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Wrapped up in a blanket, I chafe my arms through the sleeves of my wool pyjamas. The child from the forest is seated at the edge of the velvet sofa, while Jacqueline, as she kneels on the carpet, cleans the dirt off the girl’s face with a wet wipe. The belt of Jacqueline’s lipstick-pink silk-blend robe has loosened and the fabric slipped over her meaty breasts, revealing the old rose areolas. A couple of times, the savage girl has snapped out of her puzzlement to glance down and admire my queen’s bountiful mammaries; soon enough the child will salivate, then her sucking reflex will kick in.

My head is throbbing, my body feels bruised and battered, and my fingers and toes are tingling like pins and needles. Now that I’m coming down from the adrenaline buzz, I’m getting dragged down further by the exhaustion that has settled in after successive sessions of nightmares, and that’s on top of how wrung out my job leaves me five days a week.

“My stalkers didn’t come to visit me this time,” I say in a tired voice. “They somehow brought me to another place.”

Jacqueline sustains a smile to reassure our guest, but the worry is deepening her crow’s feet.

“I was staring at you when you disappeared, Leire. You vanished as if you had walked through an invisible doorway.”

I shudder with a chill, then pull the blanket tight around me.

“For you this must feel like dating someone whose exes keep trying to ruin her life, except that I would never allow those abominations to befoul me, regardless of the size of their genitals.”

Jacqueline winces.

“Was it the bunnyman?” she asks with indignation. “What the hell did he want this time?”

“That filthy buffoon likely wants me to worship him like a god. He never showed up, though. Maybe he and Alberto were mocking me from some hiding place.”

Jacqueline lets out a deep sigh.

“I’m so tired of those assholes.”

“You’re telling me. I should consider filing a restraining order against them.”

As if Jacqueline were babysitting a stray kitten, she wipes dried mucus from the child’s nostrils, who’s staring at my queen with rapt attention.

“This kid looks Mongolian, wouldn’t you say, Leire?”

I sniffle.

“Those eyes seem Asian, yes.”

Jacqueline lifts the child’s necklace off the mud-speckled leather tunic, then examines the strung sand-colored teeth.

“She also looks as if she came from a different era.”

“Well, once I figure out from what corner of this planet I snatched her up, I’ll put her on a plane headed there. Given how her parents clothed her, I doubt they use cell phones, but she may find her way back to her tribe somehow from the airport.”

My own body interrupts me with a yawn. I’m getting cranky; I want to say fuck off to all my troubles then go beddy-bye, but it must be about five in the morning, and in two hours I’ll have to prepare myself for work. Maybe next time I’ll reach the shower.

I rub my eyelids with my knuckles.

“I’m almost delirious. I need to guzzle down some coffee, although it may worsen my jitters.”

I shrug off the blanket and rise to my feet, then I shuffle out of the living room and into the kitchen. The candy-red coffee maker stands out on a corner of the cloud-grey countertop. I load a capsule into the machine, I place a mug under the spout, I push the start button. As the coffee machine hums, the noise of the fridge door closing startles me.

Jacqueline has taken out a burgundy apple, which is glimmering in the kitchen light. The child’s eyes flare with sudden interest, her nostrils quiver like a rabbit’s. Jacqueline gestures for the girl to sit down on the closest dining chair, and once she obeys, my girlfriend hands over the apple as a reward. Our guest munches on the fruit, then lets out a yip of delight.

The coffee machine’s spout drips the last drops of coffee into my mug, then it lets out a mechanical sigh and its red light switches off. I warm my hands with the mug. My eyelids are heavy and my head woozy from exhaustion. Once some caffeine enters my bloodstream, I should feel my brain slowly unclench.

Jacqueline, while she strokes the girl’s disheveled hair, is staring at me as if trying to figure out how to bring up a troublesome topic. When she breaks the silence, she speaks in an anxious voice.

“Leire, have you been… contacted by Ramsés?”

I was taking a sip of the bitter brew partly to feel a tiny heater inside me, but when my brain processes Jacqueline’s reference, I gag on the coffee. It now smells and tastes like a dirt-encrusted metal pipe used to transport waste, or as if my girlfriend ripped an atomic fart that will seep into these consecrated walls and stink up the place forevermore. I put down the mug with a thunk, and the dark liquid inside splashes the countertop.

“J-Jacqueline, such a blasphemous word shouldn’t have been uttered in this sanctuary! Why would that pig factor in anything that we do during our blessed time away from his domain? And what kind of dealings do you believe I’ve had with that evil wannabe satyr? Are you implying that he’s been sending me pictures of his erect cock and hairy balls, and my consequent urge to flee from this plane of existence is why I suddenly became capable of walking through an invisible portal into some boreal forest? Or do you believe that I would turn into a wanton harlot if I snagged a peek at his genitalia?”

The child’s face is tight with tension as her eyes dart between Jacqueline and I, but she keeps chewing on the apple. My girlfriend’s eyebrows are knitted together. She shakes her head, maybe to clear up her mind from an unsavory notion.

“Sorry, Leire, I’m… overwhelmed. Keep drinking in peace, please.”

I turn away and clutch onto the edge of the counter. My mind attempts to picture some of Ramsés’ demands, and I catch a glimpse of me wearing a dog collar and flogging myself while my boss jerks off in a nearby chair. Then I see myself with my nose stuffed into his sweaty armpit.

My mouth fills with the metallic flavor of lukewarm, poisonous puke.

“I loathe Ramsés with all my being. Why wouldn’t I? He has the face of a gargoyle and a donkey dick. I shouldn’t be associated with that rotten cocksman. He believes that all women should bow down to him and lick his filthy feet!”

I shut my eyes tight, then I breathe deep to calm down. My entire body feels hot and prickly with embarrassment and disgust. Why did I believe that I had the right to raise my voice at Jacqueline, who is my beloved, my savior, my queen, the only person that makes it worth it that I have spent most of my adult life slaving away so the government can steal my money? Has she not provided many tender caresses and loving licks? Hasn’t her warm and honeyed saliva, as well as other juices, flowed down my throat? Doesn’t she make me cum more powerfully than ever before, in more interesting ways, and with all my fantasies brought to life? But I still felt compelled to shout at her.

I sniffle, and my chest fills with an onrush of sorrow. I should grab a knife from a drawer, slice my gut open and offer my dripping viscera for Jacqueline to feast on.

I mop up the coffee spill with a paper towel, then I empty my mug in the sink.

“It’s alright,” I mumble weakly. “I suddenly hate coffee.”

Jacqueline approaches me, pulls my head towards her and nuzzles my hair. Her hand slides under my pyjama top to roam my bare back, and as her warm breasts press against my side, I imagine them filled with milk for my baby needs to be fed.

“I know you are exhausted, sweetie,” Jacqueline coos, “but now you are home, safe with me.”

I inhale deeply. My shoulders slump in relief.

“Where on Earth do you think you ended up?” she asks.

I want to scrub that memory before it crawls into some crevice of my brain, but the child would remain as a puzzling memento of having crossed that invisible threshold between worlds.

“There were… pines and skinny trees with moss hanging from their branches. I glimpsed ice-capped peaks far off into the distance. The sky was blue with little puffy white clouds flying in formation like some mythical flock. And a hulking monster nearly mangled me.”

Jacqueline’s hand travels down so her fingers can knead my ass. A shiver rolls over my skin. I hope she slips one digit into my asshole. When she thrusts it deeper, I always yelp like a puppy.

“Can you describe that animal?” she asks with a faint tremor in her voice. “They tend to live in specific areas of the world.”

I briefly envision a reindeer with a human face. Then a woman who has a vagina for a face. Also a snake with human arms and breasts.

“Well, it was quite hairy, was covered in mud and drool, had teeth like daggers, and reeked of sex. Its claws could have torn my body into tiny pieces, and its tail could have wrapped itself around the planet a dozen times.”

Jacqueline turns her gaze to a corner of the ceiling, then she arches an eyebrow.

“Lead the child into the living room while I go get…” After one look at our guest, Jacqueline strides up to her and snatches the ravaged apple from her hands. “You don’t need to eat the core, baby girl. I’ll get you something much tastier later.” She tucks a stray lock of raven-black hair behind her ear, then she smiles at me. “I’ll go grab the laptop.”

My beloved leaves the kitchen with the apple in her grasp, and her hurried footsteps move towards the bedroom. The wild child’s lips are smeared with juice. She’s staring up at me inquisitively while the fingers of her right hand, which she has rested on the lap of her leather tunic, are curled around an invisible fruit.

My neck starts twitching. I swallow thickly. The gaze that is penetrating my pupils hasn’t been corroded by schooling nor society, and sparkles with curiosity. This child is a creature examining another creature to figure out some truth for herself. It feels like she’s pointing a flashlight directly at my heart, exposing its scarred tissue.

I fear that I’ll burst into tears.

“I-I’m from France,” I manage to stammer, and my voice cracks because I am a burden. “There, our children don’t talk to strangers. There are piles of trash everywhere. Our rivers run with sewage and raw waste. W-we also don’t eat apples whole.”

The child gets down from the chair, reaches out and grabs my hand. Her grip is light but confident, her palm is moist, her fingers are tiny. She widens a smile that narrows her monolid eyes and dimples her cheeks. I would have expected her teeth to be rotten, but in the kitchen light they look quill-grey with some plaque buildup.

How has this girl survived in that forest from which I kidnapped her, and what part of me is her life raft in this ocean of madness?

“Can’t you see that I’m a monster,” I ask in a worn voice, “one far worse than any that walks on four legs?”

The girl tilts her head up. Her fingers tighten around my palm.

“You mean your face?” she asks in a gentle voice unbefitting of her ten years of living in that desolate land. “Or your soul?”

I’m the most miserable failure in history, the weakest person that ever lived. But right this second I’m a lonely human who needs this child to feel loved.

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Author’s note: today’s three songs are Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises’, Lucy Dacus’ ‘The Shell’ and Bill Callahan’s ‘Too Many Birds’.

I forced a neural network to produce plenty of images inspired by this chapter: here’s the link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A panicked mass of survival instinct kicks in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The bunnyman must have been waddling towards our office at a leisure pace, because we catch him mid-step about seven meters away from us. His flint-grey-tipped ears twitch. On the periphery of my vision, his girthy sausage dangles to a stop. He lifts a dirt-brown hand to scratch at his fluffy mane, that reminds me of an Elizabethan ruff.

I hold my breath as I wait for the bunnyman to pounce at me and sink his incisors into my face. I almost crave for him to do so, to feel the shockwaves of pain as he shreds my flesh.

Jacqueline drapes an arm around my back and squeezes my shoulder to comfort me.

“What are you seeing, Leire? That horse again?”

In my mind, I see myself reflected in my doomed, equine friend’s bulging eyes, when they were puffy with sorrow as they leaked copious tears. I wish I could admire his glossy coat, with its tawny shades of sable and russet, perfectly groomed and polished to perfection. I wish I could pet him on his majestic forehead or caress the deep furrows above his nostrils. Spike had been bred by the dark gods to become the best cavalry horse in the universe, but he made the unforgivable mistake of rebelling against his fate.

I swallow a lump in my throat.

“No, Spike died. You know that, mommy.”

Jacqueline kneads my shoulder gently.

“A different horse then?”

The hulking, bunny-headed demon is eyeing me up as he sways on his feet like a ship bobbing on the ocean. I want to reach into his chest and rip out the pulsing, black-blooded heart that beats in there with sinister malice.

“Sentient, elegant horses I can handle,” I mutter, “but this bunnyman is just a pile of fur and fat with a glistening shaft to show for it. He should have died in the mud long before civilizations came about. I can’t deal with his drooling or the stink of death coming out of his armpits. I’m going to give him a piece of my mind.”

I approach the bunnyman with Jacqueline in tow while my spine trembles. I feel like a svelte, sexed-up whore in front of this brute’s sagging belly and his hunched back. The wet, matted fur of his face is yellow-tinged and reeks of urine. A glob of drool drops from the tip of his overgrown upper incisors and lands on the vinyl floor with a plop.

I’m scared out of my wits, I’m shivering with revulsion. I fear that my sanity will snap like a rubber band if I have to stare for one more second into this abomination’s gunmetal-grey eyeballs, that resemble marbles wedged into his skull. I’ve gotten a glimpse of the abyss of his soul, his vast and unfathomable depravity. I want to yank out his eyeballs then plunge my hands into the sockets to squeeze his rubbery gray matter until it bursts out in an explosion of gruel.

“Wh-what’s your problem, bunnyman?” I muster in an anguished voice. “You’re standing in the middle of our hallway and you think that you are allowed to be here? Look at that mess you call fur! It’s like a ratty carpet of fleas and lice. You must be the result of a sick orgy involving donkeys and sows, you hideous bastard. I shan’t bear the invasion of a horde of bunnymen who will prowl around to the ends of this planet, so come at me, demon! I’m ready to rip out your festering guts!”

My brain is bubbling with rage and disgust; when I hear Jacqueline giggle, it bewilders me. She bear-hugs me from behind.

“Leire, sweetie, you should calm down. Any of our neighbors may come down the hallway at any moment.”

“Good,” I grumble. “If I’m forced to stare at a naked bunnyman, so should they.”

The intruder draws his lips back, exposing the glinting incisors to their roots; his upper lip is parted in an inverted V-shape, and in between peeks out a clam-shell-pink nub of flesh disturbingly similar to a clit. He then huffs out a thick breath that smells like rotten flesh and stale urine.

“You are Leire,” he says with a gravelly voice. “You can help.”

My heart sinks into my bowels. I’m tempted to take a step back, then as many necessary until I reach the doorway to our office.

His eyes glaze over and a drooling slobber drops from his mouth.

“Wh-what the hell is wrong with you?” I ask while trying to hold in my hysteria. “Are you on drugs? Did you fall out of a tree and smash your head against a boulder? Spike seemed this spaced out the first few times he stalked me… Wait, you aren’t Spike, are you?!”

The bunnyman’s whiskers twitch. He raises a stubby hand, and I’m expecting a swipe to my jaw, a punch to my temple or a blow to my groin, but instead he reveals a handkerchief that’s embroidered with a coat of arms. He uses it to mop the piss off his face.

“Spike is gone,” he says somberly. “He’s lost in the void of time.”

A pang of grief rises in my throat as I contemplate Spike’s hay bed and his empty trough. His crazed black eyes will never gaze at me again with unbridled love as he gallops to greet me, or chase after me for that matter. Spike, my loyal mount, was a visionary: his idea of heaven was forcing me to ride him although I begged him to stop.

I clench my teeth before the tangle of emotions overwhelms me.

“So, Lord of the Hellfires, you are one of his pals, huh…?” I utter in a bitter voice.

The bunnyman lodges the handkerchief between his belly folds.

“We were friends, yes. And I’ve come in his place because he failed.”

I’m shaking with anger.

“You dare to stand before me in your abominable form without bringing me good news about my old pal Spike? You spineless turd! You let your friend rot away in some dank ditch? I was going to send him a bottle of whiskey from France and a letter describing my suffering. Instead, I’ll have to compose my own poem: ‘I will drink a glass of your piss, old friend, then I’ll give you a pat on the head and a scratch behind your ear’.”

The bunnyman’s lips droop, making him resemble a senile grandpa. As far as I can tell, this furry, bunghole-riddled lump of humanoid is thirty to thirty-five years older than me.

“Well, we’ve been short of good news since we meddled with the laws of nature, but there may still be hope left.”

My eyes are fixed on the bunnyman’s gum-nub. I shudder at the thought that one day it’ll sprout into a fully functioning clitoris. My loins ache, and the urge to touch myself is almost overwhelming.

“H-how can you expect any help from me while you’re presenting yourself as a hulking bunny beast? Why don’t you take off your skin and show me what lies beneath, you revolting monstrosity? Your fur is full of muck, your breath stinks of dead animals, you’re insane as a bag of rabid squirrels.”

The bunnyman huffs.

“We are the result of a daring experiment, one that I fear will get abused again and again.”

“I’m also the result of an experiment. Did you know that humans can produce new beings when they copulate? How did you come to exist, though? Were you spawned in a giant pile of manure with the help of some insane proctologist? I wish that the bacteria present in human and animal waste would have concentrated in a broth that would have stewed your beastly flesh in its own juices. If I didn’t have a pressing engagement, I’d smash you so hard that you’d end up as a puddle of bone fragments.”

The bunnyman’s nostrils flare wide.

“Are you done venting your outrage? Can we start talking in an amicable fashion?”

“Not with that cock in the picture! It’s so long and thick that it may as well be a shovel. At least Spike had the decency to be castrated. How could I have a civilized conversation with you while you’re concealing the most disgusting thing on my planet in that accursed sheath of skin? It looks like a length of rotten, knotted intestine.”

The bunnyman grimaces as if I had shoved a cold turd down his throat. More saliva drips down his chin in thick threads.

“It’s not my cock per se,” he says in a voice like a gravel-ridden, rusty pump. “And in this dimension I can only wear my current appearance. Leire, I see your thought patterns; they are noisy and illogical. Please, remain quiet and listen to me. You see, we were trying to break out of this awful cycle of death and rebirth. The essence of the cosmos is an electromagnetic field that we’re able to manipulate.”

I shake my head to disperse the foul thoughts.

“I’m already going through enough heartbreak, and you come searching for my help? Do I look like I can even help myself? And you look like you haven’t bathed for months! What can you offer me other than more suffering? I wouldn’t trust you with my car keys, and I certainly wouldn’t ask you to wash my back if I needed it scrubbed.”

The bunnyman glances at the wall.

“I’m not an expert at treating psychological distress, but I know that you have struggled to make the best out of a bad situation for quite a while now. You had been crying in a dark room. You were longing to be free although you had no means of escape. You were looking for hope, but it had faded away.” The bunnyman’s gunmetal-grey eyes are peeling my soul out like an egg from its shell. “Leire, you can never get rid of your pain. However, you can avoid wallowing in it, and instead focus on saving us from a dark fate.”

I lift my chin and try to keep myself from crying, but tears well up and fall down my cheeks.

“Let me guess: this help you want from me involves some ritual,” I mutter, “one that will start with me performing a cutesy dance and that will end with you sticking your cock in my mouth and saying ‘wibble-wobble-gobble’ while I taste your slime. You think that your genitals are going to make me worship the ground you walk on because you’re a big bad rabbit and I’m a sick slave girl that just wants to fall in love? You think I’ll be begging you for more and more until I become a brainless husk? That’s what it always comes down to, isn’t it?”

The bunnyman shudders. After he takes a deep breath, the air he exhales stinks like the aftermath of a tornado that devastated a pet shop.

“You were given a brain but no control over your emotions. I assure you: I want no part of such perversion.”

I look down to make sure that my nipples haven’t sprouted erect, but to my dismay, the nipples have sprouted erect. My lips are trembling.

“All of you freaks think that you know me. Do you have any clue what’s it like to exist in a brain infested with spiders, in a body that is constantly wet with pre-cum, in a world full of monsters and abominations? Until Jacqueline found me, all I did was work, work, work, work, and no one understood me. I am a person, I have a mind, and I could have probably achieved some level of mastery, but here I am, stuck with one foot in reality and the other in an insane asylum. I am Leire, the Great Bunnywoman, Lady of the Skull, Emissary of the Gods, Rabbit Killer of the Universe! I am not some nympho who gets turned on by the sight of your oversized dong!”

The bunnyman takes a lumbering step back.

“Look, lady, we’re on the brink of a crisis. If we don’t do something soon, we will be sucked into the maelstrom of a collapsing universe.”

“I won’t be your prostitute, I won’t be your sex slave, and I will never give birth to a bunch of bunnybabies to further your unholy cause! Do you wish to taste the sweet nectar of death?! I have slain beasts ten thousand times larger than you, a dozen of them a day! I will bite off your giant penis and spit it at your feet! So flee, go back to the mud and the slimy marshland, and tell Alberto to shove his likely furry dick up his own ass!”

The bunnyman gasps, displaying the sickly pink inside of his mouth, which looks like a wrinkled vagina. As he stammers some words, I jab a finger at him and let out a noise of glee.

“I knew it! The bastard who disturbed me with random messages and ruined my car had to belong to your flock of freaks. Tell him that I don’t appreciate being filmed while I’m pleasuring myself, unless Jacqueline is handling the cinematography! W-wait… you aren’t Alberto, are you?”

The bunnyman bows his head.

“I’m not,” he says in a surly voice.

“Are you sure? Is there any chance that Alberto is hiding somewhere in your bunny body?”

He buries his face in his furry hands, and when he lowers them, he evades my gaze.

“Alberto was right: you are impossible. If he’s going to interfere anyway, I’ll tell him that he should deal with you himself. This place has already begun to collapse into madness.”

The bunnyman shifts his hulking weight awkwardly to turn around, then he waddles down the hallway towards the bathroom. His tail is an ash-grey pom-pom; it clashes with his rotund ass as if someone had stuck in there one of those BDSM butt plugs.

A flood of relief pours out of my mouth in the form of an exhausted sigh. I sniffle. I’m about to wipe my tears when two warm hands reach from behind me and dry my cheeks. I flinch, but I remember that I dragged Jacqueline along with me. I forced her to witness this deranged face-off.

When she stands in front of me, the burn of shame compels me to avoid her gaze. She grabs my chin and tilts my head so that I’m looking straight into her cobalt-blues.

“I-I’m sorry…” I whine.

Jacqueline shushes me.

“My baby is afflicted with some sort of incurable condition. She suffers from a lack of sleep, depression, hallucinations and suicidal thoughts. You have burst into tears while shouting obscenities at a bunny. That was a wonderful performance, Leire. I believe that you believe you were arguing with this creature.”

“I don’t need to believe in what shows up in front of my eyes, or under my butt for that matter.”

“Of course. Has he vanished, though?”

I shake my head and point at the big bastard, who’s lumbering down the hallway as he scratches his flank through the almond-colored, matted fur.

“I guess he intends to leave the same way he came in, through the toilet,” I say in a quavering voice. “B-because I was peeing when he showed up, that’s why I likely turned the bathroom into a disaster zone. Perhaps the damage cannot be undone.”

Jacqueline’s smile lights up my sky like a rainbow after the rain. She grabs my hand.

“Let’s chase this bunnyman so you can see him leave. Then tell me all about it.”

She’s already dragging me along when I react.

“Wait! Are we really going to pursue that monster?”

“Yeah, why not? He had ample opportunity to hurt you, right?”

“He could have caught me in a headlock and smashed my brains against the wall,” I concede. “But maybe this is what bunnymen do: they chase prey until they become prey themselves.”

Jacqueline lets me control our pace to avoid alerting the otherworldly demon of our pursuit. By the time we catch up to him, he has reached the bathroom door. He looks over his bulky shoulder at us and he scrunches up his nose in disdain.

“Hey, stop following me, you nutbag.”

As I’m trying to come up with a quip, the bunnyman pushes the door open, strides inside and shoves the door shut behind him so that it slams against the frame.

Jacqueline’s grip on my hand tightens. I sigh.

“Escaping an argument through a toilet must be a sorry sight. Well, good riddance to him.”

I glance up at my beloved. Her face has paled, and she’s gaping wide-eyed at the closed bathroom door.

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My temples are throbbing, my shoes are tapping an anxious rhythm on the ceramic tiles of the bathroom floor. I’m wrung dry, I’m desiccating, I’m wilting. I want to be in ecstasy, possessed, and hear myself moan as I rub my crotch raw, but there’s only the chuff of my breath and the hollow beating of my heart. How long will it take me to die of shame?

Maybe I already needed to pee, or I’m about to empty my bladder out of fear; either way, I pull down my pants and panties and I allow myself to relax enough that a stream of urine shoots out from my urethra. I’m rubbing my eyes when I feel something solid and furry pushing my butt cheeks upwards.

I jump to my feet. As I turn around, I stumble and hit the stall door with my back, making the door rattle.

A basketball-sized, furry head is sticking out of the toilet. Almond-colored tufts of matted fur, like fuzzy wings, come out of close-set, pointy ears. A gunmetal-grey eye bulges out on either side of a whiskey-colored, downward band of fur that ends in a tobacco-brown muzzle. Framed against a fluffy, cream-colored mane, a pair of overgrown, shimmering incisors are dripping a gluey drool, and look sharp enough to punch through bone. The fur on top of its head is drenched in urine that is also trickling down its face. This creature resembles some stuffed animal that ghost hunters would come across at a dilapidated insane asylum.

My mind is buzzing with fright. I’m spritzing the tiles with pee, and I doubt I’ve emptied my bladder when I yank my panties up then I squat awkwardly to reach for the waist band of my pants.

I’m gawking at a rabbit, one whose head is bigger than mine, and whose eyes glint with intelligence. After an instant of recognition, the rabbit rises further, lifting the toilet seat with its human-like shoulders. The creature’s massive body gets jammed; the toilet seat won’t budge anymore. As my shaking left hand fumbles for the door latch, two dirt-brown, stubby hands maneuver under the toilet seat and lift it over the rabbit’s head.

I open the stall door. I’m retreating backwards on my wobbly legs when the toilet water sloshes about and the bunnyman steps out to plant its feet on the ceramic tiles.

This beast towers over me. From up close, its fur is matted with filth and splotched with gunky crusts. Its soaked face stinks of ammonia, and its breath suggests that it’s been fed a steady diet of rotten offal and garbage. A grotesquely sagging belly leads down to a pendulating penis as thick and dirty pink as a salami sausage.

I shriek.

My limbic system must have taken the reins, because I’m sprinting down the hallway towards the door to our office while repeating the word ‘nope’ over and over. My heart skips a beat, and my legs collapse underneath me. The vinyl floor makes a screeching noise as I slide on my chest for half a meter.

I’m stretched out on the floor like a broken doll, I’m breathing in the particles that dozens of shoes dragged into the hallway. As I hold my breath to avoid wheezing and gagging on dust and grime, I turn over and witness the broad-shouldered, fluffy bunnyman waddling down the hallway towards me. In the brute’s massive frame, his belly, the color of rusted copper, is swollen like pregnant and wobbles with every step. His cock waggles left and right, bouncing against the furry mounds of his thighs.

A chill shoots through my body. I scramble to my feet and rush to our front door. I throw it wide open, jump inside and slam the door shut behind me.

Jordi and Jacqueline, seated at their workstations, look over their shoulder in unison at the savage that just disturbed their peace of mind.

Sweat is trickling through my pores like molten lead; it burns while it travels down my neck, then along my spine and finally into my lower back. Although I suspect that my eyeballs will collapse into bloody slop and dribble down my cheeks, I fix my wide-eyed gaze on Jacqueline and I gesture for her to approach me. She swivels on her chair, she stretches her tall frame, and as she strides her way to me, her skirt, the color of Irish coffee, rides up slightly towards her waist; her lean legs, tanned by walnut-brown, dotted tights, exchange places in front of the other; her glossy ankle boots clop-clop-clop.

Jacqueline halts a couple of feet away from me and rests her left hand on my neck. Her raven-black hair falls over her shoulders like a wave. Those luscious, moist lips are parted, and her breath smells of spearmint gum.

Jacqueline’s cobalt-blues remind me of a summer morning when we were eleven years old and she bequeathed me a kiss in the middle of a forest near our country home in Aquitaine. I want to devour her as if she were a chewy piece of candy.

“Leire, you smell like pee,” Jacqueline whispers. “Have you cleaned yourself properly, sweetie?”

A thick, spongy sound rings from my throat, like a retch.

“I-I may have made a mess in the bathroom. I had a fit in there.”

My gaze darts around as I try to figure out the best way to explain that a bulky, humanoid rabbit has risen out of the toilet as I was peeing, but Jacqueline caresses my neck, which eases my anxiety, and she speaks to me with a voice like a serene ocean lapping at its shores.

“That’s okay. It’s all okay, honey.”

I wish she would guide her warm hand below the edge of my panties.

“W-wait, you saw the revolver that Spike brought over,” I say in a hushed voice, “so maybe you can see the bunnyman as well.”

“A bunnyman?”

That’s right, I’m sick of being harassed by demons from the underworld. Maybe that well-hung abomination is standing right behind our office door, ready to smash his fist into my skull, but as long as Jacqueline remains by my side, I know that everything will turn out all right.

I’m a swirling dervish, a pouncing panther, an enraged rhino. I grab Jacqueline’s left wrist, swing the door open and pull my beloved after me out of the office.

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Authors note: listen to Echo & the Bunnymen’s ‘The Killing Moon’ (obligatory), Modest Mouse’s ‘Tiny Cities Made of Ashes’ and The National’s ‘Abel’.

I usually wouldn’t upload such a short chapter, but this part of the scene had a natural stopping point. Apart from that, I’ve run into some personal issues recently and it’s been hard to focus on anything. However, I’ve finished the first draft of the remainder of this scene, so it will go up in a day or two.

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I run the latest batch of unit tests on Visual Studio Code. When the red cross next to the test name changes to a green mark, a speech bubble pops up in the swirly tar of my mind, and it says, “Well done!” Some organic contraption in my body tasked with synthesizing drugs supplies the promised dopamine hit. My brain is convinced that I have stepped forward towards fulfilling my purpose as a living creature, but the wrinkly mass of soft tissue and blood vessels that contains my self won’t remain deceived for long. Soon enough, another speech bubble will pop up inside my head, this one saying, “Leire, you are wasting your time. You have the chance to do something worthwhile in your life, why do you let it slip through your fingers?”

Thankfully, some programming maestros figured out that if you systematize software development into a growing pyramid of unit tests, you can chase a reliable sequence of dopamine hits and still end up with a functioning product. If I didn’t spend my workdays zooming through this reward course of intellectual orgasms, I’d get mired in self-destructive thoughts regarding my inability to become an acceptable member of my species. It takes a regular pounding of dopamine hits on my soggy brain to shield me from the background radiation of reality; only when I am under the influence do I manage to forget the vast swath of shit that I’ve been dragging around: the pains of inhabiting a rotting body, the knowledge that we were born to grow old and die, the humiliation of wasting at least eight hours working, five days a week, so the government can steal part of my paycheck to fund the destruction of our society.

Yet, these dopamine hits are a pale shadow of the main reward that life built into us so we would remain slaves to its bidding: orgasms. I wish I could catalyze each orgasm from the previous one, in a consecutive chain that would barely allow me to breathe; that’s how I could aspire to enjoy my existence instead of tolerating it for a few minutes at a time. I’d love to see my brain turned into a bonobo jungle. I want to become a selfish, self-obsessed idiot whose only goal is to indulge her appetites without any regard for her fellow human beings or the planet she’s inhabiting. I want to stay in a bath for hours, lazing and masturbating. I want to eat a whole damn vat of ice cream even though you can only hold so much before you feel ill. But I suspect that life must have developed some regulatory programs into our brains or into some hormone-secreting lump of tissue, and if those biological algorithms detected that we dared to enjoy ourselves too much, even orgasming would start to feel dull and pointless. If due to excessive self-diddling I ended up locking my finite-state machine into such an anhedonia, I’d have no choice but to grab the nearest sharp tool and lacerate my carotid arteries. Then I’d jab the tool’s pointy end into each of my eyeballs, because I wouldn’t want to witness a second longer of this worthless world. I better take a break every now and then from masturbating, lest I become permanently brain-damaged.

I once read an article about a woman, a Floridian I believe, who due to a medical condition was blessed with constant, uncontrollable orgasms. She had so many that she didn’t know what to do with them. She could have bought a jet ski, a houseboat, a miniature zoo, and an island in the Bahamas so she could party with her friends and family. She could have invested in several casinos, started a line of vibrators, founded a private school where rich kids would be taught by tutors how to be filthy rich and even filthier in bed. She could have built a huge robot, crammed all the most important men in the world inside, and fucked them all in every orifice she had. Instead, such bliss impeded her ability to function as a human, so she chose to escape her life through the emergency door. She swallowed a bottle of pills, or perhaps she slit her wrists. In any case, I wish I had stood in front of this woman during her final moments as she cursed the purest pleasure that nature made available to us, claiming that even the ultimate reward wasn’t worth suffering through the terror of being alive.

“It seems we are both in the zone, senpai,” Jordi says. “We are going to finish this contract two or three days ahead of time.”

Our intern’s fingers dash across the keyboard as his gaze darts over the screen in precise jumps. When I first met him, Jordi seemed frail and timid, but these days he comes off as an unyielding machine, so concentrated at times that I could sneak away with one of his kidneys. While I distracted myself suffering mental breakdowns and wishing to die, my twenty-three-year-old coworker absorbed new programming techniques. I dread the day that he’ll choose to keep treating me deferentially as a legacy issue.

“I’m in the zone alright,” I say in a croaky voice. “I keep coming and coming.”

Jordi snorts, then he pushes the glasses up his nose as his dark eyes snap into focus on me.

“Both of you have been on an exhibitionist streak recently. I’m feeling out of my element.”

Jacqueline giggles.

“Leire, you can’t be that frank with the kids these days. They force them to grow up in padded rooms, the poor things.”

Jacqueline, seated to my right, is wearing a purple-magenta crossover blouse with puff sleeves that show off her toned arms, which she strengthens regularly by imitating the grueling exercise routines of American YouTuber despots. The way the crossing pieces of fabric struggle over Jacqueline’s majestic tits makes me want to grasp the blouse in a fist, rip it off, and latch on to either of my girlfriend’s nipples for an hour-long session of sucking and nibbling. It would white out the myriad of anxious scribbles that have marred the surface of my mind lately.

I swallow the excess saliva building in my throat.

“Jordi is forced to share a desk with the most curvesome temptress, whom he’ll never get to touch, so his subconscious must be bubbling with sexual frustration on a daily basis.”

“You know that I usually have my mind on other things,” Jordi says as he continues typing.

I may have intended to turn Jordi’s pale, freckled cheeks into hot fudge sundae of molten desire, but I missed my target. This kid seems as detached from sex as if he had been chemically castrated.

“I was only… what’s the word that humans use? Teasing. You may need to see a neurologist, though. At your age you should be awkwardly trying to hide your erections under the desk.”

Jordi stops typing and turns his head towards me to gift me a gentle smile.

“Senpai, I wouldn’t pursue a taken woman.”

“My, aren’t you a gentleman,” Jacqueline says in a mellow voice.

“Besides, I believe that flat is justice.”

Jacqueline gasps, then she stares open-mouthed at our intern as if he insulted her ancestors. Jordi has returned his fingers to the keyboard and his gaze to the screen, but the kid is pursing his lips to restrain a silly grin.

I’m amused despite my instinct to experience every instant of living as a nerve-racking nightmare. I grab my bottle of water, and when I lean back in the chair to take a sip of the tepid liquid, I find myself staring at a sentence in bold letters glued across the row of frost-white cabinets as if it were a sticker. The sentence reads: YOU’VE GOT MAIL.

A chill runs down my spine. I shudder. Although Jacqueline’s heavenly voice is flowing around my head on its way to our intern, it sounds remote as if I were sinking underwater. I must have blinked; the sentence, a message to me, has vanished. I once saw a sentence like that written across the dashboard of my car, didn’t I? That one told me that we were fucked. It had shouted silently at me until I tried to peel it off, then it blinked out of existence.

I scoot closer to the desk. My hands coordinate themselves to move the mouse and type on the keyboard so Gmail opens in a new tab. I’ve received a new email from someone named Alberto Portuondo. The subject reads: KNOCK KNOCK.

I’ve heard of plenty of Albertos, but if I ever met one, it must have been at school. Back then I had no choice but to interact unwillingly with thirty or so other students in my classroom, in addition to the rest of the developing humans whose lives collided with me over those grueling years. I couldn’t tell you the name of most of the boys who spent their time staring at the back of some girl’s head, who made eyes at anyone with a pussy so they could get a girl’s attention, who whispered words into some girl’s ear as they moved their hands under her skirt. I remain only distantly aware of the adults who were in a position to take care of me, but I doubt that any of them were looking out for my best interests. My own father, a dark shape in a forest of faces, would pull me up into his lap, stroke my head, and tell me to be brave. I thought that being brave meant suffering more to earn their love, so I acted as brave as I could.

The email body contains a single sentence: Now check your phone, you silly bitch.

I slide my gaze to the mobile phone lying close to my mouse, and as soon as the first photons that bounced off the phone hit my retinas, the device buzzes. An ice cube of dread is melting in my stomach. After I grab the phone, a notification leads me to a new message. Someone who chooses to represent himself as the Linux penguin has sent me a video locked behind a black thumbnail. A down arrow symbol offers me the choice to download its seven point seven megabytes of content.

“No thanks,” I mumble, then I press the download button.

While a loading wheel spins, my heart thumps faster and faster. About ten seconds later, a video fills the phone screen showing an isometric view of a seated woman, filmed as if the camera was mounted on the ceiling behind her right shoulder. The woman is sitting on the same chair that is holding my body, near the desk that supports the workstation that justifies my existence. She’s wearing a dark mauve hoodie with white, frayed drawcords and long sleeves that hide half of her hands, as well as rifle-green cargo pants that look like a hand-me-down from a drug-dealing older brother. I refuse to focus on the woman’s face, but why would I need to, when that stranger has presented herself as me for my entire life as I remain trapped inside her human frame? She’s a cuckoo in a nest of fluffy eggs, a worker drone for the horse-human empire.

The creature in the video is squeezing her thighs together, spellbound by the territory of the desk that Jacqueline claimed for herself, which she embellished with a photo collage, a plastic rose bouquet, a silver pen holder and a leather blotter. The line of four puncture wounds on my past self’s neck, from when I stuck a fork in my flesh, must have scabbed over a couple of days before this video was shot. As the woman breathes deeply, her right hand keeps fiddling with the fabric of her pants next to the fly. She resembles some trailer park loner who’s peeping through a hole in a wooden fence at a sunbathing babe.

The woman on-screen rolls her chair closer to Jacqueline’s domain. She runs her fingertips over a half-empty water bottle that belongs to her coworker, and when she stares at the pineapple-yellow tube of lip balm, a shiver of recognition makes me stop the video and flip my phone. I know against which part of her greasy body my past self was going to rub that cosmetic product.

I feel like a deer who has stumbled into the middle of the road in front of a speeding truck. When I rise to my feet, my legs are trembling. A maniacal laugh rings through my head, like the high-pitched screeching of a murderous harpy.

“You’ve gotten so pale all of a sudden,” Jacqueline says as she looks up at me.

“With all due respects, my queen: have I ever not looked pale as death? It’s safe to assume that I will look sickly for the rest of my life. Anyway, I’ve received a sexual video on my phone, so I’m going to lock myself in a stall and enjoy it in private.”

Jacqueline chuckles, then she twists her lips in a silly smile.

“Alright, baby doll. Have fun.”

Jordi clears his throat.

“And remember to wash your hands afterwards.”

I stride towards the front door of our office while I clutch the mobile phone. When I close the door behind me, I dash down the hallway to the bathroom. Both stalls are vacant. I lock myself in one and I plop down on the toilet seat. Hunched over, I resume the video. The recorded sounds of ragged breaths fill the enclosed space as my past self plants kisses on the surface of Jacqueline’s lip balm. She slides it cap-first into her drooling mouth, and after she closes her eyes, the ruminant motion of her jaw suggests that she’s licking the cap of the tube. I vaguely recall that I imagined myself suckling on any of Jacqueline’s nipples, but instead it looks like I was giving a blowjob to a micropenis.

The woman on-screen shivers. She unbuckles her belt and pulls down her pants, revealing her downy thighs.

I feel a wave of embarrassment and anger at my own crotch. I stop the video, then shove the phone in a pocket. My head spins with dizziness. Why would I want to witness the proof that I violated that innocent lip balm? And I already knew that someone had recorded me as I diddled myself at work, didn’t I? My mind must have blocked it out the same way it allows me to forget, at least for a couple of hours at a time, that I have an expiration date. Why would any random Alberto want to record me masturbating at work? Does he intend to extort money from me?

I stick my head between my knees, I dig my fingers into my scalp, I force air deep into my nostrils. I’m tasting bile. My chest feels like a barrel of toxic waste that’s been dragged through mud and filled with acid.

As my fingers knead my temples, I yearn for the shadow of the goddess of lust to spread over my mind and take up residence inside my cranium. I would feel her thighs squeezing me into a quivering pulp as she mounted the back of my mind. I need to close my eyes and enjoy the delights of an orgasm-by-numbers, a mechanical act. My crotch would clench, my breasts heave, my nipples throb and my toes curl. I would hold my breath and pretend to be a dolphin. Then I’d relax and sink into the sticky pool of orgasmic sensations until I fell asleep.

If any justice remained on this shell-shocked planet, in any of the millions of videos distributed of me pleasuring myself, I’d resemble a creature of myth and legend. Instead of skin I’d be covered in scales, which would be painted red as a raging fire. I’d have pointed ears, gills on my neck and a tail that flicked behind me. I’d inhale the smoke of smoldering wood and breathe out flames. Instead of a bra I’d wear a spiderweb that hung from my breasts. Instead of a heart I’d have a pulsating jellyfish inside my chest that was drowning in a sea of my own blood. My inner thighs would be slick with sweat and shimmering with a shiny sheen. Two pink and dainty protuberances would stick out from my cheeks, ready to satisfy simultaneously two women who would be squirming on their knees, desperate to lick the viscous secretions from my dripping face-cocks. I’d hear the sounds of my flesh sloughing off my bones and into the void as I climbed up cliff walls and fucked every hole and crevice like some monstrous woodpecker. I would be hideous as a blackened sun, and worshipped by a mass of sex-crazed creatures who’d want nothing more than to adore my cold and crackling scales.

My stomach churns, my chest heaves in and out. I retch, but I can’t throw up. The acid that burns my tongue is me, that’s my very flesh roasting from within. A razor-sharp claw stuck in my guts is scratching and scratching, trying to break free by gouging out my entrails.

I can always escape into daydreams. I light up the theater of my mind, where I materialize an octogonal mahogany table, an Edwardian antique that would make a great prop for a murder mystery. I conjure up some velvet curtains that billow gently when the room gets a breath of air. I add a gilt-framed mirror, a chandelier, two thronelike chairs, and a sculpted lamp with ornate shades that look like they were made from King Louis XIV’s ceremonial wigs.

On the tabletop I set up a session of one of my imaginary games, which I named ‘The Game of the Gods: the Tower’. It’s the first and arguably best entry in a trilogy that was continued by ‘The Game of the Gods: the Agony’ and ‘The Game of the Gods: the Fall’. The game’s black box is adorned with a relief that shows three women making love under a crown of roses. The gameboard is made of thick grey board, but regarding the pawns I invested in premium replacements, which are made of jade, green jasper and blood-red agate, all carved from mythical gemstones by a master jeweler. Several sculptures represent the traps that must be arranged on the board, including a heart-shaped maze of thorns, a secluded hideaway guarded by a phoenix that spews fire, a boudoir full of handcuffs, and a cavernous vagina in the shape of a satyr’s penis. The game’s main piece is a figurine of Minerva, the Roman goddess of civilization, strategy, poetry, the crafts and twenty or so other subjects, whose bejeweled crown and rich robes represent wisdom and power. Minerva’s finely carved, white-faced beauty is backed by a silver shield and a shining gold spear.

I place my player pieces on the board. My avatar, an elf queen, wears a metallic lace dress and stands on a mountaintop. Her elaborately braided hair hangs down past her hips, trailing in the wind like a golden mantle. She’s surrounded by a court of warrior princesses, dwarves, a charioteer, a cat-headed lady who’s carrying a pomegranate, and a few stags who sport crowns of oak leaves.

In the solo version, the player decides between fighting to protect their civilization and starting a war of extermination against their enemies, which are controlled by Automa decks. In the multiplayer version, each player must keep taking sips of poisoned wine and wear a mask made of human skin. The masks get glued to their faces, so if they tear them off, they’ll expose the skulls underneath. In the solo game, any player who reveals all of the opponents’ cards triumphs, but in the multiplayer game, if even one player removes their mask, that’s the end of civilization.

I have played this board game a couple hundred times, and I’ve developed a simple, if obtuse strategy for victory: I try not to lose. I play the same strategy for life, and it’s worked out pretty well so far.

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Author’s note: shout-out to the YouTube channel named Nemo’s Dreamscapes due to videos like this one, that allow me to remain sane during the many, many hours that takes me to produce any of these chapters. I must also thank the anonymous sentient creatures that upload hours of genuine storm and rain sounds, which I use to shut out the outside world during my train rides and in bed as I’m trying to sleep. I have no clue what I’d do without you.

I’ve also been on a Jackson C. Frank binge recently. I came across this recording from back in 1968, when he hosted a BBC Radio program. He plays fantastic live versions of beloved songs, and even speaks to the audience. I wish that cursed bastard had gotten to do more with his life.

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Jacqueline has wrapped her left arm around my waist to guide me along the pavement, towards Ondarreta beach. I wish I could say that a myriad stars twinkle in the cloudless night sky like a shimmering crystal veil over an enchanted realm, but instead the sky has blackened as if it were suffocating in woodsmoke. Above the low wall that prevents boozers and even stupider people from falling into the freezing waters of the Cantabrian Sea, the string of glowing streetlights along the opposite coast of Donostia are projecting hazy, swelling pillars of citrine-yellow light onto the wrinkles of the waves, transmuting the bay into an agitated pool of piss.

The breeze is pushing its atoms of cold through my exposed pores, forcing me to shiver in the grasp of my beloved. I’m exhaling puffs of vaporous breath. Although Jacqueline is keeping me upright, my legs are trembling. When an elderly couple and later a group of teenagers passed us by, I feared that I would trip and faceplant on the pavement, imprinting a bloody smear.

I’m venturing through the barren, boreal interspace between a sweltering, vis-à-vis encounter with my girlfriend and the holy moment in which I will slide under her sheets. I need to kneel and plead to the vaginal vaults of heaven for a blessing upon my wretched self. I hope that it will rain menstrual blood, that I will feel those warm drops running down my face, that all the earthworms will drown. In the end the earth will go dark and silent like in a blackout. I yearn to meet the bottomless blackness that waits outside of time, for a cataclysmic storm to erase my life, rubbing out even the shadows. The only things left to worship in this world will be the glowing spheres of our love-spoilt flesh.

As I narrow my eyes to shield them against the headlights of an incoming car, Jacqueline leans in to whisper in my ear.

“Leire, you are shaken up by something. And don’t pretend it’s about the cold.”

“I’m having a fit of despair,” I blurt out in a hoarse voice.

Jacqueline stops walking, which causes me to stumble. I’m about to dismiss my comment with an exaggerated gesture when she unlinks her arm from my waist, grabs my hand and pulls me towards the long stretch of public gardens that run along the beachfront, dragging me at her pace as if I were her pet. Gravel crunches under our shoes as we walk past a sculpture that resembles three upright, five-meters-tall rolled-up newspapers shoved into the ground.

Jacqueline stops us next to one of the scattered benches with a view of the sea. Distanced from the closest streetlight, the grass and trees from the adjoined garden have been drained of colors, giving way to a shadowy monochrome world, lifeless as the inside of a grave. A gust of cold air whistles between the branches of a nearby tree, and sends leaves scampering around like a squad of tumbling pawns. In summer, this spot would make for a suitable trysting place to indulge in some lewd act or another.

The backpack’s weight is pulling down on my shoulder. I figure that we will stick around for a while, so I take the backpack off and drop it onto the bench. When I dare to lift my gaze, I expected to face Jacqueline’s annoyance, but she’s scrutinizing my expression with the fathomless affection of a mother for her child.

“So the sexual videos of those other women didn’t bother you that much,” Jacqueline says. “What is it, then?”

I avert my gaze. Jacqueline runs her fingers along my jawline, then she turns my head towards her.

“Are you having suicidal thoughts again?” she asks with a tremor in her voice.

“Ah, you know I’ve tried to kill myself before… W-well, not more of those thoughts than usual, I don’t think. I’ve always been terrified of that abyss, and of the darkness that it wants to drag me into.”

Jacqueline takes a deep breath. She cups the back of my head and rests her forehead against mine. Our lips touch each other, but I restrain myself from sucking on hers or even letting my tongue wander out of my mouth, in case she shuts me down.

“I won’t let you fall in,” Jacqueline says.

My chest trembles. A rush of warmth behind my eyes forces me to take a labored breath.

“The truth is, Jacqueline, that if I were to fall in, not even you would be able to prevent it.”

She tightens the grip on my nape.

“We’ll see about that. Now tell me what you’ve been dying to share for the whole afternoon, you idiot.”

Although her hot breath is tickling my lips, my spine keeps shivering. I’m growing numb. My tongue feels as heavy and paralyzed as an anchor stuck in the muck of a deep-sea trench. I hear the low, ruminating murmur of the waves against the shore, as well as the ticking of time’s clockwork winding down my life.

I should remain obnoxiously quiet and wait for Jacqueline to grow bored of my personal pains, but I’m sick of worrying her.

“I-I used to watch my parents commit slow suicide day after day. They lived without a shred of passion or compassion as they drowned in mediocrity.”

Jacqueline pats my nape.

“Oh Leire,” she coos. “I meant about what’s going on with you now.”

My teeth are chattering, my lungs filling up with cold air.

“M-my hometown has become unrecognizable. Someone has stolen my door handle, and now my living room window is broken.”

Jacqueline pulls back and grabs my shoulders. I had never seen her this outraged.

“Holy shit, someone broke into your house? What did they steal?”

“Maybe I’m misrepresenting the situation,” I mumble. “Someone did steal the door handle of my apartment building. The culprit was likely a fiend, some insane monster, a vile child murderer who just appeared in town as if summoned by the most malevolent sorcerer of the nine hells, or maybe by a rabid dog. He stole our door handle to sneak inside and inflict unspeakable evils on us.”

“Okay, Leire, calm down. But your living room window broke, right? Did someone throw a stone at it? Some drunk asshole maybe?”

My legs are trembling like the tectonic plates of a fractured planet, my heart is leaping wilder than a rabbit on cocaine.

“I-I mean, I saw who broke it, but it… couldn’t have happened that way.”

Jacqueline furrows her brow and turns her head slightly.

“You mean that maybe you were the one who broke it, during a peculiar state of mind perhaps?”

I let out a pained groan and bury my face in my hands.

“I don’t know, Jacqueline. That would have made sense, but if I faced the proof that I’ve lost my mind to that extent, I don’t know how I would be able to continue living. That wasn’t what I saw. I didn’t headbutt that damn window.”

I flinch at the sound of a passing car, then at the feeling of warm hands closing around mine. Jacqueline lowers my arms so she can look into my eyes. The breeze is making her raven-black locks flap around her neck like a bird trying to escape its cage.

“Tell me who did it then,” she orders me calmly.

My lungs have been vacuumed out; my body forces me to take in a big gulp of air, inviting the stink of burnt gunpowder. A wind is sweeping through the cracks of my mind. Jacqueline as well as the ruthless world that surrounds her go blurry, then two hot tears roll down my cheeks.

“It w-was a h-h-horse. A h-horse who had failed to kill himself with a murdering implement, so he headbutted the window, shattering it. Then he threw himself out the same way some filthy smoker would discard a cigarette butt.”

Jacqueline softens her expression. She reaches to wipe my tears away.

“I-I told the honest truth,” I say in a desperate tone. “That’s how insane I’ve become.”

Jacqueline sighs and nods in resignation, as if I shared that our preferred vending machine at work had doubled its prices overnight.

“The world is a strange place, far stranger than I would have considered years ago. So maybe a horse did break your window.”

“Huh?”

“You had been strangely fixated on horses recently. How did that animal end up in your apartment, then? Tell me about it.”

I let out a painful laugh, which causes more tears to leap from my eyes.

“It was just a run-of-the-mill, worthless horse. But he was my friend. I once saved him from a slaughterhouse; I carried him on my back when I rescued him, and for many years I helped him regain his dignity. He has ceased to matter, though, because he’s dead. We shouldn’t be talking about him or even remembering him. Being a horse is a way of life, Jacqueline. Sometimes I’ve thought about becoming a horse myself. You would prefer to die as a horse, wouldn’t you? Your demise would be more honorable than a human’s. But the world is better off not being filled with horses. Besides, I’d better die in obscurity rather than become a beast that has to put up with people like me.”

“Oh, honey,” Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes my hair. “You’re much too hard on yourself. You know I’d prefer for you to live as long as you can, don’t you? You’ve become precious to me in so many ways.”

“There’s no other way to deal with the world but with utter hopelessness and disdain for your fellow humans.”

Jacqueline presses her index finger against my lips, as if to suggest I should shut up.

“I guess you haven’t called anyone to fix the window, have you? I’d hate to lose you for another night, but maybe you’d feel better if you spent it at your apartment? I wouldn’t be comfortable sleeping away from home if one of my windows was broken.”

“No!” I cry out in horror.

Jacqueline flinches and steps back. Her lovely features, that would bring joy to anyone’s heart, suggested for moment that she was facing a battle against a hellhound.

I press my hands together as an apologetic gesture.

“I didn’t mean to… I want to stay away from my apartment!” I cry. “That dreary ruin has long become a fetish room for my sick delusions. I’ve rolled down the shutters anyway, so nobody will even notice that the window is broken. My living room will turn into a fridge and my board games will freeze, but I have only played a third of them.” I grab onto Jacqueline’s arms and I step closer. “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do now than to go to your apartment, get naked and jump into your bed so you can order me what to do. Those are the only times when I’ve ever felt free, when I can forget for a while that I’m forced to exist among horrifying monsters. I’ve been dreaming for decades, Jacqueline, but nothing ever changed. I’m sick, I’ve been sick for as long as I can remember, of living in terror. Maybe… Maybe others should fear me instead.”

Jacqueline places a kiss on my forehead, then she wraps me in a tight embrace, snuggling her cheek against mine. Her body heat envelops me. I clutch the back of her suede trench coat like a drowning woman would cling to a floating log.

“You are a creation of flesh and blood that has the right to love,” she whispers in my ear. “You don’t need to be a monster to be a person.”

I bury my face in her neck and choke back a sob. When I finally pull away, her turtleneck must have absorbed plenty of my tears and snot.

“P-please, Jacqueline, give me your purse and close your eyes until I tell you to open them,” I say in a hoarse voice.

My request confuses her, but she slides the strap of her purse off her shoulder and gives it to me. She closes her eyes and stands there as if expecting a present.

I open the purse. As I reach inside my jacket, I look around warily. The few human-shaped silhouettes framed against the distant, darkened bulk of the island are busy strolling along the beachfront.

I pull out Spike’s revolver and put it in Jacqueline’s purse, on top of her wallet, her keys and some paper handkerchiefs.

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Author’s note: thus concludes the sequence I’ll refer to at this moment as ‘Leire’s Got a Gun’, that has taken me fifteen days to write. According to the 11,793 words of notes left to render into coherent scenes, things are going to get far weirder from here.

Spike headbutted Leire’s living room window back in chapter 51.

Anyway, it’s six o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, which means that the day is almost over; I go to bed at ten to wake up at six for work. I’ve spent this weekend writing, lifting weights, shedding tears and masturbating, so I’m fully prepared to face a series of five new workdays filled with meaningless drudgery and unknown horrors.

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My gaze traces the vermillion border where Jacqueline’s pearly-white skin meets the rounded, jasper-red vermillion zone of her lips, but I wish I could close my eyes and chart with my own thin skin those millimetric grooves and wrinkles. Her mouth opens, exposing that sultry cave to the evening chill. It’s a forbidden, slippery topography that could swallow me up with ease. As the lips part, they unveil two shiny frontal incisors, cast like premium tokens for a beloved board game, as well as the saliva pooled in the basin between the dorsal surfaces of her watermelon-pink tongue.

From the bottom of the frame rises a roughly cubical potato chunk, its yellow-ochre skin crispy and smeared with a swath of alioli sauce. I’d like to have you inside me, Jacqueline thinks to the potato chunk. She guides the fork towards her mouth, and when her lips slide over the chunk to enfold it, they get coated in a greasy sheen and spotted with flecks of paprika. Those two voluminous, glossy surfaces curve around each other as she purses them to rip the potato away from the fork. She bites into the chunk, cracking its skin to expose a bright layer of flesh. Her cheeks dimple while she chews. A yellow-ochre dribble runs down from the corners of her mouth to meet at her chin, where they entwine into a long, oily strand. I want to reach with my stretched fingers to scoop the mixture up. I’d let that elongating strand hang down from my palm like an elastic stalactite, so it would trickle slowly onto my face and the warmth of Jacqueline’s saliva would seep through my pores.

She lets out a juicy grunt as her throat swells and the mashed potato slides down the cozy tube of her esophagus. Her tongue riffles along her teeth, dips and weaves its way across her lips, and swabs at the corners of her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed with a mix of crimson and coral, her cobalt-blues are glazed with potato lust. She has swallowed a secret message, one that reveals that she has become more than human and that the world of pleasure is at her doorstep.

As a child I dreamt that Jacqueline would offer me a bite of such a spiced, fried, tumefied tuber. That fantasy had fueled many an evening of masturbation, but now my memory fails to conjure up how my lips would feel on that flesh, creamy like the supple lips of an oyster.

“I’d like to have you inside me,” I mumble.

Jacqueline’s eyelashes flutter. When she exhales my way, her hot breath is tinged with the scent of garlic and pepper.

“What did you say? You better stop focusing on my mouth so much,” Jacqueline says in a voice that suggests that I should keep focusing on her mouth, “or else I’ll snarf through the rest of the potatoes before you know it. Was your stomach gurgling for nothing?”

I’ve gulped down my latte to combat the growing chill of the evening. The setting sun’s fire has dyed the sky a scarlet shade, turning the clouds into a fiery display of crimson and gold. On the opposite side of the chain link fence, the remaining tennis players, two middle-aged men that look like they own a collection of suits and spend their mornings shouting into phones, along with two dwarf-sized children, are engaged in a doubles match. One of the kids, whose face has the shape of a pizza, waddles towards the net as the racket wobbles in his right hand, to volley the descending ball. However, it whizzes past the kid and strikes the ground with a dull thud.

The world’s babble gets drowned out by a deep grumble coming from my stomach. The potato lover in me is screaming to go for a bite. I want to drown in a tidal wave of potatoes and alioli sauce, so that I’ll be able to forget the pangs of despair that are stabbing my insides.

I jab a chunk, but as I hold it to the evening light, it has transformed into a satanic totem, an offering to be consumed by some demon. I shove the food into my mouth and I gnaw on it in an effort to masticate my anxiety. The chunk’s skin is crisp and slightly charred, its insides are meaty and unctuous. I devour my fourth potato in one minute.

“My mouth is burning,” I say with a strained voice, “and I’d really like to have you inside me.”

My girlfriend laughs.

“But, Jacqueline…” I continue timidly.

Jacqueline has rested her right elbow next to her coffee cup and leaned her head on that hand. Her kindly expression suggests she had been waiting for me to gather enough courage to open up.

“Yes, baby girl?” she asks in a mellifluous voice.

“About your external hard drive…”

Jacqueline perks up.

“Ah, did you forget it at home? Is that why you are so tense?”

I pat the top of my backpack, that is resting against one of the rear legs of my chair.

“No, I got it right here.”

She sighs in relief.

“To be honest, I would have been a bit annoyed if you had forgotten it, because I’ve wanted to revisit some of those videos. But even if you had forgotten to grab it, we can make new ones, right? At least a couple more tonight.”

“I hope so. But I meant to bring up that… ‘Misc’ folder.”

A roguish smile of recognition lights up Jacqueline’s face. She starts twirling her fork around in her fingers.

“Yeah? What about it?”

“Well,” I say, trying to keep the tension out of my voice, “why did you include the videos of other women masturbating?”

“Oh.” Jacqueline snickers. “Partly so they would make you horny. Those ladies were delicious, weren’t they?”

She said it in the same tone I would have praised gummy bears as a kid. I want to bring up that she filmed those strangers in her apartment, that they doused with their girly juices the same fabrics that kept me warm at night, but as I try to push some words together into an objection, the words congeal into a thick clot of panic. I give up and let the air out through my mouth.

“That was me also opening up to you,” Jacqueline adds. “Are you troubled because you rubbed your sensitive little button to someone other than your girlfriend?”

My shoulders have drooped. I have to make an effort to remain upright in my seat, and it feels unfair that Jacqueline is demanding that I spend my limited energies talking.

“I don’t know, Jacqueline,” I say in a weary voice. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.”

A tennis ball rattles the nearby chain link fence, then it rolls back into the court. I take a sip of my tepid latte. Jacqueline grabs a potato chunk with her thumb and index finger. She rotates the potato as if inspecting whether or not it deserves to get shoved into her mouth.

“You aren’t supposed to feel in any particular way, baby,” she says in a calm, motherly tone. “People don’t experience the feelings that they are expected to or would prefer to have; they feel whatever chemical mix their brain produces. They sometimes pretend otherwise to fit into someone else’s idea of how a human being should feel.”

She slathers alioli sauce from the plate on the potato chunk, smearing it too on her nails and fingertips. The chunk has transformed into a savory weapon.

“Does it bother you that those videos made you horny while you were struggling with other feelings?” Jacqueline asks as she shoots me a sideways look.

What little remains of warmth on this October evening is evaporating into a bitter chill.

“I don’t think I want to know that far more attractive women than me have lain in the same bed where you and I have made love. I want you all to myself. I wish you had always been mine, and me yours. But yes, those videos made me feel guilty because I couldn’t stop myself from abusing my genitals to them.”

Jacqueline breaks into a gentle laugh, and when that melody stops, her satisfied smile suggests that I have overcome some hurdle.

“That’s what I want, your authentic self, full of contradictions and confusions. Some poor fools spend their whole lives repressing themselves, even in the solitude of their own minds, just to please cowards who have wasted their existence straitjacketed. Isn’t that a shame?”

I shift my weight in the chair.

“Apart from my feelings, whatever passes for sentient thought in my rotting brain fails to understand the purpose of presenting those past lovers of yours to me.”

Jacqueline chuckles, then she stares down at the piece of potato she’s holding, as if she expected it to start talking.

“They aren’t my lovers, at least in the strict sense.”

“Huh? Just business partners then?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I know for a fact that you mix business and pleasure. So do I, for that matter.”

Jacqueline squares her shoulders and holds my gaze steadily with her cobalt-blues.

“I promise you, sweetie, that this mouth you see, and that you were previously salivating over, has never kissed any of those ladies, nor has this skin felt theirs.”

My muscles loosen up.

“You may have found your vocation in the porn industry, then. I haven’t seen you this serious about anything else.”

“I would respect anything that brought me so much dough.”

Jacqueline scoots her chair closer to me, then she guides the potato chunk through the air until it waits in front of my lips like a car at a toll booth. I inhale its spicy, smoky scent.

“Open up, baby,” she says as her smile broadens.

I want to be stuffed so hard with potatoes that my blood turns into potatoes. When I part my lips, Jacqueline pops the potato chunk into my mouth, which gets filled with the taste of salt, oil and garlic, and a hint of lemon. My tongue relishes the rough texture of crisp skin.

“Good girl,” Jacqueline adds huskily. “I’m curious to know, though, which among my starlets was your favorite.”

After she lowers her gaze to my mouth, she slides her lower lip against her two maxillary central incisors in a way that makes me want to swallow before I’ve finished chewing the potato chunk.

“I was partial to that redheaded… girl,” I mumble sheepishly.

Jacqueline’s eyebrows shoot up, and she beams like I just praised one of her proudest accomplishments.

“She’s really something, isn’t she? A legend in certain circles. Unfortunately, hers is not a look that can be exploited for long before strangers on the internet start getting nosy.”

My stomach acid has started dissolving the bolus of tuber when I attempt to understand Jacqueline’s words, but a searing memory flashes in my mind: that sylphlike, freckle-spattered girl lying in a pool of cum, her burgundy mane blotched and her frozen grimace of agony concealed by a daisy-white crust.

A cold shiver runs down my spine. I rub my face with both hands to regain my composure.

“May she rest in peace,” I utter gravely.

Jacqueline lets out an unusual noise of confusion.

“What do you mean? She’s alive and well.”

I shake my head slowly. I won’t clarify any of the horrors burned into my brain, lest I traumatize my beloved. Anyway, I’m a wilted violet; I can’t be expected to make sense.

“Hey,” Jacqueline says calmly.

When I look up, she’s holding the index finger and thumb of her right hand in a pinching motion in front of my mouth. Those fingertips, as well as her short, almond-shaped nails, are smeared with sauce. Jacqueline’s cobalt-blues twinkle like a naughty schoolgirl’s.

“Clean them up for me, sweetheart.”

Despite the growing cold, my cheeks puff up with heat. I close my eyes and I lean in to house her fingers within my warm mouth. I lap and swirl my tongue around her fingertips and the edges of her nails, spreading the alioli sauce on my tastebuds.

My mind draws in its darkened theatre the outline of nearby seated patrons by the babel of their conversations. A child lets out an enthusiastic vocalization, and someone follows it with the whap of a tennis racket hitting a ball. A blaring motorcycle passes by the entrance of the pub’s grounds.

I want to taste more and more of Jacqueline; she’s bread and water for my starving body. But she must have noticed that I’ve removed every trace of the oily coating, because she withdraws her two fingers from my mouth, scratching lightly the surface of my tongue with her nail on the way out.

When I open my eyes, Jacqueline’s gaze threatens to drown me. I’ve learned to recognize her two moods; as she ordered me to suck on her fingers, she was a house cat that alternates between playfulness and carefree lounging, but now she has become a relentless predator aching to pounce on her prey to rip a juicy throat out. She breathes deeply through her teeth while her moist lips quiver. As she narrows her shoulders, overcome by some swell of emotion, a thick lock of her lustrous, raven-black hair bends against the turtleneck of her blouse. My skin erupts with gooseflesh.

“I missed you so much last night,” Jacqueline says, lowering her voice to a husky whisper. “But tonight I’ll have you back in my bed, won’t I? And that bottomless hunger of yours will devour me until I can’t walk anymore.”

I nod fervently as my crotch warms up with sticky, creamy desire. Once again Jacqueline will allow me to gnaw on her flesh with the vigor of a desert locust. I’ll provide the most sensitive patches of her skin a feverish tongue-bath. Unfortunately, this pub is populated with families that would be disturbed by the sight of a couple of women openly indulging in sex on top of this rickety table, although some of the men would likely offer the two of us free drinks.

“I’ll choke on your saliva as your hot tongue rambles around my own,” I say between gasps of air, “I’ll lick your tits wet and shiny, I’ll kiss and nibble on your nipples, I’ll bury my face in your pussy until I suck up your juices to the last drop. Just tell me when and where I should drop to my knees. I exist to pleasure you.”

Jacqueline chuckles throatily as her lips curl into a smile that would make any hardened criminal fear the end of the world. She lowers her head to stare at me through her eyelashes with an air of bloodthirsty divinity. Her pupils have become wide-open tunnels to the bottom of an ocean.

“Alright, you may have your wish. It’s going to be my treat to take you away from this stressful life of yours. You’re all mine now, and I won’t let you ever forget it. But I’m afraid that your behavior needs some polishing.”

My heart is thundering in my chest, and the needy pressure in my clit is increasing uncontrollably.

“Maybe you need to try harsher methods, mommy,” I utter in a rough voice. “Spank me with a tennis racket. Carve my flesh with a rusty knife. Chain me to your bed using high security combination locks with codes that you’ve long forgotten. Make me disappear from the world. I want to shit in a bucket for the rest of my life.”

Jacqueline rests her elbows on the table, pushing her coffee mug towards the remaining potatoes, and she shuts her eyes tight. A bead of saliva grows at a corner of her mouth until she dabs at it with the tip of her tongue. When she holds my gaze again, her cobalt-blues have become pools of burning lust.

“Baby,” she starts hoarsely, “you are such a good girl that I regret having asked you to spend the afternoon anywhere else than at my place.”

“Nothing will prevent me from ending up naked at your mercy tonight, Jacqueline. You are the only person who has ever made me feel like I’m human.”

Jacqueline stands up forcefully, nearly toppling over her chair.

“Fuck the rest of the potatoes. Let’s leave.”

I leap to my feet. I lift my bulky backpack and I sling it over my left shoulder. Jacqueline is rubbing her cheeks with one hand as if to hide the traces of her frenzy. She retrieves her purse and clicks the clasp to open it, then she takes out her wallet. I hurry to fish mine from whatever pocket of my trousers I shoved it in. Under such pressure, carrying a purse would have helped me, but I’ve never been a fan of them; I fear that I would lose it, that some fiend would snatch it, or that I would leave incriminating evidence inside that would lead me to prison.

“Wait, I can pay for this one,” I say.

Jacqueline raises my chin with her thumb, and her gaze shuts me up.

“You will never have to worry about money with me, doll. You’ll repay me by letting me do to you whatever I want.”

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Author’s note: as I wrote most of this chapter (and the following) these past couple of days, I mostly listened to compilations like this one on YouTube, which are helpful if you want to feel like you are writing at an empty coffee shop during the thirties/forties while it’s raining outside. But throughout this past week, on the train to and from work, I listened to Jackson C. Frank’s stuff. Songs like ‘Blues Run the Game’, ‘Milk & Honey’, ‘October’ and, of course, ‘Marlene’. He was maybe the cursed songwriter of the sixties.

Jacqueline’s infamous external hard drive and its contents were developed back in chapter 45.

As it has happened before, I originally believed that this part and the following one would fit into the same chapter, but I eventually decided to divide it. I’ve already written about two thousand words of the next part, that will conclude this sequence, so I’ll likely be able to upload it in a couple of days.