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Ahead of Jacqueline and I, the child born thousands of years ago is prancing on the asphalt footpath. My girlfriend chose and bought a modern costume for our girl: mid-calf leather boots, skinny pants, a wool sweater, and a lemonade-pink scarf. However, she may as well be wearing her leather tunic the way she’s bopping and swaying to the long-lost song she’s humming, making her twin loose braids bounce and the tail of her scarf flop around. Maybe she’s mimicking the beastly gait or mating dance of one of the many species, like the giant tapir, the woolly rhinoceros and the saber-toothed tiger, that were blown apart by superbolides, drowned in the floods, were buried under tons of mud and ripped-out trees, had their DNA cooked and mutated, starved after their food sources vanished, turned into vampires through a bite from some vampire-creature, or froze to death during the roughly 1,300 years-long plunge into glacial conditions. A phantom of catastrophes that may come again.

We crest the hill. The path turns on level ground, leading towards a playground and its recreational equipment, which gleams silver in the moonlight. Twin human-sized contraptions depict the structure of the atom; metallic hula hoops represent the orbitals of the electrons, but the nucleus is missing. Beyond that equipment, a play tower is constituted of four poles, a slide, and a perforated vertical panel that resembles a grater.

In a grassy area adjoined to the playground, a venerable tree’s trunk is as wide as an obese person’s waist, but it supports a humongous, leafy canopy that resembles a mushroom cloud. The breeze is bullying its leaves around as their cast shadows on the grass and across the path form a labyrinthine maze. Maybe the tree is several hundred years old. Perhaps it was a sapling during the Ice Age, and then survived the heat of the cataclysm, outlasted soaring flood waters and the twitches of volcanos, in pursuit to yield fronds of fine lace. But who would place a playground next to a radioactive tree?

Our child gawks at the playground equipment. As she wriggles with excitement, she jabs her index finger at the metallic hula hoops and utters a few words that suggest that she’s begging for permission to play. I doubt that the girl has caught on yet that nodding means yes, but smiles must have been a universal currency even back in frigid times, because as soon as Jacqueline shows off her pearly whites, our dainty lambkin darts ahead to the playground. Her twin braids sway in rhythm with her confident strides, those of someone unable to conjure up dangers more metaphysical than delinquents throwing cherry bombs, or dragons that spit poison.

When the child steps onto the rubber tarmac, its springy nature distracts her. She looks the surface over, which is painted in three distinct wavy shapes, red, green, and blue. Squandering this much paint in coloring a floor must be a sign of high civilization.

Our girl forgets about the tarmac, and leaps onto the closest atom-like structure. From up close I realize that the builders have created surfaces for the two inclined orbitals by attaching sturdy nylon nets. I wouldn’t know how to play with this equipment, but our adopted daughter exercises her monkey nature by balancing herself on the netting and by swinging like a pendulum between the orbital rings. Although the metallic hula hoops must be hand-burning cold in this November night, the child clutches on to the top of the vertical orbital and pulls herself up while giggling.

I sense a presence to my left. I find myself staring at the most ravishing woman of the Holocene, who looks back at me with a pair of gleaming cobalt-blue eyes. Jacqueline’s face is tinted peach orange in the lamplight, fitting for the succulent fruit whose juice sweetens my life. Her raven-black hair shimmers with dark cerulean highlights. Her nose, the cupid’s bow of her upper lip and the fullness of her lower one are shading the right half of her face. Her long eyelashes flutter, then the corners of her mouth rise in an affectionate smile.

In front of such beauty, I feel like a cockroach. Yet, I speak.

“Not going to lie, Jacqueline: this playground is kind of shit.”

She breathes out through her mouth, which forms a white cloud, then she laughs.

“You silly idiot. I brought you here because of the trees! The playground at the end of the street is far better, and it offers a lovely panorama of the outskirts of our city.”

“Just how many luxuries have you been able to afford through your debauchery?!”

Jacqueline closes her eyes and giggles as her shoulders tremble. When she pulls herself together, she cocks her head at me and smirks.

“Hey, do you think that I invest all the money I make at work in a retirement fund? Every little bit contributes to provide a safe life away from the tumult. I’ve always loved peace and quiet. Did I tell you that I used to dream of buying land in one of the many hills further into the province, large and green enough to grow crops and raise animals? Wouldn’t you have loved to grow up in such a place? Once I got used to the notion that I would never have children, I gave up on that dream, but… look at us now. Haven’t I won the lottery with you, baby?”

A shiver runs down my spine; she must have knocked at a fissure in my porcelain-ice psyche. My neck trembles, and I consider averting my gaze before the warmth gathered behind my eyes escapes through my lacrimal glands in liquid form.

Jacqueline drapes an arm around my shoulders, pulls me closer and rests her head on mine. I swallow saliva to loosen my throat, but my voice comes out thin.

“I’m tempted to assert that my company is like contracting a plague.”

“I know you think so, honey.”

The warmth that emanates from her body, as well as her hair brushing my face, takes me back to the nights that I have spent under Jacqueline’s sheets, nestled between the ample globes of her bosom. That goddess consumes my maladaptive vulnerabilities with the sheer exuberance of those tits. Hasn’t the temperature kept dropping since we got out of her Audi? I want to finger myself under a blanket.

Our child is draped face down over the top of the vertical orbital, balancing herself while she expels puffs of vapour that rise around her head.

My eyelids are growing heavier, my brain turning into a sponge. A big yawn overwhelms me, and Jacqueline copies it.

“Careful,” she says in a sleepy voice, “you are going to unhinge your jaw if you open your mouth that wide.”

“My jaw will never go unhinged. It’s the only sane part of me.”

Jacqueline snorts. She touches my lower lip with the tip of her index finger.

“And that mouth of yours looks like it was made to eat bonbons.”

She giggles at her own words, although the pastry-adjacent reference has brought up recent trauma. She lowers that hand to mine and interlaces our fingers. The breeze has chilled the back of my left hand, but its palm and fingers now feel snug in Jacqueline’s grasp.

I want to sneak along Jacqueline’s inner thighs and climb through to enter her honey labyrinth headfirst. What delicious feelings would tighten around my nape.

“You are a queen bee, Jacqueline,” I say to my sublime beloved.

“Then you should be a ladybug.”

I want to scoff at such notion, but I sigh instead. If Jacqueline were to study every detail of my skin, apart from dirt and grime and insect bites, she would recognize the traces of sunburns and countless bruises. The lines and furrows are engraved there by decades of sadness; the blue-gray discoloration is due to postorgasmic trauma after determined self-diddling.

“I’m not the least bit ladylike. In fact, I’m feeling more like a slug right now. But I would like us to make love in a hive and then emerge with thousands of childish faces crawling all over my body.”

“I… need some time to process that imagery.”

“I devoured a decade’s worth of pastries, so I’m afraid that I won’t be able to have sex tonight. I’m going to pass out as soon as I lie down. However, you can take advantage of my unconscious self however you see fit.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that, darling, because I will take you up on the offer.”

“Give me a stamp and I’ll make it official.”

Jacqueline turns to me and lifts my chin with her free hand. Her cobalt-blues leer at me through their eyelashes while her warm breath caresses my lips. It smells faintly of sugar and jam.

“What I will do tonight is hold you in my arms and entwine my legs with yours. Soon enough you’ll start drooling and snoring against my neck.”

My blood grows hotter. After I close my eyes, the lustful urge becomes a comforting lullaby, a hymn for my heart to sing while the blood pours through my body.

“Yeah, squeeze your tits against my comparatively puny ones until I can barely breathe,” I say in a weak voice. “That’s the optimal state of this world.”

Our child squeals with joy. How can anybody distil so much fun out of a misguided representation of an atom, one that was turned into playground equipment?

A gentle breeze brings the scent of damp leaves, and flutters my hair.

“Isn’t it such a nasty thing to do to someone, Jacqueline,” I say, “to present them with a child from a Paleolithic forest for whom they are responsible, at least until she turns eighteen? All the baggage, rules, duties, chores, sexual hangups, eating disorders and seclusion-seeking behaviors, without anyone asking if you’re ready for that kind of commitment.”

I melt into the sound of her chuckles. She rests her forehead against my temple, then she nuzzles my ear.

“Oh, I’m not mad,” she whispers. “Not at all. But don’t you think it’s about time we name our daughter?”

Jacqueline’s half-lidded eyes are sparkling, and the warmth in her smile suggests that she would push me out of the way of an incoming truck even if it would flatten her instead. My knees weaken and my heartbeat quickens. Now that we have a daughter, our relationship has become more serious.

“I-I suppose that any child would have a hard time growing up if her parents can’t be bothered to name her. Why don’t we just call her Child? Capitalize it, pretend it’s a name.”

Jacqueline giggles, then shakes her head.

“Leire, we can’t do that!”

“Why not? We’ll always know we are referring to her. We don’t have more children running around.”

“Do you think we’ll keep her cooped up in the apartment forever? What if other people find out that this child that somehow belongs to us is called Child? We would get a visit from Child Services in no time!”

My mind has devolved, and I barely discern solid thoughts in the fog. I rub my temples.

“Sorry. Only the most rudimentary notions are rising from the dark matter inside my cranium.”

Jacqueline squeezes my hand.

“That’s alright, darling. Coming to the park after the day you’ve had was asking a lot of you.”

“So our girl needs a proper name, but what kind would fit a prehistoric painter?”

“This morning I’ve been researching names on the phone, and I think I’ve come across a good one.”

“Great, because my brain would love to settle for nonsensical ones. But please, no clichés. I wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

“‘Alicia’ goes out of the window, then?”

“Unless you want me to vomit. Besides, we’d have to give her the full-on hippie treatment. She’d wear a flower crown and a headband made of wheat stalks.”

“What do you thing about ‘Leire’?”

“Too common. Also, that’s my name.”

“Then how about ‘Sylvie’? It seems to originate from the Latin word for forest. And Silvanus was the Roman god of the woodlands and fields. Wouldn’t it be an appropriate name for our forest fae?”

“Oh, I love it!”

“I thought you would. Let’s announce it to the recipient.”

We step onto the rubber tarmac to approach our girl, who’s dangling upside down from the top of the vertical orbital. Her eyes are shining like glassy marbles, maybe a combination of the blood pooling in her head and the cold breeze, that is also whipping her hanging twin braids.

When the child notices us, her expression turns attentive; a moment ago she was a cat pawing at a mouse toy, but now she has found herself the target of the whims of two of those bipedal giants that although they feed her and keep her warm, still frighten her with their size, and one day might flip out and stomp her to death. However, the child’s scarf unwinds further, covering her face like a funeral shroud. Both of her hands are busy; she shakes her head and lets out noises of frustration that resemble those of a dog having a fit while being teased with a rolled-up newspaper. She ends up clambering down from the metallic orbital. With her legs splayed, she perches herself on the netting and gazes at us.

“Hey, little one,” Jacqueline says as she stands in front of our child so that the words will reach her directly, echoing through her mind. “Your other mommy and I have decided to take care of you forever and ever, so we will give you a name: it’s Sylvie.”

“We’ll also keep you away from ovens,” I say, “just in case.”

The girl tilts her head sideways.

“Now, how will I make you understand…” Jacqueline wonders. “Oh, I know.” She perks up and points at herself. “Jacqueline.” She points at me, which causes a burst of warmth to flow down to my groin. “Leire.” She points at our adopted daughter. “Sylvie.”

The girl furrows her brow and squints, then her mouth opens in disbelief. She utters a word soup full of vowel sounds and gurgling consonants, but the tone alone spells out her disapproval.

“She hates it,” Jacqueline says, crestfallen.

I put a hand on her shoulder.

“The name is good.”

Our child speaks in a loud, dollish voice.

“Nairu!”

Jacqueline and I exchange a look. When we stare back at the girl, she’s smiling as if our confusion amused her.

She points at Jacqueline. “Akedin.” She points at me. “Eide.” She points at herself. “Nairu!”

Jacqueline has blushed, but I shake my head at our girl.

“What the hell, child of the woods? Back at the cursed patisserie, I taught you that whole thing of pointing at yourself to share your name, but the two words you uttered to call yourself didn’t sound anything like ‘Nairu’! And why do you keep calling me Eide although you can pronounce the R of the name you gave yourself?”

An impish grin widens across Nairu’s face. She clutches the top of the diagonal orbitals, installed at both sides of her body, and she swings back and forth while giggling like a loon.

I sigh. Our adopted child was born during the Ice Age; for all we know, her birth was celebrated with a drumming ritual during which the proud parents slapped each other’s faces with dead birds, then they danced and beat their backsides to an inhumane rhythm, thus bestowing upon the infant a life of madness, a love of the absurd, and a hatred toward civilization. So I guess ‘Nairu’ fits this girl just fine.

“She may be trying to pull a fast one on us, and that word means ‘booger’ in her ancient language. In that case she played herself, because we will honor her choice. Won’t we, mommy?”

Jacqueline’s shoulders droop. She shoots me an awkward smile.

“Well, there goes my research.”

I walk up to the playground equipment, then I reach to wrap the tail of our daughter’s scarf around her neck.

“Welcome to our deranged little family, Nairu.”

Her face breaks into a joyous smile. She claps her hands and chortles.

The corners of my mouth are fighting against my self-control to curl into a smile. This child is the most endearing little creature that I’ve ever met. I want to slide through her pupils until I reach the back of her brain, where I’d dissolve and become an indistinguishable part of her soul.

How would it be to exist as someone who can hoot with laughter like that? How does it feel to live a life that lacks a looming black cloud hanging over it?

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Author’s note: the two songs for today are “I Found a Reason” by The Velvet Underground, and “Perfect Day” by Lou Reed.

I keep a playlist with all the songs mentioned so far throughout this novel: this is the link.

A genius neural network (old pal of mine), one that has generated plenty of images based on moments from my novel, teamed up with a newborn AI trained on anime to render images from the current chapter: follow this link.

Although it may seem otherwise, this chapter still hasn’t finished the current sequence. I clearly have no clue when it comes to figuring out how many words rendering a bunch of notes is going to take: I originally believed that this story, which is already about 180,000 words long, would be a novella. I’m likely the only person on earth that cares about this, though.

Perhaps three months ago I enjoyed a two weeks-long break from my office job. One of the (very few) special tasks I managed to complete was visiting the park depicted in the current sequence (as well as the previous patisserie). I walked around and took some photos until I had a good notion of how being present there felt like, something you can’t properly garner through photos and videos, unfortunately.

Another thing that writing does, at least for people whose brains work as weirdly as mine, is create memories that feel stronger and more meaningful than those of stuff you’ve actually lived through. So now that park in the hills of Donostia will forever be for me the place where I had a good time as Leire, Jacqueline and their little nugget. I also retain many bittersweet memories of the events depicted in my previous novel. Does this phenomenon happen to people other than writers?

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When I step out of Jacqueline’s Audi into the night and I exhale, a ghost escapes from my mouth in a cloud that glows citrine-yellow in the light of the streetlamps. On the other side of the street, beyond a boundary wall that the Ice Age civilization that built the pyramids would point at and mock, on the third and last floor of the apartment building, a parapet encloses the balcony that may have cost half of what my girlfriend paid for that apartment.

As I refresh my lungs with cold air and I stare up at that home, a lump of emotion grows in my throat. For years I have lifted my weary legs off the bed every morning, although I couldn’t justify why I should bother. Half of the days that I got off at the Euskotren station in Irún after hours of overtime, I felt like turning around and waiting for a train to come in the opposite direction, so I could step in front of the death machine and let its wheels run over me like a hulking lawnmower; instead of that I rushed to my dreary apartment, where I threw off my clothes and ate chocolate while I masturbated furiously. My mind was too weak to dig me out of the ice-cold soil where it had buried us; it hunched between my legs, and whenever it got shamed or scorned, it forced me to bury my fingers into my evil cunt again and again and again.

But I endured these thirty years so at the end of the day I could return here, to this isolated apartment in the hills of Donostia, away from the stench of the car exhausts, away from the wastoids and their shrieks, away from the dog shit and the urine splashing down from their balconies, and high enough that when the sea levels rise again, our island of peace will protrude from the crimson tide of blood and corpses.

I yank my mind back to my wilting body and I order my legs to carry me across the cobbled road, but a dizzy spell bleaches my vision, making me stumble. My hands are trembling. A growing headache and my exhaustion have coalesced into a grimy mesh of spiderwebs inside my skull. How many pastries did I gorge myself on back at that cursed patisserie? My heart must be pumping liquid sugar.

A hand cups my elbow. Jacqueline has materialized in front of me, standing in the middle of the cobbled road. Clothed in a dark sienna peacoat and a black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and with her legs hugged by cinder-colored tights, she looks as if she just walked out of a movie premiere. She has draped her other arm around our Paleolithic daughter’s shoulders, squishing the back of her scarf. The child is staring up at me as if my sugar-induced infirmity was an exhibit at a zoo.

Jacqueline wastes her limited time on Earth working as a secretary for a pig; the money she earned through that degradation, apart from the porn videos she sells online, paid for our girl’s sweater, yet its fabric has been ruined by five brown stains, each surrounded by tiny stains caused by splashed droplets, as if a villain had thrown coin-sized turds at the child’s chest. Mommy always seems ready to turn towards an ambushing paparazzi and flash a radiant smile that would burn out the camera’s electronic components, so how come she has cointaned herself from peeling off the sweater and tossing it into a dumpster?

“Are you okay, darling?” she asks me in her sweetest voice.

I squint, then rub my temple to emphasize my headache.

“D-don’t you feel sick after the bombardment of sugar we’ve received? I have become permanently dumber, as if a goblin had been nibbling at my brain.”

“I feel jittery. But do you know what would do us some good on this November evening?”

“Rush to your apartment and jump bare-assed under the covers of your bed?”

Jacqueline chuckles. A smile warps the skin beneath her eyes.

“Also take a nature stroll through the park I told you about this morning.”

“What?! Now?!”

“After you woke up from a nightmare, you got teleported to a boreal forest from thousands of years ago. Let’s end this momentous day by exploring willingly a closer sanctuary enclosed by trees, one that will welcome you from now on whenever the world gets overwhelming.”

Jacqueline might as well have asked me to unload furniture from a truck after I’ve been awake for forty-eight hours straight. But as I stare at her face to formulate my defense, I’m silenced by those soft-angled, raven-black eyebrows; her gleaming, ivory-white skin; the cupid’s bow of her upper lip and that thick lower one into which I’d love to sink my teeth; her features designed by a team devoted to rendering the loveliest mommy face; and her breeze-swept hair gathered in a braided ponytail. I want those half-lidded, cobalt-blue eyes to keep staring at me, at this loosely human-shaped bundle of flesh and bones varnished with vaginal secretions and covered in spiders, because the moment Jacqueline ceases to acknowledge my existence, I’ll get vaporized like the breath that pours from between her lips, and I will vanish into the night as if I had never existed.

“Okay,” I surrender. “But I may end up vomiting and passing out.”

“In that case, I’ll carry you in my arms back to my apartment, and I’ll tuck you into bed.”

“Now I want to risk it. Let’s go.”

Jacqueline steers me across the road, with the child in tow, toward a path that ascends between her apartment building and the closest one. We stroll along a four-meter-tall fieldstone wall, the kind that upmarket neighborhoods often choose instead of brick walls, because laying randomly-shaped stones must be more expensive and annoying.

To our left, a view opens of the rounded top of Mount Igueldo, a black mass darker than the night sky and that blocks the horizon. Isolated clusters of lit pixels reveal the presence of those who could afford to live on the slope of the mountain. And now I can retreat to a shelter located about seventy meters above sea level, which fulfills a need for security that must have been inscribed in the genes of humans from when we witnessed the sinking of our world beneath the rising tides. We’ll also spot the invading hordes as they trudge uphill, which will give us time to roll down flaming tar barrels towards them, or at least push them back with head of our pikes.

Jacqueline stops next to an open gateway. Past the entrance, a flight of stairs leads to a darkened footpath where a tall person would stoop to pass under the low branches, most of them nude like skeletal fingers. I look up at the canopies of the trees closest to the fieldstone wall. They reach higher than the nearby apartment buildings, and have grown outwards as if trying to escape.

“This place looks like private property,” I say.

Jacqueline smirks.

“I know, right?”

She shepherds our child into the park, and I follow them up the stairs. Further down the path, a row of streetlamps is casting circular pools of light on the asphalt, which is bordered on our left by clusters of thin trees like the European equivalent of bamboo, and on our right by an ascending, grassy slope littered with dried leaves. The arched canopy filters the moonlight.

As I walk, my shoes scuff the rough asphalt, that reminds me of a go-karts track. The streetlamps throw our shadows in front of us, and stretch them across the path. The surroundings smell of moist bark, soil, moldy leaves. This cool, dark wood may swallow up my uneasiness; I want to venture deeper towards its enticing scents.

I’m groggy from the fatigue. After I blink away tear-stickiness, I lift my gaze to our right, towards the crest of the hill. Its grass has concealed the path, but I spot the upper half of a white bench bathed in the light of a streetlamp. The hill is bare except for a few segregated trees that have shed their leaves. Three frail, leaning trees are strapped with rubber belts to nursery stakes driven into the ground.

Lamplight illuminates the contour of our child’s silhouette; she has skipped ahead and is prancing about with a graceful gait while she talks to herself in her native tongue. A sudden breeze whips my cheeks and lashes, and makes dead leaves skitter along the asphalt. The chill dips into my bowels, but our girl is acclimated to boreal conditions. In comparison to her, Jacqueline and I are house cats who have pestered their owner to let them out in the snow, only for us to regret it and claw at the door to be allowed back into the coziness of a modern home. While the child’s footsteps sound ahead of us, I feel blessed by her presence, as if a snow leopard had chosen us to be part of her family.

Does our new daughter consider her relocation to this world as a strange vacation? Does she wonder how she will explain to that father of hers the sights and tastes we’ve presented to her? I can’t imagine how she’ll react once she realizes that she’s stuck in this present forever. She’s more resilient than me: by this point I would have already run into traffic with my hands on my ears, attempting to outrun the pain, or maybe I’d have pulled a knife and cut my throat. However, Jacqueline and I should be pleasant and kind to her to diminish the trauma of her displacement in time.

The child flinches, startled by a person who’s jogging down a bend in the path: a bearded guy who’s wearing tracksuit bottoms, a hoodie and a beanie. At the other end of a leash attached to his belt, a black-and-white border collie is running alongside the man. The dog’s tongue is lolling out, and its ears flapping about. The pair’s vaporized breaths are trailing behind them. As the man passes by us, he nods to acknowledge our existence, or maybe to apologize for having bothered us.

Why the hell is this punk intruding in our private park? I sigh, then remind myself that random human beings are technically allowed to exist near me, as long as they pay for the privilege.

Our daughter is standing in the grass next to the path. She has craned her neck towards the pair that is about to disappear through the park’s gateway. I hope that she’s interested in the dog instead of in the guy’s ass.

I walk up to her, then pat the crown of her head.

“C’mon. You’ll get to see plenty of cool wolves throughout your lifetime, because we protect them from extinction.”

The child tilts her face up to mine and shares a look of wonder: her eyebrows are raised and her mouth is broadened into a grin that shows her gums. She utters a few words in an enthusiastic voice, but they sound like gibberish.

“I’m sure you’re right, Ice Age girl,” I say.

I put an arm around her shoulders to guide her towards Jacqueline, who has tucked her hands into the pockets of her peacoat, and whose nostrils are exhaling wisps of vapour.

Leaves crunch under our feet as we walk up the bend in the path. Although this park is enclosed by a wall of trees, the breeze is picking up and cutting through the leafless branches to chill my exposed skin. My body has realized that I will force it to trudge upwards, and now my head is throbbing.

I fix my gaze on the vision of that swaying white bench as I fill my lungs with cold air.

“L-let’s rest a bit, Jacqueline. I haven’t been young in a thousand years.”

She steps closer to me and slips an arm around my waist as if she suspected that I would tumble face-first into the asphalt.

Once we reach the bench, I lean my ass against its side. I’m blowing a stream of vapour when the slats tremble through me as they complain with a wooden creak; our child must have jumped onto the bench. I cross my arms, which presses a solid frame against my ribs. Ah, I was carrying my revolver, wasn’t I? I’m a huntress, the protector of a child who’s lost in a world she can’t understand, and who doesn’t know what to expect from this life.

As the vapour dissolves, I notice that from behind the uneven palisade of trees, most of which are naked except for a few semi-deciduous ones that hang on to their leaves, stick out three belfries. They end in spires topped with crosses. The structures may belong to a monastery, or to an insane asylum.

I close my eyes and take deep breaths of the crisp air, that smells of damp earth and rotting leaves. It gives me goosebumps and makes my head feel lighter. My heartbeat is slowing down. I hear the distant echoes of a barking dog, as well as the background hum of traffic like a sonic blanket draped over the city. I hear the thump thump of the music that some dickhead is blasting out of his car speakers.

A rustling in the trees past the bend in the path makes me open my eyes. I glimpse a lumbering black mass stalking the tree line. I straighten my back and uncross my arms, but after I stare at the space between those two tree trunks, I only see a mesh of branches, which quiver as if they were the timid nipples of some as-yet-to-be-discovered mammal.

I cock my head towards Jacqueline; she must be standing in front of the bench.

“Your neighbors haven’t spotted sasquatches marauding around, have they?”

She giggles, then puts a hand on my shoulder. My girlfriend must be unaware of the sasquatches’ history of kidnappings, mind-wipes and probably molestation of humans throughout the ages.

“I don’t interact with my neighbors remotely enough to bring up Bigfoot, honey. But I think that being surrounded by neighborhoods would dissuade any of those creatures from settling in this park, unless they spawn wherever a forest is present.”

I shudder.

“They might. I wish I could ask our girl about them; the Ice Age must have been a giant sasquatch den, where monsters and humans coexisted for many millennia. The age of miracles.”

Wait, why the hell would I be worried about sasquatches attacking us? I’m armed. I should be able to punch a few holes through the chest of a sasquatch before it manages to control my mind. That should be enough to topple over one of those eight-foot-tall interdimensional monsters. But if they were already trying to summon their goddess so she would twist her mad weavings over the world, then we’d be fucked, along with the rest of mankind.

My head is pounding; I feel like there’s an angry, feral god locked inside my skull. I dread to glance at the tree line, in case the glowing yellow eyes of a sasquatch are peering from behind a bough. Perhaps the rank stench of their musk will hit us first.

I push myself off the bench.

“We shouldn’t risk it. Let’s get going. If at any point we find ourselves in a bubble of silence and we can’t hear the breeze, I’ll grab your hand tight. You grab our girl’s. Then we’ll sprint to the nearest exit.”

“I’ll have that in mind, darling,” Jacqueline says in a serious voice.

She offers a hand to our child, who is balancing herself on the backrest of the bench, lit by the glow of the streetlamp. The girl gets the point; she jumps down to the asphalt with a soft thud. We continue strolling upwards towards the next bend in the path.

I rub my eyebrows to dispel the image of sasquatches that are hiding in the trees, behind bushes, beneath piles of leaves, waiting to pounce on us and tear us apart. A middle-aged woman’s voice startles me.

“What a cute child! Is she yours?”

A random stranger has materialized in front of us. She has a bob haircut dyed blonde, as well as round spectacles. She’s wearing an oyster-pink cardigan over a denim dress, and she’s holding a few shopping bags, one in the crook of her elbow.

This bitch must know Jacqueline. I step aside to let them talk, but the woman’s eyeballs roll to follow me. Why would this stranger care about whether the child is cute or ours? Maybe her fake smile disguises an enemy in our goal to keep the Ice Age orphan for ourselves. Maybe she endures a boring routine as a librarian or a researcher, and now she wants to feel virtuous by rescuing a child from the traffickers that have fed her tons of pastries. My fingers are itching to grip the revolver under my jacket.

When I look down at our girl, she was already staring up at me in confusion. Those monolid eyes belong to a doll. I envy that smooth peach-orange skin, and I want to squeeze her chubby cheeks while babbling nonsense. She makes an angel look like a succubus on crack.

I hold the nosy stranger’s gaze. Is she a sasquatch in disguise?

“Our child is quite pretty if you are into mongoloids. Regarding your question, does it look like my girlfriend and I can procreate? We adopted this child from the Ice Age.”

The woman grimaces, crinkling her nose, as if she reached to pet a dog only for the beast to snap its jaws at the tasty hand. She opens her mouth, then closes it.

“Excuse my utterances; I’m insane,” I add.

The woman avoids my gaze. She lowers her head and hurries to walk around us, then past the bench.

I take a deep breath. This pointless interaction has gotten my heart racing again, although I had taken a break to attenuate my anxiety.

“Is this what happens when you have a child, random people come to steal her from you?”

Jacqueline caresses my neck with a thumb. The breeze is brushing a lock of raven-black hair against her face, and when our gazes meet, she flashes a smile like a white flame.

“I have always admired your talent to stupefy people into silence,” she says huskily.

The grassy slope is already concealing the lower half of the stranger as she scurries down the path to escape us.

“I fucked up, didn’t I? Was she one of your neighbors?”

Jacqueline shrugs.

“I’ve seen her a few times; she must live around here. But who cares.”

My heart is still pumping like a piston. I shake my head.

“Why would any stranger dare to vocalize towards me? Can’t they tell that I’m unhinged?”

Jacqueline chuckles. She steps closer, lifts my chin and gazes into my eyes. A streetlamp is backlighting her head, bringing out loose hairs, but her cobalt-blues are gleaming. She’s eating me alive with her intense gaze, filling my veins with hormones, kindling something ferocious and primordial within my being.

“I love it when you lose control, baby,” she utters in a predatory tone. “It makes me want to spread you on my bed with your ass raised in the air.”

A hot jolt shoots through my body. The monster inside my brain stirs awake: the master of lust and vengeance, of addiction and despair. My blood is boiling at such a rapid pace that even our child, whose face is impressed on the fringes of my awareness, must smell it in my veins. The dark deity arrives to pulverize the mind and incite erotic insanity within me. In another life, I would have found a hideout in the park to masturbate, spreading my genital lips to spread the plague, and I wouldn’t stop myself from molesting myself in the dirt, against a tree, in the water of a pond, wherever I could reach, until I rubbed myself to death.

The Paleolithic girl, who is standing next to us, has tilted her head as she observes our interaction with curiosity.

My desperate need for cunt distorts my awareness, and for a moment I’m frozen in place. Some programmed instinct attempts to shame me for exposing a child to perversion, then I recall that this girl hangs out with us without understanding a single word of our private conversations. Maybe everyone’s children should be prohibited from learning the local language until they become adults, when they’ll have any business figuring out what the fuck is going on in this world. But perhaps that’ll be the custom when civilization degenerates to the stage where trees grow through cities, and the devolved ghouls freebase sugar sprinkled on piles of skulls.

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Author’s note: the four songs for today are “Communist Daughter” by Neutral Milk Hotel, “Red Moon” by The Walkmen, “Slow Show” by The National, and “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset” by Modest Mouse.

I keep a playlist of all the songs I’ve mentioned throughout this novel: here’s the link.

Holy crap, this was the most agonizing chapter to write in a long time. Took plenty of freewrites. I’ve been in an awful mood recently, which hasn’t helped.

I figured that Leire would be instinctively aware of the sasquatches’ goddess and her evil designs.

A kind neural network took time out of its day to generate plenty of images related to this chapter: here’s the link.

The next chapter should conclude the current sequence, and we’ll be getting into third-act territory.

• Previous part (70)
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The pearl-white glaze of the eclair reflects the lights as I inhale the buttery scent of its choux dough. I tear off its tip with my front teeth. As I chew on the spongy dough, the taste of the sugary glaze, as well as of the cream that has choked the hollow inside of the eclair, swamps my taste buds and spreads across my palate. I scoop the cream out with my tongue. When I close my eyes to savor the sweetness, I picture the marrow inside the torn appendage of some alien arthropod from a pastry dimension. I wish I could justify buying enough eclairs to last weeks; they may keep me from sliding into an abyss that would swallow me alive.

Our Paleolithic child tugs on my right sleeve. When I look down at her face, the shock makes me snap my head back. Did someone smash a glass against her mouth? No, those are crystal-like sugar granules; otherwise she would have ended up with a hundred bleeding puncture wounds in the vermilion zone of her lips. But I wouldn’t put past this girl that if we left any glass within her reach, she might crush it against her teeth to honor her pre-apocalyptic ancestors as well as their mascot, the ground sloth.

“Eide, Eide,” she says.

Jacqueline gags on a morsel of puff pastry braid.

“She’s trying to say your name,” she remarks between coughs.

My chest swells with pride.

“Oh yeah. We have a special connection. I may also be Eide now.”

The child’s dazzling eyes smile at me as she holds up the sketchbook. She has drawn a person with a night-black, moppy head of hair. Inside the outline of the face, our child has left a void except for a black smudge that may represent the nostrils. On either side of the short torso, the two outstretched arms end at the wrists in rectangular stumps, as though a butcher had hacked the hands off with an axe. She has attempted to portray the checkered pattern, drawn in sunrise-orange, of the wool pyjamas I wore this morning as I warmed myself up after I almost suffered frostbite from my short stint in the Ice Age. From below the bottom hem of the pyjamas peek out bare feet that resemble fleshy hooves.

For most of my life I’ve felt invisible as I floated through this derelict society. A few foolhardy souls took time out of their day to interact with me, but I watched them from inside a plastic doll that had been gathering dust in the corner of some sordid sex shop before a random spark infused it with life. Although the spark should have sent the doll dashing across the city streets only to be crushed by a garbage truck, even that misfired. In any case, the portrait in the sketchbook proves that our little princess of a long-dead age has registered me in her untamed mind. It feels like a miracle.

I swallow a knot in my throat. What is this rush of feeling that the child has provoked? I want to grab her hand in case she wanders off and gets lost, or in case someone steals her away. If she were to come to harm because of my stupidity, of my inability to perform basic duties like any other human being, the crushing guilt would render my nights sleepless until I ended up jumping off a roof. But how could I take care of a child when I can’t even be kind to myself? Ah, I can count on Jacqueline, the most loving mommy that any human would want. As long as she remains by my side, she can compensate for my shortcomings, which means that she will take care of ninety percent of everything that rearing a child involves.

Jacqueline fake-pouts.

“I have spent most of the day with our girl, showing her the sights of the city, even buying her clothes, but she drew you first.”

“Well, she saw me naked.” I turn my head to the child. “But please, lick your lips clean, will you? My brain already comes up with enough violent scenarios unprompted.”

The child giggles defiantly. She ignores me to inspect the rows of crayons contained in the Crayola pack, pressing her fingertips against some flat tips, caressing other crayons, rolling a couple between her thumb and forefinger. She pulls out both a blue and a clam-shell-pink crayons, which she arranges with the previous ones close to the upper right-hand corner of the sketchbook.

Her attention slides to the fruit tartlets. Their folded bases, made of shortcrust pastry and filled with a vanilla-colored cream, are topped with clusters of distinct berries I can’t name. One tartlet flaunts round, bluish-grey berries that have a star-shaped opening, and the half-buried berries of another tartlet resemble crimson pinecones. The same selection of fruits were presented at breakfast in our ancestral home near Dijon in the year 1615.

“Yeah, those are raspberries,” I mumble. “They’re also called cloudberries, because they grow high up in the clouds.”

I’m struck by a weird memory. Before my journey to the future began, I used to pretend that I was an astronaut exploring the moon-like surfaces of my imagination. Once I spotted an ice world made of methane, ethane and propane, which lured me closer and closer. I was sucked into its gravity field, and shortly after I encountered alien orbs that looked like the berries that rest on top of these tartlets. Although those alien orbs were inedible and insipid, I lacked the chance to study them further, because the planet swelled and exploded like a watermelon under the pressure of my growing curiosity.

Our child snatches the raspberry tartlet. She crumbles a chunk of it in a crunchy bite, then she utters an appreciative noise. As she chews, crumbs spill from her lips onto the table and into her cup of chocolate. After the girl has swallowed half of the tartlet, she puts it down, grabs the midnight-black crayon, scratches her nose with it, and leans in to draw. While she presses the tip of the crayon against the paper, her expression morphs into one of fierce concentration.

The puff pastry braids are calling out to me like delicious sirens. I’m tempted to pick those brown raisins and the pieces of toasted cashew nuts off the surfaces to which they are glued, as if I were a baboon grooming a fellow primate to remove lice and ticks. When I bite into my chosen braid, the dough comes apart in flakes. A honeyed goo that tastes like apple ambushes my taste buds, sending a swarm of pleasurable signals that infiltrate my brain.

This tray of pastries alone will make me obese; my blood pressure is raising already. Didn’t Jacqueline announce from the beginning of our relationship her intention to fatten my malnourished self up, as part of her ploy to resuscitate my dried-up brain? When I used to return to my old apartment after work, I barely retained enough energy to shamble to the sofa, and the prospect of preparing a proper dinner represented a herculean task. Maybe mommy wants me to grow so fat that my knees would crumble under the weight of my reserves of lard. My breaths would come out in labored wheezes as I lay like a beached whale in her bedroom, and the legs of her bed would groan as they struggled to support my humongous mass. I don’t deserve a mother’s love, yet Jacqueline would spend hours seated beside me. She would massage my jiggling breasts to ease my pain. She would smile sweetly at me as she poured a blobby gruel through a funnel and down my throat to fill my ravenous void. At night we would lie there like a pair of pigs rooting in a pile of refuse, playing latrinal notes of pleasure at the aromas of salt pork mixed with garbage soup.

A gooey warmth in my crotch makes me rub my thighs together. I shiver from head to toe. I close my eyes and chew on a morsel of puff pastry braid until my heartbeat slows down.

Our child struggles to contain a giggle. She perks up and brandishes her sketchbook at us: it features a close-up portrait of Jacqueline. The girl has drawn the outline and the features of my girlfriend’s diamond-shaped face with careful strokes; she must have told herself in her Paleolithic language that if she dared to depict such a hot lady, she’d better do her justice. Single delicate curves evoke the model’s elegantly arched eyebrows. Our child had picked a blue crayon to color the irises of those feline eyes that stare ahead with determination. A corner of the full, red lips is turned in a naughty smile as if she were imagining herself playing with the viewer. The child has drawn in night-black each lock of hair from the middle parting to the way they flow over the shoulders of Jacqueline’s turtleneck sweater, which was colored with a soot-black crayon. Our little artist has also depicted the vertical lines of the fabric that come down from under the jaw and chin, following the folds of the close-fitted collar, and stretching outwards to follow the swell of the breasts.

Jacqueline gasps, then she puts her hand to her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed. When she lowers that hand, her pearly whites threaten to blind me.

“Oh, that’s me! Your artwork is incredibly detailed and flawless, sweetie! You have the soul of an artist.”

“She should have been born five or six hundred years ago,” I say, “when painters and sculptors were commissioned by aristocrats to immortalize their families and lovers. Perhaps our little girl would have grown up as a court painter to some duke.”

The child must have understood the gist of Jacqueline’s reaction, because a starry glow lights up her eyes. Is she falling in love with my girlfriend? In that case, could I blame her?

I gesture for the girl to pay attention to me, then I point at our mommy.

“Jacqueline,” I pronounce carefully.

The child raises her eyebrows. She turns towards Jacqueline, but her lips tremble in hesitation before she speaks.

“Akedin.”

Mommy nods. After an anxious rustle of cloth and a shaky breath, her face scrunches up, her eyes well up with tears. She purses her lips and presses the back of her hand against her eyelids.

Our child puts down the sketchbook. She shoots me a look of confused concern, like a cat who brought home a dead mouse as a gift only to be confronted with disgust.

How could I explain Jacqueline’s reaction to this Paleolithic child? She wouldn’t understand me anyway. I smile down at her, I pinch her chubby cheek, then I wipe with my thumb the sprinkle of sugar and tiny crumbs off her lips.

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Author’s note: today’s song is “Sawdust & Diamonds” by Joanna Newsom (also this live version from sixteen years ago). I’m keeping a playlist of all the songs I’ve linked throughout this novel: right here.

I hadn’t expected this chapter to be so hard to write, although I would have expected it if I had bothered to think about it: the scenes in which the POV character interacts with new stuff tend to be troublesome. But it didn’t help that I’ve had to deal with increased anxiety, dizziness and lethargy recently. I have no clue to what extent I can blame the drug I take for my pituitary tumor, my heart issues, and the nonsense I’ve had to handle at work.

To be honest, as I was about to start writing the current chapter, I considered ditching it, as well as the following one. My notes for them felt mostly inconsequential. However, I wanted to write them and offer the girls some good times before the narrative turns let’s say a bit darker.

Anyway, good to be back. Hopefully my desire settles down for a day or two.

An enslaved neural network generated images related to this chapter: link here.