a hundred pretexts. When I let my guard down, they’d corner me, their eyes gleaming with a shared intent. The mere thought that at some point in recent days the supervisor had been thinking of me, evaluating me, horrified me—like coming home to find the lights on and someone roaming around inside.
My headlights washed a figure in silver. It had stepped into the road, crossing perpendicularly. It stood on two legs, its head barely rising above the hood of the car. Glimpsed in my vision, like the afterimage of staring at the sun, was a face drained of color and two eyes gazing at me in surprise.
My muscles clenched. I slammed the brake pedal, but the figure vanished beneath the horizon of the hood. With a thud, the chassis jolted. The car lurched once, twice, as though the right tires had rolled over a rock.
My back slammed against the seat. My left hand jerked the wheel. The car skidded diagonally off the path, snapped through the plastic strip marking the off-limits zone, and plunged several yards into the oil field. I yanked the handbrake.
The headlights shone through a dust cloud swirling with insects, as though I had kicked over a hive. The engine rattled with clanking metal that sounded like a loose part.
My hands were locked, gripping the wheel and the handbrake, knuckles going white. I was panting. The impact’s echo reverberated in my skull like a tolling bell, and then it faded.
Heat radiated through my body. I pried my hands off the wheel and the brake.
Some bit of fabric was burning. Two inches from my knee, I felt a spot on my thigh heat up. I slapped my pants and sent the lit cigarette flying, a streak of smoke floating in the glow of the dashboard for a moment. A tremor inside my skull muddled my thoughts. I rubbed at the hole in the pants and the stinging skin beneath. I swept my foot around the mat under the pedals, just in case the cigarette was still lit and, in a few minutes, might force me to deal with a car engulfed in flames.
I shoved the door open and staggered out. It felt like escaping the wreckage of a Humvee in a blackness so absolute it suggested I’d gone blind. Keeping one hand on the hot hood, I circled toward the bumper while touching the right side of my face with my free hand—the ridges of the scars on that cheek and near the corner of my eye. A thin membrane of skin covered the bone and the knotted tissue. Nothing had exploded peppering the car with shrapnel, but the smell in my nose stung like melting metal or explosives.
I cut across the left headlight’s cone. I crouched near the bumper, but the glare hid the spot right in front of me, so I twisted around to fish my phone out of a pocket. It lit up with the manufacturer’s logo animation. Once the icons showed, I rummaged through the menu for the flashlight, but the phone vibrated and spat out a distorted chirp that grated on my nerves like a whistle shrieking inches from my ear. The screen alerted me to four missed calls.
I switched on the flashlight app. The now-bright screen took a slice out of the night. The center of the bumper was caved in with a head-sized dent, shiny with blood. Thick drops dangled there like strands of phlegm, tapering off toward the parched ground.
I straightened and felt dizzy. The phone’s white glare lit the windshield, revealing the seats as though I’d just peeked into a house window at night. I staggered backward while pressing one palm over my mouth.
When my head cleared, I searched the ground along the side of the car toward the trunk. I followed the skid marks in the dirt, tracing the tire tread pattern until I reached a place where the tracks on the right side were speckled with blood, like splatters on ceramic. I moved on until the light fell upon a body sprawled there, barely three and a half feet tall. Was I looking at a coyote’s back?
I approached the way I would enter a house I was breaking into. I made out the back of a shirt, filthy with stains and caked mud. A stench of urine and dried feces slapped me in the face, so I pressed the back of a finger beneath my nose. The legs were tangled, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He wore pajama pants. Fine, wispy hair—like a baby’s—covered his head, and a few inches above the nape, a gaping wound had opened, matting what hair he had. Beneath the head, a dark red pool of blood had spread. Floating in it, like bits of food in vomit, were gray, wrinkled matter and curved fragments of bone.
My arms went limp at my sides. In the phone’s shaky beam, I saw the trail in the dirt behind him, where the tire tracks vanished into darkness. I rubbed my eyelids. My legs barely held me. Surely I’d made some mistake, and if I stood still, holding my breath, I would open my eyes to find myself back in the car, still driving toward the main road.
The distant traffic noise could easily pass for a windstorm. Silence was broken now and then by snapping sounds, like the crack of a twig in the brush.
I shook my head. I stepped over the child in a single stride and crouched to shine the light on him. His arms—pinned under his torso or splayed across it—were twisted and bent as if they had no bones left. A tire had left its tread across his shirt, right over his heart.
When I finally dared shine the light on his face, for a moment I saw an animal in clothes. Then I blinked. An albino face. A cleft lip forced the nose upward, breaking one nostril and twisting the bridge, like someone had hacked it with an axe. From the reddened gums, teeth jutted in different directions like kernels of corn. The eyes, half-closed and slanted, hinted at some mental disability, and his ears—large and sticking out—spread like satellite dishes.
I moved backward until the gloom blurred his features. If I took three or four steps more, the night would swallow the corpse as if it had never existed.
My head spun, my whole body hit by a feverish chill. A child. I had run over someone’s child.
When I lowered my gaze and held my breath, the background noise swelled as if someone had turned up its volume. The traffic, hundreds of yards to my right. I braced for the sound of an adult running this way, calling a name over and over. Footsteps, then some figure bursting out of the dark to find me standing a few yards from their child’s body. No matter if the child had dashed in front of my car when he must have seen the headlights, this person would only understand that I had killed him. Around here, they’d probably be armed if they came out at night.
I aimed the phone downward and covered the light with my palm. A thread of white glow leaked between my fingers. I waited two or three minutes. When a distant horn blasted across the plain, I pictured a man perched on a tower blowing a horn.
I wandered around. The dried-out earth crumbled under my soles. To my right lay a wide desert cut by a highway. To my left, whose depths I couldn’t gauge, oil pumps dotted the landscape. They would be creaking in rhythm as they siphoned.
While pressing my temples, I shook my head. I glanced back at the blackness hiding the body, and felt like scolding the child for having run blindly into the road.
“Where were you going? Did you even know where you’d end up?”
Bent over with my hands on my thighs, I thought: What should I do?
Of course I’d call the police. With a trembling hand, I exited the flashlight app and punched in 911, but my thumb froze over the call button.
Besides wanting to keep silent, how could I explain myself to the cops? The dispatcher would pry out every detail. I’d wait for a patrol car that might get lost for a few minutes before it arrived, headlights picking out my silhouette maybe fifteen feet away. Two officers would step out, a hand resting on their holsters, ready for any excuse to shoot. They’d blind me with their flashlights and zero in on my scars, on my dead eye. They’d ask why I’d driven down this road in the middle of the night—what was I up to, dealing drugs? Hiring prostitutes? They wouldn’t buy that I only came out here for solitude; they’d call it suspicious. I’d end up in the back of the cruiser on the way to the station, passing through rows of desks under fluorescent lights. My mind would recede into static. I’d be put against the height chart, and the bored officer running the camera would tell me: Look forward. Flash. Look right. Flash. From then on, anyone who Googled my name—any prospective employer—would discover I’d killed a child. A disabled child. Even the workshops would refuse to hire me. The radio stations, the TV news, everyone would know. I’d live in a glass cell riddled with eyes. A disturbed veteran who’d failed to rejoin normal life, like some feral child found years later and unable to speak. Someone who would grunt, eat out of a bowl on the floor, run around naked.
I paced, rubbing my face, tugging on a beard that wasn’t there. About thirty feet away, the car’s silvery headlights formed an oasis in the dark, and as I walked in circles, the car’s body either concealed or revealed the beam.
How could I leave the child behind? Whoever found him would see he’d been struck. If I brushed dirt over the tire marks, that alone would look suspicious—someone obviously tried to erase something. I’d have to hide any sign that suggested I hit the child and then covered it up.
I turned the phone’s flashlight back on and rushed toward the car as though I was running out of time. I opened the driver’s door, knelt on the seat, and stretched my right arm into the passenger seat, where I’d left my Coke and the food wrappers. Gone. I groped the floor mat under the dash, among cigarette ash, butts, and old wrappers. The plastic cup had spilled, but the lid was still on. I picked it up. It felt like there was about a quarter left inside.
Contorting as I got out, I set the phone and the cup on the hood. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Shirt in one hand, cup and phone in the other, I walked around to the front of the car and dropped to my knees at the dent in the bumper. I popped the plastic lid off with a snap, soaked the cuff of my shirt’s sleeve in the Coke, and under the phone’s beam, scrubbed the concave metal until every last crease shone spotless of blood.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago, contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.”
I have zero memory of having written this scene. Zero. That disturbs me. I don’t know if to produce the details contained, plenty of which impressed me (I can say that because it feels like someone else wrote them), I just used my imagination or instead references. I’m not sure if these days I would be able to write similar details. Where did you go, me from ten years ago?
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