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I must have been thirteen when I was startled awake by my father barging into my bedroom. His brown hair, disheveled and matted with sweat, as well as his beard, sported patches the color of dusty cobwebs. He stopped mid-stride. His gleaming eyes widened in their sunken pits, his wrinkly face scrunched up. His cheeks flushed crimson as he glared at my crotch.

I remembered: an explosion of ecstasy and relief had knocked me unconscious. My inner thighs were coated in dried juice, and my folds still felt puffy from the punishment I had meted upon them with the sticky dildo I was holding.

I sat up with a jolt, horrified that my father was getting an eyeful of my pussy. As I stuttered an apology and scrambled to cover myself, the old man let out a strangled grunt, lunged and struck me square in the face. The whiplash cracked my vertebrae and blanched my vision. An overwhelming pain swelled behind my shattered nose as if I had inhaled icy seawater. I was yanked off the bed onto the wooden floor, where my father delivered blow after blow as if I were a piñata. Darkness was pouring in like oily tar. I must have missed my father’s footsteps leaving the room; I was writhing, sobbing and bleeding when he dropped a damp washcloth on my face.

“Quit whining, little pervert,” he said. “You’re lucky I caught you first.”

In one of the first memories that my defective brain bothered to save, I was sprawled out face down across my mother’s lap as she spanked my bare bottom. She’d smack me so hard that the shock traveled along my spine, and the stinging skin of my ass cheeks broke into droplets of blood that dribbled down my thighs. I squealed, I pleaded for forgiveness. My tears seeped into the fibers of the living room carpet. I begged to know what I had done wrong to deserve this pain, but my mother repeated, “This is the only way to get back on track for a better life.” After her wrath subsided, while she caught her breath and my ass burned bright red, she would squeeze me against her chest. Her cheap perfume cloyed my nostrils. Her fingers trailed along the sensitive skin of my back to knead my buttocks. She whispered, “I know you’ll make me proud someday, my baby starfish.” I wanted to ask when would that day come, when would I be worthy of a loving embrace.

Ages of this world have come and gone. Try infinite loneliness. I remember floating inside the amniotic sac, inside the womb, as an embryo. Tiny hands grasped at the umbilical cord. Warmth encompassed me in a soft embrace, a protective fluid that buffered me from the horrors outside, that flowed down my nostrils and caressed my tongue with its velvety texture. The baby starfish swam inside its mother’s tummy, and when it heard music, it waved its tube feet. I was waiting for something, or someone. Perhaps it remains within me, that insatiable longing.

I have been shot, stabbed, strangled, drowned, electrocuted, exsanguinated, eviscerated, crushed by boulders, frozen solid, blown apart, thrown off a roof, run over by a truck, trampled, hanged, crucified, burned at the stake, boiled in oil, decapitated by guillotine, impaled on a pike, poisoned with cyanide, flayed alive, torn to shreds, eaten and excreted. Yet, I still operate a flesh-and-bone mecha from the command center housed within my skull. A couple of years ago this body passed the vertex of its parabola from growth to decay, and began the accelerating descent that one day, turned into an arthritic hag, a withered husk covered in sores and boils, will land me in a grave, to linger as bones with flesh clinging to them while I join the cosmic reservoir of carbon and silicon and phosphorus and hydrogen in the great big mess known as Earth.

My unsteady legs want to drop me like dead weight. Those intrusive daydreams had blocked off the stream of colors and sounds and crazy that reality dishes out, in which I’ve spent a lifetime wading neck-deep, but I feel it rushing back in through my pores, flooding me. I hunch over and hide my face. Some tectonic shift has shaken my mindscape, plunging the plate of my sanity into the ocean, locking it a thousand kilometers below sea level, down into the pitch-black, icy trenches of despair. My brain craves to squander what remains of its energy running in an idle loop, turning over and over on itself.

“What the fuck is wrong with you now?” the blob spits out.

My chest tightens. No, I can’t bear to look up at that rotten blancmange sprinkled with eyeballs. If I’m doomed to receive the visits of sentient monsters from some interdimensional abyss, why couldn’t I have met a half-woman, half-octopus who used her tentacles to draw intricate artwork on the seabed? Or a man with the wings of a bat, who spent his nights soaring through the sky, seeking out those in need of an angelic guide. Or a half-woman, half-serpent who became a healer, milking her knowledge of venom and antidotes to save lives. At least a witch with a vagina of glittering gold. Instead, a black-humored goo-pile, like the foul sludge from my mother’s bowels, got its shit together and came stumbling through a dimensional rift to annoy me.

I’d love to tell my former co-worker to piss off, but my voice would push against the lump in my throat. An insurgent faction within my mind is attempting a coup d’état to usurp control over my nervous system. I turn away from the contaminated wall, then I stagger past the wastebasket where my vomit must have cooled. With my trembling hands, I pull Jacqueline’s chair and I slump onto it, making the chair squeak and skitter closer to the window.

As cold pellets of water splash against the glass, the office lights are contouring in white those raindrops that streak down in zigzag over the black canvas of this night. Amidst the pitter-patter of rain, the wind howls and thunder grumbles. Toss thy dildo at the reflection in that cracked mirror.

The outside world awaits me in a superposition. In how many of those probabilities has everything already come to an end?

I close my eyes. I take measured breaths of fetid air to steady my racing heart. The cacophony of noise and colors fades into the background, and my mind starts painting on the void. A cabin, its cedar boards grown mossy and bowed with age, its shingles weather-beaten by decades of harsh winds and rainstorms, its wooden shutters hanging crooked on their rusty hinges, stands on a plot of land by Crystal Lake, surrounded with snow-laden fir trees. I’m sitting next to my father on a bed covered in blood and hair and bits of bone. As usual, the old man is naked. He’s combing the hairs of his forearm with his fingernails.

I clench my eyes tighter. In the vast, dark, cold ocean of my mind, an intricate tapestry blooms as it unravels, stretching to infinity. Galaxies shine like jewels, glued to trillions of purplish-pink, bioluminescent threads woven in a cosmic web.

I’m an infinitesimal starfish suspended on a silken thread over an abyss. My lips have been sewn shut with tiny sutures by my surgeon goddess. As Her glowing, blood-red gaze penetrates my consciousness, I expand through the vortex of Her web.

A silver-white flash dazzles me. I’m melting. My cells burst and ooze with viscous juices, and my atoms break down into electrons, protons and neutrons, until only my ghost remains. A phantom, a specter in the void, a lost soul drifting through the endless expanse of space alone.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “Oh Sister” by Neutral Milk Hotel, “Made-up Dreams” by Built to Spill, “How Does it Feel” by Roy Harper, “Always This Way” by Laura Marling, “Fallin’ Rain” by Link Wray, and “It’s Happening Again” by Agnes Obel.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout the novel. A hundred and forty-six songs so far. Check them out.

You would love to hear Leire narrating this troublesome chapter, wouldn’t you? Maybe you would not, but regardless, here’s the link to the audiochapter.

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I’m thrust back to that October night in my former home, a madhouse of lurking shadows. Spellbound, I’m staring at the shabby, demon-spawned horse that stood on his hind legs in front of my busted living room window. His mangy coat, crisscrossed by scars, reeked of rot. His brain and nervous system must have been atrophied, maybe vestigial. He had headbutted the windowpane, so his forelock was matted with blood that flowed down his forehead, between his bulging eyes, which were black as midnight oceans, and along the long slope of his face. Through his puffing, the gaping holes of his nostrils blew drops and strings of blood, splattering the shards of glass strewn on the floor. A foul green pus oozed from the jagged wound where his missing genitals ought to be. The horse opened his jaws wide, exposing dagger-sharp teeth, and let out a mournful bray.

Alberto the blob shakes, making his dozens of eyeballs swing and jostle in their gooey sockets.

“Poor Spike, he was unprepared to handle a lunatic like you, and too eager to help if that meant protecting his pals. I never knew him as well as the professor did, but he always struck me as a good guy, the kind of pushover that could irritate you with the lengths he went to accommodate others. He didn’t deserve any of this shit, and now he’s lost to wander madly for eternity.”

My mind is going numb. I avert my gaze from the malevolent glop and his dozens of eyeballs, which are focused, laserlike, on my hunched self. I fear that if the blob blames me again for that horse’s mental collapse, I may break down in tears.

“Wh-why a horse?”

“Why not?” the blob croaks, his voice a cacophony of mucus and slime. “If you are forced to slough off your human form, you may as well become a horse. I’d rather be a majestic animal capable of trampling people to death.”

“That’s a horsey way to put it. Nobody would give a damn if you stepped on your own excrement, and horses care more about their hooves than their souls.”

The blob snickers.

“Do you hold a grudge against equines?”

“Not at all, even though a stallion once pinned my mother to the ground with his steaming member while the rest of the herd feasted on her entrails. Horses may lack empathy and compassion, but they know how to survive in this fucked-up world. They are also a key component in the food chain. However, do I hold a grudge against deformed and putrid horses? I should have despised them on principle, but Spike held a special place in my heart. Anyway, you know what I meant: why a horse instead of a giraffe, or a caribou?”

“The professor suggested that it depended on the person’s self-image. What we truly feel or believe about ourselves, beyond conscious recognition, becomes flesh. Our current forms incorporate elements of decay and suffering because we are always aware that our efforts will be curtailed by death, as much as we’d love to forget it, or deceive ourselves.”

I rub my chin and squint.

“Spike didn’t have a dick. What does that mean?”

“It means he couldn’t get himself off.” He chuckles. “Was it so important to you for his horse form to be capable of ejaculating?”

I fold my arms, annoyed at the blob’s frivolous answer.

“I’d say so, yes. Whenever I caught a glimpse of that jagged scar down south, a chill ran down my spine. Besides, nobody should deny any mammal their primary pleasure.”

The blob sweeps his dozens of gazes around the office. When he focuses back on me, an elongating rope of goo breaks from his underside and plops into a puddle.

“Spike showed up deformed and dickless. What did that illuminate about his self-esteem?”

“I see. An unlovable workhorse that wasn’t even built properly to fulfill his role as a slave to the system. So he was a horse for horses’ sake and a horse for his own sake.”

The blob snorts.

“A sad example of human potential, for sure. The guy even avoided using his real name; he referred to himself by some ancient IRC handle. Is that a symptom of profound self-loathing?”

“Perhaps that’s how horses communicate nowadays.”

“Or he believed that he wasn’t worthy of an authentic name.”

“That is plausible. His low self-esteem manifested as a tenebrous desire to lose himself in the abyss of a nameless existence, to exist unnoticed as inconsequential flotsam. Anyway, what is IRC?”

“Have I become obsolete? It’s short for Internet Relay Chat. Late nineties, early two thousands way of communicating for nerds and horny teens.”

“That’s why Spike referred to himself as IRC?”

“No, that’s why he called himself Spike!” His dozens of eyeballs joggle around as they glitter menacingly. “Whatever. Back to the point: these horrid forms are creative incarnations of our self-image. That’s the professor’s working hypothesis. Some days I’m inclined to believe that the universe is playing a joke on us, maybe to highlight the absurdity of our lives. I used to come to such conclusions even when I could rely on skin to contain my oozing insides.”

“Sure, I hate to see your phlegm-like innards leaking out, but of course you’d rather believe that the universe has conspired to torment us all the while.” I gesture towards the slimy infestation, the many-eyed, squishy bag of rotting guts at which I’ve been staring unflinchingly. “Your bizarre form doesn’t speak wonders about you.”

“I suppose not, but do you choose what reality you accept based on how it suits your vanity?”

“I rarely accept reality. And don’t change the subject! This isn’t about the universe, buddy. This is about you, a lonely and disturbed man-slime.”

The blob glugs as it wobbles from side to side, slopping gunk onto the ruined carpet, expelling a gust of putrescent gas that reminds me of rotten cabbage and anus breath.

“Well, my self-image did falter regularly. Even now I feel my gut digesting what remains of that self-esteem. It’s getting all sludgy inside me.”

“I bet.”

“In my youth, I went to see a psychiatrist for my problems. What about you, huh?” he asks in a piqued tone. “Were you ever analyzed, diagnosed and treated by a proverbial horse doctor? ‘Hey, why the long face?'” He laughs insanely. “Because if you want to talk about disturbed minds, you need a shrink far more than I do. Who knows, you may come to shed layers of your own repulsive form.”

“Thanks for the unsolicited advice, but my mental dysfunction can only be cured by a bullet.” I sigh. “It seems that the three of us, collections of fluids and biochemistry that occupy a certain volume in the space-time continuum, are overgrown clusters of germs with a low opinion of ourselves, damaged creatures in need of a hand and a quickie, who grew up as half-person, half-slime in this fucked-up society of one-size-fits-all humanoids. We should have been born to shine as noble steeds.”

I recall a night when I wandered into an old tavern. In a dimly lit, dusty corner, a deformed horse was twisting his elongated neck and torso to accommodate his position atop a worn wooden stool. He was munching on fried chips. The hazy light of a dying bulb highlighted the scars that crisscrossed his once majestic coat. Other patrons were stealing glances at the equine as they traded whispers and hushed theories about the life he must have led before being confined to this hole in the wall, where no self-respecting animal deserved to dwell.

I approached the bar. Despite the horse’s atrophied forelegs, his stench and his dribbling mouth, he possessed a quiet dignity. Melancholy flickered in his bulging black eyes. I recognized a fellow weary soul that sought solace in the embrace of a cold beer, or in my case, a mug of warm milk.

I sat on the stool next to his, and we drank together until the sun awakened from its coma. The horse gazed at the reflections in the dwindling amber liquid of his glass while we talked about life’s inanity, about how little we enjoyed our time as half-people in this world where only whole persons mattered. I have retained a single sentence that the horse uttered from his slobbering muzzle: “Your dreams are wishes you lack the courage to express.”

After I shuffled out of the tavern, a pain ached deep in my chest, as if someone were stabbing my heart with a needle. I miss that broken-down ungulate, my friend, more than words can describe.

Spike suffered like me, like any being that ever existed and will ever exist. Back when he stalked me, I believed that he wanted me to become an accomplice and abettor to his villainous deeds. I had become terribly vigilant of every hurt from which I needed to protect myself; after all, what had my parents achieved except teach me to distrust others? Wary of every bump on the sidewalk and every scrap of litter, of every stranger that crossed my path and every corner I turned, I was afraid to leave my apartment. I pictured savage beasts leaping out of the darkness to strike with claws sharpened by broken bottles. We see in the world a reflection of ourselves.

I kept to myself whenever possible, I hid whenever necessary, and I prevented others from getting too close. I welcomed them believing I was insane, as long as they left me alone. I refused to face in the mirror those tears and scars, and that black ink from the inscriptions of self-hatred. My mind was my only refuge against the all-consuming abyss, the sole weapon against a loneliness that threatened to drown me.

Spike was a vulnerable soul who carried his broken heart around like a primed grenade. He neglected to feed himself, he let his hooves grow long and scratchy as he wasted away, and he killed himself because I’m an unbridled machine of ruination that I can barely steer, destined to hound more and more victims to insanity or suicide.

Can’t I bring everything back like I’ve always done?

A white coat shimmers under a sunny sky, a silky tail lashes around, hooves tread on the sands of time. Show me a beautiful horse. Let that beast look me in the eye and share his name. Tell me he’s proud of what I’ve made out of him.

Author’s note: today’s songs are “A Horse With No Name” by America, “Caribou” by Pixies, “Australia” by The Shins, and “Kim’s Caravan” by Courtney Barnett.

I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and forty songs so far. Check them out. I didn’t add “Caribou” because it was already there, but I made a reference to the song.

Are you following the audiochapters I have made for this whole sequence so far? No? Anyway, here’s the latest one.