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I held the machine part in my hands like it would shatter if dropped. My features had petrified; I blinked only when my one sensitive cornea dried out. The hum of the air conditioner hypnotized me as it battled to cool this box of a room beneath the sun-scorched roof. Droplets of sweat slid like snails down my back, my sides, my chest, while I inspected each part three times before passing it to Christopher.

I pressed the button to start the conveyor belt. Two seconds later I realized I’d forgotten to screw in the bolt clenched in my fist. A wave of rage hit me, sharp as the stench of burning plastic. I grabbed the piece, positioned it, and hunched over to twist the screwdriver. How had I convinced myself I’d completed this part? Why had my brain hidden the mistake? Exhaustion—the kind that comes from juggling multiple jobs at once: assembling machine parts, fixing others’ errors, tolerating coworkers stuck in fight-or-flight mode, locking my anxiety behind a mask of calm. I pretended nothing bothered me, but I was draining the energy I required to function. Soon, others would sense it—that sixth instinct for reading people—and realize that a festering abscess of dread was swelling inside me. Anxiety fissured my face. I’d need stories to explain those cracks, to pacify anyone who noticed.

Someone watched from above. Like daring to glance at a shadow that had cracked open my bedroom door at midnight, I stole a look toward the supervisor’s office window. It showed the lime-green shirt clinging to her frame, her hair loose, a vaccination scar stark on her bare shoulder. Her eyes stayed fixed on the computer screen.

The shift-end horn blared, drilling into my throbbing headache. I sank onto the stool and rubbed my temple. My mind felt liquefied, as if I’d just staggered out of a final exam.

I joined the purple river of workers flowing toward the lockers. The world had turned to glass; if anyone collided with a table edge in the chaos, both would shatter.

As I peeled off my work coat, Héctor slung an arm around Christopher’s shoulders and pulled him close. He held up his phone.

“Check this one out.”

Christopher nodded and scratched his chin. Héctor snorted. He then howled like a cartoon wolf, shaking Christopher until his head bobbed like a clapper.

“The kinda woman you have kids with,” Héctor said.

Christopher traced the arched scar on his scalp with a finger, as if tucking a strand behind his ear. My stomach turned to ice. The man began to stammer, his thoughts filtering through a drain clogged with rot.

“Doubt she’d want me. Besides, it’d ruin her figure.”

“She’d look fine after six kids.” Héctor tapped the screen. “Those hips? Fertile as hell.”

I stepped into the inferno of the parking lot. Dust choked the air as I dragged my feet toward my Chevrolet Lumina, its hood blazing under the sun. Someone slapped my shoulder. I swallowed a scowl. John—or Joseph—in a wrinkled shirt, gestured at the dent in my bumper.

“Someone did a number on you.”

“Found it like that this morning. Maybe a drunk kicked it.”

He shook his head, tongue clicking.

“Bastards slashed my bike last year. Never stick around after.”

He strode to his motorcycle, fastened his helmet, and within seconds shrank into the distance, swallowed by the engine’s snarling growl.

I slumped against my car door, waiting for the oven-like interior to cool. Héctor and Christopher, still glued to the phone, drifted toward the far fence, where Héctor had parked his car. The supervisor emerged waving goodbye, a folder under her arm. Her sister’s silhouette loomed in the SUV’s windshield.

Caroline wandered past the dispersing crowd—a time traveler stranded in the wrong era. Her sunflower-yellow dress tangled around her legs as she tiptoed toward the scrap container, moving with the tentative, wide-eyed stealth of a child sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to swipe cookies. She leaned over the edge and rummaged through broken parts.

By a smoke-gray Porsche stood the woman who picked Caroline up. Deep wrinkles suggested her forties, but her hair was silver-streaked save a few chestnut strands. She hugged herself, a trembling cigarette at her lips, coiled like a compressed spring. When Caroline pocketed a scrap, the woman shot her a look reserved for a dog with chronic diarrhea. Caroline, grinning, bent deeper into the container, her dress riding up her thighs. The woman flicked her cigarette, inhaled sharply, and barked Caroline’s name. She jerked upright and shuffled over, slippers scuffing asphalt.

I drove home through streets clogged with families, café terraces, parks where kids swung from wooden bridges. An antique shop flashed by: rows of tarnished silver, furniture styles extinct for decades. A bronze horse, no bigger than a G.I. Joe, galloped in my mind—hoof suspended, mane frozen mid-shake. Minutes later, a bag sat on my passenger seat. I had dodged the usual guilt over splurging, the fear that I had stolen from savings meant to save me when I next woke in a ditch.

I parked four strides from my apartment door. The bronze horse weighed down the bag in my grip. I circled the car, feigning interest in scratches while eyeing passersby: a twentysomething glued to his phone, a rotund woman hauling a bloated grocery sack.

The trunk key trembled in my hand as if I were descending into a haunted basement. Inside, a beast raged, waiting to claw my eyes out. I wrenched the key. The lid rose. The canvas bag lay there, stuffed like military gear.

My pulse hammered. Nausea tightened my throat. I slung the canvas bag over my shoulder, its weight yanking my collarbone. Closed the trunk.

On the stairs, footsteps echoed. I pressed against the wall, shielding the bag. Jeans and scuffed sneakers paused.

“Back from the gym?”

“Gotta stay fit.”

His laugh clipped the exchange. I hurried upstairs. All it took was to answer these intrusions with some trivial nonsense. People who actually liked human beings needed those signals—hollow small talk, rehearsed smiles—and those gestures turned you invisible. Even though I would have preferred to stay silent and vault upstairs two steps at a time.

Inside, I dumped the bags on the dining table. I stripped to my skin, then collapsed facedown on the couch, breathing dust that smelled of tinsel crushed under asses. My body vibrated like post-marathon.

I woke to rust-colored light bleeding through the balcony. Half-asleep I wandered, chugging from a plastic bottle, thumbing the warm bronze horse. I craved the night—headlights splitting oil-black roads, trucks’ phantasmal glows. But what would happen while I was gone? The landlord might storm in clutching some flimsy pretext—a leak to inspect, a vent to clean. Against all odds, a thief would ransack the apartment, find the corpse, and his conscience would claw him raw until he called the cops, even though that would fuck him over too. I was born smeared with that vile luck, a grease stain no detergent could scrub out.

I positioned the bronze horse beside the canvas bag, arranging it as if mid-gallop along the edge of an imaginary cliff. I slumped at one end of the dining table, opened my laptop, and launched VLC to play the last film I’d downloaded. Forty-five seconds of corporate logos flashed by—a gauntlet of animated studio emblems—before the film began: long shots of a car winding through pine-stitched roads, the background to a long list of credits.

Fiction used to distract me when I drowned in the molasses of monotony, but now I was just killing time. Behind the laptop screen, the swollen canvas bag darkened in the gloom. The horse clung to its bronzed hue as the apartment dissolved into blackness.

I closed the film. The browser loaded Google’s homepage, its search bar blinking a taunting vertical slash. An itch festered in my chest. Every passing minute pumped more diluted poison into my blood.

I typed “corpse decomposition process,” then hammered the backspace key. Police, FBI, NSA—they’d flag the search, log the query, trace the IP. What if I used a public library computer? I scrubbed my face. Brilliant plan: risk being the sunglasses-clad, mangled-faced freak googling how corpses rot.

I stood and snapped the laptop shut. The canvas bag, the horse, the table beneath them—all had grayed into ashen silhouettes. I gripped the bag’s zipper pull. Hesitated, no idea why.

I yanked the curtains shut, cranked the blinds down over every window. Scoured the ceiling corners. Crouched to inspect the undersides of two lampshades, hunting for hidden cameras.

Flicked on the hallway light. The zipper’s teeth split open. While pressing my lips tight, I slid my hands along the sides of the corpse sheathed in plastic. Hauled it out. It weighed like a dog. When I dropped it onto the table, the crumpled mass slid into folds and lumps.

Behind the fogged plastic blurred by condensation, I discerned the contours of the head, the half-closed eyes like those of a dead lamb. The yellowish-green skin had mottled with freckles, except for the bruises stretching from what seemed to be a shoulder down to the hip—areas where the body’s weight had pressed when I’d placed it in the freezer the night before.

I grew dizzy, like a child who had spun a dozen times in a chair. I doubled over, clutching the edge of the table. When I forced myself to look back at the body, I noticed that a band of skin on one wrist had peeled away from friction, exposing a wound that had never healed. A tight watch? No. Handcuffs? Shackles. Iron shackles that had gouged the wrists, with chains linked to a ring bolted into a wall.

I wandered the room as if in a trance. A stench seeped from the corpse, like a chunk of chicken forgotten for a week at the bottom of a trash bin. I needed it to vanish. If I shut my eyes tight, maybe when I reopened them, the plastic would have deflated into a shapeless heap. Should I drive aimlessly, fling the door open mid-road, and hurl the package into a ditch? No—I had to make identification harder, to sever any link to myself. Dismember it. Carve it apart and scatter the pieces.

I dragged my fingers through my scalp, hyperventilated to clear my mind. How had I ended up needing to decide a corpse’s fate? A growl slipped out. I turned toward the boy as though he’d disobeyed me.

“Why did you dart across the road in the middle of the night without checking for cars?”

The boy had chained me to his fate. As long as any recognizable part of the corpse existed, my life hung in the balance. I pulled the chef’s knife from the counter drawer and hefted it. Imagined slicing through an arm at the bicep. Would I need shears? I reached for them with my free hand but, revolted, hurled the knife into the sink, where it clanged against metal. Leaning my forearms on the counter, I realized I’d need workshop tools. A saw. Maybe I could find one in the job-site storage. Tomorrow, during a break, I’d slip away and look. No, no. Even if I brought back a saw, could I bring myself to dismember the body? And how would I dispose of every piece before the weekend?

I slumped against the counter’s edge and slid to the floor. Above me, the semi-transparent package lay on the table, veined with haze. Less than twenty-four hours ago, this boy had sprinted through the night, far from any house I might have glimpsed by day in those oilfield plains. Had he escaped confinement like a tiger that, finding its cage open, would leap and bolt into the thicket, driven by some genetic imperative for freedom?

How much mental disability had burdened this boy? Had he understood how others would see him? If he’d faced a mirror, would he have recognized himself, or would he have thought he stared at a monster?

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

That bit about a high-strung woman barking at Caroline to quit picking up trash and leave was inspired by an unfortunate moment I witnessed. Back when people could still smoke in bars and coffee shops, I was writing in the basement of a coffee shop I liked to frequent because the basement was usually deserted. Not that day: the sole other couple was a high-strung woman in perhaps her early thirties, who kept chain smoking while listening to a bespectacled younger woman who was clearly mentally challenged. The latter woman went to the bathroom. Once she returned and sat down, the nastiest stench of shit filled the basement, as if she had expelled the foulest diarrhea and hadn’t wiped her ass. This clearly mentally-challenged woman kept talking with a smile while the other woman, perhaps her relative, chain smoked even harder while tapping nervously on the floor with her foot. It felt meaningful, the kind of moment you can’t share in a world where the darknesses of interacting with severely disabled people tend to be swept under the rug. At least in Spain, the public message regarding disabled people is that of smiley, good-hearted, resilient folk who just happened to have been burdened with any of life’s myriad nonsenses, which of course they handle without significantly bothering anybody. But sometimes you’re burdened with someone who shits all over and doesn’t know how to clean after herself.

Sorry, Caroline, for turning you into a receptacle of troublesome qualities I witnessed in different disabled people. Even ten years later, I remember you fondly as a distant, mysterious spirit of unbridled innocence.

I’m also quite certain that if you leave a corpse in the trunk of a car in the scorching sun, in less than twenty-four hours, the plastic package would have been swarming with maggots. Just pretend that it wouldn’t, alright? We’re in the business of make-believe here.

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I drove toward the outskirts as the sun hid itself, painting the sky bubblegum pink and the horizon raspberry red. I sank into the night the way a frog might slowly cook in a simmering pot. I switched on the headlights. The amber pulses of the roadside reflectors split the road into parallel lines, while in the dusk the rectangular white signs floated. In the next lane, glowing orbs of light would appear and swell until the cars passed me with a whispery rush.

My left arm rested on the rolled-down window frame as I smoked, dragging on the cigarette again and again, flicking ash into the cooling wind. The vibrant guitar riffs followed one after the other sounding weary, the way they might at the end of a tour.

I took a shortcut skirting an oil field and used the strip of plastic—like police tape cordoning off restricted land—to guide me. The car’s wheels rolled over barren dirt.

Hidden, nestled in the night, there was no one around to bother me. To keep me company, I would have only the coyotes prowling around and other creatures that had been raised in the desert.

I parked on the shoulder of the track. The headlights shone on an oval of cracked, mummified dirt. They bathed some shrubs with branches like insect legs, and the shadows they cast arched over the fissures in the brown earth like bridges.

I unhooked a Modest Mouse CD from its case and slipped it into the player. When the first track started, I leaned back in my seat. Still except for my arm and lips, which moved together so I could inhale each drag, I listened to the guitar, bass, and drums. The dashboard clock and other indicators floated in the car’s darkness like bioluminescent fungi in a cavern. Out in the headlights’ cones, insects—tiny black dots—fluttered silently. Isaac Brock lisped about endless parking lots.

My neck, which had been stiff as bone the rest of the day, relaxed as if a pillow cradled the base of my skull. My back slid down the seat inch by inch. I bobbed my head in time with the melody, while filling my lungs with smoke.

Those dark expanses of desert convinced me that there wasn’t another soul for dozens of miles around. I confused the background noise of far-off traffic with some gust from a distant storm. Any occasional honk was just part of the night’s wildlife—herds of prehistoric beasts that, upon seeing me, would ignore me the way I would ignore an ant colony.

Here, alone, nothing could hurt me. No one could force on me tasks and principles that revolted me. My mind ran free, unbothered by prying looks or those compulsive conversations people insist on just to fill the silence—those efforts they make so that their fellow humans will confirm they exist. The complications that choked the rest of my time distracted me from why I needed to come to the desert in the first place. I lived to water this inner core I understood and valued, at the risk that the world might tear it apart the way an invading army burns the fields. Whenever I drove to work or back, maybe some of the pedestrians framed by my car windows had been born with a core, too, but had let it die. They’d suffocated it to tend what they were taught mattered.

Even in my apartment, these moments of solitude slipped away—my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps drummed the ceiling in the small hours, and in the apartment next door, a family argued and yelled in Spanish. The night in the desert gifted a hush that the society I was supposed to belong to had forgotten. Time and the world pressed on these moments like tons of water against a submersible, but while the night lasted, I escaped the toll life demanded. I was saved from the people who insisted I cater to them and speak, who believed I should be grateful for it. I was saved from their forcing me to celebrate what I rejected, from making me wear a smile—just one of the many ways humanity demanded I betray myself.

I listened to three Modest Mouse albums and one by Radiohead. They turned the darkness into a canvas on which melodies and lyrics painted a living picture. Those musicians had saved their virtues from oblivion, while their everyday lives—the ones everyone else gets entangled in—would be lost like a millennia-old civilization beneath the sands. The music rose like a red clover sprouting through dry, stony soil. Even between miles and miles of wasteland where real people were missing, some persistent individual had managed to create life.

I headed back. The silvery oval of the headlights traced out the cracks in the earth, inking them black.

Memories crept in: the people at the workshop, the responsibilities they had pinned on me, the conspiracies they’d drag me into. My supervisor had glanced at my file. Why? And all day, my coworkers—the strangers in the team they’d stuck me with—knew she’d eventually haul me into her office for that idiotic ritual. They kept me in the dark. If they hid one thing from me, they could ambush me on a hundred pretexts. When I let my guard down, they’d corner me, their eyes gleaming with a shared intent. The mere thought that at some point in recent days the supervisor had been thinking of me, evaluating me, horrified me—like coming home to find the lights on and someone roaming around inside.

My headlights washed a figure in silver. It had stepped into the road, crossing perpendicularly. It stood on two legs, its head barely rising above the hood of the car. Glimpsed in my vision, like the afterimage of staring at the sun, was a face drained of color and two eyes gazing at me in surprise.

My muscles clenched. I slammed the brake pedal, but the figure vanished beneath the horizon of the hood. With a thud, the chassis jolted. The car lurched once, twice, as though the right tires had rolled over a rock.

My back slammed against the seat. My left hand jerked the wheel. The car skidded diagonally off the path, snapped through the plastic strip marking the off-limits zone, and plunged several yards into the oil field. I yanked the handbrake.

The headlights shone through a dust cloud swirling with insects, as though I had kicked over a hive. The engine rattled with clanking metal that sounded like a loose part.

My hands were locked, gripping the wheel and the handbrake, knuckles going white. I was panting. The impact’s echo reverberated in my skull like a tolling bell, and then it faded.

Heat radiated through my body. I pried my hands off the wheel and the brake.

Some bit of fabric was burning. Two inches from my knee, I felt a spot on my thigh heat up. I slapped my pants and sent the lit cigarette flying, a streak of smoke floating in the glow of the dashboard for a moment. A tremor inside my skull muddled my thoughts. I rubbed at the hole in the pants and the stinging skin beneath. I swept my foot around the mat under the pedals, just in case the cigarette was still lit and, in a few minutes, might force me to deal with a car engulfed in flames.

I shoved the door open and staggered out. It felt like escaping the wreckage of a Humvee in a blackness so absolute it suggested I’d gone blind. Keeping one hand on the hot hood, I circled toward the bumper while touching the right side of my face with my free hand—the ridges of the scars on that cheek and near the corner of my eye. A thin membrane of skin covered the bone and the knotted tissue. Nothing had exploded peppering the car with shrapnel, but the smell in my nose stung like melting metal or explosives.

I cut across the left headlight’s cone. I crouched near the bumper, but the glare hid the spot right in front of me, so I twisted around to fish my phone out of a pocket. It lit up with the manufacturer’s logo animation. Once the icons showed, I rummaged through the menu for the flashlight, but the phone vibrated and spat out a distorted chirp that grated on my nerves like a whistle shrieking inches from my ear. The screen alerted me to four missed calls.

I switched on the flashlight app. The now-bright screen took a slice out of the night. The center of the bumper was caved in with a head-sized dent, shiny with blood. Thick drops dangled there like strands of phlegm, tapering off toward the parched ground.

I straightened and felt dizzy. The phone’s white glare lit the windshield, revealing the seats as though I’d just peeked into a house window at night. I staggered backward while pressing one palm over my mouth.

When my head cleared, I searched the ground along the side of the car toward the trunk. I followed the skid marks in the dirt, tracing the tire tread pattern until I reached a place where the tracks on the right side were speckled with blood, like splatters on ceramic. I moved on until the light fell upon a body sprawled there, barely three and a half feet tall. Was I looking at a coyote’s back?

I approached the way I would enter a house I was breaking into. I made out the back of a shirt, filthy with stains and caked mud. A stench of urine and dried feces slapped me in the face, so I pressed the back of a finger beneath my nose. The legs were tangled, making it impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. He wore pajama pants. Fine, wispy hair—like a baby’s—covered his head, and a few inches above the nape, a gaping wound had opened, matting what hair he had. Beneath the head, a dark red pool of blood had spread. Floating in it, like bits of food in vomit, were gray, wrinkled matter and curved fragments of bone.

My arms went limp at my sides. In the phone’s shaky beam, I saw the trail in the dirt behind him, where the tire tracks vanished into darkness. I rubbed my eyelids. My legs barely held me. Surely I’d made some mistake, and if I stood still, holding my breath, I would open my eyes to find myself back in the car, still driving toward the main road.

The distant traffic noise could easily pass for a windstorm. Silence was broken now and then by snapping sounds, like the crack of a twig in the brush.

I shook my head. I stepped over the child in a single stride and crouched to shine the light on him. His arms—pinned under his torso or splayed across it—were twisted and bent as if they had no bones left. A tire had left its tread across his shirt, right over his heart.

When I finally dared shine the light on his face, for a moment I saw an animal in clothes. Then I blinked. An albino face. A cleft lip forced the nose upward, breaking one nostril and twisting the bridge, like someone had hacked it with an axe. From the reddened gums, teeth jutted in different directions like kernels of corn. The eyes, half-closed and slanted, hinted at some mental disability, and his ears—large and sticking out—spread like satellite dishes.

I moved backward until the gloom blurred his features. If I took three or four steps more, the night would swallow the corpse as if it had never existed.

My head spun, my whole body hit by a feverish chill. A child. I had run over someone’s child.

When I lowered my gaze and held my breath, the background noise swelled as if someone had turned up its volume. The traffic, hundreds of yards to my right. I braced for the sound of an adult running this way, calling a name over and over. Footsteps, then some figure bursting out of the dark to find me standing a few yards from their child’s body. No matter if the child had dashed in front of my car when he must have seen the headlights, this person would only understand that I had killed him. Around here, they’d probably be armed if they came out at night.

I aimed the phone downward and covered the light with my palm. A thread of white glow leaked between my fingers. I waited two or three minutes. When a distant horn blasted across the plain, I pictured a man perched on a tower blowing a horn.

I wandered around. The dried-out earth crumbled under my soles. To my right lay a wide desert cut by a highway. To my left, whose depths I couldn’t gauge, oil pumps dotted the landscape. They would be creaking in rhythm as they siphoned.

While pressing my temples, I shook my head. I glanced back at the blackness hiding the body, and felt like scolding the child for having run blindly into the road.

“Where were you going? Did you even know where you’d end up?”

Bent over with my hands on my thighs, I thought: What should I do?

Of course I’d call the police. With a trembling hand, I exited the flashlight app and punched in 911, but my thumb froze over the call button.

Besides wanting to keep silent, how could I explain myself to the cops? The dispatcher would pry out every detail. I’d wait for a patrol car that might get lost for a few minutes before it arrived, headlights picking out my silhouette maybe fifteen feet away. Two officers would step out, a hand resting on their holsters, ready for any excuse to shoot. They’d blind me with their flashlights and zero in on my scars, on my dead eye. They’d ask why I’d driven down this road in the middle of the night—what was I up to, dealing drugs? Hiring prostitutes? They wouldn’t buy that I only came out here for solitude; they’d call it suspicious. I’d end up in the back of the cruiser on the way to the station, passing through rows of desks under fluorescent lights. My mind would recede into static. I’d be put against the height chart, and the bored officer running the camera would tell me: Look forward. Flash. Look right. Flash. From then on, anyone who Googled my name—any prospective employer—would discover I’d killed a child. A disabled child. Even the workshops would refuse to hire me. The radio stations, the TV news, everyone would know. I’d live in a glass cell riddled with eyes. A disturbed veteran who’d failed to rejoin normal life, like some feral child found years later and unable to speak. Someone who would grunt, eat out of a bowl on the floor, run around naked.

I paced, rubbing my face, tugging on a beard that wasn’t there. About thirty feet away, the car’s silvery headlights formed an oasis in the dark, and as I walked in circles, the car’s body either concealed or revealed the beam.

How could I leave the child behind? Whoever found him would see he’d been struck. If I brushed dirt over the tire marks, that alone would look suspicious—someone obviously tried to erase something. I’d have to hide any sign that suggested I hit the child and then covered it up.

I turned the phone’s flashlight back on and rushed toward the car as though I was running out of time. I opened the driver’s door, knelt on the seat, and stretched my right arm into the passenger seat, where I’d left my Coke and the food wrappers. Gone. I groped the floor mat under the dash, among cigarette ash, butts, and old wrappers. The plastic cup had spilled, but the lid was still on. I picked it up. It felt like there was about a quarter left inside.

Contorting as I got out, I set the phone and the cup on the hood. I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off. Shirt in one hand, cup and phone in the other, I walked around to the front of the car and dropped to my knees at the dent in the bumper. I popped the plastic lid off with a snap, soaked the cuff of my shirt’s sleeve in the Coke, and under the phone’s beam, scrubbed the concave metal until every last crease shone spotless of blood.

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

Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset.”

I have zero memory of having written this scene. Zero. That disturbs me. I don’t know if to produce the details contained, plenty of which impressed me (I can say that because it feels like someone else wrote them), I just used my imagination or instead references. I’m not sure if these days I would be able to write similar details. Where did you go, me from ten years ago?