• Next part (2)

Where the grass and ferns grow, twenty-one years ago I stumbled upon a circle of broken branches and blackened grass, as though a boulder had crushed them, sealing them from the sun until they rotted. Two beech trees guarded the circle. Their branches sprouted at ground level, as if they had grown several meters underground before rupturing into the air. Along their trunks swelled knotted protrusions—wooden shoulders—stretching horizontal, splintered limbs. A pelt of damp moss cloaked the bark, and between those green tufts peeked fungal scabs and the leaves of creeping vines.

In the forest’s stillness, someone watched.

I halted and held my breath. Crossing my arms, I clutched the portfolio to my chest like a shield.

An owl hooted. A squirrel scampered through dry leaves. The undergrowth crackled from some collision. A man’s lament seeped through the air echolike, as if rising from a cavern.

In every knot of the trees, faces etched themselves into the wood, but when I focused, they vanished. Through the foliage stirred by the breeze drifted a procession of shadows, encircling me.

I stepped closer to the ring of ashen grass, but an impulse repelled me—a silent thunder’s thrum, a force that might sweep me away. The man had fallen silent. I rose onto my toes, straining to glimpse who watched me, who had hidden when my sneakers crunched the underbrush. Behind the beeches, blurring the forest, the branches of their kin intertwined and overlapped above the green of leaves and moss, forming a bone-white latticework.

“Come out. It’s alright.”

A beetle scuttled through the leaf litter. The gaze of two invisible eyes lanced into me.

I raised my voice.

“I know you’re here.”

“Leave.”

It reverberated like an echo ricocheting through corridors before striking me. A voice unlike mine—clear and brittle—or my Father’s and Mother’s. I’d assumed I’d never hear another. But I straightened up. The man had ordered me gone.

“You’ve found my refuge. One of them.”

“Yours? Did you build it? Buy it?”

The voice seeped from the air two meters above the circle of withered grass, sheltered by the beeches. I sidestepped, hoping a new angle might reveal the speaker.

“I’ve come dozens of times. No one else ever occupied it.”

“And that makes it yours? As I said, leave, girl.”

“I meant to spend time here. My presence doesn’t mean you must go. Or hide. I won’t harm you.”

When the man snorted, an invisible bubble swelled from the dead grass, warping the sight of the beeches before sweeping through me. It stung my face and hands like lying in nettles. The distorted haze settled, but my skin prickled. I scrubbed my face with a sleeve.

“You won’t harm me,” the voice said. “How reassuring.”

I gnawed my cheek. When I opened my mouth, my lips smacked.

“What do you want?”

“Why would I want anything?”

“No one comes here. Three days ago, that black circle didn’t exist. You’re here for a reason.”

“I want you gone. To leave me in peace.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you here.”

“Tough luck. I came to draw. I’ll use the time I have left, even if you’ve decided to steal my spot.”

“Draw? What is there to draw?”

Scrambling to justify my sketches, I flipped open the portfolio and shuffled papers. What scenes might appease this stranger? Which would shame me?

The portfolio slid from my grip onto the grass, papers fanning out. I crouched, then brushed twigs and bark from the drawings. As I restacked them, I chose a scene I’d sketched here: the stream behind the beeches, no wider than a forearm, transformed into a river fit for ships. Along its banks gushed millwheels. A village crowded both shores. Spiral staircases scaled the beech trunks, now kilometers tall. Walkways and lookout posts sprouted from every branch, watchtowers mounted on their elbows. Silhouettes in armor scanned the horizon from their security posts.

In the foggy distance smudged in pencil loomed a creature spanning hundreds of meters, its face black, limbs thick as cannons. Iron spikes bristled like fur. Fire snorted from its nostrils. The composition hinted that even if the sentries sounded alarms, the monster would trample roofs and wooden walls.

I lifted the sketch and turned it toward the dead grass.

“I like how this one turned out.”

I held the page for seconds. Shifting my weight, I felt awkward, as if coerced to hold a heavy bag until its owner returned, and I’d waited half an hour. Though the man’s gaze probed my face, the angle likely hid the drawing’s details. I waved the sheet in an arc.

When the man murmured, his voice rumbled like a landslide.

I bowed my head, then slipped the drawing back into the portfolio. Why had I bothered showing it?

“You’d see it better if you showed yourself.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You call this not hiding? Speaking from cover while you watch me?”

“I’m facing you.”

“I don’t see you.”

“Then look.”

Pressure swelled in my chest, the same warning that tightened each afternoon. I’d strayed too far from home for the minutes left before dusk. Even if I conjured another scene, I’d barely start sketching. If I lingered, Father would rage. Yet this floating voice had invaded my territory. Had he hidden inside a hollow trunk? Was the intruder peering from behind a beech?

When I stepped forward, a voice’s rumble halted me like a wall, scraping my skin with nettles.

“Keep your distance.”

I retreated.

“Why?”

“I’ll harm you.”

“What kind of person shows up in someone else’s forest and threatens whoever finds them?”

“This forest isn’t yours. But I’m not threatening you, girl. I’m stating a fact: come closer, and you’ll suffer. Whether I will it or not.”

The thicket had darkened, leaching greens to gray. I squeezed the portfolio to my side. I needed to sprint back as if I’d left a pan on the fire.

“Listen, I want to speak again. Will you be here tomorrow?”

“One place is as good as another.”

“But you insisted on staying here.”

“You claimed it was yours. Gave me reason to claim it too.”

I opened and shut my mouth. What could I reply to that?

Behind me, the path wound through undulating slopes dense with beeches. Their branches, draped in climbing vines like garlands, would arch overhead as I retreated.

The circle of parched grass blurred into gloom.

“Will I find you when I return?”

“You can count on it.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Seven Devils” by Florence + The Machine.

Honestly, I didn’t want to revisit this story, but I’m translating all of them, mainly for Elena’s sake.

Unless I hallucinated the whole thing, this tale allegedly caused the stroke of an elderly writing instructor that a year or so later died due to his health complications. That has to be an endorsement of some kind.

• Previous part (9)

A barrage of light assaulted my eyes. I blinked like a newborn. The center of my vision filled with humming fluorescent lamps. I tilted my head. Behind a desk sat a man in his fifties, mustached and jowled, clad in a police uniform.

I lay sprawled on a metal bench, the armrest bruising into my cheekbone as a makeshift pillow. A scratchy blanket covered my nakedness.

The policeman stood, circled the desk, and bent over me. His lips carved syllables, words shattering against my face. He waited for speech, but my brain had severed its wires to my vocal cords. I clawed back the names of objects and sounds, slow as a toddler fitting blocks into holes.

The officer arched his brows, then teetered on his tiptoes.

“Were you born half-brained?” He cocked his head right. “Sure no one cracked his skull?”

“No visible injury,” said another voice. “Maybe an old trauma.”

“Or he’s a psych ward runner.”

I pushed aside the hair veiling one eye. My hand trembled. A young cop, chin wounded by two razor nicks, materialized at my left and offered a T-shirt and trousers—faded donations moth-rotted in storage. I clutched them like alien artifacts.

The young cop snapped his fingers before my glazed eyes.

“Know where you are?”

I unfolded the shirt. Its chest logo had frayed into orange shreds.

“Motomiyacho Police Station,” the junior said.

The mustached cop rolled his eyes. “He read the badges.”

“Hitachi. Ibaraki Prefecture. Understand?”

I studied his pupils, hairline, nose, uniform collar, the metallic badge. My eye muscles buckled and dropped my gaze.

They led me to a bathroom. Locked inside, I dressed at the pace my stiffened joints allowed. My ligaments ached as if stretched gumlike on a rack. I avoided the gaunt stranger in the mirror.

Five minutes later, the police officers marched me to the station doors. Midmorning light slanted through dust-streaked windows.

“Got somewhere to go?” said the mustached cop.

“I’ll figure it out.”

He shook his head, and snorted.

“So you can talk.”

As he walked off, the junior cop appraised me with resignation. From his wallet, he slipped a 5000-yen note into my shirt pocket.

“Take care.”

* * *

For months, I swallowed hypnotics to smother the reasoning part of my brain. Sounds and voices slowed down, and the links between events frayed. On nights when the pill case emptied, I writhed in sweat-soaked sheets for hours. Chiseled memories—the forest clearing, the lagoon, the illuminated ocean, the woman—besieged me. Her sentences swarmed around my ears like gnats. The ghost of her mottled pink-and-white skin grazed mine, and those parts of my body stung like a rash. I choked.

After hours of rolling on the mattress, in the tar-pit of my mind floated—like the afterimage of the sun—the woman’s face, frozen in the expression I had provoked by betraying her. Even as I stretched out my arms, she floated far away.

She was talking to me.

Why didn’t you follow me to the city?

I had wanted to.

Then why am I alone down here?

Because I am weak. I am nobody. I was born to endure the decades of my life as the hollow shell of what a person ought to be, and those I encounter, I infect with gray. You chose the wrong man. I never found the strength to obtain what I needed.

I sat up in bed and panted as if I’d fallen from a rooftop.

In the mornings, the echo lingered. That flute-like voice, the intermittent current of a brook, sounded in the distance. The flow carried words I had to fish out, and I longed to roam the streets until I recognized each syllable. In my apartment, on the street, in the workshop, the moment when I would hear the woman speaking from afar hovered on the verge of arrival. Whenever I strained my ears and scanned the surroundings for the crevice through which the voice poured, the current would cease, though in my mind the fading echo reverberated.

On the morning of the first anniversary of the day I met the woman, feverish surges overwhelmed me. My body screamed that a cancer was multiplying inside. Dizzy to the point of nausea, I knelt over the toilet bowl.

On the second anniversary, I anticipated the surges and stuffed myself with anxiolytics. They blocked my capacity to care about anything. I drifted in a void.

At the dawn of the third anniversary, clinging to the edge of my bed, I sensed the woman’s presence like a silhouette on the horizon. She called to me. While I dressed for work, chills raced down my spine. I planned to ignore them until they subsided, so I could plunge into the tar sea in which I dove every day. But I called the workshop and reported that I had awoken with a fever—something I had eaten.

Sitting in a train seat, I stared at my trembling knees. Every glance at the landscape sliding past the window tempted one of the plates of my mind to slip over another, and from the ensuing crack burst forth creatures belonging to savannas—creatures that would race through tall grass and scramble up trees. That forced to live in the world allotted to me, would perish. Yet I looked on.

The landscape evoked an absence. Some symphony that had once played without pause was now missing. Reality had lost its fundamental piece, and trembled like pillars on the verge of cracking and collapsing. The world—the obese beast that they upheld—gobbled and gobbled.

The image of toads perched atop the pillars at the entrance of a villa flickered. In the folds of the statues, grime had accumulated, and the paint had begun to flake off. Was I merely imagining those imperfections, or would I have discerned them years ago had I known how to truly look?

When I stepped off at Hitachi station, I followed the path while battling chills and dizziness. Dust-stained buildings unfolded before me, where decades of rain had darkened cascading streaks. Everywhere I looked, the colors had lost their vibrancy, merging into shades of gray. A man in his sixties, standing at the corner of a dwelling, surveyed the landscape as if he had lost his bearings. Passersby drifted like puppets and spoke as if following a script. Their organic masks confronted the vistas while in their minds they navigated through a gleaming technicolor scenery.

I arrived at the street where, on the opposite sidewalk, the passage to the woods would open. I straightened up on the familiar patch of pavement. To my right, three red-and-white vending machines were embedded in a concrete recess.

I lifted my head toward the opposite sidewalk and blinked until my vision cleared. Both buildings that had guarded the passage now appeared conjoined—the electronics store, with its facade of wooden planks, nestled against the rusted shed of the beige house. Not a single fissure betrayed that they had been built separately.

Three warehouse boys surged past me from both front and rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one casting a look of bewilderment my way, then extending his gaze toward the wooden plank on which I was fixed, unblinking.

I inched up to the facade until the tips of my sneakers brushed against the walnut-hued wood, which reeked of mold, and I could discern its grain and cracks. I closed my eyes. In the dim half-light of my mind, the passageway unfurled into a grassy path winding its way among the pines, flanked by ferns and a sea of clovers. I held my breath. I listened to the chirping of birds, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the fruits crashing against the leaf litter. In the background, in the chasm between sound and silence, her voice emerged.

I shuddered and my vision blurred. I dragged my legs to the electronics store. I pushed the door, triggering a digital chime. Inside, the air smelled of metallic casings and plastic cables. I hobbled between shelves, amid outlets, lamps, bulbs, and electronic devices whose purpose was a mystery to me. I trod on linoleum grimy with footprints, yet with every step, my feet expected to flatten grass. I beheld smoked glass and cardboard boxes where I should have seen wine-red tree trunks and a serpentine path.

The scent of pine invaded my nostrils, and the earth warped under the weight of the lagoon. Beyond the backdrop of this electronics store, beyond this rotting gray world, somewhere lay that ocean of crystalline water illuminated by a different sun. The abyss of that ocean, beneath tons upon tons of water, harbored another architecture, other creatures.

She had never told me her name. Didn’t need to. Her face and blotched-white skin had plastered the walls of my mind. Instead of blood, her voice flowed through my veins. She had offered me the only chance, and I had ruined it.

The shopkeeper approached as if a vagabond had wandered into his shop. The years had contorted the man into a wrinkled, gaunt parody. His back was hunched, his hair had turned gray.

He scrutinized me from head to toe.

“May I help you?”

Before I could even craft a response, the nucleus in the depths of my being, kilometers beneath the navigating consciousness, revealed to me that no bridge could ever convey the images and sounds trapped within me, that no effort would succeed in making others understand what truly mattered.

I had nothing to say. Not to him, not to anyone.

THE END

---

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 “Since K Got Over Me” by The Clientele.

With this, three of my six novellas written and self-published ten years ago have been translated. The two others so far are Smile and Trash in a Ditch. You can check them out here.

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• Next part (10)

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.

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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.”

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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.

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I awoke in the dark room of my closed eyes. Birds chirped and trilled from every direction, as if perched on an invisible dome. My back pressed flat against the bed of grass, and a cool breeze brushed the soles of my feet. Against me lay another warm body, its chest rising and falling against mine, its breath heating my neck. I allowed myself to marvel at this for a few seconds before prickling with the reminder that I needed to find a job or I wouldn’t have enough to cover the rent.

The fingers resting on my shoulder curled, digging between the bony ridges. I opened my eyes and tilted my head as the woman lifted hers. Her pale-blue eyes met mine as if instead of sleeping, she had merely stretched a blink.

What could I possibly want from life except to wake to the gaze of this woman looking back? I needed to comb every strand of her honey-blonde hair with my fingers, glide my fingertips over the taut skin of her abdomen, feel her breasts yield and mold to my palms, bury my face in her neck or armpits and inhale the scent of a lagoon. Every passing minute brought me closer to the moment when I’d need to hold her in my arms, like a dolphin must surface or drown.

But I forced myself to sit up. The flattened grass sprang back and tickled my lower back. The woman wrapped a hand around my nape.

“Stay.”

“I wish I could.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Rather? Nothing. But I need to find a job.”

“Do you love it that much?”

Was she being sarcastic? Did she really not understand?

“Yes, I adore having a job steal my time, my thoughts, my energy, all so my bosses can sell someone else a product they’d survive without. It chokes me, playing a role I must uphold every moment, lest the master holding my leash drop me at the pound.”

“Then why do it?”

I tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear and traced the outline of the white blotch on her cheekbone.

“Maybe you don’t understand money, but out there you need it to exist. Plus, people find it natural to be handed a purpose. It saves them from thinking. Here, when you want to, you dive, talk to trees, lie in the grass. No one’s forced a society on you, and that’s one of the things I find most mesmerizing about you. You’re free from the worst humans have invented. But I belong to that outside world. To secure a good life, I’d need either stratospheric talent or the ability to ruthlessly manipulate others into handing over cash. I lack both. I must obey someone who’ll slip money into my bank account each month. And I’m glad you’re making that face. Glad you don’t get it.”

Leaving this forest felt like tearing metal from an industrial magnet. On the train back to my apartment, I yearned to jump off at the next stop and board one returning to Hitachi. Entering my apartment, sometimes after days away, felt like stepping into a summer home. I wandered the rooms suspecting the furniture had been rearranged, that someone had claimed the place and would brand me an intruder.

I compiled job listings from the internet. I sent my résumé even to postings that would reject me unless I lied during the interview. Each application meant leaping the same hurdle: I needed the money but loathed the routine it would condemn me to. Nerves. Cramps. Terror daily at finishing tasks on time, unsure if I could. I’d dread the next pit I’d stumble into, and to prepare myself, fueled by hair-pulling stress and coffee, I’d sacrifice some of my spare hours to research. The rest of my time would be reserved for rest, ensuring I was alert for incoming workloads. I would dream I was working, and after waking up at six, I’d drag myself to the job. I’d choke my thoughts and reactions to avoid appearing dispensable to the boss. Whenever an office drone included me in small talk, I’d spit out scripted lines, betraying my silence, and wonder if they saw through me. When I entered common areas, conversations would die. One day, a colleague I’d never spoken to might blurt their opinion of me. Corner plant. Zombie. Daily, my genetic intuition, the kind even citizens of a totalitarian regime feel, would needle me: We exist for a better fate.

So many hours and dignity sacrificed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. But what alternative was there? Live under the sky, eat rocks? Each passing minute edged me closer to needing another meal or drink—the unending struggle to exist that organic life had committed to, a struggle I’d signed up for through the unconscious decision to be born. A hollow existence stripped of color, that kept me busy to prevent me from questioning whether it was worth living.

At night, lying in my apartment bed, my mind churned. The woman’s absence ached like an amputated limb, but closing my eyes summoned her burning presence beside me. Though I needed sleep to stay focused on job hunting, she commandeered every checkpoint in my mind, deciding which thoughts passed and which jammed. Dozens of her details cycled, each flooding my veins like heroin. Her face, pupils dilating in the center of those pale-blue irises. Her flute-like voice pouring into my ears. Her honey-blonde mane shimmering under cloudy light. Her naked body, pale pink mottled with white patches. The dip of her abdomen between pelvic curves. Her breasts and neck trembling with spasms, lips parted and damp, bridged by a thread of saliva.

How did she hijack my thoughts until my life became a magnifying glass focused on her? I craved to chart every inch of her skin with my fingertips, map every discoloration. What would she think if she knew? She’d recoil. Yet I’d have installed cameras and mics in the clearing to capture every second, refusing to let those moments vanish into time and memory like a library torched.

Though one company called, they’d confused me with another interviewee they meant to reject. Of twenty applications, one led to an interview. I laundered a white shirt, black trousers, and a tie. That morning, I sat on a plastic chair outside an office door. A secretary would peer out and call my name eventually. Around me, men and one woman in monochrome outfits stared ahead like statues, or fiddled with phones. I avoided tapping the floor or shifting posture like a sleepless wreck hours into the night. Behind walls: muffled keystrokes, creaking chairs, voices cordially faking that enthusiasm tethered them to this office instead of their salary. But none of my rival applicants’ faces hinted they resented the poor script they performed like under penalty of breaching a contract.

If some lapse in judgement got me hired over these humans, I’d reenact the grueling routine: rising at six, trudging home drained at seven-thirty in the evening, fearing my mask might slip and reveal my disdain for having to obey in exchange for crumbs, disgust at forced small talk with strangers when talking wore me down. How would I balance that grind with the life I craved—secluding myself in the forest, grafting my skin to hers, forgetting that I had ever known the outside world? I’d lack energy to sustain both lives. The downfall from the time I had discovered the clearing until I lost my job proved it. I’d repeat that ending with new actors, or abandon the clearing and her.

I scratched a palm. One of my shoes tapped linoleum. Two expressionless men across the aisle watched me. I cleared my throat and leaned back. My pulse throbbed in my neck.

I wanted to slap every applicant. They waited to enter the office and kneel. Please, future boss, pay me enough to commute here and back, keep a roof, eat, and prop up the economy so the ruling party stays in power. Let me serve society. Assign me a purpose. Bury me in tasks to save me from thinking.

Had I become this? Someone terrorized by what moved and mattered, who agreed to neuter those feelings for shelter? I’d avoid anything that might spark new meanings, lest I question my enslavement. But at least I’d have a roof under which to age into a rotten shell, locked doors barring my inner self.

I closed my eyes. In my mind, I reached out to feel her skin against my fingertips. Of all humans I’d met, only she deserved to belong to the species. Daily she unveiled spectrums of light that life had hidden. If my future excluded her, why live?

I heard echoes of my name as if they had slipped into a dream. Through the ajar door, the secretary was peering out while holding my résumé. On its upper left corner, my photograph stared straight ahead with a cowlike expression.

I rose and followed her, stiff-legged. Inside, the secretary retreated to an adjacent room. Behind the desk sat a rugby-sized man in a suit and tie. His hair obeyed his comb’s orders. When he spoke and gestured to the chair, his teeth gleamed unnaturally white—nights spent with whitening strips.

I sank into the chair, head level with his chest. He scanned my résumé with a pen. Though he spoke, my brain refused to retain his questions, or my answers. Waves of unease coursed through me, threatening to erupt into nausea. Sweat trickled down my spine, pooled on my face, stung my eyes.

The man locked eyes with me, his mallet-like fist planted on the desk. Time to sell him the lie that I dreamed of laboring here, surrendering my life.

“I need someone to pay me enough monthly to cover food and the rent of my burrow. In exchange, I’ll do the bare minimum. The rest of the time I’ll pretend to work while resenting every hour wasted in the office—time better spent staring at my living room walls.”

The man shifted. Glanced away, scratched an ear. Took his time unknotting his frown.

“I don’t share your sense of humor.”

“I’m serious. Whether I work decides if I keep my apartment.”

The man drummed his knuckles and hunched over the desk. His eyes darted toward the typing noises next door.

“You have the wrong attitude for this office. Or any office.”

“You’re right.”

He shook his head, then shoved his chair back and pressed a button on his desk intercom. His voice hardened.

“Are you waiting to laugh and point at a hidden camera?”

“That would’ve been funny.”

The secretary peered out from the adjacent room. At her boss’ military-coded gesture, she opened the door and called the next applicant. The man fixed me with a squinted glare.

“You’re pulling stunts like this without an audience. I recommend you add a note about your mental health to the résumé. It’d speed things up. Now, out of my sight.”

I left the building like I’d just had an infected appendix removed. I had endured those humiliations for the last time.

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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 “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National.

• Previous part (5)
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I took sick leave from the office for as long as they would tolerate it, and when I dragged myself back to work, I pretended to be recovering from the flu. I strategized how to use the accumulated vacation days I had never cashed in. In my former life, I would have spent those days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

I endured a workday convinced it was Tuesday, but by the end, overhearing colleagues exchange weekend plans, I realized two days of holiday would follow.

The hours passed in blurred frames. Sweat beaded at my temples. I squirmed in my chair, skimming tasks as my brain burned and throbbed like an infected wound.

While rubbing my eyelids and breathing through clenched teeth, a presence stirred the air around me, now saturated with the scent of a perfume sampler. My supervisor. Her black mane, pulled into a ponytail, gleamed like a doll’s. She wore one of her white blouses, through whose fabric I glimpsed a black bra.

“Still sick?”

What could I say? Although I cleared my throat, I stayed silent, so she continued.

“You used to be the type who’d come to the office even when green with illness. Now you’re late, delaying tasks. You’re not here.”

I stared numbly into her eyes. Her looming beside me felt unreal—a scene from a low-budget TV show.

“Yes.”

She drummed on my desk with her pink nails, adorned with star and moon stickers.

“What’s wrong with you?”

None of your business. I owe you no explanations. If my performance displeases you, you know how to fix it. Otherwise, leave me alone.

“Nothing. Personal matters.”

Her plastered cordial smile slipped into the disdain beneath. She stiffened, and tilted her head slightly.

“We’re behind on this project, and I’m out of excuses. Take a breath and get to work, okay?”

Before I could reply, she glided to another wing of the office.

Outside the forest, I needed armor against the world—a beast sheathed in metal spikes. I’d forced myself to act like a servant of society, but among pines, beside her, my words and actions flowed unscripted. How could I not ache to shut my eyes and reopen them to find her lying beside me?

Our conversations revealed that any mention of the world beyond the clearing overwhelmed her. Half her replies twisted my questions, as if translated through another language. Thankfully, her madness flew under conscious radar. The clearing and its pines satisfied her; she craved no other lands. I admired her like nobility from an exotic realm, her customs endlessly fascinating.

The next morning, at the office, I organized tasks and fought to focus, but an invisible force tugged me away from the blinking cursor and sea of cubicles. Heatwaves drowned me. When I turned my head, the office quaked like during an earthquake.

I thought it was noon, but my wristwatch showed minutes to one. I stared at the back and black hair of the colleague across from me; the next moment, my supervisor materialized beside me, and the colleague’s chair sat empty, his screen saver dancing. She stood rigid while frowning at papers to avoid my gaze.

“Today.” Her tone implied she was sparing me insults. “Meet the deadlines. Your colleagues have enough on their plates.”

The rest of the day, I tracked the blur of her swinging ponytail through glass partitions and screens. Fifteen minutes before clock-out, when I’d be spared from bumping into my supervisor, I slipped away.

That night, I slept in fits. Pressure pulsed in my skull. Lying on my back, headlights streaking through blinds to cast geometric shapes on the ceiling, my eyes burned as if soaked in saltwater.

Before meeting my woman, I’d breeze through tasks and scavenge an hour to wander online. If I wasted the night sweating into my sheets, tomorrow I’d battle drooping eyelids. If I slept, the alarm would yank me awake, leaving just minutes to shower, dress, eat, and commute to the office, where I’d race deadlines. Every hour dictated its use. Daily, the minutes clamped my neck like tightening pliers. Yet at dawn, I’d show up at work and polish my overdue work, whatever the cost.

The next morning, I sat at my desk, and as the computer booted, my supervisor’s silhouette slid across the mosaic of glass toward my area. I straightened. She met a figure in the office center—a man around sixty, gray buzzcut, square glasses. Whenever he appeared, the baseball chatter died. My coworkers stiffened; their chairs fell silent. He entered a meeting room, leaving the door ajar.

I glanced over my shoulder. The supervisor marched toward me. Our eyes met; hers flicked away as if spotting a cockroach. Her heels clacked over keyboards and coughs. Stopping beside me, she fixed her gaze left of my monitor. Citrus perfume cascaded from her neck.

“To the meeting room.”

She tugged at a wrinkle in her skirt, then click-clacked away. She disappeared into the meeting room, from which the scraping of chairs and somber voices emerged.

The throbbing in my temples reddened my view of the cursor stranded on the spreadsheet. I gathered my notebook and pen, cleared the browser history, and shut down the computer. Ears taut, I fled the office.

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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 “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.