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We rolled in the grass, rubbing sweat and soil onto each other’s skin as her tongue probed my mouth, and the part of my brain that believed itself in charge checked out. But sometimes my consciousness resurfaced and noted that while I kissed the woman’s breasts, I bit and tore at her flesh, digging deeper until I should have chewed through her ribs and burst a lung. Instead, just a handspan beneath her skin lay white meat free of veins, arteries, tendons, organs, cartilage, or bones. Kissing along her nape and spine, I sank my teeth into her back and gnawed off a chunk. I shredded skin like ripping a hangnail. My mouth flooded with blood that flowed hot and coppery down my throat. I craved the next mouthful of meat.

Lying beside the woman, my belly full, I traced the contours of her ribs and pelvis with my fingertips. Her skeleton held. But whenever I bit, I found white flesh. Even so, seconds after tearing off a piece, the wound oozed blood, and minutes later, when I looked back, her body had stitched itself together. The missing bite was outlined in sticky, half-clotted threads of blood.

Once, I devoured her neck to the extent that I nearly decapitated her. Another time, prying apart her labia with my tongue, as she bucked her hips to my mouth, I chewed into her womb and beyond, splitting her abdomen open to the ribs. I ate an entire thigh and ended up clutching her detached calf, foot dangling from the end. I shoved myself backward on my ass, driving my heels into the earth, and screamed. But when I dared to glance back at the woman, she stood on both legs, and my hand gripped air.

With her lower lip caught between mine and her nails gouging my back, memories flashed: a past where I’d never known this grass, this clearing, the lagoon, or the woman. A jailer hunting me to drag me back. It clawed me awake, forcing me to confront the grimy, stinking body I inhabited, to question the future that awaited me.

I pressed my eyelids into the woman’s mane. I wanted to whimper like an animal. That afternoon long ago, boarding the wrong train, daring to venture into the passage—I considered these my only strokes of luck, my wisest choices. But if I lost her, I’d spend my life haunted by memories of us sprawled on this grass, lips fused, skin pressed to molecular closeness.

Her face absorbed my anguish as if following a rehearsed script. The pale blond of her brows bled into her pink skin, and her hairline glistened with sweat. Saliva dampened the corners of her parted lips as she breathed like recovering from a marathon. Under her patchy-white skin sprawled a web of capillaries, circuitry proving life pulsed within.

I wanted to bite off her nose. To scoop out her eyes with my tongue and chew them. I’d hollow her face chunk by chunk until a crater of white meat gaped, framed by her hairline, ears, and jaw.

The woman fixed me with an animal gaze, stripped of the stratagems and counterattacks other people hid. I loved a creature who held her breath for dozens of minutes, who never ate or drank, who regenerated any body part in a blink. How had I deserved the privilege of knowing her?

I brushed the white blotch on her cheekbone.

“Why me?”

“Why you what?”

“Why did I find this clearing and get to love you? Why did you appear for me, someone this mediocre?”

The woman glanced away. She raised her hands between our faces, picking mud from under a nail.

“I was here. You chose to come.”

I remembered wandering Hitachi. The passage to the grassy path had lured me before I even looked up.

“When I found the passage, I knew I needed to lose myself alone in nature. For those minutes, I’d reclaim my freedom. Meeting you, talking to you, I realized I’d found what deserved my focus and energy. A real person in this hollow world where everyone’s guided by lies.”

The woman slid her nose along the bridge of mine. The question hovering, the one I daily forced underwater, overrode my preference for silence.

“Where did you come from?”

She flinched. Clamped a hand over my mouth, but I took her wrist and eased it away. Her flute-like voice trembled.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

“Out of curiosity?”

“In case one day… you need to return.”

It struck her like a fist to the face. Her smile died, her features twisted. Tears welled. Her Adam’s apple bobbed.

A knife slit my heart.

The woman kissed me, and I wanted to forget I’d asked, but I pulled back until my vision framed her face. Tears from her right eye streaked that temple, dripping into grass; tears from the left rode her nose’s bridge.

I wanted to scream.

“How long is left?”

“Not long.”

“Months? Weeks?”

“I leave tonight.”

I clamped my arms around her as if to wring air from her lungs. She dug her nails into my shoulder blades.

“I asked because I needed to know,” I said. “Stay.”

“It doesn’t matter. You know I belong elsewhere.”

“Don’t say that. Who’s forcing you?”

“Who forces the moon to orbit? Who forces atoms into molecules? Now that you require explanations… I must go.”

Clutching her, I rolled onto my back and back again.

“You won’t leave. I won’t let go.”

Her tears speckled my corneas.

“You’ll blink and find yourself hugging air.”

“How could I return to that world? You’ve never seen its tarnished colors, its counterfeit emotions. What good would come of enduring there? I need to forget. I want no face and no voice but yours, here among these trees and water. The exit should seal. Why should we accept that happiness always slips away? As long as we stay in this clearing, no one will find us. No one will bother us again.”

The woman sat up, stretching her legs beside mine, and pulled me to face her. The tear-streaked glaze of her eyes slammed into my gut. She laid palms on my shoulders and opened her mouth, but I trampled her words.

“Would you rather stay?”

“You doubt it?”

“I don’t know how you think. I’m not sure you wanted me to get close.”

“I don’t want it to end either. But you can choose. Come with me. I’ll show you reality as it should’ve been. I’ll engulf you. You’ll never yearn for anything else again.”

When I stood, she mirrored me. Her bare feet stepped onto mine. I pressed my brow to hers, stroked her cheek. In my mind, a lighthouse beam sliced fog.

“Will you come?” she asked.

“I’ll follow.”

“Anywhere it leads? No matter what you have to leave behind?”

I mashed my lips to hers. Breaking away cost me.

“What choice remains? Breathing that rotten world’s air, surrounded by organic robots? I’ll follow. With luck, I’ll forget every minute wasted outside.”

She gripped my nape and kissed me like she’d devour me, suck out my guts. My mind dissolved. When I surfaced, she was leading me hand-in-hand toward the lagoon. Pebbles stuck to my soles. A white blotch spreading from her lower back covered half her right ass cheek. She advanced naked, holding my hand with her arm stretched behind her, as if the dress she’d worn when we met had been someone else’s shame to conceal. She waded into the fur of algae and mud, that snarled around her legs and waist, sealing every glimpse of the water it covered.

The winter-ocean chill numbed my legs and crotch, prickling my skin with gooseflesh. My muscles clenched, my lungs fought to hold air. Fleshy eel-like shapes brushed my legs under the algae.

The woman stopped and turned. She glowed like a child on Christmas morning, though wet trails crossed her cheeks. The algae fur grazed the curves of her breasts. She bear-hugged me. Compared to the water, her skin scalded.

I swallowed, jaw trembling.

“We’ll dive into darkness.”

Her laughter leaked.

“Feels that way.”

She pressed her forehead to mine. Each streak and fleck of blue, white, and green in her irises swelled like under a microscope. I could map every vein stamped in her sclerae.

She lowered her voice.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s the only certainty I’ve had.”

She smiled. Dove backwards, yanking me under. Sound died. I expected an explosion of cold to overwhelm me, but I had plunged into water warm as if bathing in the woman’s liquefied remains. I opened my eyes to crystalline water. We sank spinning headfirst. Above our feet, a horizon of water bloomed, lit by a coin of light—a sun choked by clouds.

Liters of water fought to flood my nostrils. Our bodies should’ve floated, but we accelerated downwards. Amid bubbles spewing from our noses, the woman grinned, mouth wide. She locked her legs around my lower back and squeezed.

Crushing pressure was flattening me like a collapsed wall. My throat spasmed, urging me to inhale even though I’d drown my empty lungs.

I tried to slide my cheek over hers to catch her gaze, in case it convinced me to override my survival instinct, but she hid her face. She clung like a monkey to its mother. Did she understand she would kill me? Maybe she thought I, too, could hold my breath for minutes. Or had she planned to drown, dragging me down with her?

I stifled a convulsion. I wanted decades with her. If she’d chosen to drown, why would I live? We’d vanish into the depths, our entwined corpses rotting in the dark.

When I opened my mouth, liters flooded my stomach. As coughs wracked me, I breathed salty liquid that inflated my lungs. My vision blurred with red static. Needles stabbed behind my nose.

I kicked, thrashed. The woman slackened her leg-lock, slipped her grip. Her chest peeled from mine. As I flailed, her hands scrambled for purchase. I shoved her collarbones. We were drifting apart, but her hand, sliding down my left arm, snagged my watch, its buckle biting my wrist like it’d sever tendons.

My lungs threatened to rupture. My consciousness was snuffing out like a dying flame. I fumbled the watch clasp until it unlatched, then shoved her chest. We floated in opposite directions.

Her hand, at arm’s length, released my watch. Her face warped into the agony of someone shot by a loved one.

Below, as if an abyssal sun glowed, a bare mountain rose. Rockfaces were carved into steps; walls featured clusters of cubed buildings and towers. Stairways vanished into the mountain through inky black voids. Pacing the steps, roaming past the buildings, smeared figures of people milled about.

I kicked and paddled upward through crushing pressure. My shredded lungs irrigated my guts, bloating me.

My arms breached into air. Vision blackened like peering up from a well’s depths. I gagged and spewed water. Choking, convulsing, I staggered toward the shore while peeling algae from my skin. The water tugged my legs like a drain’s pull.

At the shore, I tripped and collapsed onto clattering pebbles. The ground shook. A rock-splitting quake boomed.

I rolled, muscles locking as I tried to rise. I sneezed, I spat water.

The lagoon clenched like a sphincter. It shrank to a sewer-mouth’s width. As I stood, the land contracted like a rug yanked taut.

The lagoon vanished, leaving a dwindling circle of trembling pebbles.

I ran into dusk, following the snaking path through pines that slid toward me. I stumbled through waving ferns, crashed into trunks, lurched at others. Canopies showered pine needles; low branches lashed my face. Trunks erupted, firing bark shapnel. Gusts whipped my soaked body as if the clearing inhaled. As I fought toward the exit, a force was sucking me, even my thoughts, toward the center, in a mute command to surrender.

The edges separating pines from grass blurred. The colors bled from the trees, plants and grass, shuddering towards my back into a myriad of frayed ends. My body stretched.

I sprinted toward the passage’s metal-plated mouth wedged between buildings, just meters ahead.

---

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 “Pagan Poetry” by Björk.

These days, I eagerly drown.

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I disembarked at Hitachi Station and retraced the pilgrimage. In yards fenced by cement walls or concrete blocks, whenever branches and leaves spoiled the silhouettes of trees, invisible humans would prune them into cones, into tiered clouds. On facades, years of rain had streaked grime into darkened veins. The distant murmur of traffic mingled with waves crashing against shore rocks. In a parking lot, dozens of workers’ cars crammed together, their owners pouring money into insurance and gasoline to maintain vehicles bought for commuting. Telephone and power lines etched straight and curved seams against the overcast sky, converging into a tangled loom at the street’s end. Each rusted shutter and iron gate bore rectangles of faded brightness where posters had been peeled away. Landscapes of a distant country I was visiting for the last time.

Goodbye to those strolling, returning from work, emerging from school in uniforms. Actors in a mediocre play repeating generation after generation. The residents had toiled lifetimes to end up owning one of these narrow two-story homes. As I walked the sidewalk, I glimpsed a man’s silhouette passing behind wooden planks fencing his garden patch, stepping one foot after another between his house’s facade and a row of potted plants. Any citizen accepted society’s humiliations—the acid of anxiety corroding their chest, bowing in reverence to those wielding power—only to grow old among gray walls. They pushed carts full of bills into a carnival prize machine, which spat back keychains.

What could I want from this charade? What did they want? They desired promotions to command underlings. They hoarded junk. Craving immortality, they birthed heirs, hoping to snare eyes on their fleeting lives. Instead, they wrenched fresh players onto a packed stage for a ceaseless drama of misery. We had sprouted by accident, our constructs scarcely holding. More disasters and wars loomed. But the faces passing by ignored it, or hid it. They clung to living by accident, just as life tasted of rot to me by accident.

Why waste my existence pretending, only to crumble into dust? Let them keep their costumes, their roles to obey, their ingrained lies propping up societies as if built on crystal toothpicks. Some accident would slice me down, or sickness gnaw me. If I outlived statistics, I’d earn care from someone who’d prefer me dead—feeding me, bathing me, wiping my ass. Let them rot in their charade. I had the forest and my woman. I’d rot as I pleased.

I paused under the metal awning of the passageway and turned, suspecting the world had melted to black. If only the inevitable future would crash today. Beyond the opposite sidewalk’s walls, beyond the warehouse and the cement facade with its vending machines, beyond office towers and malls, dawns would flare. Thick columns of black smoke would swell until luminous mushrooms erupted. Shockwaves would surge, disintegrating buildings into breaker tides of cement, brick, metal, and glass pulverized back to stardust. As fire-clouds bloomed on the horizon like blazing brains, dust tsunamis would roar toward the warehouse across the street—but I’d have retreated into the forest like a turtle tucking into its shell. Even if bombs burned this world to ash, the shockwaves would skid over the cloudy vault above the clearing. When the last ash settled, this world where we’d wasted energy, tears, arguments, and brawls would fade to gray waste. No intelligent species visiting these ruins, nor successors emerging from ash in eons, would grasp who we were.

How many days did I weave in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark? From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy. Night blackened to tar in minutes. I forgot which weekday dawned. I wanted to forget such concepts existed.

The woman had plunged into the lagoon to dive, and I sat on the pebbled shore when hunger twisted my guts. Outside this forest, I’d eaten by rote—breakfast, lunch, dinner—but now an evolutionary alarm installed eons ago in some aquatic ancestor shook me: eat or be consumed. I touched my sunken belly, once padded by fat folds. I had to leave.

I waited for the woman to surface, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. She submerged as casually as retreating to the bathroom. When she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against me as I peeled lichen patches from her skin.

I left the clearing in darkness, fingers grazing the promised pines, their bark’s roughness a brand that I knew. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Civilization neared. I crept, stifling breath. Emerging onto the deserted street, I blinked at the glare. I hurried past a lamppost’s island of light to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines, watchful of every shifting silhouette like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes.

Next time hunger speared me, I was kissing the woman, her legs entwined with mine. Hours of mounting dizziness spiked. I rolled onto my back, gasping. She nestled on my chest and stared as if waiting for me to dress my impressions in words. If I left this forest, I’d skulk amidst cement, metal, and glass—a raccoon tipping trash bins before darting back to the trees. Against such nakedness, what did this ache for food matter?

Memories of the outside resembled yellowed photos of another country, another era. Half the album’s pages were lost; luckily, I had forgotten what they used to contain.

Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke me. My guts clung like an old balloon. I sat up, hugged my knees. I felt faint. My body was imploding, a growing vacuum in my guts sucking the organs.

I glanced over my shoulder at the clearing’s exit. The path curved between pine pillars; in the distance, trunks and foliage narrowed the path, dissolving it in a green phosphorescence. I had to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machine hunched and disheveled like a fugitive.

Sheltering here had stripped society’s makeup. Due to the lack of contrast, I had tolerated its piercing thorns and scorching fire. How could I dare to go outside? I refused to breathe that air even if my starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into my core.

The woman looped her arms around my neck, forehead against my cheek.

“You need to eat.”

“I can last.”

“How long?”

“Until hunger stops my thoughts.”

“You don’t need to endure, dummy.”

Her face suggested ignorance of pain. I meant to say her name, but struck a void. I had her face, her eyes, the certainty that she knew whom I addressed.

“I don’t want to leave.”

“I didn’t say you should.”

“I could hunt squirrels, birds. Some cultures eat spiders.”

“Feed from me.”

Her lips curved upward, as usually since I’d moved here. Would I recognize when she joked around?

“That’s… generous of you.”

The woman leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore out a handful of white flesh. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had ripped the fibers. Blood pooled.

I froze.

She offered the chunk. Her parted teeth glistened wet. Numb, I let her fold my limp fingers around the meat, that resembled a block of ham. She arched expectant brows.

Saliva drowned my tongue. I yearned to savor that flesh as much as I longed to hold the woman against me, joining our warmth like two coals in a bonfire. I brought the piece to my mouth. I could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of my fingers gripping the chunk.

I pressed my lips to the soft flesh and grazed it with my teeth. Saliva spilled from the corners of my mouth, trickling down my chin. I clenched my jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of my tongue, but when my teeth split the meat, a shudder ripped through me. Before I could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded my mouth. I tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. I devoured the rest, then I licked the juice off my fingers.

When I looked up, shame flooded me like someone caught chewing open-mouthed. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, spattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. I covered the hole with one hand, but warm blood seeped between my fingers like soup.

The woman stroked my cheek.

“It’ll grow back.”

I tried to laugh, but a whimper escaped.

“I can’t live off eating you.”

“Do you eat so much you’ll swallow me whole?”

“Plus, I’d need to buy water bottles from the machine.”

The woman twisted in my arms until she lay on her back. She cupped one breast, and squeezed the nipple between thumb and forefinger. Thick milk oozed like honey.

If turning or shifting my posture made me face the clearing’s exit, I jerked my gaze away until the path blurred at the edge of my vision. A monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if I wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush me, tear my limbs from my torso, slurp the marrow off my splintered bones. How had I entered and left this clearing without realizing it? Like exploring an abandoned asylum on a starless night.

Beyond this forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever these images and memories assailed me, patches of my brain crackled with electricity. I wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach until they whitened.

I lost track of time. My beard scratched the woman’s skin like a rake. I pushed greasy strands from my eyes. My breath reeked like a cat’s. When the woman dozed, or dove underwater, I’d slink into the trees to squat over a hole. I scrubbed my teeth with leaves that smelled fresh, but the stench of my breath lingered, as if rot had wedged between my molars. I avoided breathing near her face. When I kissed her, she never flinched.

I dreamed my teeth crumbled. Awake, I sank them into the woman’s juicy flesh, but feared that a tooth might splinter, exposing the nerves.

My sweat dried to a film that fresh sweat soaked anew. I stank like a mange-riddled stray sleeping in a landfill. I envied the woman diving into frigid, muck-thick waters. I washed in the lagoon as if at a sink, but each handful of water teemed with algae, sludge, and wriggling microbes. I scrubbed my skin while suspecting that my pores filtered civilizations of bacteria. Even after washing myself, the stench of decay seared my nostrils—a reek that clung to me like leeches, that the woman maybe smelled all the time as if I sprayed it into her face.

Lying beside me, her chest rose and fell. Beneath her lids, her eyes darted. I’d spend my life watching her, but a bolt of pain struck. I dragged the anchor of years wasted in a world sliding into ruin. I wanted to believe we’d lie together forever, but I deceived myself by pretending that the rules spared this clearing. Like how on my first visits I’d known when to go home, another border neared. A matter of when. Knowing this rotted me like poison, and pain drowned my eyes. How would I exist elsewhere, without the woman? If I ever had the chance and it found me strong enough, I’d prune my past and every foray outside, so all I’d ever know included her.

I was kissing the inside of her thigh when my stench dizzyied me. I lifted my head, ashamed. Her eyes peered between the curves of her breasts—whether agreeing or staring because I’d stared, I didn’t know.

I rested my temple against her thigh.

“I wish I didn’t stink.”

“You could always bathe.”

“In stagnant water? I’d turn into a Petri dish of disease.”

“Am I one?”

“No filth sticks to you. Not even my stench. But if I plunged in that water for a second, I’d emerge a lichen-caked sludge-man, and never could I scrub off the grime.”

---

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

Today’s song is “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky.

Isolating, self-sustaining, all-consuming.

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I awoke in the dark room of my closed eyes. Birds chirped and trilled from every direction, as if perched on an invisible dome. My back pressed flat against the bed of grass, and a cool breeze brushed the soles of my feet. Against me lay another warm body, its chest rising and falling against mine, its breath heating my neck. I allowed myself to marvel at this for a few seconds before prickling with the reminder that I needed to find a job or I wouldn’t have enough to cover the rent.

The fingers resting on my shoulder curled, digging between the bony ridges. I opened my eyes and tilted my head as the woman lifted hers. Her pale-blue eyes met mine as if instead of sleeping, she had merely stretched a blink.

What could I possibly want from life except to wake to the gaze of this woman looking back? I needed to comb every strand of her honey-blonde hair with my fingers, glide my fingertips over the taut skin of her abdomen, feel her breasts yield and mold to my palms, bury my face in her neck or armpits and inhale the scent of a lagoon. Every passing minute brought me closer to the moment when I’d need to hold her in my arms, like a dolphin must surface or drown.

But I forced myself to sit up. The flattened grass sprang back and tickled my lower back. The woman wrapped a hand around my nape.

“Stay.”

“I wish I could.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Rather? Nothing. But I need to find a job.”

“Do you love it that much?”

Was she being sarcastic? Did she really not understand?

“Yes, I adore having a job steal my time, my thoughts, my energy, all so my bosses can sell someone else a product they’d survive without. It chokes me, playing a role I must uphold every moment, lest the master holding my leash drop me at the pound.”

“Then why do it?”

I tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear and traced the outline of the white blotch on her cheekbone.

“Maybe you don’t understand money, but out there you need it to exist. Plus, people find it natural to be handed a purpose. It saves them from thinking. Here, when you want to, you dive, talk to trees, lie in the grass. No one’s forced a society on you, and that’s one of the things I find most mesmerizing about you. You’re free from the worst humans have invented. But I belong to that outside world. To secure a good life, I’d need either stratospheric talent or the ability to ruthlessly manipulate others into handing over cash. I lack both. I must obey someone who’ll slip money into my bank account each month. And I’m glad you’re making that face. Glad you don’t get it.”

Leaving this forest felt like tearing metal from an industrial magnet. On the train back to my apartment, I yearned to jump off at the next stop and board one returning to Hitachi. Entering my apartment, sometimes after days away, felt like stepping into a summer home. I wandered the rooms suspecting the furniture had been rearranged, that someone had claimed the place and would brand me an intruder.

I compiled job listings from the internet. I sent my résumé even to postings that would reject me unless I lied during the interview. Each application meant leaping the same hurdle: I needed the money but loathed the routine it would condemn me to. Nerves. Cramps. Terror daily at finishing tasks on time, unsure if I could. I’d dread the next pit I’d stumble into, and to prepare myself, fueled by hair-pulling stress and coffee, I’d sacrifice some of my spare hours to research. The rest of my time would be reserved for rest, ensuring I was alert for incoming workloads. I would dream I was working, and after waking up at six, I’d drag myself to the job. I’d choke my thoughts and reactions to avoid appearing dispensable to the boss. Whenever an office drone included me in small talk, I’d spit out scripted lines, betraying my silence, and wonder if they saw through me. When I entered common areas, conversations would die. One day, a colleague I’d never spoken to might blurt their opinion of me. Corner plant. Zombie. Daily, my genetic intuition, the kind even citizens of a totalitarian regime feel, would needle me: We exist for a better fate.

So many hours and dignity sacrificed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. But what alternative was there? Live under the sky, eat rocks? Each passing minute edged me closer to needing another meal or drink—the unending struggle to exist that organic life had committed to, a struggle I’d signed up for through the unconscious decision to be born. A hollow existence stripped of color, that kept me busy to prevent me from questioning whether it was worth living.

At night, lying in my apartment bed, my mind churned. The woman’s absence ached like an amputated limb, but closing my eyes summoned her burning presence beside me. Though I needed sleep to stay focused on job hunting, she commandeered every checkpoint in my mind, deciding which thoughts passed and which jammed. Dozens of her details cycled, each flooding my veins like heroin. Her face, pupils dilating in the center of those pale-blue irises. Her flute-like voice pouring into my ears. Her honey-blonde mane shimmering under cloudy light. Her naked body, pale pink mottled with white patches. The dip of her abdomen between pelvic curves. Her breasts and neck trembling with spasms, lips parted and damp, bridged by a thread of saliva.

How did she hijack my thoughts until my life became a magnifying glass focused on her? I craved to chart every inch of her skin with my fingertips, map every discoloration. What would she think if she knew? She’d recoil. Yet I’d have installed cameras and mics in the clearing to capture every second, refusing to let those moments vanish into time and memory like a library torched.

Though one company called, they’d confused me with another interviewee they meant to reject. Of twenty applications, one led to an interview. I laundered a white shirt, black trousers, and a tie. That morning, I sat on a plastic chair outside an office door. A secretary would peer out and call my name eventually. Around me, men and one woman in monochrome outfits stared ahead like statues, or fiddled with phones. I avoided tapping the floor or shifting posture like a sleepless wreck hours into the night. Behind walls: muffled keystrokes, creaking chairs, voices cordially faking that enthusiasm tethered them to this office instead of their salary. But none of my rival applicants’ faces hinted they resented the poor script they performed like under penalty of breaching a contract.

If some lapse in judgement got me hired over these humans, I’d reenact the grueling routine: rising at six, trudging home drained at seven-thirty in the evening, fearing my mask might slip and reveal my disdain for having to obey in exchange for crumbs, disgust at forced small talk with strangers when talking wore me down. How would I balance that grind with the life I craved—secluding myself in the forest, grafting my skin to hers, forgetting that I had ever known the outside world? I’d lack energy to sustain both lives. The downfall from the time I had discovered the clearing until I lost my job proved it. I’d repeat that ending with new actors, or abandon the clearing and her.

I scratched a palm. One of my shoes tapped linoleum. Two expressionless men across the aisle watched me. I cleared my throat and leaned back. My pulse throbbed in my neck.

I wanted to slap every applicant. They waited to enter the office and kneel. Please, future boss, pay me enough to commute here and back, keep a roof, eat, and prop up the economy so the ruling party stays in power. Let me serve society. Assign me a purpose. Bury me in tasks to save me from thinking.

Had I become this? Someone terrorized by what moved and mattered, who agreed to neuter those feelings for shelter? I’d avoid anything that might spark new meanings, lest I question my enslavement. But at least I’d have a roof under which to age into a rotten shell, locked doors barring my inner self.

I closed my eyes. In my mind, I reached out to feel her skin against my fingertips. Of all humans I’d met, only she deserved to belong to the species. Daily she unveiled spectrums of light that life had hidden. If my future excluded her, why live?

I heard echoes of my name as if they had slipped into a dream. Through the ajar door, the secretary was peering out while holding my résumé. On its upper left corner, my photograph stared straight ahead with a cowlike expression.

I rose and followed her, stiff-legged. Inside, the secretary retreated to an adjacent room. Behind the desk sat a rugby-sized man in a suit and tie. His hair obeyed his comb’s orders. When he spoke and gestured to the chair, his teeth gleamed unnaturally white—nights spent with whitening strips.

I sank into the chair, head level with his chest. He scanned my résumé with a pen. Though he spoke, my brain refused to retain his questions, or my answers. Waves of unease coursed through me, threatening to erupt into nausea. Sweat trickled down my spine, pooled on my face, stung my eyes.

The man locked eyes with me, his mallet-like fist planted on the desk. Time to sell him the lie that I dreamed of laboring here, surrendering my life.

“I need someone to pay me enough monthly to cover food and the rent of my burrow. In exchange, I’ll do the bare minimum. The rest of the time I’ll pretend to work while resenting every hour wasted in the office—time better spent staring at my living room walls.”

The man shifted. Glanced away, scratched an ear. Took his time unknotting his frown.

“I don’t share your sense of humor.”

“I’m serious. Whether I work decides if I keep my apartment.”

The man drummed his knuckles and hunched over the desk. His eyes darted toward the typing noises next door.

“You have the wrong attitude for this office. Or any office.”

“You’re right.”

He shook his head, then shoved his chair back and pressed a button on his desk intercom. His voice hardened.

“Are you waiting to laugh and point at a hidden camera?”

“That would’ve been funny.”

The secretary peered out from the adjacent room. At her boss’ military-coded gesture, she opened the door and called the next applicant. The man fixed me with a squinted glare.

“You’re pulling stunts like this without an audience. I recommend you add a note about your mental health to the résumé. It’d speed things up. Now, out of my sight.”

I left the building like I’d just had an infected appendix removed. I had endured those humiliations for the last time.

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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 reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National.

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I took sick leave from the office for as long as they would tolerate it, and when I dragged myself back to work, I pretended to be recovering from the flu. I strategized how to use the accumulated vacation days I had never cashed in. In my former life, I would have spent those days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

I endured a workday convinced it was Tuesday, but by the end, overhearing colleagues exchange weekend plans, I realized two days of holiday would follow.

The hours passed in blurred frames. Sweat beaded at my temples. I squirmed in my chair, skimming tasks as my brain burned and throbbed like an infected wound.

While rubbing my eyelids and breathing through clenched teeth, a presence stirred the air around me, now saturated with the scent of a perfume sampler. My supervisor. Her black mane, pulled into a ponytail, gleamed like a doll’s. She wore one of her white blouses, through whose fabric I glimpsed a black bra.

“Still sick?”

What could I say? Although I cleared my throat, I stayed silent, so she continued.

“You used to be the type who’d come to the office even when green with illness. Now you’re late, delaying tasks. You’re not here.”

I stared numbly into her eyes. Her looming beside me felt unreal—a scene from a low-budget TV show.

“Yes.”

She drummed on my desk with her pink nails, adorned with star and moon stickers.

“What’s wrong with you?”

None of your business. I owe you no explanations. If my performance displeases you, you know how to fix it. Otherwise, leave me alone.

“Nothing. Personal matters.”

Her plastered cordial smile slipped into the disdain beneath. She stiffened, and tilted her head slightly.

“We’re behind on this project, and I’m out of excuses. Take a breath and get to work, okay?”

Before I could reply, she glided to another wing of the office.

Outside the forest, I needed armor against the world—a beast sheathed in metal spikes. I’d forced myself to act like a servant of society, but among pines, beside her, my words and actions flowed unscripted. How could I not ache to shut my eyes and reopen them to find her lying beside me?

Our conversations revealed that any mention of the world beyond the clearing overwhelmed her. Half her replies twisted my questions, as if translated through another language. Thankfully, her madness flew under conscious radar. The clearing and its pines satisfied her; she craved no other lands. I admired her like nobility from an exotic realm, her customs endlessly fascinating.

The next morning, at the office, I organized tasks and fought to focus, but an invisible force tugged me away from the blinking cursor and sea of cubicles. Heatwaves drowned me. When I turned my head, the office quaked like during an earthquake.

I thought it was noon, but my wristwatch showed minutes to one. I stared at the back and black hair of the colleague across from me; the next moment, my supervisor materialized beside me, and the colleague’s chair sat empty, his screen saver dancing. She stood rigid while frowning at papers to avoid my gaze.

“Today.” Her tone implied she was sparing me insults. “Meet the deadlines. Your colleagues have enough on their plates.”

The rest of the day, I tracked the blur of her swinging ponytail through glass partitions and screens. Fifteen minutes before clock-out, when I’d be spared from bumping into my supervisor, I slipped away.

That night, I slept in fits. Pressure pulsed in my skull. Lying on my back, headlights streaking through blinds to cast geometric shapes on the ceiling, my eyes burned as if soaked in saltwater.

Before meeting my woman, I’d breeze through tasks and scavenge an hour to wander online. If I wasted the night sweating into my sheets, tomorrow I’d battle drooping eyelids. If I slept, the alarm would yank me awake, leaving just minutes to shower, dress, eat, and commute to the office, where I’d race deadlines. Every hour dictated its use. Daily, the minutes clamped my neck like tightening pliers. Yet at dawn, I’d show up at work and polish my overdue work, whatever the cost.

The next morning, I sat at my desk, and as the computer booted, my supervisor’s silhouette slid across the mosaic of glass toward my area. I straightened. She met a figure in the office center—a man around sixty, gray buzzcut, square glasses. Whenever he appeared, the baseball chatter died. My coworkers stiffened; their chairs fell silent. He entered a meeting room, leaving the door ajar.

I glanced over my shoulder. The supervisor marched toward me. Our eyes met; hers flicked away as if spotting a cockroach. Her heels clacked over keyboards and coughs. Stopping beside me, she fixed her gaze left of my monitor. Citrus perfume cascaded from her neck.

“To the meeting room.”

She tugged at a wrinkle in her skirt, then click-clacked away. She disappeared into the meeting room, from which the scraping of chairs and somber voices emerged.

The throbbing in my temples reddened my view of the cursor stranded on the spreadsheet. I gathered my notebook and pen, cleared the browser history, and shut down the computer. Ears taut, I fled the office.

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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 reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.

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The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.

In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.

I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.

That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.

As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.

She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.

“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”

“I’ll talk with you.”

I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.

“Want to sit?”

She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.

I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.

Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.

Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?

I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.

My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?

I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?

I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.

Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.

Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.

“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You want me here?”

“In the morning?”

“I work.”

Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.

“Please.”

That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.

Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.

It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.

I called, asking for a supervisor.

“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”

I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.

I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.

The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.

I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.

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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 reinos de brea.