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I woke up lying on my back atop cracked earth. When I peeled myself off the ground, stiffness in my arms and legs seized my muscles. The sun breached the horizon, a bisected sphere blazing like an oven.

I staggered forward while pressing my temples and blinking to clear my vision. My skull throbbed. My limbs hung leaden, as if I’d dreamed of fleeing a killer. I felt swollen with tar sloshing inside me; one stumble and it’d surge from my mouth.

Where I’d dug and refilled the hole last night, an oval of disturbed earth stood out—a fresh grave in some makeshift cemetery. Any maintenance worker tending the oil pumps might spot it.

My Chevrolet Lumina, reeking of pestilence, sprawled under the dawn’s glare like a naked newborn in snowfall. I hobbled toward it, fighting my buckling legs.

Minutes later, I hurtled down the dirt road. My consciousness plunged and surfaced in feverish waves. Beasts kill to eat or survive; I carted this shattered child’s corpse like trash awaiting a dump.

Warm air rushed through the window, scouring my skin. The oxygen molecules seared me. I merged onto the highway toward the sprawl of single-story buildings, apartments, and office towers. I weaved between delivery trucks and commuters while flames licked and blackened my car’s frame, escaping through the windows.

I deserved lifelong torture, not a cell. An act to redeem the world for spawning something as toxic as me. Yet prison bars awaited; I knew it clearly now as the fact that one day my heart would stop. I doubted even other prisoners appreciated child-killers. Who would defend me? A lawyer that would stretch logic to wring jury sympathy? Embellish stories about my war trauma? Claim the shrapnel that had gotten embedded in my cheekbone and had slit open my cornea justified a reduced sentence?

Once they safely locked me behind bars, cops would comb the city for the basement that had held the boy I’d killed. They’d find his parents—grotesques fit for a Victorian freakshow: the man pig-eyed in an egg-shaped skull, coin-gray skin, jagged rotten teeth; the woman a sack of fat, greasy hair, squirrel-cheek jowls, a frayed shirt draping her striated blue belly. No—a magazine-perfect blonde couple, both smiling, the man in a pressed shirt and tie, the woman in a shimmering blouse and platinum earrings. Their pine-scented home hiding a trapdoor to a concrete cellar with wall rings and coiled iron chains. Years of filth, piss, and shit.

Cops would shove the couple into a media scrum, cameras aimed like firing squad rifles. Under pulsing red-blue lights, their panic-twisted faces would weep as officers crammed them into a cruiser. The cops would let that couple explain themselves, though I hoped someone would spit that chaining their deformed, cow-stupid child underground stole his future.

Would my former supervisor see the arrest news? Do people like her watch the news? Maybe over breakfast, she’d glance up at the boy’s reconstructed face, and her smile would collapse. Once her limbs obeyed again, she’d cross herself and change the channel.

I reached the single-story brick-and-glass police station. A mesquite tree clawed near the entrance, tar-black branches veined beige, half-obscuring the limp Texas and U.S. flags.

I parked in an empty side of the lot, away from the patrol cars. I exited the Lumina. Dizziness and weakness had drenched me in sweat; my heart hammered near cardiac rupture.

Two figures stood by the glass doors. An officer with her straw-colored hair in a ponytail—leathery face, ranger-lean frame—had placed a hand on an old man’s shoulder. The man held on to a dog leash attached to nothing.

“She came back alone twice before,” the officer said. “I doubt she’s stolen. Give it time, search the neighborhood. By the afternoon, if she’s still missing, call us and we’ll figure out what we can do.”

The old man trudged away, brow sunk.

After clearing my throat, I called after the officer, but she was reentering the station, and the door’s squealing hinges silenced me. She blurred behind reflective glass as I hurried after her.

Once inside, my footsteps echoed across the air-conditioned lobby’s tiles. The officer circled behind the rear desk, settled into a chair, exhaled sharply, and typed. Nearby, a hunched cleaning lady swept.

I dragged myself to the desk. The morning KRLD newscaster droned on an unseen radio. Some paces away, a glass door led deeper into the station. Uniforms milled in the hallway.

“Good morning,” I told the officer.

She frowned, then jerked her head toward the plastic benches bolted to a wall.

“Just a moment, please.”

I drummed the desk. Should I push? No, they’d uncover my crime soon enough, so I shuffled over there and slumped onto a bench. Its plastic groaned.

Her typing clacked like tap shoes as she squinted at the screen, crow’s feet fanning. Two brawny black officers passed—one buzzcut, the other with coffee-brown stubble—trailing deodorant. They greeted her and vanished down the hall.

The cleaning lady crouched, sweeping dust and wrappers. The officer summoned me. I stood up and approached the desk. She took a sip of her mug while eyeing me like I’d interrupted her in the bathroom.

I took a deep breath and regained my voice.

“I want to turn myself in.”

“Remove your glasses. This is a police station.”

It unnerved me as if she had demanded me to tear out my healthy eye. My hand trembled as I slid the sunglasses off, then hooked one of its temples into my collar. Her starched navy uniform, straw-colored hair, bronze skin, and metallic gaze sharpened. Her oval badge glared like a mirror, reflecting fluorescent light onto my face.

She studied my scarred cheekbone and dead eye.

“Fireworks mishap?”

“IED in a ditch, a mile and a half from Kirkuk. I’m surrendering.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m surrendering for a crime.”

Her mug clacked against the desk, then she rolled her chair back. Her stare judged me an overlooked bank robber or serial killer.

“What’d you do?”

Words jammed against my lips. I gripped the desk to steady myself.

“I hit a kid. Killed him. I was driving at night near an oil field in the outskirts when the kid darted out. My headlights caught him too late. Not a hit-and-run, I don’t think, ’cause I took the body. Hid it for a couple of days. I thought of dismembering him and scattering his pieces. Last night I tried burying him, but I realized my mistake, so this morning I’ve driven here.”

She bowed her head as if reading a desk-carved note, then she exhaled and stood up stiffly, hand on holster.

“Stay calm. You said you tried to bury the body. Where is it now?”

“In the trunk of my car.”

We marched outside. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the policewoman’s right hand fiddling with the flap of her holster, and with every step, I heard the clink of her handcuffs sliding. I led the woman to my car while squinting against the sun. The stench from the trunk clawed up my nose. I turned to the officer, whose expression had soured. Until now I might have passed for any lunatic who’d claimed to have run over a child, but the reek of corpse confirmed me as a madman parading said dead child in his car’s trunk.

I pulled out the key.

“You might want to cover your nose.”

She fixed me with a glare, as if she’d sniffed out a ploy to snatch her gun.

“Just open it.”

I turned the key in the lock and lifted the lid. The breath of some carrion monster escaped—rotted meat festering between its teeth. The officer recoiled, coughed sideways, and cursed. When she peered into the trunk, her face betrayed that the image inside would haunt her dreams, nights she’d spend thrashing in sweat-soaked sheets.

She slid the baton free from her belt. I stepped back, but the woman prodded the corpse with its tip, flipping it onto its side. Through the torn plastic peeked the child’s features: a misshapen nose, the cleft of a hare lip. Blotched greenish skin, glistening with grease, crawled with white maggots.

The officer spoke as if stifling a cough.

“Something’s wrong with this boy.”

“He’s rotting.”

“His face. The features. One of those… retarded kids.”

“One of them?”

The woman clamped a hand over her mouth, fighting nausea. She forced herself to meet my eyes, hers sharp with the urge to slam me face-first and kneel on my spine.

“Where’d you say you hit him?”

“I was driving at night through one of those roads near the oil fields. To clear my head. I was within the speed limit, but the kid dashed in front of the car even though he must’ve seen the headlights, heard the engine.”

“If it was an accident, why didn’t you call the police?”

“I’m an idiot. And human beings disgust me.”

The officer scanned me head-to-toe. She stole another glance into the trunk as if verifying my story.

“Some woman’s birthing these retards in a house of horrors. Family members getting freaky is my guess. They lock them in rooms or basements, but a few escaped. Maybe the parents got careless. Maybe they got tired of tossing scraps or dumping piss buckets, so they let the freaks loose knowing they’d end up roadkill for someone else to scrape off. Nobody taught them roads or cars. The last one wandered train tracks like a sidewalk. Doubt he understood the horn blaring as the engine plowed into him. No one claimed those kids, no one’ll claim this one. Bet they’re relieved to be rid of them.” She adjusted her collar and shook her head. “In this job, I see too much shit I’d rather forget.”

A chill surged through me, pooling in my gut. My words barely rose above a whisper.

“There were others.”

“What? Others? Yeah, at least three, yours included. Better you didn’t know. Folks stomach car crashes, robberies, drive-bys. This… this ruins your digestion.”

A grimace seized my face like a puppet’s.

The officer clicked her tongue and slammed the trunk. She jerked her chin toward the station.

“Follow me. We’ll fill out paperwork.”

She strode ahead to the glass doors. I obeyed but slowed my steps until, as she opened the door and slipped inside, I backpedaled. When the door shut, I was already circling the car at a sprint. I yanked the driver’s door open, folded myself into the seat, and twisted the ignition. The engine roared. As the front right wheel mounted then dropped off the curb, the rearview mirror framed the officer, gaping, frozen in place.

---

Author’s note: this novella was written in Spanish nearly ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Country Death Song” by Violent Femmes.

The next part will conclude this novella.

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I drove to the gardening store on the outskirts. A dozen cars and pickups, occupying a quarter of the parking spaces, had clustered to one side as if a lone parked car risked attracting a predator’s attack. I parked at the opposite end, bordering a barren stretch of land, to avoid the stench drawing curious onlookers.

How would the cashier see me? Did they activate some protocol when a man as jittery as me, hiding his eyes behind sunglasses, checked out with just a shovel? Would the cashier call the police?

I bought a sack of fertilizer, a shovel, a hoe, and a rake. As the cashier, a bald old man with bulging blue veins in his hands, scanned my items, he barely glanced up to mutter a greeting.

I hauled the bags out. While maneuvering between parked cars, I imagined my car smothered in a writhing mass of scurrying spiders and squirming worms, cascading down the bodywork and pooling on the asphalt like a gasoline spill. The darkness summoning its congregation for a black mass. But instead, a minivan had parked to the right of my car. By its open passenger door fumbled a heavyset man in a short-sleeved polo and khaki cargo shorts. Plenty of spaces were free, but he’d nestled close to my car for intimacy, for warmth. Natural as breathing.

I held my breath and opened my car’s rear door. I piled the fertilizer sack, shovel, hoe, and rake onto the seat.

A door slammed. Flip-flopped footsteps slapped toward me from behind.

“Your car reeks, buddy. Thought it’d been abandoned awhile, that the owner died inside.”

I stared, lips pursed. After five seconds, his friendly expression faltered. When I slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door, the man, as if recovering from a punch to the face, jerked awake and approached my half-open window. I started the engine; it sputtered.

“Buddy,” the man said, “I’m talking to you.”

I shifted into reverse, slammed the accelerator, and swung in a semicircle. As I roared out of the lot, backfiring, the man stood frozen in the lane, shouting in baffled outrage that someone had refused to engage when he wanted to talk.

Though I put a mile between myself and the oil field desert, I imagined the man pulling out his phone, reciting my license plate. Would the car’s stench and my behavior be enough for patrols to watch for my Chevrolet Lumina?

As I drove parallel to the spot—dozens of yards to the right—where I’d killed the boy, I white-knuckled the wheel, staring ahead unblinking. A mile later, I turned onto a bare dirt road edged with plastic strips, that split the oil field. My car brushed past shrubs with branches brittle as thorns. The oil pumps creaked and groaned in their antediluvian nodding.

I parked where the road opened to a miles-wide expanse of barren land on my right. I removed my sunglasses and squinted at the nuclear-dawn glow of orange and pink inflaming the horizon. Anyone passing would notice a grave being dug. I’d need to wait for night.

I stepped out to smoke, distancing myself from the fumes, though the rot had already lacquered my nostrils. I stepped over the plastic strip. As I dragged on my cigarette, I wandered into the parched land, toward sunset rays sliding along the horizon like foam on a wave’s crest. I avoided the elongated shadows of skeletal shrubs. Straw-like grass blades scratched my pant legs.

At an indistinct point, I sat, flicked the cigarette away, and fell backward. My spine settled into the cracked earth. I lay like some desert-crossed beast whose body had given out—except mine still functioned, though my will to go on had short-circuited or atrophied. It was pointless to even lift my head and witness the last lights sink behind the horizon. Like a balloon, I’d roll and snag on brittle branches at the first gust. Unanchored. All my life, I’d wandered this time and land as an intruder, exiled from a world I’d never reclaim.

Night thickened. A bluish light outlined the oil pumps. The sky’s dome glittered with constellations, planetarium-perfect. I had sat against an oil pump’s frame; with each nod, its creaks and wounded-animal moans vibrated through my bones.

I stood, stretched my legs, and marched to the trunk. I improvised a gas mask with my palm while unlocking the trunk with my free hand. Eyes shut, face turned, I lifted the lid. The greasy airburst hit me as if my skin had sprouted olfactory cells—a poison gas cloud, a bioweapon.

I swallowed bile and resisted fleeing. After pulling gloves from my work coat pockets, I plunged my arms into the trunk and groped the plastic-wrapped bundle’s underside for a grip. But the plastic slithered under liquid boils, suppurating blisters. I cradled the bundle. After tilting my head to gulp clean air, I heaved the corpse out. I crab-walked backward as the bundle dripped onto the dirt. Twenty paces away, I set the boy down and retreated. Returning to the car, I swept loose soil with my sneakers to mask the glistening splatter, like sprinkling sawdust on vomit.

I opened the rear door and grabbed the shovel. Ten paces from the corpse, I drove the shovel into the parched ground. The crusted earth disguised the hardness beneath.

Twenty minutes later, I climbed out of the four-foot hole. I stood panting. Sweat drenched my skin; my face steamed. My arms tingled forewarning tomorrow’s soreness. I planted the shovel and leaned on the handle to catch my breath.

A trick of light suggested the plastic-wrapped corpse was moving—the folds shifting, lumps sliding against the membrane like in a pregnant belly. I slid the shovel under the bundle, pried it inches off the ground, lugged it to the hole, and bent to drop it into the rectangular black pit. I shook the shovel until the plastic’s oozing phlegm sloughed off.

I was scooping dirt into the shovel when I paused. The oil pumps’ creaks returned, along with the distant storm-rush of traffic a couple miles off. Given my luck, I’d feared being followed—police, Héctor, the supervisor. Caught unprepared, squeezed for explanations. But the boy’s luck countered mine: born broken. That night, after fleeing a dungeon, he had crossed the dirt road I drove on, and tonight, only his killer would attend the funeral.

When I inhaled deeply, the stench seared my nostrils. I coughed.

“I’m burying you. I killed you. So I could say a few words.”

My voice scattered into the night, across the vast plain, like an intruder whispering in a burgled house at dawn, taunting its occupants to wake and attack.

“I’ve wondered why you ran. Whether you knew why. Where to. Those who kept you locked up, your family I guess, saw you as a monster to hide, to spare their stomachs. This world breeds people like you, who are born broken and suffer until death. The marks on your wrists—”

I froze. Quadrupedal steps probed the night toward me. I gripped the shovel like a halberd, legs braced. A cougar?

A long snout defined itself in the dark. The coyote stepped into the headlights’ cone, insects swarming like dirt on old film. It crouched. Its doglike eyes weighed me with fear and curiosity. When I stayed silent, it trotted to the oval of darkness, wrinkled its snout, and tilted its head as if to snag the bundle with its fangs.

I brandished the shovel, shouted. The coyote leaped back, eyes wild. Its gaping mouth was parched and ulcerated. It glanced at the hole.

“You kidding?” I said. “That hungry?”

I waved the shovel as I stepped forward. The coyote scurried toward my car. The headlights highlighted its mangy fur, scabby patches, curved gaps between its ribs. The animal melted into the night like a shark into depths.

I shoveled dirt. After hefting it, I tipped the load in a cascade down the mound.

“What was I saying? The marks on your wrists. Shackles. You were born, existed—for what? Suffered pointlessly, and the day they freed you or you escaped, someone sick of living hit you by accident. Now I’ll bury you so no one knows. I’ll spare people the memories you’d stir. For the rest of my life, I’ll remember where I buried you, and worry they’ll find you.”

A breeze rattled a shrub’s withered branches. I shoveled dirt into the black oval, sprinkling the plastic. I stabbed the shovel into the mound. My arms and legs weighed as if I’d climbed a mountain, energy and spirit drained for the descent.

“Some people drift through the waking hours half-dreaming, because the world tastes like a nightmare. Such chaos. No reasons to stay, nowhere to go. Our whole lives, we’re ruled by nature’s impulses, and we’ll disappear before fulfilling a fraction of our parasitic dreams. And for what? All this struggling, trying to find someone to love. Distractions on the road to the grave. Life’s unfair, and I’m making it worse.”

My sternum compressed as if punched. I gasped. My vision blurred. I leaned on the shovel.

“I’m making it worse.”

I stepped back. Teetered until my legs steadied.

The headlights’ glare split against my back; my giant shadow stretched like a tongue unrolled by the night. The oil pumps creaked and groaned. In the darkness, a lurking shape advanced toward me—until, at the last moment, the headlights would outline an outstretched, monstrous arm, fingers reaching to touch me.

---

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is “Pyramid Song” by Radiohead.

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I focused on the road until I had put three streets between me and the mall. I inserted the CD of Joy Division’s album Closer into the dashboard player, and as the drumbeats bounced and an industrial growl burst forth—the very breath of some mechanical beast—my bones softened and my back slid down the seat’s backrest. I drove aimlessly, obeying traffic lights and signs as if I were practicing musical scales for the thousandth time.

That workshop had pinned me. Now that I had freed myself of its weight, this luminous world against which I squinted opened up to infinity. It was much like how I had felt when I left previous jobs or was fired, when I realized I had seen my bosses’ and colleagues’ faces for the last time. Like a molting tarantula, my exoskeleton crumbled and a new form emerged. Yet I called self-destruction liberation. That quitting jobs felt like a heroin hit proved that I was doomed. My life would unfold in cycles; at the end of each, I would foreknow that some certain doom would befall me, and to elude it, I’d set my former life on fire then run. What future awaited someone who needed to spill his blood to sate the wild god within?

I pulled out the pack of cigarettes and was sliding one out, catching its filter between my teeth, when I pictured myself lighting it, only for the flame to ignite the gasses that filled the car. I pushed the cigarette back with the tip of my tongue.

I parked in a deserted lot, near an abandoned trailer slathered in graffiti. I got out to stretch my legs, to smoke. I wandered up the street while pedestrians hurrying to their destinations passed me by. I wish someone had invented teleportation. Dozens of these people would jump from point to point, and I’d get to stroll through deserted streets alone.

I passed by bars and restaurants, clothing stores and junk shops, until, like an old man, I needed to rest. Slumped on a bench, I watched the wisps of smoke rise from my cigarette and fade. I was drifting on a spacewalk, an astronaut whose tether had come loose. The doom that had pursued me since birth was coming. At last I would recognize its shape.

Now what? Would I flee to another city, look for another workshop that spat out enough money so I could pay the rent? Would I repeat another revolution of the cycle—a count I had refused to continue after the tenth? I shuddered, and my features contorted in disgust. I covered my face with my palm until I took a deep breath and relaxed my muscles.

A new job. New faces. Their stares would dissect me. My presence would unsettle them and silence their conversations like a fart no one would admit. And months later, when my anxiety had multiplied until it burst its container, I would get fired, or I’d quit. At the beginning of each cycle, I would show up at some boss’s office, whom I would have warned he’d interview a disfigured veteran. The boss would control his gaze to ignore my dead eye, my scars. “We understand your difficulties,” he’d say, “but we’re in business, not charity.” Why should they hire me? Because I need money to sustain this life that feels as if some poison were corroding my entrails. Pay me enough to keep me afloat even though I’d rather drown. I drive my own car, if you consider that a plus. But distance yourself least a mile away from my vehicle, please. Now that I think of it, I better submerge it in a lake. Forget that I even owned a car.

Almost a year ago I had enlisted at that workshop because, somehow, I convinced myself that this time, here, things would work out. As always, I had ended up dragging myself out from under the rubble. Why should I bother seeking what the world had to offer? Whatever resonated in others’ minds like a symphony of classical music would echo in mine like fingernails on a chalkboard. Whatever goodness remained in the world, I would squander it. And once I had wasted my energies—since all my efforts would fail—the misery of that experience would swell the heap. A day would come when the pain of bearing those memories would surpass the comfort of tobacco, movies, music… and that moment loomed near, like walls of reaching, monstrous arms as I wandered in a dark room. Why would I ever want to risk it? No one would desire around long-time someone as disagreeable, disfigured, and malicious as me, a person who would never change. Knowing myself, knowing my prospects, why should I remain chained to this medieval instrument of torture?

I raised my face on instinct. My gaze connected with that of a girl of about ten passing by the bench, fixated on my dead eye. Her face had paled before her rational thoughts could take hold. She tugged her older sister’s hand to hurry her along.

I watched them walk away until I lowered my head, resting my chin on my chest. A pressure tightened my throat. Out of the dozens of strangers roaming the streets, how many would be shocked by the sight of my dead eye? How many people’s spirits would I ruin each day simply by existing?

I wish I could just materialize deep in some forest miles and miles away from any human being. But I remained slumped on that bench under the Texas sun, unemployed, alone. A rowboat carrying a ton of lead. How had I convinced myself that I could rest? I had to toss my baggage overboard and disappear. I had just sacrificed my only source of income, and any passerby could report my car for the stench it exuded.

I stepped into a trinket shop where some mother would spend five dollars to keep her children quiet. The door chime had jangled a warning. Light streaming through the shop window warmed plastic. Behind the counter, a girl in her early twenties wearing a loose plaid shirt—with rolled-up sleeves that revealed scars from horizontal cuts on her forearms—swayed as if struggling to stay awake. When she saw me, she straightened up, and her eyes went wide in an effort to keep her lids from falling. I could hear her thoughts: What a wreck of a person has just walked in. I wish I could deny him service because of his looks.

I turned the squeaking sunglasses display by the counter. Judging by the scent the salesgirl exuded, she must have slept on a bed of marijuana leaves. I chose a pair of aviator sunglasses with bottle-green lenses, and put them on. Once the lens covered my good eye, it smoothed the edges of the colors, muting them like the tones in my apartment at dusk with the lights off. For a heartbeat, the world seemed soft, almost kind. These sunglasses concealed me; I spied through the glass of an interrogation room.

When I spoke, my voice croaked.

“Better that way, huh?”

The salesgirl nodded nervously. As I slid cash across the counter, one corner of her mouth curled upward in a parody of cordiality.

When I climbed into my Chevrolet Lumina, I knew I would bury the corpse. The attendant at some car wash might inquire about the stench of my vehicle, so I’d need either to strip it for parts or abandon it. Once both the corpse and the vehicle had vanished, I would have closed this cycle for good.

---

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

Today’s song is Joy Division’s “Atrocity Exhibition.”

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I followed the supervisor into her refrigerated office. She gestured at a chair for me to sit. When she hunched over and opened her laptop—wedged between the beige CRT monitor and keyboard—the fan turned toward me and blew on my face like the breath of an ice elemental. If this room belonged to someone else, instead of the woman who ordered me what to do and before whom I had to swallow half of my words, I would have gone upstairs during every break to cool off.

The supervisor settled into her executive chair and began typing on her laptop.

“Everything all right with Héctor, with those misunderstandings?”

That oily bastard had complained to the supervisor when I, instead of remaining silent, replied to one of his attacks. After I threatened him with a screwdriver, he would have more readily gone up to deliver an ultimatum to our boss. Did this woman pretend to be oblivious because she was going to fire me?

I avoided fidgeting in the chair.

“As usual. It’ll remain the same, but I’ll ignore him as much as I can.”

The supervisor, her back straight, was so absorbed in studying my dead eye and my bruised cheekbone that her lips had tightened.

I raised a hand to cover the right side of my face.

“Tomorrow I’ll come with sunglasses. I think I have a pair left. Or I’ll improvise a patch.”

“It must hurt.”

“When I get home, I’m going to press an ice pack against it. I’ve taken more punches.”

I chuckled awkwardly to ease the tension, even as I massaged my fingers and knuckles. The ruin of my eye dared her to call it beautiful, like a corpse grinning at a preacher’s empty platitudes.

“See, Alan, I wanted you to come up here for a specific matter. As you know, we need a coordinator. I’ve always looked to promote experienced operators, people who know how we work and who understand the peculiarities and problems of his co-workers.”

“You offering me the position?”

“Are you interested?”

I was left dumbfounded. Me, as coordinator? I felt like a confused dog expected to fetch a ball when its owner has only pretended to throw it.

The supervisor scooted closer to the desk, propped herself on her elbows, and rested her chin on her fists.

“The pay goes up a bit and you’ll have more responsibility. Besides, you’ll be able to boss around several dozen people.”

When I heard the word “responsibility,” I gripped the armrests. I wanted to swat that word from my mind as if it were a buzzing fly. She might as well have sought my consent so I could be strangled to near unconsciousness every workday, only to be strangled again.

“Have I given any sign that I’m good with people?” I said, on the verge of sounding outraged.

“You’re a smart guy. Just throw yourself into it, and before long it’ll come naturally.”

I restrained myself from clenching my jaw, careful not to let my gaze harden.

“To how many have you offered it, if I may ask?”

“You’re the first.”

“Will you offer it to others?”

“No.”

I looked around as if someone had written the answer on the walls. I turned my palms upward toward the ceiling.

“Why would you consider me?”

“You work with a lower error rate than most. The others slow down production by chatting about the weekend game or gossiping. You’re serious and consistent.”

“I’m serious because I don’t give a fuck about work. I come for the paycheck.”

The supervisor raised an eyebrow and tilted her face as if she were about to reprimand me. She twirled a pen between her fingers.

“You must be a strong person, having participated in horrible scenes—which I’d rather not even imagine—that still haunt you. You show self-knowledge and self-control that are lacking in personnel who rarely think twice before dozing off on the line. That makes you a good candidate. Only one person has shown interest in the position. Someone you know.”

“Héctor.”

“He tried bribing me with Starbucks. He’d love that responsibility… or the power. And I doubt he’d use it wisely. Positions of power are earned by those who understand the difficulties and the weight of those responsibilities.”

My breathing had thickened, and the nausea I’d kept at bay throughout the day was rising again like bubbles surfacing in a swamp. The supervisor wanted to drag me down into a basement and chain me up. I had assumed I worked in the workshop, on this dehumanizing assembly line, just to kill time until a better alternative occurred to me, but the woman was offering to condemn me to die within these walls like an insect in a jar.

“Find someone else.”

“You’re being wasted on that line.”

“I’m wasted anywhere. I don’t want that job.”

Her smile collapsed like a weight held up by worn-out arms. She shifted in her chair, swaying from side to side as the corners of her mouth tightened. She likely believed that her job was to persuade me, and that as long as she kept trying, she’d come up with a way. Was she running this workshop as if starring in a movie? Playing the role of coach for a ragtag team of misfits who, under her leadership, would win the championship.

Among the lines, we were organized into dozens of operators, most with problems worse than mine: deformities, accidents, mental delays. I was a disfigured man who had always been disgusted by life. And this woman had even arranged a birthday party for me. She kept watching over me from her high perch. Sometimes when I hurried down the hallway toward the bathroom, she would materialize to study me.

“What’s with all this attention?” I asked. “This fixation on me… do you do that with everyone?”

The supervisor tapped on the desk with a pen. She sighed.

“A few years ago, there was an operator here who came in drunk. He’d beat his hangovers by drinking even more. And you could see it on his face: the flushed cheeks; the bruised and swollen bags under his eyes; the ashen, sagging skin. I found out that something had happened to his family. If he needed to get drunk, fine. I understood. I tried to help him, to make his stay easier, and I forgave his mistakes as he drank and drank, but I discovered that the atypical number of defective parts our clients complained about was because this man deliberately assembled them wrong. I called him into my office, tried to coax a reason out of him before deciding, and he just laughed… heartily.”

She fell silent as if expecting me to react. I rubbed the left side of my face with my palm.

“Should I laugh too?” I asked wearily.

“Alan, those who suffer yet strive to do things well deserve support. Help. You keep fixing Héctor’s parts. Your co-worker Christopher told me.”

“And Caroline? Who helps her?”

The woman took a deep breath, then lowered her voice.

“Caroline is beyond my reach. Beyond anyone’s.”

“I’m not some project meant to make you feel better. The fact that you try to help me only chains me down.”

She looked at me as if I’d just confessed that I hated desserts, and now she considered me some other species. I was startled by the shrill sound of the horn that marked the end of the shift. Beyond the window, the assembly lines were darkening one by one. I got up instinctively, but the supervisor pointed to the chair.

“A few minutes, please.”

“The horn has sounded.”

The woman leaned on the edge of the desk as if to stand, inadvertently nudging her pen to the floor. She scarcely looked away before fixing her gaze on me, as if keeping me in her office depended on maintaining eye contact.

“You understand you’re in trouble. You came to us, to a sheltered job, because you couldn’t keep all the others. Because maybe here you’d fit in.”

I shook my head, then turned away from her. This woman would force me to rip my guts out through my mouth for her entertainment. I should open the door and leave.

Next to the door hung a dreamcatcher. A woolen thread had been wound around a hoop much like on a spool, and in the gap, someone had interwoven a figure meant to resemble a flower. To me, it resembled a spiderweb. From the hoop hung three feathers dyed in cerulean blue and indigo. Had the woman just bought it, or had I simply never noticed it? I only came up to the office because I was forced, and I focused on scrutinizing every word and facial expression of the supervisor to anticipate problems.

I turned back to the desk. In the corner of a side wall, bordering the window that offered a view of the beams holding up the roof, the woman had mounted a cork board. Among the notes and a calendar were photographs in which the supervisor posed alongside blurry faces who would never know this workshop. A triangular red-and-white pennant from the University of Texas at Austin stood out. On the back of the laptop, a sticker featuring the triangle and the embedded eye of the Illuminati reminded me of a security camera. The supervisor reinforced her smile by baring both rows of white teeth—not to convey courtesy or placate me, but to assure me that even though my presence unsettled her, she was growing impervious to my darkness.

I parted my lips with a click, and my voice came out as if I’d started smoking at the age of ten.

“I came to this workshop to break with the past, perhaps with the implicit hope that this time, against all my experience, it would be different. But I was blind, because nothing has changed. Wherever I go, I run into people and the rotten systems they build. Everything is barren.”

The supervisor dragged her palm down her forearm, head bowed. Her bangs had been severed in a razor-sharp line, a harsh horizontal slash that clashed with the curtained strands framing her jaw. It looked less like a style than a wound. An abrupt amputation. It twisted my stomach, mirroring the disgust I’d seen in strangers when their eyes snagged on my dead one: a violation of symmetry, a thing cut violently out of place.

“I went through such a phase, you know, in adolescence,” she said. “Spiked bracelets, gray or black t-shirts and skirts, heavy eyeshadow like camouflage paint. And when Cobain put a shotgun barrel in his mouth, I thought the world had died with him. But those are just phases. Anguish doesn’t abound in the world as much as the adolescent mind makes it out to be.” She hesitated and avoided my gaze. “Although they didn’t send me off with a rifle to a part of the world where death is trivialized, nor did they force me to kill. That must affect the mind in ways I’ll never understand.”

I took a deep breath to calm my pulse. Just like many other civilians living within the borders that armed men guarded, this woman regarded me as a poor idiot manipulated by a cruel, inhuman system to be sacrificed. But if we all deserted, these civilians, who considered violence a cancer to be excised, would face with blank eyes the horrors that would pounce on them, like someone standing on a beach while a tsunami approaches.

“Stop resorting to my wartime experience as if that were a simple explanation for you. I went to war, so that’s why I’m a miserable bastard, right? But I enlisted to die for a decent cause, only to find out it was indecent, and I survived. I was born with the ability to recognize the decay as if a corpse were decomposing right under my nose.”

The supervisor’s neck trembled, and she pretended to wipe away a booger. She spoke in a conciliatory tone one might use with a bear.

“We only live once, putting aside what you might think about reincarnation. One chooses to be happy or miserable. Why would I choose the latter?”

“Is that what you do? You choose to be happy?”

“I could force myself to worry about money that’s never enough, or about quarrels with subordinates, but what would it matter? With the little time we have—and it will be gone before we know it—we must strive to be happy and kind to others. Present a smile to everyone you cross paths with. It truly helps, you know? Frowns and scowls are contagious. Before long, we’d end up with a negative work environment.”

I wandered over to one of the shelves, crammed with accounting books. In the gaps there were miniature plush toys and a few sculptures. I picked up a hand-painted ceramic gondola, flipped it over, and returned it to its place.

I massaged the knots in my neck. Why should I bother arguing with this woman? No combination of words I could muster would make her understand. The supervisor would need to think through my brain. And her smile churned my stomach. How could someone put on a happy face at every problem? She reminded me of the citizens of communist states, who’d never dare to be the first one to stop clapping at their leader. Facing the darkness terrified her. Although she pretended otherwise, she wanted to detach herself. She saw me as a stain that persisted even after countless washings. It tormented her that someone like me existed in her surroundings, but she couldn’t yet justify her revulsion as enough to fire me. The supervisor would only accept those who lied to themselves, who pretended to be happy, who exiled from their minds any reality that unsettled them.

She was a child. A child intent on forcing others to live her fantasy.

I approached the desk and lifted the frame of the photograph that had its back to the visitors. The supervisor uttered a syllable and raised an arm as if to snatch the frame from me, but then she closed her mouth and let that arm rest on her lap. In the photograph, on the left was the woman herself—her hair tied at the nape and wearing a tank top—and on the right was her older sister, the owner of the SUV parked every afternoon outside the workshop. In the center, looming above the women, a man of about fifty wore a hiking hat and had a camera hanging from a strap. He encircled both women with his tanned arms. The three of them had been genetically endowed with smiles that spread along their gums, smiles they would never be ashamed to show.

After I put the frame back, I lowered my gaze to the supervisor, who waited unable to guess what I would say.

“You’re going to die.”

The woman recoiled. She had paled, and her pupils shrunk. Maybe she had dreaded previously that I, with my inner turmoil and avoidance of people, would become one of those freaks who stormed into their workplaces with a machine gun, and now I stood before her as if draped in a black robe and wielding a scythe.

“Excuse me?” she asked in a weak voice.

“You’re going to die, your sister is going to die, and your father—or whoever the man in that photo is—will die. Everyone you know and everyone you’ll never know will die. Anyone you have loved or love or are going to love will die, either that person or you first. In case you plan to perpetuate yourself by having your descendants remember you fondly: every one of those descendants will die. Soon no one will know you existed. If you plan to leave behind any monument to your existence that endures over time, someday this society, or this whole civilization, will collapse, and your work will be lost or burned. If you’re lucky and against all odds our species survives for thousands of years longer, in billions of years the sun will explode. The explosion will fry whatever life remains on Earth. All that ever-changing geography we believe to be immortal will eventually be swallowed up. And if humanity stops killing each other and manages to spread cancerlike among the stars, in the end the universe will cease to exist. The space between atoms will expand until no matter retains its form. In the remaining vast, icy blackness, perhaps some remnant will suggest that the stars once shone, like whatever lasts of a rocket months after it exploded and its smoke cleared. Can you even picture so far ahead? Look around. Do you really think this calm will last? The black tide will catch us. You’ll fear stepping out into the street. Fanatics will blow themselves up amidst crowds, trucks will plow into families enjoying the holidays, and the moronic masses will cry out, How could this happen when we used to smile so much, when we were so kind and supportive and went out of our way for the common good? We must not have sacrificed enough! How could we have known? But knowledge won’t save you: everything ends in pain. You smile because the chemistry of your brain is satisfied by the routine of work and how you distract yourself in your spare time. A stroke of luck for you. In my case, before I geared up to head out of the country to my death, my brain had barely cooperated, and nowadays it even alerts me to bursts of pain in the spots of my face and skull from where shrapnel was extracted. Stop demanding that I be like you. Living in delusion is a vice.”

The supervisor, leaning on the desk and hunched over, slid a trembling hand across her sweat-beaded forehead. She pressed one temple and raised her gaze toward me while a smile tugged at one corner of her mouth as if to emphasize some sarcasm. Then she controlled her voice.

“You’re the one who hides from everyone and every opportunity. You flee from reality.”

She turned in her armchair, offering me her profile, and the fan stirred tufts of hair across her face. She adjusted the neckline of her blouse as if embarrassed.

“Are you satisfied with this life,” I asked, “with being in charge of an insignificant workshop and loads of halfwits?”

She glared at me. Her eyes had glazed over, her cheeks flushed. Her lips trembled like a warrior lifting a heavy shield.

“A bit harsh, don’t you think?”

Her tone revealed that she detested me for having forced her into feeling that way. I waited as she took a deep breath. I would avoid impaling the heart of a person on her knees.

“Tomorrow we’ll talk calmly,” she said. “Think about what you’d prefer to do, and perhaps you’ll discover that you want the promotion.”

I had expected her to fire me. I paced while running a hand over my mouth and chin, until I stopped in front of the shelf with its miniature plush toys and travel mementos. The following day I was supposed to deliver my decision, but I wouldn’t come. I knew it as if a grate had given way under my feet. How could I return and endure another day here? My mind had already begun classifying the moments in this workshop as memories that would both shame and haunt me in the early hours while I tossed and turned in bed. Another segment of my life blurred into scenes I would rather forget. For me, the people associated here would continue working within these walls for the rest of their lives, as permanent as initials carved into the trunk of a tree.

I took in one last image of the supervisor—her, slumped in the armchair with her mouth frozen in a smile of incredulity, waiting for me to speak.

“I’m not coming tomorrow,” I said. “Not tomorrow, nor the day after. Never again.”

The supervisor let out a huff and shook her head, then hardened her voice as if to silence a toddler throwing a tantrum.

“Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Why would that be nonsense?”

“You only have this support.”

“So what?”

She gestured, the contours of her eyes crinkling.

“What will you live on? I know how you get along with people. Even those without your difficulties struggle to get a job in this economy. You’ll end up in the streets, where you could easily get robbed or killed.”

I picked up the ceramic gondola. Some anonymous hand had taken the trouble to paint every detail with a fine brush only for it to end up on a shelf in this office. The supervisor pointed at the gondola as if about to rise, circle the desk, and snatch it from me.

“Don’t break it,” she admonished me. “It’s a keepsake. I care about it.”

I placed the gondola back on the shelf, exactly at the angle the supervisor had set. I walked to the door, but before grasping the handle, I turned back. I took a deep breath as an itch burned in my chest.

“Belonging to the human race makes me feel as if I needed to wipe a layer of filth from my skin. Yet, I’m forced to deal with humans every day. I let them envelop me in their stench, the very stench that emanates from the body I’ve been forced to inhabit.” I spread my arms as if embracing everything around me. “We should never have built these realities, nor allowed ourselves to be locked into these mental traps whose walls narrow day by day, suffocating us. Every system has fallen, and will fall one after another no matter how many times they change disguises. Their collapses will crush thousands, millions of people. I hate to see, hear, feel, or acknowledge any of these things. Don’t you understand what I’m saying? We should have lived in communities of just a couple of hundred people whose faces we recognized, where we’d never have to fear at night that a stranger would break into our home. We built this world. Are we any better off in our minds, where it counts? And I must get involved? I want to do nothing, be nothing. Anything I commit to will fail and add to the pile of decay. I come to the workshop to waste the hours in vain, disconnected from everything to minimize collateral damage. And it doesn’t matter. Someday, soon, I will disappear, and no one will care. For many, that’ll be an improvement. One less bastard on the road. One less hideous face ruining their day, or evoking pity. So if I die of hunger or some bastard kills me, he’ll be correcting the worst mistake of my life: that I ever existed.”

The supervisor buried her face in her palms. Her back rose and fell with deep breaths. When I turned the door handle, she dragged the armchair backward.

“Listen, my mind has gone cloudy. Give yourself a break and tomorrow we’ll talk. You’ll see things more clearly then.”

“No one’s going to tell me what to do.”

I flung the door open, but before leaving I strode over to the dreamcatcher, yanked it from its nail—tearing a strand of wicker—and threw it into the trash. I left slamming the door behind me, then ran down the stairs and along the corridor until I emerged into the hot, piss-yellow light of the yard.

---

Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.

At times I still feel like I’m trapped in that refrigerated office, arguing with the supervisor.