The blob sloshes his bulk like a tar-black wave of putrefaction coming in on a beach, sending ripples of oozing flesh and eyeballs across his gelatinous mass.
“Here’s the gist: a big fuck-off apocalypse is approaching.”
“Oh, another end-of-days scenario.” I sigh. “The Old Gods must be back in business after a long absence, during which they watched us monkeys clamber through the mud in a voyage toward self-destruction. By Arachne’s glorious breast! We’re doomed to be swept off the stage, to end as a stain of entropy, once the Mother of Spiders finishes consuming this universe.”
“Please, stop spewing horseshit and listen. This mess started because the professor designed a revolutionary…”
“Wait, what professor?” I demand to know, irked. “Are you one of those cretins who mention third parties as if their interlocutor were in the know? Have a modicum of respect for the laws of communication, you slobbering slimeball!”
“You met him, idiot.” The blob pulsates with a sloshy squelch. Across his bulk, coconut-sized growths bulge as if they were about to shoot out, pushing eyeballs away and making them bump into other eyeballs. The growths sink back under the rippling goo. “I can’t mime for shit in this form. Nevermind; it’s the bunny guy.”
I’m seated in the first row of my mind theatre when it projects a portrait of the bunnyman’s furry, piss-soiled head sticking out of a toilet: close-set, pointy ears; bulging, gunmetal-gray eyes; a pair of overgrown incisors dripping with drool; almond-or-whiskey-colored fur matted with filth, splotched with gunky crusts.
My guts curdle as a wave of revulsion sweeps through me. I stagger backwards.
“Professor… bunnyman?” I ask in a cracked voice.
“Yes, the bunny-brained professor.”
“Th-that pervert with a torpedo-sized dick?!”
“Healthy self-esteem, I’d say.”
My temples throb with a dull pain.
“You hang out with a cacodemon who pours his own semen on pancakes and force-feeds them to his guests?!”
The blob huffs a blast of fetid air.
“Leire, you’re the kind of woman who would stab her partner because they cheated in a dream. I’m glad I haven’t shared a horizontal position with you.”
“Your loss. I’m a ravenous pussy-eater.”
“Anyway, let me illustrate the problem in terms you may understand: the professor’s contraption ripped reality a fresh vagina, and ever since, it has been oozing fluids from the darkness inside.”
My mind replaces the sight of the wall-wide mass of goo with that of a corundum-hard cock as thick as a stick of salami. Pulsating veins snake under stretched skin that threatens to rip open. The crimson cockhead, glistening with pre-ejaculate, draws nearer and nearer to my wide-open pussy.
A shudder of vertigo wrecks me. My legs go limp; I drop to the carpet. As I clasp my hands to my temples and shut my eyes tight, I rock back and forth.
“Get out of my brain, you giant fuckpole made of twisted, purple veins!”
“Quit your histrionics!” Alberto barks out. “Can’t you stay lucid for five fucking minutes?”
I grit my teeth. After I wipe sweat from my forehead, I lift my gaze to glower at the insolent blob and his legion of glazed eyeballs.
“Wh-why did you have to mention a vagina in such close proximity to that bunnyman bastard?” I demand to know, my voice strained.
The blob heaves and ripples as if he were containing laughter.
“I was trying to relate to your go-to frame of reference. Should I have mentioned penises instead?”
How could I defend my honor? I’ve been known to draw pencil sketches of cocks to visualize data structures.
“I keep glancing away from your greasy thoughts,” Alberto continues. “Oh, did I tell you that I can see them? They emanate from your head as psychedelic steam mirages, constant reminders of your depravity. If they could, they would smell of musty socks.”
I want to sob and curl into a fetal position, but instead I let out a guttural noise and rise from my kneeling position, jerking to my feet. Heat crawls up my cheeks.
“Says the dickbag who stinks like a cesspool filled with rotting corpses. You have thoroughly and blatantly invaded my privacy, so you may as well violate the sanctity of my mental space.”
“Now, could you clarify how come a child has been popping up in your thoughts? There she is again. Anything seedy you’d like to share, you dirty cunt?”
“Are her eyes squinty?” I ask in a calm voice.
“Uh… Yes, she’s Asian.”
I jab my forefinger at the blob.
“Then that’s my new daughter you’re talking about, you jizz-filled, brain-dead bastard. Have some respect!”
The blob’s bulk wobbles, making his myriad eyes quiver.
“Wait, you’re serious. Why would you suddenly have a child? How?”
“Jacqueline and I adopted a little girl that I found in the Ice Age, and she’s the cutest bundle of joy to ever warm my heart. Name’s Nairu.”
“Care to explain rationally how you acquired an Asian kid?”
I cross my arms and tilt my head.
“Rationality is for pussies who believe they need to justify themselves. I merely walked into the trap that you, or that so-called professor of yours, laid out for me.”
“Leire,” the blob growls, “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. Please tell me you didn’t steal some random girl!”
“Relax, you poxy shit. I’ll explain the origin story. One recent night, after the last round of sex, Jacqueline wrapped me in her arms, pressing her bountiful breasts against my back. Sheltered by mommy’s warmth and heady scent, I started slipping into dreamland. I visualized Jacqueline and I in our old age, curled up together under the covers, sharing a cigarette. By Arachne’s nipples, I was flooded with gratitude for the woman whose light had seeped through the cracks in my battered mind to extinguish the lonely part. As a child, before I became the target of harassment by interdimensional creeps, whenever I pictured my future, I saw myself stumbling around in a labyrinth of corridors lined with funhouse mirrors. I sobbed and sobbed, terrified of that appearance that kept warping, knowing that soon enough I would lose the only image of myself that I understood.”
“Move on with your story!”
I let out an exasperated sigh as I brush strands of hair from my forehead.
“You interrupt me at such an emotionally charged moment? What a disrespect for the art of storytelling!”
“My interruption was driven by a desperate desire not to hear more about your problems. Just get to the part where you nabbed the kid!”
“Fine, I’ll provide a streamlined version, you blobulous mound of pus. In the morning, I got up from mommy’s bed and I walked naked to the bathroom. When I reached out to turn on the lights, a crackle of energy ran through me. Next thing I knew, I was standing on the muddy pebbles of a riverbank, and an icy wind was blowing against my bare tits. I won’t bore you with my initial freak-out. Anyway, I met the girl in that boreal forest. I also ended up annoying a ground sloth as it was drinking from the river. That long-extinct beast nearly performed extensive surgery on my face with its twenty-centimeter-long claws. Are you getting the close-up of that magnificent mofo from my thoughts? What a gigantic, shambling mass of meat!”
“Oh shit.”
“I wish I could have ridden that goddamn goliath, whose claws were created to rend and gouge, to pull down trees and reap lives. Just so you know, it was probably the largest mammal to ever exist, larger even than the bunnyman’s cock!”
“Leire, none of us opened that rip in space-time,” the blob says gravely as he shifts his bulk. “They will keep appearing spontaneously near you, because your insanity makes you a conduit. It’s a miracle that you returned to the present.”
“You’re telling me. I only had to walk backwards, though. To be fair, I fell on my ass back to the hallway of Jacqueline’s privileged apartment in the hills, to then find out that I had dragged along a filthy, confused child who was unaware that parquet flooring existed.”
“So, in a way, you did kidnap that girl.”
“The authorities might see it that way.”
“I guess it couldn’t be helped. No way to un-kidnap her now.”
“Perhaps I pulled off the greatest scam in the history of interpersonal relations.”
Alberto’s amorphous form shudders, sending waves rolling across the gelatinous mass. His glossy eyeballs, fixated beyond me and beyond the windows, are catching the light from the ceiling fixtures in a somber dance.
“Oh man,” the blob mumbles. “This is terrible.”
A pang of shame forces me to look down.
“You know, I thought so back then, wrapped up in a blanket, chafing my arms through the sleeves of my wool pajamas, near hallucinating due to shock and hypothermia. ‘This is terrible.’ What the hell was I supposed to do with the kid that I snatched from her home? But Jacqueline embraced that little girl like a gift from the universe, and when her angelic giggles fill the apartment, I catch myself smiling. You should see her drawings. She’s so eager to express her uniqueness, like I used to be before my parents shredded my psyche. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those ancient cave paintings belonged to her. But… being raised by me is like getting injected with poison.”
“I meant the rips in space-time. Still, a living child from thousands of years ago is mind-blowing.”
“At least about 11,500 years, which is when the Younger Dryas ended.”
“If the press got ahold of this story, the scientific community would want to lock that girl up in a lab.”
I picture a gaggle of white coats gathered around Nairu as they dazzle her with bright lights. The medical staff will take her temperature, make her pee into a cup, pry open her mouth and reach down her throat to study her lungs, inject her with syringes full of strange fluids, cut away strips of flesh to check her DNA, and open her skull to peer inside the brain.
A sickening ache squeezes my heart, and I clasp a trembling hand over my breast. The urge to murder those butchers sears through me with the fervor of an ancient beast’s drive to dominate and breed.
“I’m sure many scoundrels would love to run their greasy hands all over my sudden daughter,” I say in a cold voice, “but none will, because no non-monstrous person will find out that I kidnapped her from the Ice Age, as well as from her bearded, hunter-gatherer father. In due time, Jacqueline and I will relocate to some remote wilderness, where we’ll survive by farming, raising poultry and livestock, and staging highway robberies at gunpoint. So don’t you go spilling our little secret, you blubbery ectoplasm. In fact, restrain yourself from talking to anyone else; they will run away in terror.”
“Well, in any case, do the world a favor and don’t raise that innocent soul as a pervert.”
I chuckle.
“Nah, she’s fucked. Both of her moms are freaks.”
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Angel From Montgomery” by John Prine, and “Bitter Sweet Symphony” by The Verve.
I keep a playlist with all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel. A hundred and fifty-eight songs so far. Check them out.
Leire met that bunnyman bastard back in chapter 59, during the sequence titled “That Bunnyman Bastard.” She ended up in the Ice Age back in chapter 63, during the sequence titled “A Gift From the Ice Age.” You can check out all the chapters in this page.
How about audiochapters? Do you enjoy them? I do, which is why I spend hours putting each of these together. Here’s the audiochapter for this chapter.
You know how I know that I will never become a professional author, other than the fact that I need to write stuff that virtually nobody else wants to read? I got a sales report from last month; someone has bought both of the books I self-published in Spanish back in 2017 or so. I got paranoid and wondered who was trying to fuck with me.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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