Tag: novellas

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 9 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I lowered the blankets down to my nose as bile surged into my throat. The bedroom had shrunk as if the missing furniture had been holding up its dimensions. From the mattress sprawled on the floor, the bedroom door towered, its jambs slanting toward the narrow lintel, resembling a monolith.

Feverish tremors rattled me. I sucked air into my lungs, but they rejected it.

I blinked, and the door burst open as if rammed by a battering ram. It swung on its hinges and slammed the wall, exploding into splinters. In the doorway loomed Father’s hulking frame. His inflamed breath illuminated black nostrils and a bristly snout.

I blinked again, and the door stayed shut. I strained to hear footsteps beneath the roaring gale in my ears, where screams floated like driftwood from a shipwreck.

As my vision prickled into blackness, I levitated in a void—but jolted awake, back to my starlit bedroom. I buried my head under the blankets. Once darkness swallowed me, nothing could hurt me.

My swollen bladder pulsed. I clenched my thighs to trap it. A lapse and I’d wet myself. I thrashed on the mattress—rolling onto one shoulder, the other, my back—shuddering as cold sweat glued my pajamas to my skin. Urine clawed to escape. When I imagined leaping from bed, sprinting down a kilometer-long hall to the bathroom, then emptying my bladder, relief flooded me.

Why hold back? Would it matter if I peed myself? Was I afraid of disturbing him?

I spread my thighs and relented. A hot stream soaked my crotch, fused my panties to the pajama pants, and pooled between my buttocks. My body from navel to thighs felt warm as if I were sinking into a bath.

I peeked from the blankets. In the view quivering like a tuning fork, the cork oak outside stretched toward the star-patched sky. An owl clung to a branch, hunched in black-and-olive streaked plumage, wind ruffling its citrine underfeathers. Its crest and beak-framing feathers had grayed; the rest of its head camouflaged with the forest. Two tufts spiked from its crown—antennae of a space helmet. Wide amber eyes locked onto mine as if commanded to witness what came next.

The owl spread its wings, flapped them, and swiftly soared out of sight. The branch and its sinuous leaves shuddered, then stilled.

Tears boiled in my ducts, glazing the oak. Even the owl wouldn’t stay. I cocooned under the blankets. Blind blackness greeted my opened eyes. I gulped stagnant, warm air that reeked of ammonia.

In the void, the owl’s outline gripped the branch. Its eyes warned me in a language to which I was born deaf.

I rose. The owl watched as I neared the window. When I opened it, cold air rushed in. The bird spread its wings, flapped them, and swiftly soared out of sight. I craned into the night, twisting to scan the roof.

“Wait.”

I climbed the window frame. Jumped, and found myself dangling between the facade and oak, suspended by an invisible thread tethered to the sky. I clawed upward through air, soaring past the roof as pine-clad hills and valleys shrank below.

The owl’s silhouette fluttered ahead, a black smudge against a spatter of stars.

My chest swelled. I chased the bird for ten minutes while muscles I never knew screamed in my limbs.

A hundred meters below, a greenish sea stretched horizon-to-horizon, waves wrinkling with reflections of the stars and moon. The owl glided toward a fleet of anchored galleys, and landed on the central ship’s deck. Two rows of figures flanked the bird. A delegation approached.

I swooped to the stern and landed feet-first, but momentum slammed me down, dragging me five meters across planks. I stood.

Two long-necked egrets in slashed doublets and ruffs slid a purple dalmatic over the owl’s wings and head. They wrapped its shoulders and torso in a sash embroidered with gold and silver filigree. Across its stripes glittered dozens of gemstones. Another egret wedged a conical crown onto the bird’s crest—silver adorned with raised reliefs of owls, runes, and geometric patterns.

The deck’s flanking figures converged on me, stalking like a cat encircled by hounds. Eagles clad in bronze helmets and breastplates tilted halberds my way.

“Sir, they followed you,” growled the lead eagle soldier.

A hiss echoed above. Bird silhouettes aimed crossbows from the crow’s nest and rigging.

The owl adjusted its dalmatic, waddled closer, and raised a wing. Lemon-sized amber eyes fixed on me.

“I recognize this human. She hails from that sorrowful overseas land.” His voice dropped. “You were born into a bleak country, girl.”

I shuddered. Swallowed to unclench my throat.

“It is, sir.”

The owl glanced at his guards, then lowered a wing. The eagles retreated, nodding.

It stepped nearer, wingtips resting on my shoulders, fanning black-striped feathers.

“I hoped you’d choose to follow me.”

I clasped my hands, voice shrill.

“May I accompany you, sir?”

“Of course.”

He encircled my back with a wing, and guided me toward the prow.

“Rest as long as you need. When you wake, you will breakfast with me. Tomorrow we reach my domains.”

In the morning, as I stepped out of the captain’s cabin onto the deck, the orange hole in the sky dazzled me. It bathed chalk-white cliffs. Salty air cleansed my lungs.

The fleet sailed through the mouth between two capes into a gulf, its shores teeming with houses, towers, and multicolored crops, while the sparkling waters were dotted with fishing boats and cargo ships. We docked at a harbor. The towering masts of hundreds of vessels rose like a forest of bare trees and tangled vines.

On the cobblestones of the harbor, the owl invited me to a carriage that would be drawn by six horses. The vehicle was decorated with golden garlands that gleamed in the sun, and up close, you could make out the stylized figures of birds perched on branches or in flight. The wheels were rimmed with gilt flowers, the interior of the carriage covered with purple velvet curtains. The cherrywood panels depicted the emperor owl and his retinue.

Inside, I settled onto a cushioned bench. The owl positioned himself across from me and drew the curtain across the window. I insisted on speaking, but utterly exhausted, I kept babbling incoherently. The emperor suggested I rest. I stretched out along the bench, burying my head in a feather pillow, and closed my eyes.

The carriage wheels glided over earth and grass, clattered along cobblestone streets. The clamor of villages poured in. The music of street performers emerged and vanished amidst vendors’ cries. Every few minutes, the uproar of crowds swelled around the carriage as they cheered for the emperor.

That noon, I dined in his castle, within a throne room as lofty as a cathedral. Rows of marble pillars supported a ribbed vault, its surface carved with rosettes and inlaid with colorful mosaics depicting heroic deeds. I sat beside the emperor owl at a table whose ends curved at the horizon. Bathed in the soft glow of candlelight, dozens of birds dipped their spoons into bowls of soup and purée. They pecked at pork ribs drenched in a tangy vinegar and lemon juice sauce. Between sips and bites, they chattered and laughed.

Seated across, a kingfisher dressed in a doublet, with an indigo head speckled in turquoise, poured cider through its long beak. To its right, a peregrine falcon, its head a smoky gray, adjusted a monocle that magnified one brown eye. Boasting, it boomed its deep, braggadocious voice over a plate of sea bass and potatoes.

As I savored the third bite of my lasagna, the emperor owl clinked a knife against his goblet. The clamor ceased. The guests turned their attention to him as if he were a revered professor.

“Listen.” His voice echoed through the throne room and returned as if a choir were mimicking it. “I thank you for having restrained your curiosity. This human, as you may have heard, followed me from the overseas land. Just as with the rest of its inhabitants, every day the shadows that ravage those lands hammered her body with mallet and chisel, and one day they would have reduced her to nothing.”

Emotion clouded my voice.

“But the emperor owl found me, and in his wisdom, he allowed me to accompany him to his domains.”

He pulled back the chair and settled in beside me. His warm wing draped over my shoulder. He gazed at me with amber eyes, their gleaming pupils reflecting the flickering flames of candles. The corner of his beak curved into a smile.

“And from this day onward, brave girl, you will be my right hand. Your belly will never writhe with hunger. You will forget fear. Never again will you endure pains you were never meant to know.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 8 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

When I rounded the hallway corner toward my bedroom, my dresser blocked the path, its drawers slightly ajar as if they had slid forward while the piece was being pulled. I pushed the dresser aside until I squeezed through the gap between its edge and the wall. From my open bedroom spilled a harsh scrape. It was punctured by the footsteps of a hulking mass, their vibrations trembling the floor.

I crept forward on tiptoe, fingertips grazing the grainy texture of the wallpaper. Congestion glazed my eyes, and static fogged my mind. My mouth, through which I was breathing, tasted stale.

From the bedroom doorway jutted a hand’s breadth of desk. It inched outward in jerks until halfway. Father growled. With a shove, the desk emerged fully, revealing the man behind it, his meaty palms planted on the furniture. When his gaze flicked toward me, I ducked my head as if I risked turning to stone. The desk legs screeched against the wooden floor as Father wedged it flush against the wall.

I lunged to the bedroom threshold, arms flung wide to block it.

“No.”

Father marched toward me and swatted me aside like a curtain. The bristles of his arm pierced the skin of my shoulder and chest through my sweater, shirt, and bra. I staggered against the hallway wall and crumpled to the floor.

Father muttered in the gutted space. He yanked open the screeching doors of my closet.

I rose as if waking from a faint. I couldn’t stop this man, nor persuade him to leave me alone. What could I do? Had he warned Mother? Told her he planned to strip my room of furniture that might barricade the door? Was she absent because she objected, or because she didn’t care?

My vision blurred. After wiping my nose on a snot-crusted handkerchief, I hurried down the hall, descended the stairs, crossed the living room, and stepped into a dusk that chilled my face and hands. The moon and first stars pierced clotted clouds. I scanned the pasture for Mother’s gaunt silhouette.

Chains clinked. The cows.

I rushed to the barn, plunging into its musky, dung-thick air. The beasts, chained in their stalls, chewed hay. Mother sat hunched on a stool beside one of the cows, squeezing the swollen teats of its udders, which were ridged with bulging veins. Milk jets splashed into a half-full bucket. She tilted her face toward the wall, hiding behind straggly, unkempt hair.

I halted beside her, fists clenched.

“Tell him to leave my furniture alone. Please.”

Mother tugged another udder, spraying milk. I crouched to glimpse her profile: features scratched into rotted wood, lips a mere slit. She stared down at the milk-filled bucket, making it seem like she had closed her eyes.

I softened my voice as much as my trembling allowed.

“Mother, do you know what he intends? If he told you, I don’t know if you could’ve stopped him. But you have to help me.”

“Don’t call me that.”

The volume of her voice had matched the splashing in the bucket, her words as though I’d imagined them in the gurgle of aching guts.

When I placed a hand on her sweatered shoulder, a bony lump pressed my palm.

“Do you know why he’s taking my furniture? Do you know what he does to me?”

She shot upright, the stool clattering on stone. Mother clamped her hand around my cheeks and squeezed. It hurt as if she might rip my mouth off with a tug. Her tangled gray mane framed creased and shovel-colored skin, and the paint with which her eyes had been drawn threatened to flake away. Her breath smelled of garlic.

She let go of my face. With her other hand, she gripped my nape, then shoved me beneath the cow and plunged my head into the milk bucket. I gulped a mouthful that flooded my lungs. I convulsed, trying to sneeze the milk out, but each spasm swallowed more, drowning my eyes, drenching my brain. Mother pressed my head deeper, the bucket’s curved edge digging into my collarbones. I grabbed the cow’s hide—it mooed and thrashed about, the chains binding its legs clinking.

Mother yanked my hair, and I fell backward onto bits of straw. I coughed bursts of milk. Sneezes and hacking shuddered through me, raking my nostrils and throat raw.

When I lifted my gaze from the straw-strewn floor, Mother was gone. The bucket lay overturned by the stool, and a milk puddle spread around the cow’s hoof.

Rising would waste energy. Someone should chalk my outline.

The cow nudged its muzzle close and lowed. Its nostrils exhaled a cloudy breath that warmed my cheek, glassy eyes gazing at me as if I were a wounded calf.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Screen Shot” by Swans.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 7 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Before I stifled the sneeze, snot shrapnel sprayed my drawing, speckling the page with translucent blotches, smothering some strokes with globs. What did it matter? My trembling hand had sketched shaky curves. The scene I’d created was hazy, mirroring my mental fog, as if I were glimpsing a landscape through greased paper.

I crumpled the sheet into a ball. When I dropped it beside me, it rolled over the portfolio and lodged between chunks of bark. I blew my nose as if I were filled with liters of mucus, but ten seconds later, a trickle slid from one nostril. The wings of my nose were raw. My mouth tasted of phlegm. I should—and wanted—to lie in bed, but why stay under that roof when I could escape for a few hours?

I twisted my nose with the handkerchief, which muffled my voice.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Whatever you like,” said the man. “We’ll see what I answer.”

“Do you like me?”

The air thickened near the blackened circle, charged like static.

“You think I don’t?”

“Would you betray me?”

“Have you given me reason?”

“I don’t know. You might think I have, even if I didn’t mean to.”

“Is that cold of yours messing with your head? Why worry?”

“It is messing with me. I can’t think straight. But maybe you’re pretending to like me as a distraction.”

“A distraction from what?”

“From planning to hurt me.”

The man sighed, his breath prickling my face.

“I’m not planning to. Though if I were, I imagine I’d hide it.”

“If someone I thought cared for me switched sides, I assumed I would know.”

“It’s been years since anyone entertained me like you. Though, to be fair, I’ve never delved deeper into a relationship than telling someone to leave and watching them flee.”

I blew my nose until I needed a fresh handkerchief. The sight of the charred grass circle wavered, and the taste of my saliva sickened me. I set the cloth-covered tureen on my thigh, loosened the elastic, and lifted a corner of the fabric. If I could smell, maybe the aroma of marmitako inside would’ve stirred my hunger.

“Will it taste like anything to you?” said the man.

“Maybe it’ll taste like something to you.”

“Want me to try it?”

“I brought it to offer you. Even an invisible man needs to eat. What kind of person would let you starve?”

At the edge of my hearing floated the murmur of clashing thoughts, mingled with wind whistling, birds trilling, and the creek’s whisper.

“I should refuse.”

I crawled forward, but stopped a meter and a half from the circle to avoid the pins stabbing me. Bowing, I placed the open tureen on the grass. I jerked backward, then leaned on my hands, damp leaves and grass beneath my palms.

“If I ate, it’d be wasted. It’d taste like phlegm.”

“Charming word to hear while I consider eating.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but the image of the circle, the beeches, the tangle of branches beyond, slid toward the tureen as if painted on a stretching rubber band. The distortion coiled around the tureen like a claw, contracted, and swallowed it into a mirrored lake. The rustle of crumpled fabric. Chewing. A gulp.

A cough exploded, convulsing the beeches and the circle, the shockwave knocking me onto my back. The tureen flew past my head. My legs folded against my chest—firecracker-like coughs jolted me as if trying to make me roll. Needles stabbed my face and hands like a swarm of bees, their stings piercing my sweater and pants.

When the man stopped coughing, I lay supine. Above the quivering lattice of branches, a mass of gray-blue clouds slid south. I sat up. Snot bubbled in one nostril, and my exposed skin burned.

Before the circle of withered grass, a black, mercurial vomit had flattened the blades and buried the debris. I couldn’t smell, but the fumes attacked my nose like smoke-itch. The view of the blackened circle had stilled.

Had I poisoned the invisible man?

“Please, tell me you’re still there.”

“I’d forgotten how vomiting feels.”

I covered my mouth. I wanted to kneel and weep.

“I didn’t mean to. I swear. If I’d known it’d affect you like this, I’d have eaten it myself, even if it tasted like phlegm.”

“Relax. Years ago, I tried your food and it ended in another puddle. I thought this time might be different.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in English about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 6 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

The bathroom door opened with a click that rippled through the bathwater, mingling with the pressure in my eardrums and the submerged gurgle of bubbles rolling across my skin. A draft seeped through the door crack and slithered over my knees and shins, that jutted from the water like ice cubes. Light footsteps entered the room.

I shrank deeper while trying to avoid disturbing the water. Who’d entered, knowing I was bathing?

I lifted my head into the cool air. I expected the shower curtain to silhouette the hulking mass of thick arms and legs, but the lamp lightened the nylon. I peeled the curtain back a hand’s width. Mother, leaning against the sink, stared at me.

I loosened my shoulders. Better her resentful glare than Father’s.

“Hurry up,” Mother said.

She rummaged through my pajamas, bra, and underwear, heaped on the toilet lid. She bundled them. Snatched the folded towel from the sink, and added it to the pile.

As I hunched over the tub’s edge, my wet hair and face splattered the tiles.

“What will I wear when I get out?”

Mother tilted her head to address me but hid her ashen face behind her silver hair.

“If you want clothes, ask your father.”

She left the door ajar.

The chill prickled my skin as my heart galloped. She’d return, I thought, and toss fresh underwear and pajamas onto the toilet lid. But her footsteps faded into silence. The cold air invading the bathroom through the cracked door whispered that if I emerged from the warm water, I’d risk pneumonia.

I shut the curtain and submerged myself up to my nose. Had Father ordered her to steal my clothes? Why had she obeyed? Mother knew she’d condemned me to shuffle naked toward that man, clutching my breasts and groin. To beg.

A searing heat in my chest overwhelmed me. As I shut my eyes tight, my body jerked in silent, tearless spasms.

I shoved the curtain aside and clambered out, hunched, as droplets drummed the tiles. At the sink, I froze, legs trembling as if I’d bathed in an icy river. In the mirror, wrinkled strands clung to my forehead, and rivulets snaked down my pallid skin. I recognized the gaze of a lamb hearing the bleats of its kin as it’s dragged through bloodied puddles.

I swept the hair from my face. Wringing my mane, it dripped down my back and spattered my buttocks.

I nudged the door further, and its knob grazed the wall. To my left, the shadowed hallway led, past a corner, to the bedroom. To my right, Father’s silhouette clogged the far end like cholesterol in an artery. The ancient bellows of his chest wheezed, swelling and deflating. Though darkness veiled his face, his stare pierced mine as if pinning a moth to cork.

A shudder seized my legs. Dizziness blurred my vision. I fixed my eyes on the wallpaper ahead, its lumpy patterns like spider eggs. I stiffened. Swallowed. I shielded my breasts with one arm, cupped my groin, then strode into the hallway.

What did it matter? He’d already seen. That man assumed forcing me to parade naked would render me helpless, yet I’d barricade my room even as I became stiff from the cold.

I let my arms drop. As if sleepwalking, I turned toward my bedroom and marched stiffly. Father’s gaze scorched me from hair to Achilles’ heels. When I rounded the corner, his stare detached. I sprinted to my room, stomach acid searing my throat. I opened the door, closed it behind me, and pressed my back against it.

A threadbare sheet covered the mattress. I recognized it from the storage closet in the attic; the sheet had been buried beside a yellowed pillow and hole-riddled slippers. I rifled through the dresser drawers—empty. When I jerked the wardrobe open, the draft rattled unburdened wire hangers.

My jaw quivered. Cool droplets slid down the gooseflesh on my arms.

I shoved the dresser screeching across the floor to barricade the door. Dragged the desk and wedged it against the dresser drawers.

I switched off the lamp, but starlight and the pockmarked moon bled through the window. As I neared the glass, an owl burst from the cork oak’s branch, wings thrashing. I yanked the curtain shut.

Clambered onto the bed as if escaping lava. Slid under the frayed sheet, pulled it over my head. Faint light seeped through the fabric’s cracks. It reeked of mold and old clutter fermented in the closet’s depths. The damp sheet clung to my skin.

I shut my eyes, hugged my knees. Counted to four again and again to drown out my hammering heart and chattering teeth.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Pink Moon” by my boy Nick.

This story is written in a manner that makes my skin crawl, and I don’t mean just the subject matter. I’ve long forgotten what headspace I was in at the time, but it reminds me of my teenage years, which were spent mainly slipping in and out of psychosis. Maybe that’s a huge part of why I didn’t want to revisit this story.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 5 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

Bleats wafted through the fog. On the facade of the house at the meadow’s edge, the white paint had peeled like rotten skin on a corpse’s forehead, exposing walls built of mismatched rocks in precarious balance. Above six crooked windows, walnut-brown tiles crowned the structure like a sun-scorched straw hat.

I hastened through the overgrown grass, searching for a sheep’s four-legged silhouette. Beside me, a garment snapped in the wind with a crack of cloth. I kept moving until Mother clicked her tongue at me.

“Follow me.”

In her mane, ash-gray strands twisted like storm warnings. I trailed her, arms crossed over the portfolio I clung to. Shivers ran through me. I should’ve brought a scarf.

From the shed at the meadow’s corner came bleats like a tortured soul’s wails. Mother stopped by a fence where a lamb hung skewered by barbed wire, its neck and chest hooked. From its gaping mouth dangled threads of saliva. Eyes bulged grotesquely. With each twitch, its wounds spilled tongues of brass-scented blood that stained the wire and steamed. A dark pool grew at its hooves.

“Don’t bother claiming you’d penned all the sheep and this lamb slipped out,” Mother said. “You rushed your chores to vanish into whatever hole you like to hide in.”

She spoke as if forcing air through her larynx exhausted her energy, and at each word she questioned if the effort was worth it.

I uncovered my mouth and crouched near the lamb. Stroked the coarse fur along its back while its warm body shuddered under my palm.

As if the sun had eclipsed, darkening the world, I envisioned Father surging from the horizon and rushing across the meadow toward me, footsteps quaking the earth.

When I stood, a dizzy spell blurred my sight. I scanned the meadow, skin prickling. Mother’s bony fingers grazed the portfolio’s edge I clutched. I braced for her to snatch it, but she bent instead to grab a handle hidden in the grass.

“I’ll keep to myself what you’ve done.”

She pried open my right hand and placed an axe’s smooth wooden grip into my palm. The heavy metal head dragged my arm down.

“For what?”

“Kill it.”

Fire seared my gut. I gulped.

The lamb probed the air with its crimson, glistening tongue as if parched. Each spasm rattled the wire in metallic shrieks while blood oozed from the beast’s wounds thick as honey; surely its body held less than it had spilled. A bleat rippled from the shed in a cold current as if a ghost were weeping.

“I can’t.”

“You prolong its agony. And it’s suffering because of you. Do your duty.”

I knelt, pressing my brow to the lamb’s feverish chest, inches from wire barbs gouging flesh. My fingers tangled in its matted fur. Underneath, muscle fibers quivered.

I swallowed to steady my voice.

“Maybe it’ll heal. Give it time.”

Studying its neck wounds, I wondered how I could lift the lamb without slicing deeper, but Mother yanked my sweater’s collar, making me stumble back. As she snatched the axe, the momentum flung me onto slick grass, sprawling sideways. She glanced away through her ashen hair, as if seeing me pained her.

“You learn nothing. Your head always in the clouds. Nothing good’s going to happen to you.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

This may be the worst conceived scene of all I’ve translated so far from my work ten years ago. I had trouble even envisioning what I meant in some of the original text.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 4 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

I detailed the face of the man standing upright over the circle of withered grass, flanked by twin beech trees guarding him like sentinels. With a gray crayon, I shaded the segmented plates of his armor. I perfected the goose-feather quill jutting from his silver helmet. I erased the outline of his jaw and redrew it square, rock-hewn, to match that cavernous voice.

I stretched, then reviewed the drawing. Perfect. No detail to add, no stroke to erase.

I smiled, stifling a chain of laughter. I set the drawing atop my portfolio. When I uncrossed my numb legs, blood surged back in a torrent of prickling needles. I snatched the sketch, turned it toward the ring of blackened grass, and held it aloft.

“Do you like it?”

The man coughed. The circle and the beeches rippled as though I were peering at a painting submerged in churning water. My face and hands burned, but the sting would fade before blooming into rashes.

“You wear armor granted to honorable warriors,” I said, “those who’ve proven their valor defending the king and slaying scores of monsters. You’ve come on a secret quest to purge this land of darkness.”

“Did the helmet need a feather?”

Leaning over the page, I stole a glance at my drawing, hunting for errors I might’ve missed.

“I could erase the feather, but I’d have to redraw the helmet and part of that beech.”

“It’s a fine portrait of someone else.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“It isn’t me.”

I studied the scene. What other details could offend him? The man in the drawing would helm adventures where he’d always prevail, though bloodied and scarred. He’d slaughter beasts threatening those he loved.

“Maybe I’ve imagined it better than reality, but isn’t it lovelier this way?”

I slid the drawing between the portfolio’s pages, careful not to crease the edges. I lay on my side in the grass, dewdrops glittering like scattered glass.

“But it isn’t real,” said the man, as if he’d weighed the words for fifteen seconds.

“You can tell me. Truly.”

“Tell you what?”

“Why you’re here. What you seek. Do you think I’d hinder you? I want to help.”

He snorted, air whistling through a rusted pipe.

“You’re imagining that your knight has galloped here from distant lands, plunged into this forest, and awaits the stars’ alignment to fulfill his mission. Yet I appeared among these trees—this arbitrary speck in the cosmos—as I could have materialized on another planet, in the depths of a hydrocarbon sea. I linger because no corners remain worth moving out to.”

“Hydrocarbon?”

“Why are you here?”

“When I met you? To sketch this landscape. Today? Because I’ve met you.”

“On this planet, I mean.”

“I didn’t choose that.”

“Nor did I.”

I knelt. A beetle trudged past, legs ticking like a cuckoo-clock figurine. It wove through twigs and scaled dry leaves toward the border of blackened grass, but a meter away, its antennae groped the air like a blind man tracing a wall. The beetle pivoted and marched in perpendicular, bulldozing debris with its shell.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“Do what?”

I hunched, palms sinking into the underbrush—crunching leaves, flattening grass. I stretched an arm toward the circle and crawled. A meter from the blackened grass, needles stabbed my fingertips. I jerked back. Though my fingertips tingled, no blood welled, and the pain ebbed.

“That.”

“Girl, I couldn’t explain it if I tried. Curious, though. Other creatures flee. Had another stumbled upon me—a disembodied voice in these woods—and heard me command for them to leave, they’d have bolted. Yet you persist. You lack instinct.”

“I’ve won.”

“Were we competing?”

“We’re talking. You’ve stopped ordering me away.”

The man sighed, his breath a stale gust.

“What I touch withers. All I near rots. What do you suppose that means for you?”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Sawdust & Diamonds” by God herself.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

When I went down for breakfast, I sat in the chair opposite my usual spot. Father barged into the kitchen. A scent of wet grass and manure, like a beast sprawled in the mist, flooded my nostrils, trampling the stench of the garlic and onion braids hanging from the ceiling. Father’s fiery snorts heated the air.

My ears had stiffened. I ducked my head over the bowl of milk, baring my nape.

Father’s hulk prowled behind me while hissing through his teeth. He yanked the chair next to mine and dropped onto it as if to splinter the wood, which creaked. He planted a fist beside my bowl.

I gulped the milk as my throat clenched, risking a choke.

His fist bulged like a club, his fingers like swollen sacks of soil. Hundreds of iron spikes bristled across its back, climbing up a forearm thick as an oak branch. As Father breathed, the spikes converged and parted.

“Today, you’ll milk the cows and shear the sheep that were your mother’s duty. Understood?”

I nodded. Crossed my ankles under the table.

Father thrust his face toward me; it felt like a cannonball sinking into the opposite end of a mattress, causing my side to cave in. His breath grazed my skin like a flame.

“Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“If you bolt your door again tonight, tomorrow you’ll work double.”

My muscles tensed, steely. The milk bowl doubled and quivered. I would vomit.

By the counter, Mother faced away from me—a mannequin rigged from wooden slats, draped in a sweater and an ankle-length skirt. A thin, ash-gray mane covered her head. The mannequin, hunched over the sink, trembled as she scrubbed a glass with a scouring pad. If I glimpsed her gaunt silhouette from certain angles, Mother would vanish.

“Don’t bother her,” Father said. “She agrees.”

Mother spoke in a brittle whisper.

“Obey your father.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

My bedroom window framed the cork oak, beyond whose cracked stone bark, the color of capers, stretched the broad sash of the Milky Way. Its clusters of azure light, its masses of rosy nebulae. Through the bare branches slid the glimmering of hundreds of thick luminous orbs and flickering points—blue, white, and red—studding the night. Millions of glowing spiders dangling from the ceiling of a cavern.

I shrank beneath the blankets, clutching the coverlet as though I were sliding into an abyss. I’d woken in the dead of night. Why?

Everything that had inflamed my brain now hung like paintings: the two beech trees flanking the circle of blackish grass, the reverberating voice of the invisible stranger. I pressed my eyelids shut. I gasped into the pillow, dizzy. I counted from one to four, inhaling deeply with each number, but my heart raced, pounding against my left lung. How would I fall asleep again?

I curled into a ball and poked my head from the blankets into the cool air. The wind whistled. A cow’s chain jingled as the beast grazed.

When Father arrived, he’d find me awake.

I whimpered. Hugging myself, I wished to vanish. How could I let Father enter if I remained awake?

I sat on the bed’s edge, springs squeaking. My vision wavered. Standing might make me vomit. I pressed the soles of my feet to the cold floorboards and hunched toward the door.

Footsteps prowled the house—an earthquake whose tremors would reach me. They’d crescendo like palms slapping wood, then the door would creak open. He’d find me standing on the opposite side of the threshold.

I knelt. Clamped my palms over my ears, squeezed my eyes shut. My breath thickened. Maybe hyperventilating would make me faint, but it’d take minutes. The dresser, the wardrobe, the desk. Would they suffice? Could I shove them?

My forehead and neck dripped with cold sweat. I crouched beside the dresser flanking the door. Shuddering, I inched it forward, legs trembling as its feet screeched like chalk on slate. I barricaded the door. Circled the dresser, then shoved it from the side of the drawers toward the door until wood jammed against wood.

Footsteps merged with the drumroll of my heart.

My legs quaked. I gripped the desk’s edge and jerked it toward the dresser. A stubborn pain clawed my throat, as if I’d swallowed a nail.

The footsteps advanced along the hallway toward my bedroom. Drumbeats.

I crouched behind the desk, bracing it firmly against the dresser as the wood groaned.

In the gloom, the doorknob turned. The door nudged inward a few millimeters and struck the dresser.

I slumped at the foot of the desk and leaned back against its drawers, their handles stabbing my spine. I’d fallen into a pit I’d never climb out of.

The door thrust against the dresser, crushing it into the desk, the desk into my back.

A shudder coursed through me refusing to break. The sight of my bed and the still-life paintings blurred with black spots. My heart would burst like a peach hurled at a wall.

In the hallway, a voice like a flaming furnace snarled and cursed as its owner stomped back and forth.

Had I heard him leave? I inhaled sharply.

The door slammed into the dresser with a crack of wood that jolted my spine, embedding drawer handles beside my vertebrae. The knob squealed as it twisted. The door shoved the furniture as though the next thrust would hurl the dresser, the desk, and me onto the bed, burying me beneath a blast of splinters.

Cobwebs swayed on the blackened ceiling beams. Books trembled on the shelf, and crashed down. Damp stains on the walls shed flakes of paint. The bedroom had grown hot while in the hallway flames from a stove roared.

I clenched my thighs to hold my bladder, tears spattering my cheeks like scalding drops.

Growls reverberated, curses in extinct languages. Footsteps retreated down the hallway, vibrating the floorboards and rattling my bones.

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “The Killing Moon” by Echo & the Bunnymen.

I’m fully aware that you can only see the center of the Milky Way from the southern hemisphere except in some conditions near the equator. This story is set somewhere in the Basque Country, but it felt like that bit of irreality was fitting.

The Emperor Owl, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Where the grass and ferns grow, twenty-one years ago I stumbled upon a circle of broken branches and blackened grass, as though a boulder had crushed them, sealing them from the sun until they rotted. Two beech trees guarded the circle. Their branches sprouted at ground level, as if they had grown several meters underground before rupturing into the air. Along their trunks swelled knotted protrusions—wooden shoulders—stretching horizontal, splintered limbs. A pelt of damp moss cloaked the bark, and between those green tufts peeked fungal scabs and the leaves of creeping vines.

In the forest’s stillness, someone watched.

I halted and held my breath. Crossing my arms, I clutched the portfolio to my chest like a shield.

An owl hooted. A squirrel scampered through dry leaves. The undergrowth crackled from some collision. A man’s lament seeped through the air echolike, as if rising from a cavern.

In every knot of the trees, faces etched themselves into the wood, but when I focused, they vanished. Through the foliage stirred by the breeze drifted a procession of shadows, encircling me.

I stepped closer to the ring of ashen grass, but an impulse repelled me—a silent thunder’s thrum, a force that might sweep me away. The man had fallen silent. I rose onto my toes, straining to glimpse who watched me, who had hidden when my sneakers crunched the underbrush. Behind the beeches, blurring the forest, the branches of their kin intertwined and overlapped above the green of leaves and moss, forming a bone-white latticework.

“Come out. It’s alright.”

A beetle scuttled through the leaf litter. The gaze of two invisible eyes lanced into me.

I raised my voice.

“I know you’re here.”

“Leave.”

It reverberated like an echo ricocheting through corridors before striking me. A voice unlike mine—clear and brittle—or my Father’s and Mother’s. I’d assumed I’d never hear another. But I straightened up. The man had ordered me gone.

“You’ve found my refuge. One of them.”

“Yours? Did you build it? Buy it?”

The voice seeped from the air two meters above the circle of withered grass, sheltered by the beeches. I sidestepped, hoping a new angle might reveal the speaker.

“I’ve come dozens of times. No one else ever occupied it.”

“And that makes it yours? As I said, leave, girl.”

“I meant to spend time here. My presence doesn’t mean you must go. Or hide. I won’t harm you.”

When the man snorted, an invisible bubble swelled from the dead grass, warping the sight of the beeches before sweeping through me. It stung my face and hands like lying in nettles. The distorted haze settled, but my skin prickled. I scrubbed my face with a sleeve.

“You won’t harm me,” the voice said. “How reassuring.”

I gnawed my cheek. When I opened my mouth, my lips smacked.

“What do you want?”

“Why would I want anything?”

“No one comes here. Three days ago, that black circle didn’t exist. You’re here for a reason.”

“I want you gone. To leave me in peace.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you here.”

“Tough luck. I came to draw. I’ll use the time I have left, even if you’ve decided to steal my spot.”

“Draw? What is there to draw?”

Scrambling to justify my sketches, I flipped open the portfolio and shuffled papers. What scenes might appease this stranger? Which would shame me?

The portfolio slid from my grip onto the grass, papers fanning out. I crouched, then brushed twigs and bark from the drawings. As I restacked them, I chose a scene I’d sketched here: the stream behind the beeches, no wider than a forearm, transformed into a river fit for ships. Along its banks gushed millwheels. A village crowded both shores. Spiral staircases scaled the beech trunks, now kilometers tall. Walkways and lookout posts sprouted from every branch, watchtowers mounted on their elbows. Silhouettes in armor scanned the horizon from their security posts.

In the foggy distance smudged in pencil loomed a creature spanning hundreds of meters, its face black, limbs thick as cannons. Iron spikes bristled like fur. Fire snorted from its nostrils. The composition hinted that even if the sentries sounded alarms, the monster would trample roofs and wooden walls.

I lifted the sketch and turned it toward the dead grass.

“I like how this one turned out.”

I held the page for seconds. Shifting my weight, I felt awkward, as if coerced to hold a heavy bag until its owner returned, and I’d waited half an hour. Though the man’s gaze probed my face, the angle likely hid the drawing’s details. I waved the sheet in an arc.

When the man murmured, his voice rumbled like a landslide.

I bowed my head, then slipped the drawing back into the portfolio. Why had I bothered showing it?

“You’d see it better if you showed yourself.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“You call this not hiding? Speaking from cover while you watch me?”

“I’m facing you.”

“I don’t see you.”

“Then look.”

Pressure swelled in my chest, the same warning that tightened each afternoon. I’d strayed too far from home for the minutes left before dusk. Even if I conjured another scene, I’d barely start sketching. If I lingered, Father would rage. Yet this floating voice had invaded my territory. Had he hidden inside a hollow trunk? Was the intruder peering from behind a beech?

When I stepped forward, a voice’s rumble halted me like a wall, scraping my skin with nettles.

“Keep your distance.”

I retreated.

“Why?”

“I’ll harm you.”

“What kind of person shows up in someone else’s forest and threatens whoever finds them?”

“This forest isn’t yours. But I’m not threatening you, girl. I’m stating a fact: come closer, and you’ll suffer. Whether I will it or not.”

The thicket had darkened, leaching greens to gray. I squeezed the portfolio to my side. I needed to sprint back as if I’d left a pan on the fire.

“Listen, I want to speak again. Will you be here tomorrow?”

“One place is as good as another.”

“But you insisted on staying here.”

“You claimed it was yours. Gave me reason to claim it too.”

I opened and shut my mouth. What could I reply to that?

Behind me, the path wound through undulating slopes dense with beeches. Their branches, draped in climbing vines like garlands, would arch overhead as I retreated.

The circle of parched grass blurred into gloom.

“Will I find you when I return?”

“You can count on it.”

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Seven Devils” by Florence + The Machine.

Honestly, I didn’t want to revisit this story, but I’m translating all of them, mainly for Elena’s sake.

Unless I hallucinated the whole thing, this tale allegedly caused the stroke of an elderly writing instructor that a year or so later died due to his health complications. That has to be an endorsement of some kind.

The Drowned City, Pt. 10 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

A barrage of light assaulted my eyes. I blinked like a newborn. The center of my vision filled with humming fluorescent lamps. I tilted my head. Behind a desk sat a man in his fifties, mustached and jowled, clad in a police uniform.

I lay sprawled on a metal bench, the armrest bruising into my cheekbone as a makeshift pillow. A scratchy blanket covered my nakedness.

The policeman stood, circled the desk, and bent over me. His lips carved syllables, words shattering against my face. He waited for speech, but my brain had severed its wires to my vocal cords. I clawed back the names of objects and sounds, slow as a toddler fitting blocks into holes.

The officer arched his brows, then teetered on his tiptoes.

“Were you born half-brained?” He cocked his head right. “Sure no one cracked his skull?”

“No visible injury,” said another voice. “Maybe an old trauma.”

“Or he’s a psych ward runner.”

I pushed aside the hair veiling one eye. My hand trembled. A young cop, chin wounded by two razor nicks, materialized at my left and offered a T-shirt and trousers—faded donations moth-rotted in storage. I clutched them like alien artifacts.

The young cop snapped his fingers before my glazed eyes.

“Know where you are?”

I unfolded the shirt. Its chest logo had frayed into orange shreds.

“Motomiyacho Police Station,” the junior said.

The mustached cop rolled his eyes. “He read the badges.”

“Hitachi. Ibaraki Prefecture. Understand?”

I studied his pupils, hairline, nose, uniform collar, the metallic badge. My eye muscles buckled and dropped my gaze.

They led me to a bathroom. Locked inside, I dressed at the pace my stiffened joints allowed. My ligaments ached as if stretched gumlike on a rack. I avoided the gaunt stranger in the mirror.

Five minutes later, the police officers marched me to the station doors. Midmorning light slanted through dust-streaked windows.

“Got somewhere to go?” said the mustached cop.

“I’ll figure it out.”

He shook his head, and snorted.

“So you can talk.”

As he walked off, the junior cop appraised me with resignation. From his wallet, he slipped a 5000-yen note into my shirt pocket.

“Take care.”

* * *

For months, I swallowed hypnotics to smother the reasoning part of my brain. Sounds and voices slowed down, and the links between events frayed. On nights when the pill case emptied, I writhed in sweat-soaked sheets for hours. Chiseled memories—the forest clearing, the lagoon, the illuminated ocean, the woman—besieged me. Her sentences swarmed around my ears like gnats. The ghost of her mottled pink-and-white skin grazed mine, and those parts of my body stung like a rash. I choked.

After hours of rolling on the mattress, in the tar-pit of my mind floated—like the afterimage of the sun—the woman’s face, frozen in the expression I had provoked by betraying her. Even as I stretched out my arms, she floated far away.

She was talking to me.

Why didn’t you follow me to the city?

I had wanted to.

Then why am I alone down here?

Because I am weak. I am nobody. I was born to endure the decades of my life as the hollow shell of what a person ought to be, and those I encounter, I infect with gray. You chose the wrong man. I never found the strength to obtain what I needed.

I sat up in bed and panted as if I’d fallen from a rooftop.

In the mornings, the echo lingered. That flute-like voice, the intermittent current of a brook, sounded in the distance. The flow carried words I had to fish out, and I longed to roam the streets until I recognized each syllable. In my apartment, on the street, in the workshop, the moment when I would hear the woman speaking from afar hovered on the verge of arrival. Whenever I strained my ears and scanned the surroundings for the crevice through which the voice poured, the current would cease, though in my mind the fading echo reverberated.

On the morning of the first anniversary of the day I met the woman, feverish surges overwhelmed me. My body screamed that a cancer was multiplying inside. Dizzy to the point of nausea, I knelt over the toilet bowl.

On the second anniversary, I anticipated the surges and stuffed myself with anxiolytics. They blocked my capacity to care about anything. I drifted in a void.

At the dawn of the third anniversary, clinging to the edge of my bed, I sensed the woman’s presence like a silhouette on the horizon. She called to me. While I dressed for work, chills raced down my spine. I planned to ignore them until they subsided, so I could plunge into the tar sea in which I dove every day. But I called the workshop and reported that I had awoken with a fever—something I had eaten.

Sitting in a train seat, I stared at my trembling knees. Every glance at the landscape sliding past the window tempted one of the plates of my mind to slip over another, and from the ensuing crack burst forth creatures belonging to savannas—creatures that would race through tall grass and scramble up trees. That forced to live in the world allotted to me, would perish. Yet I looked on.

The landscape evoked an absence. Some symphony that had once played without pause was now missing. Reality had lost its fundamental piece, and trembled like pillars on the verge of cracking and collapsing. The world—the obese beast that they upheld—gobbled and gobbled.

The image of toads perched atop the pillars at the entrance of a villa flickered. In the folds of the statues, grime had accumulated, and the paint had begun to flake off. Was I merely imagining those imperfections, or would I have discerned them years ago had I known how to truly look?

When I stepped off at Hitachi station, I followed the path while battling chills and dizziness. Dust-stained buildings unfolded before me, where decades of rain had darkened cascading streaks. Everywhere I looked, the colors had lost their vibrancy, merging into shades of gray. A man in his sixties, standing at the corner of a dwelling, surveyed the landscape as if he had lost his bearings. Passersby drifted like puppets and spoke as if following a script. Their organic masks confronted the vistas while in their minds they navigated through a gleaming technicolor scenery.

I arrived at the street where, on the opposite sidewalk, the passage to the woods would open. I straightened up on the familiar patch of pavement. To my right, three red-and-white vending machines were embedded in a concrete recess.

I lifted my head toward the opposite sidewalk and blinked until my vision cleared. Both buildings that had guarded the passage now appeared conjoined—the electronics store, with its facade of wooden planks, nestled against the rusted shed of the beige house. Not a single fissure betrayed that they had been built separately.

Three warehouse boys surged past me from both front and rear. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed one casting a look of bewilderment my way, then extending his gaze toward the wooden plank on which I was fixed, unblinking.

I inched up to the facade until the tips of my sneakers brushed against the walnut-hued wood, which reeked of mold, and I could discern its grain and cracks. I closed my eyes. In the dim half-light of my mind, the passageway unfurled into a grassy path winding its way among the pines, flanked by ferns and a sea of clovers. I held my breath. I listened to the chirping of birds, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the fruits crashing against the leaf litter. In the background, in the chasm between sound and silence, her voice emerged.

I shuddered and my vision blurred. I dragged my legs to the electronics store. I pushed the door, triggering a digital chime. Inside, the air smelled of metallic casings and plastic cables. I hobbled between shelves, amid outlets, lamps, bulbs, and electronic devices whose purpose was a mystery to me. I trod on linoleum grimy with footprints, yet with every step, my feet expected to flatten grass. I beheld smoked glass and cardboard boxes where I should have seen wine-red tree trunks and a serpentine path.

The scent of pine invaded my nostrils, and the earth warped under the weight of the lagoon. Beyond the backdrop of this electronics store, beyond this rotting gray world, somewhere lay that ocean of crystalline water illuminated by a different sun. The abyss of that ocean, beneath tons upon tons of water, harbored another architecture, other creatures.

She had never told me her name. Didn’t need to. Her face and blotched-white skin had plastered the walls of my mind. Instead of blood, her voice flowed through my veins. She had offered me the only chance, and I had ruined it.

The shopkeeper approached as if a vagabond had wandered into his shop. The years had contorted the man into a wrinkled, gaunt parody. His back was hunched, his hair had turned gray.

He scrutinized me from head to toe.

“May I help you?”

Before I could even craft a response, the nucleus in the depths of my being, kilometers beneath the navigating consciousness, revealed to me that no bridge could ever convey the images and sounds trapped within me, that no effort would succeed in making others understand what truly mattered.

I had nothing to say. Not to him, not to anyone.

THE END

Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los reinos de brea.

Today’s song is “Since K Got Over Me” by The Clientele.

With this, three of my six novellas written and self-published ten years ago have been translated. The two others so far are Smile and Trash in a Ditch. You can check them out here.