Category: Arte

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 11 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Elena lowered her head, unfocused her eyes, and fell silent. I resumed my reading. When Kirochka left the psychiatrist’s office, she obscured her face by pulling up the hoodie, and tucked her hands into her baggy sweatpants pockets. She hurried through the space station’s hallways and corridors. To distract herself from the stormclouds of shadows, which thickened as more people gathered around her, she took deep breaths and counted to four. A pulsating headache blurred the vision in her only functioning eye. Sweat coated her nape and soaked her hairline. The shadows kept insulting, fondling, scratching—their hatred seeping into her pores like an acid.

Talking to the psychiatrist made Kirochka nauseous. That woman would write a bestseller about this parasite, and to mine that vein, she would stretch Kirochka’s psyche until it snapped. The narrator was plagued by an exhaustion that neither ten hours of sleep nor days of isolation could cure. Even when she abstained from booze, as soon as she collapsed onto her bed, she passed out, and hours later woke up tired.

The military and the psychiatrist would fill Kirochka with platitudes and empty hope. Why did she waste her energy and endanger her fragile mind to serve as a pawn in their farce? Merely to protect their professional pride? They had no clue how the artifact worked, and they never would. They insisted that Kirochka contain her dark impulses while reminding herself that her second consciousness was deceiving her. She’d have to trust in a future where she would accept hosting a malignancy in her brain. But even if the scientists developed a cure, could it ever free her from the guilt that left her sweating and rolling in bed at night, groaning into her pillows as memories of irreparable damage flooded her?

Kirochka was panting. Her body insisted she find a bench to rest on. When her functioning eye met the world again, a passing mechanic gave a startled glance at her scars. The man’s shadow reached out to her, its fingers stretching toward her face. How long until she could board the maglev train? Her head was spinning, her bidimensional vision pulsing.

She spotted a bench and hobbled towards it as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. Kirochka’s leg muscles burned as she collapsed onto the cold bench. Sweat dripped from her face, splattering onto a metallic floor grimy with dust, footprints, and chewing gum. Down the corridor, groups of shadows drifted by in a ghostly procession.

The scarred woman. Do we really need to endure the sight of her roaming the hallways as we come and go? What a way to sour our day. They should cage her in a hole far from people. Check out that scarred flesh. If it had happened to me, I would want to be killed. How can she go on living knowing herself disfigured?

Kirochka ran her fingertips over the rough, calloused texture of the right side of her forehead, of her right cheek. She scratched at the scars that marked her neck. She forced herself to stand up and continue. The floor and the passersby’s legs swayed. Panting and drenched in sweat, she arrived at the maglev station and sank into a vacant bench at the far end of the platform. Someone approached the bench, about to sit down, but then abruptly stopped and hurried away.

Who is this monster? She’s hogging the only available seat. Why do the brass allow such a ruin to share our space? She should kill herself.

I pulled my shoulders in. As the sunlight waned, a chill seeped into every crack of the afternoon.

“Those disembodied voices are awfully cruel.”

“I’ll answer your implicit question,” Elena said. “That comes from years upon years of seeing people’s smiles drop shortly after meeting me. Of realizing how uncomfortable I make people just by existing near them. I’m generally terrible at reading others’ emotions, but that revulsion always came through loud and clear.”

“Your story brings up that such thoughts are intrusive.”

“And therefore not real? You can tell yourself over and over the world isn’t as nasty as you experience it, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling that way. Soon enough you’ll want to steer clear of people who ellicit such thoughts.” Elena pointed lazily at the stack of printouts. “You’re almost done.”

Kirochka’s heart hammered against her ribs. She shot a glare at the man, who was walking away towards the throng of passengers waiting for the train. Mechanics, pilots, military couples, a solitary guard, families with kids—some sitting, some standing. They hogged most spaces, they violated the silence with their screeches. Why did so many of them exist? Within the universe’s walls, a colony of spiders proliferated, pouring through every crack and skittering over surfaces in black currents. At such a relentless pace, which corner of the cosmos could escape the encroachment of the human scourge? On every virgin planet, one of their ships would plunge through the atmosphere and settle on its soil. Some moron would leave his footprints, plant a flag and declare, I own this. They would flood the landscapes with their machinery, their engines, their weapons. They would rape every forest and jungle, laying waste to ecosystems that had persisted in equilibrium for thousands, millions of years. The seas would turn gray with oil and plastic. Humans multiplied to multiply, each generation following the unconscious programming of a robot trapped in a maintenance cycle.

After the next therapy session, Kirochka hurried along the corridors leading back to her apartment, until her path was blocked by a pair of thin legs clad in black stockings. The narrator halted, expecting those legs to shuffle out of her way. Instead, that woman remained rooted to the spot while dozens of passersby and their shadowy bodyguards flowed around them like a river’s current.

Kirochka looked up. A woman confronted her with venomous hatred. Tears welled up in the corners of her slanted eyes. The woman lunged and spat in Kirochka’s face. Spittle splattered across her left cheekbone and the bridge of her nose. A clump of phlegm slid down her cheek.

She awoke to the sight of faces looming above her. Claws clutched her neck while a spiked phallus rammed into her vagina, ripping her apart from the inside. Kirochka screamed and thrashed about. She threw punches at faces so close that their warm breaths brushed against her skin, and when they recoiled, she lunged at one of the shadows, knocking it down. She pinned its arms under her knees and pummeled its skull with her crunching knuckles.

Unseen hands grabbed her by the hoodie and hurled her aside. She rolled until her shoulder slammed against a bench. As she scrambled to her feet, a kick burst her ribs into searing pain. Her lungs spasmed, her breath came in ragged gasps, and her vision blurred. Someone’s weight pressed down on her back, pushing her face against a cold, metallic floor marred by footprints.

A crowd surrounded them. A few meters away sat a man wearing blood-spattered maintenance coveralls. His right eye was shut and purple, and that eyebrow had swollen to the size of a golf ball. A reddish gash cut across the bridge of his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, soaking the lower half of his face and tinting his teeth, several of which were broken or missing. The man convulsed with sobs and whimpers while someone crouched beside him squeezed his shoulder.

Kirochka had awoken on a bench bordering a recreational area. In another life, she used to frequent these bars and dance floors to get drunk with fellow pilots.

A guard snapped handcuffs around Kirochka’s wrists and lifted her up by one arm. They carried her off to the district’s security station. She was locked in a cell, her hands still bound behind her back, until two military officers came to fetch her. They dragged her to a well-lit room and sat her down at a desk for interrogation. Her ribs throbbed, her back ached. What did she remember? Nothing. An unconscious part of her had veered from the direct route home, and when she woke up, she realized she was being raped the same way she’d recognize the taste of a lemon or the scent of gasoline. If nobody had yanked her off that maintenance man, she would have beaten him to death.

Author’s note: today’s song is “Shine a Light” by Spiritualized.

The Drowned City, Pt. 7 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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.

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.

The Drowned City, Pt. 6 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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.

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.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 10 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I picked up the stack of pages, leaned back in my rattan chair, and delved into Elena’s darkness. The narrator declared that they had skipped the next therapy session. Their psychiatrist called, but the narrator refused to answer. Hours later, the psychiatrist left a voicemail asking how the narrator expected to improve by hiding in the outskirts of the station, isolating herself. The following day, this psychiatrist sent a message urging the narrator to fight against the parasite at every step. The narrator wrote back demanding to be left alone.

The narrator woke up clutching a bottle, its contents spilled across her chest. A cloud of hate, reminiscent of a swarm of mosquitoes, grew toward her apartment and halted at the front door. The hate seeped through the door and wall, it crept through the ventilation shafts. The doorbell rang. The army of shadows had brought a battering ram.

The narrator hid under the sheets, but the psychiatrist, speaking through the door, claimed to know that her patient was inside. The narrator tossed the sheets aside and slid onto the edge of the bed. Her hangover squeezed her brains. The apartment stank like a sewer. She wondered if she had flushed the toilet.

The narrator was outraged that her psychiatrist had invaded her privacy. A rage flared up in her chest, but it waned with each steady breath. She acknowledged that she needed to see another human face even if it meant asphyxiating in hate.

She opened the door, then hobbled back to the edge of her bed. The psychiatrist wrinkled her nose and tried to ignore the mess. She was wearing a glimmering blouse and glinting bracelets that clashed with the grime of that apartment like a wedding ring fished out of a garbage dump.

The psychiatrist, addressing the narrator as “Kirochka,” urged her to try again. The narrator believed the therapy sessions were useless, because she would never be cured. The psychiatrist conceded that their scientists would have to find a cure, but that Kirochka, parasite or not, had to coexist with others. For now she could afford to seclude herself in her tiny apartment, but this limbo was temporary. Kirochka trembled with anger that reddened her vision. The psychiatrist embodied the overflow of mud that had flooded the corridors of this space station, that had now reached her last refuge.

The psychiatrist warned Kirochka that, as per military orders, she was required to attend therapy sessions, and failure to comply might result in confinement with other detainees. For Kirochka, that meant unending torture, suffocating in a miasma of hate. The shadows would overwhelm her even in dreams. The psychiatrist reminded her of a better alternative: a weekly hour-long therapy session. Kirochka argued that attending therapy also meant commuting through crowded hallways. The psychiatrist eyed Kirochka’s facial scars, then assured the narrator that nothing more would be demanded of her.

I lowered the papers and looked up across the table into Elena’s icy blues. I was struck again by the feeling that I faced an enigma, a person displaced from their proper time and place. And behind those eyes, the mind grown accustomed to the darkness, to the cold touch of loneliness, now bristled in the glare of social scrutiny like a wary, wild thing slinking toward a campfire’s warmth.

“Kirochka has been forced to attend therapy to control the darkness within her. In this story, a literal parasite. I don’t have to wonder what inspired you, given that two days ago you spoke about harboring a malignancy inside you from birth.”

“Though ‘therapy’ implies there’s something to fix, doesn’t it? Kirochka knows better, just like I do. Some things can’t be fixed. They can only be endured. That darkness, that malignancy… it’s not a tumor you can cut out or medicate away. It’s more like radiation poisoning. It has seeped into every cell, become part of your DNA until you can’t tell where the poison ends and the person begins. Kirochka’s therapy is just society’s attempt to contain something they don’t understand. Something that terrifies them because it doesn’t fit into their neat little boxes.”

“The story is set in space? Curious, coming from you.”

“Yeah, in a space station. Maybe the only way to make sense of feeling like a monster is to write yourself into the void. Kirochka… she’s what happens when isolation stops being a choice and becomes a sentence. When your own mind turns alien, transforms into a nightmare world filled with shadows. I suppose the space station is a sort of metaphor: a prison floating in the endless darkness, where the only true company you have is the thing growing inside your brain. A parasite that feeds on your pain, your loneliness, and the hatred of others. It whispers to you at night, saying that perhaps you were always meant to be like this, a monster wearing human skin, and the only way to protect yourself is to hide, to shut out the light and the noise and the people.”

“So the point is that those like the protagonist and yourself are beyond repair?”

“I don’t write stories to make points, Jon. I write them so they don’t explode inside me and scatter their shrapnel throughout my body. Keep reading.”

I lowered my gaze to the text. On the day of Kirochka’s next therapy session, she rummaged through her pile of unwashed clothes: pants that clung to her thighs, t-shirts that stretched across her chest. She wondered how she had ever dared to wear clothes that spotlighted her. She wanted to blend into the throng, unnoticed. She ended up materializing a baggy hoodie and sweatpants, both black. She left the apartment with a bag of her old clothes, which she dropped into the incinerator.

The journey to the psychiatrist’s office made Kirochka feel like she had aged decades. Her trauma isolated her from everyone around her. She longed to be invisible; as she wandered those hallways and corridors, she’d watch others embrace life and look forward to tomorrow, while Kirochka’s future had darkened, tainted like a pool filling with oil. Invisible, no one could anchor her to reality with their gaze, which would leave them unburdened by her scars. For as long as her broken life would stretch out, she’d belong in the shadows.

Sitting opposite the psychiatrist—a well-to-do, well-groomed, and well-spoken woman who likely earned more for handling lost cases—Kirochka argued that it was pointless to expose herself to the shadows that had taken permanent residence in her brain. Instead, she insisted on channeling her energy into her strengths, like drinking herself into oblivion. The psychiatrist countered that her client couldn’t opt for self-destruction. According to the psychiatrist, others lacked Kirochka’s ability to perceive the emotions stirred by the parasite as intrusive, to separate them from one’s true feelings. This insight gave her a fighting chance against the malignancy, and would allow her to integrate with society. It appeared the psychiatrist had screwed up: the narrator wasn’t meant to learn that others had been infected by equivalent parasites. Although forbidden from disclosing this secret, the psychiatrist believed that revealing it to Kirochka would motivate her to fight. Nine others—ranging from soldiers to scientists, and even a reporter—had been affected, while the military suppressed any hint of the crisis. Kirochka burst into uncontrollable laughter, her cackles persisting even as the flustered psychiatrist ended the session.

Three days later, shortly after entering her psychiatrist’s office, Kirochka stole a glance at the woman’s screen, and noticed a waveform jittering with each sound. Kirochka asked if she was being recorded without her consent. The psychiatrist explained that military-ordered therapy sessions required recording. Kirochka pointed to the notes and asked if the psychiatrist planned to write a book based on her observations. The woman admitted it, although she would change her patients’ identifying details. The narrator sank into her chair, exhausted from fighting off the shadows that clawed at her skin. She felt like a paralyzed beast resigned to be pecked apart by vultures. The psychiatrist assured her treatment was meant to help Kirochka recover, but the narrator, in turn, retorted that the woman served two masters.

I flexed the stapled printouts and tapped their lower edges against the tabletop.

“Was this psychiatrist modeled after one you had?”

Elena’s fingertips had been drumming a silent, absent rhythm against her empty glass. She stopped, and her pale blues flicked up to meet my gaze.

“Not consciously, but you’ve reminded me of a therapist my parents sent me to when I was about twenty-two. Every visit cost more than I’d earn in two hard days of work. Sessions that usually started late and ended early, and were interrupted by phone calls. After ten or so episodes of this woman listening to me spill my guts, which made me feel nauseous afterwards, she suggested I’d have no problem working as a cashier. I realized I had scraped my psyche open for someone who was just there to collect a paycheck. Who didn’t care and couldn’t understand. I never went back.”

“You don’t trust therapists, I’m guessing.”

“I distrust their profession. If anyone can be cured by someone listening to their problems and validating their feelings, then they don’t have my issues. And for that matter, any empathetic person lending a willing ear would be enough, not a professional who keeps glancing at the clock and interrupting you to take a phone call. Do psychotherapists exist because our societies are so dysfunctional that nobody talks about anything meaningful?” Elena sighed. “People want to be cured of their suffering, but you can’t undo what’s been done. You can’t erase the scars that have been etched into your heart. All you can do is learn to live with them, to accept that you’ll never again be the innocent child that existed before the pain. You need to find a way to make peace with the darkness inside you.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Mr. Tambourine Man,” a cover by Melanie Safka.

On Writing: Five-act structure – Act 1 – General #1

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, and you have determined the general structure, you could strengthen the scaffolding further by relying on a five-act structure. The original three-act structure suffers from issues regarding the second act, which is the bulk of the story yet it’s treated as if it were the same length as the first and third acts. The five-act structure divides the second act into three, relying on a mid-story turning point as the main mast of the tale.

The following list of notions strives to strengthen the first act of a five-act structure.

  • What is the goal in this act that the main charactes believes that by achieving it he’ll get closer to achieving his external goal?
  • How does the main character’s external goal bend to his internal issue, the thing he struggles with that keeps him from easily achieving said goal without breaking a sweat?
  • For every goal in an act (or scene), see which goals could fail first. That ups the conflict.
  • One way to tell if what the protagonist wants in the beginning is her genuine goal is to ask yourself: will she have to face her biggest fear, and so resolve her inner issue, to achieve said goal?
  • Look at every single character in your story and ask, “What’s their goal at this very moment?” If they don’t have one, give them one.
  • List the actions your hero will take toward his goal.
  • Create a plan that requires the hero to take a number of actions, but also to adjust when the initial plan doesn’t work. How is the plan unique and complex enough that the hero will have to adjust when it fails?
  • As a general rule: whatever the protagonist tries, his first two attempts must be futile.
  • How is this act an unit of action bound by a character’s desire?
  • How does this act fulfill its purpose of preparing the readers for what’s in store?
  • How do you bring with your important characters, as you introduce them, the stakes, what they care about, and the antagonistic forces that threaten what they care about.
  • How do you take the time to introduce the character in his “normal world” before the inciting event comes blasting into view?
  • How does this act represent the phase of the universal story that is Comfort and Separation?
  • In the beginning quarter of the story, get the front story going first by hooking readers and audiences with present moment-to-moment conflict. The protagonist faces an immediate dilemma, experiences a loss, feels fear, and is compelled to take action.
  • The first act sets up the story: the story problem, the story question, and the motivation for the protagonist to take action.
  • Is there a hint of the consequences of failing the act’s goal, a mirror or echo of the kind of death he risks (physical, psychological, social, or a mix)?
  • How does this act mirror and echo act five (the traditional third act)?
  • How do the actions in this act prompt readers to ask “what is the worst consequence of this decision”, and the consequences will be shown in the second half of this story?
  • How do you set up the stakes and the opposition for the desire line?
  • All the scenes in this act should be contributing toward that First Plot Point moment: revealing backstory, giving it stakes, infusing it with tension and fear and anticipation.
  • The mission of these act one scenes is clear: Make us feel like we’re there (vicarious experience), so that we see dynamics that the characters cannot. The characters feel them—and you can certainly make that feeling visceral—but for them it isn’t a story yet, it’s just their lives.
  • The mission of this opening quartile is to invest the reader in the story through empathy for the hero, which depends on the establishment of stakes and a clearly defined dramatic question at the heart of the story.
  • The scenes within each act should align contextually with that mission and thus bear a different context than scenes from the other parts. That’s critical to understand—it’s the difference between a writer who knows what she’s doing and one who is faking it or imitating what she’s read and mislabeling it as knowing how to write.
  • Every single scene before your First Plot Point should contribute to the setup of the dynamic in the second act and forward, either through foreshadowing, hero backstory and present context, the establishment of stakes, or the ramp-up to the First Plot Point story turn.
  • To set up the “Normal World,” not only focus on the existence and archetypical role of the protagonist, but also in the relationships he maintains, and especially in how those relationships are going to be altered or cut off when moving into the second act.
  • Act 1 introduces your hero then throws a problem at him.  That problem will propel him into the heart of your story.
  • Does the hero hesitate to engage with the story problem until the stakes are raised?
  • Make sure the order of the events creates a gauntlet of challenge, baptism by escalating fire.
  • Since story, both internally and externally, revolves around whether the protagonist achieves his goal, each turn of the cause-and-effect wheel, large and small, must bring him closer to the answer. How? By relentlessly winnowing away everything that stands in his way, legitimate reasons and far-fetched rationalizations alike, until the clock runs down to “now or never”.

The Drowned City, Pt. 5 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.

In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.

I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.

That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.

As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.

She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.

“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”

“I’ll talk with you.”

I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.

“Want to sit?”

She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.

I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.

Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.

Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?

I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.

My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?

I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?

I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.

Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.

Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.

“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You want me here?”

“In the morning?”

“I work.”

Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.

“Please.”

That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.

Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.

It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.

I called, asking for a supervisor.

“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”

I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.

I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.

The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.

I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.

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

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 9 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Elena gripped her glass of coffee, raised it to her lips, and tilted her head back. The remaining coffee sloshed as she guzzled it down to the sediment, a sludge that must have smelled of earthy, singed beans. She set the glass down with a hollow clink, then paused to swallow. Her tongue flicked across the surface of her lips and disappeared between them.

“I didn’t conclude my talk about the unnamed void. In case you’re still game to continue this tour of the netherworld.”

“If you’re willing to share, I’m willing to listen.”

“Alright. As the darkness fills every corner of your mind, as it eats away at everything that made life bearable, you spot a yellowing scrap of paper at the bottom of the abyss, so small you’d miss it if you didn’t squint. You lean to make out the words scribbled on its crumpled, dirty surface, and they read: ‘This is not temporary. This is not an anomaly. This is the true state of being.’ You integrate a realization that the majority of humanity has been spared: the void existed from the start, and only the evolved chemical balance, the lies your brain tells to keep you alive, had shielded you from confronting it. But my safeguards had failed. As if the Earth’s magnetosphere had collapsed, the solar winds had blasted away the atmosphere, and the planet had become exposed to a torrent of radiation. The void can never be vanquished; it can only be delayed. Down there, the notion that such a nightmare could end doesn’t make sense. The mocking voice repeats that this is how it’s always been and always will be. But you’ve escaped before. The only way out of that black hole is to hold on tight and wait until it spits you back out. Your mind has been reduced to a whirlwind of razor blades. Your body is made of lead. You retreat under the covers, curl into a fetal position, and await a new birth. You wait through the night. You wait through the morning. You wait through the afternoon. You wait through another night. Days pass, but you perceive them in increments: the space between one breath and the next, one heartbeat and the next. One day, the abyss feels shallower. The cold begins to thaw and the darkness retreats, dragging with it the voice repeating that you’re useless, rotten, unwanted, a cancer to all those close to you. Your inner theater lights up with a faint, fuzzy memory of sunlight. A song. A line from a book. A hand on yours. The brain’s machinery churns out its magic again. Inhibitors and disinhibitors toil overtime to rebuild the protective illusion. The veil of normalcy falls back in place, allowing you to resume the masquerade. It’s not a victory. You haven’t slain a dragon or stormed a castle; you survived yourself. You emerge from the underworld, your face smudged with ashes, your eyes haunted. Then you remember the voice that has been your lifeline. You reconnect with the artists that have seen through the cracks of the world, who helped you understand yourself, and made you hope to survive long enough to light your own candle in the dark.”

The breeze had grown colder as the sun struggled to pierce through a sheet of darkening gray overhead, the color of corroded silverware. Elena tucked her almond-blonde locks behind her ears, then rubbed her palms against the thighs of her jeans. After a quiet sigh, she continued.

“You may have noticed that my tolerance for bullshit is low, which is funny considering what we all swim through, which is liquid bullshit, from the moment our ears are developed enough to process the noise spouted from our parents’ mouths. That’s why we need to learn to distinguish the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves, or the raindrops pattering on a window, or the symphony of a band we like, or the voice of someone we love. To have a few sounds in our lives that break through the fog of bullshit to mean something.” Elena’s left hand drifted up to her sweatshirt and sought her metallic moth pendant, thumb and index fingers encircling the sculpted insect. “Sadly that is a precarious, temporary healing. Eventually, a shift of weather and a misfiring of synapses will drag me down to that dark place, to that ancient void waiting for me in the caverns of my mind, that reminds me that my joy has always been an illusion. Each cycle of darkness scraping precious matter from my brain that I will never recover. Until one day, that black hole will return and there won’t be enough of me left to claw my way back into the light. So there is no happy ending. Not in this life. My best answer to your original question, Jon, is that I’m not actively suicidal but I’d prefer not to exist. I’d rather be a book on a shelf than a living human.”

I pictured Elena as a child, alone in her darkened bedroom, huddled in a corner. Her knees hugged to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming down her cheeks, her body trembling with each ragged sob. The tiny figure in a vast and uncaring world rocked back and forth while muttering to herself, “I want to die. I want to die. I want to die.” But no matter how fervently she wished, the world refused to let her slip away. It clung to her like a parasite, feeding off her misery. Meeting Elena meant brushing against a profound sorrow, to trace one’s fingertips along a fault line.

My throat felt dry and constricted, and my vocal cords struggled to produce words.

“Live for today, Elena. Keep going as long as you can, and keep enjoying what you love.”

She dipped her chin and furrowed her brow, her pale blues fixed on my eyes. A faint smile tugged at a corner of her mouth; she might as well have told me outright to come up with better lines.

“Sometimes I think Siobhan had it right. At least she knew what she wanted: oblivion, peace, whatever you want to call it. Me? I’m stuck in this loop of wanting to disappear while craving something to tether me here. Like my favorite songs, or…” She gestured vaguely at the printouts. “Or these words I keep bleeding. I’m a junkie who needs a fix to prevent her from falling apart. So yeah, the only question is whether anyone’s going to be there to drag me away from the edge when I finally give up. Right now, though, I’m here, in a fancy coffee shop, with a guy who has long eyelashes and a strange fascination with my stories, and who is probably a serial killer. That’s about as good as it can get for me.”

The fingers of Elena’s right hand fluttered in a wavy motion. Maybe she caught my glance, because she balled that hand into a tight fist before withdrawing it beneath the table. With her head bowed, her eyes skittered over the table.

“You didn’t ask me to spill that much of my guts,” she said in a hesitant voice. “It’s just that, well, I’m on edge. Not used to sharing my serious writing or talking about anything that matters. I also have a hard time filtering myself.” Elena took a deep breath. She lifted her gaze to meet mine, her pale blues searching. “Let’s talk about you for a change. What do you like to do, Jon?”

“Masturbate.”

Elena smirked, then chuckled dryly. She uncoiled as if my reply had released the built-up tension, and her eyes twinkled with a conspiratorial gleam like an imp about to propose mischief.

“Oh, samesies. I don’t know if I have a sexual orientation so much as plain perversion. Do you ever feel ashamed when you molest yourself?”

“I only feel ashamed when I don’t.”

She snorted and shook her head.

“What other hobbies have you developed to cope with the misery of existence, Jon? Writing’s one of them, right? We met at a writing course, after all.”

“I used to. For me.”

“How long ago, and why did you stop?”

“Ten years, when I realized my words would be useless.”

Elena’s eyes searched my face. My skin itched as if I’d been bathed in toxic goo, and now I could feel every cell’s molecular structure degrading.

“Maybe you should give it another shot, Jon, for the sake of the lonely, invisible man behind your bullshit.”

“I also like to listen to a woman telling me the most intimate, horrifying things.”

She lounged back in her rattan chair, her head cocked slightly as she scrutinized me.

“Now seriously. Why are you here, Jon?”

“Because of you.”

“I’m not asking why you’re sitting at this table. I’m asking why you’re here in the world. What is it that keeps you from walking into the ocean and swimming until you sink?”

“I’m addicted to the smell of your hair. Honey-scented shampoo, right?”

“Whatever’s there when I reach for the shelf. And you know that’s not what I meant.”

“I’m also a sucker for a pretty pair of eyes, especially if they’re full of pain.”

“If you don’t answer truthfully, I’ll have to go with my serial killer theory.”

“I’ll say it again: because of you. The story of your existence.”

Elena’s pale blues narrowed as she stared me down, trying to figure out the angle.

“What a sweet lie.”

“You’re my motivation to stay afloat. You’re that guiding star on a stormy sea at night. That’s all there is.”

She exhaled deeply through her nose.

“Please. I’ve been dumping my depressing shit on you. I thought it’d be harder to open up, and I was sure that once you realized what you’d gotten into, you’d run away screaming.”

“I’m not going to leave. I’m here for the long haul. Even if you tell me fuck off, I may pretend I didn’t hear it.”

“Fuck, you’re an idiot. Why the hell do you want to hang out with a miserable bitch like me? I’m not even that hot.”

“My loins disagree.”

“The monster might emerge if you stick around. I’m radiation’s daughter. I can’t stop hurting people.”

“Someone needs to be there to drag you away from the edge. One day you may look back and be glad you didn’t jump.”

Elena’s shoulders slumped.

“Being someone’s only tether to the world. That’s quite the sacrifice, Jon. I doubt you’d benefit much from it.”

“That’s for me to decide.”

Her eyes bored into mine. She then hunched over, a loose almond-blonde lock spilling onto her forehead, and she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms.

“Late at night, when I’m listening to my favorite music, there are fragile moments where I believe life may be worth living. Just to hear what she’ll create next, to feel whole if only through my headphones. But that’s pathetic, isn’t it? Clinging to life because of an artist who has no idea that I exist. Who would probably hate my guts if she met me.”

“Your everyday life can erode even your sense of what’s meaningful. Jobs in particular excel at that. Everything becomes an unwanted transaction. But art is worth sticking around for. If you feel understood at least by some artists’ work, that means you’re not alone. And I care about what you write.”

“Do you have any idea how terrifying you are to me, Jon? Having someone want to read the darkness that spills out of my mind. I don’t know if I’m more afraid of you understanding or not. Because if you do understand, then what the fuck am I supposed to do about that? And if you don’t… well, then we’re two strangers playing at connection in an overpriced coffee shop, aren’t we?”

“When it comes to my role, Elena: the next time you find yourself at the end of your rope, if you can’t reach me with your hand, send me a text message that just reads, ‘Siobhan.'”

Elena tried to beat me in a staring contest, but she broke away and looked down at the second stack of stapled printouts. She picked it up and tossed it in front of me, letting them land on top of the first set.

“Something about you sets off alarm bells in my head. It makes me feel like I could fall deep into that dark, fathomless place within you, never to emerge. A strange comfort, to say the least. Like discovering someone who looks at the same bleak landscape, who feels the same cold, uncaring winds. Who’s heard the same whispers in the dead of night. But I’m afraid if we get closer, that place inside of you will pull me in. So here’s to this distance between us and these small steps, Jon. Now quit fucking around and move onto the second exhibit of Elena’s Dark Carnival.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” by The Flaming Lips.

Life update (02/19/2025)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Recently I found out about an intriguing Norwegian songwriter named Aurora Aksnes. Her general demeanour as well as clear stimming when performing live made me suspect she was autistic, which she apparently has confirmed herself. I’ve been reflecting on the autistic artists that end up floating to the top.

Apart from Aurora Aksnes, I know of other songwriters that have spoken about being autistic: Björk Guðmundsdóttir (I’ve never retained any of her songs, so I can’t link to anything in particular), Claire Elise Boucher (AKA Grimes, one of Elon Musk’s many exes, Musk himself being autistic), and Ladyhawke (I barely know anything about her, but that song is cool enough). I’ve suspected for many years that Joanna Newsom is also autistic.

To make it as an artist, you need luck, connections, a winning personality, and preferably an attractive physical form. Most autists are doomed when it comes to connections and winning personalities, to the extent that they eat into their luck. That leaves whatever remains of luck, as well as the attractive physical form. Given that men are more likely than women to elevate others professionally because they’re hot, that makes it far, far more likely than any autistic artist that makes it out of obscurity will be a woman that at her peak was very attractive, in some cases drop-dead gorgeous. That’s certainly the case for all those female songwriters mentioned. If I recall correctly, Joanna Newsom herself (I say herself because she may as well be a god as far as I’m concerned) didn’t intend to perform in public. She recorded her songs with a Fisher Price recorder, then passed her tapes to her friends. One of those friends went to a Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy concert and gave him the tape, which led to Newsom getting a recording contract with Drag City. It probably also led to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy wanting to bang Newsom really, really bad (she wrote the song “Go Long” mainly about him). Anyway, I naturally connect more with autistic artists than with those who aren’t, which makes me regret that the vast majority of them are lingering in absolute obscurity.

About ten years ago, when I was working on my Serious Six, the novellas I sent around hoping to get published, I met regularly with a group of local autists, so I got to know like fifteen or twenty of them. I believe I met three autistic women in total, but there were some troubling commonalities: all the female autists were in relationships with neurotypical men who were, by the women’s own admission, very accommodating. All the autistic men save for two were single. The tales of those two, well, they’d make you want to be single. Their partners seemed to recriminate most aspects of their nature, and had them running on a treadmill to counter their shortcomings. Both of them seemed to be on edge and generally miserable all the time.

I also realized that there is a huge schism among autists: there are those whose peculiarities have been embraced and nurtured by their parents and close ones, then there are those whose natures have been repressed to pass for normal. I’m in the latter group. The autists in the first group are far happier, freer, and often obnoxious. Autists, of course, can be extremely obnoxious; I recall having been that way at different points of my life. Those of the repressed group not only are generally guarded and somber, but can deal with lots of self-hate and even trauma. Many of them don’t make it far in life, as in they step out of life at some point of the journey.

Of course there’s the general ignorance about autism, mainly thanks to the media. I recall the admin worker that many years ago had to assess my disability level asking me how come if autism is a developmental disorder, I still struggle with it as an adult. Who’s the retard here? Then there are those that believe autists to be math geniuses with perfect memories. In reality, autists are more likely than not to have tremendous issues with abstraction, and regarding math, many end up with some level of dyscalculia. Some idiots mention Rain man even today; Hoffman’s performance was based on a single guy who wasn’t even autistic: he was born without a corpus callosum.

Also, autism is caused by an atypical pruning of neural connections during development, which leads to idiosyncratic neurological processing. They proved that the differences between the neural activations between autists are larger than between those who aren’t autistic, nevermind how large those differences are between autists and those who aren’t autistic. That makes it hard to generalize about autists, although they are generally extremely sensitive (both emotionally and to sensory input), more likely to suffer from gut issues, also more likely to suffer from OCD and ADHD (I have the OCD comorbidity, which comes with intrusive thoughts and heightened obsessions). Also weird stuff like prosopagnosia, which I have, and consists on being unable to properly register a face. It’s so bad that I can’t tell if I ever saw again one of the girls I dated even though we lived close, because I wouldn’t have been able to recognize her on the street. When I worked as a technician and had to interact with nurses and doctors, it was common for me to enter a room, talk to someone, walk away to do something, and then realize I had no clue whom I had just talked to.

I got to thinking about autism in general because the protagonist of the novel I’m writing at the moment, The Scrap Colossus, is a female autist to whom I’ve assigned the authorship of the six novellas I wrote back in the day. But as I work on the notes, I’m having a hard time pretending that Elena, being an attractive woman, would have had that much issue getting those novellas published. Perhaps that’s bitterness talking through me. Since I was a child, I’ve felt cursed in that respect: no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get anybody to pay any attention to what mattered to me. It seems there’s no further point I wanted to make about that other than saying it.

Anyway, I’ve got a scene to finish, so bye.

The Drowned City, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

On Sunday, I awoke clinging to the image of the winding path through the pines, but the morning light dissolved the sway of branches and leaves. Before I could shake off the grogginess and reason clearly, I arrived at the station and boarded the train to Hitachi. When I exited the station, I mimicked the wandering that had led me to the passageway. An emotion magnitudes greater than any I had known guided me toward that spot, as birds recognize magnetic north.

I reached the point on the street where days earlier I had glanced up at the passageway on the opposite sidewalk. To my right stood the three white-and-red vending machines embedded into the cement building. I bought a water bottle. To calm myself, I sipped it while pressing my free hand against my side to keep it from trembling.

A delivery van passed. Two men in warehouse overalls overtook me. One stared ahead; the other’s gaze swept the pavement a hand’s breadth from his feet. An elderly man walked the opposite sidewalk, passing rusted sheds and an electronics store.

None of them had noticed the passageway. To me, the vision in the half-light—the path of trampled grass, the palm-like fronds of ferns flanking it, the clover field the path bisected—invited admiration, like a centuries-old fresco in a museum.

I crossed the sidewalk and entered the path’s curves. Beneath my soles crunched a layer of leaves and pine needles. An electric current heightened my fingertips and sharpened my awareness. Butterflies of light and shadow fluttered over pine trunks split by vertical grooves. Twisted branches, meters above the path, were cloaked in emerald-green moss hanging in fringes. Ferns and clover sprouted from the gaps of a stump, its structure barely protruding with splintered shards. Between two pines glistened the hammock of a spiderweb. Its owner, as large as my palm, swayed on the net as a breeze billowed it.

The grass thickened, a sign fewer feet had trodden here, and I pushed aside the fern fronds draping the path. In minutes, the lagoon would come into view. I hunched forward as if to arrive fractions of a second sooner, placing each heel down only to immediately lift it again.

Itches flared across my body, as if trapped in a room with an invisible mosquito. I had climbed to the peak of a snow-covered slope, fastened my skis, and now had to hurtle down at breakneck speed. What would I say to the woman, and how would she reply? What combination of words would seize her pale-blue gaze and draw out her voice?

I emerged into the clearing as rings of static constricted my vision. I exhaled. Beside the swampy lagoon waited the moss-upholstered rock, worn by decades of people sitting, where the woman had been the afternoon I met her. The clearing smelled of wet fur and stagnant water.

Of course, the woman was absent. I’d have needed luck for her to come on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I should be content just to have met her. This clearing remained, though her absence dominated it.

I sat on the rock, settling into the plush moss to occupy her ghost’s space. I filled my lungs with the air that might have filled hers. Leaves swayed in a mausoleum silence, where no sound muzzled the cacophony of inner voices passing judgment.

I hunched. My gaze fell to the pebbles around the lagoon, the scattered pine needles. A pain pierced my heart. Perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, I would return to this clearing in my daydreams and replay our conversation. I’d chastise myself for idiotic phrases, insert clever remarks that years later would occur to me. In my imagination, before saying goodbye, I’d ask for her phone number or propose another meeting.

The lagoon’s surface bulged into a green tumor, outlining a figure. The coat of algae and mud sloughed off, revealing the woman’s honey-blonde hair, and her face. Streams of water flowed over her eyelids, nose, and cheekbones, crossing the mottled patches of discoloration. She advanced toward the shore as if her legs cleaved air. Green foam stained her soaked dress, which clung to her shoulders and molded her breasts. With each step, the skirt, plastered to her thighs, wrinkled like a second skin, her bare feet imprinting wet marks on the shore’s pebbles. She noticed me as she brushed off lichen flakes stuck to her shin.

When I regained my senses, I flushed as if caught hiding in her closet to spy while she undressed. I stood and retreated a few steps toward the clearing’s exit. I forced myself to meet her gaze as my temples burned.

She eyed me like we’d bumped into each other in the living room of a shared home.

“You can sit there if you want.”

I didn’t know if I shook my head, though I’d meant to. I gestured toward the rock as if offering my train seat.

When she sat, her dress slapped wetly. Water trickled down the rock’s sides. She gathered her honey-blonde mane into a fist, wrung it, and water gushed from the darkened strands. Some slid from her scalp, circumvented her eyes, traced her jawline, and fell. Her skin, mottled with irregular patches, reminded me of a leopard trapped by a hunter for a zoo.

“Did you miss this forest?” she asked.

I straightened. My vision blurred as if recovering from a blow to the head.

“I needed to see you.”

I expected her face to show discomfort, even terror, but whatever raced through her mind halted before reaching her facial muscles.

“Why?”

“I had never met anyone like you.”

She nodded and rested one hand over the other in her lap.

I’d admitted it—the words had left my mouth without needing to unlock gates or lower a drawbridge.

“I had to see you again. You, whose name I don’t know, to whom I’m nobody. It should bother you. Does it?”

She shook her head. Contorting as if stretching, she adjusted the back of her dress.

“I enjoy talking to someone.”

My throat tightened. A pulse throbbed in my neck like a muscle tic as I fought the smile tugging my lips. I wanted to hear every word she’d share, uncover every detail of her life.

“How do you spend your time? Beyond swimming, I can’t picture you outside this park, this forest.”

“What do you think the answer is?”

“Do you wake early to trudge to an office and waste hours on nonsense?”

“I don’t need to do any of that. Whenever you come here, you’ll find me.”

Her lack of expression might have meant she’d forgotten, or never learned, that people use gestures to communicate. Beyond the mottling, she belonged to another race. A lifetime of rejection might have taught her to avoid others. She’d bond with the lagoon she dove in and the encircling pines. Perhaps she welcomed this conversation as if we were exotic creatures separated by zoo glass.

“Who do you live with?” I said. “I assume you don’t work. Does the state pay for your home?”

I cringed at my hunger for every scrap of information. I imagined her scowling, sharpening her tone, rebuking my impertinence.

“Before you came, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time.”

I crouched on the shore’s pebbles, leveling my face with hers. Meeting her gaze—those pale-blue eyes flecked with white and green—sent electricity from my nape to my toes. No one else had interested me because no one else deserved it. Here sat a real person, not someone playing a role society had drilled into them.

“Do you want to know anything about me?” I asked.

“Tell me.”

“No, I’m asking. Are you interested?”

“In what?”

“Where I live, how I spend my time, what I like.”

She tilted her head, her gaze dancing across the trees as if weighing whether another human was worth knowing.

“Does it matter?”

My legs protested. I sat and leaned a forearm on my knees.

“I don’t know. There’s little to say. Little I care about.”

I searched for some nugget to share, but my past spread like a muddy expanse. I spoke before realizing it.

“My childhood was boring and miserable—the tedious kind. I went to university expecting the promised camaraderie. A week after graduating, I’d forgotten my professors’ and classmates’ faces. I’m on my second job. Since childhood, I’ve waited for some passion to seize me, something I’d crave to spend hours on unpaid. But for years, I’ve walked straight ahead down a gray hallway. When I paused, invisible hands shoved my back. I suspected that somewhere—behind walls, a door, an inaccessible wing—a luminous world existed. Meanwhile, I experienced a plastic, flavorless reality. I blamed myself. The world’s data filters through my distorting brain. I live like acting in a disjointed play during a fever dream. I followed instructions, excelled at them, but found only hollowness. I assumed someday I’d stumble upon why I bothered.”

I elongated a silence. Droplets slid down the woman’s forehead. She glanced away but soon locked eyes with me again, awaiting direction.

I inhaled as my cheeks burned.

“But let’s talk about you. What do you enjoy?”

“What?”

“What do you like to do?”

Her damp hair dripped onto her soaked dress. She laid her palms on her thighs, fingers relaxed. She stared unblinking, whick kept my eyes from wandering to the curves her dress hugged.

I shifted, thirsting to draw out her words.

“What satisfies you? What do you do whenever you can?”

“I come here. I swim.”

Her irises quivered within their orbits, pupils dilating and contracting. She studied my face like a beast’s cub encountering a human.

I listened to her breath mingle with the hiss of branches and occasional thud of fruit falling into rot.

“Give me your hand.”

She raised her left hand, palm down. Cloudy droplets swelled on her fingertips. I crawled forward and clasped her hand between mine. It was cold and wet, like something left overnight in a bucket of water. Chalk-white patches mapped her veins. The hairless arm, smooth as if waxed, showed no goosebumps, no tremors.

“Aren’t you dying of cold?” I asked.

“I’m not dying of anything.”

I squeezed her hand, warming it. She lifted her gaze to mine and curved her lips slightly. I brought our joined hands to her face, tracing with our fingers the mottled patch spanning half her cheekbone and jaw. I swallowed.

“Does it bother you?”

“It tickles.”

“Having these patches. Being different.”

She shook her head.

“I am who I should be.”

I glided my fingertips over her hand’s back, shifting pliant skin. I outlined a patch. Light carved white curves along her knuckles’ wrinkles. Her nails, segmented by microscopic ridges like pine bark, held mud under their edges. I turned her hand over. Water and cold had puckered her fingertips and creased her palm, aging it. I traced every line, imagining their formation from her birth to this moment, when I could touch them.

“I think I’ll return soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

Dizziness struck.

“I work.”

“In the evening?”

How could I focus at the office, counting hours until I returned? But my mouth dried, and the details of her face and the forest’s silence sharpened as if I’d shed nearsightedness and earplugs. I longed to transport myself to the moment tomorrow when I would descend the office stairs and realize that instead of spending the rest of the day resting in order to perform well at work the next day, I would meet the woman in this clearing where no one dared to venture. A smile surfaced unbidden. She lowered her gaze to my lips as if they were another pair of eyes.

“Will I find you,” I said, “like you promised?”

“Whenever you come.”

Reluctantly, I released her hand and stood. How did I know to leave? My wristwatch warned of dinnertime. The canopy of branches etched a granite-gray sky, and the same half-light that had greeted me upon entering the passage enveloped us.

I stepped forward, half-raising my arms to embrace her, but stopped even though my heart pounded like a radar nearing its target. I wanted to hold her, balance her warmth with mine, imprint the feel of her soaked dress and the body beneath until tomorrow. I’d just met her. What if she’d tolerated my touch only to avoid conflict?

I bid goodbye with a smile she returned. I promised we’d meet tomorrow. As I walked away, she raised a hand and waved. I left the clearing and quickened my pace to overcome the urge to run back to her side.

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 “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.

On Writing: Five-act structure – Act 1 – Objectives to hit

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, and you have determined the general structure, you could strengthen the scaffolding further by relying on a five-act structure. The original three-act structure suffers from issues regarding the second act, which is the bulk of the story yet it’s treated as if it were the same length as the first and third acts. The five-act structure divides the second act into three, relying on a mid-story turning point as the main mast of the tale.

The following is a list of points that should be nailed for a satisfying first act in a five-act structure (or in a three-act structure for that matter).

  • Introduce the major characters, giving the reader an idea of who they are, their emotional makeup, and the weight they carry in the story.
  • Devise the characteristic moment for your protagonist:
    • How does it accomplish several tasks:
      • Introduce your protagonist.
      • (Probably) reveal your protagonist’s name.
      • Indicate your protagonist’s gender, age, nationality, and possibly his occupation.
      • Indicate important physical characteristics.
      • Indicate his role in the story (i.e., that he is the protagonist).
      • Demonstrate the prevailing aspect of his personality.
      • Hook readers’ sympathy and/or their interest.
      • Show the protagonist’s scene goal.
      • Indicate the protagonist’s story goal.
      • Demonstrate, or at least hint at, the protagonist’s lie.
      • Influence the plot, preferably directly, but at the very least in a way that foreshadows later events.
    • To do this, select an event that will:
      • Make the protagonist appealing to readers.
      • Introduce both his strengths and weaknesses.
      • Build the plot.
    • What important personality trait, virtue, or skill best sums up your protagonist?
    • How can you dramatize this trait to its fullest extent?
    • How can you dramatize this trait in a way that also introduces the plot?
    • How can you demonstrate your protagonist’s belief in his lie?
    • Can you reveal or hint at his ghost?
    • How can you use this scene to reveal the thing he wants most?
    • Does your protagonist’s pursuit of both the overall goal and the scene goal meet with an obvious obstacle (i.e., conflict)?
    • How can you share important details about your protagonist (name, age, physical appearance) quickly and unobtrusively?
    • Don’t settle for anything less than spectacular for your Characteristic Moment. This is your opportunity to create a fun and effective scene that will introduce readers to your character in a way the’ll never forget–and from which they won’t be able to look away.
  • Show us the hero’s situation, goals, worldview, and emotional state prior to the launch of the path that lies ahead.
  • Show us setting, time, place, and (as necessary) some backstory.
  • Develop the normal world of the story:
    • People are largely defined by the microcosms in which they live. We are inevitably shaped by our surroundings, either because of the ways we fit in or the ways we don’t. Just as inevitably, we are defined by our surroundings because they reflect our choices and limitations. How we came to be someplace, why we choose to remain there, or why we are forced to remain even if we don’t want to–all these factors reveal interesting facets of our personalities, values, strengths and weaknesses.
    • How does it do this: the Normal World plays a vital role in grounding the story in a concrete setting. Even more important, the Normal World creates the standard against which all the personal and plot changes to come will be measured. Without this vivid opening example of what will change in your character’s life, the rest of the arc will lack definition and potency.
    • Is it a place in which the character has found contentment–or at least complacency?
    • The point is that the Normal World is a place the protagonist either doesn’t want to leave or can’t leave. It’s the staging ground for his grand adventure.
    • Think of the Normal World as a symbolic representation of your character’s inner world. The Normal World dramatizes the Lie and Character Beliefs. It empowers the character in that Lie, giving him no reason to look beyond it. Only when the Normal World is challenged or abandoned at the First plot Point is the protagonist’s belief in that Lie shaken.
    • Does it present one set of challenges, which the protagonist finds himself unequipped to deal with until after he’s experienced life beyond the Normal World?
    • In creating your story’s Normal World, first ask yourself what kind of world will provide the most logical backstory for why your character believes the Lie. Then consider how to enhance the Normal World by making it the comfiest place ever for that Lie to continue its existence. note, however, this does not mean it necessarily has to be a comfy place for your protagonist. Sometime she may seem outwardly comfy, while, deep down, the Lie is making him miserable.
    • How can you create a Normal World that will best contrast the “adventure world” to follow in the next acts?
    • You want to strive for the most dramatic contrast possible between the worlds, in order to provide your character with as much incentive as possible to enact this change.
    • What setting will open your story?
    • How will this setting change at the First Plot Point?
    • How does the Normal World dramatize or symbolize your character’s enslavement to the Lie?
    • How is the Normal World causing or empowering the Lie?
    • Why is your character in the Normal World?
    • If your character doesn’t want to leave the Normal World, what is helping him mask the discomfort caused by his Lie?
    • If your character wants to leave, what’s stopping him?
    • If the Normal World is a legitimately good place, how will the protagonist need to change in order to appreciate it?
  • The first act’s highest calling is to introduce and set up the story elements in such a way that when the First Plot Point arrives, it is reinforced by stakes, emotional empathy, the shadow of an emerging antagonistic force, and foreshadowing of other elements that await down the road.
  • What kind of thesis about the normal world of the characters this act poses, for which the rest of the story will be an antithesis?
  • Represent the overall range of change of your hero in the story. This frame gives you the structural “journey” your hero will take. As when starting at the endpoint of your hero’s development by figuring out his self-revelation, we returned to the beginning to set his weakness and need and desire, we must use the same process when determining the plot. Establish the endpoint of the plot first.
  • What will my hero learn at the end?
  • What does he know at the beginning? What does he believe?
  • What is he wrong about at the beginning?
  • Is there an event from the past that still haunts the hero in the present? An open wound that is after the source of the hero’s psychological and moral weakness. Could think of it as the hero’s internal opponent. The great fear that is holding him back from action. Acts as a counter desire: the hero’s desire drives him forward, his ghost holds him back.
  • In some stories, it could be that a ghost is not possible because the hero lives in a paradise world. The hero begins free, but an attack will change that.
  • Try to withhold as much information as possible about the hero, including the details of his ghost.
  • Weakness: the hero has one or more character flaws that are so serious they are ruining his life. They come in two forms: psychological and moral. Could have both.
  • Inner person is damaged in some way. The moral one causes someone else to get hurt.
  • If he has a moral weakness, how does he have a direct negative effect on someone else? Is he clearly hurting at least one person at the beginning of the story?
  • Need: what the hero must fulfill in order to have a better life. It almost always requires that he overcomes his weakness by the end.
  • Problem: the trouble or crisis your hero faces at the very beginning of the story. He is aware of the crisis but doesn’t know how to solve it. The problem is usually an outgrowth of the hero’s weakness and is designed to quickly show that weakness to the audience. Should be present at the beginning, but it is far less important than weakness and need.
  • Set up the dramatic action and the underlying conflict that will run throughout the story.
  • Foreshadow as necessary, including the presence (perhaps implied, maybe in the reader’s face, your call) of the antagonist (dramatic tension).
  • Make us care about the hero through the establishing of stakes.
  • Make sure you establish the underlying stakes and the personal demons attached to the First Plot Point decision before it hits.
  • Hook the reader (compelling premise).
  • Introduce the concept of the story (compelling premise and dramatic tension).
  • How does it manage to get the readers involved?
  • Have you come up with the most powerful and memorable combination of inciting event and key event so that they will fuel the entire story?