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I tore myself from the dance between burning fuel and watching the altimeter to peer through a viewport. Jing’s profile hindered the view of the crater, its walls rising, encircled by a walnut-brown barren plain. The crests of the hills forming the crater rim gleamed bone-white, and deep within its sandstone-red base, the four-story high dome scintillated. It had been clad in hexagonal panels that reflected the star’s arctic-blue light like a kaleidoscope.

Jing smiled, and stroked the black bristles of his goatee. I focused back on the controls while monitoring our velocity. I burned half a second’s worth of fuel to dampen the descent. Every microscopic adjustment vibrated through the seat into my body; I barely needed the instruments for guidance.

Three hundred meters to touchdown. Two meters per second. The crater walls rose, hiding the dome like an inverted curtain. Jing craned his neck toward a viewport, drinking in the landscape.

One hundred fifty meters. One and a half meters per second. The ship accelerated in its descent, but I fired the thrusters in hundredth-of-a-second bursts to slow it. The altimeter dropped: seventy meters, fifty, thirty. I burned fuel, keeping the descent under two meters per second, until the landing gear touched down with a metallic screech that resonated through the cabin.

Seated at my four-thirty, Mara had turned toward me. She’d bared the whites of her eyes, pursing her lips as she waited for me to confirm her suspicions.

I cut the engine. I was checking the gauges, making sure nothing had broken, when the cabin shuddered with an indigestion. With a jolt, we slid downhill at an eight-degree angle.

I grabbed the controls. Hunched over to peer through Jing’s porthole. The slope that obscured the view of the dome—that carapace of hexagonal panels—was sliding away to the northwest.

Mara spoke over the metallic scraping sound.

“We’ve landed on a slope.”

“Thanks. I wouldn’t have realized otherwise.”

“Just making sure.”

“You’re distracting me.”

The tilt steepened to twelve degrees. One leg of the landing gear lifted a few centimeters then scraped back down the slope, while the other leg swept through the sandy ore like a breakwater. A waterfall-like roar resonated through the cabin.

I fired the thrusters for a second, which lifted us diagonally off the slope. We drifted in a parabola, moving away from the landing point—a trajectory that would roll us onto our side unless I righted the ship. I fired the lateral thrusters in bursts. On the altimeter and the velocity gauge, numbers scrolled past. For fractions of a second, I countered the roll from one side to the other, like damping the sway of a bell with gentle touches, until we were descending vertically.

Jing spoke over the roar of burning fuel.

“Solar panels, the dome cladding. And on the forecourt, caterpillar tracks.”

My right hand gripped the control, my thumb tensed over the burner button, as if I were an extension of the ship. I balanced the descent, guided by the cockpit’s vibrations while the indicators blurred. My instinct decided before I could even consider overriding it.

The landing gear touched down. The cylindrical stack of cargo bay, fuel tank, and cockpit settled, sinking us a few centimeters into the sandy ground.

The pad of my thumb rested on the burner button; my shoulders were still tense, lifted off the seatback, until I took a deep breath. The ground held.

I released the controls and wiped the sweat from my palms onto the suit’s padded kneepads. I unbuckled the crossed harness straps.

To my left, Jing met my gaze, smiling. His thinker’s forehead and the patch of scalp conquered by baldness, damp with sweat, reflected the indicators.

I glanced over my right shoulder at Mara. She had tucked her chin behind the neck ring of her suit. The look she shot me rebuked me for the landing, as if I had promised her a textbook descent. Had I promised her that? But a smile unfolded on my face all by itself. Just like a hundred times before, I had mastered gravity, plunged down the well that some rock titan sank into the fabric of space-time, but this time I’d managed it in a training ship.

I took the tin of mints from a compartment. I tilted my head back and shook the tin until three mints tumbled onto my tongue, refreshing it. I reached back over my shoulder to offer the tin to Mara.

“I would’ve preferred we hadn’t relied on luck,” she said.

“I’ve had rough landings before.”

Mara took the tin from me. She shook two mints onto her palm, picked one up between two fingertips like medication, and slipped it through the gap between her lips, stark against her pale face.

“If we’d capsized, could you have righted the craft?”

“We wouldn’t have capsized. I was flying her.”

“We would’ve needed to call for rescue. Then what?”

“We’ve landed, Mara. Breathe.”

I stood up as Jing unbuckled his harness. I made my way, hunched over, to the airlock hatch. Inside, on a sidewall, three spare suits dangled like deflated balloons. Curves of light skittered across the folds of the plastic material. The fabric shone golden from the shoulders to the gloves, down the sides of the torso, and along the outer legs, while the chest and inner thighs remained white.

I took down a helmet and seated it on my suit’s neck ring. When the lens interface activated, it projected data between me and the airlock wall, displaying my vitals in a blue font. I aligned the back of my suit with the oxygen tank feed. Engaged it. My helmet flooded with cool, light air, like the kind I’d breathed in the mountains of several planets.

As I pulled on my gloves, Mara and Jing jostled each other carelessly in the space where we could barely fit shoulder to shoulder. Jing apologized; Mara frowned. I checked the seal on the woman’s helmet. Her ashen gaze darted across my face. I ordered them to let the helmet intelligence run the suit integrity check. They scanned the results while I physically checked the seals on their suits where gloves met sleeves and pants met boots. Reflections from the overhead halogens slid across their helmet visors. I nodded.

When I pulled the lever to depressurize the atmosphere, the hatch to the cockpit slammed shut with the clang of an armored door. Hidden machinery hissed as it worked until the exterior hatch opened a crack. I pushed the hatch, maneuvered my body out through the opening, turning as I went, and my foot found the first rung of the ladder. I descended past the fuel tank.

Above me, the legs and boots of a suit, silhouetted against the violet sky, probed cautiously from rung to rung, as if fearing the next one might give way. When the curve of a landing gear strut emerged to the right of the ladder, I let go. I landed, kicking up dust.

The reconnaissance flights had led me to believe I had a grasp of the terrain, but from the ground, those hills, craters, and mountain horizons dwarfed me. The star, bottle-cap-sized, glittered an arctic blue, and when I gazed at it, the helmet’s visor tinted to protect my vision. I moved forward a few meters, my boots sinking into the sandy soil, toward the hill we would skirt. Beyond, the dome awaited.

I fidgeted like a dog waiting for a ball to be thrown. My racing heart sent a tremor through me, concentrating in my hands and feet. I wished I could have a shot of liquor to moisten my mouth.

I requested the helmet’s AI to project the map of the complex, and the AI displayed it in blue light onto the folds of sandy ground. It had extrapolated the aerial photos I’d taken of the complex into three dimensions, displayed on a grid. The hexagonal-paneled dome stood four stories tall, and in the forecourt, dominated by a smaller crater, several tracks crisscrossed like on a construction site.

I wanted to sprint up to the top of the slope and survey that carapace. It was as if I’d pulled up to the starting line of a race, waiting for the countdown to reach zero, anticipating the moment I would stomp on the accelerator.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Everything in Its Right Place” by Radiohead.

It seems all those dozens of hours playing the original Kerbal Space Program paid off.

• Previous part (16)

I open my eyes. The midday sun, bathing me through the branches and leaves, bleaches my vision, rendering the jagged branches like pencil sketches.

The wave of emotion has knotted my throat and weighs upon my chest, as if every tree, every blade of grass, were fighting to tell me what ails it. I clutch the folder beneath my left arm, then undo the pin holding the fold of my right sleeve and roll it up until, a few inches below the elbow, the stump of my arm emerges like a blind, white mole. The blur of scar tissue makes me shudder with the pain of having had to hide it. A pain that intensifies with every person who discovered the stump, who strained to meet my gaze while hiding their revulsion, as I fought to focus on their words and ignore their pity.

At my feet, the grass traces the scabrous blight burned into the earth by the black vomit. On the trunks of both beech trees, thick welts—where the bark shrank and withered—mark the touch of that mass of muscle and sinew.

The brook murmurs. A breeze stirs. I imagine unseen eyes watching me, but even the birds chirping from the canopy ignore me.

I open my mouth, clear my throat. How will my voice sound after such a long silence?

“I wanted to stay away. I’ve put this off for too many years. You shouldn’t have existed in this world, so I must have invented you. I wanted to forget those memories of someone impossible. If I clung to them, I’d slide down the slope toward believing in a reality different from this ugly, somber world. I tried to convince myself I’d had an accident, that doctors amputated my arm.” When I steal a glance at the stump, the tangle of scars chills me. “But you existed. It happened just as I remember, and I remember every detail.”

The sickening tide that threatens daily to submerge me washes over me. Though I blink to keep tears from surfacing, they gather behind my eyes like water against a dam.

“You warned me, and I ignored you. Most times I need to use the hand that’s missing, I become enraged, but I dodge my own blame. I tried to convince you that you were wrong, even though I knew nothing. Many nights, before falling asleep, I wonder where you are. We came to this forest, to this world, by chance. In these past decades, I’ve lived the best I could, but even the worst moments surpass how I lived before I met you.”

A cavernous echo frays. When I rise onto my tiptoes and strain my ears, the echo fades away. My legs tingle as, for a few seconds, I cling to that illusion. Will I glimpse his silhouette from the corner of my eye? Will the pins and needles prickle?

“Wherever you are, I hope you can forgive me. I convinced you to trust me, and I remember you drawing away before you vanished, knowing that what had happened would be repeated with everyone who persuaded you to escape.”

I look around. Behind me, the grassy slope climbs beneath vines that strangle some branches of the interwoven canopy. At my feet, chunks of bark, sticks, and leaves partially conceal the splatter of muck.

“Your very substance, wherever you might have come from, now flows within me. Your world doesn’t accept returns. I know what you had to endure, why you needed others to keep their distance.”

I modulate my voice to keep it from breaking. The corners of my eyes burn, and between blinks, my vision glazes over.

“Once it touches you, it contaminates you. I stopped it from killing me, but it flows through my veins, soaks my brain, stains everything I see. It supports me as much as my own skeleton.”

When I close my mouth, I wish I had just parted my lips for the last time. I relax my shoulders, but my left arm tugs my torso towards its side. I loosen that armpit until the folder slides into my hand. I crouch, open the folder, take out the drawing, and set it upon the splatter of muck, fitting it into the clearing amid the grass. I stand up and take two steps back.

In the center of the charcoal-shaded sheet, eraser strokes reveal a greasy heap of muscles and tendons hanging in strips, its surface bulging with buboes. From the heap’s left side, a fibrous, dripping appendage extends, reaching out towards me.

THE END

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Velouria” by Pixies.

Four of Elena’s novellas translated. Only the stories of Siobhan and Kirochka are left.

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I staggered, losing my footing in the swaying motions, but managed to thrust a leg forward to catch myself before falling. I turned and retraced the trail back through the passageway between the beeches, wading through the blackness toward the house. My consciousness floated above the pain like a squirrel perched atop a pine tree that towered over an ocean of flames and columns of smoke. The black, taut skin of my right hand’s fingers tightened, and the stain spread across the palm and the back.

My mind went blank. I pitched forward and would have slammed into an oak, but I thrust my right hand out to brace against the trunk, wrinkled like an elephant’s hide. Starlight silhouetted the low-hanging branches, which draped in clusters of leaves. Though I’d pressed my fingers and palm firmly to the bark, the pressure in that arm dulled as if the limb had fallen asleep. In the darkness, beneath my blackened fingers, the bark shrank and withered. When I tore my hand away, the wood crumbled into gray sawdust.

I hunched over the trunk, blinking. I had carved a hole in the shape of my fingers, and the depression spread, rotting the bark until it crackled and broke into fragments and dust.

I reeled through the blackness. In flickers of awareness, slopes tilted up or down, the gray outlines of trees obstructed my path. Branches scraped me and struck my head—featherlight touches amid the waves of pain that my boiling blood radiated through me.

I emerged from the forest. Fifty meters away, a cone of white light swept over a grassy pasture. In sways, the beam tilted skyward, dissolving into the night.

I opened the pasture gate and climbed the slope. The beam spotlighted me suddenly, blinding me before sliding down to the chest of my sweater. At the crest of the pasture stood two figures: a bearded man in a corduroy shirt and denim jeans, accompanied by a gaunt woman whose wild, ashen mane framed a pallid face. A terrycloth robe hung from her shoulders as if draped on a coat hanger. The man gripped a flashlight in his left hand, and in his right, the long handle of a headless tool.

I froze. Did I know them? A ring of pain burned around the palm of my right hand.

The man strode toward me. Hatred twisted his weasel-like face, where the sparse hair atop his head merged with a thick, wiry beard. As the man and woman approached, they split apart to flank me. The man jabbed the tool handle in my direction.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, because this was the last time you’ll leave the house.”

I advanced toward him and raised my right hand.

The man halted, freezing the tool handle mid-air, and stared at the taut, burnished skin—black leather—that sheathed my hand up to the midpoint of my palm, which I held aloft like a greeting.

I locked eyes with him.

“I see you.”

I pressed my open hand against the man’s face. A surprised gasp escaped him as he stumbled back two steps. The curve of his upper lip, the tip and bridge of his nose, and the imprint of my four fingers on his forehead, rooster-crest-like, had all turned ashen gray. His mouth fell open, features swelling with panic. Then, parts of his forehead, nose, and upper lip crumbled into a spray of ash.

The man shrieked. He dropped the flashlight and the tool’s handle to slap his palms against his face. Borders of ash expanded across his forehead—eaten down to the bone—along the cartilaginous ducts of his nose, and over his bare teeth as though he’d been born with a cleft lip. With each smack, between screams, his skin and flesh crumbled into puffs of ash.

He crumpled to his knees. His eyeballs blackened and dried like raisins. The hollows of his nose and mouth merged, revealing bloody cavities like the ventricles of a heart. His thick tongue quivered as rotting gums released their teeth. His screams sputtered out, replaced by those of the woman beside him, hunched and shuddering. She clawed at her face, fingers sinking into flesh, shrieking through a gaping, twisted mouth.

I stepped forward. The woman, startled, tried to run, but I seized the collar of her bathrobe with my left hand. When I yanked her toward the ground beside the man, momentum sent us both crashing down—her sprawled on the grass, me kneeling.

The man had collapsed onto his side atop ash-sprinkled grass. Within the hollow shell of his skull, borders of rot spread, swallowing the ruined bone toward the nape of his neck.

The woman screamed, soles of her slippers slipping on the damp grass as she struggled to rise, but I straddled her back and shoved her face against the man’s skull, which shattered on impact into a cloud of ash. She whimpered and thrashed. I clasped her nape with my left hand, pressing her face into the ashen ring at the man’s neck—a smoldering cigarette tip. Her muffled scream choked the air. In a spasm, she wrenched her face upward to the sky. It was now coated in a layer of ash like fleece, gray and greasy, the hole of her mouth contracting and expanding as it sucked in clumps of rot.

I leaned my full weight against the nape of her neck, driving her face into the corpse’s ashen, sludgy mass between its shoulders. The woman groaned, shook, thrashed her legs. Her nails clawed at the sleeves of my sweater as the muscles in my arms quivered. I squeezed my eyelids shut; my teeth grated together.

Her body convulsed for a few seconds, then fell still. I released her head, letting it slump onto the man’s torso—a lump of thick, greasy ash—as if resting on a bed of crumbled incense stick half-charred to nothing.

I stood. My left arm flashed white with a cramp. The woman lay facedown in a frothy sludge, while the man’s corduroy shirt sagged where the flesh beneath had crumbled.

The flashlight lying to my right cast sharp outlines on blades of grass in the dark. Insects swarmed in its luminous pool. I grabbed the flashlight and swept its beam across the field as I staggered downhill toward the house.

The black stain had gloved my right hand and crept up several centimeters past my wrist. My heart pumped darkness. Half-hobbling, half-tumbling down the grassy slope, I forgot I’d ever known anything but this pain.

I entered the stable. The cows craned from their stalls, chains clinking, and fixed me with wide, glassy eyes. One stretched its neck and loosed a low, drawn-out moan.

When I halted, I swayed. My vision blurred, but I lurched toward the first stall. The cow grew frantic, stomping the stone floor, and retreated into the wooden partition as it stared with dread at the stain on my right hand. I crouched over the chains, which swept up wisps of straw as they dragged. With my left hand, I fumbled open the shackle clamped around the cow’s leg, and when I tossed the iron aside, it clanged against grimy stone. I freed the other three cows, but they lingered in their stalls. Two dipped their heads to chew hay.

My flesh seethed with pain. I hobbled to the stool by the entrance, flanked by tools propped against walls or dangling from hooks: an axe, a hoe, a saw. I grabbed the saw. Set it on the stool. Traced my fingers over its jagged teeth. Kneeling, I gripped the saw with my left hand and laid my right arm across the stool. I aligned the blade’s teeth a handspan below my elbow, close to the encroaching stain.

I swallowed, locked my jaw. With a single left-armed thrust, in a flare of agony, the teeth bit into muscle, then scraped bone.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s collected in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Out of the Black” by Royal Blood.

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I stepped on the splatter of crusted filth where dried vomit from days prior had hardened. I advanced as if pushing through a bramble while dozens of pins pricked my face, digging through the wool of my cap and gloves.

The emperor owl puffed out the feathers of his neck and shrank back. He stared at me as if needing to speak but finding no words.

In my vision, white holes widened. The pins had pierced through my sweater, t-shirt, and pants, breaking the skin of my torso and legs. They perforated my eyeballs.

“I don’t know if I can,” said the emperor owl, as though pleading for help.

I spoke through the icy thorns boring into my vocal cords.

“Do your best. It’s enough for me.”

“It will torture you.”

“I’ve grown used to it.”

I took another step. My ears rang as if my eardrums had shredded, while hundreds of points across my body screamed in pain. I’d been thrust into an iron maiden, and someone was pushing the door shut. When I parted my lips, a groan seeped from my mouth, like an animal wailing from my gut.

“No one should live like this, hiding, bracing for the next time they’ll harm her.”

The emperor owl’s outstretched wings trembled, the feathers on his face bristled.

“You force me to participate.”

“It’ll be magnificent,” I murmured. “You and I, a carriage with velvet curtains, a throne room tall as a cathedral.”

“Give me time.”

Air escaped my throat in whimpers as the frozen tips of the pins tore through my molecules.

“If at any point you would have let me escape, tonight will be the night. Come tomorrow I will cease to exist. If you care for me, if you believe I deserve salvation, you will take me with you.”

The emperor owl shuddered. He furrowed his eyelids and stretched his left wing toward me.

I yanked off my gloves and extended my right arm toward the wing as my frayed vision bleached to eggshell white. I limped forward, hunched, sinking deeper the hundreds of pins skewering my flesh.

I cleaved through an unctuous membrane—a cascade of petroleum—and emerged into a pitch-black vault as tall as a house, its arched ceiling gleaming chrome-like. The air reeked of dozens of corpses rotting in a sealed chamber. At the center loomed a mass of tangled black muscles and tendons, its folds oozing oily sludge. Across its surface, lumps slid like air bubbles. It stared at me without eyes.

The left flank of the mass was extruding an appendage of dangling fibers. A stentorian voice struck me like a battering ram of air.

“Touch me.”

I strained forward, stretching my fingers toward the slimy appendage, but a hurricane-force wind shoved against me, threatening to rip me away if my legs faltered. The gale scraped my edges, pelted me with microscopic pellets. I hauled myself forward, bending at a forty-five-degree angle, inching my legs forward centimeter by centimeter.

The hurricane roared. My skin and flesh rippled, slackened, peeled from my bones, and tangled across my skeleton like a dress snagged on a tree. As the wind scoured my corneas, the black, dripping fibrous appendage filled my vision. When my sight whited out, my fingertips brushed a greasy callus.

I sank into a blackout. The lingering sensation of hundreds of pins piercing me submerged into my memory. I lost all awareness of having arms or legs, of how to send signals to move them. My consciousness floated in a silence devoid of the murmur of blood coursing through me, the whirring of my inner mechanisms. Though I tried to count the seconds, they slipped away. Thoughts undulated in my mind like fluorescent eels.

In the abyss, white, yellow, red, and blue flickers ignited one by one, clustering in nests of a brumous purple substance. They spun silken filaments between themselves. The flickers and their nests multiplied until they veiled my vision in a glistening web of vaporous light that trapped the millions of white, yellow, red, and blue gleams like mosquitoes.

There was no room for worry or fear. Nothing could harm me. I would hang in the void and watch as the flickers caught in the web shone forever.

I was hurled back into my body as if sucked through a straw. An avalanche of pain overwhelmed me. I inhabited a rotting body, a colony of decaying atoms and molecules. Noises throbbed in my ears. When I located my arms and legs and staggered backward, the icy pain of hundreds of pins grazed my viscera and flesh until the pins slid free of my body.

At the end of my outstretched right arm, I splayed the fingers of that hand like a sea star. The fingers and their nails, from tip to first joint, were stained a burnished black, and along the edges of those stains, nerves crackled with pain.

Among the beech trees rose the heap of black, greasy muscles and tendons. Buboes slithered across its surface. It concealed the ring of withered grass, as though someone had traced it around the base of the heap.

It unleashed a reverberating lament—a bear’s guttural bellow—that shook the tangle of muscle and sinew. The mass recoiled in a fluid undulation. Its sides swelled and braced against the trunks of the beech trees, causing the entire heap to quiver like gelatin. Cords of muscle and tendon swayed, dripping with greasy residue.

“I thought this time would be different.”

On my right hand, stains of burnished black encroached millimeter by millimeter toward the second joint, seeping into the pores.

The heap slithered between the beeches and suddenly wrenched backward, dilating the circle of withered grass to the heap’s base, as though smudged by a finger. Where the creature had pressed against the beech trunks, the bark had puckered into ash-gray ovals—rotten bruises like those on spoiled fruit. The clump of muscle and sinew retreated in jerks, keening as it dissolved into the night.

I limped forward on rubbery legs, following the trail of flattened, wilted grass that snaked between the beeches—the wake of a gargantuan snail. The taut skin of my blackened fingers twitched. I tried to scream for my friend, but my vocal cords had fused shut. A storm of agony flooded me; even the primal command for my legs to hold me up barely pierced through.

The two-meter silhouette of the mound of muscle and tendon detached itself from the night. Whimpering, it murmured that it had believed this time would be—then vanished before finishing.

I stumbled along the path of blackened grass. On my right hand, the dark stains now crept toward my knuckles. I halted where the creature had disappeared. The trail of flattened, charred vegetation ended abruptly in a semicircle.

No one watched.

My legs trembled. I clutched my right wrist. At the border of the stains, now merged and cresting over my knuckles, nerves sparked and short-circuited.

“I was there,” I croaked. “Thank you.”

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies.

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I crumpled my pajama pants into a wad and placed it on the pillow. It would serve as the head for the twin bundles of pajamas and shirts I’d spread over the mattress cover. I pulled the blankets up until they covered the bundles and the wad.

I stepped back. I was gauging the effect of the lump under the blankets when, carelessly, I grazed the wound on my cheekbone. It flashed with pain. I clenched my teeth and waited, my carotid pounding, for the surge to settle.

The lump in the blankets hinted at a child sleeping beneath them, not a teenager, but it would suffice to trick Father until he pulled back the covers.

I layered myself in a thick wool sweater. Tightened my waterproof boots. Jammed on a fleece hat, and tugged wool gloves over my hands.

In the dim starlight sieved through the curtains, I scanned the wardrobe, the dresser, and the desk as if they were waiting with raised hands for me to grant them speech. What would I regret abandoning? I’d leave the pencils, crayons, and looseleaf paper, but they’d be abundant in that overseas land.

Halfway between the bed’s headboard and the dusty cobwebs on the ceiling hung two still lifes. In one painting, a basket heaped with apples and pears sat on a table, with a mortar leaning against it. In the other painting, a green pepper, an onion, and a garlic clove clustered on wrapping paper. The canvases had been smeared for years with skin flakes and mite droppings. Father and Mother believed a bedroom needed paintings to fulfill its purpose, and the first ones they’d found had sufficed.

I would forget it all. None of it belonged to me, never had. I’d arrived on Earth as if I could have just as easily touched down on some icy planet light-years away, and now I’d escape to where I wanted.

I drew the curtain. When I opened the window, careful to silence the hinges’ creak, a gust swept in, chilling my face and burrowing under my sweater collar like an animal seeking warmth. I climbed onto the window frame and let my legs dangle over the facade.

Each night, my window framed the cork oak, but the tree stood three strides away, and none of its twisting branches reaching toward me hinted they’d hold my weight.

My heart revolted. My arms and legs trembled. Once I jumped, if I changed my mind and opened the house door to creep back upstairs, I’d wake them. I inhaled sharply and scrubbed my palms over my thighs. As I slid my butt forward on the frame, I contorted to grip the inner ledge before letting go. My right hand’s fingers clawed the bedroom-side jut of the frame, but my backside slipped loose.

I blinked. Darkness veiled my vision, then fractured into pinpricks of stars. Meters above, the cork oak’s sinuous leaves writhed on their gnarled branches, wind-lashed. The house’s facade loomed like a cliff, its surface pierced by the rectangular void of my open window. Wind battered my right ear, numbing the fiery throbbing in my cheekbone.

When I peeled myself from the grass, a headache stabbed my skull. I clamped my palms to my temples as if to trap my brains inside. I stood, but my legs threatened to buckle. My vision lurched. I slumped against the cork oak’s fissured bark, shut my eyes, and summoned the mental map of the route I’d carve through the night. Five or six hundred meters to my refuge. By the time Father came searching, hours would bleed away before he found me.

I waded into the forest’s blackness, hurrying toward oases of starlight streaming through tangled branches. Scents guided me. I decoded familiar trees as landmarks. I climbed and slipped down slopes slick with shredded bark and rotting leaves.

By day, I would have combed the trees for the brook’s curve to pinpoint my shelter. I sat against the moss-sheathed root of a beech, jutting from the soil like an octopus’ tentacle. I dug my elbows into my thighs and clutched my throbbing skull.

The wind surged and faded, hissing through branches, shaking loose fruits that cracked the leaf litter. An owl hooted. A rivulet snapped like a dog lapping from a bowl.

I shut my eyes. I rose, angled an ear toward the stream’s murmur, and fumbled forward. In my mind, the golden serpent of the brook slid between the beech silhouettes, its current swaying and swelling with each step.

I opened my eyes. Eight meters downhill, amid the gray beech grove, a smudge of withered grass circled the ground. A meter and a half above it, perched on an invisible plinth, the emperor owl fixed his gaze on me.

I scrambled downward. My steps kicked up debris; I windmilled my arms, skating the slope like ice.

The owl emperor arched his neck, rotating his head in a full circle, as if calibrating the dark. Gems studding his sash glinted white.

“Trouble sleeping?”

Breathing through flared nostrils, I halted two meters from the circle, thrust my face forward, and jabbed a finger at my swollen cheekbone.

“You see it, yes? The pain’s so sharp, it’ll glow in the dark.”

“I assume you didn’t walk into a door.”

“I’ve never spoken of the rest of my life—where I live, with whom. You never asked. I preferred that. For a couple of hours each day, I forgot my fate. But after tonight, I can’t return, and if I stay here, he’ll find this refuge in less than a day.”

“Who?”

“A monster.”

The emperor owl spread his wings behind his head, splaying the black-striped feathers, and adjusted his conical crown. His cavernous voice hesitated.

“You wish to leave tonight.”

“Please.”

“Girl, I care for you. I hope you know that. But you ask me to attempt something I’ve never achieved.”

“Is it possible?”

“There are rumors.”

I recalled myself soaring through the skies. I could swear I had glimpsed, hundreds of meters below, constellations mirrored on the waves. A warmth flooded through me as if I were swaddled in blankets. I steadied my legs, and when I spoke, my voice quivered.

“It will be perfect. You’ll return where you belong, and I’ll accompany you as your right hand.”

The emperor owl opened and closed his beak. His gaze darted across the forest as if anticipating an interruption. When he leaned toward me, moonlight streaked white bands over the embossed owls and chalices on his conical crown. The plumage around his round eyes blazed pumpkin-orange in the shape of a mask, while the black strokes of his brows split into a V-shape.

“My world allows no returns. Once you see it, you’ll spend the rest of your life gazing through it.”

My throat constricted. My lungs fought to hold air.

“I’ve seen all I wanted to see here.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

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I whimpered.

“Stop.”

“Will you burn your drawings?”

“Whatever you want.”

He pulled me away from the table, and with that tug, I fell back in the chair, the front legs rising as it tilted precariously. Father braced the backrest to keep me from falling.

Even as I blinked, my vision clouded with dark specks, and every time I tensed any facial muscle, my right cheekbone flared. I sucked in a breath of snot. I studied the lighter in my palm and slid the tip of my thumb along its serrated, rough wheel.

Nothing would ever take away my overseas kingdom. Nothing would erase those chalk-white cliffs, nor the kilometer-long dining table, nor the people who treated me like a cherished guest. No one would confiscate or invade the sanctuaries of my mind, and the landscapes and characters I had discovered in that darkness would greet me when I closed my eyes. Let Father have my childish attempts to order this nightmare.

When I flicked the lighter’s wheel, a flame leapt up, flaring brightly—a genie I had conjured to obey me, yet too weak to set all three of us on fire, of charring our flesh and stripping us down to scorched skeletons. I touched the flame to the paper scraps, and they ignited. The fire begot offspring that carbonized other scraps, crumpling them into black wrinkles that crumbled into ash, devouring them as if a horde of newly born spiders were consuming their mother. From the bowl, a tangled flame rose, warming my face and intensifying the pain in my cheekbone. The ascending column of black smoke crashed against the ceiling like a slow cascade tumbling onto rocks. It scattered in shavings. The stench of charred paper invaded my lungs, which stung.

Father poured the bottle of milk into the bowl, quelling the flames, until the smoke turned to a white vapor. The burnt odor intertwined with the smell of hot milk. Mother crossed an arm in front of my face to hand a mortar and pestle to the man, who gripped the pestle and pounded the ashes into the bottom of the bowl, soaking his hand and spilling gray clumps across the table.

As my tears dried, I drifted away. I shivered, slumped in the chair. The pain in my cheekbone worsened in waves.

Father stirred the paste, lifted the bowl, and brought it to my mouth. I snapped awake. I leaned back and tilted my face. The man grabbed me by the nape and pressed the rim of the bowl against my pursed lips, splattering my face. Milk spilled over my lap.

“You know you’ll swallow every last drop,” Father said.

He shoved the bowl as if to shatter it, so that shards might embed in my lips. He growled. He clutched my nape and shouted to my right.

“Help me.”

Mother appeared at his side. My twisted neck ached, but my moans died in my throat. Father released my nape and pinched my nose, sealing my nostrils closed. The woman pulled at my lips, exposing my tight set of teeth.

I resisted while the bowl, in a seesaw motion, slammed against my incisors like a battering ram. I lacked oxygen. My vision darkened.

When I opened my mouth to gasp for a breath, Mother pried my teeth apart and held them open. Father, after yanking my head back, emptied the bowl. Clumps spilled over my neck, my chest, my thighs, while my mouth swelled with a goop that tasted of wet charcoal, that seared my tongue, palate, and uvula like a freshly cooked soup. The man dumped out every last clump. My swollen cheeks ached, threatening to tear apart. I coughed up a cloud of lumps. While standing behind me and pinching my nose, Father clamped my mouth shut, and—pulling on my chin while pressing my nape against his stomach—forced my teeth to grind together.

Tears streamed from my eyes. The hot milk that pooled behind my nose reddened my vision. I thrashed in convulsions, and with every spasm, my throat gulped down lump balls as if I were a snake trying to swallow an ostrich egg. I grabbed the man’s wrists, his spikes biting into my palms, and wriggled to break free.

Once he released my mouth, I coughed a spray of clumps and milk that splattered the table and part of the counter. Father threw me off the chair to the side, and I landed on a shoulder.

I struggled to breathe. Clumps clogged my trachea and stomach, filling my insides as in a stuffed carcass.

The man towered hundreds of meters over me, a dark colossus against a shrouded ceiling. His face was a black blur. He clenched his red-hot fists, as large as mallets. The iron spikes jutting out and bristling along his form vibrated as he expanded and contracted his minotaur chest.

“What do you think I wouldn’t take from you if you keep up this useless rebellion? Do you want to shit in a corner? Roam around the house naked, to be led on a leash? Do you want me to beat you every time you speak? Because that’s what you’ve earned, stupid girl.”

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Wave of Mutilation” by Pixies.

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Mother called me to dinner, but when I entered the kitchen, Father was waiting by my pulled-back chair, and my drawings had been scattered across the table like the disordered panels of a comic. The lamplight waned along the man’s outline, as if he were hiding in the blind spot of an alley.

I would escape. I turned around, but the woman stood in the way. She shoved the door, which slammed shut. Mother’s nose jutted out from her silver, disheveled hair while she rummaged through the cupboard of pots and jugs.

Father pointed to the chair. I advanced as if a rope were tugging at my chest. When I sat down, the chair’s legs groaned. The man leaned in. I shrank back. His breath warmed my hair, and his gaze fixed on me like a gun.

He pressed one of the drawings with his index finger. That sheet showed the house set against a backdrop of hills, where pines jutted out like the bristles of a carpet. The door of the house was guarded by Father—a minotaur that had broken out of his labyrinth. His body, studded with iron spikes, bulged as if several men were merged into one, and in the black smear of his face—a chasm—the fire of his breath lit up his two eyes. The monster would pounce on anyone who dared to look at the drawing.

“Is this supposed to be me?” Father said.

My guts writhed as if tormented by a week of constipation; I hunched and clutched my forearms to my abdomen. My vocal cords refused to cooperate. My heart pumped clotted blood.

Father grabbed some drawings and scrutinized them while murmuring as if damning some world to a curse. When he palm-struck the sheets back onto the table, a whirlwind of air scattered more papers from the epicenter.

“I feed you and give you a bedroom, you exist thanks to me, but you waste your time painting fantasy towns, drawing me as a monster.” He seized a drawing and flipped it toward me. The sheet crumpled under his fingertips. “Tall as a skyscraper and breathing fire. Ungrateful bastard.”

“They’re prettier,” I muttered in a hoarse voice.

My words had taken Father aback as if a dog had suddenly spoken.

“What did you say?”

I tried to swallow through my constricted throat.

“Those towns are prettier. Those people are kind to me.”

“They don’t exist. You have this house. Us. The cows, the sheep. Work that keeps you busy. If you even have time for your imagination to fly, it’s a sign you need a heavier burden.”

My head swayed. I was breathing in hiccups. Hunched over, I clutched my abdomen as my guts creaked like an old house. The lamplight, along with the foul smell of garlic and onions, were scraping on my brain.

Although I imagined myself running to my bedroom and hiding under the blankets, Father seized my head with his thick fingers, as if restraining a nervous sheep for shearing. A shudder shook my spine.

“We appeared on Earth to fulfill our role,” the man said. “For us to survive, all three must carry our share. Your job is to tend to some cows and sheep, serve me, and keep quiet. When you refuse to obey or only half obey, you harm us, your parents. But as long as you obey, you’ll avoid bruises. You’ll have a plate on the table and a bed. That’s enough.”

“It’s not.”

As Father emptied his lungs, his scorching breath singed a patch of my hair. The hand gripping my head prevented me from looking away from the drawings that covered the table. Mother appeared to my right, holding a bowl and a glass bottle filled with milk and smudged with fingerprints. The man cleared a space on the table in front of me, where the woman placed the bowl. She handed the bottle to Father. The arm that had been pinning me to the chair relaxed as the man gulped down the milk with the sound of a shark gobbling down live fish.

When Mother folded one of the drawings and tore it into four pieces, I trembled as if she had slashed me with a razor. She dropped the fragments into the bowl.

My lips quivered. If I blinked, my eyes would water and ruin my last glimpse of the drawing the woman had torn.

Father leaned close to me and spoke an inch from my ear.

“Insulting us will have consequences.”

I tried to turn my head toward the man, but his fingers tightened on my scalp, imprinting the five tips in red.

“Why are you like this, Father?” I said, my voice cracking. “Someone must have cursed you. It should have been different.”

“Curses don’t exist, you moron. Such nonsense occurs to someone who wastes hours drawing, thinking up fantasies. An idle mind eats itself like an empty stomach.”

Mother had crammed the bowl with scraps white on one side and drawn on the other. The meaning of the strokes and colors was lost like in the scattered pieces of a puzzle. The woman folded the last drawing with her bony fingers, and tore it apart.

How long would it take me to glue these fragments back together?

Father’s free hand seized my wrist. He turned my hand over on the table, opened my fingers, and closed them around the warm metal of a lighter.

“Burn them.”

A jolt of ice pierced my heart as my muscles convulsed in cramps. I had to break free, yet his thick fingers squeezed my scalp as if drilling into my skull. Although ever since I’d drawn that first scene I’d known one day I would lose them, I had convinced myself I’d postpone that moment until I died.

“No.”

When Father yanked my hair, my scalp flared with pain, drawing a scream from me. One more tug and my skull would be stripped bare. The man panted against my face. Growled like a dog.

“Burn them.”

Tears welled from the corners of my eyes, painting burning streaks on my cold skin.

“They’re better than this.”

Father slammed my right cheekbone against the table with a bang. The impact reverberated through my skull, rattling my brain. My vision went white. Was I still in the kitchen?

The man shifted his weight onto the hand that was pushing my head, and on my crushed cheekbone, the fibers covering the bone were tearing apart. The right half of my face boiled; the burning spilled over the bridge of my nose, reddening the view of that eye.

“You’ll be useful to me even with broken bones,” Father said.

---

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “A Little God in My Hands” by Swans.

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About six hundred meters from the house, in the opposite direction of the emperor owl’s refuge, I no longer recognized the curves of the road along which I had come years ago. Why had I forgotten them? Had I been sleeping and only awakened as we neared the house? Had the route been erased from my memory because I assumed I’d never leave? What awaited me a kilometer or two away? The neighbors’ lands?

I leaned against the soft moss and ashen lichen crusts that covered the trunk of an oak. I could smell my cold sweat. The muscles in my legs had tensed, poised to sprint at every sound. I was venturing through a jungle teeming with predators. If I let my guard down, a pack would burst from the undergrowth.

I marched on, clutching the swollen portfolio against my side like a shield. Five minutes later I sensed a shadow. As I shifted my gaze toward it, it slipped from trunk to trunk.

I veered off the road and crouched among clusters of prickly bushes adorned with yellow flowers. I drew a deep breath while keeping a fixed, unblinking watch on the road, which, in the distance, twisted through a grove of narrow, charred-looking trunks. They distorted the distances and masked the gaps with their mint-green foliage, which draped stripes of shadow over the path.

The ground trembled. A gaze fixed on the back of my neck. I turned. A thick shadow spread over the pebbles and earth of the road, cloaking them like a funeral veil.

I sprang from my hiding place among the bushes. I imagined sprinting, but my body froze. I wanted to scream, to call for help. The fading twilight exposed me like a mouse to a bird of prey.

At the edge of my vision, two columns of shadow emerged from mud-splattered boots. Father approached until a pair of denim trousers appeared in my sight. His breath heated my face like a bonfire.

“Are you lost?”

His voice barely contained a roar.

“I was watching the landscape, sir.”

“What are you looking for? What is it you need to see?”

When Father encircled me to block the path, I raised my eyes by a span. The man’s right hand—his arm bristling with hundreds of iron spikes—clutched the long handle of a headless tool.

I counted from one to ten to distract my heart as I fought against my muscles betraying me. My mind was growing hazy.

“You heard me,” Father said.

“I was watching the landscape.”

The man inhaled, drawing the air from my lungs. He straightened the tool’s handle and pressed its headless end against my sternum.

“You have too much free time. Have you finished your duties?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Surely you can help your mother.”

He shoved me with the handle, forcing me to step back. I turned and walked upright, but within seconds, I lowered my head. My lost gaze swept over a doubled path as Father’s bulk followed me and, with every stomp, the earth quaked.

Five minutes later I was clutching the portfolio and hobbling. The emperor owl refused to let me accompany him, and I would never leave this place. How could I have managed it? I only knew how to shear, to milk, to draw. Gifts and miracles were reserved for those who deserved them.

The twilight faded. Colors hung from the treetops, the branches, and the grass lining the road like a dress several sizes too large.

Father led me to the barn, where Mother, seated on a stool, was sharpening the axe with a pumice stone. From beneath her hair, a gray, angular face peeked out. Father jabbed the tool’s handle against one of my shoulder blades and pushed me to the back of the barn. He pointed to a stool beside the flank of a cow, whose swollen udders bore veins bulging like branches swathed in skin.

“It’s her turn tomorrow, but surely you can do it ahead of schedule.”

While clutching the portfolio, I sat like an abandoned puppet. The stone of my thoughts sank deeper and deeper into a black ocean.

With a snap, a pressure clamped around my ankle. A shackle. It was connected by chains as thick as a finger, bolted to the rock.

Father straightened. In one swift motion, he snatched the portfolio from me and held it under his armpit.

“Remember your duty.”

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “I Put a Spell on You” by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

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I descended the slope toward my refuge among the beech trees. A meter and a half above the circle of blackened grass levitated the emperor owl. Sunlight blazed on his conical crown. His folded wings peeked from the open sleeves of his purple dalmatic, and the drapery of his coiled sash hung beneath his talons.

Hobbling on trembling legs, I halted about five meters from the circle, and a gasp of surprise slipped out. I paced side to side, testing if a mirage deceived me, yet the emperor owl’s amber eyes tracked my every shift. I tilted my head, jaw slack.

The emperor owl raised a brow and parted his beak.

“Hello.”

When his cavernous voice swept through me, my face and hands prickled. My throat clenched. I fought the urge to leap for joy. Instead, I clenched my fists and pressed my knees together, tense like a spring.

“It’s you. Of course.”

I stepped closer. The emperor owl ruffled the black-and-olive striped feathers of his throat, eyes widening.

“You see me.”

I nodded frantically. A mouse-like squeak escaped me. I inched forward, but he unfurled one wing and stretched his neck.

“Remember. Keep your distance.”

I swayed, then crumpled to the grass, dropping my portfolio. Joy flooded me, stifling my speech—if I opened my mouth, laughter would stream out.

“You see me and do not fear me,” said the emperor owl, his tone like a man reassessing his world’s foundations.

“Why would I? You’re magnificent.”

The emperor owl flared his neck feathers, and a grin split his face.

I stood even though my legs threatened to buckle. My congestion made me dizzy; I shook my head to clear it.

“So, now I know. No more secrets. You’ve wandered from your land, lost, because we must have met by chance. But I think I’ll remember the path, or at least the direction.”

“What path?”

“I’ve seen the fleet waiting for you.”

The emperor owl gaped open his beak, his gaze wandering as a lemonade-pink tongue emerged, flickering faintly in the dark hollow of his mouth.

“Please,” I pressed. “How many kilometers separate you from your home? No one should have to live here.”

“Countless.”

“You can go back accompanied.”

“Girl, I don’t know what kind of world you’re imagining.”

“I’ve seen it, and miss it. You could have moved away from my refuge—you said so—but you had decided to stay for a while.”

“My world can’t be reached the way your kind travels.”

“I know. I’d follow you from land, and on the coast, I’d rent a boat—or steal one. Even if rowing wore me down, I’d know what lay ahead. And if I needed to sleep in the boat, you could alight and keep me company.”

The emperor owl narrowed his eyes. He snapped his wings open, shook them with a rustling whoosh, and folded them.

I rubbed my sweaty palms. My stomach tightened. Why was it so hard for him to accept that I recognized him? Did he distrust the person who would become his right hand? He must have met some of the inhabitants of this land and learned to avoid them. How could I convince him that I was worth the risk?

A meter and a half from the circle, near yesterday’s vomit—now a metallic crust—I swept aside rotten leaves and knelt on the grass.

“I swear allegiance to the emperor owl. I renounce all ties to this dark land into which I have unfortunately been born, and I vow that for the rest of my days, I will turn my back on it. I will obey the laws of the domains you rule and serve you in whatever manner you see fit.”

I furrowed my eyelids as I held my breath. The emperor owl would descend from his invisible pedestal and rest a wing on my shoulder.

A couple of fruits thudded into leaf litter; the narrow stream of the nearby creek hissed.

I stood. The emperor owl’s pupils quivered behind half-closed lids. I shook fragments of leaves and twigs from my palms. When I spoke, my voice faltered.

“Do you reject my oath?”

“What has happened to you?” asked the emperor owl, and though he had softened his tone, it reverberated like a cavernous echo.

“Too much. I must seem nervous, impulsive. Things are going badly for me. But test my loyalty however you wish. I swear I would leave today.”

The owl shrank and lowered his head.

“For now, I will stay.”

My muscles strained to keep me upright. I swallowed a lump of phlegm. How could I convince him beyond swearing my loyalty? Or was I striving in vain, because I could never deserve for the emperor owl to take me with him? But how could I ever deserve it, having been born here, among these people, tainted? What place could I belong to other than this darkness?

“Soon, right?” I whispered. “We’ll leave before long.”

The emperor owl inflated and deflated his chest beneath the dalmatic as he held my gaze with his amber eyes.

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Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.