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We rolled in the grass, rubbing sweat and soil onto each other’s skin as her tongue probed my mouth, and the part of my brain that believed itself in charge checked out. But sometimes my consciousness resurfaced and noted that while I kissed the woman’s breasts, I bit and tore at her flesh, digging deeper until I should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung. Instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of veins, arteries, tendons, organs, cartilage, or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, I sank my teeth into her back and gnawed off a chunk. I shredded skin like ripping a hangnail. My mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down my throat. I craved the next mouthful of meat.

Lying beside the woman, my belly full, I traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with my fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever I bit, I found white flesh. Even so, seconds after tearing off a piece, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when I looked back, her body had stitched itself together. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.

Once, I devoured her neck to the extent that I nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with my tongue, as she bucked her hips to my mouth, I chewed into her womb and beyond, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. I ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot dangling from the end. I shoved myself backward on my ass, driving my heels into the earth, and screamed. But when I dared to glance back at the woman, she stood on both legs, and my hand gripped air.

With her lower lip caught between mine and her nails gouging my back, memories flashed: a past where I’d never known this grass, this clearing, the lagoon, or the woman. A jailer hunting me to drag me back. It clawed me awake, forcing me to confront the grimy, stinking body I inhabited, to question the future that awaited me.

I pressed my eyelids into the woman’s mane. I wanted to whimper like an animal. That afternoon long ago, boarding the wrong train, daring to venture into the passage—I considered these my only strokes of luck, my wisest choices. But if I lost her, I’d spend my life haunted by memories of us sprawled on this grass, lips fused, skin pressed to molecular closeness.

Her face absorbed my anguish as if following a rehearsed script. The pale blond of her brows bled into her pink skin, and her hairline glistened with sweat. Saliva dampened the corners of her parted lips as she breathed like recovering from a marathon. Under her patchy-white skin sprawled a web of capillaries, circuitry proving life pulsed within.

I wanted to bite off her nose. To scoop out her eyes with my tongue and chew them. I’d hollow her face chunk by chunk until a crater of white meat gaped, framed by her hairline, ears, and jaw.

The woman fixed me with an animal gaze, stripped of the stratagems and counterattacks other people hid. I loved a creature who held her breath for dozens of minutes, who never ate or drank, who regenerated any body part in a blink. How had I deserved the privilege of knowing her?

I brushed the white blotch on her cheekbone.

“Why me?”

“Why you what?”

“Why did I find this clearing and get to love you? Why did you appear for me, someone this mediocre?”

The woman glanced away. She raised her hands between our faces, picking mud from under a nail.

“I was here. You chose to come.”

I remembered wandering Hitachi. The passage to the grassy path had lured me before I even looked up.

“When I found the passage, I knew I needed to lose myself alone in nature. For those minutes, I’d reclaim my freedom. Meeting you, talking to you, I realized I’d found what deserved my focus and energy. A real person in this hollow world where everyone’s guided by lies.”

The woman slid her nose along the bridge of mine. The question hovering, the one I daily forced underwater, overrode my preference for silence.

“Where did you come from?”

She flinched. Clamped a hand over my mouth, but I took her wrist and eased it away. Her flute-like voice trembled.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Out of curiosity?”

“In case one day… you need to return.”

It struck her like a fist to the face. Her smile died, her features twisted. Tears welled. Her Adam’s apple bobbed.

A knife slit my heart.

The woman kissed me, and I wanted to forget I’d asked, but I pulled back until my vision framed her face. Tears from her right eye streaked that temple, dripping into grass; tears from the left rode her nose’s bridge.

I wanted to scream.

“How long is left?”

“Not long.”

“Months? Weeks?”

“I leave tonight.”

I clamped my arms around her as if to wring air from her lungs. She dug her nails into my shoulder blades.

“I asked because I needed to know,” I said. “Stay.”

“It doesn’t matter. You know I belong elsewhere.”

“Don’t say that. Who’s forcing you?”

“Who forces the moon to orbit? Who forces atoms into molecules? Now that you require explanations… I must go.”

Clutching her, I rolled onto my back and back again.

“You won’t leave. I won’t let go.”

Her tears speckled my corneas.

“You’ll blink and find yourself hugging air.”

“How could I return to that world? You’ve never seen its tarnished colors, its counterfeit emotions. What good would come of enduring there? I need to forget. I want no face and no voice but yours, here among these trees and water. The exit should seal. Why should we accept that happiness always slips away? As long as we stay in this clearing, no one will find us. No one will bother us again.”

The woman sat up, stretching her legs beside mine, and pulled me to face her. The tear-streaked glaze of her eyes slammed into my gut. She laid palms on my shoulders and opened her mouth, but I trampled her words.

“Would you rather stay?”

“You doubt it?”

“I don’t know how you think. I’m not sure you wanted me to get close.”

“I don’t want it to end either. But you can choose. Come with me. I’ll show you reality as it should’ve been. I’ll engulf you. You’ll never yearn for anything else again.”

When I stood, she mirrored me. Her bare feet stepped onto mine. I pressed my brow to hers, stroked her cheek. In my mind, a lighthouse beam sliced fog.

“Will you come?” she asked.

“I’ll follow.”

“Anywhere it leads? No matter what you have to leave behind?”

I mashed my lips to hers. Breaking away cost me.

“What choice remains? Breathing that rotten world’s air, surrounded by organic robots? I’ll follow. With luck, I’ll forget every minute wasted outside.”

She gripped my nape and kissed me like she’d devour me, suck out my guts. My mind dissolved. When I surfaced, she was leading me hand-in-hand toward the lagoon. Pebbles stuck to my soles. A white blotch spreading from her lower back covered half her right ass cheek. She advanced naked, holding my hand with her arm stretched behind her, as if the dress she’d worn when we met had been someone else’s shame to conceal. She waded into the fur of algae and mud, that snarled around her legs and waist, sealing every glimpse of the water it covered.

The winter-ocean chill numbed my legs and crotch, prickling my skin with gooseflesh. My muscles clenched, my lungs fought to hold air. Fleshy eel-like shapes brushed my legs under the algae.

The woman stopped and turned. She glowed like a child on Christmas morning, though wet trails crossed her cheeks. The algae fur grazed the curves of her breasts. She bear-hugged me. Compared to the water, her skin scalded.

I swallowed, jaw trembling.

“We’ll dive into darkness.”

Her laughter leaked.

“Feels that way.”

She pressed her forehead to mine. Each streak and fleck of blue, white, and green in her irises swelled like under a microscope. I could map every vein stamped in her sclerae.

She lowered her voice.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s the only certainty I’ve had.”

She smiled. Dove backwards, yanking me under. Sound died. I expected an explosion of cold to overwhelm me, but I had plunged into water warm as if bathing in the woman’s liquefied remains. I opened my eyes to crystalline water. We sank spinning headfirst. Above our feet, a horizon of water bloomed, lit by a coin of light—a sun choked by clouds.

Liters of water fought to flood my nostrils. Our bodies should’ve floated, but we accelerated downwards. Amid bubbles spewing from our noses, the woman grinned, mouth wide. She locked her legs around my lower back and squeezed.

Crushing pressure was flattening me like a collapsed wall. My throat spasmed, urging me to inhale even though I’d drown my empty lungs.

I tried to slide my cheek over hers to catch her gaze, in case it convinced me to override my survival instinct, but she hid her face. She clung like a monkey to its mother. Did she understand she would kill me? Maybe she thought I, too, could hold my breath for minutes. Or had she planned to drown, dragging me down with her?

I stifled a convulsion. I wanted decades with her. If she’d chosen to drown, why would I live? We’d vanish into the depths, our entwined corpses rotting in the dark.

When I opened my mouth, liters flooded my stomach. As coughs wracked me, I breathed salty liquid that inflated my lungs. My vision blurred with red static. Needles stabbed behind my nose.

I kicked, thrashed. The woman slackened her leg-lock, slipped her grip. Her chest peeled from mine. As I flailed, her hands scrambled for purchase. I shoved her collarbones. We were drifting apart, but her hand, sliding down my left arm, snagged my watch, its buckle biting my wrist like it’d sever tendons.

My lungs threatened to rupture. My consciousness was snuffing out like a dying flame. I fumbled the watch clasp until it unlatched, then shoved her chest. We floated in opposite directions.

Her hand, at arm’s length, released my watch. Her face warped into the agony of someone shot by a loved one.

Below, as if an abyssal sun glowed, a bare mountain rose. Rockfaces were carved into steps; walls featured clusters of cubed buildings and towers. Stairways vanished into the mountain through inky black voids. Pacing the steps, roaming past the buildings, smeared figures of people milled about.

I kicked and paddled upward through crushing pressure. My shredded lungs irrigated my guts, bloating me.

My arms breached into air. Vision blackened like peering up from a well’s depths. I gagged and spewed water. Choking, convulsing, I staggered toward the shore while peeling algae from my skin. The water tugged my legs like a drain’s pull.

At the shore, I tripped and collapsed onto clattering pebbles. The ground shook. A rock-splitting quake boomed.

I rolled, muscles locking as I tried to rise. I sneezed, I spat water.

The lagoon clenched like a sphincter. It shrank to a sewer-mouth’s width. As I stood, the land contracted like a rug yanked taut.

The lagoon vanished, leaving a dwindling circle of trembling pebbles.

I ran into dusk, following the snaking path through pines that slid toward me. I stumbled through waving ferns, crashed into trunks, lurched at others. Canopies showered pine needles; low branches lashed my face. Trunks erupted, firing bark shapnel. Gusts whipped my soaked body as if the clearing inhaled. As I fought toward the exit, a force was sucking me, even my thoughts, toward the center, in a mute command to surrender.

The edges separating pines from grass blurred. The colors bled from the trees, plants and grass, shuddering towards my back into a myriad of frayed ends. My body stretched.

I sprinted toward the passage’s metal-plated mouth wedged between buildings, just meters ahead.

---

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

Today’s song is “Pagan Poetry” by Björk.

These days, I eagerly drown.