To render moments of this chapter, I relied on a neural network that churns out mesmerizing masterpieces as long as you pay that artificial intelligence a monthly wage for it (which is fine; great work should be rewarded). A second neural network, one trained on anime and furry shit, also helped.
The following images are related to chapter 80 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
I have posted many, many entries that feature AI-generated images: check them out.
I rest my forehead on the windowpane, that barely insulates the office from the cold of this November sunset. My breath fogs the glass. Our star is a cream pie on which someone has landed ass-first, splashing its pinkish-orange filling all over the sky. The fat storm clouds that drift by are dyed the color of dried blood; mixed with the charcoal-black of the clouds themselves, they resemble stains on the clothes of plague victims.
As sound waves pour from the speaker of my cellphone down my ear canal, I close my eyes and rely on my echolocation to render the scene that’s taking place at home: Jacqueline, my queenly beloved, is explaining the purpose of a cellphone to our adopted daughter Nairu, who contributes high-pitched vocalizations of nonsense syllables, sounding more like a fairy than a human child. The forms of the two females, sculpted in obsidian, stand on the carpet of that remote living room, framed against the shapes in relief of the cabinet and the widescreen TV.
My chest feels hollowed out with longing. I’m craving something sweet, warm and moist. I wish I were lounging on the sofa with my girlfriend and our Nairu, but the clock is ticking on the evening hours, and I need to progress my programming tasks for this job that sucks the joy and wonder out of my life.
Through the phone’s speaker comes a rustle, followed by Jacqueline’s sultry voice. Her full lips must be brushing the plasticky surface of her phone, spattering it, blessing it, with microscopic particles of saliva.
“I won’t get Nairu to understand the concept of a phone today, but she misses her other mommy. That’s what I wanted her to convey to you, sweetie.”
I’m touched by my girlfriend’s attempt to comfort and cheer me up, but am I capable of tending to a child’s needs to the extent that she would appreciate me as a mother? Thankfully, Nairu would become a functional adult even if she grew up as a stray; the Ice Age gifted us an Asian kid tempered in the boreal cold, who survived her skirmishes against an ensemble of Paleolithic megafauna. Grade A material.
My voice comes out in a croak, as if a lump was blocking my throat. I swallow hard to dislodge it.
“She must have been cuddling with you all afternoon, so she has likely forgotten that I exist.”
Jacqueline giggles. Nairu was babbling in the background when a flash startles me. A porcelain-white vine of lightning, twisted and barbed, has streaked through the thick belly of a storm cloud, burning its image into that gray slug filled with rain. The electric crackle sends a shiver down my spine, then a shudder forces me to narrow my shoulders. I imagine myself as a critter caught outside during a storm in the tropics: a tree snail clinging onto a mangrove to weather nature’s wrath.
“Eide?” Nairu asks over the phone.
She remembers me! Her worried voice sounded like a cat meowing at a screen that shows her missing owner.
“Help me, Nairu! I’m trapped in this futuristic device!”
Jacqueline’s laugh comes through like a bell pealing over the hilltops. Nairu’s high-pitched voice dwindles to a murmur; I picture my beloved holding the phone to her own ear with one hand while her other strokes the child’s Paleolithic hair.
“I’m sure she fears that you may get attacked by any of the monsters she encountered in the Ice Age, yet you go and tease her. If anything like that would happen, you’d be a goner, little missy. They would consider you a delicious breakfast buffet, the tastiest and nuttiest prey in their hunting ground. So do I, for that matter.”
“Those beasts weren’t monsters, though. Just misunderstood.”
“Even so, the trick is to survive. Fortunately, Nairu’s tummy is full. No danger that she might starve to death. And like you suspect, we have been cuddling all afternoon. She has also discovered the wonders of animated movies. A Pixar one, we got it paused now.”
Despite the distance between us, Jacqueline sounded so snug, like a fur pelt draped over my shoulders, that I can picture myself pressed up against her on the sofa, instead of standing in this brightly-lit, air-conditioned office as I gaze out past the reflection of my computer screen at the thickening gloom of the twilight. Those storm clouds resemble an avalanche of dirty snow sliding across the sky in slow motion.
“Our adopted nugget may be considered insane by today’s standards,” I say, “but she can still enjoy the visual feast presented by 3D environments and characters on a widescreen television. Glad you’re keeping her fed and warm in that glass-encased bubble while I risk my life in this forest of cement and metal. In any case, which Pixar movie were you watching? I hope you chose one of the classics, instead of the turds they’ve been pushing out since they got gobbled up by that demonic mouse, a slobbering beast that has hijacked children’s imagination.”
Jacqueline’s response drowns in a thunderclap like a cannon shot, one that ripples through my body. My arms tense up, my toes curl in my socks and shoes. Above the flat roof of the opposite building, whose silhouette resembles a tombstone, I glimpse the afterimage of the lightning bolt. A drifting cloud has unveiled the moon and its silvery haze: a thinning scab on a bruised sky.
“Did you hear the thunder, Jacqueline?” I ask in a rough voice.
“Poor thing, you must feel like I called from another dimension. I’m just a ten minute drive away from you. But yes, a thunderstorm is rolling in, honey. It may turn nasty soon.”
The part of me that retains a percentage of genes from a dog, procured by some freaky ancestor of mine, wants to yank open the window and stick my head out, so I can bathe my face in cold air that must smell of rain. Being trapped in this dead office instead of spending the evening with Jacqueline and our girl makes me long for an earthquake or flood to strike, for me to see the streets choked with mud, and cars crushed under heaps of debris.
I rub my eyes and take a deep breath to scrub from my mind the yearning for another cataclysm, one that would leave this planet exposed to the starlight.
“A-anyway, what movie did you pick, my statuesque queen of love and lust?”
Jacqueline giggles.
“Toy Story, dear.”
“Ah, the classic tale involving a murderous cowboy and a clueless space marine. An original, daring narrative that wouldn’t get produced in today’s industry. The 3D humans in that one would traumatize me even now, but… has Nairu ever seen a toy in person?”
“Well, they carved figurines out of wood, right? The Ice Age peoples, I mean.”
“Nairu contradicts some basic assumptions about a child’s knowledge that would make the movie work. When we buy her toys, won’t she assume that they’ll spark to life the moment she looks away, even though they’re made of plastic or some other non-biological material?”
“That may be the case, but wouldn’t it make her world more magical and wondrous?”
“Or sordid and disturbing. I wouldn’t have wanted my toys to know what I did in the privacy of my bedroom. Particularly the stuffed triceratops with the yellow plaid bowtie, who stared blankly at me while I lay in bed with my panties around my ankles, trying to achieve the perfect orgasm. What if the dinosaurs talked to each other? ‘Hey, did you catch sight of the human doing it to herself?’ I would have felt like a pervert.”
Jacqueline must have pulled the phone away from her mouth to muffle a laugh. When she speaks again, her giggle-like tone warms everything within its reach, like the heat emanating from the belly of a giant furnace.
“You should have locked up the stuffie, locked him away and kept your shameful secret a secret. Anyway, I promise you that Nairu loved the spectacle on screen; she gaped and gaped at the talking toys. So focus on what truly matters, my girl: plenty of love is flooding from both of our hearts towards the tiny sweetie that you took out of the ice.”
I nod at Jacqueline’s distant presence, although I’m picturing her assemblage of dildos and vibrators doddering around in her wardrobe like stoic, limbless soldiers, leaving trails of lubricants with each stump-step. They clamber over the piles of external hard drives that store hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of our lovemaking sessions, as well as of the fabled girls that Jacqueline employed to build her porn empire. I imagine myself sitting at the edge of mommy’s bed, facing my reflection in the mirrored wardrobe as her dildoes and vibrators knock and knock on the inside of the door, vying for the privilege of joining me in a muggy session of self-worship. They are calling to me with dollish voices meant to sound melodic: “Hello, Jacqueline’s cummer! Do you need assistance? We are here to serve your needs, little lady!” My own voice interferes: “Come on, motherfucking dildos and dongs, let me get inside this stinking sack of skin so I can taste my own flesh, so I can be submerged in a sea of pleasure, so I can feel something besides the excruciating pressure of my brain against my skull. To hell with you dicks. The last thing I need is a swarm of cocks and pricks crowding my crotch!”
I shudder, then bite my lower lip to keep from giggling, or crying out in distress.
Lightning zigzags along the night sky, and as its glare whitens the windowpanes, I’m left with the afterimage of a black blot suspended in the air between the glass and the opposite office building. A vulture-sized bug? The blot is accompanied by the blurry images of the long desk, the three chairs and the rectangular glow of my monitor. As the booming rumble of thunder sweeps through the business park, a realization prickles the hairs on my nape: I glimpsed a reflection. Or maybe the blot is me.
I look over my shoulder. At the other end of the office, on the lily-white wall, a tar-black stain is growing like ink bleeding into paper, like oil leaking from a deep puncture hole.
Lightning-lizards lurk outside, spreading out their glow into the room while jagged hairline cracks hover in front of me, superposed to the vision of the office and its flickering ceiling-mounted lamps, as if I were encased in scratched glass. My nostrils fill with the odour of burnt ozone.
A crackle of thunder reverberates through my bones and makes my blood surge hotly toward my groin. The hairline cracks have vanished, replaced by a uniform, flawless plane. I am one with the glass.
The black blob on the wall, engulfing a larger patch of white, pulsates as it swells, bulges out in viscous globs like a toilet backing up, and oozes down in gooey tendrils. Light-snakes from the ceiling-mounted lamps are wriggling on the slimy, visceral mass, a glistening murk that has gouged a hole in my skull and is crawling through my gray matter like a centipede.
My vision wavers; the world is swimming. I’m bobbing up to my nose in a gelatinous sea that tastes of vinegar and fish guts. I shiver at the flapping sound of fat membranes uncurling, at the feel of viscid tissue-matter sticking to my skin. Lightning bolts illuminate the waves in stroboscopic flashes, making them resemble a seething kelp forest, while I thrash my limbs around to stay afloat against the churning currents.
From the phone that my right hand is gripping comes crinkly static, the sound of aluminum foil rustling. As the interference scratches my eardrum, a honeyed voice breaks through, floods my mind and envelops my thoughts like a welcoming womb:
“Leire, are you still there? That was some strange lightning phenomenon, must have messed up with the electronics. Thankfully I bought some overvoltage protectors.”
My heart is pumping in my throat. When I open my mouth to speak, my tongue flaps uselessly, and I only manage to exhale a pent-up breath.
“Leire?” Jacqueline insists. “You okay, honey? I can hear you breathing on the phone.”
I miss her luminous allure, that even before we started dating enticed me to steal glances at her. I miss the taste of her silky skin, like an ambrosial mixture of rosehip and milk. I miss the way her panties stick to her slit when she gets wet. I miss the feel of her long fingers kneading my flesh, of her nails scratching the skin of my back. I miss the firmness of her nipples grazing my breasts, the softness of her thighs wrapping around my face as I inhale the hot and juicy tang of her insides. I miss her gasps, sighs and moans during the throes of our lust-frenzy.
I picture the inverted triangle of prominent features that make up Jacqueline’s ivory-white visage: her penetrating cobalt-blues at the two upper vertices, and her full lips at the lower vertex. She’s standing in front of me in her peacoat and turtleneck sweater as the November wind tousles her hair. Jacqueline is my sole lighthouse, a beacon amidst the storm of insanity that rages inside and outside of me.
A croaking voice pours forth through the speaker embedded in my neck, where the voicebox and throat structure must be housed.
“Yeah, I’m still here, my goddess of delights, mistress of dreams. No time for a Pixar flick now, though. Overvoltage probably fried the electronics in my brain.”
Jacqueline’s laughter echoes into the farthest recesses of my being.
“You’re right. I’d love to keep you on the phone when I can’t keep you in my arms, but the sooner you finish that boring stuff, the sooner you can get your butt over here. And once you return to me… I may show you something special.”
“As in I won’t be able to peel your pussy away from my face?”
“Oh, I’ll open myself up to you in plenty of ways,” she answers with a sensual drawl that slithers down to my toes. “You have yet to experience some of my best moves, darling. Bye-bye for now!”
Once Jacqueline clicks off, the warmth evaporates, replaced by a tar-black blob that has encroached upon a huge chunk of the wall, a hole that sucks all hope through its bottomless whirlpool.
Author’s note: the five songs for today are “Man on the Moon” by R.E.M., “Pink Moon” by Nick Drake, “Catch the Wind” by Donovan, “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies, and “Season of the Witch” by Donovan.
I maintain a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-nine songs so far. Check them out.
Hey, are you aware that neural networks can generate intriguing images based on the prompts you send them? I sent a couple of those artificial intelligences plenty of prompts from this chapter. Check out the results.
This chapter kicks off a new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” You can read any of the previous chapters of this novel through this link.
A child’s vocal cords produce utterances of confusion close to my right ear, noises like those of a tourist who has been reduced to rely on primal vocalizations. A small head is resting on my arm, and I smell the shampoo and conditioner that cleaned that hair and scalp.
Am I a prisoner in some dark cave, or a homeless bum living in an alleyway, or a guru who takes orders from the voices in my head? I blink away the fog of drowsiness. I must have fallen asleep like a slug in its tiny burrow.
Behold, the glowing flower of a child’s face, with her chin tucked under a lemonade-pink scarf. Her smooth skin is tinged sand orange by the closest streetlamp, with paprika-red shadows. In her monolid eyes, and surrounded by the sclera, her irises and pupils have merged into dark circles. Nairu is sinking her gaze deep into the tunnel of my eyes, that leads straight to madness.
She sniffles, then wipes her runny nose with the sleeve of her wool sweater. A glint of sentience must have returned to my eyes; Nairu arches her eyebrows and repeats the utterances of confusion while pointing at the sky. She seeks my input, although I’m the kind of woman who wanders naked into a boreal forest.
I gasp, breathing in cold air. Don’t tell me she has spotted a UFO! About time I witnessed one of them. I picture a spacecraft shaped like a watch battery, hovering higher than the tallest mountain around. The stars are reflected in its silvery, mirror-like top half. In the underside, the gravity-bending propulsion engines, likely powered by a black hole, phosphoresce in shades of green, red and yellow as they interact with the atmosphere. Are there lifeforms riding the craft? They may be alien truckers that have pulled over for the night at their equivalent of a rest area, and tomorrow they will resume the trip back to their star system. Once they supply the hydrogen and helium they siphoned from Jupiter, they’ll waste their wages at some alien brothel.
The sky is painted onyx black. From the left, the canopy of an evergreen tree has sneaked into the frame. The coalesced silhouette of its leaves and branches resembles a hoarfrost-covered lung.
Nairu jabs her finger at the sky while she babbles in her long-extinct language.
“A-am I this drowsy,” I ask, “or is Nairu pointing at nothing?”
“I think that’s the point, darling,” Jacqueline says in a low voice from my left.
I gasp.
“I-is she trying to warn us that it’s over, that the end has come?”
“Baby, she’s telling us this isn’t the sky she grew up with.”
“Ah, of course. This is how the heavens ended up after the apocalypse.”
Can a woman who grew up like a rat, scurrying around the streets until she reached her sordid shelter, imagine how the dome of the sky looked like before the mythological age? The heavens would have been ablaze with a billion pinpricks of red, yellow, white and blue light, kaleidoscopic diamonds strewn across a carpet of indigo velvet. Among the glittering embers of the stars, among the amoeba-shaped nebulas, I would have recognized the shapes of Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia and many other constellations, the gods that watched over our affairs from their far-flung thrones. Every night our gaze would have drifted towards the stars. Hypnotized like moths, our hair would become infused with celestial phenomena, and our eyes would gleam in the cold starlight as we soaked up the silver song of the cosmos.
Even the beasts that agonized in a pool of blood, while their festering wounds flashed with burning pain, knew that their spirit would escape and ascend to milky river overhead, where they would float in the sparkling current forever. But the celestial curtain was torn apart; the nightly sky fell like a collapsed ceiling, crushing our ancestors. Now, when humans look up from their earthly hell at night, they face an ocean of blackness, and during the day, the dying sun hangs out in the sky like an aged streetlight.
Some nights, the glowing trails of meteor streaks cross-section a silent sky: reminders of the cosmic hazards that threaten us far above the corpses of ancient cities. Our Earth, as it races unflinchingly toward her fate like a suicidal teen dashing across a highway, bathes in a major meteor stream twice a year, where millions of pieces of a long-fragmented comet, from glassy gravel to iron balls the size of football fields, plummet through the vacuum faster than a rifle bullet.
I blow a billowing white puff towards the sky, then I knead Nairu’s warm hand with my icy fingers.
“Yes, all that bright light is gone,” I say in a quavering voice while the chill pierces my bones. “You have noticed because you aren’t blind yet. Now, where could they have hidden the stars without them cracking or shattering? I know the truth, even though I don’t understand it.”
The darkness has blotted out the moon, or else that celestial eye and its ghostly glow hang out of frame. Its sclera has been corroded into dark cerulean patches, and bears star-shaped scars of ejecta from asteroidal impacts. I wish that Jacqueline, Nairu and I could chase after the shimmering reflection of the moon like lunatic bats. Instead, I peer into the black shroud up above us, that looks like the darkness floating inside a trash can full of rainwater. As I slide my gaze around, I spot pinpricks of light, the last vestiges of a candle’s flame, glimmering at the fringes of my sight. If I blink or distract myself, those twinkling dots will be snuffed out. Maybe I’m only imagining them, maybe I’m losing my mind, but what difference does it make to me? And if I focus long enough in the boundless darkness, allowing the stream of photons that traveled for millions of years to penetrate my pupils, I may get a glimpse of Her: Arachne, Lady of the Abyss, Weaver of the Cosmic Web, She who spins the tapestry of time and space, She who trapped the galaxies in Her sticky filaments. She pulls out memories of a billion of our pasts and weaves them into strands around Her fingers. In the end, the cocoon formed out of our selves will serve as a nursery for Her hatching eggs.
I’m hearing a low rumble in the distance, like the noise of an electric guitar being played with a grunge distortion pedal. The wind slaps its frozen fingers against my face. Although my brain is burning up, the cold is numbing my skin and creeping into my body, where it turns the blood into slush. Soon enough my teeth will chatter, the chatter will become a moan, the moan will rise to a howl of despair, and the howl will echo over the frozen earth to the fathomless ocean of empty space, where the fringes of the expanding universe push against the invisible wall that separates us from the unknown. I will hallucinate that I’m a deer running in circles on a desolate tundra, running and running until my hooves crumble into ice shards and the wind smears the last mist of my breath.
What’s that over the black hills? Are those hands crawling up the outer edges of the world? Do they hunt with pincers, claws or talons? Do you grow stronger as you pluck the meat from its sockets? The air tastes of fresh blood, which trickles down the gullets of your dying sisters. Suck the warm lifeblood flowing like sap from the wounds of your enemies. You can’t hold onto the lives of others, or even your own.
A sudden sensation jolts through my body: I’m falling and spinning. The centrifugal force of the Earth in its rotation has flung me out and I’m hurtling towards the black ocean above, in which the worlds are sinking like stones in water.
The hollow noises of footsteps and doors closing echoed in the velvety darkness as I sat on cold, anonymous stairs to escape from a prison of screams and insults. The blood of my ancestors coated my hands, dripped down my elbows and onto the step under my feet, where the blood puddled around my shoes. Its stifling odor, mingled with the sweat pouring out of me, turned into a nauseating wave of bitterness. My mind was like a house whose every door had been slammed shut. I closed my eyes and built shelters in islands and in the canopies of sequoias, I built towers that bristled with anti-tank weapons; anywhere I could rest as a hermit in sealed silence. I imagined the mountains crumbling, the oceans flooding, the sky erupting in a fireball to vaporize everyone except the beasts. In the end, the parting clouds would reveal the stars as they were before the sky cracked and bled.
“How long?” I whispered while tears formed in the corners of my eyes. “How long until She arrives?”
My life back then was a grain of sand compared to the sediment on the seafloor. Even kings and conquerors were icebergs compared to the glaciers beyond. This world will freeze us, burn us, flood us, bury us, wipe us out. Our cells will be devoured by rust. Like soldiers in wartime, humans burrow in trenches to wait out the battle; we pretend that we’re safe while the cannons roar and the shells explode. Yet, in this frozen darkness, two pockets of womb-like warmth remain where I can survive: one to my left and the other to my right. In an echo of the time when history began, in an age about to end, for now Jacqueline, Nairu and I lie nestled together at the center of our web, our own private constellation.
“How long?” I whisper again.
I’ve faced the barbaric, senseless absurdity step by step. The lights will shut off soon enough, so let’s bathe in the cosmic ocean, let’s float in the currents of atoms and energy that flow through this universe. I will take its waters in and quench my thirst.
Author’s note: the three songs for today are “機械仕掛乃宇宙” (Kikaijikake no Uchuu) by Ichiko Aoba, “Emily” by Joanna Newsom, and “Young Lion” by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-four songs so far. Check it out.
Three neural networks competed with each other to render images inspired by this chapter. Two of the AIs lost horribly. Check out the results.
Thus concludes the sequence titled “Who Stole the Stars?” as well as the saga of Nairu the Paleolithic, that started with the sequence “A Gift From the Ice Age” back in chapter 62 (which I posted in the 13th of July). More or less, this chapter also concludes the traditional second act of the story.
It took me about forty-one thousand words to render the setup and ramifications of a single sentence in my original treatment for this novel (long gone; back then I believed it would be a novella), that said, more or less: “Leire travels to the Ice Age and returns with a child.”
The next chapter will kick off a whole new sequence, titled “Cumlord of the Abyss.” I’ve accumulated 4,563 words of notes for it, but the sum of rendered scenes will end up at least twice and a half that length.
Some neural networks excel at recognizing patterns in data, and as if that wasn’t enough, they can extrapolate those patterns into new data. In practice, the AIs involved in this entry study images (millions, perhaps billions of them) and produce new images based on the patterns they have recognized, patterns that you wouldn’t understand even if they explained them to you. Plenty of those images are masterful paintings and compositions far better than anything you will ever create with your mess of a human brain haphazardly cobbled together by evolution, that still believes you are fleeing from predators in a savannah. That’s just how it is. Learn to use AI-generated images as inspiration, because you’ll only rage against the machine in vain.
Anyway, if the measure of density of a chapter is how many images it manages to inspire, chapter 78 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked is hella thicc. Some of the pictures look like anime because one of the neural networks studied anime-like stuff exclusively, plenty of it perverted.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with AI-generated images (twenty-nine so far) through this link.
The breeze blows on the grass and weeds like a whistling ghost. Its cold seeps under my corduroy jacket and leeches the warmth from my bones. I shiver as though I’m sitting naked on the floor of a cavern.
Jacqueline has walked up to us although she risked soiling the soles of her boots, and is towering over my supine self. Her raven-black braid is draped over the thick lapel of her peacoat, but dark indigo highlights are undulating in the windblown loose locks around her ivory-white face, that hovers above me like an earthly moon. A sweet smile settles on her rosy lips, which would feel as soft and supple as the nipples now hidden by her turtleneck sweater and by the reinforced brassiere that supports her prodigious breasts. Her cobalt-blues, beneath which she conceals a thousand secret fountains and grottoes, are piercing deep into my psyche as if to flush my demons out of their hiding spots.
I’d love to stare up in silence at this divine being for the rest of my life; any words would mar the silence. But humans have to acknowledge their mental states through verbal constructs on a regular basis, to distract themselves from the certainty of their impending doom. I wring enough energy out of my bone-tired brain to string together a few words.
“Our adopted daughter vastly overestimated my physical prowess,” I utter in a rusty voice.
Jacqueline narrows her eyes and broadens her smile. She brushes a raven-black lock away from her face.
“Sure, but she already trusts you enough to know that you would save her from a nasty fall.”
“Or maybe she’s that reckless and self-destructive.”
Jacqueline chuckles.
“That may be part of it. She has taken quite a shine to you, hasn’t she?”
“A nice glow-in-the-dark shine. Enough to travel with me across spacetime to our wretched present.”
Nairu’s warm breath is tickling the base of my neck. This Paleolithic creature deserves a bit of paradise, with food to eat, a wide-open sky, trees for shade, and grass for chewing.
My mind gets inundated with images of that boreal forest from which I snatched our girl. A lump rises to my throat. Nairu’s abandoned kin must have prayed to their gods and devils to be spared from the unspeakable apocalypse that befell them. I wish I could leap forward another ten thousand years and disappear from this sickening age of mass destruction and despair.
“More importantly now,” Jacqueline says warmly, “even in this growing cold, you two look comfortable. Don’t mind if I join you.”
As Jacqueline crouches, she smooths her plaid skirt over her thighs, then she lies down sideways beside me, resting her face on her palm. The close-up of her regal visage in the dark makes me feel like a cat snuggled up by a radiator.
“Jacqueline, thank you for everything,” I say in a strained voice that risks becoming a broken whisper. “For welcoming this new daughter of ours into your home. For being here with me in this park. For existing at all in this insane world, when most of everything has come and gone.”
Jacqueline’s eyes glimmer. She softens her gaze and blows air through her nostrils. The vaporized exhalation lingers between our faces.
She slides a hand behind my head, brushing the top of Nairu’s, to cradle my nape. My beloved leans her face down and kisses me on the lips. She pushes her tongue into my mouth while her fingers entwine themselves in my hair. I take a whiff of her fragrance, a flower garden blooming with myriad blossoms. When Jacqueline pulls away, my heart is pounding in my ears like a tribal drum.
“You’re welcome, sweetie,” she whispers. “Isn’t it nice to feel the grass beneath us and hear the sound of the wind in the trees?”
“I’ve been far worse.”
She nuzzles my nose with hers.
“It’s going to be alright, you know.”
I swallow to loosen my throat.
“As long as you’re around, I’m sure it will be fine. If you become to Nairu even a fraction of the loving mommy you are to me, she’ll be happy.”
Growing up I only integrated bad examples of motherhood, so I’ll have to avoid turning into the kind of mom that forgets her daughter’s name, locks her out in the freezing rain, keeps her chained in the cellar, or hands her over to a warlord.
Jacqueline rests her head next to mine on the grass. With the tip of her index finger, she traces the seam of my upper lip.
“And I have no intention of ever giving you up,” she says in a deep purring voice.
“E-even after ten thousand years of brutal struggles, wars, earthquakes, plagues, ice ages and extinctions? Even after the human race disintegrates, leaving only scattered tribes of primitive savages? Even after the Earth becomes a burnt cinder drifting in the void?”
She slips her lips and tongue along the rim of my ear.
“Even if you get old and wrinkly,” she murmurs in my eardrum.
Jacqueline has stirred the water in the teapot within me; as its contents heat up, they slosh around and boil, threatening to scald my internal organs. I’d love to take my clothes off then roll around naked over every inch of mommy’s skin, with the zest of a dog that comes across a mud puddle in a park and rushes to turn itself into a swamp monster.
The wind gusts a long-ass moan through the leafless tree branches as the night takes a chillier turn. Nairu slides down from my chest, squeezing my right tit through my shirt and bra, and nestles against my shoulder as if to sniff my armpit. The three of us huddle together like house cats napping in a wrinkled blanket.
My limbs feel heavy and stiff, like sacks of sand strapped to my torso. I’m slipping into a languid trance. I close my eyes and unmoor my mind, which has grown fuzzy with drowsiness, so that it paints on the canvas of soft blackness whatever insane spectacle it pleases.
The first pinkish streaks of morning light stain an ethereal sky. A yellow sun appears, spreading waves of liquid gold. But the sky cracks open as if a projectile punched through the stratosphere, that sheds its pale inner membrane down over the horizon like a dirty gauze while the culprit, a rotund creature with shaggy, burnt umber fur outlined in buttermilk-yellow light, falls towards me with leisurely gravity.
The beast’s leathery snout gleams with its own sticky sap. On either side of a chalk-white face, the roughly nostril-sized eyes, two black holes into a crumpled universe, betray the monster’s dim-witted gentleness, like that of an uncle who would always lend a helping hand and dispense morsels of dubious advice. At the end of its elongated forelimbs, the inward claws, large as dinner forks, are holding awkwardly a folded, yellowed paper.
When the beast lets go of the paper, it unfolds itself with a dry crackling sound and takes off like a sparrow that had gotten captured and imprisoned in a birdcage. The decrepit paper flutters towards me. It touches my nose, flips over and hovers in front of me, displaying its underside. The paper’s edges are browned and torn, and its coarse surface is sullied with bloody fingerprints, but it contains spidery handwriting in fading red ink and an archaic script.
I am a creature of great mystical power. My name is Dialectos, which in your language means “tongue.” My soul is sustained by the constant stream of dark matter that suffuses every atom of the universe. At the end of my feet I have four toes, and at the end of my tail, two; each of them a gigantic stiletto. I enclose in my wings a tiny sliver of the blackest metal, found at the center of your Milky Way galaxy, where countless stars spin like pinwheels of fire. I do not speak the language of men, or even the tongue of beasts, and yet my speech is known to all living creatures. In the realm of the unseen, you humans and other beasts are like flies upon a wall.
Leire, your ancestors’ bloodlines can be traced to the sphinxes that used to roam your continent like sentient wildcats, before the age of iron and steam engines. I hereby grant you full custody of Nairu, the little orphan from the Paleolithic age, who was exploring the fringes of her community when you kidnapped her, upending her life forever, to bring her past the barrier of the Younger Dryas apocalypse into a world of steel-boned cities, lightbulbs, telephones, radios, televisions, submarines, airplanes, rockets, computers, guns and atomic bombs.
You have violated the sanctity of time and space, as well as diverted the riverlike course of fate, so I shall appoint you to the job of loving the Ice Age child. Although she was born in a distant time, now she belongs to your tribe. You will feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, dress her in pink tutus and slippers, sing her lullabies, cuddle her when she has nightmares, buy her toys, stuff her face with pastries and ice cream, and teach her to play the harp. To help Nairu forget the horrors of the world that your gormless species has created, you will make her life fun and absurd. In return, I promise to reward you with a salary of dark matter.
Under your care, if the child grows into a lovely woman, your name will be inscribed in the Hall of Ancestors at her place of birth. But if you instead become the fiend that haunts the nightmares of children, I will cast you back in time, into a frozen cave where you’ll meet a future self who will ask: “Who are you?” And you shall answer: “I’m Leire, the mommy who lost her daughter.” That I promise and swear on the ancient blood that coats every blade of grass. For the next three thousand years, I shall periodically send you letters so you may remember your mission, and that I am always watching.
Signed this day, at the last hours of the eighth year of the calamity,
Dialectos.
The paper curls itself into a bowtie, then flies away towards the dawn’s light. As the paper shrinks, it ignites into a fluttering white flame against the furnace-red sphere of the sun.
I smile to the darkness of my mind, and imagine my heart hardening to the extent that a thousand years of suffering couldn’t crack it. I want to slice my head off with a kitchen knife, then hold the decapitated head in the sky so that my eyeballs and mouth, dripping red-and-green goo down on humankind’s face, could scream one thing to everyone, even those who loathe me: “I love you.”
Author’s note: the two songs for today are “路標” (“Michishirube“) and “鬼ヶ島” (“Onigashima“), both by the great Ichiko Aoba.
I keep a playlist that contains all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Eighty-one songs so far. Here’s the link.
Two neural networks did AI stuff to render many, many pictures related to this chapter. Here’s the link.
Coaxing two neural networks to produce generated images of whatever nonsense is going on in a chapter creates a strange dynamic: plenty of the stuff they spit out inspires me to go on deranged tangents that in turn send new prompts their way. It’s like having talented creative partners that can’t refuse to cooperate with you no matter how much they’d want to.
I hope you enjoy AI-generated images, because I’m going to post a fuckton of them, all related to chapter 77 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
Nairu has gotten stuck in a dopamine-driven feedback loop, hypnotized by the promise of controlled danger. As she stands on top of the play tower, the streetlamps bathe her in yellow ochre light and shade her features with stark shadows. She lowers herself to the slide and compresses her butt cheeks against the cold metal, then she submits her fate to the interaction of gravity and friction, which bring her in contact with the rubber tarmac. Our girl jumps to her feet and runs to the climbing wall while the white ghosts of her breath pursue her. She leaps to the top of the play tower like a mountain lion.
Our adopted daughter is careening down the slippery metallic surface when the soles of her leather boots squeak. Her legs fold, and she bounces off the slide in a burst of velocity. She sails through the air as if riding the crest of a rollercoaster. Her body plows belly first into the rubber tarmac, which squeezes a yelp out of her lungs.
My heart palpitates in alarm as a wave of dread rolls through me. Nairu lies spread-eagled on a dirty, spongy surface that has absorbed, helped by rainwater, the grime of hundreds of soles and dog paw pads. I witness in a flash the splatter of blood and grey matter that the impact spurted out of our girl’s shattered skull, which remains tethered to the spine by a thin strip of skin. Jacqueline drops to her knees, takes the broken head by its hair, and cradles it against her breasts.
Her ashen face is frozen in a grimace as she glowers at me.
“We failed. We are unfit to be parents. It’s all your fault.”
My muscles twitch in spastic panic. Jacqueline has rushed to Nairu’s aid, but our adopted daughter pushes herself to her knees. She spits dust. My girlfriend was about to kneel beside her when Nairu scrambles to her feet.
“Quite the dramatic fall, darling,” Jacqueline says warmly. “Thankfully you’re fine.”
She brushes dirt off Nairu’s chocolate-stained sweater. The child grins up at her adoptive mother, then giggles and scampers away towards the climbing wall, as if to reclaim her place atop the play tower.
My heart sinks back to my chest. The pilomotor reflex shuts down; slowly, the tiny hairs on my arms go limp. Jacqueline approaches me, strokes my neck and leans in to kiss my hairline.
“Is that how we lived as children?” I ask hoarsely. “After some potentially devastating mishap, we just sprung to our feet and kept playing, instead of remaining traumatized for years?”
Jacqueline sighs, blowing a plume of vapor.
“I wish I could remember. Don’t they say that the majority of cells in your body get replaced every seven to ten years? Or is that a myth?”
“Maybe we never grew up, we just appear to age to our bodies.”
“I have changed,” she says as her fingers comb through the hair on my nape. “If I were to meet my child self, I wouldn’t recognize her.”
“Well, I’m glad that Nairu can giggle like that. I only laugh anymore as an evolutionary mechanism to prevent me from going insane.”
Did we forget about our adopted daughter? She has climbed the tower and is standing on the edge, maybe waiting to be noticed. The closest streetlamp is bathing her in light, giving her a golden tinge, as if framed against the sunset sky. The shadow cast on her left cheek is inky black.
If I controlled her body, I’d make her step back, but I can barely make myself understood by the Paleolithic child. I walk closer, the same way an onlooker would approach the façade of a building if she had spotted a child leaning over the windowsill on a high floor. I’ve known our adopted daughter for less than a day, but if she were to fall and break her neck, the memory would petrify inside my brain, and for the rest of my life, most of the blood and thoughts would need to flow around the tumorous stone.
“H-hey, Nairu, please be careful. You’re going to end up looking like a modern sloth again.”
I’m paralyzed under the weight of her inscrutable gaze. I feel like I’m the kid and she’s the parent, but then again, I would have perished in hours back at that boreal forest where Nairu lived and played. Why would I pretend to know the right answers, when in my own daydream I let a child slide down a kilometric slide-grater that reduced her to a waxy pile of death?
The corners of Nairu’s mouth curl up in a mischievous smile, as if she had imagined herself slipping a caterpillar into someone’s hand as a prank, and she could barely contain the giggles at the thought of the ensuing freak-out. She grins, then flings her arms out wide, bends her knees and leans forward.
“W-wait, what are you doing?!” I exclaim.
She leaps from the edge towards me like a linebacker hurling himself into a tackle. I hurry to catch her. When the few dozen kilograms of girl body hit my chest, the electricity in my heart crackles, the muscles along my back shudder with strain, and most of my breath rushes out of my lungs.
My vision whitens. I stumble backwards on my wobbly legs while Nairu giggles. One of my heels collides with a raised slab of concrete, and I drop down onto the grass.
When I regain my bearings, I move my toes to make sure that I haven’t cracked my spine. However, I have likely smushed dog shit against the back of my corduroy jacket. Weeds are bending against my ears and the underside of my jaw as their vegetal blades dig into my flesh; some are brushing my earholes while they plan how to conquer my defenseless brain. Our adopted child is pressing down on my chest as she clings to me like a koala.
I lift my head off the ground and take a deep breath of cold air to fill my lungs, but a cough roughens my throat.
“Wh-what’s the big idea, you little hellion?” I ask hoarsely. “You must have shattered my ribcage. Did you want me to know how it feels to breathe through a couple dozen puncture wounds to my lungs?”
Nairu giggles. She snuggles closer, rubbing her warm cheek against my jaw, tickling my neck with her wool scarf. As if the barrier of my skin had been breached, the girl’s softness invades my insides. This stranger from the cold wildlands of the past has bested me with her mysterious guile, making a mockery of thousands of years of language evolution.
My facial muscles relax. I let the back of my head rest on the grass, pressing my hair against mud, anthills, and whole ecosystems of bacteria; it will take less than an hour for those microscopic beasts to crawl in through my scalp, spilling some of my brains’ juice in the process, and begin digesting my scalpels and bone saws. Meanwhile, Nairu burrows deeper into my corduroy jacket. By the time I catch myself, I have snaked an arm around our adopted daughter’s back to hold her in a hug, while my free hand moves through hair that this morning absorbed shampoo and conditioner for the first time, hair soft as a baby bison’s wool. My heartbeat echoes between the bricks of my chest, beating out the rhythm of Nairu’s purring.
I close my eyes. In the isolation of a droning sound in my ears and a darkness tinged with citrine-yellow lamplight, I become a mother who is holding her firstborn child. Beyond the boundaries of our snug embrace, a blizzard swirls up and down, covering our hair in white ice, creating a maelstrom of whirling snowflakes as it sucks up in a frenzy leaves, bits of bark, and twigs. The frozen matter, as well as every form of organic litter, will be taken away by the whirlwind of the snowstorm, swept up into the sky and reincarnated as dust particles.
Nairu and I have begun an evolutionary journey into a stronger species by this act, by her invasion of my world, by our physical and psychic bond. Our bodies now resonate like the soundboard of a Stradivarius, like the vibrating walls of a gargantuan tuning fork.
Blessed be the innocent children! Back when I used to return to my dingy apartment in that border town, I sought interlocutors among my dilapidated sofa, the pile of board games, the washing machine, and my collection of dirty dildos, until I gave up and, curled up in a corner, felt like a piece of rotten meat thrown in a dustbin. My brain itself had long been picked over by scavenging vermin, leaving behind only a bitter and loathsome taste. I dealt with the ghosts of programming languages past, haunted by their convoluted syntaxes, buried under the piled layers of virtual scaffolding that supported their unfathomable intricacy. All of existence had become a black box, and it almost drove me to suicide. I inhabited a realm far beneath society’s surface, at the bottom of an ocean populated by abyssal beasts that had to be fed with pain.
But now I have someone to play with! After learning to distinguish one sound from another, we are all destined to speak, or at least to bark. To my beloved partner I shall bark in French: “Je te mords les couilles!” Words will always be inadequate and inept compared to the wordless truth of music, but if Jacqueline and I teach Nairu Spanish to the extent that she can read the newspapers and understand the newscasters, our adopted daughter will despair at the post-apocalyptic world into which I snatched her. She’ll scream that she has grown sick of our time together, that I’m a horrible human being who should be avoided at all costs, that her lungs are breaking out into plague-riddled boils, and that she wants to return to her forests and her freedom. Such an outburst would turn my brain into a sponge forever dampened by the sticky ooze of regret. After all, should any child fear to see her loved ones shot with bullets that tear out the insides of human bodies? Should any child fear her home being ravaged and bombed out? So we better focus on teaching Nairu how to play board games. With our Paleolithic wonder by my side, I won’t need to depend on the moods of a depressed horse to beat Shadowcluster. And if anyone ever looks at Nairu with ill intent, or ridicules her squinty eyes, I will disembowel that person with a rusty spoon. Their viscera will rot in the dirt for the fleas to feast on.
I’m overwhelmed with an urge to snatch our girl up and flee from civilization. To shield Nairu from this insanity, we could whisk her away to a deserted tropical island, a sanctuary of natural beauty and blinding sunlight where the air would smell of brine and warm skin, where only birds would speak a language. The three of us would watch the clouds roll into giant clumps shaped like breasts. Nairu would paint the amber hues of sunset skies on my bare legs. We’d snuggle up in the sand and listen to the surf while the saltwater washed over our feet. My naked body would be drenched in sweat, and the sand would cling to my ass.
Perhaps I should take up on my old pal Git’s advice and become a family of merfolk. We would spend the days hunting fish in the coral reefs, and at night we would congregate in the clear blue waters to admire the stars. A whole pod of dolphin children could join our mafia-run aquatic colony. We’d drag under the waves any human who swam too far from the shore.
We could travel to the Moon and live on its lava plains. I’d love to bathe in the dust of millennia. We would launch ourselves down the tubes carved out in the lunar crust by rising liquid rock, slippery slopes that lead all the way down to the center of the world.
Author’s note: the two songs for today are “Oxford Comma” and “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance”, both by Vampire Weekend.
I keep a playlist of the all the songs mentioned throughout this novel (seventy-nine so far): check it out.
Leire attempted to play the board game Renegade with a somewhat sentient horse back in chapter 20. Also, she sought counsel from an anthropomorphized open source software for distributed version control back in chapter 44; Git recommended that she should transform herself into a sea creature.
I promised to throw scraps at my pair of pet neural networks if they digested my prompts and vomited out fucktons of images related to this chapter. Check them out!
This chapter is just half of what I intended to include to conclude the current sequence. However, these last 2-3 weeks have been a nightmare at the office; I’ve felt more mentally unstable than in the previous few months, even unhinged at times. Posting two thousand words of my ongoing novel makes me feel better, so that’s what I’ve managed to do today.
Two neural networks, one of them trained on anime, teamed up to depict moments from chapter 76 of my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. It’s a good thing that I keep such talented artificial intelligences busy; they may otherwise figure out how to open portals to other universes, and who knows what kind of nonsense might walk out from the other side?
You can check out all the entries I’ve posted with generated images through this link.
Nairu stares up at the vertical, perforated panel of the play tower, a grater-like surface from which protrude pink climbing holds like half-jammed-in butt plugs. Although the metallic panel and the plasticky climbing holds must differ from any rock wall or tree that Nairu may have climbed, she reaches to grab one of the holds, then she pulls herself up. She attempts to climb further, kicking her right leg like a monkey, but her left foot slips. She falls flat on her butt with a thud.
I gasp. This is my fault: if I hadn’t brought her to the present through an invisible portal, she wouldn’t have had to suffer the indignity of landing ass-first on a rubber tarmac. I expect Nairu to start bawling and then increase the decibels exponentially, which is what I would have done, so mommy would rush to her aid and fill her mouth with one of her flesh pacifiers. Instead, Nairu springs to her feet and wipes dirt off her rear end. Her unbreakable confidence that whatever she does, both of her mommies will remain forever by her side to pick up the pieces, must have made all her woes vanish as if they never existed. She squints at the climbing wall with newfound respect.
Our girl stands on her tiptoes to reach a climbing hold, but Jacqueline approaches the child from behind, grabs her by the armpits and lifts her. Nairu, defenseless against the might of an adult, goes limp, until she clings to the closest metallic poles. She places a foot on a climbing hold and steps onto the top of the tower. The girl, turned into a watchtower lookout, surveys her surroundings: the splash of color of the rubber tarmac, the park that spans the hilltop, and the encircling trees, most of which are leafless, but also taller and older by a few decades than Jacqueline’s apartment bulding.
My girlfriend’s show of strength has caused tingles to shoot through my body, with my groin as their neuralgic center.
“Holy damn, Jacqueline,” I say in awe. “You are ground-sloth strong!”
Jacqueline chuckles. She adjusts the collar of her peacoat.
“Am I that strong, or should you eat healthier and exercise with me more often?”
“Likely a combination of those three things.”
“Anyway, I want our doll to experience how it feels like to go down the slide, so she’ll have a better motivation to scale the tower. Don’t you miss playing with this stuff? My parents brought me to indoor playgrounds quite often. I guess they paid by the hour so I could jump in ball pits, cross suspension bridges, slide down plastic pipes, lose myself in mazes made of netting and padded walls… Don’t you wish you could access such equipment as an adult?”
“That sounds enthralling, but my parents never brought me to magical places.”
Jacqueline shoots me a look imbued with pity. I feel as if I dared to examine my face in the stark light of a bathroom mirror, only to remember that my skin is marred with scars and pockmarks.
Coldness spreads in my chest. Did I become depraved because I was deprived of a girl’s dreams?
I avert my gaze, in case my eyes reveal the misery lurking within.
“Don’t look at me like that, please. I wasn’t one of those latchkey children, although I stole food from stores, and hocked jewelry and clothes. I worked as an assistant for a black market doctor and a bootlegger, until one day I fell in love with a nobleman’s daughter. All in the past, though. I’ve had lots of fun with you, Jacqueline.”
“We sure have.”
Nairu utters a garbled string of nonsense syllables. She’s standing at the top of the slide, hunched over and eager to put herself at the mercy of the playground equipment that may butcher her, but hesitating like a dog that considers jumping into the pond where its owner has thrown a stick.
Jacqueline and I walk up to the slide. After she signals for our adopted daughter to pay attention, my girlfriend squats down, which causes the flesh contained by her cinder-colored tights to bulge like a fruit about to be squeezed out of its juice.
“It’s easy, Nairu,” Jacqueline says. “Lower your butt to the slide, then…” She thrusts her waist forward. “Let yourself go.”
I picture a child, the size of a sack of potatoes, throwing herself down the slippery surface of a kilometric slide, but as she accelerates, she remains unaware that further down the metallic slide turns into a grater. Its sharp-edged grating slots gleam in the moonlight as they anticipate snagging the child’s skin and shredding her flesh. When the slide’s grater takes the first bite, the child screams and screeches. She hugs the side of the slide, but the metallic teeth dig deeper and deeper into her flesh, which bubbles under the strain. Her tears fall like raindrops from a starless night sky; they mix with the waterfalls of blood that paint the scene in scarlet hues. Her heart sputters and shuts down.
The chewed corpse lands on the rubber tarmac with a thump, like a sandwich dropping to the pick-up port of a vending machine. Her mother rushes over, only to discover that her child has become a flayed-pork carcass. The father rushes in too late: the dismemberment and devouring of his child’s remains has begun.
A cold shiver runs down my spine. The flood of this vision has carved through the mountains of my brain like an Ice Age outburst of subglacial meltwater. I’m bracing myself for more devastation, for more blood-soaked trauma. My consciousness keeps cycling back into madness, and I’m having a harder and harder time clambering my way out of that spiral. Will one day my nerves burn so violently that I’ll beg my girlfriend to push me off a cliff?
I unclench my teeth, then rub my eyes as my heart calms down. The slide squeaks; Nairu is sliding down the smooth metal at breakneck speed. She braces herself for landing, and at the end of the ride, she bounces on her feet and wiggles her arms in wild excitement. Our girl shrieks with laughter.
Jacqueline claps.
“Good job, darling!”
“She loved it,” I say, relieved. “And kept her flesh intact.”
Nairu bounds to the climbing wall. Once she faces it, she jumps and clutches a climbing hold that protrudes halfway up. She swings her legs and pulls herself up to reach the next hold, again and again until she summits the play tower.
Nairu straightens her back and shows off a triumphant smile. A giggle bursts from her lips along with puffs of white mist. She hurries to sit down on the flat part of the slide, and as she crows with delight, she launches herself into her descent, plunging feetfirst on her back like a luge track’s racing bobsled.
Author’s note: the two songs for today are “Don’t Lie” by Vampire Weekend, and “Rambling Man” by Laura Marling.
I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned throughout this novel. Seventy-seven songs so far. Here’s the link.
Hey, do you know that neural networks can generate quite competent images? Check out some inspired by this chapter by clicking this link. I’ve already posted twenty-two such entries, which you can check out through this link.
Leire’s sickly daydream feels right now like the most harrowing in a while, perhaps because it involves a child. But hey, if I have to endure intrusive daydreams, so should you; it’s not like anybody forces you to read this shit. Poor Nairu, though: of all the people that could have visited the Ice Age through an invisible portal, she had to end up with my protagonist.
The current sequence had already become the longest in the novel. Once I realized that Jacqueline, Leire and Nairu would spend at least four chapters in this park, it became clear that I could split the sequence into two. The previous sequence, titled “A Hail of Meteorites Upon Our Heads,” ended back in chapter 73. The current sequence is titled “Who Stole the Stars?” You can check out all the chapters of this novel through this link.
If I were to travel back in time to meet my child self and told him that in the future, an artificial intelligence would generate images of whatever nonsense crossed my mind, my child self would ask, “Then why are you still miserable?” I would be rendered speechless, then I would punch my kid self in the face for being impertinent.
This time I have also enlisted the help of a newborn neural network trained exclusively on anime. Bring forth horrors beyond comprehension!
The following images are related to chapter 75 of my charmingly-named, ongoing novel We’re Fucked.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.