An online service that is becoming increasingly popular offers any old dolt the opportunity to send a prompt to a trained neural network, which will spit back a generated image. Some of those images turn out to be masterpieces. At least one of those images was good enough to win a contest, which pissed off the human participants. The age of mankind is coming to an end.
This chapter’s set of related images felt lackluster, but it’s better than nothing. Here’s the link to chapter 70.
“Imagine yourself holding a gun,” I tell our child. “Well, not exactly. Imagine that your right hand is a gun. Wait, you don’t know what a gun is, and you can’t understand what I’m saying.”
I show her my right hand with the fingers extended as if I were about to high-five her, then I curl up the ring finger and the pinkie. My index and middle fingers now resemble the barrel of a gun. Using those fingers and my thumb, I imitate a duck’s bill. With my left hand I place the child’s chosen crayon, a Prussian blue one, on my right hand so the three fingers hold her crayon close to its tapered end. I draw a circle on a blank page of the sketchbook while the child follows my movements.
“Alright, your turn, forest girl,” I say.
When she imitates a duck’s bill with her fingers, she gawps at them as if she had never imagined making such a gesture. I slide the crayon between her three delicate fingers, then I guide her to press the crayon’s tip firmly against the paper. Once I let go, she hunches over and draws a vertical line.
I pat the back of her head.
“That’s good, girl. You are becoming smart!”
I sense the presence of our saintly mommy. Jacqueline pulls back the chair opposite me, and with a twirl of her plaid skirt she sits down, squeezing her buns against the undeserving seat. Her breasts bounce, contained by the tight fabric of her black turtleneck sweater. On her ivory-white face, her painted lips and her sparkling cobalt-blues accentuate the joy she feels now that both the Ice Age girl and I are back within her reach.
“I see that both of my girls have kept busy,” she says. “Isn’t our new daughter endlessly fascinating, Leire?”
“She’s an interesting creature,” I concede.
Jacqueline reaches over the table to grab my hand, then she squeezes it. Her skin feels warm and silky soft.
“But don’t you think that I’ve forgotten about you, baby.” Her warm smile falters. “Throughout the morning I imagined that you were suffering at the office, dreading that the moment you headed to the bathroom or outside to take a break, you’d walk through an invisible doorway and disappear.”
“I’ve learned that I would only need to step back and hope that no extinct demon follows me back to our world. Anyway, I’ve kept myself quite busy: I went down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos to learn more about our distant past. It was extremely informative.”
I turn my head to the child, who remains hunched over as she draws with a midnight-black crayon a conical shape, maybe a collection of twigs and logs that would become a campfire, or maybe a crude tepee. A nearby brown shade with a spiky outline may represent a bush.
“Hey, forest girl,” I say, “did you know that during the Ice Age, about two kilometers of ice were sitting on top of most of northern Europe and half of North America, going south as far as New York? That 12,800 years ago, fragments from the Taurid meteor stream bombarded our planet in an apocalyptic cataclysm that plunged us into a deep freeze we’ve come to know as the Younger Dryas, which caused the extinction of megafauna as well as a human reproductive bottleneck? That the partial melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet after that event, pouring tons and tons of water into the Arctic Ocean, probably caused such an isostatic rebound in the North American tectonic plate that major islands of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge eventually sank beneath the waves? That from this cataclysm to the end of the Younger Dryas period 11,600 years ago, sea levels rose by more than 120 meters, swallowing about 27 million square kilometers of prime real estate, a span of land that combined would be as large as Europe and China put together? That although people are still told, possibly due to the influence of the Abrahamic religions, that human civilization started 6,000 years ago, an astronomical observatory in Southeastern Anatolia named Göbekli Tepe was deliberately buried 12,000 years ago? That the pluvial erosion in the quarry walls of the Sphinx suggests that it must have been built at the latest 12,000 years ago? That the stonework from the most intriguing megalithic constructions in Egypt, Peru and other places distant from each other are nearly identical, down to odd details like protuberances and angled cuts? That an analog computer named the Antikythera mechanism, capable of predicting astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance, was built at the latest in the second century BC? That Marinus of Tyre’s maps, from back in the first century AD, used both latitude and longitude, although calculating the longitude requires knowing the accurate time as the Earth spins, and the technology to measure that was discovered in the nineteenth century? That the Piri Reis map compiled from ancient, crumbling sources, depicts bodies of land that went underwater at the end of the Ice Age, which implies that at least one seafaring civilization was capable of mapping the world’s oceans 12,000 years ago? That the academics who protected the Clovis First dogma, which stated that no humans existed in the Americas prior to 13,000 years ago, ruined the careers of those who dared to dig deeper and proved that humans inhabited the continent at least ten or twenty thousand years earlier, maybe even a hundred thousand? That genetic signatures from Australasia are present in the DNA of Native Americans living in the Amazon rainforest, so a certain Thor Heyerdahl, leader of the Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific Ocean, was right all along? That the director of the museum of Malta scrubbed the painting of an extinct animal from the Hypogeum’s walls, because the narrative forbade it from having been constructed during the Ice Age? Don’t you sometimes want to raze this fucking world to the ground?”
The child has scrunched her eyebrows as she studies my expression like a cat startled by a sudden bang, trying to figure out how to react, while she rests the tip of the Prussian blue crayon on the paper. I have yanked her out of her creative reverie, and now she’s forced to process the chatter of nearby patrons as well as the hum and hiss of the industrial coffee machine.
“What I caught of that sounded interesting,” Jacqueline says, “but you are confusing our poor doll. From her perspective, you were shooting a stream of nonsense at her cute face.”
I stroke the child’s chubby cheek with my thumb, then I guide her right hand so she continues drawing an unfinished tree. Jacqueline rests her chin on her palm as she eyes me with pity.
“I suspect that you have programmed very little today.”
I heave a sigh.
“Yeah, close to nothing of value. I could tell that Ramsés was about to annoy me about it, so tomorrow I’ll stay to work overtime.”
“I guess that’s a sacrifice you have to make. But you becoming more interested in this world, even in a time period long gone, is a good sign, Leire.”
“Back when I was as young and even younger than this child, I dreamed of venturing into the mysterious and unknown. I wanted to explore fog-shrouded mountains, forgotten caves, cursed forests, sunken ships, submerged islands, deep abysses, and come back rich with tales of witches, unicorns, dragons, fairies, mermaids, merfolk, dvergr and selkies. Unfortunately I ended up infected with whatever it is that makes people crazy, so I became an observer of my life. Soon enough I believed that I was already dead.”
“That sounds healthy. And it must have been nice to feel that you weren’t responsible for your actions.”
“In any case, musing about the Ice Age serves as a distraction from my endless cycle of arousal and depression, and it may help me repress my violent tendencies towards human beings.”
The blond barista, who is wearing a black apron over her equally black uniform, sashays towards us from the first counter as she holds a tray.
“Here you go, ladies.”
She bends her knees to place two steaming cups of hot chocolate next to the open sketchbook, and a latte in front of Jacqueline. This messy-haired Slav would never fumble a cup and spill the scalding liquid on some customer’s face, which could disfigure them and cause the barista guilt that she’d have to expiate through vigorous self-flagellation. Wait, the barista has decorated Jacqueline’s latte with a small heart that’s hanging over mirrored ripples. That fucking whore!
“I’m coming back with your pastries,” she says with a friendly but likely fake smile that conceals the grimace lurking underneath.
She turns around to show us how her butt looks in the black trousers of her uniform, which resemble a nurse’s, then she heads towards the first counter. I don’t know what bothers me more, her disregard for customers’ feelings or her sluttiness.
Chocolate’s dark intensity can penetrate deep into one’s mind, which can calm and inspire that person. Although its sweet and chocolatey aroma assaults my nostrils, it can’t seduce me as it would have in times past; I’ve been too traumatized by a lifetime of daily abuse, which left me with the bitter trace of longing for the embrace of oblivion, as well as the urge to channel my anxiety through my revolver into a discharge that may inconvenience whoever gets caught in the path of the bullet. Anyway, our child’s monolid eyes have widened. She cups her little hands around the closest cup of hot chocolate, then she leans in warily towards the steaming, pine-cone-brown liquid as if she suspected that a frog would leap out of it. Her mouth opens like a wound and she sticks her tulip-pink tongue out, which is coated with a rose-gold membrane; she looks like an adorable corpse.
The tip of her tongue inches closer to the chocolate, and when they touch each other, the child recoils. She complains with a whimper. As she brings her eyebrows together, her forehead crinkles, and she eyes us demanding an explanation.
“I guess that we can’t expect a child from the Paleolithic to avoid sticking her tongue in a hot liquid,” I say, “nor to know how to cross the road without getting flattened by a truck. If the world were a fair place, this wouldn’t be a problem.”
“Oh Leire, don’t make me imagine such a horrendous thing,” Jacqueline protests.
I gesture for the child to look at me. When I grab my cup of chocolate, the ceramic’s heat starts spreading across my palms. I bring the cup to my mouth and I blow on the content. I’ve turned into a grandmother.
I’m hoping that our child will learn fast that her breath should cool the muddy liquid. After I put my cup down, she hurries to grab hers and blows hard on the chocolate, depressing its surface, forming tiny waves, and splashing brown drops on the inner wall of the cup as well as on a page of the sketchbook. She takes a cautious sip.
We’ve been lucky with this random kid that saved me from a ground sloth; if she had proved unable to hold her shit in or to keep herself from eating my slippers, I would have wanted to drop her at whatever ditch remains in modern society to abandon such children, those about whom one should have cared enough but failed to do so.
A carmine flash slashes my mind, then a shiver shakes me. I hunch over and bury my face in my palms. My brain is scraping the bottom of a rusty barrel for enough nourishment so I can think coherently, but I’m so wired that even if I reached a bed now, I would waste hours rolling around while drenched in sweat.
“What’s wrong?” Jacqueline asks me.
“We’re wild and unpredictable beasts,” I say in a rough voice. “Our ancestors survived an apocalypse, which goes a long way to explain how fucked up we are. The main takeaway of my previous rant about prehistory was that we remain children, that we know nothing of what came before us, and that for the last two thousand years or so we’ve been pushed down a narrow road with few detours, none that would make us question the intended destination. But you can’t cage nature and force it to follow your rules.” I take a deep breath as I rub the back of the child’s sweater. “Before this morning, I didn’t even know you existed, little savage. I’m having a hard time comprehending that.”
The girl slurps noisily. When she lowers the cup of chocolate, her lips are splodged with a brown sludge as if she were cosplaying as a dirty clown. She grins at me. In her eyes I may have provided the treat, and I guess I did; if I hadn’t kidnapped her from that boreal forest, she would have spent the afternoon fleeing from short-faced bears and giant armadillos. However, now she wouldn’t give two shits about my growing despair even if she could understand me.
Jacqueline grabs a napkin from its dispenser and walks around the table to wipe our child’s mouth. After a yawn climbs my throat, my mouth gapes so open that my ears pop. Maybe I should have ordered coffee. I shake my head, then I drink a mouthful of chocolate. The hot and sticky liquid smears itself over my palate like a second tongue.
I close my eyes to savor the sweetness and let it melt my brain away, but I hear the accented voice of an incoming Slav. Why the hell is that barista bothering us again? My disdain towards her deafens me to her likely pointless words. Jacqueline stands aside so the barista can lower a heavy, rectangular tray loaded with pastries, as well as with a plate and a set of cutlery for each of us. She has rounded up sugar donuts, fruit tartlets, puff pastry braids laden with raisins, millefeuilles with pearl-colored cream pressed between their layers, and oblong eclairs glazed with a coat that resembles frozen cum.
Our child ogles the feast with glistening eyes; she must be salivating like a mad beast trapped in a cage.
“What an awesome drawing!” the barista says. “You are so talented!”
Our Ice Age child must have turned the page back in the sketchbook, likely so my masterpiece would inspire her, and now the barista is soiling it with her gaze. Then she stares at the girl, who smiles the same way a stray cat would purr at the stranger who went out of his way to pet it. I wonder if our child thinks that everyone in this new world is retarded; why else would they insist on talking to someone who can’t understand them?
I squint as my nostrils flare. This barista must be a mercenary from some Eastern European shithole, sent here to sabotage our civilization through psychological operations; the real war is on the battlefield of the mind.
“Leaving aside the masterful painting, which would be worth thousands in the international auction circuit, don’t address our girl as if she were some pet,” I say sternly. “She’s an orphan from the Paleolithic period, and we are raising and educating her for a better future.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” the barista says in a bubbly tone. “She reminds me of my niece Tanya.”
“Please, I don’t want to hear about your relatives. Can you give us some peace and quiet? This is a family patisserie, not a kangaroo shelter.”
I regret my words as soon as they escape my mouth. I should never return to this cursed store; if I forget the current confrontation and one day I end up ordering coffee here, this barista may serve me some beverage that would taste like sewage.
“Sure thing!” she says with a smile that would disarm a lesser woman. “Enjoy your pastries and the rest of the afternoon.”
The barista turns around, and while she swaggers towards the first counter, her butt wiggles slightly as if proclaiming that no matter how our verbal sparring ended, now I’m forced to stare again at the back of her flimsy trousers.
I sigh.
“We’re a bunch of troglodytes here in the twenty-first century,” I mutter. “We should be grateful that these baristas don’t massacre us and pillage our civilization like so many invaders did in the past.”
Jacqueline arches an eyebrow at me. When she rests her elbows on the table, her mighty breasts overhang the cup of latte.
“Leire, what’s your problem with this service industry worker?” she asks as she chuckles.
“Hey, it has nothing to do with her temporary subservience because she’s forced to take our orders. I would have disliked her even if she were my mother. Especially if she were my mother.”
“Why, though? She was perfectly nice.”
“I… don’t remember. But I haven’t forgotten how she made me feel.”
Jacqueline shakes her head slowly. She’s observing me as if I were lying in bed with a damp washcloth on my forehead, waiting for my fever to relent.
I fidget with my cutlery.
“I have so much anger bottled up inside, Jacqueline,” I confess. “It’s not fair to keep it in.”
“That’s alright, but you told that stranger dangerously true things.” She lowers her voice. “Are you that exhausted, my poor baby?”
I rub my eyebrows.
“Let’s say that I’m running out of the necessary energy to restrain my primal instincts.”
My girlfriend smiles, then she picks up the sketchbook and admires my masterpiece.
“That young woman wasn’t lying when she praised your drawing, sweetie.” She turns the page. “Oh, and our doll drew her home! That’s the forest you ended up in, right? She has depicted the cold so well with the aquamarine crayon. And are these tepees?”
Drool is trickling from the corners of our child’s mouth as she pokes her index finger into a fluffy donut sprinkled with sugar.
“Well, that donut belongs to you now,” I say to the girl. “Your index finger may have been in any amount of extinct beasts’ anuses.”
I take the donut and tempt our child by holding it in front of her mouth. She giggles, then snatches the ring-shaped piece of fried dough. She opens her mouth wide, scrunching up her face and making her eyes go squinty, and she munches on the donut.
I hear her high-pitched noises of delight while my eyes lose focus. This child’s home is a forest? Are we talking about the same girl that we have brought to a patisserie so she could taste pastries for the first time? But less than twenty-four hours ago I flashed my tits and genitals at her unsullied self as I stood in that boreal forest next to a burbling brook, didn’t I? My brain must be hustling to mend the wounds that the ordeal has inflicted to my psyche.
I first met our sudden daughter when she peeked out from behind a tree trunk. In my memory I’m staring at her disheveled hair, at her peach-orange skin stained with dirt, at the ash-colored leather tunic that clung to her lithe body. Jacqueline left on her coffee table the child’s tooth necklace: a gift for a wild princess who lived at the end of a world where ice would meet fire. I can barely get through a fucking morning at the office without sinking in the sludge of my existential despair, yet I survived a trip to the Ice Age through an invisible gateway opened by my otherworldly stalkers. What the hell has happened to my life?
I have broken out in a cold sweat. I gulp, then I lift my gaze and scan the vicinity for any trace of the Ice Age. A woman who’s wearing a fur-lined coat is ordering some beverage at the second counter, and the beanie-wearing lowlife who nearly assaulted Jacqueline is scuttling out of the store while he taps the screen of his smartphone. Both, as well as the rest of the patrons, are oblivious to the fact that ninety-nine percent of everything and everyone that ever existed has disappeared and been forgotten.
I bite the nail of my index finger. When I open my mouth to speak, my voice comes out threadbare.
“Before mankind rose and became gods, the ground sloth was one of the dominant herbivores, as well as the largest land mammal that ever lived on Earth. By far the chunkiest sloth that I ever saw in person. It could have devoured a horse whole, but they weren’t murderous, just confused and lazy. And now we exist in a world where sloths are no longer sloths.”
Jacqueline’s cobalt-blues shimmer as she softens her gaze. She picks up an oblong eclair adorned with Brandy-colored lines in zig-zag, then she offers it to me.
“Soon enough we will all go extinct,” she says in a soothing tone. “There’s only one of you, only one of me, only one of this darling girl. Everyone will eventually be forgotten. We can mourn what is lost, but also celebrate that we are still here, for example by stuffing ourselves with as many pastries as we can.”
If we can still celebrate anything even when the ground sloths, mammoths and mastodons are already gone, then I shall eat until the bitter end.
Author’s note: the three songs for today are “Myth” by Beach House, “‘Cello Song” by Nick Drake, and “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter. Here’s the link.
Another long chapter at 3,586 words. It took me ages to get through, partly because I’ve been feeling apathetic for a while.
Last Monday I got an echocardiogram done. After the test, the cardiologist just told me that he would see me in a year unless I endured another episode of atrial fibrillation. When I reminded him that he had just performed an echocardiogram on me, he said, paraphrasing, “Well, your left ventricle is way too big. You shouldn’t drink alcohol again, like at all.” I don’t drink alcohol. I was so stunned that I didn’t ask why my left ventricle dilated, nor what should I expect in the future. Now I have to figure out how to visit a different cardiologist. On top of that, out of nowhere I’ve developed red-brown, itchy spots on my ankles and feet, as well as a varicose vein. It sounds heart related to me.
Regarding prehistory, some years ago I came across the notion that a “black mat” layer that dates to 12,800 years ago or so, right at the onset of the tremendously anomalous Younger Dryas climatic period, contains impact proxies (high-temperature spherules, meltglass, amorphous carbon, etc.) that are characteristic of extraterrestrial events, mainly comet/meteor impacts.
The same impact proxies are present at the K-Pg boundary related to the Chicxulub impact, which eradicated the dinosaurs. To be fair, some scientists believe that the ET event might have been due to coronal mass ejections and solar storms from the sun. Others believe that both comet/meteorite impacts and coronal mass ejections were responsible, and related. In any case, our ancestors suffered a catastrophe that ruined the course of humanity.
Apparently this subject was discovered in the mid-to-late 2000s. You can read more information on the webpage of the Comet Research Group, linked here. This other link leads to the scientific publications. As the years pass, more and more scientists seem to agree that the evidence supports the impact hypothesis.
Ever since I discovered that a cosmic apocalypse hit the reset button on the previous 187,200 years, in conservative estimates, of history that modern human beings had accumulated (because modern human beings have been around for at least 200,000 years), I’ve remained fascinated (on-and-off, autistically obsessed) by that catastrophe, its implications, and the ripples it made on our likely outrageously incorrect narrative of the Holocene.
This linked video is a compelling overview of how the discovery of the Younger Dryas impact, as well as other recent discoveries, shines a light on the many incongruences in the current history of human civilization, which is unlikely to be rewritten until many people with authority in academia retire or pass away. I’ll also display the video below.
In this novel, Bukowski forces us to follow his alter ego Henry Chinaski, an alcoholic drifter whose personality can be summarized by the following quote from the book: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”
For half of the book or so, Henry travels from place to place hoping to land any job that would allow him to pursue his two goals: getting drunk and fucking women. Through the protagonist we meet curious people and we learn some intricacies, as much as he needed to know to survive there, of the jobs that Henry landed and that usually lasted him less than a week before he quit or got fired.
Henry daydreamed briefly about becoming an author, and even wrote a few pieces, but above that he hoped that some wealthy woman would take pity on him and become his sugar mommy. At some later point he also hoped to land a Japanese wife because he considered that they have the wisdom of the ages or some shit. Henry failed to luck out; the two women who made repeated appearances were 1) a barfly who, along with two female friends of hers, had a sugar daddy of their own, an aging millionaire who alternated between paying the women to receive some affection and berating them for cheating on him; 2) a woman named Jan, the female version of our debauched protagonist. She drank about as much as he did, but cheated even more. Their relationship was reduced to Henry bringing home, if they were lucky, enough money to buy food and alcohol, then fucking while drunk. Jan is present throughout most of the story, yet for Henry she barely seems to matter more than someone who is home when he returns from work.
I’m guessing that this novel is mostly autobiographical. We are presented with accounts of the protagonist’s attempts at finding a job that will last, or that at least won’t make him wander off in the middle of his shift to get drunk at the nearest bar. We go through twenty-five or so of such experiences. Even the most memorable people from those microworlds end up disappearing as if Henry had never met them, and that transience extends to his personal life. People come and go; he can only rely on the pleasure and oblivion that either a bottle or sticking his dick in someone else provide.
If Henry had cared about his future or his well-being throughout the events depicted, the story would have been a harrowing nightmare in which a broken, alienated man can’t relate to people on a human level, and can only tolerate his responsibilities for about three or four days at a time before he self-destructs. In any case, the guy is a piece of shit who can’t help himself: he steals from his jobs, he cheats, he sort of rapes, he drags other people’s wives out of bed in front of the husbands and French-kisses the wives (only happened once, but it bothered me), casually murders, and plenty of other dubious stuff I’ve already forgotten.
The most memorable moment for me was the following, otherwise minor one: Henry had gotten off a bus somewhere during the height of his drifter period. He rents a room at some inn owned by a couple. The woman tells him that her husband is on his last legs, and Henry can hear him wheezing as the man struggles to breathe in a nearby room. The next morning, an attractive female guest, who had been told that Henry was some sort of writer, approaches the protagonist, informs him that the sick owner had died, and asks him to give her some money for some gift or a memorial. Henry informs her that he isn’t actually a writer, that the dead owner is none of his business, and that the living are the ones who need to be pitied, starting with Henry himself, so what she should do is strip down and offer him some affection. The woman, disgusted, turns around and leaves. The author describes how she walks to the end of that hallway, enters her room, and disappears from Henry’s life forever. And in a way the whole story is like that: he gets pressured with some societal demand (including the basic ones of having to earn enough money to keep existing), he clashes with people in usually self-destructive ways, then those people are gone only to be replaced by the next group of people who will quickly be gone as well, including the few ones that Henry would have preferred to keep around.
Bukowski was an honest guy, someone who saw clearly despite his boozing, and who managed to keep going in style despite the hopelessness of it all.
I will return to work in a couple of days. From then on, every afternoon I’ll want to take advantage of my remaining energy to make some progress on my ongoing novel We’re Fucked, so now I’ve gone through the posted chapters to figure out how to organize them properly; otherwise when I end up self-publishing the novel in a few months, the potential readers (probably two or three people) would find a list of about a hundred chapters in the table of contents, which would feel swampy. So far I’ve posted 69 chapters, that I have divided into the following named sequences:
I have yet to render about 18,000 words of notes into the two remaining sequences:
This novel is already 174,984 words long. Ain’t that nuts? If you consider that your average novel contains 80,000 words, We’re Fucked is 2.2 times the length of a normal novel. It doesn’t matter to me; reducing the size of novels was a conspiracy by traditional publishers to save money on paper.
Anyway, all of these chapters are available (until I self-publish the ebook, because I can’t sell it on Amazon and such platforms otherwise) through this link. You know, in case anyone apart from me is enjoying this novel.
In case you don’t know already, some internet service out there allows you to pay so you can send prompts to a high-end neural network that runs on some supercomputer, and that AI will spit back fantastic images of whatever crossed your mind. Ain’t that grand? Anyway, I fed it prompts related to chapter 69 of my ongoing novel, and as usual the neural network produced some winners. In addition, I took advantage of a beta upgrade of the AI that seems stronger, if maybe less creative.
Millefeuilles made of layers of puff pastry, cake, and cream. Chocolate croissants sprinkled with powdered sugar. Danish pastries topped with rosewood-colored jam. White mousse cakes that look like melting snowdrifts. Heart-shaped pastries half-caked in chocolate. Coffee buns dusted with coarse sugar. Coconut-flavored croquembouches. Crumbly cream horns. Sugar donuts. Stuffed crullers. Buttercream-iced choux buns. Cookie-crusted hazelnut pralines. Red fruit tartlets with a golden crust. Puff pastry braids bedecked with nuts and raisins. Freshly baked croissants that resemble legless, buff crabs. Oversized, rust-brown palmiers covered with a thick layer of glazed sugar. Oblong eclairs stuffed with cream and decorated with lines of white chocolate in zig-zag.
My mouth is flooding with saliva. The lining of my stomach secretes more and more acid like a flesh-vat at some dystopian factory, ready to dissolve whatever bolus gets pushed down the esophagus. I need to stuff myself with the whole inventory of pastries; their sugar will make me forget about my otherworldly stalkers, about the exponential ruin of our society, about the fact that I’m a failed genetic experiment that should have been thrown in the garbage, and about the fact that my brain is hoping to spot a hole in my defenses to unleash another assault of nightmarish memories: the disasters that the universe has hurled at me out of spite, and the disgraces that I’ve brought upon myself because I’m a cowardly fiend that is counting the minutes until she can shove her hand down her panties.
Our adopted daughter is standing on her tiptoes and pressing her hands and nose against the glass display counter, hypnotized by the concoctions of chocolate, cream and jam supplied by this factory of death and gluttony. She looks like she might faint if we let her try any pastry. The child will make us gorge ourselves on a cake of toxic sludge, to push us deeper into the underbelly of this rotten world that promises periods of blissful oblivion through drugs, only to fuck us over.
“She’s going to become addicted to sugar in no time,” I say.
Jacqueline chuckles.
“Aren’t we all.”
From behind the counter comes the chirpy voice of a young woman with an Eastern European accent.
“She’s so adorable! It’s like she’s the cutest thing I ever laid eyes on! What kind of pastry would you like, little bunny?”
Past the reflections in the plexiglass partition, the barista is wearing a black uniform and grey-blue sanitary gloves. She’s at least half a head taller than me. Her sandy-blond hair, tied up in a messy bun, gleams under the overhead lights. Her eyes are shadowed by deep mascara, and she has the Slavic gaze of someone who has witnessed officers of Communism forcing entire villages to starve, although she looks young enough to be in college.
I should prevent her from interacting with Jacqueline; if this woman flirted, my beloved may snap out of her trance and realize that she’s dating the human equivalent of a raccoon. But the barista has fixed her haunted gaze on our child, and dared to address her. Although I’m tempted to tell this woman that she should mind her own business, over the years I’ve learned that if you are as hostile to people as they deserve, they tend to bother you even more, so I measure my response.
“Please, don’t mention bunnies in my presence,” I say icily. “And we haven’t decided yet. Once we do, I hope you’ll be capable enough of providing the chosen pastries for us.”
When the woman smiles, I’m surprised that she had been able to cover those teeth with her lips.
“I’m sure I will!”
“Then we’ll have two millefeuilles, a half-dozen of the chocolate croissants, one fruit tartlet with almonds, four palmiers, and two dozen donuts. Plus two bottles of your best champagne.”
She raises her eyebrows.
“What was that?”
“We haven’t decided yet,” Jacqueline says through a grin, then she pats me on the shoulder. “Let’s pick our table. One of those at the back.”
I stifle a yawn as I nod. Hand in hand with our adopted daughter, we head deeper into the pastry shop, past two short-haired, middle-aged women who have ordered toast and coffee, then past an ancient woman whose wrinkled skin is stained with liver spots, and who is sitting next to her South American carer; both are frowning as if they’re trying to figure out the purpose of their existence.
Jacqueline picks two joined tables at the back, then she gestures for the child to climb onto the chair closest to the wall and facing the entrance. She’s safer if we box her in.
This shop features a second counter dominated by an industrial coffee machine, above which menu boards advertise breakfasts. Two male clients are seated on wooden stools at the counter. My skin itches; my brain is busy monitoring the presence of multiple strangers although I’m already exhausting my reserves of energy on remaining coherent. Jacqueline, however, remains as calm as a cup of warm milk.
After we set down the shopping bags on the fourth chair, my beloved walks around the two varnished maple wood tables to take off our child’s lemonade-pink scarf, revealing the peach-orange skin of her throat. The girl lets out an anxious vocalization, as if she had been deprived of a toy.
“You shouldn’t wear it indoors, darling,” Jacqueline says in her honeyed voice. “It will catch lots of crumbs.”
I slump down into the chair next to our child, but as I’m considering that she would feel more comfortable closer to the woman that has taken care of her, Jacqueline interrupts my thoughts.
“What would strike your fancy, dear?”
“Well, if I force myself to drink more coffee today, I might vomit.”
“So how about a cup of chocolate? Our girl will also enjoy that.”
“Sounds tasty.”
“And what kind of pastries would you like?”
“Anything you think that I can fit in my mouth.”
Jacqueline chuckles. She leans over the table to move aside the menu and the napkin dispenser, clearing some space in front of the child. She pulls out from one of the shopping bags a sketchbook, the kind that an art teacher would order his middle school students to buy, as well as a yellow pack of Crayola crayons that contains sixty-four different colors. My girlfriend’s face lights up with a grin as she opens the pack, revealing four rows of crayons like multicolored, cone-headed freaks seated at an auditorium. I lack names for half of those colors.
The child perks up, then she gabbles a couple of sentences excitedly. Jacqueline reaches over to pat her on the head.
“It will take us a long time to teach our language to this doll, if… if she’s capable of learning it.” Her smile falters. “But she should be able to draw, right?”
I pull out an asphalt-black crayon from the pack. I probe its flat tip.
“Yeah… I read this morning that plenty of those cave paintings were made by children.”
“Perfect. Keep her entertained, will you?”
Jacqueline squeezes my hand, then she struts towards the counter to order. When I turn my head to the right, our child is paying attention to me with curiosity; I feared that she would look at me as if I were some pest that she’s forced to tolerate. Her cherubic cheeks disturb my heart, but the gaze of her monolid eyes is like a laser running over my face. It reminds me of my high school biology teacher; when he was about to explain the insides of an elephant, he stared so long and hard into our eyes that I started to wonder if elephants actually existed.
This girl is shining a light on the garbage bags I piled up at the apartment I abandoned, on the shattered living room window I never bothered to fix, on the board games I bought but didn’t unwrap, on the times I stuck around after hours at the office and tugged my trousers and panties down to rub one out. Is she a cosmic judge sent from the distant past to bring the gavel down on my foul deeds? Or maybe this girl will grow into the exact image of my mother: an indifferent humanoid programmed to erase me from history.
I gulp.
“Just wait until they serve us a bunch of pastries, forest girl,” I say nervously while I try a smile. “You have never tasted anything that good! And you’re lucky I’m not the one preparing your food. I’m able to fry ham and bacon and cook some eggs, but you never know if they’ll somehow end up covered in cum.”
The child arches her eyebrows and tilts her head, and my cheeks flush. I scoot my chair closer to her.
“Nevermind what I said. I guess you need to be taught how to draw with crayons, so check this out.”
What should I draw? What effluvia of my diseased brain could I show to this pristine child that has just begun to get eroded by modernity? I risk scarring her for life. But what an odd worry for me to have; when was the last time that I doodled anything else than a close-up of my own face? No, of the face with which I should have been born, instead of the rotting husk with which any reflective surface torments me.
I survey the rows of crayons as if they were the opportunities of a full hand in a card game. I let my instinct grab four other crayons from the pack. When I lean back, I spot Jacqueline: she’s standing in front of the pastry counter and pointing at some items inside the glass display counter. Behind it, the Slavic barista, pastry chef or whatever the hell she pretends to be, is using food tongs to pluck an oblong eclair.
Seated at the second counter, next to an uneven and dented wooden pillar, a man in his late twenties is ogling my girlfriend’s legs. He’s wearing a beanie and a nylon windbreaker. He’s holding his phone in his hand as if he was staring at it before he realized that the most delicious woman alive had materialized in this store. The sight of my girlfriend’s twin mountains hugged by her sweater would be enough to make the man’s crotch swell up like an angry balloon.
I can make out the tight, toned flesh of Jacqueline’s legs through her cinder-colored tights, and as she bends over to press a fingertip against the glass display counter, her plaid skirt hikes up slightly. The bottom of her peacoat may keep hiding her butt, or it may instead fail catastrophically at its mission, exposing her ample behind that resembles a pair of ripe pomegranates. Anyway, Jacqueline is an exquisite piece of art that should have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci, while I’m an unmade bed with a dirty quilt and a crusted-up blanket, my sheets tattered by two decades of restless sleep and smelly ejaculate.
How dare that beanie-wearing beast take a sneak peek at my queen’s attributes? Merely grazing Jacqueline with his gaze would befoul her as if she had fallen in one of those Indian rivers. I should stop him. I would stand up, walk up to the pervert and tap his shoulder. When he turned around, I would clock him hard on the nose. No, that may break my fingers, and he might even punch me back. I could hurl the napkin dispenser at him. A hail of paper may distract him so much that Jacqueline would return to our table unmolested. I could snatch the barista’s tongs, then I’d snap the guy’s neck with a quick twist and a jerk. I’m also holding crayons; although their tip is flat, the end is still tapered, so I could try to push them through the guy’s face. No, I would have to sharpen the tips first with my teeth. I could fling the crayons at the prick, but I don’t know which colors would be the most effective in dissuading him from polluting my queen.
What the hell am I thinking? Isn’t Spike’s revolver weighing down the inside pocket of my corduroy jacket? I should take the weapon out and check that the bullets haven’t vanished, that they remain in the chamber. I’d cock the hammer, then aim the revolver at the back of that windbreaker. Blam, blam! Blood would start oozing from the two black holes. After that triumph of justice, an oily thread of equine saliva would descend from the heavens, and its beady end would morph into a thumbs up.
If either of the bullets buried themselves in the guy’s spine, he would slump instantly to the hardwood floor. Otherwise he would stand up and turn around with an annoyed expression. Upon noticing that a thin stream of smoke rose from the muzzle of my revolver, he would say, “what the hell, lady.” But I would lower the barrel towards his abdomen and squeeze the trigger. Blam! Another blood spatter. The bullet would pierce his intestines, which would leak out their shit and cause an infection that would rot his insides. If by this point the revolver didn’t misfire and explode turning my hands into shredded ribbons, I would aim the revolver further down. A thick liquid would be dangling from the glans of his erect penis. Blam! His dick and balls would burst. The windbreaker-clad wretch would fall to his knees while clutching his pulsating groin, then tumble into a pool of liquefied meat.
Once a man loses his genitals, he wouldn’t care if I smashed his face with a rock, if I gouged his eyes out, or if I cut his head off. His life was already over anyway. If someone were to shoot out my clitoris, I’d have a hard time getting out of bed in the mornings.
A small hand tugs on my right sleeve. I flinch, my heart leaps to my throat. Our child lets out a sentence in a questioning tone, which pulls me down into the atmosphere of this patisserie and its scent of pastries splashed with blood. Her childish innocence will strike me dead and bury me in the same grave as that beanie-wearing lowlife.
I wish I were like this girl. Her eyes are clear and she’s free. And she probably has no clue how to use a knife nor a fork.
My brain feels like it’s dripping with tar. I catch my breath, then I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand.
“You are right, I was supposed to work on my masterpiece. You know what they say: never make your art in a patisserie. It may be a fine place for fattening food, but for creative work, it’s too distracting. Anyway, my drawing will become the most famous ever, and it will cure my insomnia.”
I hunch over the sketchbook and start drawing the outline of a face, but the stroke comes out faint. I examine the tip of the asphalt-black crayon. No, they didn’t come with transparent caps, and my exhaustion is preventing me from thinking straight, because the crayon’s pigmented wax wouldn’t have touched the paper in that case. I must have gotten used to pens and markers.
I press the tip of the crayon harder against the paper until the curve comes out as thick as I want, although it feels like I’m punishing the sketchbook. I draw round eyes like those of a slow loris, the well-mouths into an inner chasm. Added to the slightly raised eyebrows and the half-closed lips, the woman’s expression suggests madness, frustration and pent-up horniness. In short, her look screams, “I’m trapped within my own mind, so fuck me, please and thank you, mistress.”
I can’t figure out how to make the strokes seem continuous, and some of the colors have blended into mud. The tip of an orange crayon splinters into chips. When I brush them away with my hand, they leave a stain on the paper. I guess that any crayon drawing ends up looking like it was made by a child.
I’m enjoying shading that brow furrowed in worry, as well as the space under the arched eyebrows, under the marked eye bags that befit someone who suffers from anxiety-induced insomnia and severe depression, and under that downturned mouth of a person for whom every moment of happiness, as soon as it ends, feels like a mirage.
I draw each sinuous lock of hair in caramel and wood browns, with some orange added in as if I had dyed those locks with henna, until I end up rendering a beastly mane that matches my unkempt mind. Hair is about a hundred thousand protein filaments that grow however they please out of the person’s scalp; aren’t we damaging its dignity by arranging it with a narrow-toothed tool into artificial shapes?
Under the caricaturesque head, I’ve depicted a skinny neck and narrowed shoulders; even in a drawing, I want to occupy as little space as possible. I don’t dare to continue the drawing below that close-up, but I envision a body like a column, its legs thin as pipes and the feet dangling from them. I’m tempted to add a title in the top right-hand corner of the paper: ‘The Lonely Loon, Queen of Monsters.’ I should also write an accompanying poem:
I am a monster from a land far away.
I roamed the mountains,
I lurked in the caves,
I slithered on the sand,
I climbed the trees,
I scaled the clouds,
I jumped between the rainbows,
I swayed amidst the stars.
I’m not a good kid, as you can see
From my monstrous countenance.
My feet are freezing and bloody red,
But my mouth is filled with hot steam.
My mom is a lizard. She says she’s an angel.
My dad is a worm. He says he’s a god.
My only companion is the moon.
I eat other monsters’ bodies,
And I swallow every stranger
Who wanders in from outside.
My shadow is so long
As I cast it upon the ground.
I stick my teeth into my soul’s wounds,
And eat myself alive.
I will end up living on ice.
This is my song of mourning,
This is my prayer to the night,
That a special monster like myself
May find herself at peace in another realm.
My voice does not reach the skies,
Nor do my words touch the Earth,
But I sing my songs to the moon
While she falls asleep by the lake,
And wakes up by the river
Where there is no one else.
I remove my elbows from the table, then I push the sketchbook to the child’s side.
“Ta-ta!” I exclaim using an expression that may have been common in the Ice Age.
The child snaps her head back and lets out an admiring O sound through her O-shaped mouth. A flood of pride flows down to my groin.
“Hell yeah, I’m pretty good, huh?” I point at the drawing, then at myself. “Leire. That’s me. My name is Leire.”
She stares at me hesitantly while her eyebrows twitch. When she parts her lips, they form a bubble of saliva that slides to a corner of her mouth. She closes it again.
I tap the drawing with my index finger.
“Leire.”
“Eide,” the child says in her high-pitched voice.
Did the word’s consonants become shapeless blobs of doughy mud, as if they’d fallen into a tar pit and gotten stuck?
“Eide?”
She claps and hoots with laughter as if I were a monkey and she had heard me utter a ridiculous sound.
I’m flabbergasted. A rush of warmth fills my chest, and my head feels like it’s about to shoot off like the cork of a champagne bottle. Oh no, I want to hug this child so hard that her liquified viscera would get squeezed through her orifices like toothpaste!
The name Leire is elegant and alluring; a poet would form it with his lips while gazing at the stars and yearning for the one he loves. Eide sounds like a rude kid who has failed to learn that she shouldn’t insult other people’s parents, or hit people over the head with a hammer. Eide is a name for a morose girl who needs hugs. I guess I’m Eide now.
That was the first of the Ice Age child’s vocalizations that showed intelligence; whatever vestiges of sentience we recognized in her previous actions might have been wish fulfillment. Now I suspect that she may be smarter than me.
My heartbeat resumes its steady thud. I point at myself with one thumb.
“Leire.”
The child waves her little hand at me.
“Eide!”
When I jab my index finger at our girl, her eyes sparkle. She clenches her hands into fists and blurts out maybe two words, but I don’t understand how she used her tongue and lips to vocalize them, even though I’m staring at her mouth.
I should give myself a break. An otherworldly demon invaded my dreams to force-feed me tainted pancakes, which caused me to wake up screaming at four in the morning, then a rip in spacetime sent me to the Paleolithic Age, where I risked losing my fingers and toes and nose to frostbite, as well as my sanity. I also pissed off an extinct ground sloth to the point where it wanted to ram its claws through my windpipe. I should be thankful that I can still understand my own language, and if I think about all of this too long, I might become incapable of speaking.
Author’s note: today’s songs are “Caribou” (as well as this alternate version) by Pixies, and “Mute” by Youth Lagoon.
Leire’s fear that any food she prepares may end up covered in cum is actually a reference to chapter 14.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter: here’s the link.
This was the last chapter I will be able to post before I return to work this Friday. Of course, it feels like a disaster. Back to the routine of wasting my time and energies on fixing stupid computer problems, dealing with even stupider users, and tolerating my coworkers, who often act like middle school kids. But I’ve never managed to earn more than ten euros selling my ebooks, and I’m a thirty-seven-year-old disgusting dude, so nobody would want to pay the bills while I stay at home jerking off whether literally or psychologically, or both at once.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this one.
Somewhere in that nasty world out there, a brave neural network runs laps in a supercomputer to generate visual depictions of whatever its capricious clients demand. I told the AI to render stuff related to the 68th chapter of my ongoing novel, or else. But how does lemur skin reflect the sea?
The tingling at the base of my brain suggests that if I closed my eyes and allowed myself to relax for a few seconds, I’d pass out on my bus seat. Would I suffer through another nightmare here, stimulated as I am by the vibrations that travel through this plasticky seat and into my groin to spread between my viscera?
Since I left Jacqueline’s apartment this morning to face the hellish outside world once again, my skin has remained untouched. I need her to kiss me and lick my wounds, then squeeze me in a warm, tight embrace and whisper sweet words into my ear. I want to forget that I’m doomed to keep working even though my muscles cry in agony from the fatigue and pain. If Jacqueline ravaged me with her fingers and her tongue, I would also forget about the monsters that lurk beyond the veil, that their jaws may close on me and tear me to pieces, that their demonic semen might drown me in a gloopy flood.
My pussy jerks like a fish on land as my clit throbs again, demanding a rubbing motion. Why can’t public transports provide their users with vibrators? If those in charge worry about their clients getting flashed by a stranger, they should install some partitions, then buy disposable vibrators and allow the passengers to pull their trousers and panties down. I’d love to spend the journey to and from work pleasuring myself. Ah, to be cradled by the soothing drone of the engine while my toes curl, the fingers of my free hand dig into my thigh, and a detached cock slides in and out of my sopping insides. I would feel like a medieval queen inside her curtained carriage, who otherwise would be sipping champagne while she strokes some ornate dildo. As I fucked myself, my sticky juice would soak into the seat beneath me; a gesture of gratitude that would mix with the stale remains of what hundreds of previous users leaked. It would become a communal ritual like those walls covered in chewing gum, or that fence where couples hang locks to symbolize their commitment to each other.
I stare out the window right as the bus turns a corner. A view of Mount Igueldo opens up. The setting sun, which is hovering above the left flank of the mountain, dazzles me like a spotlight. The sight from this angle of that amusement park perched on the mountaintop is my cue to stand up; my stop is just ahead. Jacqueline should be waiting nearby, so I must snap out of my daze and behave like a human being, lest I worry my beloved.
As I scramble towards the exit, I spot that a pair of toned legs in cinder-colored tights are standing next to the bus stop, framed against a clump of miniature palm trees. I have started to salivate when I realize that those legs have been wrapped around my face. I lift my gaze to find my girlfriend’s cobalt-blues staring back at me. She beams, widening her plump, rose-pink lips, and dimpling her cheeks. She shifts the shopping bag that she was holding on her right hand to her left one, which was already holding a bag, then she waves in greeting. I straighten my back and greet her with a timid smile.
My body feels heavy and sluggish. When I stumble off the bus, the crisp November air engulfs me and refreshes my lungs. My breath comes out in a white puff.
A tiny human is standing next to my girlfriend, soaking up the waning sunlight. Although less than twenty-four hours ago this child had been frolicking in an Ice Age forest, now she resembles a preppy kid who attends a private school for girls. She’s wearing mid-calf leather boots, navy skinny pants, a wool sweater with a pattern fit for a ski resort, and a lemonade-pink scarf that hides her chin, all of them brand new. Her chestnut-brown hair, woven in two loose braids, gleams as if Jacqueline had washed it with a shampoo and conditioner combo. She reminds me of those videos in which a flea-ridden homeless man gets a makeover, because some rich socialite wanted to bestow upon him the chance to enjoy a life of luxury, and the fairy tale continues until the bum comes across a crack pipe.
The child narrows her slanted eyes, which shine with a bright luster, to shoot me a knowing look, even though she’s as clueless as a baby bird: until today she had never seen a bus. She also has no clue what kind of floor she’s standing on, who are the two women that have become her self-appointed guardians, or how she ended up thirteen thousand years in the future.
I can’t handle this strange mixture of affection and shame. I open my mouth to greet the girl, but what the hell can I say to her other than some version of ‘I’m sorry’? And should I treat her like a person or like a dog?
“Ah… Hello, forest girl.”
The child steps forward, then flings herself onto me like a rag doll. When I catch my breath and cup the back of her head, she stands on her tiptoes and hugs my waist, nestling her face into the velvety surface of my corduroy jacket. I want to warn this pristine child against touching me; it’s like dunking her hand in toxic waste.
“How’s our little savage doing?” I ask in a voice thickened and raspy from lack of sleep.
Jacqueline lets out a crystalline laugh.
“This little girl is very chatty, as well as easygoing and curious,” she says in a slight French accent that I recognize from my dreams. “Don’t you think she looks adorable in that outfit? I’ve had to contain myself from smooching her all morning.” Jacqueline pets the girl on the head. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Too bad you can’t understand anything I’m saying.”
The child pulls away from our embrace, but her small hands still cling to my jacket. The way my girlfriend spoke clarifies that she still appreciates me even though I failed to perform the most basic of duties after I woke up from my nightmare, such as giving her a morning-after kiss or having her roll over and let me lick her pussy.
Jacqueline sports a grin that I wish I could bottle up and preserve inside me as an antidote for loneliness. The golden light of the late afternoon is bathing her queenly features in a honeyed glow. She has gathered her raven-black hair in a braided ponytail, that is draped over her shoulder like a waterfall of silk. She’s wearing a fitted, night-black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and over those, an unbuttoned, dark sienna peacoat. Her breasts, that seem fuller and more buoyant than usual, are shadowing half of her tummy, and begging for a squeeze. Compared to her, I’m a tramp who wears her dad’s clothes and stinks like a dumpster.
Jacqueline resembles a wealthy mom who would come across me as I hugged my knees and cried in the rain, only to invite me into her mansion and offer me a cup of water. She would guide me to take a warm shower to wash off the scent of rotting garbage. When I stepped out with water dripping from my body, she would be waiting for me in a net nightie, ready to dry me with a fluffy towel. She would cradle me in her arms squeezing her meaty breasts between us, which would intoxicate me with their warmth and scent. She’d call me a pitiful creature who needed her help.
She would tighten her grip around my shoulders as her slippery tongue snaked inside my mouth. She would drag me to her bed, and while the feather-softness of her silky hair, as well as the weight of her breasts crushing my ribcage, distracted me, she would shackle my arms and legs to the bedposts. She would rip open her nightie, straddle my face and lower her well-oiled pussy on my mouth.
The taste of her nectar would make my senses reel and my eyes roll back into my head. I would lap at her clit for hours while she petted my head and her nipples leaked jellied milk globules on my cheeks and forehead. Her body would convulse into a series of rhythmic contractions as I gagged on her geyser-like squirts. She would coax my body to expel its most intimate, bitter excretions, and when I felt fully humbled, she would whip me with her strap-on cock and pound my asshole into submission.
With the passing days my hands and feet would go numb, then bloated and gangrenous. My brain would be burning hot, my guts would be churning with bubbling lava. While the flesh of my extremities sloughed off the bone, my tongue would wear down like a lollipop against the woman’s throbbing, steel-hard clit. Her cream would cause me to regurgitate a slimy mess that I would have to swallow and vomit again before it disappeared down my throat, like a cow grazing on toxic grass. One day her juices would overflow from my digestive system into my lungs, and I would start drowning with my nose buried in her pubes, inhaling the pungent scent of her sopping insides: the bitter tang of jasmine flowers crushed under a woman’s heel, mixed with the sweet scent of strawberries. The woman’s naked body would come into focus: a face smudged with charcoal, two silver-white eyes like those of a skull, and a black-as-night tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. Her hair would be a patchwork quilt of reds, whites, and purples, streaked with carmine blood.
I would spasm with a paroxysm of coughing, and retch up a glob of pus that would splatter against the woman’s unshaven thighs. My breath would rasp from my scorched lungs and dribble in a gray stream into my nostrils, but she would burst out in a wailing, orgasmic laughter, then she’d pinch my nose shut. As my brain boiled and blistered in my skull, a white light would explode behind my eyes, and my mind would crack open like a pistachio. I would die knowing that my saviour never loved me as much as I loved her.
I would be reborn in the Ice Age, where I’d be greeted by our adopted daughter’s tribe as a returning heroine. We would all ride on a giant snowball into the future.
After I shake my head to banish the images that have sequestered my senses, I can barely pass enough air through my dilated nostrils. My face feels hot despite the nippy weather. As I shift my weight on my wobbly legs, I rub my thighs together, which elicits a sensation that I can only describe as a dry orgasm.
I risked losing my limbs to frostbite back at that boreal forest, so I want to remain warm outside, but at least I’d like to bring Jacqueline’s knuckles to my lips so I can give her a chaste kiss. However, both of her hands are busy holding shopping bags.
“Jacqueline,” I start in a ragged voice, “this is one of those times that I wonder how come someone as hot as you can exist.”
She bites her lower lip, then takes a deep breath as she burrows into my pupils with her gaze.
“Tell me later what has crossed that dirty mind of yours, darling, and you’re gonna get it. If you can stay awake, that is. I was surprised that you didn’t pass out on the bus and missed the stop. In any case, I’m so glad you are okay, my baby. I’ve been worried about you this morning, you know?”
My mouth is gummy. I lick the saliva that has gathered at the corners of my lips.
“W-why would you be worried?”
“Well, for one thing, this morning you ended up in the Ice Age,” she says with motherly patience.
I was about to lift my right hand to rub my eyebrows, but a small hand is holding mine. The child I kidnapped has wrapped her fingers around my palm. They feel so thin that I could snap them like twigs.
“Yeah, that’s… a thing that happened,” I say. “I can’t believe we have a kid now.”
Jacqueline brushes my free hand with hers, as well as with the handles of the bag she’s holding.
“I can hardly believe it either, but it’s all real, honey.”
When I rub the wild child’s palm with my thumb, she smiles up at me, showing me her healthy choppers. Her eyes are brimming with trust, and I feel like I’m peering into the heart of Mongolia. We must protect her; the world will ruin her otherwise.
“A-anyway, I drank two more coffees after the ones I texted you about,” I say wearily. “Their caffeine is solely responsible for holding me up. If I fail to sleep through this night, I may not wake up tomorrow.”
Jacqueline expels a tiny cloud of white vapor through her teeth.
“Now it feels cruel to ask you this, but I intended to bring our girl to the nearby La Tahona so she could taste pastries for the first time. They won’t do much harm except to your waist, will they?”
My stomach growls. I’ve barely eaten anything since I woke up at four in the morning, except for a ham sandwich and a handful of nuts at the office.
“Sure, why not. I wouldn’t want to deprive our suddenly adopted daughter from the teeth-rotting wonders of modernity.” I hold up my free hand towards Jacqueline, palm up. “But give me one of those damn shopping bags first.”
We turn our backs on Ondarreta beach to cross the road while we escort the Ice Age child like a couple of deranged bodyguards. We stroll along the sidewalk past a Santander and a Kutxa banks, between the façade of a building and the outside tables of a coffee shop, where the patrons are wearing coats and breathing out white steam above their coffees and croissants. Our child’s fingers intertwine with my own.
My eyes are burning from the lack of sleep. To avoid taxing my brain, that would take notice of every passerby in case they are hiding a knife, my gaze slides along the pavement made of hexagonal tiles, which is dirtied with streaks of dog or human piss. A glob of phlegm glistens at the center of a tile; some dickhead believed that subjecting me to the sight of his discharge was less harmful than swallowing it.
A Kaiku delivery truck, likely full of pasteurized cow milk, attempts to pass us by on the one-lane road, but the traffic slows it down. Its engine is expelling a monstrous gurgle that drowns out our foosteps and even a nearby conversation. The truck lets out a loud tsk as it changes gears, then the engine roar swells and the vehicle leaves us behind. Its exhaust dissipates like the smoke of a dragon’s breath.
I have clenched my teeth, and my heart is pounding in my ears. That noise felt like an invading army scaling the walls of my mind to demolish everything left inside. Our child is squeezing my hand; she’s grimacing as she stares at the shrinking truck with wonder and apprehension.
We have gotten used to nasty stuff that we shouldn’t have tolerated. In the past, while strolling along any street, I would have only heard footsteps, the lively chats of passersby, children’s laughter, distant barks, and at the most a clatter of hooves from some wandering horse. We would have been spared the horrid din of traffic, as well as the music, usually fucking reggaeton these days, that some bastards blast out from their car stereos because they feel good when they annoy people. Our stomachs would wince at the first whiff of fumes from a motor vehicle. The ruckus that human beings create evokes the image of an eye-patched warlord that’s holding a rifle in his free hand while masturbating on a throne of corpses, ready to unleash bullets and semen on the masses. In the end I had to face that I can’t control the sound of the world around me, that I can barely control my own life; I had to bear the ugliness and misery, and I know very little except for the mysteries of my own stupidity.
I must have reached my limit, because my senses are tuning out the sounds and smells in order to save me from drowning in them. My field of view narrows down until it gets reduced to my lover and our sudden child. My brain is questioning why the hell am I walking around when I should lie down on any surface, close my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep.
I take a deep breath and picture myself far away, in a temperate forest populated by beasts that would only be big enough to bite off my fingers, and if I befriended them, I could sink my head in their furry bellies and let their heaving breaths carry me away to dreamland. I’m tired of pretending to be civilized.
When I notice that a hand has rested on my shoulder, I stumble on my feet. Jacqueline has stopped and turned to face me. The awning of the closest store reads ‘Tahona,’ and a vertical advertisement sign hanged on the wall displays two baguettes. Behind the closed sliding door, the inside of the patisserie is bathed in the kind of dim, warm light that would befit a cozy living room or a study.
Jacqueline leans in close to my face, and her white breath breaks against my nose and lips. I inhale her fragrance; it smells like the blackness that engulfs you when you fall asleep.
“You are carrying it, aren’t you?” she whispers.
I have to repress a cough, because the lingering stench of the truck’s exhaust has been burned into my lungs.
“Carrying what? The weight of this world? The weight of my past and my guilt? My life has been little else than a bloody cycle of pain.”
Jacqueline glances down at the breast of my corduroy jacket.
“I meant the dangerous tool that previously belonged to a horse.”
“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t forget it at work as if it were an umbrella or my wallet.”
I consider unbuttoning my jacket, but that would look more suspicious, so I probe through the fabric the solidity of Spike’s revolver.
“You needed to check if you had it with you?” Jacqueline asks, concerned. “You weren’t sure?”
“The stuff and people in my life are known to blink in and out of existence.”
Jacqueline sighs, then she swipes a lock of hair away from my face.
“Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Velouria” by Pixies. I’ve been listening to Pixies so much recently that it probably constitutes a midlife crisis.
This chapter is about 3,100 words of three characters (two deranged, one their adopted daughter from the Ice Age) moving from a bus stop to a pastry shop located 200 meters away. That’s how I roll.
Recently I’ve thought about why I’m so impatient with novels (I’ve always been impatient with them, but it gets worse the more I age) although I devour mangas, and why my stories feel so different to most others I come across. I think it comes down to the fact that I want the vicarious experience of here-and-now through an interesting POV character throughout an entire story. A visual medium like manga, which offers much more leeway than movies or shows, allows the reader to feel like you are kind of hanging out with the characters in specific places and figuring stuff out with them as they experience their surroundings. Also, manga authors have no choice but to research each location and object involved, because they’ll need to be depicted on the panels. It’s hard to imagine that a series as hard hitting for me as Asano’s “Oyasumi Punpun” could have happened in any other medium. The closest an author of novels has come to that, that I remember, is Murakami, although he has put out plenty of shit.
If you are as interested in sexual debasement and/or torture as the demon that commands Leire’s subconscious seems to be, you may want to read my narrative poem “You Choose Who Owns You”, that I wrote back in August of last year.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter: here’s the link.
Recently I’ve been exploiting a neural network to generate images inspired by moments or sentences of my ongoing novel. I originally conceived what ended up being the sixty-sixth and the sixty-seventh chapters as one, but I split it because I tend to go on tangents. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this entry: the following are the images that an artificial intelligence generated for moments or sentences of those two chapters.
Jacqueline has rested the laptop on her half-bare thighs, and as she slides her fingertip over the touch pad, the order travels through an HDMI cable from the laptop to her LCD television, where the cursor moves on a vertical plane over the rows and columns of illustrations. They depict beasts that may have come from fantasy, from prehistory, or from the instructions that some paleontologist was dictating to a painter while they both were tripping on peyote.
The wild child had grabbed one of the scarlet pillows and dropped it on the carpet, then she flopped down on the pillow and curled into a tight ball with her arms folded under her chin and her knees tucked into her chest. Now she’s mesmerized by the parade of still beasts on the TV screen as Jacqueline scrolls up and down.
How would it feel to have been snatched from a boreal forest, where the comings and goings of ants may have seemed interesting, and dropped into this modern world of traffic jams and smartphones? A world that drowns us with so many choices that we prefer to slump down in a chair and let the hours pass. Meanwhile, we daydream about how nice it would be if the decay of our bodies accelerated exponentially, to free us from the responsibility of figuring out how to fill productively the time we have left until we are thrust violently into a pitch-black oblivion, where we’ll forget that we were once human.
When I return my gaze to the screen, Jacqueline has clicked on a thumbnail to load the original image: an artist’s rendition of a hulking beast with wood-brown, shaggy fur, who is standing on its hind legs, which are thick like tree trunks, to reach for a branch laden with verdant leaves. The beast’s bone-white claws are curved and solid like a sabretooth’s canine teeth. Those sunken, amber-colored eyes, that are surrounded by ovals of black fur in a swan-white face, stare at me with disdain. I escaped the monster’s grasp through a doorway between worlds, but now that it has found me, it will burst out of the screen to reduce me, as well as Jacqueline and the child, to piles of bones stripped clean of flesh.
I gasp, then spring up from the sofa and jab my finger at the TV screen.
“Th-that’s the monster that almost tore us to shreds!”
Jacqueline lets out a noise of confusion.
“It resembles a cross between a gigantic bear and a sloth. That tail looks far less impressive than what you suggested. Are you sure, Leire?”
I slide down from the sofa onto my knees and grab the child’s shoulder. She looks at me over her shoulder, open-mouthed.
“You recognize it, right?” I ask as I point at the screen with a quivering hand. “That’s the monster that wants to roast us into a meat pie!”
The child speaks nonsense in her high-pitched voice as she fiddles with one of her animal hair bracelets. I fear that she’s not quite sane.
“At least nod or something, kid,” I say, defeated.
Jacqueline clicks a link; it leads to the website that contains the original picture. The screen fills with a wall of text that imitates Wikipedia. My girlfriend narrows her eyes and pinches her lower lip.
“Megatherium? It’s Latin for ‘great beast’.”
“How can they call something with such an ugly name?”
“So they are giant sloths, right? Funny, I didn’t know they existed. Where do these animals live? Let’s see… Like today’s sloths, they were pure herbivores that ate leaves and grasses…”
I click my tongue.
“Anyone can write vile lies on Wikipedia. There are plenty of morons out there with nothing better to do than ruin everyone else’s life. I’d also bet that the scientist who first described this species had a crack pipe in his hand. I’m telling you, the child and I stood in front of that monster. It was pining for our flesh. The claws alone could have severed us at the waist, and its body could have squashed us flat as a piece of paper. Let’s name that beast… Hrafnagelr! It’s a male with two penises that he uses to hunt his prey, and he makes sure to castrate them first. It’s a shame we don’t have a picture of his scrotum.”
Jacqueline nods as she listens to my babbling.
“Once he’s satiated,” I continue, “he tosses his victim’s guts out of his cave onto the shore, so the fish can feed on them. However, that’s only the beginning of the monster’s terrorizing: he rips out the tongues of those who annoy him, and even castrates himself to find out how much pain he can endure. Everyone in the world will eventually kill themselves so they can become a part of Hrafnagelr’s fur.”
Jacqueline, focused on the screen of her laptop, snaps her head back. As she reads on, her face pales. She straightens her spine and shifts her gaze to my eyes. Any trace of my girlfriend’s self-assured self has been wiped from her expression; she looks as if someone pushed her off a platform and now her feet can’t find a floor under them.
“Leire… these animals went extinct twelve thousand years ago,” she says in a shaky voice.
After a moment, we turn our heads in unison to appraise the child. That chestnut-brown, disheveled hair has only ever been combed with fingers. Her ash-colored leather tunic is worn and scratched as if by bending branches. Her necklace displays teeth pried out from downed beasts. The twisted animal hair that she uses as bracelets may have been found on the forest floor, or harvested from corpses. Jacqueline took off the child’s crude boots, because they had been tracking mud over the hallway floor; the girl’s bare feet are dirty, and their nails jagged.
Our guest’s eyes dart like a wary beast’s between the two strangers that are staring at her, trying to decipher the meaning in this tense atmosphere. Under our focused gaze, she narrows her shoulders, her pupils tremble, and she crosses her hands over her chest.
Jacqueline puts the laptop aside, then lowers herself to the carpet. She strokes the child’s face.
“Somewhere out there,” my queen starts in a thin, quavering voice, “somehow happening at the same time, this child’s parents must have noticed her missing and they are searching for her, calling her name with desperation. But those thousands of years are already gone, aren’t they? Her parents endured the rest of their lives wracked by guilt. They never saw their precious daughter again.”
Jacqueline’s eyes brim with tears. She scoots closer to the girl and hugs her, mashing the ten-year-old’s face against that holy pair of breasts. The tit-meat bulges over the child’s cheeks while her eyeballs roll around in their sockets.
Jacqueline sniffles.
“Sorry, doll, but I doubt you will ever return home. Still, you don’t need to worry, because we will keep you safe.”
Are we now responsible for this child’s wellbeing? As the realization sinks in, a shudder shakes my bones. Until fifteen minutes ago this child had never seen a television, but forget about that tool of conformity; this girl would be unable to name a single board game. How would she ever navigate the modern world? Although she’s still a child, I recall that the first four or five years are fundamental to build the neurological pillars upon which the rest of her future depends. Isn’t she doomed to become a mental recluse forever isolated from the surrounding society, no matter how many sights and experiences we drag her to discover? And what about the damage that my manic paranoia will do to her fragile mind?
I swallow the knot in my throat.
“Are you sure about adopting this girl, Jacqueline…? Think hard, because this decision might haunt us for the rest of our days. She’s obviously mentally damaged, and I bet her eyes glow in the dark. She probably hasn’t heard of the Big Bang or the Industrial Revolution or the Spanish Inquisition. She may come from a prehistoric tribe of cannibals. And do you own any toys that she might enjoy, other than dildos?”
Jacqueline flings her head back and shoots me a teary-eyed look that shuts me up, but she must have recognized my concern. As she pulls away from the embrace, a trembling thread of saliva connects the meaty curve of her right breast to the child’s wet lower lip. Our guest is focused on the mighty pair, maybe assessing them as weapons.
Jacqueline licks her thumb and washes the girl’s eyebrows with that fingertip.
“She has lost everything,” my girlfriend says with determination. “She needs us. It will take her years to understand the world we live in, and she’ll always feel different. But anything is better than abandoning her.”
I hug my knees to my chest and rest my chin on my wrist. My brain is buzzing, my temples are throbbing. My stomach churns like an unruly tide. I should have slept for a full night; I’m unequipped to consider the ramifications of taking care of a prehistoric person who will likely live for about five more decades. But if we surrender this child to the government, they’ll confine her in some center for minors, where she’ll be preyed upon by this country’s uninvited guests, or she’ll become some politician’s plaything. Besides, the prehistoric tribes were likely as peaceful as they could, except for the occasional acts of cannibalism to replenish their stock of meat.
I lower my head in shame.
“F-fine, but make sure she keeps her hands off your tits. She’s about ten, not five.”
Jacqueline giggles like a drunk.
“Of course. My boobs are my insurance for survival.”
Alright then, we have a pet, an exotic one. I would have preferred a cat, but you gotta work with what you’re given, even if it’s a strange forest girl from the Ice Age. She likely needs a mommy as much as I do; thankfully, Jacqueline can draw upon her boundless reserves of love to provide this child with enough affection that she won’t kill us in our sleep. Along with fresh clothes, tasty food and a warm bed, the girl will forget her parents soon enough. For what remains of the night, maybe a good scrubbing in the bathtub will rid her of dirt and fleas, then we’ll put her to sleep in the spare bedroom.
Author’s note: listen to Neutral Milk Hotel’s “King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1” and The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin'”.
My latest contract with the hospital where I work ended last Saturday, and I’m very unlikely to be recalled until three weeks from now. That means that I have spent most of yesterday, as well as this entire morning, working on this chapter and the following one, of which I’ve finished the first draft. Apart from writing, I intend to exploit these three weeks to research certain locations that my characters will visit, take walks in the sun, read manga and a few books, masturbate to VR porn, and play through my ongoing campaigns of “Arkham Horror” and “Marvel Champions”.
Minus points to Jacqueline for failing to notice immediately that the Megatherium was extinct. Leire likely knew that, but her mess of a brain failed to connect the dots and realize the ramifications regarding the child she kidnapped from the Ice Age.
I used a neural network to generate images from this chapter. Here’s the link.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
You must be logged in to post a comment.