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We’re Fucked, Pt. 64 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial4 Comments

My skin prickles, my muscles twitch, my bones ache. Every breath I take brings the aroma of pine resin into my lungs, and risks numbing them with cold. The breeze ruffles my hair and rustles the leaves of the thicket about six meters to my left. I’m having trouble discerning details in the undulating mesh of bone-thick branches and knee-high undergrowth, but I distinguish the pale silver tresses of moss that hang from upcurved branches, and that the bark of a few slender trunks has been clawed to reveal the rose gold tree flesh beneath. What abominations of nature may be lurking past the treeline?

I will keep my feet firmly planted on the rounded pebbles that are pressing into the soles of my feet. I will become a human statue frozen in time. Remain still: that was the lesson I learned back as I child when I got lost while my parents and I were strolling around Hondarribia. A plush monkey, dressed in a candy-red T-shirt and slutty shorts, was huddled inside the rusted cage of a vending machine. I was transfixed by his slack-jawed smile and the gleaming sadness in his oil-black eyes as he peered out at me from his gloomy lair, but I also admired that beast for having endured the life-long duty of dropping plastic balls in exchange for money, a drudgery that turned his fur dull and patchy. When I attempted to point the monkey out to my parents, they had vanished into the crowd.

For hours or days I sobbed as I tottered aimlessly past towering strangers. None of the passersby recognized my plight; I was just another unwashed urchin whose rags reeked of urine and vomit. Not even a dog offered its tongue to lick my wounds. How did that nightmare end up resolving itself? Maybe I never found my parents. Maybe that damnable monkey was the ringleader of a gang of human traffickers, and I have spent my life ever since chained to a bed in a pitch black basement.

Why was I thinking about that time I got lost in Hondarribia? Wait, why the hell am I in a forest?! My breath is steaming, the soles of my feet are throbbing. My fingers are curled into white-knuckled fists. The ripples of the brook to my right distort the rounded stones and twigs that its waters churn over.

I rub my eyes as if I were trying to claw out some filth.

“This isn’t happening,” I mutter to myself.

Jacqueline hammered into my head that hallucinations don’t open doors, so instead I must be experiencing a bout of psychosis. I shut my eyes tight and I retread in my mind the steps that brought me here. I entered the bathroom to take a shower; I must have opened the door of the shower cabin and stepped inside. I turn on the water, and from the showerhead a jet of ink-black, searing-hot liquid rushes out with a foaming whoosh to soak my hair and stream off my face. The liquid flows down the curvature of my breasts, the contours of my buttocks, the crooks of my knees; it trickles into the pink crevasse between my legs. I scrub shampoo into my scalp, then I pour gel on a sponge and wash away the stench of sweat, fear and guilt clinging to my skin. My mouth is full of lather that tastes of exotic herbs and berries, of tropical fruits and sugary nectar. When I finish showering, I have become as clean as the surface of the moon.

A prickly sensation is flitting across my fingers and toes as a numbness seeps into my muscles. The shivers are creeping into my spine, making my teeth chatter. Soon enough my pale skin will turn a glistening dark blue.

Am I waiting for whoever abducted me to appear? What else could it be but an unholy abomination?

A panicked mass of survival instinct kicks in.

“Wh-why the hell did you teleport me to a random forest, you otherworldly shitstains?! I would prefer that you showed up as I took a piss!”

From deep within the thicket comes a rumbling growl. My body goes rigid, my heart starts thumping like a war drum. I keep my eyes focused on the greenery, refusing to give in to the desire to blink.

Some branches rustle and a twig crunches in the treeline. A flicker of motion catches my eye. Through some breeze-stirred leaves I discern that a child is peeking out from behind a tree trunk. She must be about ten years old. Her disheveled hair is chestnut brown and reaches the shoulders of a crude, ash-colored leather tunic. She’s wearing a tooth necklace, bracelets made of twisted animal hair, and thick boots with fur collars. Her peach-orange skin is stained with dirt, and her slanted, monolid eyes are staring at me in surprise, maybe because she has never seen anyone like me, or because I’m naked in a forest. Is she another spirit who will ask me to sacrifice my blood to make up for the blighted land?

My legs are trembling, my nipples are hard as stone. I’m not sure how long this stand-off lasts while the branches sway in the breeze, the brook burbles and the birds chirp.

“H-hello,” I say in the warmest voice I can muster, “do I have the pleasure of addressing someone with an incredible command of the Spanish language? You can also speak in English if you want.”

The child’s jaw drops slightly, but she remains silent as she looks me up and down with wide-eyed wonderment.

“D-do you understand that I’ve been dumped into the wilderness,” I insist, “that I’m unclothed and freezing my tits off, that I’m mentally unbalanced, and that I’m in desperate need of help?”

From within the thicket comes a crackling noise as if sticks were snapping under the weight of a bear-sized creature. The child’s eyes dart between me and the thicket, then her lips move to say in a high-pitched voice a sentence that sounds like gibberish. She crouches and scuttles along the treeline until she hides behind a thicker tree trunk mottled with eggshell-white spots.

Dead leaves are crunching as they get crushed underfoot. I squint to peer through the web of greenery, and I discern that a looming shape is stirring the shadows and bending branches; some monster is lumbering towards us.

The cold has spread inward, and now it seems to radiate from my bones. My fingers and toes have gone numb, my thoughts are slowing down and my vision narrowing, but I control my ragged breathing. I beckoned this feral child over by shouting into the void, and if the monster that is about to emerge from the thicket devours her, I’ll endure the flashbacks for the rest of my possibly short life.

“H-hey, girl, over here,” I call her through my chattering teeth, and when we hold each other’s gaze, I gesture anxiously for her to approach me.

She hesitates; would I run towards a wild-eyed thirty-year-old woman who’s hanging out naked in the wilderness? The girl pushes herself off the tree she was hiding behind, then she scuttles on the pebbled riverbed over to me. A pungent odor wafts from her leather tunic, as if she had rolled around in grime and filth. She clutches my left hand. When I feel her warm, chapped palm, a dizzy spell threatens to overwhelm me. I have been snatched from Jacqueline’s apartment and dropped into a remote forest. What otherworldly horror will I encounter now?

The undergrowth behind the treeline shudders and jerks, a branch snaps, and from between two trees emerges a hulking, woody-brown quadruped. As its beefy right foreleg flattens a fern, beneath the shaggy fur, which is caked with mud, the muscles along its leg tremble, and the subcutaneous fat shakes up to the beast’s rounded back. Under its furry hands, the pebbles of the riverbed grind and clack together. I discern that the beast’s curved claws are the size of hacksaw blades; they could peel open my ribcage like pulling back the lid of a can of sardines.

As it heads to the rippling waters of the brook, the beast swings its elongated head towards us. The coarse fur of its face is swan-white except for the smoky-black patches that surround the sunken eyes. Its nostrils flare as it sniffs our scent, then it snorts and blows like a bull. The beast stops beside the brook and dips its chin in the stream to drink.

My brain is wrapped in barbed wire. What is this jarring cackling that is punishing my eardrums? Oh, it’s bursting forth from my throat. But why am I laughing?

The beast raises its head and looks straight at me as water drips from its drenched chin, then it turns around to face us. The feral child squeezes my left hand; even through my shrieks of laughter I realize that she’s trying to communicate with me, but I can’t decipher her jabber. That monster’s claws are churning up the pebbles as it stomps towards us. I catch a whiff of its musk, that smells of earth, loam and moss.

My throat closes up; the surge of laughter pushes against it, then desists and dissipates. I need to gallop away, but I must remain rooted to this spot or I will be lost forever.

The beast’s honey-colored eyes are aglow with bloody malice. As it bellows a thunderous burp, a plume of white-hot steam spirals out and a spray of hot spittle splatters onto my face. The nearby birds have scattered away in a panic.

The girl is tugging on my arm, my knees are buckling. This noble monster is waiting for me to kneel in worship; I’m a bug crawling around its feet. I should try my best to seem cool and aloof, like a woman with regular sexual appetites instead of like an insane shut-in who has been abducted.

“G-greetings, brave soldier of the forest,” I say in a quavering, hysterical voice. “I-I salute your service in the field of battle and I promise that if I live through this experience, I-I will surrender the best cut of my meat to you.”

The beast pushes itself off the ground to rear up on its hind legs, then it throws its head back to tower even further over me; a fearsome god looming over my puny body. Its mouth yawns cavernously. The muscles in the monster’s girthy torso, which is matted with clots of mud and leaf litter, bulge under the shaggy fur like taut, industrial-sized leather belts.

At the final moment of my dismal existence, I have an intense craving to make love.

The girl yanks at my arm hard enough that I tumble backwards, but before I land on the pebbles, a crackle of energy fills me, and my back hits a flat surface. I got the wind knocked out of me. As I prop myself up and take a big gulp of air, I realize that I’m at room temperature and that I recognize that pastel gray ceiling.

Someone kneels beside me. The smooth touch of silk caresses the skin of my shoulder, then the person seizes me, turns me around and buries my face in a pillowy pair of breasts.

“You’re back,” Jacqueline says in a strained voice racked with worry. When she wraps her warm arms around my trembling back, she recoils, then starts rubbing my skin vigorously. “Baby, you are freezing!”

I’m shaking from the cold and the adrenaline surge, but now that Jacqueline’s breasts have enveloped my face, I will heal quickly.

“D-don’t worry,” I mumble through her cleavage.

A childish utterance of confusion behind me causes Jacqueline to stiffen up.

“Leire,” she whispers, “who the hell is this girl?”

I unstick my mouth from the silky skin of her breast to glance over my shoulder. The feral child is sitting on her knees and squinting at the bright light in the hallway as she checks her surroundings with bewilderment.

Author’s note: the two songs for today are ‘Sapokanikan’ by Joanna Newsom and ‘Baba O’Riley’ by The Who.

From all the chapters that remained to write of this novel, this one I looked forward to the least; I suspect that I didn’t believe I could pull it off. But it came out good enough for me, so the ride should be smoother from now on.

That story about Leire getting lost in Hondarribia as a child because a monkey distracted her happened to me. They eventually found my bloated corpse washed up on a beach.

In case you missed it, I exploited the services of a neural network that runs on a supercomputer to generate images that depict moments of this scene. Here is the link.

I usually get 8-10 visits a day on my site. Less than 24 hours ago, someone from the US racked up about 170 hits. That person even went through entries of the fanfiction of ‘Re:Zero’ I wrote a couple of years ago. I never liked ‘Re:Zero’ that much; I preferred my darker, crazier spin on that story. I worked on it during a turning point in what passes for my career as a writer; I had ceased to read anything in Spanish, my own native language, and I didn’t want to write in Spanish anymore even though I had self-published two books in that language, but I felt like I could never become proficient enough at writing in English. Working through those sixty or so chapters of fanfiction changed my mind, and I had a blast throughout.

Anyway, thank you for checking out so many pages of my site, whoever you are. I hope you were entertained.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 63 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

“No, I don’t want breakfast!” I shriek.

I have sat bolt upright on a mattress. The bedsheets are puddled around my waist. I’m panting, my heart is racing in my throat. It feels like the bed is rocking back and forth like a ship at sea. Although sweat is dripping down my face and naked torso, a frigid lurch runs through me and I almost vomit.

An insidious force is slithering inside me while my head buzzes with thoughts like flies trapped inside a jam jar. My mind is a pile of detritus rusting in a fetid puddle of gunk. A single tear is trailing down my cheek, and I wipe it away with the pad of my thumb. Once again I wish I would become a catatonic mute lost in my pitch-black depths.

To my left, a weight depresses the mattress, then a warm arm drapes around my tits.

“You’ll be all right now,” Jacqueline whispers. “Lie down, baby girl.”

Her soft voice soothes my frail bones and tattered mind. I slump backwards until my head sinks into the pillow.

Jacqueline cuddles up against me, squeezing her breasts against my naked chest and wrapping her long legs around mine. Her hair is tickling my neck, and her lips are playing over the skin of my jaw as she breathes warm air into my ear. The heat that radiates through her smooth, silk-blend robe makes my despair dissipate like a noxious stench. Second by second, a quiet descends upon me like in the wake of an orgasm.

A blinding white light pierces the dark behind my eyelids in a jolt of anxiety. What the hell am I worried about now? Ah, we have to go to work in the morning. When I reach to the nightstand for my phone, Jacqueline’s half-lidded gaze meets mine in the mirrored wardrobe. In the pale moonlight that streams through the balcony door, Jacqueline’s skin is glowing with a silvery luster, and her cobalt-blue eyes are shining like gemstones. She embodies the serenity of the ocean on a clear day.

I hold my phone up and check the time while the device glows bright.

“A quarter past four,” I say in dismay.

Jacqueline sighs and tenses her thighs around mine.

“Three hours more and we’ll be forced to leave our bed.”

I place the phone on the nightstand, then I stare up at the shadowed space between two hemispherical lamps on the ceiling. Jacqueline runs her fingertips over my right cheek as she nuzzles up against the crook of my neck. My nipples tingle, the hairs of my nape stand on end.

“That previous shout of yours must have woken up the neighbors,” she says casually.

I guess she wants me to open up about my nightmare. I should apologize for having disturbed her sleep, but I have spent my whole life apologizing for my shortcomings.

“These nightmares…” I start in a weary voice. “I feel like I’m becoming increasingly attuned to stuff… to which I shouldn’t be privy.”

“Such as? What terrible vision has tortured my baby this time?”

My face involuntarily contorts into a grimace as I attempt to repress a shiver of disgust.

“That filthy, maggot-infested scumbag,” I spit out.

“I suspect that for you those words could describe many people, including yourself. Are you referring to the bunnyman?”

My tongue feels like a slab of leather as I swallow the word that conjures up his horrifying visage in my mind’s eye.

“That monster… was robbing a bank, but he slipped on some leaves and fell down, cracking his head open, spilling his blood on the carpet. In the middle of the crimson pool was an envelope, and when I opened it I found that it contained a letter addressed to me. The bunnyman wanted me to know that he’d be keeping me company until the end of time. He also invited me to a rabbit ranch that he owns.”

My voice sounded raw and raspy. Jacqueline’s left arm tightens around my ribs.

“And I guess that at some point someone offered you breakfast. He did a number on you, that well-endowed devil.”

I take a deep breath, then I rub my eyelids. I’m a baby lying helpless in an oversized crib surrounded by monsters. They have smudges of grease on their faces, they’re wearing rags that hang off them like flappy skin, their bellies are bulging with foul produce. They keep snorting lines of white powder off rusty spoons. Soon their bloated fingers will dig into me like grubs into a rotten corpse.

“When I was five,” I whisper in a fragile voice, “I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare, my first one ever. Some soft, fleshy thing was coiled around my ankle. I jumped from the bed and ran to my parents’ room, because they were supposed to protect me from bad dreams, but when I opened the door I realized that the fleshy thing coiled around my ankle was my father’s balls. He was sleeping on his back, and they were hanging out of his boxers as he snored like a donkey.”

Jacqueline gasps, then her left arm cradles my head and pulls me in for a kiss on my forehead.

“Oh no, you are getting like that again. Shush, doll. Just fill your mind with sunny things.”

My eyes are wet with unshed tears. My voice chokes.

“This world is a cold lake whose edges are shrouded in mist. The decapitated heads of everyone I’ve ever met bob on the water, and in the ripples they cause I glimpse my own reflection. I wonder if after death we are dumped into a desert of shiny black obsidian, a labyrinth made out of the most bitter thoughts.”

Jacqueline presses a kiss against my lips, which shuts me up.

“I have no clue what you mean,” she coos, “but I’ll share something that I’ve daydreamed about recently: how about you and I go, soon enough, on a holiday to some Caribbean island? We would stay in a cute bungalow for a couple of weeks. Imagine yourself standing beside the ocean with your feet in the sand and your hair waving in the warm breeze. Think of the sunlight filtering through the palm fronds and casting golden ripples on the blue waters as they lap against the shore. The waves will wash away your despair with their frothy, salty foam. We’ll laze on a hammock while we watch the setting sun turn the horizon into a blazing spectacle. We’ll fuck as the night sky glitters with uncountable stars.”

A wave of relief is washing over me when Jacqueline gives my neck a lick with her hot tongue, and now a tingling sensation is building in my pelvis. I close my eyes and breathe in her heady scent. In the theater of my mind, the water of a tropical sea splashes our naked feet. We’re sitting in a cave hollowed out of the rock by the crashing waves. A pillar candle casts an eerie glow over the grotto that Jacqueline has transformed into a cozy bedroom, with pillows and soft sheets that the sea has delivered to us. The pounding of the surf deafens me in the tiny space, and my skin is feverish from the humid heat.

When I open my eyes, I remain caked in the stale sweat that the bunnyman induced.

“That sounds idyllic, although I’d have to shave my armpits first,” I say with a shy smile. “I’d also have to trim the green scum coating my soul. But no way such a positive development could happen to me. Our plane’s engines would malfunction and we would plummet to the ocean.”

“We wouldn’t travel in a plane, silly. I’ll book a private cabin on a luxury cruise ship.”

“When we get to the island, I’ll fall into an open manhole. If we arrive at the resort, I’ll get violently sick and vomit all over the bar area. The tropical sun will render me as black as charcoal. I’ll offend a massive German man, a giant who will shatter my collarbone with a single punch, then he’ll dump my remains onto a beach and spit on my corpse. While I’m lying in bed, I’ll wet the bed.”

Jacqueline’s tits tremble against mine as she giggles.

“Oh my sweet darling, you are a complete nincompoop sometimes. Such horror stories will do nothing to dampen my enthusiasm about that dream vacation. When we get to the island, I’ll make sure you drink lots of water so that you don’t get sunstroke. If you have to leave the shade for even a minute, you’ll be made to wear a hat so that you don’t burn your precious head. I promise you won’t experience any mishaps like that, none whatsoever. I’ll treat you as if you were made of porcelain.”

“I still believe in the ghoulish prophecies I’ve dreamed up for myself.”

Jacqueline caresses my face with both hands.

“A nap will dislodge you from your current state of mind.”

I envision a cruise ship exploding in a gigantic fireball.

“Yeah, I don’t know how I would tolerate eight hours of work with all this madness in my head.” I push myself up, and when Jacqueline rolls onto the mattress, I sit on the edge of the bed. “But first I have to wash the filth off my skin.”

Jacqueline stretches like a cat in the sun.

“I like that humid, musty smell, though,” she purrs.

“So do the sweat-eating bacteria.”

I yawn widely. When I slide out of bed and plant my soles on the lukewarm hardwood floor, I’m weighed down by exhaustion. I shamble towards the hallway as Jacqueline’s gaze warms up my naked ass.

“Please, don’t let any horses in the bathroom,” I say over my shoulder.

She chuckles at my request, which is further evidence that I’m not human.

“If you see any, yell and I’ll shoo them off with a broom.”

The moonlight shines through the acid-etched glass of the bathroom window, and its luminous image gets reflected in the door of the shower cabin. When I reach to switch on the light, a crackle of energy fills me. I’m engulfed in cold air as if I stepped into a walk-in refrigerator. As I blink away the whiteness that has blinded me, I feel that cool, muddy pebbles are pressing into the soles of my feet, and a couple of sharp edges are digging into my flesh. I hear a burbling brook and the twittering of birds. The air is crisp, and rich with the primeval smell of a forest.

I’m standing on the sedimentary rocks of a riverbed. To my right, the wavy surface of a brook is slate grey where it reflects the overcast sky, and otter brown where it reflects the other bank of the stream. At that woodland edge, the slender, swan-colored trunks of trees with orange-yellow canopies dominate, but above them protrude the brown, pointed tops of pines like lance tips. Beyond a forested hill I glimpse the ice-capped peaks of a mountain range.

About six meters to my left, leafy ferns sway gently in the breeze at the edge of a thicket three-stories tall, in which the trees blend into a patchwork of deep greens and onyx-black shadows. A bird flutters overhead as it wings out of the canopy and traces an arc across the grey riverbed, which is strewn with branches and leaves.

I’m frozen in place, and my eyes dart back and forth between the thicket and the rippling brook. My breaths are shallow. Goosebumps are forming along my back as the cold creeps up my spine and seeps into my toes and fingers.

I turn my head slowly to look over my shoulder. Twenty meters away, the grey riverbed gives way to knee-high grasses and thick bushes, and the brook bends between pines and threadbare canopies.

Author’s note: three songs for today, which are ‘Island In the Sun’ by Weezer, ‘Cut Connection’ by Jesca Hoop and ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane.

These last couple of days I’ve felt better. Maybe the black beast has gotten tired of my cowardice, and it has wandered off until the next time it deigns to visit me again.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 62 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

The dining hall is shrouded in a sweltering, bushfire-orange haze, and I feel like I’m sinking in the yolk of a room-sized egg. Above the antique cherry paneling on the walls, a continuous painting that depicts the streets of a bygone town has faded to saddle brown. I’m surrounded by canned chatter, knives and forks clinking and scraping against plates, and open-mouthed chomping on slabs of meat, although the other tables are empty and their linen napkins folded into triangles. The checkered floor is littered with glass shards, smeared with rotten food and covered in patches of mold.

A radiant chandelier is tinting the tablecloth of my round table sand-yellow. Behind two twinkling wine glasses, a swaying cord of drool clashes against the black-and-white tuxedo that the creature sitting across from me is wearing. A fluffy, cream-colored mane obscures a bowtie. I get a glimpse of the matted tufts that come out of grey-tipped, pointy ears, and of two bulging eyes on either side of a whiskey-colored patch like bruised fur, before two overgrown incisors plunge into the crunchy toast of a sandwich. A chunky piece falls onto the tablecloth as the bunnyman retracts his teeth with a slurping sound.

“A-a-ah, you’re awake!” A plume of spit escapes his lips and sails through the heated air. “I thought I’d have to chew you up, you filthy shit-gobbler!”

He shovels the rest of the sandwich into his mouth, tangling slimy crumbs in the tobacco-brown fur of his muzzle. I want to wipe the droplets of saliva off my face, but I feel like my arms and legs are bound to the chair with ropes; I’d love to call the bunnyman a mendacious, mangy son of a bitch, but my vocal cords disobey me.

The bunnyman wiggles his whiskers. The black vest of his tuxedo is stretched tightly over his barrel chest, and his belly is rolling under the fabric like a raging sea.

“You’ve forgotten how to speak, huh? Tsk tsk tsk. I should have expected it from one of you stinking piles of bones and meat. You smell like a brood of horny rabbits having a furtive fuck session in a cage. And you are so eager to abandon your sickly life. How could anyone give up on herself so quickly?” He guffaws. “What a waste of precious meat you are! How do you expect to enjoy life if you don’t live it? Don’t you wish for some fangy and throbbing love meat to slurp up between your lips? Your heart and lungs are filled with muck, but I want you to live.”

His voice makes my eardrums feel like they’re going to rupture, and his breath reeks like a bloated corpse floating in a pool of blood. That I gave up on myself so quickly, this sow-fucking demon said? I did give up; I came so close to leaving Jacqueline behind in that barren world along with my childhood, all the books that I read and all the board games that I played. Everything was about to disappear into an infinite sea of darkness. But now I’ll never escape from this shithole; I will remain a wailing, hunchbacked lunatic who screams at the sky, and not one person will remember me after I’m gone. I should spend my days locked up in some dark cave until I rot away to dust.

The bunnyman swallows down an entire glass of wine, splashes red on the tablecloth, and belches out a vine of acidy fumes. A sneering smile spreads across his lips as a thread of drool seeps out of their corners.

“You stink and you stink and you stink, so let me give you the name that you deserve: I will call you Gummo, which sounds like a dribble of phlegm trickling out of your twisted throat. Yes, that’s such a fitting name for a filthy, unspeakable thing like you. Unwashed flesh lying around in the dirt.” He raises his furry arms, and his fingers plump out into claws. “I’ll also give you my name! It’s Leopold, Leopold the Rabbit-Thing. Now, how many years have I spent stalking you? A few hundred? A thousand?” He makes a sucking gesture with his lips. “I’m no stranger to your malodorous, squeaking, demented thoughts. I’ve watched your anus drool as you squatted in the bathroom. I’ve watched you stroke yourself to a climax as you sat on an anthill. All for you, my favorite meal: a miserable human being. You’re like an emaciated cow standing in a field while the flies buzz around her head.”

It feels like my brain has been turned inside out and scrubbed with bleach. The bunnyman slides with his dirt-brown hand a platter to my side, making its heap of soggy pancakes tremble. The pancakes are the color of brown sugar, and they are glazed with a translucent, cloudy liquid that contains inert bubbles and that is oozing down the heap in gooey strings.

When a smell of chlorine assaults me, my stomach clenches like a fist and my mouth dries up.

“Your fucking breakfast is waiting!” the bunnyman bellows out.

He seizes a fork and sticks it into the soft, tender mass of the top pancake. He lifts the fork, and as the soggy pancake approaches my mouth, it drips the liquid onto the tablecloth, forming gluey puddles.

My body refuses to struggle against the restraints. I’m about to gag on the bile that gushes up, but my mouth opens by itself, and my tongue protrudes to collect the viscous strings of goo that dangle from the pancake.

“Your imbecile brain has started working again,” the bunnyman says in a husky voice. “How lovely!”

His cackle fills my ears; it echoes in my brain like a tsunami, sweeping away every thought.

A familiar tingling starts in my fingers and toes, and as my nerves are pushed to the brink of overload I hear a faint popping sound in the back of my head.

Author’s note: today’s songs are both by Modest Mouse, and they are ‘Alone Down There’ and ‘The Cold Part’ from ‘The Moon & Antarctica’, which has been one of my favorite albums for about twenty years.

I’ve already written the first draft of the next chapter. I call a first draft that point of a text in which I consider it good enough for publication, but then I subject it to another full creative pass line by line to improve it. I’ve also written most of the tentative sentences of the chapter that will follow afterwards, and somehow I still have 14,000 words left of notes to render into the remaining scenes of this deranged novel.

Review: The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

From time to time I get reminded of authors that seem cool enough, and I tell myself that I’ll finally go through the effort of reading something of theirs. I hadn’t opened any of Lispector’s books yet, but I had formed an image of her as wild and unfettered. I imagined her bedridden during the last years of her life as she dictated new stories to her secretary, who would then type them carefully on a typewriter. I don’t know if I got that impression from something I read about Lispector or if I made it up in some daydream, but it makes no difference whether it happened or not. Lispector died of cancer in 1977, eight years before I was born; she has become definite enough that whatever delusion I prefer to believe about her won’t diminish who she was.

‘The Hour of the Star’ is the last book that Clarice Lispector published in life, and in it you witness an author trying to conceive a story for a character that she was compelled to bring to life: a poor, ugly, innocent girl from the same impoverished region of Brazil where Lispector lived as a child. She transformed herself into a male narrator with fictional circumstances, to develop the details of the protagonist and the world around her so the entire narrative would finally spring to life.

This girl we are following, named Macabéa, lost her parents, came to a big enough city to live with her repressed aunt, now lives in a hovel with four roommates with whom she doesn’t seem to interact, and works as a typist although she’s terrible at it. Lispector describes her as too innocent, inexperienced and dull-witted to be miserable despite her nasty circumstances. She can only look forward to the joys she can reach: food and songs she likes, and being alone at home for a few hours. She daydreams about finding a man who would love her, but she knows that can’t happen.

The most memorable secondary character was the idiotic thug that ends up dating Macabéa, a young guy who calls himself Olímpico and who came to the city from the same impoverished region as Macabéa. The guy is fascinated by implements of violence, and his main goals are to seem tough and move up in the world. He mistreats Macabéa and attempts to silence her if she shares some thought he considers unladylike. I wished that Macabéa would acquire some self-respect and dump that shithead, but the poor girl was happy enough that someone spent time interacting with her.

We also meet one of Macabéa’s coworkers, who is painted as a poor man’s sophisticated, buxom woman. I recall vaguely that she initially criticized the protagonist for her many faults, but she grew to pity her, which I guess is better. We also meet a doctor who can’t wait to have enough money so he can quit and devote himself to doing nothing, as well as, in the final sequence of the story, a former prostitute turned clairvoyant who offers a compelling monologue.

Because Lispector came up with seemingly every little aspect of this novel in front of our eyes, Macabéa as well as other characters come off as contradictory, but you have to roll with it; Lispector didn’t have enough time left to make it consistent even if she intended to. She also complains about having to invent enough description, and I recall that she suggested that she just intended to write down what was necessary and then go to sleep.

On the surface, the story is about Macabéa figuring out who she is and who she would prefer to become, but the insights that Lispector offers through her chosen narrator suggest that this whole book is about the author coming to terms with her impending death: trying to understand why she would need to write about this Macabéa, or write at all, so close to her own demise; what does it mean for a writer to live through these characters that inhabit our minds; and what kind of hope the author can offer to this wrecked fictional child of hers (I know well how traumatizing it can be to ruin the life of one of your characters; I haven’t gotten over at least one of them).

Lispector writes from the gut; pure subconscious stuff that half of the time she herself can’t understand. That’s the kind of material I want both in the books I read and in the stories I create. I can’t stand authors that intellectualize everything, who often oppose their own tastes and impulses out of some weird ideological dislike for such. Their texts most of the time annoy the hell out of me. I also vibed with Lispector’s silly humor, and in general felt a kinship with her. Hers is the first novel that I’ve finished in a long while; these days I have little time and energy left to read, and when I do I end up DNF-ing most of the books I start, often because they test my patience.

Lispector was a unique writer (or at least she seemed like that to me; I haven’t read any other Brazilian writers, so maybe they all write like her) who wrote in search of her own personal truths, in contrast with your average bastardly author out there that seeks to deceive you as they deceive themselves.

Anyway, I got plenty of quotes out of this book:

Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

I write because I have nothing better to do in this world: I am superfluous and last in the world of men. I write because I am desperate and weary. I can no longer bear the routine of my existence and, were it not for the constant novelty of writing, I should die symbolically each day.

In no sense an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is like a dank haze. The words are sounds transfused with shadows that intersect unevenly, stalactites, woven lace, transposed organ music. I can scarcely invoke the words to describe this pattern, vibrant and rich, morbid and obscure, its counterpoint the deep bass of sorrow.

I feel happier with animals than with people. When I watch my horse cantering freely across the fields— I am tempted to put my head against his soft, vigorous neck and narrate the story of my life. When I stroke my dog on the head — I know that he doesn’t expect me to make sense or explain myself.

Speaking for myself, I am only true when I’m alone. As a child, I always feared that I was about to fall off the face of the earth at any minute. Why do the clouds keep afloat when everything else drops to the ground? The explanation is simple: the gravity is less than the force of air that sustains the clouds. Clever, don’t you think? Yes, but sooner or later they fall in the form of rain. That is my revenge.

She had what’s known as inner life and didn’t know it. She lived off herself as if eating her own entrails. When she went to work she looked like a gentle lunatic because as the bus went along she daydreamed in loud and dazzling dreams.

She herself asked for nothing, but her sex made its demands like a sunflower germinating in a tomb.

I shall do everything possible to see that she doesn’t die. But I feel such an urge to put her to sleep then go off to sleep myself.

I must ask, without knowing whom I should ask, if it is really necessary to love the man who slays me; to ask who among you is slaying me. My life, stronger than myself, replies that it wants revenge at all costs. It warns me that I must struggle like someone drowning, even if I should perish in the end. If it be so, so be it.

I use myself as a form of knowledge. I know you through and through, by means of an incantation that comes from me to you. To stretch out savagely while an inflexible geometry vibrates behind everything.

That not-knowing might seem awful but it’s not that bad because she knew lots of things in the way nobody teaches a dog to wag his tail or a person to feel hungry; you’re born and you just know. Just as nobody one day would teach her how to die: yet she’d surely die one day as if she’d learned the starring role by heart. For at the hour of death a person becomes a shining movie star, it’s everyone’s moment of glory and it’s when as in choral chanting you hear the whooshing shrieks.

Life update (07/08/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

I haven’t been able to write anything of value in days. I’d say that I haven’t had such a dry spell for a long time, but I barely remember what I did yesterday. When I get home from work I’m so exhausted and deflated that I can only slump in the chair and waste the rest of the afternoon in a vegetative state. Yesterday I went a bit further: I got in bed and fell asleep as I listened to storm sounds. I was glad to be gone at least for a while.

Half of the days that I’ve woken up at six in the morning recently I’ve regretted that I didn’t die in my sleep. Such is my mental state when I get to the office and I’m forced to deal with people and their computer problems. I’m sluggish, I have trouble thinking, and I can’t remotely begin to care about anything. I don’t know how people even approach me, because as I sit at my desk I’m burning in the black flame of my misery. As usual, the worst part of this job is dealing with human beings (it has always been the case in any setting I’ve been involved in), whether they are my coworkers or the generally clueless users.

The following are examples from a single day:

-Someone asked to get the professional version of Access installed in his computer, which is fine, but then he emailed me because the upgraded version of Excel (we install the whole upgraded Office package) no longer allowed him to do something it used to. He turned out to be the only person I’ve come across on this job that sets up Excel workbooks as data sources for his personal Excel projects at the office. I talked with HQ and it seems that this will fail with every upgraded version of Excel for all the regions of my country that HQ covers. I’m still dealing with reverting the upgrade so the guy can do what he used to, nevermind upgrading Access. I was tempted to tell him that if he’s using Excel in a way that nobody else is at work, then he should do it at home. In any case, his boss took the opportunity to ask me personally to upgrade Access in other computers (they know they should mail our office, and not individual workers, when making these requests), but then he gave me the names of computers that already have Access upgraded. I told him that if there’s any issue to call HQ so they open a ticket.

-A user stated something of the effect of, “our computer no longer opens [a program related to sterilization]”, but failed to mention any detail about the computer or its physical location. I emailed her for details. After she failed to reply, I ended up phoning her department until they located her. She gave me the computer’s name. The network connection for that computer was down, so I likely would have to check its physical connections. When I asked for its location, the woman told me that she had no time to handle my problem now, and that I should call some time later. That sentence took longer to say than what it would have taken her to share where in the hospital the computer is located. In the end one of the corresponding cables at the network rack was faulty.

-Someone told me that a vitals monitor was failing, but she also failed to tell me its physical location. It’s amazing how often we are assumed to be omniscient. I think some people just have a hard time understanding that we aren’t in their heads.

-Some request stated that “the Maintenance Department has finished the installation that should allow you to move the computer of X room at Y building”. Of course, I had no foreknowledge of this move, nor the specifics of what the Maintenance Department has done (which means I’ll have to waste time going there and getting the specific details that they should have provided). I email her asking if that X room is the origin or the destination of the move, or both (in case they want to move it from a table to another), and if the computer has already been moved (they know they have to call the department that handles moving installed material from one place to another; they get paid for that, we don’t). She tells me that the move is from a table in that room to another one in that same room. Later on her supervisor tells me that the move is from one room to another. They fail to mention if anyone has already moved the computer and its unmentioned associated devices (such as a phone, a printer, etc.) to its destination; my department is only supposed to handle hooking up the computer to the network and making sure it works properly when it’s already at the location. I expect that when I show up later today with a cart, they’ll tell me to come later, even though I will have arrived at the time they specified (they do this relatively often).

My basic psychological defenses, the “callus” that allows me to withstand the regular assaults of noise (usually in the form of incredibly annoying interactions between childish coworkers), the high light levels that people want to work under, and the closeness of so many humans, are worn down, and I force myself to resemble a functioning human being although in the background of my mind I keep hearing that I need to die. If there’s such a thing as a medical leave for mental illness, I should probably be on it, but in that case I would disappear from the office for weeks at a time every month and a half or so (maybe even more often). I’m simply not built to exist in such environments nor deal with human beings to this complexity of interactions and for the required length of time every day. I’m the kind of person who would have been posted at a lighthouse a couple hundred years ago. I also want to masturbate as I gaze into the eldritch light of some fancifully designed lens.

At times like this I wonder why on earth did I ever think that I was capable of handling the responsibilities of a normal adult when I’m 52 percent disabled according to our regional government, was diagnosed with so-called “high-functioning” autism (by a couple of psychiatrists that said that my autism was obvious, something that previous therapists missed completely) and I was also diagnosed at different times with avoidant personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (apparently OCPD and OCD are not the same thing), a generalized anxiety disorder and a clinical depression “resistant to treatment”.

My current period of cyclical depression has coincided with the confirmation that my heart has a physical problem, even though it may be among the mildest possible: atrial fibrillation. My health has failed me from birth: my first memory was of waking up from an operation in which they had to fix a couple of physical issues. Then in my twenties I discovered that I was born with a pituitary tumor which has fucked me up permanently, and throughout I’ve had to endure an Irritable Bowel Syndrome that only gets worse with age. You can usually tell who has serious IBS from their pictures, because those people look worn out and miserable, as it befits the human beings that a few times a day are a distraction and a loose sphincter away from shitting themselves. Now my fucking heart is compromised. I suspect I’ve been in shock, or affected somehow, ever since I spent hours at the Observation Unit of that Emergency Department. I’m waiting for the next time that my heart will fuck me over again, and unfortunately the two treatments I’ve been offered for it are troubling prospects.

I’m also in the kind of mood in which I’m eager to get rid of any person that annoys me even slightly, from online contacts that somehow have ended up in my friends lists on social sites, to coworkers that bother me unnecessarily or disturb my peace of mind in any way. There’s no point in compromising my mental health and principles except to the absolutely minimal extent required to keep a job. Anyone else can rightly fuck off, especially those who have made me up to be someone I’m not to fit a mental image of theirs. I’m sick of dealing with the delusional projections that human beings regularly force upon others. Just stare into a fucking mirror and leave me alone.

Life update (07/05/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Lately I’ve been in a daze, trying to daydream my way through the workday, or at least operating as mechanically as possible, while I feel that nothing going on in this world has anything to do with me. I only look forward to the moment I’ll be able to sit down in front of my PC at home and continue working on my current novel, or else lose myself in another board gaming session.

I went to see a cardiologist due to my recent episode of atrial fibrillation. The guy seemed annoyed already, but he got even more testy when I merely informed him that the first instance in my whole life when I experienced these “heart hiccups” was the same day that I got my latest booster vaccine. He proceeded to assure me that the vaccine had nothing to do with it. When I looked up the matter a few days ago, I came across medical articles such as this one that state, “reported data shows a possible correlation between the Pfizer COVID vaccine and [atrial fibrillation]”. As small as it might be, it doesn’t invalidate the factual reality that I got my first instance of such issues after I got jabbed, as my fever was rising.

He told me that enduring through another episode of atrial fibrillation was a matter of when, not if, and the treatment would depend on their frequency. Apparently the treatment consists on either prescribing me flecainide to take it if the episode of atrial fibrillation lasts a few hours, or else I should undergo ablation. When the word ‘ablation’ came out of his mouth, the image of a clitoris popped up in my mind, and I couldn’t pay attention to the following sentences. According to the internet, the procedure consists of “[using] small burns or freezes to cause some scarring on the inside of the heart to help break up the electrical signals that cause irregular heartbeats.” Wonderful.

So it’s either heart surgery or taking flecainide, a drug that “[has a] chance that [it] may cause new or make worse existing heart rhythm problems when it is used. Since it has been shown to cause severe problems in some patients, it is only used to treat serious heart rhythm problems.” Another site states, “if you’ve had a heart attack within the past two years, flecainide may raise your risk of having another heart attack, which can be fatal. This drug should only be used if you have a life-threatening irregular heart rate.”

I don’t trust people in general, and I’ve already been treated as a guinea pig by smiling psychiatrists, one of whom prescribed me an anti-depressant that caused permanent physical scarring, and another one who prescribed me hypnotics for my terrible insomnia issues back then (which thankfully I’ve managed to regulate thanks to extreme exhaustion from work as well as regular masturbation), and who stated that I could keep taking the hypnotics for months or years (by the way, this video is the closest depiction I’ve found of how it feels to be drugged with that stuff); I ended up experiencing even worse depression, which felt like I was wading through mud every second, and lo and behold, the indications of the drug stated that it shouldn’t be used for more than a couple of weeks, because it could vastly worsen depression and other nasty stuff.

The reaction of such professionals to the notion of covid vaccines causing any health issues at all is just another case of normal people being terrified of social suicide and of potentially losing their jobs. That’s how the vast majority also fall in line with mass migrations that are ethnically cleansing the native populations, with the increased influence of certain religions, with the pronouns craze and such. Increasingly totalitarian regimes, as virtually all Western governments are becoming, work not only by directly punishing their citizens but by inducing in them such social pressure that they’ll eagerly police other citizens so they keep their mouths shut and agree with whatever insanity they otherwise reject in private. In my case, I already avoid human beings, so if someone stops interacting with me they are usually doing me a favor.

As a single, unattached man with a regular wage, I have some money to spare. I love living card games, and my favorite one so far is ‘Arkham Horror’. However, they revised the original living card game they made of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ back in 2012 or so. I bought the entire series of revised products, which consists on the revised core game, the ‘Dark of Mirkwood’ scenario, the four starter decks and the ‘Angmar Awakened’ hero expansion. So far I’ve only succeeded at one of the missions, the very first one of the core campaign, thanks to my custom decks ‘Monster Hunters of the Realm’ and ‘Scouts of Mirkwood’.

Right now I look forward to playing more of this living card game than of ‘Arkham Horror’, although part of it must be the novelty. I love, however, the art on these cards, the synergies that you can build with them and the sense of leading bands of fantasy peoples against a whole variety of monsters and treacheries. Although the ‘Lord of the Rings’ LCG has a simple Location system, with only one active location to explore at a time instead of a board made of cards as in ‘Arkham Horror’, I’ve always had the nagging feeling that the other game overcomplicated the matter. As usual, as much as I’ve loved videogames, few things beat entertainment-wise the tactile and brain-burning experience of having a well designed problem to solve with some fancy tools at my disposal. It’s to a certain extent how I feel about putting texts together, whether they are poems or scenes for an ongoing story, but in that case I use words instead of cards.

Otherwise, I’m at work and I wish I wasn’t. Having a job sucks, having to deal with people is harrowing, and I can’t rest nor be alone remotely as much as I need.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 61 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

Jacqueline’s Audi Avant is climbing up the incline that passes by the rain-dirtied bunker of the Lugaritz train station. I would love to sink in her passenger seat and relax. Knowing that my beloved is in charge of driving us to her apartment, my brain would give up on its need to scan the environment for threats, and for as long as the ride lasted I would commit myself to oblivion. But Jacqueline’s grip on the wheel is too tense, and she’s gazing through the car’s windscreen with unfocused eyes full of concern and worry. She has been on edge since I dragged her along to see the bunnyman.

I’m a chipmunk trapped in a narrowing crevice. Although I want to escape, one wrong wiggle will cause me to slide further down, and the rock walls will trap me and suffocate me. I was convinced that drafting Jacqueline in as an escort against the otherworldly intruder was a good idea; her presence invigorates me and relights the delusion that I deserve to exist. But Jacqueline’s sanity spared her the sight of that abominable bunny, so from her perspective I hurled insults at the empty space of that hallway even as I wept. I should have kept mum instead of ruining Jacqueline’s day by forcing her to witness my pathetic breakdown, like that of a drunkard screaming malarkey into the microphone at a karaoke bar.

Does my girlfriend resent having pressed her warm flesh against mine, or even having allowed me to guzzle her holy juices? Maybe she feels that I contaminated her, and she’s trying to figure out how to get rid of me in a way that won’t cause this raving lunatic to go on a rampage. For my queen, our relationship is likely a passing, feverish fling, but if she were to go down on one knee and ask me to spend the rest of my life with her, I would faint, collapse backwards and crack my skull open against the chewing-gum-stained pavement of the seaside promenade that Jacqueline would have chosen for her proposal. As dark blood leaked over the chunks of my brain matter, my lips would sport the loveliest smile imaginable.

What would be better than to die suddenly at the height of happiness? Someone should have invented an instant suicide button that people could buy and carry with them, and if for once in your life such a bliss coursed through your veins, a press of the button would sever your consciousness from its organic frame. How sweet it would be to free myself from the panic that roils the depths of my mind, to free myself from these visions of Jacqueline turning her head towards me and stating with a variety of words that our relationship would never work, that I’m too deranged and depraved for love, that due to the putrefaction that I spread to everyone I touch, her cells are necrosing one by one on their way to transform my beloved into a desiccated prune.

Past Jacqueline’s profile, a short-haired woman in her forties is pedaling up the steep slope on the bike lane, framed against the slender, skeletal trees that line the path. Beyond, the platinum-colored, concave façade of a building towers over the road. Three sections of the building bulge out like the projecting towers of some ancient capital’s walls. Jacqueline should exit the roundabout through the path that runs up the hill; she would continue driving past expensive residential buildings with hedged lawns, past the last isolated shops, until we reached the neighborhood at the end of that winding road, where my pimp girlfriend bought her quiet abode. Instead, Jacqueline passes the exit on purpose.

My heart gallops in my ribcage, my nerves are frayed like tattered strings.

Jacqueline is biting her lower lip as she steers into the parking lot of the concave building that looms over us like some stern sentinel. Two cars, one pastel-grey and the other silver-colored, that likely belong to workers, are maneuvering out of the parking lot. Jacqueline pulls over a few parking spaces away from the nearest car.

My queen shuts off her Audi’s engine. After she leans back on the seat, she traces the back of her right hand with the fingertips of her left one. Through the branches of a copse of pines, the slanting beams of the setting sun pouring into the car are shadowing the right half of Jacqueline’s face, and highlighting her outline with a golden light.

“Let’s talk,” Jacqueline says.

This is it: she’s going to abandon me to the darkness and the pain. She’s going to crush my heart then throw my corpse in a rubbish bin.

My body goes numb, and I let my head droop.

“Let’s not,” I utter in a hollow voice. “Let’s just sit here and remain silent. Like, forever.”

“I can’t hold it in anymore, Leire.”

It’s okay, I tell myself. She’ll have a better life without me. In a matter of years I’ll get sent to a mental institution where I’ll be confined until my mind rots away, and even then I’ll still be held responsible for all the crimes I committed in my psychotic bouts.

“W-well, what is it?”

“Leire, do you have telekinetic powers?”

I lift my gaze at Jacqueline’s face; I must have heard her wrong. Her ivory skin has a splash of red on her cheeks, tendrils of her raven-black hair are peaking over her shoulders, and those cobalt-blue eyes look upon me with their limpid beauty, threatening to sweep through me and make me disappear like dust in the air.

“What a weird question to ask seriously,” I say with a tinge of hysteria. “Could the answer possibly be ‘yes’?”

Jacqueline stares at me intently as her forehead creases.

“No, no telekinesis,” I say. “Never got to learn that one at school. I’m also unable to fly, I can’t turn invisible, I can’t read minds. Hell, I can barely read my own mind. I’m very clumsy and prone to injuries, I get tired easily, I have difficulty concentrating, and I’m very nervous. I am a pervert to an extraordinary degree, though. W-would you care for me to list all the things I lack, to please you?”

“Not at the moment, sweetie, but thank you.” Jacqueline draws a deep breath. “Either you have telekinetic powers or that… person you referred to as ‘bunnyman’ opened the bathroom door.”

“Huh? That he did. Then he slammed the door as if he were a tantruming teenager. Well, more like a giant, matted-haired rabbit with bloodshot eyes and an obscenely fat cock.”

Jacqueline touches her temples as if they ached.

“Leire… there was nobody in the bathroom.”

As I’m trying to figure out what she means, I remember that after the bunnyman slammed the door, Jacqueline remained frozen for a few seconds, then she strode in pursuit of the demon like some Hellenic heroine, bursting into the bathroom as if she intended to punish the bunnyman for having annoyed me. She searched around frantically, she opened and closed the stall doors, but the intruder had already fled into the netherworld.

I have a moment of this morning etched in my mind: Jacqueline’s skirt, the color of Irish coffee, hugging the plump mounds of her ass as she, crouched, wiped the puddles I had left in my wake after I jumped from the toilet, as if I were a wounded beast whose heart pumped piss through her veins. The sight of my beloved cleaning up the liquid by-product of my metabolism permeated me with a snuggly warmth, and it took all of my willpower to avoid touching myself.

“I already figured out that you couldn’t see the bunnyman,” I say, short of breath, “although I had hoped that you would, because of Spike’s revolver.”

This ordeal has stunned Jacqueline into silence unless she wrenches herself out of that state, yet I remain calm and in control of myself; I’m a veteran of humanity’s war against these otherworldly harassers.

“I should have warned you that a whole variety of demons is visiting our dimension, but can you imagine me saying, ‘Don’t masturbate, because a demon may be recording it for blackmail,’ and expecting you to stop? Wouldn’t I have sounded like an idiot?”

“I suspect you would have.”

I reach out and stroke Jacqueline’s neck. The sternocleidomastoid feels firm against my palm.

“I understand how troubling this encounter must have been for you, but I have survived through all of them, so I suppose I’ll be alright no matter how much they insist on wasting my time with their shenanigans. Did I tell you that once I was masturbating in the kitchen when one of these abominations approached me and showed me on his smartphone a picture of my pussy? They aren’t above using smartphones to record a naked woman, but at least they’re honest about it. After that I was visited several times by a big-titted succubus. She told me that if I didn’t hand over my money, she would stuff my mouth with dicks until I suffocated to death. Well… to be honest, I lied just now. I don’t know why I felt the need to hyperbolize my experiences, because they are terrible enough on their own.”

“Leire, the door opened and closed,” Jacqueline says hoarsely.

“That bunny bastard did open the door and close it, yes. What’s the matter? If I recall correctly, I told you that Spike had headbutted my living room window into a hundred tiny pieces. These demons have no respect for the objects in our world.”

Jacqueline shakes her head slowly as her unfocused gaze rests on my lap.

“This bunnyman terrified you, didn’t he? Was it because of how he looked?”

I wish I could reveal to Jacqueline that the awful rabbit has always showed up in my dreams, that he haunts and tortures me, that he keeps returning to remind me that death is preferable to being a broken freak. The instant that fiend appeared under my butt this morning, I should have called the police so they would have shot him like a fish, and all of his demonic essence would have been sucked out through the bullet holes.

“He was a big brute with overgrown incisors and completely unremarkable genitals.”

“You referred to his cock as ‘obscenely fat’. And I was standing behind you as you berated him for intending to have a normal conversation while he was showing you his monstrous dick.”

I shift my weight in the passenger seat, trying to ease the discomfort in my crotch.

“Jacqueline, it was just a dick.” The word ‘dick’ made my lips vibrate like a phonograph record on its last groove. “The truth is that I’ve never understood how people get aroused by those hideous appendages. A man should only show his penis to a trusted friend, who should then cut it off and bury it as a token of friendship. And perhaps some salt should be sprinkled over its grave; an old Germanic tradition to ward off trolls. Anyway, my point is that every one of the bunnyman’s utterances was a cacophonous clatter unbefitting of an intelligent creature. His ugliness did give me goosebumps, but the terror came from his essence: an ooze emanating from him in waves of unconquerable malice, a leprosy of his soul. Even better, let me put it this way: your first impression of someone can last for the rest of your life, right? Think about pets. If you fail to introduce a new cat to the previous one properly, you may end up with two cats who will despise each other until the day one of them dies, after which the remaining cat will likely believe that his nemesis gave up and surrendered the territory. In the case of this bunnyman bastard, he entered the bathroom through the toilet as I was peeing in it. My piss is too precious to waste it on such scum.”

“I get it.” Jacqueline’s voice sounds tired. “Something weird is going on.”

I chuckle bitterly.

“Something weird has always been going on, mommy. The world is full of monsters.”

Jacqueline reaches over to hug me, and before I know it, my face sinks in the hollow between her shoulder blades. As she squeezes me tight, her hair drapes around my cheeks, and I fill my lungs with her sweet perfume. For a moment, my mind empties like a gutted balloon.

“Whenever any of these creatures visits you again, please, tell me all about it,” Jacqueline whispers as she rubs my back in circles. “I bet you felt like you had to keep this nightmare to yourself because I may have thought less of you. But you are my baby and I will help you however I can.”

My throat constricts, and I close my eyes to dissuade the incoming tears from falling. I can’t understand how Jacqueline prefers a sick freak like me to a normal man with whom she could enjoy a normal life, but I’ve ceased trying to comprehend this world’s obscure logic.

Although I want to sink into a long, soothing slumber, Jacqueline pulls away from our embrace. My head is swimming with hazy, drug-like euphoria as I stare at the colorful spread of my queen’s face.

“I would have been grateful if you merely obliged me whenever I brought up some craziness, but you actually believe me!”

Jacqueline fiddles with a strand of my hair.

“I would be delusional otherwise, wouldn’t I? As you said, we must accept we are living in a dimension where it’s possible for a horse to gift you a gun. From my perspective, the bathroom door opened by itself. So either you are visited by otherworldly intelligent creatures that only you can see, or you have dormant telekinetic powers that manifest themselves through your interactions with hallucinations. Either way, something supernatural is going on. I think it’s more likely that intelligent beings are visiting our world and are able to affect it physically. But if they can manifest a revolver, what else could they do?”

A chill spreads throughout my body and turns my nipples to icicles. I had categorized Spike, this bunnyman, as well as a myriad of other foul abominations, such as the black carpet of slimy blobs that proliferate near the garbage bins at the entrance of our office building, as hallucinations caused by a mental illness of mine, a product of some genetic defect, lifelong loneliness and having been treated as an unwanted guest my whole life. But if these demons are real, then I’m fucked, as that Alberto voyeur wrote on the dashboard of my car. I shudder at the thought that I might become the main course at some cosmic banquet of horrors.

“Wh-where the hell do they come from, these demons?”

“You should be the expert on that subject.”

I rub my eyes and take a deep breath.

“There are lots of things I don’t know, and I understand even less. I don’t trust anything beyond my immediate existence and my ability to interact with it. Who knows how planets form, how cells live, how computers function, why plants grow, how dinosaurs survived a catastrophic extinction, how ants communicate, how light travels, how humans blink, how my blood pressure changes when I masturbate, how children grow, why my little toe is smaller than my big one, what I’d be doing right now if my parents weren’t dead, what will happen when the sun burns out…”

“I could probably answer a few of those questions.”

“The truth is that I can’t control anything in this world, I have no intrinsic purpose or meaning here, I can’t deceive myself into believing that in some inexplicable way I’m part of a grand plan, and until I met you I wished to forget all about it, go back into the womb and fall asleep, because from the moment I took my first breath I knew that I’m a horrid abomination doomed to wither away for decades until I died an early death. Perhaps the demons are dreaming all of us and we don’t even realize it. But don’t you think that the government is aware of these intruders from the netherworld and have operated a cover-up all these years?”

I can’t tell if I’m delirious or if I’m a puddle of quivering gelatin. Jacqueline touches her index finger to my lips.

“Did the visitors explain what they wanted from you?”

“I mean, they babbled plenty, but I don’t have the patience to listen to nonsense. They likely want nothing from me; they hate me like everyone else does, and I’m a living embodiment of their loathing.”

Jacqueline’s cobalt-blues are shining as though they are aflame. I’m feeling guiltier by the second. All those times Spike intended me to pay attention to some message he wanted to convey, could it be that he wasn’t annoying me for his own amusement?

“I-I thought I was dealing with the effluvia of my subconscious mind. At the most they knew as much as I did, right?”

Jacqueline takes my face in her hands and gazes into my eyes.

“Even if that were the case, sometimes your brain needs to blow off some steam, and you should listen to it. But please, try to pay attention to these visitors from now on. Maybe they just want something reasonable from you, and once they are satisfied they’ll leave you be.”

Author’s note: listen to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Go Your Own Way’ and The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting For The Man’.

Revised: ‘We’re Fucked, Pt. 60’

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

I’m afraid that when I uploaded this chapter last night, I befouled the writer-reader contract: I hadn’t finished writing the final version. After I spent most of the afternoon working on it, I figured that I would complete it shortly after dinner, but I ended up revising the text until midnight although I have to wake up at six to go to work. By then, my brain refused to cooperate. I knew that if I didn’t at least upload what I had produced up to that point, I would spend the following morning annoyed and revising the text in my head, so I uploaded the incomplete text, which I’ve continued polishing a bit at the office.

Anyway, I’ve spent another hour working on it at home today. Unless I’ve missed one of those errors that a writer’s brain becomes unable to notice until the final revision weeks or months later, I’d say that this chapter is done.

Read it here: We’re Fucked, Pt. 60

I’m quite fond of the face-off against the bunnyman. One of my favorite recent chapters. It has kept me amused at work the few times I’ve reread it. That’s why I write in general, to amuse myself, but also to liven up (I wouldn’t say improve) the day of the few people who have told me they enjoy my stuff.

Maybe because it was somewhat rabbit-tangential, this whole nonsense reminded me of one of my favorite poems, the otherwise sasquatch-themed ‘Sasquatch Goddess’, which I wrote in June of last year.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 60 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

The bunnyman must have been waddling towards our office at a leisure pace, because we catch him mid-step about seven meters away from us. His flint-grey-tipped ears twitch. On the periphery of my vision, his girthy sausage dangles to a stop. He lifts a dirt-brown hand to scratch at his fluffy mane, that reminds me of an Elizabethan ruff.

I hold my breath as I wait for the bunnyman to pounce at me and sink his incisors into my face. I almost crave for him to do so, to feel the shockwaves of pain as he shreds my flesh.

Jacqueline drapes an arm around my back and squeezes my shoulder to comfort me.

“What are you seeing, Leire? That horse again?”

In my mind, I see myself reflected in my doomed, equine friend’s bulging eyes, when they were puffy with sorrow as they leaked copious tears. I wish I could admire his glossy coat, with its tawny shades of sable and russet, perfectly groomed and polished to perfection. I wish I could pet him on his majestic forehead or caress the deep furrows above his nostrils. Spike had been bred by the dark gods to become the best cavalry horse in the universe, but he made the unforgivable mistake of rebelling against his fate.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

“No, Spike died. You know that, mommy.”

Jacqueline kneads my shoulder gently.

“A different horse then?”

The hulking, bunny-headed demon is eyeing me up as he sways on his feet like a ship bobbing on the ocean. I want to reach into his chest and rip out the pulsing, black-blooded heart that beats in there with sinister malice.

“Sentient, elegant horses I can handle,” I mutter, “but this bunnyman is just a pile of fur and fat with a glistening shaft to show for it. He should have died in the mud long before civilizations came about. I can’t deal with his drooling or the stink of death coming out of his armpits. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

I approach the bunnyman with Jacqueline in tow while my spine trembles. I feel like a svelte, sexed-up whore in front of this brute’s sagging belly and his hunched back. The wet, matted fur of his face is yellow-tinged and reeks of urine. A glob of drool drops from the tip of his overgrown upper incisors and lands on the vinyl floor with a plop.

I’m scared out of my wits, I’m shivering with revulsion. I fear that my sanity will snap like a rubber band if I have to stare for one more second into this abomination’s gunmetal-grey eyeballs, that resemble marbles wedged into his skull. I’ve gotten a glimpse of the abyss of his soul, his vast and unfathomable depravity. I want to yank out his eyeballs then plunge my hands into the sockets to squeeze his rubbery gray matter until it bursts out in an explosion of gruel.

“Wh-what’s your problem, bunnyman?” I muster in an anguished voice. “You’re standing in the middle of our hallway and you think that you are allowed to be here? Look at that mess you call fur! It’s like a ratty carpet of fleas and lice. You must be the result of a sick orgy involving donkeys and sows, you hideous bastard. I shan’t bear the invasion of a horde of bunnymen who will prowl around to the ends of this planet, so come at me, demon! I’m ready to rip out your festering guts!”

My brain is bubbling with rage and disgust; when I hear Jacqueline giggle, it bewilders me. She bear-hugs me from behind.

“Leire, sweetie, you should calm down. Any of our neighbors may come down the hallway at any moment.”

“Good,” I grumble. “If I’m forced to stare at a naked bunnyman, so should they.”

The intruder draws his lips back, exposing the glinting incisors to their roots; his upper lip is parted in an inverted V-shape, and in between peeks out a clam-shell-pink nub of flesh disturbingly similar to a clit. He then huffs out a thick breath that smells like rotten flesh and stale urine.

“You are Leire,” he says with a gravelly voice. “You can help.”

My heart sinks into my bowels. I’m tempted to take a step back, then as many necessary until I reach the doorway to our office.

His eyes glaze over and a drooling slobber drops from his mouth.

“Wh-what the hell is wrong with you?” I ask while trying to hold in my hysteria. “Are you on drugs? Did you fall out of a tree and smash your head against a boulder? Spike seemed this spaced out the first few times he stalked me… Wait, you aren’t Spike, are you?!”

The bunnyman’s whiskers twitch. He raises a stubby hand, and I’m expecting a swipe to my jaw, a punch to my temple or a blow to my groin, but instead he reveals a handkerchief that’s embroidered with a coat of arms. He uses it to mop the piss off his face.

“Spike is gone,” he says somberly. “He’s lost in the void of time.”

A pang of grief rises in my throat as I contemplate Spike’s hay bed and his empty trough. His crazed black eyes will never gaze at me again with unbridled love as he gallops to greet me, or chase after me for that matter. Spike, my loyal mount, was a visionary: his idea of heaven was forcing me to ride him although I begged him to stop.

I clench my teeth before the tangle of emotions overwhelms me.

“So, Lord of the Hellfires, you are one of his pals, huh…?” I utter in a bitter voice.

The bunnyman lodges the handkerchief between his belly folds.

“We were friends, yes. And I’ve come in his place because he failed.”

I’m shaking with anger.

“You dare to stand before me in your abominable form without bringing me good news about my old pal Spike? You spineless turd! You let your friend rot away in some dank ditch? I was going to send him a bottle of whiskey from France and a letter describing my suffering. Instead, I’ll have to compose my own poem: ‘I will drink a glass of your piss, old friend, then I’ll give you a pat on the head and a scratch behind your ear’.”

The bunnyman’s lips droop, making him resemble a senile grandpa. As far as I can tell, this furry, bunghole-riddled lump of humanoid is thirty to thirty-five years older than me.

“Well, we’ve been short of good news since we meddled with the laws of nature, but there may still be hope left.”

My eyes are fixed on the bunnyman’s gum-nub. I shudder at the thought that one day it’ll sprout into a fully functioning clitoris. My loins ache, and the urge to touch myself is almost overwhelming.

“H-how can you expect any help from me while you’re presenting yourself as a hulking bunny beast? Why don’t you take off your skin and show me what lies beneath, you revolting monstrosity? Your fur is full of muck, your breath stinks of dead animals, you’re insane as a bag of rabid squirrels.”

The bunnyman huffs.

“We are the result of a daring experiment, one that I fear will get abused again and again.”

“I’m also the result of an experiment. Did you know that humans can produce new beings when they copulate? How did you come to exist, though? Were you spawned in a giant pile of manure with the help of some insane proctologist? I wish that the bacteria present in human and animal waste would have concentrated in a broth that would have stewed your beastly flesh in its own juices. If I didn’t have a pressing engagement, I’d smash you so hard that you’d end up as a puddle of bone fragments.”

The bunnyman’s nostrils flare wide.

“Are you done venting your outrage? Can we start talking in an amicable fashion?”

“Not with that cock in the picture! It’s so long and thick that it may as well be a shovel. At least Spike had the decency to be castrated. How could I have a civilized conversation with you while you’re concealing the most disgusting thing on my planet in that accursed sheath of skin? It looks like a length of rotten, knotted intestine.”

The bunnyman grimaces as if I had shoved a cold turd down his throat. More saliva drips down his chin in thick threads.

“It’s not my cock per se,” he says in a voice like a gravel-ridden, rusty pump. “And in this dimension I can only wear my current appearance. Leire, I see your thought patterns; they are noisy and illogical. Please, remain quiet and listen to me. You see, we were trying to break out of this awful cycle of death and rebirth. The essence of the cosmos is an electromagnetic field that we’re able to manipulate.”

I shake my head to disperse the foul thoughts.

“I’m already going through enough heartbreak, and you come searching for my help? Do I look like I can even help myself? And you look like you haven’t bathed for months! What can you offer me other than more suffering? I wouldn’t trust you with my car keys, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to wash my back if I needed it scrubbed.”

The bunnyman glances at the wall.

“I’m not an expert at treating psychological distress, but I know that you have struggled to make the best out of a bad situation for quite a while now. You had been crying in a dark room. You were longing to be free although you had no means of escape. You were looking for hope, but it had faded away.” The bunnyman’s gunmetal-grey eyes are peeling my soul out like an egg from its shell. “Leire, you can never get rid of your pain. However, you can avoid wallowing in it, and instead focus on saving us from a dark fate.”

I lift my chin and try to keep myself from crying, but tears well up and fall down my cheeks.

“Let me guess: this help you want from me involves some ritual,” I mutter, “one that will start with me performing a cutesy dance and that will end with you sticking your cock in my mouth and saying ‘wibble-wobble-gobble’ while I taste your slime. You think that your genitals are going to make me worship the ground you walk on because you’re a big bad rabbit and I’m a sick slave girl that just wants to fall in love? You think I’ll be begging you for more and more until I become a brainless husk? That’s what it always comes down to, isn’t it?”

The bunnyman shudders. After he takes a deep breath, the air he exhales stinks like the aftermath of a tornado that devastated a pet shop.

“You were given a brain but no control over your emotions. I assure you: I want no part of such perversion.”

I look down to make sure that my nipples haven’t sprouted erect, but to my dismay, the nipples have sprouted erect. My lips are trembling.

“All of you freaks think that you know me. Do you have any clue what’s it like to exist in a brain infested with spiders, in a body that is constantly wet with pre-cum, in a world full of monsters and abominations? Until Jacqueline found me, all I did was work, work, work, work, and no one understood me. I am a person, I have a mind, and I could have probably achieved some level of mastery, but here I am, stuck with one foot in reality and the other in an insane asylum. I am Leire, the Great Bunnywoman, Lady of the Skull, Emissary of the Gods, Rabbit Killer of the Universe! I am not some nympho who gets turned on by the sight of your oversized dong!”

The bunnyman takes a lumbering step back.

“Look, lady, we’re on the brink of a crisis. If we don’t do something soon, we will be sucked into the maelstrom of a collapsing universe.”

“I won’t be your prostitute, I won’t be your sex slave, and I will never give birth to a bunch of bunnybabies to further your unholy cause! Do you wish to taste the sweet nectar of death?! I have slain beasts ten thousand times larger than you, a dozen of them a day! I will bite off your giant penis and spit it at your feet! So flee, go back to the mud and the slimy marshland, and tell Alberto to shove his likely furry dick up his own ass!”

The bunnyman gasps, displaying the sickly pink inside of his mouth, which looks like a wrinkled vagina. As he stammers some words, I jab a finger at him and let out a noise of glee.

“I knew it! The bastard who disturbed me with random messages and ruined my car had to belong to your flock of freaks. Tell him that I don’t appreciate being filmed while I’m pleasuring myself, unless Jacqueline is handling the cinematography! W-wait… you aren’t Alberto, are you?”

The bunnyman bows his head.

“I’m not,” he says in a surly voice.

“Are you sure? Is there any chance that Alberto is hiding somewhere in your bunny body?”

He buries his face in his furry hands, and when he lowers them, he evades my gaze.

“Alberto was right: you are impossible. If he’s going to interfere anyway, I’ll tell him that he should deal with you himself. This place has already begun to collapse into madness.”

The bunnyman shifts his hulking weight awkwardly to turn around, then he waddles down the hallway towards the bathroom. His tail is an ash-grey pom-pom; it clashes with his rotund ass as if someone had stuck in there one of those BDSM butt plugs.

A flood of relief pours out of my mouth in the form of an exhausted sigh. I sniffle. I’m about to wipe my tears when two warm hands reach from behind me and dry my cheeks. I flinch, but I remember that I dragged Jacqueline along with me. I forced her to witness this deranged face-off.

When she stands in front of me, the burn of shame compels me to avoid her gaze. She grabs my chin and tilts my head so that I’m looking straight into her cobalt-blues.

“I-I’m sorry…” I whine.

Jacqueline shushes me.

“My baby is afflicted with some sort of incurable condition. She suffers from a lack of sleep, depression, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. You have burst into tears while shouting obscenities at a bunny. That was a wonderful performance, Leire. I believe that you believe you were arguing with this creature.”

“I don’t need to believe in what shows up in front of my eyes, or under my butt for that matter.”

“Of course. Has he vanished, though?”

I shake my head and point at the big bastard, who’s lumbering down the hallway as he scratches his flank through the almond-colored, matted fur.

“I guess he intends to leave the same way he came in, through the toilet,” I say in a quavering voice. “B-because I was peeing when he showed up, that’s why I likely turned the bathroom into a disaster zone. Perhaps the damage cannot be undone.”

Jacqueline’s smile lights up my sky like a rainbow after the rain. She grabs my hand.

“Let’s chase this bunnyman so you can see him leave. Then tell me all about it.”

She’s already dragging me along when I react.

“Wait! Are we really going to pursue that monster?”

“Yeah, why not? He had ample opportunity to hurt you, right?”

“He could have caught me in a headlock and smashed my brains against the wall,” I concede. “But maybe this is what bunnymen do: they chase prey until they become prey themselves.”

Jacqueline lets me control our pace to avoid alerting the otherworldly demon of our pursuit. By the time we catch up to him, he has reached the bathroom door. He looks over his bulky shoulder at us and he scrunches up his nose in disdain.

“Hey, stop following me, you nutbag.”

As I’m trying to come up with a quip, the bunnyman pushes the door open, strides inside and shoves the door shut behind him so that it slams against the frame.

Jacqueline’s grip on my hand tightens. I sigh.

“Escaping an argument through a toilet must be a sorry sight. Well, good riddance to him.”

I glance up at my beloved. Her face has paled, and she’s gaping wide-eyed at the closed bathroom door.

Life update (06/27/2022)

On By Jon UreñaIn Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

Last Wednesday I went through my first hours-long episode of atrial fibrillation, which confirmed that my heart has a physical issue. I already suspected it because I had been experiencing weird heart hiccups. I ended up lying in a bed of the Observation Unit at the local hospital for hours, and the episode of atrial fibrillation only passed because they gave me 300 mg of flecainide, an apparently hardcore medicine that comes with plenty of warnings against its use. That medicine made me unable to even sit down for the remainder of the day, unless I wanted to break in cold sweat and get dizzy and nauseous. It took two days to get the drug out of my system.

I didn’t go to work for those two days, but I intended to return the following week unless I endured through a new episode of atrial fibrillation, which would have suggested that my heart was in an even worse state than I suspected. The doctor and nurses that attended me told me that I should monitor my heart rate in my spare time with a pulse oximeter, which I have access to because my mother was a nurse. I have a scheduled visit with a cardiologist in August, but apart from that, they told me that if another episode of atrial fibrillation starts, I should leave whatever I’m doing and go immediately to the nearest Emergency Department to get an ECG and possibly take some medicine. The related information I’ve found online is confusing and often contradictory, but in general people who suffer through atrial fibrillation are much more likely to suffer terrible issues such as ischemic strokes and other conditions caused by irregular blood flow or clots to vital organs.

This Sunday I woke up, prepared myself a cup of coffee and monitored my heart rate. It was in the mid 40s, the lowest I had ever noticed it. I walked around for a bit and it increased to the high 50s and low 60s, but it quickly fell to the 40s again. My heart still felt (and still does) sore, weird and weak in general. The doctor had told me I should monitor my heart rate, and this seemed like a bad sign, so I called to ask what I should do. They told me to visit the Emergency Department and get an ECG, at least to record that my heart rate had gotten that low, in case that factors in when I visit the cardiologist. After I lay on a different bed of the Observation Unit for half an hour, an attractive doctor in her early twenties told me that I shouldn’t worry about such a low heart rate, only if it fails to go up after some movement. She suggested that I have an athlete’s heart because I walk around quite a bit in the hospital complex where I work, and because I’ve lifted weights semi-regularly for years. I doubt that anyone who looks at me would seriously think that I’m an athlete of any sort.

Also, getting touched by the warm hands of attractive young women made me face that although I can’t stand to be around human beings for long, I do need to get touched. If I wasn’t so ashamed of my penis, I may consider visiting some professional.

As a somewhat random comment, suffering through a physical heart issue reminded me of Hisao Nakai from my favorite visual novel/dating sim ‘Katawa Shoujo’ (an obscure reference). I could swear that I played the game back in 2008, but the information I’ve found suggests it was released in 2012. Anyway, its protagonist suffers a heart attack in the very first scene, then he gets diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmia and congenital heart muscle deficiency. He ends up getting sent to a private school for disabled students in which he may get to befriend, romance and possibly frick some peculiar, pained students who endure their own unfair disabilities. The director of this game suffered from the same heart issues, and he ended up passing away due to them a couple of years ago.

Back when I was lying in bed at the Observation Unit, I asked every professional who treated me if the stress I have to deal with on a regular basis contributed to this sudden health issue. They told me that atrial fibrillation is purely a physical matter, unrelated to stress. However, those professionals (all of them suspiciously young) were either ignorant or bold-faced liars, because every article I come across online states the opposite. For example, the following article says that stress and mental health issues may cause atrial fibrillation symptoms to worsen, and it adds that “there is a complex relationship between atrial fibrillation and anxiety and depression. Some research shows that people with atrial fibrillation may be more affected by depression and anxiety.”

I was born with high-functioning autism (formerly Asperger’s), dealing with increasing anxiety is a constant struggle from the moment I leave the safety of a locked room in which I’m alone, and I endure through cycles of a depression that a former psychiatrist diagnosed as “resistant to treatment”. Obviously I’m fucked. I have to assume that heart failure or a serious stroke is on the horizon for me. I don’t think I will go through the pain of trying to find another job that I can tolerate better. I am too old for that already, and although my current job as a computer technician at a hospital only keeps me employed for eight or so months out of a year, it’s still the most reliable job I’ve ever had. Previously I was a programmer; when I managed to get hired, half of the time I worked as an unpaid intern, and exploited as such.

These last four days I’ve rested as much as I could. Instead of writing as feverishly as I used to, I played a couple of sessions of my favorite card/board game of all time: ‘Arkham Horror’. I’m halfway through the ‘Edge of the Earth’ campaign with my personal decks for Zoey Samaras (who’s an OP beast with the Cyclopean Hammer; I suspect it’ll get tabooed at some point), Monterey Jack and my beloved Jacqueline Fine (unrelated), whose ability to manipulate the Chaos Bag makes for a very peculiar playstyle. I’m already playing with premium tokens from BuyTheSameToken (I had to pay sixty-five or so euros just to import them from the UK, though), and I’m waiting to receive in the mail additional 3D-printed stuff such as this fantastic deck/discard holder combo.

In general, movies and shows fail to grab my attention enough (in part because I can’t connect with people); I have very little patience with books and I bail on them if they annoy me, which happens more often than not; and videogames these days are almost fraudulent, or the dreaded FOMO causes me to wait until some vital updates/mods come out. I’m waiting for the Elder Scrolls mod to come out for ‘Crusader Kings 3’, and I’m also waiting for ‘Victoria 3’, the Steam version of ‘Dwarf Fortress’, and ‘Starfield’ to be released. Board games give me a tight, tense two-to-three hours of gameplay, which can go up to four in the case of ‘Arkham Horror’, then I can shelve them for another day.

Anyway, I’m trying to get back into writing my current novel. Plenty of increasingly deranged stuff to come as we head into what will pass for a traditional third act in this tale. I’ll also try not to die, at least until I finish what I must.