Halfway to the workshop, I remembered the newspapers. The day before, at noon, I had ruminated about them, and that had convinced me I’d put the matter to rest, but today’s editions might report a child’s disappearance, or that a murderer was on the run. Should I veer around, go back to the city, and buy the local paper? Even though I pictured myself turning the wheel, in real life I was sliding a palm over my lips and chin as if probing for hair to pull. No, the afternoon shift would start in five minutes, and I was already struggling enough to focus on the assembly line.
I had flipped down the visor, but sunlight blurred the road as if a stun grenade had gone off and left me dazzled. My right cheekbone throbbed in a hot ache. Would I have to endure this peak of anxiety for the rest of my life? Is that what I’d condemned myself to by running over that boy—constantly fearing some microscopic clue, a hair, a speck of dandruff, or traces of blood, might betray me?
I parked by the fence of the empty lot next to the workshop, then got out of the car. An arid gust swept dust and blew across my bare face and arms like a hairdryer shaking itself. Dozens of workers had taken shelter from the sun under the workshop eaves, forming a colony of purple penguins.
Something must have slipped my mind. I went around to the trunk, where the sun burned a white hole. I inserted the key.
My heart pounded as if it had guessed I’d find an empty space. While I’d been eating, someone might have stolen the duffel bag, unzipped it, and upon discovering it contained a corpse, rushed to a police station.
When I lifted the lid, the trunk exhaled a breath of metal and floor mat mixed with the stench of feces and urine that might have sat in a toilet for a week. As I wrinkled my nose, I felt the outlines of the duffel bag. It held the solid shapes I expected.
And to the left of my hand, two tanned hands—short, slender fingers with dirt crusted under the nails—mirrored my movements. They ran their palms over the bag’s outlines until they found the zipper pull. They slid it open the way you’d peel off a bandage, and the zipper’s mouth parted to reveal bulges and folds of transparent plastic.
I blinked, rooted to the earth as if my bones had tangled with the soil. Caroline smelled like an animal that had walked in the sun for an hour. Some lumps and protrusions made the pockets of her coat bulge.
The woman tore the transparent plastic with her fingernails. A greenish skin emerged, covered by a slick membrane that had stuck to the plastic’s interior like mucus. The stench that escaped and crawled into my nostrils jolted me like a hammer blow. Caroline had slipped her hands around both sides of the wrapped corpse, peeling it away from the bottom of the duffel bag with a sound like a boot sinking into a swamp.
I grabbed the woman by her wrists. With a yank, I forced her to let go of the body and step back. I slammed the trunk shut, the bang echoing as if to alert every worker.
While pressing my palms against the scorching lid, I quickly scanned the yard and the workshop’s facade. Groups of workers were limping toward the entrance. A small whirlwind prowled the yard, rustling wrappers and cigarette butts.
A jolt of electricity rippled over my skin. My guts bothered me like I’d just ruined my digestion. I dared to face Caroline. To look at me, she swept aside a cascade of hair. Her dry, peeling lips had parted slightly.
I wanted to scold her for messing with my property, but the words slipped away once my shaky voice tried to release them. Caroline’s pupils gazed at me from inside two crystalline spheres. Compared to the vulnerability and transparency they evoked, every other pair of eyes I’d seen might as well have been just iris-and-pupil designs painted on wooden balls. The way she studied my face showed that she understood. She was examining me to figure out what kind of person would hide a child’s corpse.
My throat closed up. My neck quivered, begging me to look away. Like someone who’s spent a week locked in a reeking, dark cell and then stumbles on the light switch, I was blinded by the light. I had run over a boy, crushing him under my car’s wheels, then fled with his body. It felt so delirious I had to brace myself to keep from melting into a toxic puddle.
Caroline’s pupils alternated between focusing on my own and my cracked cheekbone. Her chest rose and fell in slow breaths.
When I opened my mouth, a stammer escaped.
“It was an accident.”
I was trying to muster some explanation that might justify me in Caroline’s eyes, in my own, so she’d stop seeing me as a monster. But the high-speed replay of me driving that night along the dirt road, of coming home with a corpse in the trunk, made any excuse seem absurd. An accident, Caroline might repeat. If it was an accident, why didn’t you call the police? I didn’t know. Who was this strange creature I was forced to be? A person hauling around the decomposing corpse of a child he’d killed, planning to dump it over the weekend like a swollen trash bag. Why hadn’t I realized during the night of the hit-and-run that what I was doing was wrong, just as I must have done wrong in countless moments?
I’d been invited to peer through someone else’s mind, someone who lived inside me and acted on my behalf, an enemy who hid from my attempts to understand him, and who might trick me into following any road I’d later want to walk back. Yet while that other “me” was in control, I felt in charge. How could I ever decide anything with certainty, knowing I’d reasoned that I should hide the child’s corpse? I needed to defend myself from this internal enemy, keep him away from everyone else.
Caroline slid her cascade of hair behind her ears, which flared out slightly. I had grown accustomed to women’s faces hidden behind layers of makeup, but on hers, craters from acne or chickenpox were scattered across her forehead, cheeks, and chin. A faint mustache showed on her upper lip. Caroline began to speak in a high-pitched voice, stringing together sounds resembling syllables. I felt like a blow had disabled my language center.
“I can’t understand you. I don’t recognize a single word.”
She fell silent, then stepped away from the trunk and studied the corpse through the lid for a few seconds. As if content with whatever conclusion her broken mind cobbled up, she flowed around the car like some aquatic creature, heading toward the workshop. Caroline rummaged in a pocket and pulled out some scrap. While she examined it with her head bowed, she slipped between two groups of workers and disappeared into the workshop’s shadows.
My legs gave out. I leaned against the trunk lid, which groaned under my weight. Why would I peel myself off this blistering metal?
My mind tried to exile part of itself, as though slicing the brain in half. Was this how others saw me? I understood why they’d avoid me, treat me with hostility. If only I could get away from myself. But I would never become anyone other than who I was born.
The workshop horn blared, summoning us to come inside. I straightened up and dragged myself across the yard. My feet seemed ready to turn themselves inside out. Why was I staying there, now that someone knew I was hiding a child’s corpse? It felt like I’d been bitten by a black widow—thinking I’d survive only because I hadn’t collapsed yet. But it would happen. And if Caroline hadn’t found out, someone else would have.
When I entered the workshop, the lighting affected me as if candles had been replaced by halogen lamps. I followed the path between the lines to my station. The purple backs, the brown veined wood of the tables, and the gray rubber of the conveyor belts—unshaded now that my tinted lenses weren’t blocking them—took on vibrant colors as though an expressionist painter had recreated them.
My neck had gone stiff, and I avoided lifting my head. At any moment I might burst into spontaneous combustion, leaving only a heap of ashes and a single foot inside its sock and shoe.
When I reached the line and climbed onto my stool, the stares of the three men stung my face. Héctor, facing me, was frowning, and to the right Christopher and John—or Joseph—were peering at me as if a player on their team had just gotten injured.
Ah, the dead eye. Without my glasses hiding that ruin, the novelty horrified them.
“I lost them.”
Héctor let out a derisive snort.
“Losing your glasses gave you that black eye?”
I touched my cheekbone, and a flare of pain lit up the mesh of nerves interlaced with the ones that had died when shrapnel pierced them.
A black hand settled on my right shoulder. Christopher, standing beside me, squeezed my shoulder to offer comfort.
I tensed. I opened my mouth to tell him to remove his hand, to say he should have asked permission first, but that would lead to more questions and complaints.
“Do you need a break?” Christopher said. “Go home. The three of us can handle this afternoon’s workload.”
Héctor dropped his screwdriver, which clattered against the table. He shook his head.
“Great. More work for us because you were a bastard to someone who didn’t take it well.”
My mind seethed in a static of white noise. Their attention squeezed me like the bars of a shrinking cage. If only I could swat every question and comment with a flyswatter so these people would shut up and leave me alone.
I lifted Christopher’s hand off my shoulder and set it aside. I sat up straight on my stool, then pressed the button that switched on the conveyor belt, which started rolling with the hum of cylinders and the friction of rubber.
“What happened is my business alone. Let’s just run this fucking line.”
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
I had expected the boyfriend’s face to be reddened with anger, but he looked at me as though I’d backed into his car bumper and he was annoyed by the paperwork. Two curving furrows framed his mouth. Horizontal lines split his forehead. His ash-blond hair had hidden the fact he was nearing forty. A diagonal, reddish shaving cut crossed the contour of his prominent jaw.
“Yeah, we noticed,” the man said.
I pressed my lips thin and took a breath.
He pulled his left hand out of his jeans and snapped his thumb and forefinger in front of my nose.
“You. Hello.”
“I work around here,” I rasped.
“You’re not driving miles every day just to drool over my girlfriend? That’s a relief. So you must think we’re idiots, or blind.”
“What difference does it make?”
He narrowed his eyes. He traded a look with his girlfriend, as if asking her whether she believed an idiot like me could exist. He rolled his shoulders while curling his lip into a mocking half-sneer.
“My girlfriend would prefer that you not stare at her.”
He waited for me to defend myself. As a car approached, we stepped aside toward the truck’s cab so the car could pass. I glanced at him and the woman, turned around, and started walking deeper into the parking lot. But he snarled something after me as if I’d walked out on a bar tab, then seized the shoulder of my shirt and tugged me into the space between the two trucks. I staggered, and as I steadied myself, he shoved me in the chest. I stumbled back a few steps. The trailers towered on either side. He closed the gap in two strides, grabbed the collar of my shirt with his left hand, and squeezed. The fabric tightened around the back of my neck.
A tremor ran from his arm into my torso, but I was calm as a Buddhist monk. It was happening to someone else.
“Anyone?” the boyfriend asked while tilting his head at his girlfriend.
She, one hand on her hip, turned toward the sight framed by truck cabs: a sprawling grid of parked cars, their windshields glinting like a chessboard under the sun, asphalt stripes dividing them into obedient lines. Out of sight, an engine revved. A group of people spoke. Her profile alone could have sold on a fashion magazine cover.
“No one.”
When I looked back at the boyfriend, his fist blotted out my vision. The punch snapped my head back, shattering my sunglasses. He jerked my shirt collar to swing my head forward, and smashed another punch into my right cheekbone, bursting it in a flare of pain.
I collapsed onto my back on the asphalt, which singed my skin through the clothes. A wash of brightness overwhelmed me as though the sun had swelled to many times its size. Two humanoid figures blurred around me in a shining cascade. I blinked. Even squinting my left eye to a slit, my cornea felt like it was burning.
“Jesus, Bill,” the woman said. “You just blew out his eye.”
“Look at the scars, honey. It was already that way.”
I propped myself on my elbows. My head hummed like a bell, and a piercing ring echoed in my ears.
Everything dimmed. The boyfriend blotted out the sun, ringed by a downy glow. While rubbing the knuckles of his right hand, he eyed my dead eye as though hitting me was tantamount to killing off an endangered species in a nature reserve.
“You get used to the looks when you’re dating this girl. But I draw the line when someone keeps ogling her even after he’s caught in the act. What would come next? I’ll tell you: nothing.”
After crouching down, he forced me onto my side and rummaged in my back pocket. Before I knew what he was doing, he opened my wallet and slid out the four or five bills, but then shoved them back. He pulled out my driver’s license and inspected it.
“Strange last name. Scandinavian?”
From the next card he drew out, I recognized the back of my veteran’s ID. He alternated between reading it and staring at me.
I frowned. I thought about speaking, but I might have vomited from the effort.
The boyfriend relaxed his shoulders, then tossed my wallet onto the asphalt, beside my hand. When I picked it up, I quickly counted the bills, as best I could in my daze, in case he’d swapped them for counterfeits in some magic trick.
“I’ve driven by those apartments,” he said. “Let me guess: roaches and bedbugs?”
When I probed the throbbing spot beneath my dead eye, a lightning pain shot through that side of my face in a web of inflamed nerves. I ground my teeth.
“No bedbugs.”
“Better. The thought of sleeping on a mattress infested with those things terrifies me. I used to think they were microscopic till I googled it. Can you imagine lifting a mattress and finding hundreds of them?”
I just watched him, blinking to moisten my cornea. The asphalt scorched my elbows.
“In any case,” he said, “I don’t fully blame you for looking at my girl—I do it plenty myself. But it bothers her.”
Then, as if stepping into the ring, the woman loomed on my left like a giant. Beneath her corset top, two vertical channels of taut skin hinted at the columns of her abs. She bent over me. The swelling of her lifted breasts pinched the chain of a pendant with a golden cross at the end.
“It bothers me when a freak stares at me.”
The boyfriend shrugged.
“You’ll have to eat somewhere else, buddy.”
The woman’s face twisted in disgust. My dead eye fascinated her like a hairy spider.
“You might try eating where people like you hang out.”
I pushed myself upright. I brushed the grime from my hands and forearms.
He sighed and looked at her. “That enough?”
She nodded, but after giving me one more glance, she struck a threatening pose and pointed a finger.
“Stay away.”
She turned, and the boyfriend laid a palm on the bronzed skin of her lower back, right above the waistline. While they walked off, he tilted his head my way, touched the brim of his hat, and nodded earnestly.
“Thanks for your service to the country.”
When the truck cab blocked them from sight, my torso felt as though it weighed a ton. I lay there on the blazing asphalt. I could barely keep my good eye open for more than a second before it glazed over. The right side of my face around the cheekbone throbbed with slow, warm pulses as my body focused on knitting torn fibers back together.
What did I think would happen with all this spying on her? Maybe I had just dreaded the day they would stop coming to Wendy’s and I’d have to sit there staring at my burger. Today I had chosen a closer table because I needed some kind of pleasure to offset the morning’s misery. My brain’s chemical balance had me in chains. I’d convinced myself piecemeal. So what if I stared today for a while, or stared more tomorrow? Since I woke up that morning, how many details had slipped by as I squandered myself, hunting for some reason to keep going?
A door opened and a radio announcer launched into the news. Someone threw an exclamation my way. I visualized the effort it would take to stand up, as if I had to heft a grown man’s corpse, but my muscles refused to execute the order. A trucker—his cap striped red, white, and blue—leaned halfway out his cab window.
“You gonna let me back this thing up, or you wanna end up under the wheels?”
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
The afternoon sun lit up fine strands of Elena’s almond-blonde hair, and accentuated her high cheekbones with a warm luster. Sunlight glinted off her eyes, pale and unblinking like winter moons. She usually looked away as if evading the intimacy, but now her gaze was burrowing into my pupils. I glimpsed a heart full of broken glass. Elena could make anyone wonder if they’d been sleepwalking through life before she appeared.
A breeze from the estuary—laden with a briny tang and the pungent odor of rotting seaweed—rustled the leaves of the plane tree overhead, and fluttered Elena’s hair. She tucked errant strands behind her ear, then shook her head softly.
“You quit because of me?” The hint of a reluctant smirk tugged at her lips, a glimmer of mischief in her weary gaze. “What was the point? Just to spite that phony cunt?”
“Isabel was out of line. She had no business attacking you like that.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around her notebook. She let out a slow exhale, releasing tension.
“That’s… Look, I don’t need anyone following my lead like I’m some twisted pied piper of misery. I’m used to that kind of treatment. I’ve had a lifetime of people thinking I’m fucked-up. My parents. Teachers. Classmates. Coworkers. Therapists. Like you, I was already on my way to quitting that writing course. It’s done, I don’t care anymore. Isabel can be queen of the idiots. Let’s get back to you, Jon, who claims to be fascinated by my work. Do you get off on watching someone else’s darkness spill out? Because let me tell you something… it isn’t performance art. I write for myself.”
A passing cyclist, a girl in her twenties, shot us a curious glance as she whirred by on a pink beach cruiser, her brunette, ponytailed hair streaming.
“I’m drawn to darkness myself, as you are. Well, I shouldn’t say ‘drawn.’ It’s not like darkness floats around and you gravitate toward it, right? No, in truth you’re sitting at the bottom of a well, engulfed in darkness. From time to time you dare to look up at the distant circle of light. But you know that no matter how high you jump, that light will never touch you. So you stop trying to reach the light and instead you describe your surroundings, to paint a portrait of the darkness you’ve lived with for so long. Someone else in a dark well of their own might read what you wrote and feel less alone.”
As Elena’s pale fingers twisted the metal coils along the spine of her notebook, she chewed on her lower lip. She met my eyes directly, her stare haunted.
“Are you always so melodramatic?” she asked in a hollow voice. “Is that the amateur writer in you?”
A sigh escaped her. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on her thighs, her chin cradled in her palm. Those pale blues tracked the lazy arc of a gliding gull, wings outstretched against the cloudy sky. When Elena spoke, her voice carried an eerie calm, a sense of resignation.
“You were in class, weren’t you, when Isabel placed on the whiteboard the vibrant, drawn close-up of a girl’s face, whose big, round eyes stared at the butterfly resting on the tip of her nose? She tasked us to write an impromptu piece inspired by that image. While the other students, including you, hunched over their notebooks, scribbling away, I sat there frozen for half of the allotted time, because I could only picture a girl chained to a wall in a dark cellar, eating that butterfly to survive. I tried to think of something else, I really did. But my mind is a radio receiver tuned to a single frequency. I felt that a thin sheet of glass separated me from the normal people in that room, and against the glass pressed a wriggling mass of blackness I couldn’t let them see. But in the end, I wrote it down. The girl eating the butterfly. When I read it to the class, I felt the weight of their stares like I had sprouted tentacles. Remember Isabel’s face?”
“I was looking at you.”
Elena rubbed the back of her neck.
“She looked like she’d swallowed a bug. Her expression said it all: I had committed a sacrilege. I had taken a beautiful thing, pure and innocent, and defiled it. Isabel didn’t understand how anyone could look at that picture and not feel inspired to write something wholesome. But that’s how my brain works. If I had to write a story about Isabel finding love in a coffee shop, it would end up with her head in a blender.” Elena slumped back against the bench, slid the pen into the notebook, then closed the pages around it. She plucked at the frayed edge of her hoodie’s sleeve. “Hey, listen to this one. I must have been twelve. My parents had dragged me to some family gathering. There was this supposed cousin, right? Maybe fifteen. Sunday dress, knee-high socks. I think her father owned a business. Anyway, she approached me, the girl who had spent the entire afternoon hunched over her notebook, avoiding everyone, bored out of her skull. This cousin, she had a bright, bubbly smile as she grabbed my notebook and read a sentence aloud: ‘The only interesting thing about you ran down your mother’s thighs after she fucked your dog.'”
“Jesus. What the fuck was the context?”
Her pupils dilated slightly, the pale blue ringed with something feral, before she looked away.
“Long forgotten. In any case, her smile died. Instant fulmination. She dropped the notebook and walked away. Never spoke to me again. Can’t blame her. But think about that, Jon. What the hell did I know of cum at twelve that would make the sentence meaningful? I hadn’t even had my period yet.” She pulled down her hood, then raked her blonde hair back with splayed fingers. “And you know what? I read some of the stuff I wrote when I was nine fucking years old. It would have made A Clockwork Orange blush. Who taught me that shit? Who put it into me? No internet back then. I can tell you it didn’t come from my parents. The point is, as a little girl, my mind was already a sewer. Born with a brain full of maggots. And now I write stories that make people want to hurt me. Isabel was right: I am a freak. Even my own mother can barely look me in the eyes.”
“I can handle that.”
“Can you, now?” Elena asked, her voice strained, brittle. “I don’t think anyone can, in the end. Maybe not even me. Maybe especially not me.” She looked up with the gaze of someone crushed under a collapsed wall, who knows no help will come, yet still won’t die. “A dark thing’s living in me, Jon. It’s always been there.”
Author’s note: today’s song is William Griffin’s “The Devil Inside My Throat,” from the album Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 2 (hey, remember when I produced like seventy songs?).
I figured that I may as well post my favorite legendary live performances as I recall them.
Back in 1977, Lynyrd Skynyrd performed “Free Bird” in California to thousands upon thousands of teenagers, a tremendous amount of them gorgeous, many of whom likely proceeded to get pregnant later in the day. One of them may now be your grandma. About three months from then, the singer (Ronnie Van Zant), the goateed guitarist (Steve Gaines), and his sister and backup vocalist Cassie Gaines died in a plane crash, which essentially ended the band, as Van Zant was its beating heart. This video captures not only legendary talent, but an America that is dead and gone.
Sometime in the nineties, Radiohead’s lead Thom Yorke bared his heart while playing “Creep,” a song you shouldn’t ask him to play in newer concerts.
Joanna Newsom, back in 2010 during her Have One on Me tour, punished herself every night for the daughter she closed the door on. The way she loses herself in her craft is spellbinding.
The horn signaled our lunch break. In the locker room, I took off my work coat and gloves. When I collapsed onto the bench, my pants fused with the wood. Behind me, other workers wandered around, chatting and laughing. The rustle of clothes. Lockers slamming shut.
I braced my elbows on my thighs. Was it worth driving to Wendy’s? I’d be surrounded by another crowd, but of strangers who couldn’t care less that I existed. They’d ignore me.
I closed my eyes and painted a composite portrait of all the times I’d spied on that woman. With her face and body, she could strut around naked without anyone finding fault. The memory unleashed my imagination, and in those intervals, I convinced myself I inhabited another body, that I’d been born as a different man—someone a pain-free woman could have loved without shame.
I stepped out into the patio’s parched air. The gazes of some workers, as they held sandwiches or lunchboxes, led me toward Caroline. The flare of her dress spun into a spiral, and before it fell, another twist sent it rippling, offering glimpses of her tanned and scarred legs. Rising onto her tiptoes, she flowed, paused, and flowed again in a drunken ballet. In flashes, her luminous features peeked through her disheveled hair. Caroline grinned like a little girl on Christmas morning, clutching the bronze horse to her sternum with both hands.
I passed by the woman. When I opened my car door to let the inside cool down, the scorching frame burned my fingertips, which pulsed in a red halo.
Caroline had drifted to one side of the workshop, under the watchful eyes of the workers standing in the eave’s shade. She ran her hands over the sculpture’s peaks and curves—its mane captured mid-fling, its ribs, its galloping legs. She crouched beside the fence, set the horse on her thigh, and rooted among blades of grass, faded cans, and cigarette butts, like a lottery winner who buys another ticket minutes after winning.
I got into the car. I closed the door, stirring the hot, stagnant air. I was smiling. My lips went slack, and I glanced around to figure out if anyone had noticed.
I started the engine and drove away from the workshop. For a few minutes there was a prickling in my chest, like I’d scrubbed off part of the sludge that was choking my insides.
I reached the Wendy’s parking lot and, although plenty of spaces were free, I parked between two trucks whose trailers blocked the view like walls. Working the line had convinced me I was rid of the nausea, but when I killed the engine, I had to press my forehead against the steering wheel and take a deep breath. Any wrong movement would make vomit surge up my throat, so I waited a couple of minutes while my tongue sloshed in stale saliva.
The nausea eased. As if to demand my attention, my guts growled. I’d driven to Wendy’s; I might as well exploit the opportunity.
I followed a group entering the restaurant, using them as a screen so nobody would notice I was searching for the woman. As if reflected in a mirror, I imagined myself skulking like a vulture. Hispanics, whites, and blacks—workers and civilians—roamed the Wendy’s in shorts and T-shirts or tank tops. They threaded between tables as if they owned the place, while I had to apologize for existing.
The woman stood out like a diamond tossed in the mud. She’d braided her hair. The table hid her from the waist down, but she wore a corset-like top that fit her like a bra, and in the accentuated cleft of her breasts, perspiration gleamed.
Her boyfriend sat across from her, his back to me. He wore yesterday’s hat and a plaid shirt.
I joined the line at the counter, and as I stood impatiently, I sneaked glances at the empty table I’d occupy three spots from the couple. The people ahead of me waited for trays of burgers, fries, and drinks. Whenever they gestured and talked to each other, whenever they squeezed by behind me on their way to their seats, you could hear the jingling of the chains binding them to one another, to their friends, to their partners, to their families, to their jobs, to their political parties, to their sports teams. In their minds, layer upon layer formed a filter. Water could pass through, but the filter blocked impurities and gold alike; the gold got trapped, congealing with the grime. These civilians thought only what their attachments allowed, and for decades they’d kept themselves from knowing what they barred from their awareness. They’d honed their brains to lie to themselves about their worth and their prospects. That made them better servants of their genes, which existed only to reproduce. The human body was a supernumerary cell grown to obscene proportions. The corrosive, cannibalistic consciousness it spawned hid everything ugly and unpleasant, anything that harmed it, so each individual could march toward a future that would never arrive.
By the time it was my turn to order, my gut had gone cold. I felt enveloped in the viscous atmosphere of a tropical cave thriving with moss and fungi.
I sat at my table and unwrapped my burger. The boyfriend, left cheek propped on his left fist, lifted lettuce leaves to his mouth. His posture suggested that an afternoon of overtime waited at the office. The woman scrolled her phone with a thumb while toying with the end of her braid.
Aside from the blonde goddess, there were more couples scattered around. Some men looked mentally stable, maybe decently employed, but I could usually spot drunks, abusers, and similar losers with worse jobs than mine. They all ended up with a woman on their arm. Did any woman who glanced at me just see a throbbing lump of pus?
Strangers strolled around. They searched for open tables or emptied their trays into the trash. Two workers chattered while smiling instinctively, but when their gazes landed on me, the smiles vanished as though I’d threatened to kill them. They changed direction to avoid passing near me. Even if their conscious minds remained clueless, their subconscious minds understood. That wariness, along with other skills, had helped humankind evolve off the savannah. Their instincts recognized the rotten and kept them away.
I had killed a child. A child alive until he crossed the path in front of my car, and I’d been driving down that dirt road in the middle of the night because I was sick. People could smell it, that sickness. It oozed from my pores like tar. That’s why I rarely lasted a year in any job: I belonged to a different species. I was a beast dressed as a human.
The boyfriend stood and made his way across the restaurant to the bathroom. This was the highlight of my day, the little bracket of time in which, behind my tinted lenses, I could savor each sight of the woman, unbothered by interruptions.
She toyed with her phone while projecting that flamingo-pink lower lip like a red apple begging to be plucked from its stem. She wrinkled her nose, pressed the middle knuckle against her nostrils and shrugged, her features scrunching as if about to sneeze. She relaxed and rubbed her nose. When she pulled her hand away, she kept the palm facing up while rummaging in her purse. She came up empty. She glanced furtively around. Then, as though grabbing the table to slide her chair back, she wiped her soiled hand on one of the table legs.
I bit my burger just to fill my stomach, but it tasted foul, and every mouthful that sank into my stomach churned my discomfort. I should have stayed back at the workshop, in the locker room. It seemed idiotic that dozens of us came to Wendy’s daily, only to head back to jobs that wasted our hours. How many of these workers were living on pure inertia? Everyone got one shot, and if you’d failed by thirty, you should quit—save yourself from the pain and indignity of the decades of decline ahead. Past that age, humans rotted like overripe fruit, sliding down the chute toward disintegration. Children, teens, and twentysomethings lived out the promised life before they could even appreciate it. Those over thirty existed to raise the next generation and keep it going until it could fend for itself, but I had tricked nature and the odds, and I survived alone. How would I have brought another victim into this farce? Other human refuse found some solace in barren relationships, but I was desperate to escape. I wanted my time to pass with the least possible pain.
Thirty-seven. I should have died in a blaze of glory among explosions and bullet whistles, leaping that low wall to gun down the bearded savages on the other side. I would have emptied my M16 and taken someone out before their AK-47s riddled my torso. I would have avenged the insult my existence inflicted on nature. But I had returned home. My heart kept beating, refusing to ask why it bothered. And another workday waited to bury the certainty of my obsolescence under the roar of machines and conveyor belts.
A wave of sickly cold shuddered through me. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, and when I closed my eyes, images played across the inside of my eyelids. Soldiers in Interceptor body armor carrying M16s advanced around me. Explosions kicked up clouds of dust. Sitting in the passenger seat of a Humvee, I heard that first lieutenant praying from the back seat whenever automatic fire intensified in the distance.
I leaned over the table, took off my sunglasses, and buried my face in my hands while stifling a groan. Every day I avoided new sights; I feared something vile might lodge in my mind and ambush me, day or night, for the rest of my life. Whenever the foulness visited me, I’d tremble, double over, lose my breath. As my mind waded through darkness, those memories detonated like torpedoes, and one day the battered hull would finish flooding and sink to the depths. I needed to erect walls around myself, all while condemning each impulse and decision that let this plague of images, sounds, smells, and tastes infest me.
I put on my sunglasses again and took a deep breath. I wolfed down a handful of fries so their salty taste would wash away the flavor of rot in my mouth.
I had wasted too many years searching for my place in this world of humans whose customs and ideals baffled me. I lacked the disposition and resources to love someone, even though the need remained. A jailer opened a skylight that poured light into my cell and showed a bright landscape, but he only opened it to remind me I’d never set foot on that grass outside. I knew the tar filling humanity. I had to stay on guard, always ready to block and counter each attack. People without those drives or insights could love others, but I recognized the predators and scavengers. Every glued-on smile was a flashy warning of venom, like the gaudy colors of a tropical fish.
Was my obsession with this woman love? It was tough to pin down those impulses. Like a lion, I needed a female who would barely resist. Then, I’d lie down and sleep. I lacked the skill and taste for trickery, the art of persuasion, that might lead a woman to follow me somewhere and undress. I was left with memories of the women who’d entranced me. Maybe those were enough—one gasp of air before diving into the abyss.
No, there was another piece missing. Plenty of the men sharing this break at Wendy’s appreciated their lives even though they had no stable job, although they might be shunned even more than I was, but they believed that the lives they enjoyed, and the futures they imagined, were worth the pain of living them. They were made of different stuff. Eating, dealing with people, small victories at work—those would unleash a chemical storm in their brains, making the effort tolerable. Did they cringe at noise? Did sorrow hurt them less? Did unpredictable people drive them up the wall? Did they despair at the fact everything ends in decay? Did they realize we scurried like fleas on a speck of dust drifting through a cold, black universe—that from a human’s first to last breath is but an atom in a drop in an ocean of time?
My mind rose from its dark chamber. The woman had leaned sideways to stare at me with her lips slightly parted. Two furrows mirrored each other between her eyebrows. Across from her, the boyfriend had an arm hooked over the back of his seat, his gaze lining me up, poised to fire.
I choked down a swell of nausea. My chair scraped backward on the floor as I stood. I gathered my wrappers onto the tray. I slipped outside, passing the cabs of a line of trucks, when a man’s voice, sharp as a blade, called out to me. I stopped and turned around.
The boyfriend had tipped his hat back as if to widen his view. His left hand was buried in that pocket, his right hand swinging in a clenched fist with each step. Two strides from me, he halted. His ballerina-like girlfriend stopped two steps behind.
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
About five yards from the backseat where I sat, the shoulder of the road swelled like a time-lapse shot of a festering boil. Its dirt half disintegrated. The asphalt on the other half cracked and peeled away like the skin of a rotten orange. The shockwave swept over us shattering the Humvee’s windows, making the vehicle rear up on my side as though slammed by a charge, and a flash of pain tore through the right side of my face, blinding me.
Five minutes after I woke up, I was in the shower lathering shampoo into my hair when I threw up. It splattered the wall and spread around the drain in a star of bile. The running water opened channels in the vomit until the yellowish residue vanished down the pipe. I sat on the ceramic floor under the stream that drummed against my scalp. The discomfort that had kept me from sleeping erupted into something worse, and my mouth tasted of vomit and phlegm.
I dried off and got dressed. Kneeling like a penitent before the toilet bowl, I spent the remaining minutes spitting out strands of saliva.
I drove to the workshop in a heatstroke nightmare. The heat had unraveled my cells, their contents diluted into my blood. I parked amid the chaos of workers maneuvering to slot their vehicles into free spaces, or meeting up with their line-mates. Of the faces crossing my field of vision, I recognized a few, though in civilian clothes they looked more like strangers.
I waited for most of them to head into the locker room. While I fiddled with the raised details of the action-figure-sized bronze horse in my pants pocket, I approached the waste container. Inside, miniature hills and mounds like a landfill rose to the same height they had the previous afternoon. Unseen workers would empty it on Friday. I buried the bronze horse among pieces whose casings were cracked or split.
As I waded through the workshop amid the clatter of machines and the lines waking up, I held back my nausea, but the sickness reverberated through my consciousness like interference on a radio signal. Seated at the line, working at the task that added money to my bank account, between one machine part and the next I sweated out the illness in beads so large they slipped off me. They pooled in wrinkles, tangled in my eyebrows, or flowed to the corners of my eyes, irritating my tear ducts. Breathing through my mouth, I blew droplets that spattered the parts. Water was escaping me like from a piece of fruit abandoned in the sun.
By instinct, my gaze flicked up to the supervisor’s office. She had swiveled her chair toward the window to observe me.
My heart lurched as if I’d just set off an alarm while cracking a safe. That look said I didn’t belong here. I had infiltrated this workshop, convinced myself I deserved to be hired. Hidden among these dozens of workers, I silently begged them not to look at me, hoping my eyes and the tinted lenses of my sunglasses would contain my guilt for every bad decision, every instinctive reaction I’d later regret. A guilt that had haunted me since birth and would follow me till death, my body tensing against its cramps minute by minute. I preferred suffering it myself rather than passing the burden on to others, to the police, to a courtroom, so that the so-called just and humane system could decide how I ought to be punished.
And so I kept getting up early to come to this assembly line. I sacrificed my hours for a hollow, insignificant task, just to keep up an apartment I could never afford to buy. But what else did life offer? How could I be sure some other routine would rescue me from this misery, or from something worse?
The child, his very essence, like a haunted house apparition, tormented me with these waves of foulness. He kept repeating that I had killed him, and that although no one else knew, sooner or later they’d find out.
I wiped my face with a damp palm. My skin stung under my undershirt and the clinging boxers. I tugged the collar of my shirt, twisted around, and pinched at my crotch to get some relief for a few minutes. Hours remained before I could go home. Tomorrow I’d endure another workday, and the day after that as well. Then, after the weekend, five more days. The cycle repeated over and over. Over and over. Over and over. Over and over. The hours ought to collapse faster and faster, breaking the sound barrier, chipping away at the block of time I was born with, time I was forced to trade on this stupid planet. Such was the result of this slavery: it made you wish a drain would flush your life away like piss.
My hands turned the parts over and over between my fingers. I screwed some pieces together, plugged wires into the right holes. But I’d lost all feeling in my arms. I had moved into another body, I faced the world from behind a different pair of sunglasses.
Parts slid into my hands then off to the right, one after another. Once they left us, where did they go? Did they fit under a car’s hood, or into a fridge or a washing machine? Did they become part of something that would satisfy someone who needed it? This workshop existed thanks to charity, giving broken people a purpose so we could believe our lives had value, yet also to keep us under control and out of sight until we died. The work distracted us from the surrounding society, in case we ever got the urge to blow it away with a shotgun.
I asked for a break to take a leak. In the bathroom, I stepped up to a wall-mounted toilet. I’d unzipped, and was taking a deep breath when someone walked in and greeted me. I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him to wait outside until I was done. I wanted to wish away his existence.
He moved to a toilet on the adjacent wall. I heard the rasp of his zipper. He spread his legs into an inverted V, and I noticed the ashen-gray folds of his right arm: thick, bulging skin. He glanced over his shoulder and psst’d me. While his stream pattered against the porcelain, he held out a ticket over that shoulder with his free hand.
“One of my buddies dropped out. You interested?”
He was inviting me to a game from the sports he loved to ramble about: soccer, basketball, baseball. The modern worker’s religion.
“I’m sure someone else on the line, or in the workshop, would appreciate it.”
“But I’m offering it to you.”
“I’ve never shown any interest.”
He soured his tone like a customer-service rep forced to remind some idiot for the thirtieth time that electrical devices need to be plugged in.
“You’d like it if you tried.”
I bowed my head and stifled a scoff. I shook off the last drops and zipped up.
“Last chance, pal,” said John—or Joseph. “Eventually people get tired of offering.”
I don’t want you to offer me anything. I want you all to leave me alone.
“That stuff doesn’t matter to me.”
He turned, hiding his face behind a thicket of hair. He clicked his tongue. As he left, he tossed me some variation of Have it your way.
I took a sip of water. While drying my mouth with toilet paper, I opened the door to the hallway. Our supervisor was climbing the stairs to her office, absorbed in the documents tucked in an open folder. The flutter of her blouse covered the butt of her leggings, whose wild pattern might have camouflaged her in a psychedelic hallucination.
I passed by the stairs while shrugging like someone caught in the rain without an umbrella, but I remembered how she’d been watching me like a prison spotlight tracking escapees. I climbed two steps. The staircase—metal, ridged—trembled, and the supervisor turned around. Her lips parted half an inch, her right hand froze in the middle of flipping a page. She took a moment to smile, as though rushing to come up with a response to an unexpected event.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m sorry I was unpleasant last time we spoke. Sometimes the memories come back. It’s hard for me to… accept it’s behind me.”
The supervisor recognized the nature of my reaction: a tormented veteran. She smiled as if inviting me to a barbecue.
“I wouldn’t pretend to know how you feel. But at least you’re out of danger now.”
She wanted me to open up. I was overwhelmed by the swampy humidity of my sweat-soaked clothes, that stale stench. I turned.
“I think that’s all.”
The supervisor stepped down a stair.
“Do they organize any veterans’ groups in this city, or in a nearby one? I imagine you all must be spread around.”
Forcing out the words while I built the context, I said, “I’ve been to groups like that. They’re all basically the same. The support helps and it’s welcome, I suppose, but it doesn’t cut out the tumor, which reacts before you can think.”
“Maybe the next group will be the one. You never know what fascinating, wonderful people you might meet. Everyone needs to connect with those who’ve lived through something similar. It’d be worth the drive, even if you had to go to Austin or San Antonio.”
“You’re right.”
When someone bothered me for any random reason, giving them the answer they wanted usually made them forget about me for a while.
The supervisor touched my right arm near the elbow. I stiffened, but she reinforced her smile.
“If you need anything, just tell me, alright?”
I nodded and said goodbye while descending the steps. I was crossing the workshop toward my station on the line when a shudder rippled through me, as though a scorpion had just scurried across my skin.
Author’s note: this novella, originally written in Spanish, is contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, self-published about ten years ago.
Editing this part made me queasy, so good job, me from ten years ago. I had forgotten that whole bit with John/Joseph bothering the protagonist to get him out of his shell. It’s based on a memory that I also exploited for the first years of grief in my novella Motocross Legend, Love of My Life. When you have been burdened with such a terrible memory as mine, and you try to avoid new experiences lest you add ammo to your intrusive thoughts, you get to recycling.
Anyway, in the real-life event, the nasty two years it took to get my programming degree were coming to an end, and a smiley classmate, likely ten years older than me, offered to get together with them for a group dinner or some shit. I refused. He said, “Are you sure? It’s your last chance.” I tasted that condescension; in his mind, I was a shy guy too nervous to hang out with them. No, buddy. Your very presence worsened my day.
I spotted Elena seated on a bench along the tree-lined waterfront promenade bordering the Bidasoa River, facing the grounds of Dumboa School. She wore a charcoal-gray zip-up hoodie with the hood tugged halfway up her head. Almond-blonde hair spilled over her shoulders. From the angle of her profile, I watched her right hand guide the pen in feverish strokes across the notebook resting on her thigh. She barely paused to flip the page, the motion seamless, as if her hand operated independently. Her pen kept scratching even as she reached for a one-liter carton of orange juice and tilted her head back for a hurried gulp. I pictured Elena as a child, sitting alone in a sandbox, eyes fixed on some invisible horizon beyond the gritty scatter of sand, her mind lost in a world of her own making.
I stepped onto the grass strip flanking her bench, and stood a few paces away. A voyeur trespassing in a museum of one. I wouldn’t startle her while she communed with the divine. Sparrows bickered in the gnarled plane tree overhead. Nearby, a pelota ball ricocheted off the court walls: whap, whap. Elena stopped writing. Her chin settled into her palm, the clicky end of her pen drumming against the notebook.
I crouched, plucked a pebble from the grass, then tossed it onto her notebook. Startled, her head jerked upwards. When she looked down, her gaze lingered on the pebble for a beat before she flipped to previous pages of her notebook. I threw another pebble, but this one hit her arm. Elena bolted upright and scanned the sky as if half-expecting a meteor to rip through the clouds.
With the caution you’d use to approach a stray cat, I edged into Elena’s line of sight. The afternoon light, straining through woolen clouds, gilded the alabaster oval of her face. She had sat with her back to three stories of balconies. Her hoodie was layered over a navy crewneck sweatshirt, and her black joggers bunched at the calves, revealing a slash of pale ivory skin. Her white sneakers, scuffed and worn, sported mismatched laces: one neon-green, one black.
“Nice seeing you again, Elena,” I said.
Her focus snapped to me. Near-translucent skin, bruised-pink lips like petals left too long in the sun. Her pupils dilated as if I had yanked her out of a trance. Her eyes—pale winter blue, adrift like ice floes in a sea of fatigue—held the somber, alienated gaze of someone who’d glimpsed the end of the world. She would haunt your story like the ghost of a tragic heroine, her face lingering long after the last page. She seemed less a person than an open wound: a thing of trembling nerve-endings and unstitched skin.
Her puzzled frown deepened as her stare sharpened, scalpel-like. She dropped her pen onto the notebook, then pulled out foam earplugs and pocketed them in her hoodie.
“Oh. You. That weird guy from the writing course.” Her voice emerged hoarse, as if she hadn’t spoken in days. “The one who didn’t join the lynch mob.”
“I wouldn’t call myself weird all of a sudden, but that’s generally correct.”
She reached down and picked up a pebble I’d tossed. Its dull grayness incongruous against the delicate curve of her fingertips, the fine-boned grace of her hand.
“Jon, was it? Did you throw these at me?”
“Yeah.”
“Throwing pebbles at disturbed writers… is that your thing?”
“I attempted a more interesting way to get your attention than just saying hello. Sadly it misfired.”
Elena studied the pebble before flicking it onto the grass. Her gaze darted between the river, the school grounds, and my face, as if trying to gauge how much trouble I was worth.
“An interesting way to get my attention? I don’t enjoy having things thrown at me.”
“I know you love a bit of dramatic flair.”
She cocked her head, her almond-blonde hair cascading across her cheek.
“You think I’m a drama queen, huh?”
“A connoisseur of the dramatic arts. A woman of refined tastes, who appreciates a little theater in her life.”
“Are you mocking me or trying to flatter me? I can’t tell.”
“Neither. Just saying that sometimes a girl enjoys a little pebble-tossing.”
Elena sighed, a weary exhalation that carried the weight of the day. She then rubbed at her forehead with a pale thumb.
“Sometimes a girl also enjoys being left alone,” she said, her tone dropping to an icy rasp. “But at least you didn’t try to psychoanalyze me or accuse me of lacking empathy. Seriously, what are you doing here, Jon? Are you stalking me, or is this just another cosmic joke at my expense?”
“I’ve been looking forward to bumping into you ever since the debacle at the writing course. And here you are, so I’m taking my chances.”
“What do you want, anyway? Do I owe you something?”
“Owing is not an accurate word for it. But if you feel that way, we can think of something.”
Her pale stare sliced into me. Irises like shards of glacier, sharp enough to draw blood.
“I’m tired of people. I’ve got no energy to spare.”
“I was captivated by your work, Elena. Powerful stuff, quite beautiful in an unsettling way. It has a visceral quality, a rawness that cuts through the bullshit. A shame what happened at the course. I feared that those differently-minded piling on your work would have discouraged you.”
Elena hunched forward and studied me as though I were an alien creature she couldn’t figure out. The sunlight caught her hair, turning strands of it to burnished gold.
“Powerful? Right. That’s exactly what everyone wants to read. Tales of mud, starvation, and eating salamanders. You’ll find that to survive in this world, you need to be sanitized. People want their little feel-good pieces about finding love in coffee shops or whatever the hell is considered marketable these days. They want to be told they’re good people and everything is going to be okay. But that’s not the truth. Truth is ugly. Truth is a woman eating a raw amphibian.”
“Who cares what people want? The whole thing is a hamster wheel.”
She leaned back, her hands gripping the edge of the bench.
“I don’t need your sympathy, Jon. It’s easier if people aren’t interested in me. I’m not like them. I don’t know how to act around them. I’m not good at pretending to be normal. I’m not good at pretending at all, I guess. But hey, since you brought it up… why did you defend me that day? Nobody asked you to play white knight for the class psycho.”
I could picture her as a princess in a castle of bones, her crown a circlet of thorns.
I leaned over the filigreed railing that bordered the promenade. Ferns sprouted from the cracks in the stone retaining wall, fanning outward. The opposite wall, moss-covered, darkened near its base like the stained bottom of an unwashed coffee cup. Below, the Bidasoa River, murky-teal and sluggish, carried twigs, bits of leaves, an orange peel. In the river’s dull sheen, wavy reflections caught the overcast white sky—a sheet of cotton wool pulled over a lamp. A trio of ducks glided over, their boatlike bodies corrugating the water in their wake. They stared expectantly like silent beggars. A silver grey mullet, open-mouthed and thriving even in the city’s sewage-laced currents, slipped into view, its gills pumping, then vanished into the murk. In the plane trees, sparrows chirped in a symphony of gossip over the whap, whap of a ball striking the pelota court walls.
I turned to face Elena, leaned back against the railing, and crossed my ankles.
“You read what you had needed to write, despite knowing it wouldn’t land well with that audience. I like bold people, those unafraid of getting their hands dirty. Who stand their ground. Too many bend their principles whenever society comes knocking. To be honest, I had wanted to quit the course for a while. Isabel is too much of a social butterfly for my taste. But I kept attending because I needed to know what you’d bring next. So after they lost you, I quit too. You can consider me your fellow deserter.”
Author’s note: the scene will continue in the next part.
As a solitary dude, all my life I have relied on music to connect with the world at large, to feel that my feelings weren’t that unique or detached from the rest of humanity. Over the years, I’ve returned to certain albums that have spoken to me in ways that can’t be fully put into words. I love discovering new albums, and perhaps that’s also the case for whoever is reading these words, so I’ll spend some of my limited time on Earth sharing some specifics about the albums that have marked me, and that in many ways changed me.
Today I’m tackling a big one for me: Joanna Newsom’s Ys, released back in 2006. I will need to think about Joanna quite a bit in the coming year, so I may as well tackle this now. Ys, her pinnacle, and as well as I’m concerned one of the pinnacles of artistry, is a baroque masterpiece of music and storytelling, produced by a songwriter at the height of her powers, who at the time danced with her subconscious unimpeded.
Joanna changed her major from music to creative writing in college; she found the constraints that teachers put into music creation too oppresive, like straitjackets. She’s a songstress of old, the kind you could imagine traveling from town to town and reweaving her careful tales to an enraptured audience. All five songs in the album are mesmerizing.
Joanna is the kind of person who would write until four in the morning, obsessing over individual words and meanings. Added to her difficulties interacting with people, authenticity, extreme sensitivity, obsession with obscure people and topics, etc., I have always suspected she’s autistic, but I’m very biased in that respect.
In addition, this version of Joanna retained her beautiful, creaky voice, before she developed vocal cord nodules and could not speak or sing for two months; afterwards, her voice changed permanently, which made her fantastic following album Have One on Me quite tragic to listen to at times.
All the songs in Ys give me chills consistently. You can use words to justify anything, but chills don’t lie. Joanna’s music is unbridled beauty. I revere her as one of the most magnificent artists to ever live.
“Emily”
This song is a love letter to Joanna’s sister, during a period of their youth in which Joanna likely got pregnant and decided to abort it in a surreptitious manner that could have caused quite the stir in the small town where they grew up. She likely refers to this event in her other song “The Sprout and the Bean.” The way she paints a picture of the whole thing, including how they were taught about nature, is awe-inspiring in the purest way. That bell at the end, the resonance of meaning and beauty, kills me every time.
There is a rusty light on the pines tonight Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow Into the bones of the birches And the spires of the churches Jutting out from the shadows The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope In the mouth of the south below
We’ve seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey We thought our very hearts would up and melt away From that snow in the night time Just going, and going And the stirring of wind chimes In the morning, in the morning Helps me find my way back in From the place where I have been
And, Emily, I saw you last night by the river I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror
Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger Though all I knew of the rote universe were those Pleiades loosed, in December I promised you I’d set them to verse so I’d always remember
That the meteorite is a source of the light And the meteor’s just what we see And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light And the meteor’s how it’s perceived And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee
The lines are fadin’ in my kingdom Though I have never known the way to border ’em in So the muddy mouths of baboons and sows, and the grouse, and the horse and the hen Grope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen And the mail is late and the great estates are not lit from within The talk in town’s becoming downright sickening
In due time we will see the far buttes lit by a flare I’ve seen your bravery, and I will follow you there And row through the night time So healthy Gone healthy all of a sudden In search of the midwife Who could help me Who could help me Help me find my way back in And there are worries where I’ve been
And say, say, say in the lee of the bay, don’t be bothered Leave your troubles here where the tugboats shear the water from the water Flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper Emily, they’ll follow your lead by the letter And I make this claim, and I’m not ashamed to say I knew you better What they’ve seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter
Let us go, though we know it’s a hopeless endeavor The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning
Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow, with Hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up their brow
And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour Butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours And my clay-colored motherlessness rangily reclines Come on home now, all my bones are dolorous with vines
Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light Squint skyward and listen Loving him, we move within his borders Just asterisms in the stars’ set order
We could stand for a century Staring, with our heads cocked In the broad daylight at this thing Joy, landlocked In bodies that don’t keep Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being Till we don’t be Told, take this And eat this
Told, the meteorite is the source of the light And the meteor’s just what we see And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee
And the meteorite’s just what causes the light And the meteor’s how it’s perceived And the meteoroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee
“Monkey & Bear”
A story about a couple made out of a monkey and a bear who escape from servitude to strive for freedom. It just happens that freedom also involves dancing to tunes that clash with one’s self. This song is clearly based on Joanna’s relationship with her then boyfriend Bill Callahan, a passionate, tumultuous romance that saw Bill either pushing her, or Joanna feeling that he was pushing her, into paths that didn’t come naturally to the gal. The climax of the song, with Bear, clearly Joanna herself, wading into the water to disappear by sloughing off her form is one of the most beautiful expressions of communion with the subconscious that I’ve ever encountered.
Down in the green hay Where monkey and bear usually lay (lay) They woke from a stable-boy’s cry Said someone come quick The horses got loose, got grass-sick They’ll founder, fain, they’ll die
What is now known by the sorrel and the roan? By the chestnut, and the bay, and the gelding grey? It is, stay by the gate you are given And remain in your place, for your season And had the overfed dead but listened To that high-fence, horse-sense, wisdom
But Did you hear that, Bear? said Monkey, we’ll get out of here, fair and square They left the gate open wide
So, my bride, here is my hand Where is your paw? Try and understand my plan, Ursula My heart is a furnace Full of love that’s just and earnest Now you know that we must unlearn this Allegiance to a life of service And no longer answer to that heartless Hay-monger, nor be his accomplice The charlatan, with artless hustling But Ursula, we’ve got to eat something And earn our keep, while still within The borders of the land that man has girded All double-bolted and tightfisted Until we reach the open country A-steeped in milk and honey Will you keep your fancy clothes on, for me? Can you bare a little longer to wear that leash?
My love, I swear by the air I breathe Sooner or later, you’ll bare your teeth
But for now, just dance, darling C’mon, will you dance, my darling? Darling, there’s a place for us Can we go, before I turn to dust? Oh, my darling there’s a place for us
Oh darling, c’mon will you dance my darling? Though the hills are groaning with excess Like a table ceaselessly being set Oh my darling, we will get there yet
They trooped past the guards Past the coops, and the fields And the farmyards, all night till finally
The space they gained grew much farther than The stone that Bear threw To mark where they’d stop for tea
But Walk a little faster, don’t look backwards Your feast is to the East, which lies a little past the pasture And the blackbirds hear tea whistling they rise and clap And their applause caws the kettle black And we can’t have none of that Move along, Bear, there, there, that’s that
Though cast in plaster Our Ursula’s heart beat faster Than monkey’s ever will
But still, they had got to pay the bills Hadn’t they? That is what the monkey’d say So, with the courage of a clown, or a cur Or a kite, jerking tight at its tether In her dung-brown gown of fur And her jerkin of swan’s down and leather Bear would sway on her hind legs The organ would grind dregs of song For the pleasure of the children who’d shriek Throwing coins at her feet and recoiling in terror
Sing, Dance, darling C’mon, will you dance, my darling? Oh darling, there’s a place for us Can we go, before I turn to dust? Oh my darling there’s a place for us
Oh darling, c’mon, will you dance, my darling? You keep your eyes fixed on the highest hill Where you’ll ever-after eat your fill Oh my darling dear mine, if you dance Dance darling, and I’ll love you still
Deep in the night, shone a weak and miserly light Where the monkey shouldered his lamp Someone had told him the Bear’d been wandering a fair piece away From where they were camped Someone had told him the bear’d been sneaking away To the seaside caverns, to bathe And the thought troubled the monkey For he was afraid of spelunking Down in those caves, also afraid what the Village people would say if they saw the bear in that state Lolling and splashing obscenely Well, it seemed irrational, really Washing that face, washing that matted and flea-bit pelt In some sea-spit-shine old kelp dripping with brine But monkey just laughed, and he muttered When she comes back, Ursula will be bursting with pride Till I jump up saying, You’ve been rolling in muck Saying, You smell of garbage and grime
But far out, far out, by now, by now Far out, by now, Bear ploughed ‘Cause she would not drown
First the outside-legs of the bear Up and fell down, in the water, like knobby garters Then the outside-arms of the bear Fell off, as easy as if sloughed from boiled tomatoes Lowered in a genteel curtsy Bear shed the mantle of her diluvian shoulders And, with a sigh she allowed the burden of belly to drop Like an apron full of boulders
If you could hold up her threadbare coat to the light Where it’s worn translucent in places You’d see spots where Almost every night of the year Bear had been mending, suspending that baseness
Now her coat drags through the water Bagging, with a life’s-worth of hunger Limitless minnows
In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial Of bear’s insatiable shadow
Left there, left there When Bear left Bear
Left there, left there When bear stepped clear of bear
Sooner or later you’ll bury your teeth
“Sawdust & Diamonds”
This song is the closest Joanna has opened up about the extremely hard to express process of artistic creation, as well as her relationship with it. The whole thing feels like Joanna lost in the currents of her subconscious, grasping at beauty while guided by the resonant bell deep inside her that lets her know what’s right. This song contains some of my favorite lines of anything ever, the acknowledgement of the ancient wildness inside every human being: “I wasn’t born of a whistle / Or milked from a thistle at twilight / No; I was all horns and thorns / Sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright“.
There’s a bell in my ears There’s the wide, white roar Drop a bell down the stairs Hear it fall forevermore Hear it fall, forevermore
Drop a bell off of the dock Blot it out in the sea Drowning mute as a rock; And sounding mutiny
There’s a light in the wings Hits the system of strings From the side, where they swing — See the wires, the wires, the wires And the articulation in our elbows and knees Makes us buckle; And we couple in endless increase As the audience admires
And the little white dove Made with love, made with love; Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
Swings a low sickle arc, from its perch in the dark: Settle down, settle down, my desire
And the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor Though no longer bereft How I shook! And I couldn’t remember And then the furthermost shake drove a murthering stake in And cleft me right down through my center And I shouldn’t say so But I knew that it was then, or never
Push me back into a tree Bind my buttons with salt And fill my long ears with bees Praying please, please, please Oh, you ought not No you ought not
And then the system of strings tugs on the tip of my wings (Cut from cardboard and old magazines): Makes me warble and rise, like a sparrow And in the place where I stood There is a circle of wood — A cord or two — which you chop And you stack in your barrow And it is terribly good to carry water and chop wood Streaked with soot, heavy-booted and wild-eyed; As I crash through the rafters And the ropes and the pulleys trail after And the holiest belfry burns sky-high
And then the slow lip of fire moves Across the prairie with precision While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue You make your first incision And in a moment of almost-unbearable vision Doubled over with the hunger of lions Hold me close, cooed the dove Who was stuffed, now, with sawdust and diamonds
I wanted to say: Why the long face? Sparrow, perch and play songs of long face Burro, buck and bray songs of long face! Sing, I will swallow your sadness, and eat your cold clay Just to lift your long face; And though it may be madness, I will take to the grave Your precious longface And though our bones they may break, and our souls separate — Why the long face? And though our bodies recoil from the grip of the soil — Why the long face?
And in the trough of the waves Which are pawing like dogs Pitch we, pale-faced and grave As I write in my log
Then I hear a noise from the hull Seven days out to sea And it is that damnable bell! And it tolls — well, I believe that it tolls It tolls for me and It tolls for me!
And though my wrists and my waist seemed so easy to break Still, my dear, I’d have walked you to the edge of the water And they will recognize all the lines of your face In the face of the daughter, of the daughter of my daughter
And darling, we will be fine; but what was yours and mine Appears to me a sandcastle That the gibbering wave takes But if it’s all just the same, then will you say my name; Say my name in the morning, so that I know when the wave breaks
I wasn’t born of a whistle Or milked from a thistle at twilight No; I was all horns and thorns Sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright
So enough of this terror We deserve to know light And grow evermore lighter and lighter You would have seen me through But I could not undo that desire
“Only Skin”
This nearly seventeen minutes-long song is one of the most beautiful love songs I’ve ever heard. Clearly about her relationship with fellow songwriter Bill Callahan. Lots of vivid scenes of their relationship, more or less mythologized. Possible references to Callahan’s drug use (“But always up the mountainside you’re clambering / Groping blindly, hungry for anything / Picking through your pocket linings, well, what is this? / Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?“) as well as cheating (“With your hands in your pockets, stubbily running / To where I’m unfresh, undressed and yawning / Well, what is this craziness? This crazy talking? / You caught some small death when you were sleepwalking“). The petite mort, of course, is an orgasm. Poor Callahan; it’s all downhill from Joanna Newsom.
And there was a booming above you That night, black airplanes flew over the sea And they were lowing and shifting like Beached whales Shelled snails As you strained and you squinted to see The retreat of their hairless and blind cavalry
You froze in your sand shoal Prayed for your poor soul Sky was a bread roll, soaking in a milk-bowl And when the bread broke, fell in bricks of wet smoke My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke
And there was a silence you took to mean something Run, sing For alive you will evermore be And the plague of the greasy black engines a-skulkin’ Has gone east While you’re left to explain them to me Released from their hairless and blind cavalry
With your hands in your pockets, stubbily running To where I’m unfresh, undressed and yawning Well, what is this craziness? This crazy talking? You caught some small death when you were sleepwalking
It was a dark dream, darlin’, it’s over The firebreather is beneath the clover Beneath his breathing there is cold clay, forever A toothless hound-dog choking on a feather
But I took my fishingpole, fearing your fever Down to the swimminghole, where there grows bitter herb That blooms but one day a year by the riverside, I’d bring it here Apply it gently To the love you’ve lent me
While the river was twisting and braiding, the bait bobbed And the string sobbed, as it cut through the hustling breeze And I watched how the water was kneading so neatly Gone treacly Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat In a frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath
Press on me, we are restless things Webs of seaweed are swaddling And you call upon the dusk Of the musk of a squid Shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib
Rowing along, among the reeds, among the rushes I heard your song, before my heart had time to hush it! Smell of a stone fruit being cut and being opened Smell of a low and of a lazy cinder smoking
And when the fire moves away Fire moves away, son Why would you say I was the last one?
Scrape your knee, it is only skin Makes the sound of violins And when I cut your hair, and leave the birds all of the trimmings I am the happiest woman among all women
And the shallow Water Stretches as far as I can see Knee-deep, trudging along The seagull weeps “so long”
Humming a threshing song Until the night is over Hold on! Hold on! Hold your horses back from the fickle dawn
I have got some business out at the edge of town Candy weighing both of my pockets down ‘Til I can hardly stay afloat, from the weight of them And knowing how the common-folk condemn What it is I do, to you, to keep you warm Being a woman, being a woman
But always up the mountainside you’re clambering Groping blindly, hungry for anything Picking through your pocket linings, well, what is this? Scrap of sassafras, eh Sisyphus?
I see the blossoms broke and wet after the rain Little sister, he will be back again I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain Spiders ghosts hang soaked and dangelin’ Silently from all the blooming cherry trees In tiny nooses, safe from everyone Nothing but a nuisance gone now, dead and done Be a woman, be a woman
Though we felt the spray of the waves We decided to stay till the tide rose too far We weren’t afraid, ’cause we know what you are And you know that we know what you are
Awful atoll Oh, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow Bawl, bellow Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow
Toddle and roll Teeth an impalpable bit of leather While yarrow, heather and hollyhock Awkwardly molt along the shore
Are you mine? My heart? Mine anymore?
Stay with me for awhile That’s an awfully real gun I know life will lay you down As the lightning has lately done
Failing this, failing this Follow me, my sweetest friend To see what you anointed in pointing your gun there
Lay it down, nice and slow There is nowhere to go, save up Up where the light, undiluted, is weaving in a drunk dream At the sight of my baby, out back Back on the patio watching the bats bring night in While, elsewhere, estuaries of wax-white Wend, endlessly, towards seashores unmapped
Last week our picture window produced a half-word Heavy and hollow, hit by a brown bird We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake And paint and labour over every intake
I said a sort of prayer for some sort of rare grace Then thought I ought to take her to a higher place Said “dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view”
Then in my hot hand She slumped her sick weight We tramped through the poison oak Heartbroke and inchoate
The dogs were snapping And you cuffed their collars While I climbed the tree-house Then how I hollered Well, she’d lain, as still as a stone, in my palm, for a lifetime or two
Then, saw the treetops, cocked her head and up and flew While, back in the world that moves, often According to the hoarding of these clues Dogs still run roughly around Little tufts of finch-down
And the cities we passed were a flickering wasteland But his hand in my hand made them hale and harmless While down in the lowlands the crops are all coming We have everything Life is thundering blissful towards death In a stampede of his fumbling green gentleness
You stopped by, I was all alive In my doorway, we shucked and jived And when you wept, I was gone See, I got gone when I got wise But I can’t with certainty say we survived
Then down, and down And down, and down And down, and deeper Stoke without sound The blameless flames You endless sleeper
Through fire below, and fire above, and fire within Sleeped through the things that couldn’t have been if you hadn’t have been
And when the fire moves away Fire moves away, son And why would you say I was the last one?
All my bones they are gone, gone, gone Take my bones, I don’t need none Cold, cold cupboard, lord, nothing to chew on Suck all day on a cherry stone
Dig a little hole, not three inches round Spit your pit in a hole in the ground Weep upon the spot for the starving of me ‘Till up grow a fine young cherry tree
Well when the bough breaks, what’ll you make for me? A little willow cabin to rest on your knee What’ll I do with a trinket such as this? Think of your woman, who’s gone to the west
But I’m starving and freezing in my measly old bed Then I’ll crawl across the salt flats to stroke your sweet head Come across the desert with no shoes on I love you truly, or I love no one
Fire moves away Fire moves away, son Why would you say That I was the last one Last one
Clear the room! There’s a fire, a fire, a fire Get going, and I’m going to be right behind you And if the love of a woman or two, dear Couldn’t move you to such heights, then all I can do Is do, my darling, right by you
“Cosmia”
Final song of the album, this one’s about the death of Joanna’s best friend, Cassie Schley-May, who was killed by a drunk driver when Joanna started touring. Apparently the moment Joanna received the call was captured in a documentary, but I haven’t dared watch it (I don’t even remember the name of the documentary now, though). This one is raw and haunting, less polished than the previous songs, because it needed to be.
In the lyrics, Joanna references a period of her teenage years that she hasn’t opened much about that I’m aware of; she fell into a deep depression and felt that the darkness of the world was pouring into her, drowning her. She used to refer to herself consistently as having no skin, defenseless against the myriad assaults of reality itself (yet another reason why I think she’s autistic). Somehow she ended up sleeping alone for a few nights in the forest, by the Yuba River, to cleanse herself of darkness, and nearly got eaten by a bear. The whole thing didn’t quite work, but bears likely became her spirit animal.
When you ate I saw your eyelashes Saw them shake like wind on rushes In the corn field when she called me Moths surround me, thought they’d drown me
And I miss your precious heart And I miss your precious heart
Dried rose petal, red brown circles Framed your eyes and stained your knuckles Dried rose petals, red brown circles Framed your eyes and stained your knuckles
And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water, water in But though I tried so hard my little darling I couldn’t keep the night from coming in
And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water by the kith and the kin Now in the quiet hour when I am sleepin’ I cannot keep the night from coming in
Why’ve you gone away? Gone away again I’ll sleep through the rest of my days If you’ve gone away again I’ll sleep through the rest of my days And I will sleep through the rest of my days And I’ll sleep through the rest of my days
Can you hear me? Will you listen? Don’t come near me, don’t go missing And in the lissome light of evening Help me Cosmia, I’m grieving
And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water, water in But though I tried so hard my little darling I couldn’t keep the night from coming in
And all those lonely nights down by the river Brought me bread and water in the kith and the kin Now in the quiet hour when I am sleepin’ I cannot keep the night from comin’ in
Beneath the porch light we’ve all been circling Beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings But in the corner, something is happening Wild Cosmia, what have you seen?
Water were your limbs, and the fire was your hair And then the moonlight caught your eye And you rose through the air Well, if you’ve seen true light, then this is my prayer Will you call me when you get there?
And I miss your precious heart And I miss your precious heart And miss, and miss, and miss And miss, and miss, and miss, and miss, and miss your heart
But release your precious heart To it’s feast for precious hearts
I held the machine part in my hands like it would shatter if dropped. My features had petrified; I blinked only when my one sensitive cornea dried out. The hum of the air conditioner hypnotized me as it battled to cool this box of a room beneath the sun-scorched roof. Droplets of sweat slid like snails down my back, my sides, my chest, while I inspected each part three times before passing it to Christopher.
I pressed the button to start the conveyor belt. Two seconds later I realized I’d forgotten to screw in the bolt clenched in my fist. A wave of rage hit me, sharp as the stench of burning plastic. I grabbed the piece, positioned it, and hunched over to twist the screwdriver. How had I convinced myself I’d completed this part? Why had my brain hidden the mistake? Exhaustion—the kind that comes from juggling multiple jobs at once: assembling machine parts, fixing others’ errors, tolerating coworkers stuck in fight-or-flight mode, locking my anxiety behind a mask of calm. I pretended nothing bothered me, but I was draining the energy I required to function. Soon, others would sense it—that sixth instinct for reading people—and realize that a festering abscess of dread was swelling inside me. Anxiety fissured my face. I’d need stories to explain those cracks, to pacify anyone who noticed.
Someone watched from above. Like daring to glance at a shadow that had cracked open my bedroom door at midnight, I stole a look toward the supervisor’s office window. It showed the lime-green shirt clinging to her frame, her hair loose, a vaccination scar stark on her bare shoulder. Her eyes stayed fixed on the computer screen.
The shift-end horn blared, drilling into my throbbing headache. I sank onto the stool and rubbed my temple. My mind felt liquefied, as if I’d just staggered out of a final exam.
I joined the purple river of workers flowing toward the lockers. The world had turned to glass; if anyone collided with a table edge in the chaos, both would shatter.
As I peeled off my work coat, Héctor slung an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and pulled him close. He held up his phone.
“Check this one out.”
Christopher nodded and scratched his chin. Héctor snorted. He then howled like a cartoon wolf, shaking Christopher until his head bobbed like a clapper.
“The kinda woman you have kids with,” Héctor said.
Christopher traced the arched scar on his scalp with a finger, as if tucking a strand behind his ear. My stomach turned to ice. The man began to stammer, his thoughts filtering through a drain clogged with rot.
“Doubt she’d want me. Besides, it’d ruin her figure.”
“She’d look fine after six kids.” Héctor tapped the screen. “Those hips? Fertile as hell.”
I stepped into the inferno of the parking lot. Dust choked the air as I dragged my feet toward my Chevrolet Lumina, its hood blazing under the sun. Someone slapped my shoulder. I swallowed a scowl. John—or Joseph—in a wrinkled shirt, gestured at the dent in my bumper.
“Someone did a number on you.”
“Found it like that this morning. Maybe a drunk kicked it.”
He shook his head, tongue clicking.
“Bastards slashed my bike last year. Never stick around after.”
He strode to his motorcycle, fastened his helmet, and within seconds shrank into the distance, swallowed by the engine’s snarling growl.
I slumped against my car door, waiting for the oven-like interior to cool. Héctor and Christopher, still glued to the phone, drifted toward the far fence, where Héctor had parked his car. The supervisor emerged waving goodbye, a folder under her arm. Her sister’s silhouette loomed in the SUV’s windshield.
Caroline wandered past the dispersing crowd—a time traveler stranded in the wrong era. Her sunflower-yellow dress tangled around her legs as she tiptoed toward the scrap container, moving with the tentative, wide-eyed stealth of a child sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to swipe cookies. She leaned over the edge and rummaged through broken parts.
By a smoke-gray Porsche stood the woman who picked Caroline up. Deep wrinkles suggested her forties, but her hair was silver-streaked save a few chestnut strands. She hugged herself, a trembling cigarette at her lips, coiled like a compressed spring. When Caroline pocketed a scrap, the woman shot her a look reserved for a dog with chronic diarrhea. Caroline, grinning, bent deeper into the container, her dress riding up her thighs. The woman flicked her cigarette, inhaled sharply, and barked Caroline’s name. She jerked upright and shuffled over, slippers scuffing asphalt.
I drove home through streets clogged with families, café terraces, parks where kids swung from wooden bridges. An antique shop flashed by: rows of tarnished silver, furniture styles extinct for decades. A bronze horse, no bigger than a G.I. Joe, galloped in my mind—hoof suspended, mane frozen mid-shake. Minutes later, a bag sat on my passenger seat. I had dodged the usual guilt over splurging, the fear that I had stolen from savings meant to save me when I next woke in a ditch.
I parked four strides from my apartment door. The bronze horse weighed down the bag in my grip. I circled the car, feigning interest in scratches while eyeing passersby: a twentysomething glued to his phone, a rotund woman hauling a bloated grocery sack.
The trunk key trembled in my hand as if I were descending into a haunted basement. Inside, a beast raged, waiting to claw my eyes out. I wrenched the key. The lid rose. The canvas bag lay there, stuffed like military gear.
My pulse hammered. Nausea tightened my throat. I slung the canvas bag over my shoulder, its weight yanking my collarbone. Closed the trunk.
On the stairs, footsteps echoed. I pressed against the wall, shielding the bag. Jeans and scuffed sneakers paused.
“Back from the gym?”
“Gotta stay fit.”
His laugh clipped the exchange. I hurried upstairs. All it took was to answer these intrusions with some trivial nonsense. People who actually liked human beings needed those signals—hollow small talk, rehearsed smiles—and those gestures turned you invisible. Even though I would have preferred to stay silent and vault upstairs two steps at a time.
Inside, I dumped the bags on the dining table. I stripped to my skin, then collapsed facedown on the couch, breathing dust that smelled of tinsel crushed under asses. My body vibrated like post-marathon.
I woke to rust-colored light bleeding through the balcony. Half-asleep I wandered, chugging from a plastic bottle, thumbing the warm bronze horse. I craved the night—headlights splitting oil-black roads, trucks’ phantasmal glows. But what would happen while I was gone? The landlord might storm in clutching some flimsy pretext—a leak to inspect, a vent to clean. Against all odds, a thief would ransack the apartment, find the corpse, and his conscience would claw him raw until he called the cops, even though that would fuck him over too. I was born smeared with that vile luck, a grease stain no detergent could scrub out.
I positioned the bronze horse beside the canvas bag, arranging it as if mid-gallop along the edge of an imaginary cliff. I slumped at one end of the dining table, opened my laptop, and launched VLC to play the last film I’d downloaded. Forty-five seconds of corporate logos flashed by—a gauntlet of animated studio emblems—before the film began: long shots of a car winding through pine-stitched roads, the background to a long list of credits.
Fiction used to distract me when I drowned in the molasses of monotony, but now I was just killing time. Behind the laptop screen, the swollen canvas bag darkened in the gloom. The horse clung to its bronzed hue as the apartment dissolved into blackness.
I closed the film. The browser loaded Google’s homepage, its search bar blinking a taunting vertical slash. An itch festered in my chest. Every passing minute pumped more diluted poison into my blood.
I typed “corpse decomposition process,” then hammered the backspace key. Police, FBI, NSA—they’d flag the search, log the query, trace the IP. What if I used a public library computer? I scrubbed my face. Brilliant plan: risk being the sunglasses-clad, mangled-faced freak googling how corpses rot.
I stood and snapped the laptop shut. The canvas bag, the horse, the table beneath them—all had grayed into ashen silhouettes. I gripped the bag’s zipper pull. Hesitated, no idea why.
I yanked the curtains shut, cranked the blinds down over every window. Scoured the ceiling corners. Crouched to inspect the undersides of two lampshades, hunting for hidden cameras.
Flicked on the hallway light. The zipper’s teeth split open. While pressing my lips tight, I slid my hands along the sides of the corpse sheathed in plastic. Hauled it out. It weighed like a dog. When I dropped it onto the table, the crumpled mass slid into folds and lumps.
Behind the fogged plastic blurred by condensation, I discerned the contours of the head, the half-closed eyes like those of a dead lamb. The yellowish-green skin had mottled with freckles, except for the bruises stretching from what seemed to be a shoulder down to the hip—areas where the body’s weight had pressed when I’d placed it in the freezer the night before.
I grew dizzy, like a child who had spun a dozen times in a chair. I doubled over, clutching the edge of the table. When I forced myself to look back at the body, I noticed that a band of skin on one wrist had peeled away from friction, exposing a wound that had never healed. A tight watch? No. Handcuffs? Shackles. Iron shackles that had gouged the wrists, with chains linked to a ring bolted into a wall.
I wandered the room as if in a trance. A stench seeped from the corpse, like a chunk of chicken forgotten for a week at the bottom of a trash bin. I needed it to vanish. If I shut my eyes tight, maybe when I reopened them, the plastic would have deflated into a shapeless heap. Should I drive aimlessly, fling the door open mid-road, and hurl the package into a ditch? No—I had to make identification harder, to sever any link to myself. Dismember it. Carve it apart and scatter the pieces.
I dragged my fingers through my scalp, hyperventilated to clear my mind. How had I ended up needing to decide a corpse’s fate? A growl slipped out. I turned toward the boy as though he’d disobeyed me.
“Why did you dart across the road in the middle of the night without checking for cars?”
The boy had chained me to his fate. As long as any recognizable part of the corpse existed, my life hung in the balance. I pulled the chef’s knife from the counter drawer and hefted it. Imagined slicing through an arm at the bicep. Would I need shears? I reached for them with my free hand but, revolted, hurled the knife into the sink, where it clanged against metal. Leaning my forearms on the counter, I realized I’d need workshop tools. A saw. Maybe I could find one in the job-site storage. Tomorrow, during a break, I’d slip away and look. No, no. Even if I brought back a saw, could I bring myself to dismember the body? And how would I dispose of every piece before the weekend?
I slumped against the counter’s edge and slid to the floor. Above me, the semi-transparent package lay on the table, veined with haze. Less than twenty-four hours ago, this boy had sprinted through the night, far from any house I might have glimpsed by day in those oilfield plains. Had he escaped confinement like a tiger that, finding its cage open, would leap and bolt into the thicket, driven by some genetic imperative for freedom?
How much mental disability had burdened this boy? Had he understood how others would see him? If he’d faced a mirror, would he have recognized himself, or would he have thought he stared at a monster?
Author’s note: this story was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
That bit about a high-strung woman barking at Caroline to quit picking up trash and leave was inspired by an unfortunate moment I witnessed. Back when people could still smoke in bars and coffee shops, I was writing in the basement of a coffee shop I liked to frequent because the basement was usually deserted. Not that day: the sole other couple was a high-strung woman in perhaps her early thirties, who kept chain smoking while listening to a bespectacled younger woman who was clearly mentally challenged. The latter woman went to the bathroom. Once she returned and sat down, the nastiest stench of shit filled the basement, as if she had expelled the foulest diarrhea and hadn’t wiped her ass. This clearly mentally-challenged woman kept talking with a smile while the other woman, perhaps her relative, chain smoked even harder while tapping nervously on the floor with her foot. It felt meaningful, the kind of moment you can’t share in a world where the darknesses of interacting with severely disabled people tend to be swept under the rug. At least in Spain, the public message regarding disabled people is that of smiley, good-hearted, resilient folk who just happened to have been burdened with any of life’s myriad nonsenses, which of course they handle without significantly bothering anybody. But sometimes you’re burdened with someone who shits all over and doesn’t know how to clean after herself.
Sorry, Caroline, for turning you into a receptacle of troublesome qualities I witnessed in different disabled people. Even ten years later, I remember you fondly as a distant, mysterious spirit of unbridled innocence.
I’m also quite certain that if you leave a corpse in the trunk of a car in the scorching sun, in less than twenty-four hours, the plastic package would have been swarming with maggots. Just pretend that it wouldn’t, alright? We’re in the business of make-believe here.
I arrived at the workshop about twenty minutes before the afternoon shift began. I planned to take advantage of those minuets in solitude. I parked in front of the adjacent lot, and as I crossed the yard, I glanced at the group gathered in the shade of the overhang, in case anyone from my team saw me. I went around the workshop on the opposite side, passing behind the backs of people in purple coats. I recognized a few faces I associated with other workstations, but no one who would justify troubling me.
In the bare ground behind the workshop, used as a dumping area, containers and stacks of boxes formed a maze. I hurried to a bend where a stack partially blocked the view of the building and cast a shadow. Seated there, I took shelter in the mild dimness that smelled of dust and rusty iron.
Only two minutes had passed when I heard a female voice pleading. I strained to catch the words, but it was pointless. I was listening to Caroline.
I edged around the stack to peer beyond it. The woman was shuffling her feet by a container packed with discarded parts. Through her disheveled hair, she looked around like someone lost. Her coat’s right pocket was bulging with pieces whose sharp edges poked out, and beneath the coat, the flutter of a sunflower-yellow dress reached to within an inch above her knees. Her tanned legs were crossed by scars. Two cuts gleamed red, as if sometime in the last twenty-four hours she’d torn her skin on a protruding edge. Dangling from her slack right arm was a metal lunch box printed with a brown horse, the sort a preschooler might carry.
Caroline was murmuring entreaties. Minutes earlier, she might have been wandering a field until some dimensional rift transported her to this world, which seemed wrong everywhere she looked, so she was searching for the way back.
Above her reddened eye bags, her corneas had gone glassy. Her head and shoulders shuddered as though coughing, and when the babble shifted into sobs, the woman collapsed onto a wooden spool the size of a coffee table, one that had once held copper cable. Caroline let the lunch box drop, and clutched at her skirt. She broke down crying.
The cracked dam that had held back tons of pain had burst. The woman trembled and whimpered as if no one in the world existed who could hear her, or care. She wandered a charred landscape as the last creature of her species.
Echoes of that crying had reached me in the workshop while I focused on whichever part I was assembling or fixing. A background track to the rolling of conveyor belts and the hum of the air conditioning.
Tears ran down Caroline’s cheeks. They dripped from her chin as her mouth murmured phrases no one would understand, strings of syllables one articulation short of becoming words. I listened as a dog’s owner might listen, suspecting any moment the animal might start speaking.
My cells had frozen over. I waited, an inanimate object among the stacks of boxes and heaps of trash. How much of an adult mind remained in Caroline’s head? What had caused her condition? A severe childhood fever, a brain injury? Was she born broken? The seamless dream in which she flowed most of the time had decayed into a nightmare, and Caroline was confronting the darkness and despair to which the rest of us had grown used, to one degree or another, so we could keep going.
Footsteps approached—a man with the gait of a scrawny gorilla, bald except for a band of hair rising at his temples. His beard crawled down his neck and merged with wirelike hair sprouting from beneath his coat. A pelt covered the backs of his hands, and the hair under his sleeves threatened to burst through the fabric. The man, worried like someone running to a car wreck on the highway, crouched next to Caroline and spoke to her. Her shoulders shook as she whimpered. He brushed a lock of Caroline’s hair behind her ear, put an arm around her shoulders, and kissed her temple. The sleeves of her coat and the ruffle of her skirt were flecked with tears.
* * *
Héctor blew his nose every couple of minutes in a wet, snoring sound that set my nerves on edge; I clenched my jaw to keep them under control. My body had a layer of dried sweat like a film of grease. Though I kept my head down, focusing on my hands and the parts sliding toward me on the conveyor belt, I had a sixth sense that Christopher, on my right, was gesturing and fidgeting. Whenever I gripped a piece, the pressure bothered my fingertips through the gloves. The racket of the machines and the conveyor belts, daily wear on our eardrums, now pricked my skin as if I were rolling around on gravel.
Ten, twenty, thirty fewer seconds remained until the horn blared. I would take off my coat and gloves and flee home to breathe within four walls, where no one would see me nor demand my attention.
My bladder ached, though it was maybe a quarter full. I asked for a break. I slid the part to my right and climbed off the stool just as Christopher leaned in to speak into my ear, like a giraffe sticking its head through a car window.
“Was that a test?” he said.
“What?”
“The two pieces with the wires hooked up wrong. You were expecting me to catch it and fix them.”
“You mean I sent you two that were messed up?”
He gave me a confused look, but in a few seconds one corner of his mouth curled in a smile, as though I’d just admitted to playing a prank on him.
“You never sent me faulty parts before. But I spotted them. So when Héctor’s on my left, if he messes anything up, I’ll fix those too.”
My brain throbbed. I excused myself. Head lowered, eyes half-closed so the path among the work tables barely registered on my glasses, I crossed the workshop. At the entrance of the hallway leading to the bathroom, I peered at the steps that went up to the supervisor’s office. I hurried past the staircase before she could catch me and start asking questions.
I peed. I splashed cold water on my face. When my chest finally eased its anxiety, I confronted the mirror. The beads of water along my cheekbones and jaw gleamed yellow. A face with a dead eye ringed by half a dozen scars—coral-pink cracks where shrapnel had lodged in the bone. A face that should have remained invisible.
After drying myself off with toilet paper, I put on my sunglasses and leaned against the sink. The child’s corpse deformed the back of my mind like a lead ball on a taut sheet. It called from the trunk of the car, a beacon growing louder and louder. The workshop crew would hear it. They’d head out to the yard, gather at the trunk, open it, and discover the rotting body.
I hobbled back down the hallway toward the workshop. A pop song spilled out of the open office door, and there stood the supervisor, stopped five steps above my floor, looking at me. Her lime-green sleeveless top hung loose like a priestess’s tunic, revealing over one collarbone the black strap of an undershirt and that of her bra. The skin of her arms hung slack. Her hair reached her shoulders, but she’d trimmed her bangs right at the hairline, as if one morning she’d gotten sick of them refusing to behave and chopped them off with scissors.
I was already turning toward the workshop when she called my name.
“Feeling better?”
What might she know that would make her ask me that? I’d told her I woke up vomiting. Fool. Any pause in which I hesitated could stir suspicion.
“I’ve stopped throwing up, but the discomfort will take a couple of days to go away.”
Standing a few steps up, she nodded and smiled with straight white teeth on full display like items in a shop window. Most times I looked at her, that grin bared down to the gums distracted me.
“And aside from that, everything okay?” she asked.
“It’s been dragging down my whole week.”
She fiddled with one of the many wristbands stacked on her left arm. The smile loosened as she weighed her words.
“It’s just… you look nervous, like something’s bothering you.”
I braced myself.
“I give that impression?”
“All day, on the line.”
I pictured her perched at the window in her office, gauging my every expression and gesture, like a judge at a gymnastics showcase.
“Is it the dead child in the trunk?” she asked.
A wave of cold rippled through me, and I trembled like I’d overdosed on caffeine. My mind rattled with white noise. Her smile was the smile of a friend. Had I slipped up, or was this my imagination?
As she studied my face, she opened her hands at her sides.
“I know how you handle these problems,” she said. “You bury what’s bad inside, and let it get infected. But with every problem, we’re free to suffer or to smile and face it positively.”
I held my breath. My pulse fluttered, but I kept my features from stiffening.
“It’s so easy to think negative,” she went on, “but we have to work at it. Before anger or fear takes over, we should think about the positive steps that could transform us. Remember: we receive what we transmit.”
“Really?” I asked robotically.
“It’s a science.”
An employee with Down syndrome appeared beside me. I recognized him from seeing the guy on breaks under some awning, eating a sandwich.
“They sent twelve fewer,” he said.
The supervisor’s grin brightened. She leaned toward him and spoke as if talking to a baby.
“You mean twelve fewer parts?”
“Twelve fewer.”
I barely kept myself from digging my nails into my palms. I wanted free of her smile, of her presence. I cleared my throat.
“I need to get back to my line.”
I turned, but she asked me to wait. She came down a few steps, rested a hand on the other guy’s shoulder, and gestured toward the workshop.
“Go back to your station. In a short while, I’ll figure out how to fix it, okay?”
He nodded and slipped behind me. The supervisor lifted her hand as if to touch my arm, but let it drop like she’d realized she almost patted a cactus.
“I’m not trying to pry. You know, I never saw the signs with Norman Reyes.” She stopped. Her smile faltered as she glanced around, like a watchdog worried a censor might overhear. “And since he left, I keep wondering if there were signs for someone who knew how to spot them.”
I’d forgotten the coordinator’s name days after he vanished from the workshop. The next day I read a newspaper piece declaring him dead, with no suspicion of foul play. During a break, half a dozen workers had cornered the supervisor to ask questions. While wearing a smile, she put her palms together at her abdomen and said the coordinator resigned for personal reasons.
I pushed aside the images of that day, then faced the supervisor. Her lips were frozen in a smile, so forced it had become a gesture of sincerity, as if letting that smile fade might tempt the universe to rain fire on her. Did she really believe we didn’t know the coordinator had killed himself? Did I work among such morons that they didn’t realize it? Even so, I still had questions. I’d never learn the answers. Had he shot himself? Drowned? Electrocuted himself? Hanged himself from a doorknob with his belt?
“I can’t wear your skin,” she said, her tone like someone speaking to a dog that won’t drop a bone. “I don’t know what the war left inside you, how it feels to come back to a world where nobody orders you to kill.”
My cheeks went hot, my nostrils flared. I could feel spines sprouting along my backbone. I swept aside the irritation from my voice.
“It doesn’t help me work better, or calm down, knowing someone’s watching my every expression.”
“Do you think I have bad intentions?”
“If my work is fine, like you told me at the last review, then my personal problems concern only me.”
“We’re in this workshop together.”
“We’re not a family. We’re tied together because we need money to survive, and working for a paycheck is a legal way to get it.”
“But if something is weighing on you so much that it darkens your mood, it affects those around you.”
I rubbed my forehead and pushed up my glasses, which had slid down my nose.
“It’s got nothing to do with my job. It’s my own business.”
She looked as though I’d insulted her. Someone else would have rushed to link together apologies.
“I just want to help,” she said.
I bent forward and pressed my palms together like a peace offering.
“Listen, you’re a good person. Okay? There’s your daily reminder. Now, please, I need to get back to the line or I’ll have to swallow remarks about how much time I’m wasting in the bathroom.”
When I reached the line, Christopher looked up.
“Feeling sick again?”
“Diarrhea,” I said. “Explosive.”
Author’s note: this novella was originally published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
That moment with Caroline crying was inspired by a moment I witnessed back when I was attending a course for disabled people. I was seated on a bench during a break, when a beautiful woman wearing a work coat lurched to the bench opposite me (we were separated by about seven meters or so, though), and started bawling like a child. I could do nothing but stare as if I were witnessing something meaningful. Shortly after, a monkey man went out and the rest of the moment played out like it happened in my story. Never found out what that was all about, nor saw the woman again.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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