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Through the train window flowed a blurry stream of single-family homes, their walls topped by conifers pruned into cloud-like shapes. As I yawned and dug a fingertip into my tear duct, two toad statues splashed green across the cement-and-asphalt vista. They perched on pillars marking the gate of a villa. Seconds after the train had passed them, their green lingered.

The headphones poured a deluge into my ears, a barrage of thunder. The soundtrack accompanied the queue of white cars and vans waiting at a railroad crossing, a woman trudging down the parallel road’s center laden with bags, and utility poles stretching cables over rooftops every dozen meters. To the left glided the occasional two-story cubic building, its facade blackened in streaks where years of rain had trickled. The train descended into a cement-walled trench with a grid-like pattern.

I slumped into the seat and blinked. Was I witnessing unfamiliar landscapes, or did my exhaustion—cracking my mind like an old rubber band—prevent me linking these views to my memories? I could have swapped this procession of villas and gray buildings for any within kilometers, yet I’d never noticed those crouching toad statues, green as amusement park props, poised as if to leap.

The train stopped at a station. Doors hissed open. When I stood, the work folder resting on my thigh slid to the floor. I scrambled to grab it and slipped through the doors just before they closed.

Hitachi. A city I’d never visited. On the route map, Hitachi lay as many stops from the office as my apartment did, but in the opposite direction.

As I wandered the station, I raked my scalp with fingernails but stopped short of tugging. Images of leaving the office and boarding the train had dissolved into a lagoon of identical memories. All day my eyelids had weighed anchors; three coffees barely kept me conscious. Why be surprised if, half-somnambulant as I lived, I’d boarded the wrong platform?

The next return train would arrive in forty-five minutes. The journey home would take twice as long. I’d eat dinner perched on my bed, sleep, and rise early to squeeze into another train bound for work.

The PA system’s echoes pierced my headphones’ wall of rain and thunder. A buoyant, game-show-host voice announced departures, arrivals, and safety protocols.

I drifted to the station’s far end. Before a glass wall stood metallic benches mimicking geometric shapes. A woman in a fitted suit pressed her phone to her ear while staring through her reflection. Two middle-aged men with hiking backpacks sat slouched on a bench. Trudging past, I glimpsed a strip of gray-clouded sky and ocean rising beyond. As I circled the benches, I realized the people had vanished. I collapsed onto a backless metal block.

Serpentine foam coiled around pillars of an elevated highway; waves slid in white ripples before dissolving against a beach’s gray stones. Plastic debris littered the shore. Cars materialized at one edge of the glass and vanished at the other. Beyond the beach sprawled a puzzle of single-story villas and gardens. No movement betrayed inhabitants.

I rubbed my face, numbed by fatigue. My limbs hung heavy as a school backpack. I’d tripped myself again, for the umpteenth time. Some presence within me loathed me, waited for weakened defenses to sabotage me. How it benefited, I didn’t know. Maybe it thought I deserved it.

Sitting forty-five minutes only to sit another ninety disgusted me. Days limped by in cycles of sitting and battling tedium—that dreadful crawl of minutes—until I earned a pause.

I stood and stretched. Exiting the station, I aimed for the overpass stairs leading downtown, but above the station roof loomed office towers and elaborate mall complexes. I envisioned streams of shoppers hauling bags, and white-shirted office workers. I’d exceeded my daily tolerance for people.

Walking away, I sought any appealing route. To my left, walled gardens bristled with pruned shrubs and trees; to my right, the station’s gray metal blocks striped with sky-reflecting windows. Passing a house half-painted green and beige, I found a dirt parking lot and an ocean band leveled with the horizon. For dozens of meters I walked past clusters of cars awaiting commuters.

My headphones sustained a wall of rain and thunder—a window to some parallel dimension silencing this world’s incursions. These telephone and power poles with their catenary cables arcing over the sidewalks, the two-story buildings housing ground-floor shops—they belonged to an immersive film powerless to touch me. Restaurants, a dentist, a costume shop streamed by as poles and wires multiplied. Beyond a hotel, I hurried through an intersection clotted with white-and-gray cars and truck hulks.

Wherever I looked, I’d missed by hundredths of a second how someone filled voids with this scenery. Every raised wall, every cleared path herded me onward.

In gravel stretches between houses, veins of green clung to facades and cement walls. Some residents kept pruned trees in bathroom-sized gardens, planters bordering sidewalks. Faded paint on buildings’ bases had eroded to bare cement. Bricks and concrete blocks supported AC units. In one entryway, two spindly shrubs—trimmed into stepped shapes—huddled against walls like doormen clearing passage.

I stopped before a row of vending machines nestled in a cement wall’s alcove. Alongside soda and water, one sold canned coffee, another whisky bottles.

Why had I stopped? Did I want a drink?

A presence pressed my back like a giant eye focusing on me. Across the narrow road stood two beige homes with corroded metal sheds. To their right hung an electronics store sign on rain-darkened wooden planks. And between the buildings, a metal sheet roofed a passage. The sidewalk beyond yielded to a path of flattened grass. I hunched and glimpsed ferns crowding the shadowed trail.

I glanced for witnesses. In a nearby lot, a man unloaded packages from a van parked inside a warehouse.

I crossed the road and hurried into the passageway as if sheltering from rain, crunching pine needles and twigs underfoot. It smelled of damp vegetation. To either side, a clover field faded into gloom.

I removed my headphones and switched off the player. A breeze hissed. As I pressed on, the darkness lifted. Hangar-ceiling-like light fell. The pillars ahead resolved into striated, wine-red pines soaring three or four stories. Scraggly trees filled gaps between them with effervescent green.

I followed the path, gaze turned to a granite-gray sky. Its light blurred leaves that a breeze stirred. Birds with sky-blue bodies and navy heads trilled from treetops. I climbed grassy slopes between ferns and plants that spilled onto the path, grazing my pants and arms. Leaves fluttered down like glowing snowflakes.

The forest thickened. Trunk columns alternated with shifting green patches in the undergrowth. Overhead, layers of branches choked the remaining white gaps.

I emerged into a clearing: grass and fern clusters like paused explosions. A swampy pond spanned half the space, its scum-coated surface feeding the encircling pines’ roots. By the bank, a moss-patched boulder—lounger-sized—bore an ethnic European woman in a white dress embroidered like a tablecloth, with circle sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Her pale-pink skin suggested years of avoiding the sun. Blotches mottled her skin as if splashed by color-burning liquid. Wet golden locks darkened her dress’s shoulders to her chest. Her bare feet, soles creased, clung with grass blades.

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Author’s note: this novella was originally written in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Alison” by Slowdive.

This is the second of my Serious Six, the novellas I wrote back when I believed that if I did it well enough and insisted on sending them around, someone would want to publish them. It didn’t happen. Chronologically, the previously translated novellas Smile and Trash in a Ditch were the third and sixth respectively.

A few years before I wrote this novella, I exhausted my very limited energies as a programmer, working a 9-to-5 at a business park that demanded plenty of commute time. Back then, I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with autism nor had my pituitary gland tumor detected. I tried to pass as normal while constantly punishing myself because I couldn’t manage to do what seemingly came so easily to others. My hormones were out of whack due to the pituitary issues, and kept me in mental states similar to those of a woman during pregnancy and lactation (TMI: I also lactated). Anyway, I kept passing out on the train and the moment I returned home. I felt like I was sleepwalking everywhere. More often than not, when I stared at an approaching train, I fantasized about jumping onto the tracks.

One of those days, instead of getting on the right train, I ended up taking the one that led in the opposite direction. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, for a good while I stared at the views in an oniric state that prevented me from figuring out if I didn’t recognize those vistas or if my brain was out of whack. Once I realized the mess I had gotten myself in, I sat alone at an isolated train station about forty kilometers into the depths of my province, a town I had never visited. I remember a middle-aged woman approaching me and asking me a question in Basque; I’m from a border town where you’re extremely unlikely to be asked anything in Basque. Hell, these days you can’t even understand what a third of the population are saying.

Eventually my subconscious urged me to write this strange story, in which a perpetually tired salaryman found a sanctuary of nature, along with a strange woman, amidst cement and decay. This whole thing was like a fever dream. Because I hadn’t chosen most of the details, it took me years to come to grips with what that whole story was about, as well as the identity of the woman.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. It’s very different from Smile and Trash in a Ditch.