Todo lo relacionado con el proceso creativo
In case you don’t know already, some internet service out there allows you to pay so you can send prompts to a high-end neural network that runs on some supercomputer, and that AI will spit back fantastic images of whatever crossed your mind. Ain’t that grand? Anyway, I fed it prompts related to chapter 69 of my ongoing novel, and as usual the neural network produced some winners. In addition, I took advantage of a beta upgrade of the AI that seems stronger, if maybe less creative.
Midway through my ongoing novel, “We’re Fucked”, I started linking songs in the Author’s Note section that often comes after the chapter. I wanted to have a convenient list at hand of the songs I have already mentioned, so I created a YouTube playlist: here’s the link.
Nobody has actually mentioned anything about the songs I’ve linked, so I don’t know if anyone has even noticed them or listened, but in any case, the playlist contains the fifty-six songs mentioned so far, and I’ll keep adding new ones as I write the following chapters.
Millefeuilles made of layers of puff pastry, cake, and cream. Chocolate croissants sprinkled with powdered sugar. Danish pastries topped with rosewood-colored jam. White mousse cakes that look like melting snowdrifts. Heart-shaped pastries half-caked in chocolate. Coffee buns dusted with coarse sugar. Coconut-flavored croquembouches. Crumbly cream horns. Sugar donuts. Stuffed crullers. Buttercream-iced choux buns. Cookie-crusted hazelnut pralines. Red fruit tartlets with a golden crust. Puff pastry braids bedecked with nuts and raisins. Freshly baked croissants that resemble legless, buff crabs. Oversized, rust-brown palmiers covered with a thick layer of glazed sugar. Oblong eclairs stuffed with cream and decorated with lines of white chocolate in zig-zag.
My mouth is flooding with saliva. The lining of my stomach secretes more and more acid like a flesh-vat at some dystopian factory, ready to dissolve whatever bolus gets pushed down the esophagus. I need to stuff myself with the whole inventory of pastries; their sugar will make me forget about my otherworldly stalkers, about the exponential ruin of our society, about the fact that I’m a failed genetic experiment that should have been thrown in the garbage, and about the fact that my brain is hoping to spot a hole in my defenses to unleash another assault of nightmarish memories: the disasters that the universe has hurled at me out of spite, and the disgraces that I’ve brought upon myself because I’m a cowardly fiend that is counting the minutes until she can shove her hand down her panties.
Our adopted daughter is standing on her tiptoes and pressing her hands and nose against the glass display counter, hypnotized by the concoctions of chocolate, cream and jam supplied by this factory of death and gluttony. She looks like she might faint if we let her try any pastry. The child will make us gorge ourselves on a cake of toxic sludge, to push us deeper into the underbelly of this rotten world that promises periods of blissful oblivion through drugs, only to fuck us over.
“She’s going to become addicted to sugar in no time,” I say.
Jacqueline chuckles.
“Aren’t we all.”
From behind the counter comes the chirpy voice of a young woman with an Eastern European accent.
“She’s so adorable! It’s like she’s the cutest thing I ever laid eyes on! What kind of pastry would you like, little bunny?”
Past the reflections in the plexiglass partition, the barista is wearing a black uniform and grey-blue sanitary gloves. She’s at least half a head taller than me. Her sandy-blond hair, tied up in a messy bun, gleams under the overhead lights. Her eyes are shadowed by deep mascara, and she has the Slavic gaze of someone who has witnessed officers of Communism forcing entire villages to starve, although she looks young enough to be in college.
I should prevent her from interacting with Jacqueline; if this woman flirted, my beloved may snap out of her trance and realize that she’s dating the human equivalent of a raccoon. But the barista has fixed her haunted gaze on our child, and dared to address her. Although I’m tempted to tell this woman that she should mind her own business, over the years I’ve learned that if you are as hostile to people as they deserve, they tend to bother you even more, so I measure my response.
“Please, don’t mention bunnies in my presence,” I say icily. “And we haven’t decided yet. Once we do, I hope you’ll be capable enough of providing the chosen pastries for us.”
When the woman smiles, I’m surprised that she had been able to cover those teeth with her lips.
“I’m sure I will!”
“Then we’ll have two millefeuilles, a half-dozen of the chocolate croissants, one fruit tartlet with almonds, four palmiers, and two dozen donuts. Plus two bottles of your best champagne.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“What was that?”
“We haven’t decided yet,” Jacqueline says through a grin, then she pats me on the shoulder. “Let’s pick our table. One of those at the back.”
I stifle a yawn as I nod. Hand in hand with our adopted daughter, we head deeper into the pastry shop, past two short-haired, middle-aged women who have ordered toast and coffee, then past an ancient woman whose wrinkled skin is stained with liver spots, and who is sitting next to her South American carer; both are frowning as if they’re trying to figure out the purpose of their existence.
Jacqueline picks two joined tables at the back, then she gestures for the child to climb onto the chair closest to the wall and facing the entrance. She’s safer if we box her in.
This shop features a second counter dominated by an industrial coffee machine, above which menu boards advertise breakfasts. Two male clients are seated on wooden stools at the counter. My skin itches; my brain is busy monitoring the presence of multiple strangers although I’m already exhausting my reserves of energy on remaining coherent. Jacqueline, however, remains as calm as a cup of warm milk.
After we set down the shopping bags on the fourth chair, my beloved walks around the two varnished maple wood tables to take off our child’s lemonade-pink scarf, revealing the peach-orange skin of her throat. The girl lets out an anxious vocalization, as if she had been deprived of a toy.
“You shouldn’t wear it indoors, darling,” Jacqueline says in her honeyed voice. “It will catch lots of crumbs.”
I slump down into the chair next to our child, but as I’m considering that she would feel more comfortable closer to the woman that has taken care of her, Jacqueline interrupts my thoughts.
“What would strike your fancy, dear?”
“Well, if I force myself to drink more coffee today, I might vomit.”
“So how about a cup of chocolate? Our girl will also enjoy that.”
“Sounds tasty.”
“And what kind of pastries would you like?”
“Anything you think that I can fit in my mouth.”
Jacqueline chuckles. She leans over the table to move aside the menu and the napkin dispenser, clearing some space in front of the child. She pulls out from one of the shopping bags a sketchbook, the kind that an art teacher would order his middle school students to buy, as well as a yellow pack of Crayola crayons that contains sixty-four different colors. My girlfriend’s face lights up with a grin as she opens the pack, revealing four rows of crayons like multicolored, cone-headed freaks seated at an auditorium. I lack names for half of those colors.
The child perks up, then she gabbles a couple of sentences excitedly. Jacqueline reaches over to pat her on the head.
“It will take us a long time to teach our language to this doll, if… if she’s capable of learning it.” Her smile falters. “But she should be able to draw, right?”
I pull out an asphalt-black crayon from the pack. I probe its flat tip.
“Yeah… I read this morning that plenty of those cave paintings were made by children.”
“Perfect. Keep her entertained, will you?”
Jacqueline squeezes my hand, then she struts towards the counter to order. When I turn my head to the right, our child is paying attention to me with curiosity; I feared that she would look at me as if I were some pest that she’s forced to tolerate. Her cherubic cheeks disturb my heart, but the gaze of her monolid eyes is like a laser running over my face. It reminds me of my high school biology teacher; when he was about to explain the insides of an elephant, he stared so long and hard into our eyes that I started to wonder if elephants actually existed.
This girl is shining a light on the garbage bags I piled up at the apartment I abandoned, on the shattered living room window I never bothered to fix, on the board games I bought but didn’t unwrap, on the times I stuck around after hours at the office and tugged my trousers and panties down to rub one out. Is she a cosmic judge sent from the distant past to bring the gavel down on my foul deeds? Or maybe this girl will grow into the exact image of my mother: an indifferent humanoid programmed to erase me from history.
I gulp.
“Just wait until they serve us a bunch of pastries, forest girl,” I say nervously while I try a smile. “You have never tasted anything that good! And you’re lucky I’m not the one preparing your food. I’m able to fry ham and bacon and cook some eggs, but you never know if they’ll somehow end up covered in cum.”
The child arches her eyebrows and tilts her head, and my cheeks flush. I scoot my chair closer to her.
“Nevermind what I said. I guess you need to be taught how to draw with crayons, so check this out.”
What should I draw? What effluvia of my diseased brain could I show to this pristine child that has just begun to get eroded by modernity? I risk scarring her for life. But what an odd worry for me to have; when was the last time that I doodled anything else than a close-up of my own face? No, of the face with which I should have been born, instead of the rotting husk with which any reflective surface torments me.
I survey the rows of crayons as if they were the opportunities of a full hand in a card game. I let my instinct grab four other crayons from the pack. When I lean back, I spot Jacqueline: she’s standing in front of the pastry counter and pointing at some items inside the glass display counter. Behind it, the Slavic barista, pastry chef or whatever the hell she pretends to be, is using food tongs to pluck an oblong eclair.
Seated at the second counter, next to an uneven and dented wooden pillar, a man in his late twenties is ogling my girlfriend’s legs. He’s wearing a beanie and a nylon windbreaker. He’s holding his phone in his hand as if he was staring at it before he realized that the most delicious woman alive had materialized in this store. The sight of my girlfriend’s twin mountains hugged by her sweater would be enough to make the man’s crotch swell up like an angry balloon.
I can make out the tight, toned flesh of Jacqueline’s legs through her cinder-colored tights, and as she bends over to press a fingertip against the glass display counter, her plaid skirt hikes up slightly. The bottom of her peacoat may keep hiding her butt, or it may instead fail catastrophically at its mission, exposing her ample behind that resembles a pair of ripe pomegranates. Anyway, Jacqueline is an exquisite piece of art that should have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, while I’m an unmade bed with a dirty quilt and a crusted-up blanket, my sheets tattered by two decades of restless sleep and smelly ejaculate.
How dare that beanie-wearing beast take a sneak peek at my queen’s attributes? Merely grazing Jacqueline with his gaze would befoul her as if she had fallen in one of those Indian rivers. I should stop him. I would stand up, walk up to the pervert and tap his shoulder. When he turned around, I would clock him hard on the nose. No, that may break my fingers, and he might even punch me back. I could hurl the napkin dispenser at him. A hail of paper may distract him so much that Jacqueline would return to our table unmolested. I could snatch the barista’s tongs, then I’d snap the guy’s neck with a quick twist and a jerk. I’m also holding crayons; although their tip is flat, the end is still tapered, so I could try to push them through the guy’s face. No, I would have to sharpen the tips first with my teeth. I could fling the crayons at the prick, but I don’t know which colors would be the most effective in dissuading him from polluting my queen.
What the hell am I thinking? Isn’t Spike’s revolver weighing down the inside pocket of my corduroy jacket? I should take the weapon out and check that the bullets haven’t vanished, that they remain in the chamber. I’d cock the hammer, then aim the revolver at the back of that windbreaker. Blam, blam! Blood would start oozing from the two black holes. After that triumph of justice, an oily thread of equine saliva would descend from the heavens, and its beady end would morph into a thumbs up.
If either of the bullets buried themselves in the guy’s spine, he would slump instantly to the hardwood floor. Otherwise he would stand up and turn around with an annoyed expression. Upon noticing that a thin stream of smoke rose from the muzzle of my revolver, he would say, “what the hell, lady.” But I would lower the barrel towards his abdomen and squeeze the trigger. Blam! Another blood spatter. The bullet would pierce his intestines, which would leak out their shit and cause an infection that would rot his insides. If by this point the revolver didn’t misfire and explode turning my hands into shredded ribbons, I would aim the revolver further down. A thick liquid would be dangling from the glans of his erect penis. Blam! His dick and balls would burst. The windbreaker-clad wretch would fall to his knees while clutching his pulsating groin, then tumble into a pool of liquefied meat.
Once a man loses his genitals, he wouldn’t care if I smashed his face with a rock, if I gouged his eyes out, or if I cut his head off. His life was already over anyway. If someone were to shoot out my clitoris, I’d have a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings.
A small hand tugs on my right sleeve. I flinch, my heart leaps to my throat. Our child lets out a sentence in a questioning tone, which pulls me down into the atmosphere of this patisserie and its scent of pastries splashed with blood. Her childish innocence will strike me dead and bury me in the same grave as that beanie-wearing lowlife.
I wish I were like this girl. Her eyes are clear and she’s free. And she probably has no clue how to use a knife nor a fork.
My brain feels like it’s dripping with tar. I catch my breath, then I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand.
“You are right, I was supposed to work on my masterpiece. You know what they say: never make your art in a patisserie. It may be a fine place for fattening food, but for creative work, it’s too distracting. Anyway, my drawing will become the most famous ever, and it will cure my insomnia.”
I hunch over the sketchbook and start drawing the outline of a face, but the stroke comes out faint. I examine the tip of the asphalt-black crayon. No, they didn’t come with transparent caps, and my exhaustion is preventing me from thinking straight, because the crayon’s pigmented wax wouldn’t have touched the paper in that case. I must have gotten used to pens and markers.
I press the tip of the crayon harder against the paper until the curve comes out as thick as I want, although it feels like I’m punishing the sketchbook. I draw round eyes like those of a slow loris, the well-mouths into an inner chasm. Added to the slightly raised eyebrows and the half-closed lips, the woman’s expression suggests madness, frustration and pent-up horniness. In short, her look screams, “I’m trapped within my own mind, so fuck me, please and thank you, mistress.”
I can’t figure out how to make the strokes seem continuous, and some of the colors have blended into mud. The tip of an orange crayon splinters into chips. When I brush them away with my hand, they leave a stain on the paper. I guess that any crayon drawing ends up looking like it was made by a child.
I’m enjoying shading that brow furrowed in worry, as well as the space under the arched eyebrows, under the marked eye bags that befit someone who suffers from anxiety-induced insomnia and severe depression, and under that downturned mouth of a person for whom every moment of happiness, as soon as it ends, feels like a mirage.
I draw each sinuous lock of hair in caramel and wood browns, with some orange added in as if I had dyed those locks with henna, until I end up rendering a beastly mane that matches my unkempt mind. Hair is about a hundred thousand protein filaments that grow however they please out of the person’s scalp; aren’t we damaging its dignity by arranging it with a narrow-toothed tool into artificial shapes?
Under the caricaturesque head, I’ve depicted a skinny neck and narrowed shoulders; even in a drawing, I want to occupy as little space as possible. I don’t dare to continue the drawing below that close-up, but I envision a body like a column, its legs thin as pipes and the feet dangling from them. I’m tempted to add a title in the top right-hand corner of the paper: ‘The Lonely Loon, Queen of Monsters.’ I should also write an accompanying poem:
I am a monster from a land far away.
I roamed the mountains,
I lurked in the caves,
I slithered on the sand,
I climbed the trees,
I scaled the clouds,
I jumped between the rainbows,
I swayed amidst the stars.
I’m not a good kid, as you can see
From my monstrous countenance.
My feet are freezing and bloody red,
But my mouth is filled with hot steam.
My mom is a lizard. She says she’s an angel.
My dad is a worm. He says he’s a god.
My only companion is the moon.
I eat other monsters’ bodies,
And I swallow every stranger
Who wanders in from outside.
My shadow is so long
As I cast it upon the ground.
I stick my teeth into my soul’s wounds,
And eat myself alive.
I will end up living on ice.
This is my song of mourning,
This is my prayer to the night,
That a special monster like myself
May find herself at peace in another realm.
My voice does not reach the skies,
Nor do my words touch the Earth,
But I sing my songs to the moon
While she falls asleep by the lake,
And wakes up by the river
Where there is no one else.
I remove my elbows from the table, then I push the sketchbook to the child’s side.
“Ta-ta!” I exclaim using an expression that may have been common in the Ice Age.
The child snaps her head back and lets out an admiring O sound through her O-shaped mouth. A flood of pride flows down to my groin.
“Hell yeah, I’m pretty good, huh?” I point at the drawing, then at myself. “Leire. That’s me. My name is Leire.”
She stares at me hesitantly while her eyebrows twitch. When she parts her lips, they form a bubble of saliva that slides to a corner of her mouth. She closes it again.
I tap the drawing with my index finger.
“Leire.”
“Eide,” the child says in her high-pitched voice.
Did the word’s consonants become shapeless blobs of doughy mud, as if they’d fallen into a tar pit and gotten stuck?
“Eide?”
She claps and hoots with laughter as if I were a monkey and she had heard me utter a ridiculous sound.
I’m flabbergasted. A rush of warmth fills my chest, and my head feels like it’s about to shoot off like the cork of a champagne bottle. Oh no, I want to hug this child so hard that her liquified viscera would get squeezed through her orifices like toothpaste!
The name Leire is elegant and alluring; a poet would form it with his lips while gazing at the stars and yearning for the one he loves. Eide sounds like a rude kid who has failed to learn that she shouldn’t insult other people’s parents, or hit people over the head with a hammer. Eide is a name for a morose girl who needs hugs. I guess I’m Eide now.
That was the first of the Ice Age child’s vocalizations that showed intelligence; whatever vestiges of sentience we recognized in her previous actions might have been wish fulfillment. Now I suspect that she may be smarter than me.
My heartbeat resumes its steady thud. I point at myself with one thumb.
“Leire.”
The child waves her little hand at me.
“Eide!”
When I jab my index finger at our girl, her eyes sparkle. She clenches her hands into fists and blurts out maybe two words, but I don’t understand how she used her tongue and lips to vocalize them, even though I’m staring at her mouth.
I should give myself a break. An otherworldly demon invaded my dreams to force-feed me tainted pancakes, which caused me to wake up screaming at four in the morning, then a rip in spacetime sent me to the Paleolithic Age, where I risked losing my fingers and toes and nose to frostbite, as well as my sanity. I also pissed off an extinct ground sloth to the point where it wanted to ram its claws through my windpipe. I should be thankful that I can still understand my own language, and if I think about all of this too long, I might become incapable of speaking.
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Caribou” (as well as this alternate version) by Pixies, and “Mute” by Youth Lagoon.
Leire’s fear that any food she prepares may end up covered in cum is actually a reference to chapter 14.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter: here’s the link.
This was the last chapter I will be able to post before I return to work this Friday. Of course, it feels like a disaster. Back to the routine of wasting my time and energies on fixing stupid computer problems, dealing with even stupider users, and tolerating my coworkers, who often act like middle school kids. But I’ve never managed to earn more than ten euros selling my ebooks, and I’m a thirty-seven-year-old disgusting dude, so nobody would want to pay the bills while I stay at home jerking off whether literally or psychologically, or both at once.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this one.
Four and a half stars for the titular story, three and a half for the other one.
When I bother to read fiction, I usually look for well-constructed mirrors. In the titular story from this manga, because it features two, the protagonist is a high-strung failed adult with a dead-end job that pays her rent but otherwise just grates on her nerves. On the very first page of that story we learn that her best friend, only friend, the titular Mariko, has committed suicide.
Along the way we learn that Mariko was as broken as they come, and little of her true nature had a chance to come through given that she suffered a childhood, up to her twenties, full of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. The only person Mariko approached for help was the protagonist, who in school was already a delinquent from a broken home.
Ever since they met, the protagonist had always been heartbroken because she couldn’t find a way to save Mariko both from her father and then from herself. Now that she won’t be able to help her anymore in life, she decides to grab a knife and visit Mariko’s father to steal her best friend’s ashes.
I won’t go into further details about the plot of a one-shot, but I loved the realistic way the author treated someone as damaged as Mariko, as well as her relation with the protagonist. Mariko knew she was broken, and even after she became an adult she searched for man after man who would mistreat her and hurt her, because she couldn’t relate on a deeper level with people in any other way.
But this titular girl wasn’t innocent either: she monopolized the protagonist’s life and attentions by guilting her into not interacting with other people and particularly not getting a boyfriend, because that would mean that Mariko would lose her chance to be saved, even though she knew from the beginning that she was doomed. That dynamic continued until a week or so before the titular character killed herself, so most of the reasons for the protagonist’s isolation and her unhappiness are related to having been tied down, and dragged to the depths of despair, by someone who had no means and no intentions of getting better.
The protagonist deals not only with the grief of losing her best friend whom the protagonist had tried to save since her school days, but also with the anger and remorse caused by the fact that the person to whom she had dedicated her life chose to abandon her. So we have a fucked up, failed adult for a protagonist, who also has a huge savior complex, and an impact character (the most influential character for the protagonist in a narrative) who is doomed from the beginning. I’m not surprised about the comparisons with Inio Asano’s “Oyasumi Punpun”, which remains my favorite manga series.
As if the story of this one-shot manga didn’t attract me enough, I found its artistic style tremendously compelling, over the top but in a way that emphasized the characters’ emotions perfectly. The depiction of both the shit they go through as well as how they react to it is more raw, and real, than in most manga, which I’m all for.
I didn’t rate it a five because it left me wanting to know more about and spend way more time with the protagonist. I thought there was far more to develop about her.
The second story takes place in the United States near the border with Mexico, and it reminded me a lot of “No Country For Old Men”. I won’t say anything else about that story except that it was a bit more on the nose than I would have liked, but I still enjoyed it a lot.
I want to read more stuff by this author, but apparently he or she has released nothing else. If this is really this person’s first manga, I look forward to that successful career.
Today was one of those summer days in which the weather is good enough that I would feel like I wasted it if I stayed inside, but I was progressing nicely on the 69th chapter of my ongoing novel. I decided to go to the balcony and lie down in front of the privacy screen to read in peace for a while.
The peace lasted two minutes. Some guy starts screaming on the phone right under my balcony. Whatever conversation he was having with his girlfriend kept getting more and more heated; apparently the girlfriend didn’t want to come to the date with this charming individual. He insulted her on the phone loud enough that every person at the nearby park kept shooting glances, and people were avoiding the plaza where the shouting was taking place. Eventually the guy said on the phone that he was breaking up with her, that he never wanted to see her again, etc. Once he terminated the call, he stuck around to grumble for a while.
I was trying to get back into reading when I heard that moron’s voice again. His stupid girlfriend decided to come and meet someone who only failed to hit her before because he was talking to her on the phone. It didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes until he started screaming at her semi-incoherently with the kind of stuff these cretins shout in such circumstances (“you must have been with some other guy”, “you don’t do anything for me”, “I ask you to do something and you ignore me”, etc.) I couldn’t hear the woman saying anything.
Then he starts breaking stuff. First his cellphone against the plaza’s pavement, then some other item (possibly her phone). Then he wanders away a bit to kick as hard as he can the roller blinds of the office right under my balcony. I hear her warning him in a meek voice that someone will call the police. He screams that he doesn’t care, that nothing is going to happen to him, etc.
A moment later I hear the noise of something hitting wood: the guy is punching and/or kicking the bench that the woman was sitting on. Then I hear the noise of flesh getting punched. I stood up and got a still shot, through the branches of a tree, of the woman protecting herself with her arms while leaning to the side, and the guy standing next to her and screaming at her.
I go back into the apartment, then walk all the way to the landline. I call the police while I still hear the guy screaming in the background. They asked for my name for whatever reason. When I return to the balcony, it was one of those situations in which the moment you call the police, the altercation stops immediately. A middle-aged guy is standing nearby. He asks the woman, who seems to be in her late twenties, possibly hispanic, if she needs any help, if someone should call the police. She doesn’t answer. I recall vaguely that she was rubbing her arm.
A patrol car arrives less than a minute later. Either someone else called as well, or they were in the area. Every single police officer I’ve seen in this province is well-built and fit, including the women; they kinda look like models (so they haven’t gotten around to lowering standards yet).
The police officers look up at me. I point down at the woman, who’s close to the bench, crying in silence. Then the guy who started this whole shit made the mistake of returning. The moment the police officers lay eyes on him, he became all meek and reasonable. “Did you verbally or physically assault your girlfriend?” the police guy asks. “No, no, nothing of that sort. Just a simple argument.”
Turns out he had hashish on him. The guy tries to school the police officer on its use (here it’s only legal to smoke it at home or at certain clubs). I was sitting behind the privacy screen of my balcony. Although I couldn’t hear much else, one of the police officers took the woman aside to speak to her in private. When that police officer returned, the woman was gone, and I heard the police officers tell the guy that they were going to wait for another patrol car.
When that new patrol car arrived, another couple of officers came out and informed the guy that he was getting arrested for domestic violence. I heard that she would visit the hospital to assess the injuries. I didn’t leave until I saw the handcuffed guy getting helped into the patrol car.
I suspect that if anyone other than the police had interfered, the woman in question would have sided with her boyfriend. That seemed very clear from her actions and demeanour. In such cases it’s far better to force her hand. However, if she baited him to have this confrontation in public because she knew how both of them were going to end up, good for her.
So all’s well that ends well, I guess.
EDIT: I realized that the last sentence of the latest chapter I uploaded is, “Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.” Life is one strange bitch.
The tingling at the base of my brain suggests that if I closed my eyes and allowed myself to relax for a few seconds, I’d pass out on my bus seat. Would I suffer through another nightmare here, stimulated as I am by the vibrations that travel through this plasticky seat and into my groin to spread between my viscera?
Since I left Jacqueline’s apartment this morning to face the hellish outside world once again, my skin has remained untouched. I need her to kiss me and lick my wounds, then squeeze me in a warm, tight embrace and whisper sweet words into my ear. I want to forget that I’m doomed to keep working even though my muscles cry in agony from the fatigue and pain. If Jacqueline ravaged me with her fingers and her tongue, I would also forget about the monsters that lurk beyond the veil, that their jaws may close on me and tear me to pieces, that their demonic semen might drown me in a gloopy flood.
My pussy jerks like a fish on land as my clit throbs again, demanding a rubbing motion. Why can’t public transports provide their users with vibrators? If those in charge worry about their clients getting flashed by a stranger, they should install some partitions, then buy disposable vibrators and allow the passengers to pull their trousers and panties down. I’d love to spend the journey to and from work pleasuring myself. Ah, to be cradled by the soothing drone of the engine while my toes curl, the fingers of my free hand dig into my thigh, and a detached cock slides in and out of my sopping insides. I would feel like a medieval queen inside her curtained carriage, who otherwise would be sipping champagne while she strokes some ornate dildo. As I fucked myself, my sticky juice would soak into the seat beneath me; a gesture of gratitude that would mix with the stale remains of what hundreds of previous users leaked. It would become a communal ritual like those walls covered in chewing gum, or that fence where couples hang locks to symbolize their commitment to each other.
I stare out the window right as the bus turns a corner. A view of Mount Igueldo opens up. The setting sun, which is hovering above the left flank of the mountain, dazzles me like a spotlight. The sight from this angle of that amusement park perched on the mountaintop is my cue to stand up; my stop is just ahead. Jacqueline should be waiting nearby, so I must snap out of my daze and behave like a human being, lest I worry my beloved.
As I scramble towards the exit, I spot that a pair of toned legs in cinder-colored tights are standing next to the bus stop, framed against a clump of miniature palm trees. I have started to salivate when I realize that those legs have been wrapped around my face. I lift my gaze to find my girlfriend’s cobalt-blues staring back at me. She beams, widening her plump, rose-pink lips, and dimpling her cheeks. She shifts the shopping bag that she was holding on her right hand to her left one, which was already holding a bag, then she waves in greeting. I straighten my back and greet her with a timid smile.
My body feels heavy and sluggish. When I stumble off the bus, the crisp November air engulfs me and refreshes my lungs. My breath comes out in a white puff.
A tiny human is standing next to my girlfriend, soaking up the waning sunlight. Although less than twenty-four hours ago this child had been frolicking in an Ice Age forest, now she resembles a preppy kid who attends a private school for girls. She’s wearing mid-calf leather boots, navy skinny pants, a wool sweater with a pattern fit for a ski resort, and a lemonade-pink scarf that hides her chin, all of them brand new. Her chestnut-brown hair, woven in two loose braids, gleams as if Jacqueline had washed it with a shampoo and conditioner combo. She reminds me of those videos in which a flea-ridden homeless man gets a makeover, because some rich socialite wanted to bestow upon him the chance to enjoy a life of luxury, and the fairy tale continues until the bum comes across a crack pipe.
The child narrows her slanted eyes, which shine with a bright luster, to shoot me a knowing look, even though she’s as clueless as a baby bird: until today she had never seen a bus. She also has no clue what kind of floor she’s standing on, who are the two women that have become her self-appointed guardians, or how she ended up thirteen thousand years in the future.
I can’t handle this strange mixture of affection and shame. I open my mouth to greet the girl, but what the hell can I say to her other than some version of ‘I’m sorry’? And should I treat her like a person or like a dog?
“Ah… Hello, forest girl.”
The child steps forward, then flings herself onto me like a rag doll. When I catch my breath and cup the back of her head, she stands on her tiptoes and hugs my waist, nestling her face into the velvety surface of my corduroy jacket. I want to warn this pristine child against touching me; it’s like dunking her hand in toxic waste.
“How’s our little savage doing?” I ask in a voice thickened and raspy from lack of sleep.
Jacqueline lets out a crystalline laugh.
“This little girl is very chatty, as well as easygoing and curious,” she says in a slight French accent that I recognize from my dreams. “Don’t you think she looks adorable in that outfit? I’ve had to contain myself from smooching her all morning.” Jacqueline pets the girl on the head. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Too bad you can’t understand anything I’m saying.”
The child pulls away from our embrace, but her small hands still cling to my jacket. The way my girlfriend spoke clarifies that she still appreciates me even though I failed to perform the most basic of duties after I woke up from my nightmare, such as giving her a morning-after kiss or having her roll over and let me lick her pussy.
Jacqueline sports a grin that I wish I could bottle up and preserve inside me as an antidote for loneliness. The golden light of the late afternoon is bathing her queenly features in a honeyed glow. She has gathered her raven-black hair in a braided ponytail, that is draped over her shoulder like a waterfall of silk. She’s wearing a fitted, night-black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and over those, an unbuttoned, dark sienna peacoat. Her breasts, that seem fuller and more buoyant than usual, are shadowing half of her tummy, and begging for a squeeze. Compared to her, I’m a tramp who wears her dad’s clothes and stinks like a dumpster.
Jacqueline resembles a wealthy mom who would come across me as I hugged my knees and cried in the rain, only to invite me into her mansion and offer me a cup of water. She would guide me to take a warm shower to wash off the scent of rotting garbage. When I stepped out with water dripping from my body, she would be waiting for me in a net nightie, ready to dry me with a fluffy towel. She would cradle me in her arms squeezing her meaty breasts between us, which would intoxicate me with their warmth and scent. She’d call me a pitiful creature who needed her help.
She would tighten her grip around my shoulders as her slippery tongue snaked inside my mouth. She would drag me to her bed, and while the feather-softness of her silky hair, as well as the weight of her breasts crushing my ribcage, distracted me, she would shackle my arms and legs to the bedposts. She would rip open her nightie, straddle my face and lower her well-oiled pussy on my mouth.
The taste of her nectar would make my senses reel and my eyes roll back into my head. I would lap at her clit for hours while she petted my head and her nipples leaked jellied milk globules on my cheeks and forehead. Her body would convulse into a series of rhythmic contractions as I gagged on her geyser-like squirts. She would coax my body to expel its most intimate, bitter excretions, and when I felt fully humbled, she would whip me with her strap-on cock and pound my asshole into submission.
With the passing days my hands and feet would go numb, then bloated and gangrenous. My brain would be burning hot, my guts would be churning with bubbling lava. While the flesh of my extremities sloughed off the bone, my tongue would wear down like a lollipop against the woman’s throbbing, steel-hard clit. Her cream would cause me to regurgitate a slimy mess that I would have to swallow and vomit again before it disappeared down my throat, like a cow grazing on toxic grass. One day her juices would overflow from my digestive system into my lungs, and I would start drowning with my nose buried in her pubes, inhaling the pungent scent of her sopping insides: the bitter tang of jasmine flowers crushed under a woman’s heel, mixed with the sweet scent of strawberries. The woman’s naked body would come into focus: a face smudged with charcoal, two silver-white eyes like those of a skull, and a black-as-night tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. Her hair would be a patchwork quilt of reds, whites, and purples, streaked with carmine blood.
I would spasm with a paroxysm of coughing, and retch up a glob of pus that would splatter against the woman’s unshaven thighs. My breath would rasp from my scorched lungs and dribble in a gray stream into my nostrils, but she would burst out in a wailing, orgasmic laughter, then she’d pinch my nose shut. As my brain boiled and blistered in my skull, a white light would explode behind my eyes, and my mind would crack open like a pistachio. I would die knowing that my saviour never loved me as much as I loved her.
I would be reborn in the Ice Age, where I’d be greeted by our adopted daughter’s tribe as a returning heroine. We would all ride on a giant snowball into the future.
After I shake my head to banish the images that have sequestered my senses, I can barely pass enough air through my dilated nostrils. My face feels hot despite the nippy weather. As I shift my weight on my wobbly legs, I rub my thighs together, which elicits a sensation that I can only describe as a dry orgasm.
I risked losing my limbs to frostbite back at that boreal forest, so I want to remain warm outside, but at least I’d like to bring Jacqueline’s knuckles to my lips so I can give her a chaste kiss. However, both of her hands are busy holding shopping bags.
“Jacqueline,” I start in a ragged voice, “this is one of those times that I wonder how come someone as hot as you can exist.”
She bites her lower lip, then takes a deep breath as she burrows into my pupils with her gaze.
“Tell me later what has crossed that dirty mind of yours, darling, and you’re gonna get it. If you can stay awake, that is. I was surprised that you didn’t pass out on the bus and missed the stop. In any case, I’m so glad you are okay, my baby. I’ve been worried about you this morning, you know?”
My mouth is gummy. I lick the saliva that has gathered at the corners of my lips.
“W-why would you be worried?”
“Well, for one thing, this morning you ended up in the Ice Age,” she says with motherly patience.
I was about to lift my right hand to rub my eyebrows, but a small hand is holding mine. The child I kidnapped has wrapped her fingers around my palm. They feel so thin that I could snap them like twigs.
“Yeah, that’s… a thing that happened,” I say. “I can’t believe we have a kid now.”
Jacqueline brushes my free hand with hers, as well as with the handles of the bag she’s holding.
“I can hardly believe it either, but it’s all real, honey.”
When I rub the wild child’s palm with my thumb, she smiles up at me, showing me her healthy choppers. Her eyes are brimming with trust, and I feel like I’m peering into the heart of Mongolia. We must protect her; the world will ruin her otherwise.
“A-anyway, I drank two more coffees after the ones I texted you about,” I say wearily. “Their caffeine is solely responsible for holding me up. If I fail to sleep through this night, I may not wake up tomorrow.”
Jacqueline expels a tiny cloud of white vapor through her teeth.
“Now it feels cruel to ask you this, but I intended to bring our girl to the nearby La Tahona so she could taste pastries for the first time. They won’t do much harm except to your waist, will they?”
My stomach growls. I’ve barely eaten anything since I woke up at four in the morning, except for a ham sandwich and a handful of nuts at the office.
“Sure, why not. I wouldn’t want to deprive our suddenly adopted daughter from the teeth-rotting wonders of modernity.” I hold up my free hand towards Jacqueline, palm up. “But give me one of those damn shopping bags first.”
We turn our backs on Ondarreta beach to cross the road while we escort the Ice Age child like a couple of deranged bodyguards. We stroll along the sidewalk past a Santander and a Kutxa banks, between the façade of a building and the outside tables of a coffee shop, where the patrons are wearing coats and breathing out white steam above their coffees and croissants. Our child’s fingers intertwine with my own.
My eyes are burning from the lack of sleep. To avoid taxing my brain, that would take notice of every passerby in case they are hiding a knife, my gaze slides along the pavement made of hexagonal tiles, which is dirtied with streaks of dog or human piss. A glob of phlegm glistens at the center of a tile; some dickhead believed that subjecting me to the sight of his discharge was less harmful than swallowing it.
A Kaiku delivery truck, likely full of pasteurized cow milk, attempts to pass us by on the one-lane road, but the traffic slows it down. Its engine is expelling a monstrous gurgle that drowns out our foosteps and even a nearby conversation. The truck lets out a loud tsk as it changes gears, then the engine roar swells and the vehicle leaves us behind. Its exhaust dissipates like the smoke of a dragon’s breath.
I have clenched my teeth, and my heart is pounding in my ears. That noise felt like an invading army scaling the walls of my mind to demolish everything left inside. Our child is squeezing my hand; she’s grimacing as she stares at the shrinking truck with wonder and apprehension.
We have gotten used to nasty stuff that we shouldn’t have tolerated. In the past, while strolling along any street, I would have only heard footsteps, the lively chats of passersby, children’s laughter, distant barks, and at the most a clatter of hooves from some wandering horse. We would have been spared the horrid din of traffic, as well as the music, usually fucking reggaeton these days, that some bastards blast out from their car stereos because they feel good when they annoy people. Our stomachs would wince at the first whiff of fumes from a motor vehicle. The ruckus that human beings create evokes the image of an eye-patched warlord that’s holding a rifle in his free hand while masturbating on a throne of corpses, ready to unleash bullets and semen on the masses. In the end I had to face that I can’t control the sound of the world around me, that I can barely control my own life; I had to bear the ugliness and misery, and I know very little except for the mysteries of my own stupidity.
I must have reached my limit, because my senses are tuning out the sounds and smells in order to save me from drowning in them. My field of view narrows down until it gets reduced to my lover and our sudden child. My brain is questioning why the hell am I walking around when I should lie down on any surface, close my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep.
I take a deep breath and picture myself far away, in a temperate forest populated by beasts that would only be big enough to bite off my fingers, and if I befriended them, I could sink my head in their furry bellies and let their heaving breaths carry me away to dreamland. I’m tired of pretending to be civilized.
When I notice that a hand has rested on my shoulder, I stumble on my feet. Jacqueline has stopped and turned to face me. The awning of the closest store reads ‘Tahona,’ and a vertical advertisement sign hanged on the wall displays two baguettes. Behind the closed sliding door, the inside of the patisserie is bathed in the kind of dim, warm light that would befit a cozy living room or a study.
Jacqueline leans in close to my face, and her white breath breaks against my nose and lips. I inhale her fragrance; it smells like the blackness that engulfs you when you fall asleep.
“You are carrying it, aren’t you?” she whispers.
I have to repress a cough, because the lingering stench of the truck’s exhaust has been burned into my lungs.
“Carrying what? The weight of this world? The weight of my past and my guilt? My life has been little else than a bloody cycle of pain.”
Jacqueline glances down at the breast of my corduroy jacket.
“I meant the dangerous tool that previously belonged to a horse.”
“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t forget it at work as if it were an umbrella or my wallet.”
I consider unbuttoning my jacket, but that would look more suspicious, so I probe through the fabric the solidity of Spike’s revolver.
“You needed to check if you had it with you?” Jacqueline asks, concerned. “You weren’t sure?”
“The stuff and people in my life are known to blink in and out of existence.”
Jacqueline sighs, then she swipes a lock of hair away from my face.
“Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Velouria” by Pixies. I’ve been listening to Pixies so much recently that it probably constitutes a midlife crisis.
This chapter is about 3,100 words of three characters (two deranged, one their adopted daughter from the Ice Age) moving from a bus stop to a pastry shop located 200 meters away. That’s how I roll.
Recently I’ve thought about why I’m so impatient with novels (I’ve always been impatient with them, but it gets worse the more I age) although I devour mangas, and why my stories feel so different to most others I come across. I think it comes down to the fact that I want the vicarious experience of here-and-now through an interesting POV character throughout an entire story. A visual medium like manga, which offers much more leeway than movies or shows, allows the reader to feel like you are kind of hanging out with the characters in specific places and figuring stuff out with them as they experience their surroundings. Also, manga authors have no choice but to research each location and object involved, because they’ll need to be depicted on the panels. It’s hard to imagine that a series as hard hitting for me as Asano’s “Oyasumi Punpun” could have happened in any other medium. The closest an author of novels has come to that, that I remember, is Murakami, although he has put out plenty of shit.
If you are as interested in sexual debasement and/or torture as the demon that commands Leire’s subconscious seems to be, you may want to read my narrative poem “You Choose Who Owns You”, that I wrote back in August of last year.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter: here’s the link.
Our protagonist is a college-age kid devoted to man’s one duty: that of sticking his penis in as many wet holes as possible. He’s been wholly unsuccessful so far. From that introduction, the story could have gone in plenty of directions, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the guy is the son of Japan’s most famous serial killer from the last fifteen or twenty years, and that he has dissociative identity disorder. Looking back at the first couple of chapters, they are incongruous with what’s to come.
We find out that something is wrong with the guy’s brain as soon as he does: he wakes up in bed next to a pretty stranger, a female classmate from college. He has no clue how he started dating her, but she seems quite taken with whoever was commanding the protagonist’s brain until then. This alternate version of the guy is also violent and much bolder. In any case, the guy is happy enough to let this sudden girlfriend of his believe that she’s dating the other version of himself.
However, the protagonist’s missing part isn’t satisfied with a hot girlfriend: he’s also hanging out with members of the worst gang around, one that runs whores and kills people. They idolize the aforementioned serial killer to the extent that they welcomed the protagonist, the serial killer’s son, with open arms.
One person realizes that the protagonist is struggling with some ghastly mental issue: an aloof young woman who attends the same college. She has been following the protagonist around and has learned to identify when the personality switches have taken place. Soon enough we find out that she has a personal connection with one of the victims of the serial killer.
A woman gets murdered in what seems like a copycat case of the serial killer’s modus operandi, and the protagonist finds himself in possession of that woman’s cut-off ear. So is his alternate personality following on his father’s footsteps, or has someone framed him? The clues lead him to the nasty gang that has welcomed him. Helped by the weird girl from before, the protagonist will try to figure out if he’s innocent or if he’s truly the devil’s spawn, as he’s been called since he was a child.
This quickly turns into a brutal, disturbing tale. At first it reminded me of the most hardcore parts of Minoru Furuya’s mangas (a hapless underdog who ends up involved in a life-or-death situation with sociopathic elements of the Japanese underworld), except that this story lacks any humor. However, after a turning point in the story that abandons plenty of the set up elements that came beforehand, the tale turns into a thriller in which anyone could betray the protagonist at any point, and everybody has a secret to hide.
The drawings are detailed and uncompromising. This is one of those iceberg stories in which the author has plotted carefully every character’s actions and deceptions. Unfortunately, he resorts to some clichés, and he also pulls his punches a couple of times.
The moment that bothered me the most happened early on in the story, but it announced that some more bullshit was coming down the road: at one point the protagonist finds himself in the club that the gang owns. He’s prodded into showing his inborn skills as a torturer with a tied-up guy that the gang intended to kill. The protagonist ends up giving a speech, the details of which I’ve forgotten (he said that torturing a random guy was beneath him, or something). His audience, a bunch of hardened criminals who idolize a serial killer, just go along with his excuse, and even end up freeing that man. The author had done a great job setting up those guys as extremely dangerous until that point. As far as I’m concerned, one of the worst things you can do as a writer is building up some symbol as something significant only to end up tearing it down out of convenience.
Later on we get a few clichéd moments that we’ve seen a thousand times: the author makes us believe that a character has shot someone in the head, but that character actually shot into the floor deliberately; X gets shot in the chest at point-blank range by people who could have easily shot X in the head, but X survives because of a bulletproof vest; a murderous bad guy gets knocked unconscious, but instead of finishing him, they good guys walk away, and the bad guy gets back up shortly after; etc.
Although I’m quite sure that dissociative identity disorder doesn’t work that way, I found the story quite interesting. You usually don’t get these kinds of thrillers in manga format.
For today I had planned to visit a park located near the home where a character of mine, Jacqueline, lives. When I woke up, my digestive tract was more screwed up than usual (I have IBS): apart from the near-liquid shits, I also bled out of my ass. I’m beyond questioning what the hell goes on any given day with my body unless it pertains to my heart, and one of these days I’ll stop caring about that too.
Usually when my health issues attempt to ruin my plans, I give in and spend the rest of the day either writing or wasting my time. However, I felt that walking the whole way up from the Lugaritz Euskotren station to Jacqueline’s house was a sort of penance that I had to undergo.
Yesterday we were enduring temperatures of 35 grades Celsius, but today the weather was stuck in that extremely humid state that announces that in a day or two the clouds are going to burst in a tremendous storm. So by the time I got off at the Lugaritz station, I was already drenched in sweat.
That’s the Lugaritz Euskotren station in Donostia, which is the local train slash subway system. I love to complain about everything, but I can’t say many negative things about the public transport system of this region.
That’s the parking lot where Jacqueline stops her car to have a conversation in chapter sixty-one.
That building is mentioned a couple of times in the novel, because it’s on the way to Jacqueline’s place.
I had to trudge up a slope all the way there. As expected, the narrow sidewalks were deserted.
Most of the homes in this area are about four or five times more expensive than what your regular computer technician could afford. Further ahead families were swimming in their private pools.
I took plenty of photos of the apartment building where I decided that Jacqueline lives (and where Leire spends most of her spare time now). However, it feels wrong to show it, so I won’t. As soon as I turned around after taking those photos, a guy was standing still further down the street as he stared at me with what looked like suspicion. This is one of those neighborhoods. Besides, I’m a bearded, shady-looking, deranged guy who tends to freak people out the moment they interact with me, so I just walked out of sight as casually as possible.
I was about to ask for the whereabouts of the park that Jacqueline mentioned in the most recent chapter; I had looked it up in Google Maps, but it was even closer than I expected, and very secluded. Real treasure for the locals.
That mountain over there is Mount Igueldo, and the complex on top is an amusement park.
That’s as much documentation as I needed, added to the notes I took of how it felt to be there. I considered returning to the Lugaritz station and taking a train straight home, but instead I decided to walk down to Ondarreta beach, which would be packed with tourists at this time of the year.
I don’t know what this building is supposed to be, but it looked really impressive.
On the other side of the beach there are tennis courts, as well as a fancy pub called “Wimbledon” where I set up the sequence that starts in chapter fifty-three.
That island looks like a whale from certain angles, particularly from the top of Mount Igueldo.
Recently I’ve been exploiting a neural network to generate images inspired by moments or sentences of my ongoing novel. I originally conceived what ended up being the sixty-sixth and the sixty-seventh chapters as one, but I split it because I tend to go on tangents. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this entry: the following are the images that an artificial intelligence generated for moments or sentences of those two chapters.
Jacqueline has hugged the child tighter and is rocking her back and forth. The raven-black, glistening cascade of hair conceals the girl’s face, but tears are sliding down Jacqueline’s cheeks and lingering on her chin. Although she keeps sniffling, snot has bedewed her upper lip.
I hurry to grab a couple of tissues from their box, placed on one of the shelves between the balcony doors. When I return to my beloved, I kneel next to her and squeeze the mucus out of her nose into a tissue. I trail the tip of my tongue along her cheek, swiping a hot, salty tear. Jacqueline gazes at me with her striking cobalt-blues and rewards me with a smile of gratitude, but remains silent.
I pat the back of the child’s leather tunic. It feels rough against my hand. From up close she smells of wet boar, woodland moss and apples.
“I’ll state the obvious: this is my fault,” I say soberly. “Whoever opened that invisible doorway to the Ice Age intended to target me.”
“Don’t blame yourself, baby,” Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes the child’s scalp. “We’re in this mess together.”
“This poor savage probably believes that the Megatherium, or whatever that monster was called, devoured her, that she has ended up in hell, or whatever underworld people believed in before Christianity hijacked our civilization. The Megatherium is probably responsible for a lot of disappearances, including that of my parents.”
Jacqueline arches an eyebrow.
“That’s what you call our idyllic nest? Hell?”
“Jacqueline, I stood in that boreal forest, apparently at the latest twelve thousand years ago. I took deep, panicked breaths of that cold, crisp air saturated with oxygen. The breeze whispered with the voices of extinct species. I was immersed in an ancient icebox of nature, alone except for the intrusion of that monster as well as of this girl that I ended up kidnapping, who until that point had lived in freedom.”
“I hadn’t been curious about prehistory, but those people needed to hunt to survive, didn’t they? Maybe they couldn’t farm reliably due to the cold weather. And what about disease?”
I sigh.
“You are right, but still: I snatched this child from a sort of paradise and sent her to hell.”
When I lower my head, Jacqueline frees her right hand to stroke my neck and knead the muscles that are taut beneath my skin.
“Would you like to take walks in the woods, honey?” she coos. “Did you know I have a secluded park with lots of trees right in my backyard?”
I look over my shoulder at the balcony; because I’m sitting on the carpet, the parapet blocks the view. Someone, I assume a previous owner of the apartment, arranged fernlike plants with rounded stones in a way that halves the available floor of that part of the balcony. Two spiky plants that have grown in cube pots resemble still shots of a nail bomb explosion. Above the parapet, the night is onyx-black except for the faint outlines of oil-colored clouds. A single star glows in the dark.
It must be about five in the morning. It feels like the sun will never come up again, but soon enough the old fiery pervert will peek over the horizon to bathe us all in its whitish-yellow deluge of photons.
“I’m guessing you paid premium for this balcony,” I say wearily. “However, the apartment didn’t come with a garden.”
Jacqueline chuckles.
“I meant nearby. That park is a couple of minutes away. A hidden gem, peaceful and quiet. I’d love to take you there on a lovely day when the sky is clear. At night you can gaze at the stars, and no one will disturb you.”
I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. I’m an idiot that needs to think to connect dots that for the rest of people come joined by thick lines.
“That does sound pleasant,” I mumble.
I drag myself to my feet, then as I shuffle up to the balcony door, the glass reflects my face: I resemble a wan and emaciated gargoyle, all bone and shadows, with haunted eyes and a sour expression. I rest my greasy forehead on the cold glass pane.
In the distance, the palatial building that crowns the Mount Igueldo amusement park gleams white. Along the spine of the mountain glow pale cerulean lights, maybe cell towers. Some windows are lighted on the mountainside; the rich people that live in those houses may have woken up to go to work, or are wandering around in a daze with a hangover after a night of cocaine-fueled orgies.
“Sorry, I’m falling apart,” I say weakly. “And somehow I will have to tolerate the long workday ahead of me, even though I never returned to bed after that bunnyman-induced nightmare.”
I’m about to continue when a realization bursts in my brain. I gasp, then turn around. The wild child has snuggled closer to Jacqueline, wrapping her arms around the silky back of my girlfriend’s robe. The girl has closed her eyes, and her placid expression suggests that now she doesn’t give a shit about anything but the warmth that emanates from the pair of breasts squeezed against her ribcage.
“W-wait, we’ll be away for work at the same time,” I say, lowering my voice to avoid unsettling the child. “What the fuck do we do? Is there a company at our business park that lets workers abandon their kids there until five in the afternoon?”
“You know, there may be, but this isn’t the kind of child you can drop off at a daycare center and forget about, is she? Besides, we can’t even prove she’s ours.”
“Right, because she isn’t.”
Jacqueline cups the child’s head, then plants a lingering kiss on its top. The girl narrows her shoulders, dimples her cheeks, and lets out a soft noise of contentment.
“Any nosy do-gooder out there may want to snatch her away from us,” Jacqueline says with an edge to her tone. “And look at this precious baby, she’s like a stray dog who has never been stroked. So I’m staying home today, maybe for a few days. You should too, Leire. It will be fun, just you and me and our little doll.”
My mouth hangs open.
“You know I can’t miss work! I can’t imagine how stressed I would be knowing the amount of overtime I’ll have to do when I return to the office. How would I rest if I knew I’m neglecting the growing pile of tasks and contracts to fulfill, and that the unmentionable pig will be fuming and cursing me under his breath as he digs into a bag of Doritos?”
The child’s misty-eyed gaze drifts over to me as if wondering why I’m raising such a ruckus.
“Sorry for disturbing you, daughter of the Ice Age,” I say. “I envy you: I wish Jacqueline would cradle me and run her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep in her arms, but instead I have to venture through the nightmarish modernity that awaits out there, because we need to earn our right to keep existing in a world that wants us gone and forgotten.”
The wild child tilts her head in puzzlement, but a wicked smirk spills across Jacqueline’s lips.
“I will take care of you soon enough, sweetie. If you feel more comfortable going to work, that’s fine. But I will message you often.”
“A-alright. What about our boss, though? Should I tell him that you’ve come down with diarrhea?”
“I’ll figure something out. That guy won’t be thrilled, but he wouldn’t dare to fire me. Anyway, I don’t want to think about work now. I’m going to cuddle this sweet morsel of happiness.”
A yawn overpowers me, so I nod as a response. I’m dizzy and exhausted. When I stretch my back, my vertebrae crackle like a bonfire. Every cell in my body wants to slink back to the warmth of Jacqueline’s bed.
So now what, I’ll prepare myself another coffee, take a shower, then look up on Google Maps what bus lines will carry me from the hills of Donostia to the business park where we work? I almost got mauled to death in the Ice Age. I’ve learned that we are surrounded by an invisible realm; although I would prefer to ignore it, its inhabitants will keep harassing me. That realm is separated from ours by a thin layer of glass that if it were to shatter, let’s say by a horse headbutting it, I would get sucked into the void between worlds.
Now we need to give this wild child the love she desperately needs. We’ll bathe her in a tub full of bubbles; feed her with pastries and ice cream; dress her in a pink tutu and a pair of slippers; tell her that everything she does is perfect, and that we admire her even when she breaks things in a fit of rage. Later on, when this cute kitten grows into a lovely young woman, she’ll stay at home forever, becoming our personal servant as we progress toward old age and decrepitude. That’s right: I want to grow old with Jacqueline, and this wild child will wipe my ass for me. The rest, like our world that has made us its slaves, or the creeping sickness that invades our brains, or the fact that I’m half-woman half-goat, I will gladly forsake.
How often do plans work out the way they should have, though? I never planned for such a life, one where a child born during the Ice Age has become our daughter. This child may become a powerful wizard one day, and leave us to fend for ourselves. Or she might get frozen to death at twenty-six while trying to save a baby penguin from drowning. But maybe it doesn’t matter whether this girl grows into a beautiful princess or the spawn of a fucking vampire, or whether we live in the Ice Age or in the cesspool of a modern city where strangers dump their loads on our heads. Maybe we can live for those little moments when we forget about our pain.
I’m likely going through a shock and trauma that no psychiatrist is trained to treat, not that I would rely on psychiatrists, because that industry is a scam. Apart from my usual despair at the knowledge that human beings other than Jacqueline exist and that I may be forced to deal with them, now I risk walking into invisible traps. My otherworldly stalkers sent me to a boreal forest with my tits and buttocks exposed; what if the next time they open the other end of that doorway above the throat of an active volcano? Or what if the bunnyman interrupts me as I’m taking a shit, then he clobbers me in the face with his dick? I can’t defend myself against anyone stronger than a child. Maybe I should start carrying around a flamethrower or a chainsaw.
I take a deep breath and try to keep the lump of dread from swelling inside my stomach. When I hold Jacqueline’s gaze, something in my eyes must have unsettled her, because she straightens her neck and furrows her brow.
“Jacqueline, where have you hidden Spike’s revolver?” I ask calmly.
My queen gasps. She attempts to rise to her feet, but the child is clinging to her.
I consider prying our adopted daughter away from Jacqueline. However, I suspect that the girl would bite me, as it befits a cannibal.
“From now on I intend to keep the revolver on my person at all times, even during sex,” I say. “I should order some sophisticated holster online, maybe one that also works as a strap-on dildo.”
Jacqueline’s expression has grown grim.
“Leire! Don’t you think you are exaggerating a bit?”
“Nope,” I reply with the assurance of one who knows that only bad news await us. “I usually defer to your wisdom, my beloved queen, but you haven’t looked up at the furry face of that extinct abomination as it was gearing itself up to swallow me whole. Pushing a bullet-shaped load of metal through the monster’s skull at supersonic speed would have surely saved me. Well, who knows if revolvers shoot at supersonic speeds, maybe just sniper rifles do. Am I being irrational? I don’t need rationality, I’m not running a bank. Perhaps the most logical approach would be to wipe the face of every otherworldly kidnapper with a thick coating of toothpaste, but I’m afraid that they might retaliate by drowning me in a bathtub full of semen. So I’m going to carry Spike’s revolver everywhere. If the police stops me, though, I’ll be fucked; the authorities want us defenseless so we’ll be easier to control.”
Jacqueline’s cheeks are flaming red. As her eyes lose their focus, she nuzzles the child’s disheveled hair.
My guts feel like a dead man’s hand is gripping them. I blink away a sudden rush of tears.
“I got snatched as I was walking into your bathroom to take a shower,” I say in a low, hoarse voice. “Even as a child I dreaded to shower: I feared that a demon would jump out of the tiles and pee on my head. The feeling that some fiend was crouching behind the shower curtain was so strong that sometimes I washed myself in the sink instead. Every time I walked past the bathroom, certain smells could trigger my fear: my dad’s aftershave, bleach, lemons… Even the scent of pizza became too much for me. In the end I only ate snacks that had been packed in plastic bags and stored for years. When I opened the bags, I often found them filled with sand instead of food. One time, I even ate the sand.”
Hot tears run down my cheeks. I shouldn’t be allowed to keep any pet more dangerous than a gerbil; I’m a pitiful, spineless wretch with no self-control and the brain capacity of a cockroach. I can’t even masturbate properly: I need a certain level of stress to reach an orgasm. My own family walked on eggshells around me until they couldn’t stand it anymore. Even an imaginary friend would run away from me screaming.
“When I was seven I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I begged my mom to take me to a ballet class,” I continue in a ragged voice, “but she said she’d rather die than let me take dance lessons. And she did. She did. You know, I missed you so much when I was in the Ice Age, Jacqueline. I can hardly believe that I found my way back home. In a billion parallel universes out there, I told you to look out for horses in case they barged into the bathroom, then we never saw each other again.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Greens and Blues” by Pixies.
I used a neural network to generate images from this chapter. Here’s the link.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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