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I disembarked at Hitachi Station and retraced the pilgrimage. In yards fenced by cement walls or concrete blocks, whenever branches and leaves spoiled the silhouettes of trees, invisible humans would prune them into cones, into tiered clouds. On facades, years of rain had streaked grime into darkened veins. The distant murmur of traffic mingled with waves crashing against shore rocks. In a parking lot, dozens of workers’ cars crammed together, their owners pouring money into insurance and gasoline to maintain vehicles bought for commuting. Telephone and power lines etched straight and curved seams against the overcast sky, converging into a tangled loom at the street’s end. Each rusted shutter and iron gate bore rectangles of faded brightness where posters had been peeled away. Landscapes of a distant country I was visiting for the last time.

Goodbye to those strolling, returning from work, emerging from school in uniforms. Actors in a mediocre play repeating generation after generation. The residents had toiled lifetimes to end up owning one of these narrow two-story homes. As I walked the sidewalk, I glimpsed a man’s silhouette passing behind wooden planks fencing his garden patch, stepping one foot after another between his house’s facade and a row of potted plants. Any citizen accepted society’s humiliations—the acid of anxiety corroding their chest, bowing in reverence to those wielding power—only to grow old among gray walls. They pushed carts full of bills into a carnival prize machine, which spat back keychains.

What could I want from this charade? What did they want? They desired promotions to command underlings. They hoarded junk. Craving immortality, they birthed heirs, hoping to snare eyes on their fleeting lives. Instead, they wrenched fresh players onto a packed stage for a ceaseless drama of misery. We had sprouted by accident, our constructs scarcely holding. More disasters and wars loomed. But the faces passing by ignored it, or hid it. They clung to living by accident, just as life tasted of rot to me by accident.

Why waste my existence pretending, only to crumble into dust? Let them keep their costumes, their roles to obey, their ingrained lies propping up societies as if built on crystal toothpicks. Some accident would slice me down, or sickness gnaw me. If I outlived statistics, I’d earn care from someone who’d prefer me dead—feeding me, bathing me, wiping my ass. Let them rot in their charade. I had the forest and my woman. I’d rot as I pleased.

I paused under the metal awning of the passageway and turned, suspecting the world had melted to black. If only the inevitable future would crash today. Beyond the opposite sidewalk’s walls, beyond the warehouse and the cement facade with its vending machines, beyond office towers and malls, dawns would flare. Thick columns of black smoke would swell until luminous mushrooms erupted. Shockwaves would surge, disintegrating buildings into breaker tides of cement, brick, metal, and glass pulverized back to stardust. As fire-clouds bloomed on the horizon like blazing brains, dust tsunamis would roar toward the warehouse across the street—but I’d have retreated into the forest like a turtle tucking into its shell. Even if bombs burned this world to ash, the shockwaves would skid over the cloudy vault above the clearing. When the last ash settled, this world where we’d wasted energy, tears, arguments, and brawls would fade to gray waste. No intelligent species visiting these ruins, nor successors emerging from ash in eons, would grasp who we were.

How many days did I weave in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark? From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy. Night blackened to tar in minutes. I forgot which weekday dawned. I wanted to forget such concepts existed.

The woman had plunged into the lagoon to dive, and I sat on the pebbled shore when hunger twisted my guts. Outside this forest, I’d eaten by rote—breakfast, lunch, dinner—but now an evolutionary alarm installed eons ago in some aquatic ancestor shook me: eat or be consumed. I touched my sunken belly, once padded by fat folds. I had to leave.

I waited for the woman to surface, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. She submerged as casually as retreating to the bathroom. When she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against me as I peeled lichen patches from her skin.

I left the clearing in darkness, fingers grazing the promised pines, their bark’s roughness a brand that I knew. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Civilization neared. I crept, stifling breath. Emerging onto the deserted street, I blinked at the glare. I hurried past a lamppost’s island of light to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines, watchful of every shifting silhouette like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes.

Next time hunger speared me, I was kissing the woman, her legs entwined with mine. Hours of mounting dizziness spiked. I rolled onto my back, gasping. She nestled on my chest and stared as if waiting for me to dress my impressions in words. If I left this forest, I’d skulk amidst cement, metal, and glass—a raccoon tipping trash bins before darting back to the trees. Against such nakedness, what did this ache for food matter?

Memories of the outside resembled yellowed photos of another country, another era. Half the album’s pages were lost; luckily, I had forgotten what they used to contain.

Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke me. My guts clung like an old balloon. I sat up, hugged my knees. I felt faint. My body was imploding, a growing vacuum in my guts sucking the organs.

I glanced over my shoulder at the clearing’s exit. The path curved between pine pillars; in the distance, trunks and foliage narrowed the path, dissolving it in a green phosphorescence. I had to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machine hunched and disheveled like a fugitive.

Sheltering here had stripped society’s makeup. Due to the lack of contrast, I had tolerated its piercing thorns and scorching fire. How could I dare to go outside? I refused to breathe that air even if my starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into my core.

The woman looped her arms around my neck, forehead against my cheek.

“You need to eat.”

“I can last.”

“How long?”

“Until hunger stops my thoughts.”

“You don’t need to endure, dummy.”

Her face suggested ignorance of pain. I meant to say her name, but struck a void. I had her face, her eyes, the certainty that she knew whom I addressed.

“I don’t want to leave.”

“I didn’t say you should.”

“I could hunt squirrels, birds. Some cultures eat spiders.”

“Feed from me.”

Her lips curved upward, as usually since I’d moved here. Would I recognize when she joked around?

“That’s… generous of you.”

The woman leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore out a handful of white flesh. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had ripped the fibers. Blood pooled.

I froze.

She offered the chunk. Her parted teeth glistened wet. Numb, I let her fold my limp fingers around the meat, that resembled a block of ham. She arched expectant brows.

Saliva drowned my tongue. I yearned to savor that flesh as much as I longed to hold the woman against me, joining our warmth like two coals in a bonfire. I brought the piece to my mouth. I could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of my fingers gripping the chunk.

I pressed my lips to the soft flesh and grazed it with my teeth. Saliva spilled from the corners of my mouth, trickling down my chin. I clenched my jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of my tongue, but when my teeth split the meat, a shudder ripped through me. Before I could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded my mouth. I tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. I devoured the rest, then I licked the juice off my fingers.

When I looked up, shame flooded me like someone caught chewing open-mouthed. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, spattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. I covered the hole with one hand, but warm blood seeped between my fingers like soup.

The woman stroked my cheek.

“It’ll grow back.”

I tried to laugh, but a whimper escaped.

“I can’t live off eating you.”

“Do you eat so much you’ll swallow me whole?”

“Plus, I’d need to buy water bottles from the machine.”

The woman twisted in my arms until she lay on her back. She cupped one breast, and squeezed the nipple between thumb and forefinger. Thick milk oozed like honey.

If turning or shifting my posture made me face the clearing’s exit, I jerked my gaze away until the path blurred at the edge of my vision. A monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if I wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush me, tear my limbs from my torso, slurp the marrow off my splintered bones. How had I entered and left this clearing without realizing it? Like exploring an abandoned asylum on a starless night.

Beyond this forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever these images and memories assailed me, patches of my brain crackled with electricity. I wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach until they whitened.

I lost track of time. My beard scratched the woman’s skin like a rake. I pushed greasy strands from my eyes. My breath reeked like a cat’s. When the woman dozed, or dove underwater, I’d slink into the trees to squat over a hole. I scrubbed my teeth with leaves that smelled fresh, but the stench of my breath lingered, as if rot had wedged between my molars. I avoided breathing near her face. When I kissed her, she never flinched.

I dreamed my teeth crumbled. Awake, I sank them into the woman’s juicy flesh, but feared that a tooth might splinter, exposing the nerves.

My sweat dried to a film that fresh sweat soaked anew. I stank like a mange-riddled stray sleeping in a landfill. I envied the woman diving into frigid, muck-thick waters. I washed in the lagoon as if at a sink, but each handful of water teemed with algae, sludge, and wriggling microbes. I scrubbed my skin while suspecting that my pores filtered civilizations of bacteria. Even after washing myself, the stench of decay seared my nostrils—a reek that clung to me like leeches, that the woman maybe smelled all the time as if I sprayed it into her face.

Lying beside me, her chest rose and fell. Beneath her lids, her eyes darted. I’d spend my life watching her, but a bolt of pain struck. I dragged the anchor of years wasted in a world sliding into ruin. I wanted to believe we’d lie together forever, but I deceived myself by pretending that the rules spared this clearing. Like how on my first visits I’d known when to go home, another border neared. A matter of when. Knowing this rotted me like poison, and pain drowned my eyes. How would I exist elsewhere, without the woman? If I ever had the chance and it found me strong enough, I’d prune my past and every foray outside, so all I’d ever know included her.

I was kissing the inside of her thigh when my stench dizzyied me. I lifted my head, ashamed. Her eyes peered between the curves of her breasts—whether agreeing or staring because I’d stared, I didn’t know.

I rested my temple against her thigh.

“I wish I didn’t stink.”

“You could always bathe.”

“In stagnant water? I’d turn into a Petri dish of disease.”

“Am I one?”

“No filth sticks to you. Not even my stench. But if I plunged in that water for a second, I’d emerge a lichen-caked sludge-man, and never could I scrub off the grime.”

---

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

Today’s song is “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky.

Isolating, self-sustaining, all-consuming.