Tag: fiction

Review: Wanitokagegisu, by Minoru Furuya

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas12 Comments

The title apparently translates to “Stomiiformes”, which is, according to Google, “an order of deep-sea ray-finned fishes”. This is the fourth series I’ve read of this author, after “Saltiness”, “Ciguatera” and “Himizu”. Furuya has become my third favorite author after Shūzō Oshimi and Inio Asano, and this series is my third most favorite of his.

The tale follows a thirty-two-year-old ugly loner who has been working the night shift as a security guard at a supermarket for seven years. A single event defined his youth: during a class in which the students were ordered to hold hands, everybody made a point of avoiding to hold the protagonist’s. Afterward the teacher berated his classmates for being so hurtful, but some girls rebelled and yelled that they didn’t want to hold his hand because he was gross and creepy. As soon as the protagonist became an adult, he went out of his way to avoid people and live as quietly as possible. However, we are introduced to him the moment he fears that he’s missing out, that he’s letting his life pass by. He has made a habit of going to the roof of the building at which he works, getting undressed to his underwear and running laps, but that night, as his anxiety grows, he makes a childish wish to the universe: for someone to become his friend.

Recently he had noticed that someone was spying on him from the shadows of a nearby apartment building as the protagonist ran laps on the roof. On top of that, some sneaky bastard starts leaving notes to him that state that the protagonist is about to go crazy and die before the end of the year. So far the only positive development in his life is that he meets his next door neighbor, who is a beautiful, tall, big-breasted young woman who aspires to become a published writer.

This story contains all the elements of a classic Minoru Furuya tale: an outcast protagonist who has trouble relating to people properly and who experiences intrusive thoughts; some of such thoughts are incarnated into creatures (humans and wild animals in this series, otherworldly “demons” in the other stories); silly humor; unpredictable behaviors; hardcore sequences that should have traumatized the involved characters but that end up having few lasting consequences; secondary characters that impact the protagonist as they play their role, but that then disappear forever; and the sense that by opening yourself up to others or even interacting with them, you are courting disaster.

Through the protagonist we meet a homeless gambler who’s running from the Yakuza; a wired young man who is in love with (and stalks) a dangerous woman; a pea-brained, big-dicked security guard who dreams of becoming rich and popular; a sociopathic hikikomori who murdered his depressive, alcoholic father; a possibly schizoid security guard who has never opened up to others and that if he does he risks finding out the extent of how fucked up he is; a gang of thugs who steal cars; an aging pleasure seeker who’s looking for a way to break up with her murderous Yakuza lover, etc. In the middle of it all, our unfortunate protagonist attempts in his fumbling way to improve other people’s circumstances, even to his detriment.

Most fiction writers, men and women, tend to dump plenty of their own flaws into their protagonists, then they also create romantic interests for those protagonists that in real life wouldn’t even deign to look at them. It rarely bothers me; after all, real life is shit and we ought to escape from it as often as possible. However, I had a especially hard time believing that a beautiful, tall, big-breasted aspiring writer would be interested in this story’s protagonist, who is ugly, unkempt, lacks any interesting hobbies or talents, has few social skills, works a dead-end job, and has never even kissed a girl. I did, however, like the character of that aspiring writer (who does very little actual writing in the story) although I couldn’t believe in most of her motivations. Her relationship with the protagonist becomes the spine of this story right up to the end, so if you can’t buy into it, you may have an issue with this series.

I have come to this story after I finished reading Furuya’s “Himizu”, a mostly serious work in which the author seemed like he was restraining himself from breaking into silliness. I much prefer the demented interactions between his characters that somewhat often end up involving sexual references and/or exhibitionism.

I’ve felt a kinship with this author ever since I started reading “Saltiness”, that remains my favorite series of his. In this story I’m reviewing, the author comments through his protagonist that he feels that his brain lacks something that would allow him to relate to other human beings as it seemingly comes easily to most other people, so naturally I suspect that he may also be autistic and in addition have OCD due to how often he depicts intrusive thoughts in his protagonists, who are often arguing with mental ghosts. So if you want to experience what a nightmare existing in such brains can be, I guess you could do much worse than going through this author’s works.

Review: Himizu, by Minoru Furuya

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Reseñas6 Comments

Minoru Furuya has become my third most favorite manga author after Shūzō Oshimi and Inio Asano, thanks to his series ‘Saltiness’ and ‘Ciguatera’. His stories follow underdogs whose mental peculiarities (OCD and autism are the most likely culprits for me) and shitty luck prevent them from realistically aspiring to anything better than an average life. The author consistently represents, in the three series of his that I’ve read, intrusive thoughts as strange, sometimes demonic entities that stalk the protagonist; I ended up doing the same thing for a novel of mine even before I knew about Furuya’s works, so this must be a result of how certain types of brains operate.

Anyway, the protagonist of this bleak series (by far the most humorless of the three) lives at a shack that also functions as a boat shop. It belongs to his father, but the old man bailed on his family to become a drunkard and a gambler. Now his teenage son has to run the business, because his mother is focused on finding a new husband.

The protagonist is fed up with life from the moment we are introduced to him. As he mentions a few times throughout the story, he knows he came from garbage and that he’s little more than a defective idiot. He tries to regulate his thoughts and actions so he won’t stray from the path that may lead him to live a regular, mediocre life, and he holds a grudge towards anyone who dares to pursue lofty dreams, as he believes that those people are delusional and blind to the fact that they are doomed to fall. He wishes to struggle and perform some grandiose good deed that would justify his existence, but he fears that as a broken person coming from a ruinous family, his destiny has already been decided.

One day his mother elopes with her new lover, never to be seen again. Our protagonist, deprived of parental support, decides to quit going to school and just runs his father’s boat shop. Soon enough, though, he comes to learn through a couple of Yakuza types that visit the boat shop that his father’s debts may become the protagonist’s responsibility as well.

As interesting characters other than the main guy we have the following: the protagonist’s only friend, an ugly, short, nearly toothless kleptomaniac who nevertheless isn’t as cursed as the protagonist because he doesn’t have the same perennially bleak outlook on life; an aspiring manga author who works as a counterbalance to the protagonist with his determined work ethic and confidence in his talent; and a reserved but tough female classmate of the protagonist who is attracted to him for some reason, and who wants to improve his miserable life.

This author’s characters, in the three series I’ve read of his, can often surprise you with their unpredictability. Some writers warn against using “and then” plot points; they suggest that every plot point must be a “but” or “therefore” regarding one or more plot points that came before. However, this author includes some sequences or scenes that in many stories would have long-lasting repercussions or be pivotal to the development of the plot, but in these stories life just goes on, or the important people fail to ever find out that the event happened. To put an extreme example, in one of the three series (won’t say in which), some secondary characters rape one of the main characters, but none of the main characters, including the victim, ever find out about it. On the topic of rape, there’s plenty of strange and/or sudden sexual stuff going on in this author’s works, even as mild as a character suddenly pulling his or her pants down, or fingering someone else. The violence included can often be equally sudden.

They made a live-action version of this story. Here’s the trailer. I haven’t watched the movie yet; apparently the director intended to follow the manga faithfully until the whole tsunami and nuclear disaster of 2011 happened, so they included that in to offer some commentary and a more hopeful message than what this series supports. So far I can tell they made at least one change I consider questionable: in the manga the protagonist’s father was constantly in a drunken daze, but he was never overtly cruel nor dismissive towards his son; the protagonist despised his father because he abandoned his family, and after that point there was nothing the old man could have done to improve their relationship.

It’s a shame that I have already read the three series generally considered this author’s best.

We’re Fucked, Pt. 64 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial4 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A panicked mass of survival instinct kicks in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI-generated images of Leire from ‘We’re Fucked’

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

I’m still two-fifths of the way through the last draft of the 64th chapter, but I have been sending prompts to the neural network that generates images on some supercomputer; it merely requires me to input a sentence. So here are some depictions of Leire, the protagonist of my ongoing novel.

This one is so ‘Uzumaki’ that the neural network must have been trained on Junji Ito’s works; I merely included ‘falls in spiral through a vortex’ as part of the prompt

As a bonus, here’s a portrait of Spike’s decapitated head:

We’re Fucked, Pt. 64: AI-generated images

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

I have finished the first draft of the next chapter of my ongoing novel, but as I was working on it I kept generating images with the neural network that runs on a supercomputer, feeding it prompts about the images I had in my head. The results have been interesting, and some horrifying.

Although chapter 64 isn’t out in the wild yet, maybe this sequence of images can work as an intriguing teaser. Probably in the future I will only post an entry with all the related images after I’ve uploaded the corresponding chapter, though.

EDIT: here’s the link to chapter sixty-four.

Although the bunnyman doesn’t show up in the next chapter, I made the unforgivable mistake of asking the neural network to generate images of him. No wonder Leire behaves likes she does.

I don’t want to end this entry on such a note, so here’s a generated picture of Jacqueline:

We’re Fucked, Pt. 63 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacqueline sighs and tenses her thighs around mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacqueline’s tits tremble against mine as she giggles.

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

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

Jacqueline caresses my face with both hands.

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

I envision a cruise ship exploding in a gigantic fireball.

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

Jacqueline stretches like a cat in the sun.

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

“So do the sweat-eating bacteria.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re Fucked, Pt. 62 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Thermae Romae, by Mari Yamazaki

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, ReseñasLeave a comment

The postface the author wrote for each volume of this series is titled ‘Rome & baths, the loves of my life,’ and it shows. She clearly had a blast producing this manga, which gave her the opportunity to immerse herself in those two obsessions for years.

It’s an isekai (for the uncultured swine among you, that’s a genre tremendously popular in Japan that usually consists in a Japanese person getting transported somehow, usually by truck-related means, to a fantasy world that more often than not is loosely based on Europe during the Age of Enlightenment but with cute elves and such. There are exceptions, though, as in the case of this story). The protagonist, an architect/engineer from the Roman Empire, gets inexplicably transported via increasingly contrived plot devices to contemporary Japan, from the seventies up to the modern day. He would love nothing more than to serve Rome well and cleanse the worries and pains of the population through the baths he gets hired to build, and when he gets teleported to Japan, he discovers a previously unknown race, to which he constantly refers with an ethnic slur, who appreciate baths even more than Roman citizens do. Most of the story is therefore about this Roman engineer figuring out how to take advantage of Japanese customs and inventions so he can improve his homeland, even though he can’t understand a single word that comes out of their mouths.

We go through the expected hijinks and more, but the story quickly turns serious as powerful people take note of the protagonist’s talents: the emperor Hadrian ends up becoming one of the main characters, and we also follow Marcus Aurelius from time to time, a teen during the events of the story; history ended up remembering Marcus Aurelius as a stoic philosopher due to his ‘Meditations’ and his wise rule.

It’s a shame that this manga isn’t well-known; I had no clue it existed until Netflix of all places released the trailer for its upcoming anime. The only thing that bothered me about this series is that the way the protagonist gets transported to Japan and back kept getting increasingly ridiculous and convenient, as the situation that the protagonist faced was almost always related to some problem he needed to solve at home, but if you accept like he did eventually that some Roman goddess (mainly Diana) wanted to use him for the glory of Rome, you can roll with it. Other than that, the author has a great sense of humor, the attention to detail and the research that went into it are typically Japanese, and I had a blast throughout. If you love both Japan and ancient Rome about as much as I do, you probably owe it to yourself to read this manga.

Review: The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, ReseñasLeave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re Fucked, Pt. 61 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial3 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s talk,” Jacqueline says.

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

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

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

“I can’t hold it in anymore, Leire.”

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

“W-well, what is it?”

“Leire, do you have telekinetic powers?”

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

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

Jacqueline stares at me intently as her forehead creases.

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

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

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

Jacqueline touches her temples as if they ached.

“Leire… there was nobody in the bathroom.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I suspect you would have.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I chuckle bitterly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jacqueline fiddles with a strand of my hair.

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

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

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

“You should be the expert on that subject.”

I rub my eyes and take a deep breath.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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