Tag: creative writing

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 5 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Bleats wafted through the fog. On the facade of the house at the meadow’s edge, the white paint had peeled like rotten skin on a corpse’s forehead, exposing walls built of mismatched rocks in precarious balance. Above six crooked windows, walnut-brown tiles crowned the structure like a sun-scorched straw hat.

I hastened through the overgrown grass, searching for a sheep’s four-legged silhouette. Beside me, a garment snapped in the wind with a crack of cloth. I kept moving until Mother clicked her tongue at me.

“Follow me.”

In her mane, ash-gray strands twisted like storm warnings. I trailed her, arms crossed over the portfolio I clung to. Shivers ran through me. I should’ve brought a scarf.

From the shed at the meadow’s corner came bleats like a tortured soul’s wails. Mother stopped by a fence where a lamb hung skewered by barbed wire, its neck and chest hooked. From its gaping mouth dangled threads of saliva. Eyes bulged grotesquely. With each twitch, its wounds spilled tongues of brass-scented blood that stained the wire and steamed. A dark pool grew at its hooves.

“Don’t bother claiming you’d penned all the sheep and this lamb slipped out,” Mother said. “You rushed your chores to vanish into whatever hole you like to hide in.”

She spoke as if forcing air through her larynx exhausted her energy, and at each word she questioned if the effort was worth it.

I uncovered my mouth and crouched near the lamb. Stroked the coarse fur along its back while its warm body shuddered under my palm.

As if the sun had eclipsed, darkening the world, I envisioned Father surging from the horizon and rushing across the meadow toward me, footsteps quaking the earth.

When I stood, a dizzy spell blurred my sight. I scanned the meadow, skin prickling. Mother’s bony fingers grazed the portfolio’s edge I clutched. I braced for her to snatch it, but she bent instead to grab a handle hidden in the grass.

“I’ll keep to myself what you’ve done.”

She pried open my right hand and placed an axe’s smooth wooden grip into my palm. The heavy metal head dragged my arm down.

“For what?”

“Kill it.”

Fire seared my gut. I gulped.

The lamb probed the air with its crimson, glistening tongue as if parched. Each spasm rattled the wire in metallic shrieks while blood oozed from the beast’s wounds thick as honey; surely its body held less than it had spilled. A bleat rippled from the shed in a cold current as if a ghost were weeping.

“I can’t.”

“You prolong its agony. And it’s suffering because of you. Do your duty.”

I knelt, pressing my brow to the lamb’s feverish chest, inches from wire barbs gouging flesh. My fingers tangled in its matted fur. Underneath, muscle fibers quivered.

I swallowed to steady my voice.

“Maybe it’ll heal. Give it time.”

Studying its neck wounds, I wondered how I could lift the lamb without slicing deeper, but Mother yanked my sweater’s collar, making me stumble back. As she snatched the axe, the momentum flung me onto slick grass, sprawling sideways. She glanced away through her ashen hair, as if seeing me pained her.

“You learn nothing. Your head always in the clouds. Nothing good’s going to happen to you.”

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.

This may be the worst conceived scene of all I’ve translated so far from my work ten years ago. I had trouble even envisioning what I meant in some of the original text.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I detailed the face of the man standing upright over the circle of withered grass, flanked by twin beech trees guarding him like sentinels. With a gray crayon, I shaded the segmented plates of his armor. I perfected the goose-feather quill jutting from his silver helmet. I erased the outline of his jaw and redrew it square, rock-hewn, to match that cavernous voice.

I stretched, then reviewed the drawing. Perfect. No detail to add, no stroke to erase.

I smiled, stifling a chain of laughter. I set the drawing atop my portfolio. When I uncrossed my numb legs, blood surged back in a torrent of prickling needles. I snatched the sketch, turned it toward the ring of blackened grass, and held it aloft.

“Do you like it?”

The man coughed. The circle and the beeches rippled as though I were peering at a painting submerged in churning water. My face and hands burned, but the sting would fade before blooming into rashes.

“You wear armor granted to honorable warriors,” I said, “those who’ve proven their valor defending the king and slaying scores of monsters. You’ve come on a secret quest to purge this land of darkness.”

“Did the helmet need a feather?”

Leaning over the page, I stole a glance at my drawing, hunting for errors I might’ve missed.

“I could erase the feather, but I’d have to redraw the helmet and part of that beech.”

“It’s a fine portrait of someone else.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“It isn’t me.”

I studied the scene. What other details could offend him? The man in the drawing would helm adventures where he’d always prevail, though bloodied and scarred. He’d slaughter beasts threatening those he loved.

“Maybe I’ve imagined it better than reality, but isn’t it lovelier this way?”

I slid the drawing between the portfolio’s pages, careful not to crease the edges. I lay on my side in the grass, dewdrops glittering like scattered glass.

“But it isn’t real,” said the man, as if he’d weighed the words for fifteen seconds.

“You can tell me. Truly.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why you’re here. What you seek. Do you think I’d hinder you? I want to help.”

He snorted, air whistling through a rusted pipe.

“You’re imagining that your knight has galloped here from distant lands, plunged into this forest, and awaits the stars’ alignment to fulfill his mission. Yet I appeared among these trees—this arbitrary speck in the cosmos—as I could have materialized on another planet, in the depths of a hydrocarbon sea. I linger because no corners remain worth moving out to.”

“Hydrocarbon?”

“Why are you here?”

“When I met you? To sketch this landscape. Today? Because I’ve met you.”

“On this planet, I mean.”

“I didn’t choose that.”

“Nor did I.”

I knelt. A beetle trudged past, legs ticking like a cuckoo-clock figurine. It wove through twigs and scaled dry leaves toward the border of blackened grass, but a meter away, its antennae groped the air like a blind man tracing a wall. The beetle pivoted and marched in perpendicular, bulldozing debris with its shell.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Do what?”

I hunched, palms sinking into the underbrush—crunching leaves, flattening grass. I stretched an arm toward the circle and crawled. A meter from the blackened grass, needles stabbed my fingertips. I jerked back. Though my fingertips tingled, no blood welled, and the pain ebbed.

“That.”

“Girl, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. Curious, though. Other creatures flee. Had another stumbled upon me—a disembodied voice in these woods—and heard me command for them to leave, they’d have bolted. Yet you persist. You lack instinct.”

“I’ve won.”

“Were we competing?”

“We’re talking. You’ve stopped ordering me away.”

The man sighed, his breath a stale gust.

“What I touch withers. All I near rots. What do you suppose that means for you?”

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 “Sawdust & Diamonds” by God herself.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

When I went down for breakfast, I sat in the chair opposite my usual spot. Father barged into the kitchen. A scent of wet grass and manure, like a beast sprawled in the mist, flooded my nostrils, trampling the stench of the garlic and onion braids hanging from the ceiling. Father’s fiery snorts heated the air.

My ears had stiffened. I ducked my head over the bowl of milk, baring my nape.

Father’s hulk prowled behind me while hissing through his teeth. He yanked the chair next to mine and dropped onto it as if to splinter the wood, which creaked. He planted a fist beside my bowl.

I gulped the milk as my throat clenched, risking a choke.

His fist bulged like a club, his fingers like swollen sacks of soil. Hundreds of iron spikes bristled across its back, climbing up a forearm thick as an oak branch. As Father breathed, the spikes converged and parted.

“Today, you’ll milk the cows and shear the sheep that were your mother’s duty. Understood?”

I nodded. Crossed my ankles under the table.

Father thrust his face toward me; it felt like a cannonball sinking into the opposite end of a mattress, causing my side to cave in. His breath grazed my skin like a flame.

“Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you bolt your door again tonight, tomorrow you’ll work double.”

My muscles tensed, steely. The milk bowl doubled and quivered. I would vomit.

By the counter, Mother faced away from me—a mannequin rigged from wooden slats, draped in a sweater and an ankle-length skirt. A thin, ash-gray mane covered her head. The mannequin, hunched over the sink, trembled as she scrubbed a glass with a scouring pad. If I glimpsed her gaunt silhouette from certain angles, Mother would vanish.

“Don’t bother her,” Father said. “She agrees.”

Mother spoke in a brittle whisper.

“Obey your father.”

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.

On Writing: Plot point generation #5

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, Arte, Escritura1 Comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

A story is made out of meaningful stuff that happens. Each unit of meaningful stuff that happens is often referred to as a plot point. Here’s how to come up with them, before you consider fitting them into a structure.

  • Brainstorm how you could put any of your characters in ironic situations. What would be ironic for any of your characters to face? For example: a suicidal protagonist needs to talk off a ledge a guy who wants to commit suicide.
  • Think of the major plot points you know about your story, and brainstorm what events could produce them.
  • Think of the escalation of conflict in terms of two oppositions skirmishing before the decisive battle.
  • Brainstorm a “lights out” moment, where the protagonist can’t possibly win in his struggle with death.
  • Brainstorm a list of several possible endings for your story. Even if you don’t actually use any of those plot points as your actual ending, one of them could be your protagonist’s “lights out” beat.
  • Think of the expectations your story and your characters have set up, then brainstorm plot points that would twist those expectations.
  • What are the stereotypical story tropes that spring to mind given your chosen story elements and characters? Can you come up with something different, something opposite?
  • Brainstorm plot points that could only happen given your unique combination of story elements and characters.
  • Brainstorm plot ploints that would act as a bait-and-switch. What plot points would convince the audience they know where the story is going, only for you to pull the rug out from under them?
  • What is the last thing the reader will suspect given your combination of story elements and characters?
  • Brainstorm plot points that turn on its head the audience’s understanding of everything in your story, throwing them out of their comfort zone.
  • Can you come up with a plot point or more in which an important character is being chased? Having your characters on the move with someone constantly on their tail is an exciting situation.
  • Every dramatic scene will likely pose your character the dramatic question: who am I going to be? The drama is a continual test for the protagonist. Are they going to be the old, flawed version of themselves? Or are they going to be someone new?

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

My bedroom window framed the cork oak, beyond whose cracked stone bark, the color of capers, stretched the broad sash of the Milky Way. Its clusters of azure light, its masses of rosy nebulae. Through the bare branches slid the glimmering of hundreds of thick luminous orbs and flickering points—blue, white, and red—studding the night. Millions of glowing spiders dangling from the ceiling of a cavern.

I shrank beneath the blankets, clutching the coverlet as though I were sliding into an abyss. I’d woken in the dead of night. Why?

Everything that had inflamed my brain now hung like paintings: the two beech trees flanking the circle of blackish grass, the reverberating voice of the invisible stranger. I pressed my eyelids shut. I gasped into the pillow, dizzy. I counted from one to four, inhaling deeply with each number, but my heart raced, pounding against my left lung. How would I fall asleep again?

I curled into a ball and poked my head from the blankets into the cool air. The wind whistled. A cow’s chain jingled as the beast grazed.

When Father arrived, he’d find me awake.

I whimpered. Hugging myself, I wished to vanish. How could I let Father enter if I remained awake?

I sat on the bed’s edge, springs squeaking. My vision wavered. Standing might make me vomit. I pressed the soles of my feet to the cold floorboards and hunched toward the door.

Footsteps prowled the house—an earthquake whose tremors would reach me. They’d crescendo like palms slapping wood, then the door would creak open. He’d find me standing on the opposite side of the threshold.

I knelt. Clamped my palms over my ears, squeezed my eyes shut. My breath thickened. Maybe hyperventilating would make me faint, but it’d take minutes. The dresser, the wardrobe, the desk. Would they suffice? Could I shove them?

My forehead and neck dripped with cold sweat. I crouched beside the dresser flanking the door. Shuddering, I inched it forward, legs trembling as its feet screeched like chalk on slate. I barricaded the door. Circled the dresser, then shoved it from the side of the drawers toward the door until wood jammed against wood.

Footsteps merged with the drumroll of my heart.

My legs quaked. I gripped the desk’s edge and jerked it toward the dresser. A stubborn pain clawed my throat, as if I’d swallowed a nail.

The footsteps advanced along the hallway toward my bedroom. Drumbeats.

I crouched behind the desk, bracing it firmly against the dresser as the wood groaned.

In the gloom, the doorknob turned. The door nudged inward a few millimeters and struck the dresser.

I slumped at the foot of the desk and leaned back against its drawers, their handles stabbing my spine. I’d fallen into a pit I’d never climb out of.

The door thrust against the dresser, crushing it into the desk, the desk into my back.

A shudder coursed through me refusing to break. The sight of my bed and the still-life paintings blurred with black spots. My heart would burst like a peach hurled at a wall.

In the hallway, a voice like a flaming furnace snarled and cursed as its owner stomped back and forth.

Had I heard him leave? I inhaled sharply.

The door slammed into the dresser with a crack of wood that jolted my spine, embedding drawer handles beside my vertebrae. The knob squealed as it twisted. The door shoved the furniture as though the next thrust would hurl the dresser, the desk, and me onto the bed, burying me beneath a blast of splinters.

Cobwebs swayed on the blackened ceiling beams. Books trembled on the shelf, and crashed down. Damp stains on the walls shed flakes of paint. The bedroom had grown hot while in the hallway flames from a stove roared.

I clenched my thighs to hold my bladder, tears spattering my cheeks like scalding drops.

Growls reverberated, curses in extinct languages. Footsteps retreated down the hallway, vibrating the floorboards and rattling my bones.

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 “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen.

I’m fully aware that you can only see the center of the Milky Way from the southern hemisphere except in some conditions near the equator. This story is set somewhere in the Basque Country, but it felt like that bit of irreality was fitting.

On Writing: General structure – Characters

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

The following questions should allow you to develop your characters.

  • See which are the major flaws of each major character. How do they explore the unifying theme? If any of them don’t, either change it or try to delete that character.
  • How is the antagonist the person who is most heavily invested in achieving the same external goal?
  • How is something a character believes challenged, so he might change his views, opinions, attitudes, behavior, or core beliefs? Particularly figure out a way for this to happen to the protagonist.
  • Is there an “arc” to each primary character’s story? In other words, do your antagonist, sidekick, and love interest all possess clear goals, and are those desires built up and resolved by the end?
  • Who is on your protagonist’s side? Create a moment in which that care, understanding and support are shown. How close to the opening of your novel can you place this moment?
  • Do any of your characters “peter out” or fade away, never to be heard from again? This is a critical error to flag and fix.
  • How are your protagonist’s flaws a barrier to them achieving their goals? Conversely, make them have to overcome their flaws to achieve certain things.
  • Brainstorm how your characters could surprise you, and therefore surprise the audience too.
  • How does your protagonist summon his inner hero to achieve the goal?
  • How do the events in the plot force the protagonist to make a specific really hard internal change?
  • How does the story’s structure shove the protagonist as far out of his comfort zone as possible, the better for him to ultimately realize that it wasn’t nearly as comfortable, or as safe, as he’d thought?
  • Does your protagonist have a moment of humanity early on?
  • How is your protagonist defined by ongoing actions and attitudes, not by backstory?
  • Is the hero’s primary motivation for tackling this challenge strong, simple, and revealed early on?
  • Detail the ways the opponent attacks the hero. Try to devise a detailed plan for the opponent with as many hidden attacks as possible.
  • How could the antagonist’s flaw contribute to his defeat?
  • How have you made the reader truly believe and feel that your antagonist is a nasty force to be reckoned with?
  • For each interpersonal encounter in the story, how is each major character altered somehow?
  • Have a real feeling for their theory of control. This is their brain’s overarching strategy for getting what they want out of the human world.
  • What do they want most of all in the world? What do they imagine will make them happy forever?

On Writing: General structure – Symbol web

On By Jon UreñaIn advice, Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

You can check out all my posts on writing through this link.

Once you’ve come up with a list of meaningful plot points that should happen in your story, the Acts structure (generally three, but could be strengthened by turning it into five) is a proven method to organize those plot points in a way that makes the story more cohesive, and usually building up in tension.

The following questions are all about consciously incorporating symbols into your story.

  • Is there a single symbol that expresses the premise, key story twists, central theme, or overall structure of your story?
  • When connecting a symbol to a character, choose a symbol that represents a defining principle of that character or its reverse. By connecting a specific, discrete symbol with an essential quality of the character, the audience gets an immediate understanding of one aspect of the character in a single blow.
  • How do I choose the right symbol to apply to a character? He is defined in relation to other characters. In considering a symbol for one character, consider symbols for many, beginning with the hero and the main opponent. How would they stand in opposition of each other?
  • Can you create a symbol opposition within the character?
  • Come up with a single aspect of the character or a single emotion you want the character to evoke in the audience.
  • Could use a shorthand technique for connecting symbol to character: use certain categories of character, especially gods, animals and machines. Think about how that would give that character a basic trait and level that the audience immediately recognizes.
  • Can you choose a symbol you want the character to become when he undergoes his change? Attach the symbol to the character when you are creating the character’s weaknesses or need. Bring the symbol back at the moment of character change, but with some variation from when you introduce it.
  • How could you encapsulate entire moral arguments in symbol? Come up with an image or object that expresses a series of actions that hurt others in some way. Even more powerful is an image or object that expresses two series of actions (two moral sequences) that are in conflict with each other.
  • Look for a symbol that can encapsulate the main theme of your story. For a symbol to express the theme, it must stand for a series of actions with moral effects. A more advanced thematic symbol is one that stands for two series of moral actions that are in conflict.
  • How could a symbol encapsulate the entire world of the story, or set of forces, in a single, understandable image?
  • Determine what symbols you wish to attach to the various elements of the story world, including the natural settings, man-made spaces, technology and time.
  • See if you could make an action symbolic, making it especially important, and it expresses the theme or character of the story in miniature.
  • When creating a web of symbolic objects, begin by going back to the designing principle of the story, and see how it turns the collection of individual objects into a cluster. See how each object not only refers to another object but also refers to and connects with the other symbolic objects in the story.
  • Think for a moment about your theme, what your story is really about. What images come to mind that might represent your story?
  • When creating an image system, one thing that might help is to envision a movie poster for your story. What key moment in your entire story would be best be shown on your poster? What colors and objects would be shown? What would the characters be wearing, holding, doing? By imagining this movie poster, you might get some ideas for strong symbols.
  • Think about your protagonist. Image one object she owns that is special to her. Maybe it’s a gift someone gave her that has great significance. Maybe it’s a shell she found on the beach on an important day in her life. You can find a place to introduce this motif-object early on in the book, then show it again a few times at important moments in your story, and then bring it into the final scene in some symbolic way.
  • If you can have an object connected to a very important moment in a character’s past (whether something painful or joyful), you can then springboard from there to infuse this object with deep meaning.
  • Write down an emotion or thematic component from your novel, such as grief or forgiveness. Freewrite all the worst images that come to your mind without censoring what you write. Picture in your head your character grieving. Where is she? What does she see? What does she touch or hold? What comforts her–a song, a picture, a place?
  • Think of the main emotion or trait your protagonist experiences (grief, forgiveness, etc.) Can you find a symbol/object for this to use in your novel?
  • Consider the title of your novel. Can you find a way to bring a motif into the title? Tie in with your themes?
  • What objects or images are central and organic to this story?
  • Pick the three most important scenes in your story for your protagonist. Can you insert the same motif into those three scenes somehow?
  • Often a secondary character who serves as an ally to the protagonist will be the one to impart words of wisdom and advice, and this is a good opportunity to come up with a special phrase (and if possible, one associated with some object) that can then be an important motivator for the protagonist.
  • Think about a secondary ally character that can give advice or insight in a way that will introduce or reinforce a motif in your story. Maybe even come up with a clever phrase for that character to use as a word whisker that serves as a motif.
  • How would you refer to and repeat each symbol throughout the story? Start with a feeling and create a symbol that will cause that feeling in the audience. How does that symbol change slightly during repetitions?
  • Describe for each symbol how it helps define the others.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Where the grass and ferns grow, twenty-one years ago I stumbled upon a circle of broken branches and blackened grass, as though a boulder had crushed them, sealing them from the sun until they rotted. Two beech trees guarded the circle. Their branches sprouted at ground level, as if they had grown several meters underground before rupturing into the air. Along their trunks swelled knotted protrusions—wooden shoulders—stretching horizontal, splintered limbs. A pelt of damp moss cloaked the bark, and between those green tufts peeked fungal scabs and the leaves of creeping vines.

In the forest’s stillness, someone watched.

I halted and held my breath. Crossing my arms, I clutched the portfolio to my chest like a shield.

An owl hooted. A squirrel scampered through dry leaves. The undergrowth crackled from some collision. A man’s lament seeped through the air echolike, as if rising from a cavern.

In every knot of the trees, faces etched themselves into the wood, but when I focused, they vanished. Through the foliage stirred by the breeze drifted a procession of shadows, encircling me.

I stepped closer to the ring of ashen grass, but an impulse repelled me—a silent thunder’s thrum, a force that might sweep me away. The man had fallen silent. I rose onto my toes, straining to glimpse who watched me, who had hidden when my sneakers crunched the underbrush. Behind the beeches, blurring the forest, the branches of their kin intertwined and overlapped above the green of leaves and moss, forming a bone-white latticework.

“Come out. It’s alright.”

A beetle scuttled through the leaf litter. The gaze of two invisible eyes lanced into me.

I raised my voice.

“I know you’re here.”

“Leave.”

It reverberated like an echo ricocheting through corridors before striking me. A voice unlike mine—clear and brittle—or my Father’s and Mother’s. I’d assumed I’d never hear another. But I straightened up. The man had ordered me gone.

“You’ve found my refuge. One of them.”

“Yours? Did you build it? Buy it?”

The voice seeped from the air two meters above the circle of withered grass, sheltered by the beeches. I sidestepped, hoping a new angle might reveal the speaker.

“I’ve come dozens of times. No one else ever occupied it.”

“And that makes it yours? As I said, leave, girl.”

“I meant to spend time here. My presence doesn’t mean you must go. Or hide. I won’t harm you.”

When the man snorted, an invisible bubble swelled from the dead grass, warping the sight of the beeches before sweeping through me. It stung my face and hands like lying in nettles. The distorted haze settled, but my skin prickled. I scrubbed my face with a sleeve.

“You won’t harm me,” the voice said. “How reassuring.”

I gnawed my cheek. When I opened my mouth, my lips smacked.

“What do you want?”

“Why would I want anything?”

“No one comes here. Three days ago, that black circle didn’t exist. You’re here for a reason.”

“I want you gone. To leave me in peace.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you here.”

“Tough luck. I came to draw. I’ll use the time I have left, even if you’ve decided to steal my spot.”

“Draw? What is there to draw?”

Scrambling to justify my sketches, I flipped open the portfolio and shuffled papers. What scenes might appease this stranger? Which would shame me?

The portfolio slid from my grip onto the grass, papers fanning out. I crouched, then brushed twigs and bark from the drawings. As I restacked them, I chose a scene I’d sketched here: the stream behind the beeches, no wider than a forearm, transformed into a river fit for ships. Along its banks gushed millwheels. A village crowded both shores. Spiral staircases scaled the beech trunks, now kilometers tall. Walkways and lookout posts sprouted from every branch, watchtowers mounted on their elbows. Silhouettes in armor scanned the horizon from their security posts.

In the foggy distance smudged in pencil loomed a creature spanning hundreds of meters, its face black, limbs thick as cannons. Iron spikes bristled like fur. Fire snorted from its nostrils. The composition hinted that even if the sentries sounded alarms, the monster would trample roofs and wooden walls.

I lifted the sketch and turned it toward the dead grass.

“I like how this one turned out.”

I held the page for seconds. Shifting my weight, I felt awkward, as if coerced to hold a heavy bag until its owner returned, and I’d waited half an hour. Though the man’s gaze probed my face, the angle likely hid the drawing’s details. I waved the sheet in an arc.

When the man murmured, his voice rumbled like a landslide.

I bowed my head, then slipped the drawing back into the portfolio. Why had I bothered showing it?

“You’d see it better if you showed yourself.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You call this not hiding? Speaking from cover while you watch me?”

“I’m facing you.”

“I don’t see you.”

“Then look.”

Pressure swelled in my chest, the same warning that tightened each afternoon. I’d strayed too far from home for the minutes left before dusk. Even if I conjured another scene, I’d barely start sketching. If I lingered, Father would rage. Yet this floating voice had invaded my territory. Had he hidden inside a hollow trunk? Was the intruder peering from behind a beech?

When I stepped forward, a voice’s rumble halted me like a wall, scraping my skin with nettles.

“Keep your distance.”

I retreated.

“Why?”

“I’ll harm you.”

“What kind of person shows up in someone else’s forest and threatens whoever finds them?”

“This forest isn’t yours. But I’m not threatening you, girl. I’m stating a fact: come closer, and you’ll suffer. Whether I will it or not.”

The thicket had darkened, leaching greens to gray. I squeezed the portfolio to my side. I needed to sprint back as if I’d left a pan on the fire.

“Listen, I want to speak again. Will you be here tomorrow?”

“One place is as good as another.”

“But you insisted on staying here.”

“You claimed it was yours. Gave me reason to claim it too.”

I opened and shut my mouth. What could I reply to that?

Behind me, the path wound through undulating slopes dense with beeches. Their branches, draped in climbing vines like garlands, would arch overhead as I retreated.

The circle of parched grass blurred into gloom.

“Will I find you when I return?”

“You can count on it.”

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 “Seven Devils” by Florence + The Machine.

Honestly, I didn’t want to revisit this story, but I’m translating all of them, mainly for Elena’s sake.

Unless I hallucinated the whole thing, this tale allegedly caused the stroke of an elderly writing instructor that a year or so later died due to his health complications. That has to be an endorsement of some kind.

The Drowned City, Pt. 10 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

A barrage of light assaulted my eyes. I blinked like a newborn. The center of my vision filled with humming fluorescent lamps. I tilted my head. Behind a desk sat a man in his fifties, mustached and jowled, clad in a police uniform.

I lay sprawled on a metal bench, the armrest bruising into my cheekbone as a makeshift pillow. A scratchy blanket covered my nakedness.

The policeman stood, circled the desk, and bent over me. His lips carved syllables, words shattering against my face. He waited for speech, but my brain had severed its wires to my vocal cords. I clawed back the names of objects and sounds, slow as a toddler fitting blocks into holes.

The officer arched his brows, then teetered on his tiptoes.

“Were you born half-brained?” He cocked his head right. “Sure no one cracked his skull?”

“No visible injury,” said another voice. “Maybe an old trauma.”

“Or he’s a psych ward runner.”

I pushed aside the hair veiling one eye. My hand trembled. A young cop, chin wounded by two razor nicks, materialized at my left and offered a T-shirt and trousers—faded donations moth-rotted in storage. I clutched them like alien artifacts.

The young cop snapped his fingers before my glazed eyes.

“Know where you are?”

I unfolded the shirt. Its chest logo had frayed into orange shreds.

“Motomiyacho Police Station,” the junior said.

The mustached cop rolled his eyes. “He read the badges.”

“Hitachi. Ibaraki Prefecture. Understand?”

I studied his pupils, hairline, nose, uniform collar, the metallic badge. My eye muscles buckled and dropped my gaze.

They led me to a bathroom. Locked inside, I dressed at the pace my stiffened joints allowed. My ligaments ached as if stretched gumlike on a rack. I avoided the gaunt stranger in the mirror.

Five minutes later, the police officers marched me to the station doors. Midmorning light slanted through dust-streaked windows.

“Got somewhere to go?” said the mustached cop.

“I’ll figure it out.”

He shook his head, and snorted.

“So you can talk.”

As he walked off, the junior cop appraised me with resignation. From his wallet, he slipped a 5000-yen note into my shirt pocket.

“Take care.”

* * *

For months, I swallowed hypnotics to smother the reasoning part of my brain. Sounds and voices slowed down, and the links between events frayed. On nights when the pill case emptied, I writhed in sweat-soaked sheets for hours. Chiseled memories—the forest clearing, the lagoon, the illuminated ocean, the woman—besieged me. Her sentences swarmed around my ears like gnats. The ghost of her mottled pink-and-white skin grazed mine, and those parts of my body stung like a rash. I choked.

After hours of rolling on the mattress, in the tar-pit of my mind floated—like the afterimage of the sun—the woman’s face, frozen in the expression I had provoked by betraying her. Even as I stretched out my arms, she floated far away.

She was talking to me.

Why didn’t you follow me to the city?

I had wanted to.

Then why am I alone down here?

Because I am weak. I am nobody. I was born to endure the decades of my life as the hollow shell of what a person ought to be, and those I encounter, I infect with gray. You chose the wrong man. I never found the strength to obtain what I needed.

I sat up in bed and panted as if I’d fallen from a rooftop.

In the mornings, the echo lingered. That flute-like voice, the intermittent current of a brook, sounded in the distance. The flow carried words I had to fish out, and I longed to roam the streets until I recognized each syllable. In my apartment, on the street, in the workshop, the moment when I would hear the woman speaking from afar hovered on the verge of arrival. Whenever I strained my ears and scanned the surroundings for the crevice through which the voice poured, the current would cease, though in my mind the fading echo reverberated.

On the morning of the first anniversary of the day I met the woman, feverish surges overwhelmed me. My body screamed that a cancer was multiplying inside. Dizzy to the point of nausea, I knelt over the toilet bowl.

On the second anniversary, I anticipated the surges and stuffed myself with anxiolytics. They blocked my capacity to care about anything. I drifted in a void.

At the dawn of the third anniversary, clinging to the edge of my bed, I sensed the woman’s presence like a silhouette on the horizon. She called to me. While I dressed for work, chills raced down my spine. I planned to ignore them until they subsided, so I could plunge into the tar sea in which I dove every day. But I called the workshop and reported that I had awoken with a fever—something I had eaten.

Sitting in a train seat, I stared at my trembling knees. Every glance at the landscape sliding past the window tempted one of the plates of my mind to slip over another, and from the ensuing crack burst forth creatures belonging to savannas—creatures that would race through tall grass and scramble up trees. That forced to live in the world allotted to me, would perish. Yet I looked on.

The landscape evoked an absence. Some symphony that had once played without pause was now missing. Reality had lost its fundamental piece, and trembled like pillars on the verge of cracking and collapsing. The world—the obese beast that they upheld—gobbled and gobbled.

The image of toads perched atop the pillars at the entrance of a villa flickered. In the folds of the statues, grime had accumulated, and the paint had begun to flake off. Was I merely imagining those imperfections, or would I have discerned them years ago had I known how to truly look?

When I stepped off at Hitachi station, I followed the path while battling chills and dizziness. Dust-stained buildings unfolded before me, where decades of rain had darkened cascading streaks. Everywhere I looked, the colors had lost their vibrancy, merging into shades of gray. A man in his sixties, standing at the corner of a dwelling, surveyed the landscape as if he had lost his bearings. Passersby drifted like puppets and spoke as if following a script. Their organic masks confronted the vistas while in their minds they navigated through a gleaming technicolor scenery.

I arrived at the street where, on the opposite sidewalk, the passage to the woods would open. I straightened up on the familiar patch of pavement. To my right, three red-and-white vending machines were embedded in a concrete recess.

I lifted my head toward the opposite sidewalk and blinked until my vision cleared. Both buildings that had guarded the passage now appeared conjoined—the electronics store, with its facade of wooden planks, nestled against the rusted shed of the beige house. Not a single fissure betrayed that they had been built separately.

Three warehouse boys surged past me from both front and rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one casting a look of bewilderment my way, then extending his gaze toward the wooden plank on which I was fixed, unblinking.

I inched up to the facade until the tips of my sneakers brushed against the walnut-hued wood, which reeked of mold, and I could discern its grain and cracks. I closed my eyes. In the dim half-light of my mind, the passageway unfurled into a grassy path winding its way among the pines, flanked by ferns and a sea of clovers. I held my breath. I listened to the chirping of birds, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the fruits crashing against the leaf litter. In the background, in the chasm between sound and silence, her voice emerged.

I shuddered and my vision blurred. I dragged my legs to the electronics store. I pushed the door, triggering a digital chime. Inside, the air smelled of metallic casings and plastic cables. I hobbled between shelves, amid outlets, lamps, bulbs, and electronic devices whose purpose was a mystery to me. I trod on linoleum grimy with footprints, yet with every step, my feet expected to flatten grass. I beheld smoked glass and cardboard boxes where I should have seen wine-red tree trunks and a serpentine path.

The scent of pine invaded my nostrils, and the earth warped under the weight of the lagoon. Beyond the backdrop of this electronics store, beyond this rotting gray world, somewhere lay that ocean of crystalline water illuminated by a different sun. The abyss of that ocean, beneath tons upon tons of water, harbored another architecture, other creatures.

She had never told me her name. Didn’t need to. Her face and blotched-white skin had plastered the walls of my mind. Instead of blood, her voice flowed through my veins. She had offered me the only chance, and I had ruined it.

The shopkeeper approached as if a vagabond had wandered into his shop. The years had contorted the man into a wrinkled, gaunt parody. His back was hunched, his hair had turned gray.

He scrutinized me from head to toe.

“May I help you?”

Before I could even craft a response, the nucleus in the depths of my being, kilometers beneath the navigating consciousness, revealed to me that no bridge could ever convey the images and sounds trapped within me, that no effort would succeed in making others understand what truly mattered.

I had nothing to say. Not to him, not to anyone.

THE END

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Since K Got Over Me” by The Clientele.

With this, three of my six novellas written and self-published ten years ago have been translated. The two others so far are Smile and Trash in a Ditch. You can check them out here.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 12 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

After finishing the excerpt, I placed those printouts on top of the first stack and aligned them absentmindedly as my mind returned from deep space, from that station overrun with a surging tide of shadows. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a dark well, peering into its murky depths, and wondering just how far the bottom lay.

Elena, sitting across from me in the rattan chair, leaned forward, shoulders rolled in, her hands planted on the table next to the empty glass. Engaged like an executive at a serious meeting. Her almond-blonde hair bunched up against the collar of her dark-brown jacket, that fit snugly against her figure and looked more like a cyberpunk gambeson than a piece of outdoor clothing. The edges of her metallic moth’s wings, which rested atop her gray sweatshirt, caught a faint sheen in the overcast light. In Elena’s face, above the high cheekbones and those reddened bags from tiredness and the nightmare of living, her pale blues focused on me with the intensity of a mountain lion. She was negotiating with a member of another species.

“Elena, did you pick these excerpts because they would allow us to discuss your innermost thoughts in a less direct way?”

“Maybe. You’ve read a lot into them. And you’ve been very patient. I appreciate that.”

“Intrusive thoughts are a symptom of a psychological condition.”

“Not necessarily. But if we’re still playing therapist and patient, do you want to know how bad mine get?”

I leaned back in my chair, which creaked; it had taken a battering from many a weary ass.

“Please.”

“Let’s start with the common ones. Knives and scissors? I avoid glancing at them, as I often get these vivid images of jamming their blades into my eyeballs. I see a bottle of bleach in the supermarket, and my mind whispers: ‘Buy this and drink it.’ When I see condoms lying in the street, I get the urge to lick them. Or else I picture myself bloated like a pregnant sow, full of diseased seed. I’ve gotten images of me slicing off my breasts and eating them. One time that my parents had dragged me to a relative’s house, this woman I was told to consider a cousin waltzed over all proud of the tiny human she had pushed out, and proffered that squishy, gurgling thing, expecting me to hold it in my arms. I thought her so reckless that I considered calling the authorities. I knew that if I held that baby, I’d be assaulted with images of me dropping it onto its malleable skull, that would cave in. I told her I didn’t like babies. Which is true. She got all flustered, said that I should change my mind, and scurried away. My parents were so embarrassed that they didn’t talk to me on the ride home. But that was a relief, given that I don’t know how to talk to them.”

Elena paused to give me time to formulate an adequate response to this barrage of graphic terrors. I stared at my empty glass. The last bits of coffee had hardened at the bottom in a clumpy film.

“Well.”

“Yeah, I would be at a loss too. I’ve always felt I couldn’t do anything about such thoughts. That I’ll have to endure these flashes of depravity and degradation until my heart stops or my brain melts. I never told my therapists about them, because I suspected I would have ended up in a psych ward, or heavily drugged. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t acted on the worst of those urges. Never so much hurt a fly. Well, I’ve killed mosquitoes. A couple of spiders as well, which I regret. I quite appreciate spiders.”

“You mean you acted on lesser of such intrusive urges?”

She sighed.

“You could say it’s all in my head, but my ability to restrain such impulses depends on my energy level and how attuned to reality I’m feeling at the moment. I still have enough control to keep the monster leashed. Usually. But once, I was holding a hard disk when my brain sent me a visual command to drop it. Next thing I knew, the hard disk was on the floor, broken. Another time, I had been struggling with insomnia for weeks, and existed in a surreal haze. Every few days, I forced myself to leave the house and sit at a nearby coffee shop. The barista placed my coffee on top of the pastry display counter, and when I went to pick it up by the saucer, a sequence flashed in my mind: my thumb flipping the cup over and the hot coffee splashing against the lap of the guy seated at the counter. An instant later, my thumb did exactly that. The guy, in his honor, was incredibly gracious. He smiled at me while patting the stains with a napkin. No harm no foul, he said. After he left, I stood there petrified. I hadn’t been able to prevent one of my intrusive impulses from taking over and puncturing the membrane that separates them from the world. Although I was out of it, exhausted from the moment I woke up, I couldn’t even pretend it had been an accident, because in the span between my thumb starting to move and it tilting the cup over, I felt as if I were watching a movie, aware of what would happen but powerless to stop it. I should have stayed at home; instead, I ruined an innocent man’s afternoon. Soon enough I stopped going to that coffee shop. I couldn’t stand how the barista looked at me.”

“I can’t deny you’re a bit of a public menace, but you have a heart. That guy should have asked for your number.”

Elena’s lips curved into a faint smile, but her drained eyes belonged to a soldier at the end of a day-long skirmish.

“Jon, I’m a danger to others, and to myself. I don’t have a driver’s license and will never drive mainly because I’d have to fight off the urge to veer into oncoming traffic, or accelerate and burst into a wall. I have to live in the world knowing I’m capable of doing things no sane, decent person would even imagine. The darkness inside me can burst out and hurt anyone at any time. As it relates to my Kirochka, while she might have some control over herself, she has none over the parasite. It’s wild and hungry, and it will feed when it needs to, using her body as a vessel to manifest itself in the world. You could say Kirochka’s biggest struggle isn’t against her parasite. It’s in resisting the urge to release the monster within and let it feast.”

“Are these your two sides? Elena the human, Elena the monster. Trying to coexist.”

“The disgust I feel at such intrusive thoughts could suggest that underneath the cancer there’s some healthy tissue. But how do I know if what I’m thinking comes from me or from another entity lurking in some recess of my brain? Does an uncontaminated me exist? Am I lying to myself, trying to avoid responsibility for parts of myself I dislike and can’t control? Should you be responsible for what you do while sleepwalking?” Her pale blues darted around. She shrugged. “The worst part is that I was born like this. With a broken nature. While other kids learned how to be around their peers, to share and take turns, to make friends and bond with people, I struggled to understand a nonsensical world. People were talking, laughing, crying, and I couldn’t tell why. The more the gap widened between me and everyone else, the less I wanted to try bridging it. Too much frustration, too little reward. So I retreated inside my head. I lived in a parallel universe that overlapped with this one. I could hear their words, I could see their actions, but I couldn’t connect to them. As I got older and my isolation deepened, my perception of people shifted from something that baffled me to something that disgusted me. Dangerous, unpredictable beasts that could turn on you in a heartbeat. And now here we are. I’m almost thirty and I’ve never had a friend.”

Elena’s words hung in the air like the reverberations of a funeral bell. I considered reaching for her hand, but I suspected she would have leaped from the chair and hightailed it out of Bar Palace.

“Do you think of your stories as vehicles to process the different facets of your darkness? Maybe ways of exorcising it?”

Her slim hand returned to her moth pendant, tracing its metallic edges.

“Are you asking if I consciously design my stories for therapeutic purposes? No.” Elena paused with her eyes unfocused and her lips parted, as if searching for the proper words. She shook her head, then snapped her gaze at me. “There’s a fundamental problem in discussing the artistic process. If you earned a degree for it and ended up working at a magazine writing articles on music, paintings, novels or whatever, well, you have to come up with bullshit that sounds good to justify the time, energy, and money spent learning about how to discuss things you didn’t create. While getting brainwashed. A valid approach to life if your goal is to win some friends and influence people, I suppose. Imagine all those professors perorating, day after day, year after year, in a language that would make the creator go: ‘What the fuck are these loons smoking?’ It makes me shudder. I swear, whole university departments could disappear overnight, and society would be better for it. You’re supposed to feel art. The texture, the tone, the rhythm. It should awaken the millions of years of beast inside you. It should remind you that you’re alive, and that you will die. That’s how you connect with the creator, not by dissecting their child, naming the parts, and then putting them on the scales to weigh them. If the artists had wanted to make a point, they’d have written a fucking essay. The conscious mind shouldn’t dare befoul art with its machinations; it should prostrate itself in awe, and be silent.”

“You’re not letting me off the hook.”

“No, I am. I don’t want to bury the conscious mind entirely, even though it should learn to rest away from the light. You need rationality during the editing phase. But if you tasked that part with producing the raw material, it would sit at the keyboard agonizing over every word, judging the pros and cons of a myriad options, quickly going insane. All the fun replaced by paralysis from self-judgment. It would produce a soulless, sterile pile of garbage. You don’t task a fish with flying, and you shouldn’t burden the conscious mind with anything other than classifying and criticizing. You have to venture into the dark places where that part fears to tread. Into the depths where monsters dwell. Only there will you find something that matters. But the deeper you descend, the more you will be tempted to give up. And what is the only tool at your disposal to endure that abyssal dark?”

“Madness.”

Elena’s pale blues glimmered as if a ray of sunlight had pierced through the clouds.

“Yeah, you need to be a little insane. Too much, and it will control you. But I’ve digressed. You wanted to know if my stories are meant to process and exorcise the darkness inside me. Writing is a compulsion. A form of psychological masturbation. If you want to be generous, you can consider it a dialogue with a sacred, hidden part of yourself. I don’t know why I write certain things or why they have to be that way. I don’t care either. You don’t choose the stories, they choose you. They demand to be told, clawing their way out through your fingertips until you’re left bleeding on the keyboard. I’m just honored that they chose me, someone so insignificant, someone with nothing to offer but devotion and the willingness to bleed, as their conduit to the world. And no, I’m not exorcising the monster by writing. If anything, I’m feeding it, and in return, the monster keeps me from spiraling. I was born with a hole in the bottom of my soul where my happiness and fulfillment drains. I can’t hold onto them no matter what I do. But words, they plug that hole, for as long as the tale lasts.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Paint It, Black” by The Rolling Stones.