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I disembarked at Hitachi Station and retraced the pilgrimage. In yards fenced by cement walls or concrete blocks, whenever branches and leaves spoiled the silhouettes of trees, invisible humans would prune them into cones, into tiered clouds. On facades, years of rain had streaked grime into darkened veins. The distant murmur of traffic mingled with waves crashing against shore rocks. In a parking lot, dozens of workers’ cars crammed together, their owners pouring money into insurance and gasoline to maintain vehicles bought for commuting. Telephone and power lines etched straight and curved seams against the overcast sky, converging into a tangled loom at the street’s end. Each rusted shutter and iron gate bore rectangles of faded brightness where posters had been peeled away. Landscapes of a distant country I was visiting for the last time.

Goodbye to those strolling, returning from work, emerging from school in uniforms. Actors in a mediocre play repeating generation after generation. The residents had toiled lifetimes to end up owning one of these narrow two-story homes. As I walked the sidewalk, I glimpsed a man’s silhouette passing behind wooden planks fencing his garden patch, stepping one foot after another between his house’s facade and a row of potted plants. Any citizen accepted society’s humiliations—the acid of anxiety corroding their chest, bowing in reverence to those wielding power—only to grow old among gray walls. They pushed carts full of bills into a carnival prize machine, which spat back keychains.

What could I want from this charade? What did they want? They desired promotions to command underlings. They hoarded junk. Craving immortality, they birthed heirs, hoping to snare eyes on their fleeting lives. Instead, they wrenched fresh players onto a packed stage for a ceaseless drama of misery. We had sprouted by accident, our constructs scarcely holding. More disasters and wars loomed. But the faces passing by ignored it, or hid it. They clung to living by accident, just as life tasted of rot to me by accident.

Why waste my existence pretending, only to crumble into dust? Let them keep their costumes, their roles to obey, their ingrained lies propping up societies as if built on crystal toothpicks. Some accident would slice me down, or sickness gnaw me. If I outlived statistics, I’d earn care from someone who’d prefer me dead—feeding me, bathing me, wiping my ass. Let them rot in their charade. I had the forest and my woman. I’d rot as I pleased.

I paused under the metal awning of the passageway and turned, suspecting the world had melted to black. If only the inevitable future would crash today. Beyond the opposite sidewalk’s walls, beyond the warehouse and the cement facade with its vending machines, beyond office towers and malls, dawns would flare. Thick columns of black smoke would swell until luminous mushrooms erupted. Shockwaves would surge, disintegrating buildings into breaker tides of cement, brick, metal, and glass pulverized back to stardust. As fire-clouds bloomed on the horizon like blazing brains, dust tsunamis would roar toward the warehouse across the street—but I’d have retreated into the forest like a turtle tucking into its shell. Even if bombs burned this world to ash, the shockwaves would skid over the cloudy vault above the clearing. When the last ash settled, this world where we’d wasted energy, tears, arguments, and brawls would fade to gray waste. No intelligent species visiting these ruins, nor successors emerging from ash in eons, would grasp who we were.

How many days did I weave in the clearing as if the outer world had gone dark? From dawn to dusk, a granite sky peered through the canopy. Night blackened to tar in minutes. I forgot which weekday dawned. I wanted to forget such concepts existed.

The woman had plunged into the lagoon to dive, and I sat on the pebbled shore when hunger twisted my guts. Outside this forest, I’d eaten by rote—breakfast, lunch, dinner—but now an evolutionary alarm installed eons ago in some aquatic ancestor shook me: eat or be consumed. I touched my sunken belly, once padded by fat folds. I had to leave.

I waited for the woman to surface, but fifteen minutes passed without any ripple stirring the green scum and mud. She submerged as casually as retreating to the bathroom. When she returned, soaked and dripping cold water, she curled against me as I peeled lichen patches from her skin.

I left the clearing in darkness, fingers grazing the promised pines, their bark’s roughness a brand that I knew. Distant streetlights invaded through the passageway’s rectangle. Civilization neared. I crept, stifling breath. Emerging onto the deserted street, I blinked at the glare. I hurried past a lamppost’s island of light to the opposite sidewalk’s vending machines, watchful of every shifting silhouette like a thief stealing food from sleepers’ homes.

Next time hunger speared me, I was kissing the woman, her legs entwined with mine. Hours of mounting dizziness spiked. I rolled onto my back, gasping. She nestled on my chest and stared as if waiting for me to dress my impressions in words. If I left this forest, I’d skulk amidst cement, metal, and glass—a raccoon tipping trash bins before darting back to the trees. Against such nakedness, what did this ache for food matter?

Memories of the outside resembled yellowed photos of another country, another era. Half the album’s pages were lost; luckily, I had forgotten what they used to contain.

Minutes after twilight yielded to a granite dawn and birdsong, hunger cramps woke me. My guts clung like an old balloon. I sat up, hugged my knees. I felt faint. My body was imploding, a growing vacuum in my guts sucking the organs.

I glanced over my shoulder at the clearing’s exit. The path curved between pine pillars; in the distance, trunks and foliage narrowed the path, dissolving it in a green phosphorescence. I had to dress, go down the trail through the trees, and hurry to the vending machine hunched and disheveled like a fugitive.

Sheltering here had stripped society’s makeup. Due to the lack of contrast, I had tolerated its piercing thorns and scorching fire. How could I dare to go outside? I refused to breathe that air even if my starved stomach devoured its own lining and spilled the acid into my core.

The woman looped her arms around my neck, forehead against my cheek.

“You need to eat.”

“I can last.”

“How long?”

“Until hunger stops my thoughts.”

“You don’t need to endure, dummy.”

Her face suggested ignorance of pain. I meant to say her name, but struck a void. I had her face, her eyes, the certainty that she knew whom I addressed.

“I don’t want to leave.”

“I didn’t say you should.”

“I could hunt squirrels, birds. Some cultures eat spiders.”

“Feed from me.”

Her lips curved upward, as usually since I’d moved here. Would I recognize when she joked around?

“That’s… generous of you.”

The woman leaned back in the grass, tilting sideways. She clenched her side at kidney level and yanked until she tore out a handful of white flesh. In the gash, grooves scarred where her fingers had ripped the fibers. Blood pooled.

I froze.

She offered the chunk. Her parted teeth glistened wet. Numb, I let her fold my limp fingers around the meat, that resembled a block of ham. She arched expectant brows.

Saliva drowned my tongue. I yearned to savor that flesh as much as I longed to hold the woman against me, joining our warmth like two coals in a bonfire. I brought the piece to my mouth. I could tell apart the white threads of fiber in the meat. Its surface had grown slick with juice from the pressure of my fingers gripping the chunk.

I pressed my lips to the soft flesh and grazed it with my teeth. Saliva spilled from the corners of my mouth, trickling down my chin. I clenched my jaw millimeter by millimeter, the fibers taut against the tip of my tongue, but when my teeth split the meat, a shudder ripped through me. Before I could refuse to feast on the woman, a hot, sap-like juice flooded my mouth. I tore off a morsel and swallowed. It left an aftertaste of turkey. I devoured the rest, then I licked the juice off my fingers.

When I looked up, shame flooded me like someone caught chewing open-mouthed. The gash in the woman’s side dripped blood down her hip, spattering the grass and pooling on the dirt. I covered the hole with one hand, but warm blood seeped between my fingers like soup.

The woman stroked my cheek.

“It’ll grow back.”

I tried to laugh, but a whimper escaped.

“I can’t live off eating you.”

“Do you eat so much you’ll swallow me whole?”

“Plus, I’d need to buy water bottles from the machine.”

The woman twisted in my arms until she lay on her back. She cupped one breast, and squeezed the nipple between thumb and forefinger. Thick milk oozed like honey.

If turning or shifting my posture made me face the clearing’s exit, I jerked my gaze away until the path blurred at the edge of my vision. A monstrous hunter stalked that pine-guarded trail, and if I wandered its bends and hollows, the creature would ambush me, tear my limbs from my torso, slurp the marrow off my splintered bones. How had I entered and left this clearing without realizing it? Like exploring an abandoned asylum on a starless night.

Beyond this forest, the machinery of society would grind on, its gears, lubricated with the sweat of nine-to-five drones, screeching as they pulverized bones caught in their teeth. Whenever these images and memories assailed me, patches of my brain crackled with electricity. I wanted to pinpoint those patches and scour them with bleach until they whitened.

I lost track of time. My beard scratched the woman’s skin like a rake. I pushed greasy strands from my eyes. My breath reeked like a cat’s. When the woman dozed, or dove underwater, I’d slink into the trees to squat over a hole. I scrubbed my teeth with leaves that smelled fresh, but the stench of my breath lingered, as if rot had wedged between my molars. I avoided breathing near her face. When I kissed her, she never flinched.

I dreamed my teeth crumbled. Awake, I sank them into the woman’s juicy flesh, but feared that a tooth might splinter, exposing the nerves.

My sweat dried to a film that fresh sweat soaked anew. I stank like a mange-riddled stray sleeping in a landfill. I envied the woman diving into frigid, muck-thick waters. I washed in the lagoon as if at a sink, but each handful of water teemed with algae, sludge, and wriggling microbes. I scrubbed my skin while suspecting that my pores filtered civilizations of bacteria. Even after washing myself, the stench of decay seared my nostrils—a reek that clung to me like leeches, that the woman maybe smelled all the time as if I sprayed it into her face.

Lying beside me, her chest rose and fell. Beneath her lids, her eyes darted. I’d spend my life watching her, but a bolt of pain struck. I dragged the anchor of years wasted in a world sliding into ruin. I wanted to believe we’d lie together forever, but I deceived myself by pretending that the rules spared this clearing. Like how on my first visits I’d known when to go home, another border neared. A matter of when. Knowing this rotted me like poison, and pain drowned my eyes. How would I exist elsewhere, without the woman? If I ever had the chance and it found me strong enough, I’d prune my past and every foray outside, so all I’d ever know included her.

I was kissing the inside of her thigh when my stench dizzyied me. I lifted my head, ashamed. Her eyes peered between the curves of her breasts—whether agreeing or staring because I’d stared, I didn’t know.

I rested my temple against her thigh.

“I wish I didn’t stink.”

“You could always bathe.”

“In stagnant water? I’d turn into a Petri dish of disease.”

“Am I one?”

“No filth sticks to you. Not even my stench. But if I plunged in that water for a second, I’d emerge a lichen-caked sludge-man, and never could I scrub off the grime.”

---

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

Today’s song is “First Breath After Coma” by Explosions in the Sky.

Isolating, self-sustaining, all-consuming.

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I awoke in the dark room of my closed eyes. Birds chirped and trilled from every direction, as if perched on an invisible dome. My back pressed flat against the bed of grass, and a cool breeze brushed the soles of my feet. Against me lay another warm body, its chest rising and falling against mine, its breath heating my neck. I allowed myself to marvel at this for a few seconds before prickling with the reminder that I needed to find a job or I wouldn’t have enough to cover the rent.

The fingers resting on my shoulder curled, digging between the bony ridges. I opened my eyes and tilted my head as the woman lifted hers. Her pale-blue eyes met mine as if instead of sleeping, she had merely stretched a blink.

What could I possibly want from life except to wake to the gaze of this woman looking back? I needed to comb every strand of her honey-blonde hair with my fingers, glide my fingertips over the taut skin of her abdomen, feel her breasts yield and mold to my palms, bury my face in her neck or armpits and inhale the scent of a lagoon. Every passing minute brought me closer to the moment when I’d need to hold her in my arms, like a dolphin must surface or drown.

But I forced myself to sit up. The flattened grass sprang back and tickled my lower back. The woman wrapped a hand around my nape.

“Stay.”

“I wish I could.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Rather? Nothing. But I need to find a job.”

“Do you love it that much?”

Was she being sarcastic? Did she really not understand?

“Yes, I adore having a job steal my time, my thoughts, my energy, all so my bosses can sell someone else a product they’d survive without. It chokes me, playing a role I must uphold every moment, lest the master holding my leash drop me at the pound.”

“Then why do it?”

I tucked a strand of honey-blonde hair behind her ear and traced the outline of the white blotch on her cheekbone.

“Maybe you don’t understand money, but out there you need it to exist. Plus, people find it natural to be handed a purpose. It saves them from thinking. Here, when you want to, you dive, talk to trees, lie in the grass. No one’s forced a society on you, and that’s one of the things I find most mesmerizing about you. You’re free from the worst humans have invented. But I belong to that outside world. To secure a good life, I’d need either stratospheric talent or the ability to ruthlessly manipulate others into handing over cash. I lack both. I must obey someone who’ll slip money into my bank account each month. And I’m glad you’re making that face. Glad you don’t get it.”

Leaving this forest felt like tearing metal from an industrial magnet. On the train back to my apartment, I yearned to jump off at the next stop and board one returning to Hitachi. Entering my apartment, sometimes after days away, felt like stepping into a summer home. I wandered the rooms suspecting the furniture had been rearranged, that someone had claimed the place and would brand me an intruder.

I compiled job listings from the internet. I sent my résumé even to postings that would reject me unless I lied during the interview. Each application meant leaping the same hurdle: I needed the money but loathed the routine it would condemn me to. Nerves. Cramps. Terror daily at finishing tasks on time, unsure if I could. I’d dread the next pit I’d stumble into, and to prepare myself, fueled by hair-pulling stress and coffee, I’d sacrifice some of my spare hours to research. The rest of my time would be reserved for rest, ensuring I was alert for incoming workloads. I would dream I was working, and after waking up at six, I’d drag myself to the job. I’d choke my thoughts and reactions to avoid appearing dispensable to the boss. Whenever an office drone included me in small talk, I’d spit out scripted lines, betraying my silence, and wonder if they saw through me. When I entered common areas, conversations would die. One day, a colleague I’d never spoken to might blurt their opinion of me. Corner plant. Zombie. Daily, my genetic intuition, the kind even citizens of a totalitarian regime feel, would needle me: We exist for a better fate.

So many hours and dignity sacrificed to keep a roof over my head and food in my stomach. But what alternative was there? Live under the sky, eat rocks? Each passing minute edged me closer to needing another meal or drink—the unending struggle to exist that organic life had committed to, a struggle I’d signed up for through the unconscious decision to be born. A hollow existence stripped of color, that kept me busy to prevent me from questioning whether it was worth living.

At night, lying in my apartment bed, my mind churned. The woman’s absence ached like an amputated limb, but closing my eyes summoned her burning presence beside me. Though I needed sleep to stay focused on job hunting, she commandeered every checkpoint in my mind, deciding which thoughts passed and which jammed. Dozens of her details cycled, each flooding my veins like heroin. Her face, pupils dilating in the center of those pale-blue irises. Her flute-like voice pouring into my ears. Her honey-blonde mane shimmering under cloudy light. Her naked body, pale pink mottled with white patches. The dip of her abdomen between pelvic curves. Her breasts and neck trembling with spasms, lips parted and damp, bridged by a thread of saliva.

How did she hijack my thoughts until my life became a magnifying glass focused on her? I craved to chart every inch of her skin with my fingertips, map every discoloration. What would she think if she knew? She’d recoil. Yet I’d have installed cameras and mics in the clearing to capture every second, refusing to let those moments vanish into time and memory like a library torched.

Though one company called, they’d confused me with another interviewee they meant to reject. Of twenty applications, one led to an interview. I laundered a white shirt, black trousers, and a tie. That morning, I sat on a plastic chair outside an office door. A secretary would peer out and call my name eventually. Around me, men and one woman in monochrome outfits stared ahead like statues, or fiddled with phones. I avoided tapping the floor or shifting posture like a sleepless wreck hours into the night. Behind walls: muffled keystrokes, creaking chairs, voices cordially faking that enthusiasm tethered them to this office instead of their salary. But none of my rival applicants’ faces hinted they resented the poor script they performed like under penalty of breaching a contract.

If some lapse in judgement got me hired over these humans, I’d reenact the grueling routine: rising at six, trudging home drained at seven-thirty in the evening, fearing my mask might slip and reveal my disdain for having to obey in exchange for crumbs, disgust at forced small talk with strangers when talking wore me down. How would I balance that grind with the life I craved—secluding myself in the forest, grafting my skin to hers, forgetting that I had ever known the outside world? I’d lack energy to sustain both lives. The downfall from the time I had discovered the clearing until I lost my job proved it. I’d repeat that ending with new actors, or abandon the clearing and her.

I scratched a palm. One of my shoes tapped linoleum. Two expressionless men across the aisle watched me. I cleared my throat and leaned back. My pulse throbbed in my neck.

I wanted to slap every applicant. They waited to enter the office and kneel. Please, future boss, pay me enough to commute here and back, keep a roof, eat, and prop up the economy so the ruling party stays in power. Let me serve society. Assign me a purpose. Bury me in tasks to save me from thinking.

Had I become this? Someone terrorized by what moved and mattered, who agreed to neuter those feelings for shelter? I’d avoid anything that might spark new meanings, lest I question my enslavement. But at least I’d have a roof under which to age into a rotten shell, locked doors barring my inner self.

I closed my eyes. In my mind, I reached out to feel her skin against my fingertips. Of all humans I’d met, only she deserved to belong to the species. Daily she unveiled spectrums of light that life had hidden. If my future excluded her, why live?

I heard echoes of my name as if they had slipped into a dream. Through the ajar door, the secretary was peering out while holding my résumé. On its upper left corner, my photograph stared straight ahead with a cowlike expression.

I rose and followed her, stiff-legged. Inside, the secretary retreated to an adjacent room. Behind the desk sat a rugby-sized man in a suit and tie. His hair obeyed his comb’s orders. When he spoke and gestured to the chair, his teeth gleamed unnaturally white—nights spent with whitening strips.

I sank into the chair, head level with his chest. He scanned my résumé with a pen. Though he spoke, my brain refused to retain his questions, or my answers. Waves of unease coursed through me, threatening to erupt into nausea. Sweat trickled down my spine, pooled on my face, stung my eyes.

The man locked eyes with me, his mallet-like fist planted on the desk. Time to sell him the lie that I dreamed of laboring here, surrendering my life.

“I need someone to pay me enough monthly to cover food and the rent of my burrow. In exchange, I’ll do the bare minimum. The rest of the time I’ll pretend to work while resenting every hour wasted in the office—time better spent staring at my living room walls.”

The man shifted. Glanced away, scratched an ear. Took his time unknotting his frown.

“I don’t share your sense of humor.”

“I’m serious. Whether I work decides if I keep my apartment.”

The man drummed his knuckles and hunched over the desk. His eyes darted toward the typing noises next door.

“You have the wrong attitude for this office. Or any office.”

“You’re right.”

He shook his head, then shoved his chair back and pressed a button on his desk intercom. His voice hardened.

“Are you waiting to laugh and point at a hidden camera?”

“That would’ve been funny.”

The secretary peered out from the adjacent room. At her boss’ military-coded gesture, she opened the door and called the next applicant. The man fixed me with a squinted glare.

“You’re pulling stunts like this without an audience. I recommend you add a note about your mental health to the résumé. It’d speed things up. Now, out of my sight.”

I left the building like I’d just had an infected appendix removed. I had endured those humiliations for the last time.

---

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 “Mistaken for Strangers” by The National.

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I took sick leave from the office for as long as they would tolerate it, and when I dragged myself back to work, I pretended to be recovering from the flu. I strategized how to use the accumulated vacation days I had never cashed in. In my former life, I would have spent those days lying in bed and staring at the ceiling.

I endured a workday convinced it was Tuesday, but by the end, overhearing colleagues exchange weekend plans, I realized two days of holiday would follow.

The hours passed in blurred frames. Sweat beaded at my temples. I squirmed in my chair, skimming tasks as my brain burned and throbbed like an infected wound.

While rubbing my eyelids and breathing through clenched teeth, a presence stirred the air around me, now saturated with the scent of a perfume sampler. My supervisor. Her black mane, pulled into a ponytail, gleamed like a doll’s. She wore one of her white blouses, through whose fabric I glimpsed a black bra.

“Still sick?”

What could I say? Although I cleared my throat, I stayed silent, so she continued.

“You used to be the type who’d come to the office even when green with illness. Now you’re late, delaying tasks. You’re not here.”

I stared numbly into her eyes. Her looming beside me felt unreal—a scene from a low-budget TV show.

“Yes.”

She drummed on my desk with her pink nails, adorned with star and moon stickers.

“What’s wrong with you?”

None of your business. I owe you no explanations. If my performance displeases you, you know how to fix it. Otherwise, leave me alone.

“Nothing. Personal matters.”

Her plastered cordial smile slipped into the disdain beneath. She stiffened, and tilted her head slightly.

“We’re behind on this project, and I’m out of excuses. Take a breath and get to work, okay?”

Before I could reply, she glided to another wing of the office.

Outside the forest, I needed armor against the world—a beast sheathed in metal spikes. I’d forced myself to act like a servant of society, but among pines, beside her, my words and actions flowed unscripted. How could I not ache to shut my eyes and reopen them to find her lying beside me?

Our conversations revealed that any mention of the world beyond the clearing overwhelmed her. Half her replies twisted my questions, as if translated through another language. Thankfully, her madness flew under conscious radar. The clearing and its pines satisfied her; she craved no other lands. I admired her like nobility from an exotic realm, her customs endlessly fascinating.

The next morning, at the office, I organized tasks and fought to focus, but an invisible force tugged me away from the blinking cursor and sea of cubicles. Heatwaves drowned me. When I turned my head, the office quaked like during an earthquake.

I thought it was noon, but my wristwatch showed minutes to one. I stared at the back and black hair of the colleague across from me; the next moment, my supervisor materialized beside me, and the colleague’s chair sat empty, his screen saver dancing. She stood rigid while frowning at papers to avoid my gaze.

“Today.” Her tone implied she was sparing me insults. “Meet the deadlines. Your colleagues have enough on their plates.”

The rest of the day, I tracked the blur of her swinging ponytail through glass partitions and screens. Fifteen minutes before clock-out, when I’d be spared from bumping into my supervisor, I slipped away.

That night, I slept in fits. Pressure pulsed in my skull. Lying on my back, headlights streaking through blinds to cast geometric shapes on the ceiling, my eyes burned as if soaked in saltwater.

Before meeting my woman, I’d breeze through tasks and scavenge an hour to wander online. If I wasted the night sweating into my sheets, tomorrow I’d battle drooping eyelids. If I slept, the alarm would yank me awake, leaving just minutes to shower, dress, eat, and commute to the office, where I’d race deadlines. Every hour dictated its use. Daily, the minutes clamped my neck like tightening pliers. Yet at dawn, I’d show up at work and polish my overdue work, whatever the cost.

The next morning, I sat at my desk, and as the computer booted, my supervisor’s silhouette slid across the mosaic of glass toward my area. I straightened. She met a figure in the office center—a man around sixty, gray buzzcut, square glasses. Whenever he appeared, the baseball chatter died. My coworkers stiffened; their chairs fell silent. He entered a meeting room, leaving the door ajar.

I glanced over my shoulder. The supervisor marched toward me. Our eyes met; hers flicked away as if spotting a cockroach. Her heels clacked over keyboards and coughs. Stopping beside me, she fixed her gaze left of my monitor. Citrus perfume cascaded from her neck.

“To the meeting room.”

She tugged at a wrinkle in her skirt, then click-clacked away. She disappeared into the meeting room, from which the scraping of chairs and somber voices emerged.

The throbbing in my temples reddened my view of the cursor stranded on the spreadsheet. I gathered my notebook and pen, cleared the browser history, and shut down the computer. Ears taut, I fled the office.

---

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 “Paranoid Android” by Radiohead.

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The next morning, no amount of effort could focus me on the tasks that, like most others, piled on my desk past the deadlines set by the production line manager. Delaying work stoked my anxiety until it boiled over, but my subconscious had stopped caring. I’d squint and drift back to the forest. I savored the vision of the woman seated on the rock, a sculpture carved from white marble, her drenched dress clinging to her body like a Greek chiton, every fold precisely rendered.

In the clearing, the woman escaped the steamroller pressure of my routine. She relished each carefree minute, sheltered in a timeless bubble immune to erosion. Yet sitting at my desk, stealing glances at reflections and movements in my peripheral vision, her absence left me gasping as though I’d woken missing a lung. Was she in the clearing now, rinsing her hair in the lagoon where insects skittered? Diving beneath lichen veils? Talking to herself, drowning the silence with her flute-like voice? My ignorance seared me, kindling an ache in my chest.

I should’ve met her years ago, and lived beside her as those years crumbled. The mountain of details her life had piled up, the ebb and flow of her mind, how she’d look if I’d seen her then, her expressions, her spoken words—all lost as if someone had gathered every unearthed gem and tossed them into the mouth of a volcano. Even recordings of such details wouldn’t have resurrected them. Each second apart inched us closer to one of our brains flickering out. And I stayed chained to this office, lashed to a screen, slogging through meaningless tasks to fund a life I couldn’t stand.

That afternoon, I boarded the train to Hitachi. When it stopped, I spilled onto the streets, teetering between a walk and a sprint. I stood three meters from the passageway and drank in the sight like a pilgrim. No one passing the gap paused to notice the forest’s ghostly outline. No one had ventured in to discover the creature within. How could they be so blind? Painters should duel to set up their easels at the entrance; photographers should brawl for the sharpest angle.

As I hurried along the path’s curves, scrambling up slopes as fern palms brushed me, I heard an intermittent rush of water. A stream tangled in foliage? No—a voice. Hers. It flowed from a distance through branches and leaves, weaving speech and silence like a song. I quickened my pace. I hoped to catch a word, but minutes before I reached the clearing, she fell quiet.

She stood by her rock, profile tense. One hand fidgeted with her opposite wrist as she stared into the undergrowth. I closed the gap until two meters separated us. My lungs burned. She turned, squinted catlike, then smiled. I lunged forward and wrapped my arms around the back of her dress, lifting her off the ground. I stifled a laugh while spinning her weight. She gripped my shoulders. I set her down and stepped back, though I’d have held her for hours. She regarded my expression as if she were incapable of communicating through language, and needed to decipher my gestures and tone. Her widened eyes reminded me of an owl’s.

“I heard you talking as I came,” I said, my voice scraped thin. “You don’t have to stop.”

“I’ll talk with you.”

I gazed at her in silence until a crackling of dry leaves broke the pause.

“Want to sit?”

She settled on the grass, her skirt’s taut drape covering her knees. I sank beside her and flopped backward into soft turf. To my right, she had lain down and tilted her face toward me, her features half-hidden in a thicket of grass blades.

I stretched my arms out. My fingers brushed her warm skin—not the cold damp I’d expected. I slid my right palm beneath her left, interlacing our fingers. Her grip tightened like a lock.

Lifting her hand, I studied it: blue veins beneath pink, translucent skin. Light glimmered around its edges, filtered through trembling leaves.

Maybe the silence clawed at her, but what could I talk about? My job and the litany of worries it spawned? What would this obligation-free woman grasp? Should I share details of my life? It had lacked meaning until I met her. What could she share? She hadn’t brought a book, nor hid a TV. Who knew where she retired to sleep between visits to the clearing?

I surrendered to the quiet. The quivering lattice of branches cast nameless shapes pierced by twinkling sunlight. Air hissed through her nostrils. Her hand warmed mine.

My body had always fought to stitch itself back from anxiety’s corrosion, but now it lay drugged-calm. I savored time’s crawl, the sun’s glare, the forest’s whispers, the heat of her foreign skin—unspoiled. Is this how they felt, those who claimed life was worth living?

I craved to roll over and clutch her until our flesh fused like adhesive. But would that send her fleeing?

I drifted into a half-sleep. Each time I surfaced to consciousness, I relived the warmth of the woman’s body, which remained close to mine.

Time to leave. I held the wristwatch up to my face. Dinnertime was approaching. I rose, tugging her up.

Facing her honey-gold hair dusted with soil, her rose-and-white ice-cream complexion, the taut neck muscle strained by that mane, a shiver tore through me, and my heart jolted as if kicked. I needed to kiss every inch of her, swallow her mouth and tongue, bite her neck, strip her, devour her. I gripped the grass and held my breath until my vision cleared and the pounding in my neck subsided. I rubbed my eyes. Sighed.

“I have to go. Hope I see you soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

“You want me here?”

“In the morning?”

“I work.”

Her unblinking eyes gleamed, though her fluted voice stayed flat.

“Please.”

That night I slept in 20-minute shards. Tossed between shoulders, sheet tangled at my chin or knees. A whirlpool sucked at my mind. The hand that had held the woman’s was now inflamed and tingling, radiating a heightened sensitivity across the rest of my skin at the touch of this hot, stagnant air, as though I had submerged my entire body in acid.

Morning found me slumped on the bed’s edge, elbows digging into my thighs, gaze deadened at the floor. I grabbed my wristwatch from the nightstand, strapped it on. 8:47. Late. Late for the office.

It mortified me like a sharp lash on the fingertips. I’d handed my superiors the excuse they’d craved to fire me and hire some groveling replacement. Years of flawless, punctual work—incinerated.

I called, asking for a supervisor.

“Yeah, sick. Maybe something I ate. Or the flu. Very likely. Thanks.”

I showered, dressed. Within an hour, I raced through Hitachi’s station-adjacent streets. Buildings blurred as my mind quivered like a gong’s aftershock.

I plunged into the forest. In the clearing, she stood back to me on the lagoon’s pebbled shore. Her hair, split and water-darkened, draped her chest; droplets zigzagged her nape and were absorbed by her dress’ embroidered collar. Skin patched eggshell-white gleamed between her shoulder blades. The skirt, suctioned to her thighs, dripped like rain from an umbrella.

The woman was etched against the backdrop of pines like a figure conjured in the mist, ready to fade with a single breath. How could I picture her near the passageway, returning from sleep or feeding coins into a vending machine? Outside this pine sanctuary, she’d face a world of clawing, asphyxiating pressures. The air I’d breathe would corrode her skin, dissolve it. She’d linger an instant before ether filled her space. Her existence was a miracle—complex life sprouting on a planet too close or far from its star. Yet the woman had been born, had gazed upon these pines, had bathed in this lagoon, and was breathing this oxygen. She had blessed this clearing with her voice. Once she vanished, the world would barrel on, oblivious to losing the sole force that infused my molecules with meaning, that made my pain-bought years worth enduring. The universe would keep chewing and grinding its prisoners until, billions of years hence, like some beast trapped in a well and driven insane, it would dismember itself.

I strode over and placed my palms on her shoulders. She turned as if no one else could’ve come. I glided my fingers through her scalp and kissed her wet lips like I’d suck out her entrails.

---

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

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On Sunday, I awoke clinging to the image of the winding path through the pines, but the morning light dissolved the sway of branches and leaves. Before I could shake off the grogginess and reason clearly, I arrived at the station and boarded the train to Hitachi. When I exited the station, I mimicked the wandering that had led me to the passageway. An emotion magnitudes greater than any I had known guided me toward that spot, as birds recognize magnetic north.

I reached the point on the street where days earlier I had glanced up at the passageway on the opposite sidewalk. To my right stood the three white-and-red vending machines embedded into the cement building. I bought a water bottle. To calm myself, I sipped it while pressing my free hand against my side to keep it from trembling.

A delivery van passed. Two men in warehouse overalls overtook me. One stared ahead; the other’s gaze swept the pavement a hand’s breadth from his feet. An elderly man walked the opposite sidewalk, passing rusted sheds and an electronics store.

None of them had noticed the passageway. To me, the vision in the half-light—the path of trampled grass, the palm-like fronds of ferns flanking it, the clover field the path bisected—invited admiration, like a centuries-old fresco in a museum.

I crossed the sidewalk and entered the path’s curves. Beneath my soles crunched a layer of leaves and pine needles. An electric current heightened my fingertips and sharpened my awareness. Butterflies of light and shadow fluttered over pine trunks split by vertical grooves. Twisted branches, meters above the path, were cloaked in emerald-green moss hanging in fringes. Ferns and clover sprouted from the gaps of a stump, its structure barely protruding with splintered shards. Between two pines glistened the hammock of a spiderweb. Its owner, as large as my palm, swayed on the net as a breeze billowed it.

The grass thickened, a sign fewer feet had trodden here, and I pushed aside the fern fronds draping the path. In minutes, the lagoon would come into view. I hunched forward as if to arrive fractions of a second sooner, placing each heel down only to immediately lift it again.

Itches flared across my body, as if trapped in a room with an invisible mosquito. I had climbed to the peak of a snow-covered slope, fastened my skis, and now had to hurtle down at breakneck speed. What would I say to the woman, and how would she reply? What combination of words would seize her pale-blue gaze and draw out her voice?

I emerged into the clearing as rings of static constricted my vision. I exhaled. Beside the swampy lagoon waited the moss-upholstered rock, worn by decades of people sitting, where the woman had been the afternoon I met her. The clearing smelled of wet fur and stagnant water.

Of course, the woman was absent. I’d have needed luck for her to come on a Sunday morning. Perhaps I should be content just to have met her. This clearing remained, though her absence dominated it.

I sat on the rock, settling into the plush moss to occupy her ghost’s space. I filled my lungs with the air that might have filled hers. Leaves swayed in a mausoleum silence, where no sound muzzled the cacophony of inner voices passing judgment.

I hunched. My gaze fell to the pebbles around the lagoon, the scattered pine needles. A pain pierced my heart. Perhaps for years, perhaps for the rest of my life, I would return to this clearing in my daydreams and replay our conversation. I’d chastise myself for idiotic phrases, insert clever remarks that years later would occur to me. In my imagination, before saying goodbye, I’d ask for her phone number or propose another meeting.

The lagoon’s surface bulged into a green tumor, outlining a figure. The coat of algae and mud sloughed off, revealing the woman’s honey-blonde hair, and her face. Streams of water flowed over her eyelids, nose, and cheekbones, crossing the mottled patches of discoloration. She advanced toward the shore as if her legs cleaved air. Green foam stained her soaked dress, which clung to her shoulders and molded her breasts. With each step, the skirt, plastered to her thighs, wrinkled like a second skin, her bare feet imprinting wet marks on the shore’s pebbles. She noticed me as she brushed off lichen flakes stuck to her shin.

When I regained my senses, I flushed as if caught hiding in her closet to spy while she undressed. I stood and retreated a few steps toward the clearing’s exit. I forced myself to meet her gaze as my temples burned.

She eyed me like we’d bumped into each other in the living room of a shared home.

“You can sit there if you want.”

I didn’t know if I shook my head, though I’d meant to. I gestured toward the rock as if offering my train seat.

When she sat, her dress slapped wetly. Water trickled down the rock’s sides. She gathered her honey-blonde mane into a fist, wrung it, and water gushed from the darkened strands. Some slid from her scalp, circumvented her eyes, traced her jawline, and fell. Her skin, mottled with irregular patches, reminded me of a leopard trapped by a hunter for a zoo.

“Did you miss this forest?” she asked.

I straightened. My vision blurred as if recovering from a blow to the head.

“I needed to see you.”

I expected her face to show discomfort, even terror, but whatever raced through her mind halted before reaching her facial muscles.

“Why?”

“I had never met anyone like you.”

She nodded and rested one hand over the other in her lap.

I’d admitted it—the words had left my mouth without needing to unlock gates or lower a drawbridge.

“I had to see you again. You, whose name I don’t know, to whom I’m nobody. It should bother you. Does it?”

She shook her head. Contorting as if stretching, she adjusted the back of her dress.

“I enjoy talking to someone.”

My throat tightened. A pulse throbbed in my neck like a muscle tic as I fought the smile tugging my lips. I wanted to hear every word she’d share, uncover every detail of her life.

“How do you spend your time? Beyond swimming, I can’t picture you outside this park, this forest.”

“What do you think the answer is?”

“Do you wake early to trudge to an office and waste hours on nonsense?”

“I don’t need to do any of that. Whenever you come here, you’ll find me.”

Her lack of expression might have meant she’d forgotten, or never learned, that people use gestures to communicate. Beyond the mottling, she belonged to another race. A lifetime of rejection might have taught her to avoid others. She’d bond with the lagoon she dove in and the encircling pines. Perhaps she welcomed this conversation as if we were exotic creatures separated by zoo glass.

“Who do you live with?” I said. “I assume you don’t work. Does the state pay for your home?”

I cringed at my hunger for every scrap of information. I imagined her scowling, sharpening her tone, rebuking my impertinence.

“Before you came, I hadn’t spoken to anyone in a long time.”

I crouched on the shore’s pebbles, leveling my face with hers. Meeting her gaze—those pale-blue eyes flecked with white and green—sent electricity from my nape to my toes. No one else had interested me because no one else deserved it. Here sat a real person, not someone playing a role society had drilled into them.

“Do you want to know anything about me?” I asked.

“Tell me.”

“No, I’m asking. Are you interested?”

“In what?”

“Where I live, how I spend my time, what I like.”

She tilted her head, her gaze dancing across the trees as if weighing whether another human was worth knowing.

“Does it matter?”

My legs protested. I sat and leaned a forearm on my knees.

“I don’t know. There’s little to say. Little I care about.”

I searched for some nugget to share, but my past spread like a muddy expanse. I spoke before realizing it.

“My childhood was boring and miserable—the tedious kind. I went to university expecting the promised camaraderie. A week after graduating, I’d forgotten my professors’ and classmates’ faces. I’m on my second job. Since childhood, I’ve waited for some passion to seize me, something I’d crave to spend hours on unpaid. But for years, I’ve walked straight ahead down a gray hallway. When I paused, invisible hands shoved my back. I suspected that somewhere—behind walls, a door, an inaccessible wing—a luminous world existed. Meanwhile, I experienced a plastic, flavorless reality. I blamed myself. The world’s data filters through my distorting brain. I live like acting in a disjointed play during a fever dream. I followed instructions, excelled at them, but found only hollowness. I assumed someday I’d stumble upon why I bothered.”

I elongated a silence. Droplets slid down the woman’s forehead. She glanced away but soon locked eyes with me again, awaiting direction.

I inhaled as my cheeks burned.

“But let’s talk about you. What do you enjoy?”

“What?”

“What do you like to do?”

Her damp hair dripped onto her soaked dress. She laid her palms on her thighs, fingers relaxed. She stared unblinking, whick kept my eyes from wandering to the curves her dress hugged.

I shifted, thirsting to draw out her words.

“What satisfies you? What do you do whenever you can?”

“I come here. I swim.”

Her irises quivered within their orbits, pupils dilating and contracting. She studied my face like a beast’s cub encountering a human.

I listened to her breath mingle with the hiss of branches and occasional thud of fruit falling into rot.

“Give me your hand.”

She raised her left hand, palm down. Cloudy droplets swelled on her fingertips. I crawled forward and clasped her hand between mine. It was cold and wet, like something left overnight in a bucket of water. Chalk-white patches mapped her veins. The hairless arm, smooth as if waxed, showed no goosebumps, no tremors.

“Aren’t you dying of cold?” I asked.

“I’m not dying of anything.”

I squeezed her hand, warming it. She lifted her gaze to mine and curved her lips slightly. I brought our joined hands to her face, tracing with our fingers the mottled patch spanning half her cheekbone and jaw. I swallowed.

“Does it bother you?”

“It tickles.”

“Having these patches. Being different.”

She shook her head.

“I am who I should be.”

I glided my fingertips over her hand’s back, shifting pliant skin. I outlined a patch. Light carved white curves along her knuckles’ wrinkles. Her nails, segmented by microscopic ridges like pine bark, held mud under their edges. I turned her hand over. Water and cold had puckered her fingertips and creased her palm, aging it. I traced every line, imagining their formation from her birth to this moment, when I could touch them.

“I think I’ll return soon.”

“Tomorrow?”

Dizziness struck.

“I work.”

“In the evening?”

How could I focus at the office, counting hours until I returned? But my mouth dried, and the details of her face and the forest’s silence sharpened as if I’d shed nearsightedness and earplugs. I longed to transport myself to the moment tomorrow when I would descend the office stairs and realize that instead of spending the rest of the day resting in order to perform well at work the next day, I would meet the woman in this clearing where no one dared to venture. A smile surfaced unbidden. She lowered her gaze to my lips as if they were another pair of eyes.

“Will I find you,” I said, “like you promised?”

“Whenever you come.”

Reluctantly, I released her hand and stood. How did I know to leave? My wristwatch warned of dinnertime. The canopy of branches etched a granite-gray sky, and the same half-light that had greeted me upon entering the passage enveloped us.

I stepped forward, half-raising my arms to embrace her, but stopped even though my heart pounded like a radar nearing its target. I wanted to hold her, balance her warmth with mine, imprint the feel of her soaked dress and the body beneath until tomorrow. I’d just met her. What if she’d tolerated my touch only to avoid conflict?

I bid goodbye with a smile she returned. I promised we’d meet tomorrow. As I walked away, she raised a hand and waved. I left the clearing and quickened my pace to overcome the urge to run back to her side.

---

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 “Breezeblocks” by alt-J.

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The following morning, I repeatedly jolted awake at my office corner, my dead gaze drifting between the lines of a report as the monitor’s glow washed over me. Seconds earlier, I had inhabited another body. Standing before the passageway to the park, I stepped in. Every trace of cement, glass, and metal vanished behind trunks, branches, and leaves. Air swollen with oxygen refreshed me. I followed a path that flickered white along its sinuous turns. The voice of the woman echoed in my head, fragments of sentences she might have spoken to me. Her hair, gleaming with water, fell over one shoulder, soaking and darkening her embroidered dress. Even in memory, I refused to look away.

Seated at my computer, hours passed while I remained stuck on the report. The monitor’s glare dulled my mind. I lost track of what I was working on, and before I could focus enough to progress a few lines, my attention plummeted like someone trying to climb a cliff with numb arms.

My skin grew clammy; my armpits and hairline soaked. My vision blurred. I tore my eyes from the screen and swiveled my chair to clear my head. Rows of fluorescent lights striped the ceiling like luminous zebra crossings. The view: a dense mass of desks and workers with black hair and white shirts, the space compressed until every pocket of air was squeezed out.

The remaining hours to surrender to my tasks slipped away, the obligation to finish them pricking like a knife tip at my neck, but the images in my mind chained me. I wanted to belong among those pines, to sit by the lagoon and speak with that woman, while the office echoed with squawking voices and clattering keyboards. When I fought to concentrate, someone fidgeted in their creaking chair. Someone squeezed past desks and chairs. Phones rang insistently until their owners returned. Pairs of employees chatted about news or baseball games.

In my drowsy vigilance, I monitored who stood, who crossed the office to take a call or piss. I spied reflections in the glass partitions, in the framed artwork, in the monitors. The lenses of a pair of glasses burned two white holes into the blurry oval of a face. I recognized a colleague’s tank top and swinging ponytail. Another’s clacking heels to the printer and back. Another’s limping hunch. I had never looked any of them in the eye.

Sometimes, a supervisor’s specter slid across glass. In my mind, I sketched a map of the office, tracking the supervisor’s blip as it weaved between desks and pillars. If they approached, I’d feign fascination with the report filling my screen.

During two or three breaks, I splashed my face in the bathroom and breathed deeply. Back at my desk, my mind retreated into images of the forest, the lagoon, and the woman—spheres of light peeking through fog. A leaden tedium crushed me: day after day of absurd labor. My mind had found a crack and, like a caged animal, it strained to slip through.

At lunch, I devoured my sandwich and rushed back to my computer. I rubbed my eyelids. Exhaustion clung to me like glue. Resisting the next report, I searched online for the Hitachi map. From a bird’s-eye view, I pinpointed the station I’d stopped at, an inch from the coast. I traced the streets I’d wandered until I located the neighborhood with the passageway. The map showed an electronics shop to the right of the path and a cluster of homes and sheds to the left, but the buildings appeared glued together.

I blinked, absorbed. I felt like I was tossing in bed late at night, enduring hypnagogic hallucinations. The office crowd returned after a break, their laughs and shouts snapping me awake. Was the map outdated? To let the passageway open into the clearing, the buildings should’ve been spaced far enough for the forest to nestle in.

Thirty minutes after lunch, an urge seized me to scour the internet for traces of the woman. Without a name or leads, where would I start? I might as well have met her decades ago, when payphones dotted the streets.

Fifteen minutes before the workday ended, I burned them checking my watch every few moments. I fled the office with my head bowed. At the station, I paced the platform a dozen times, striding several meters forward, pivoting on my heels, and retracing my steps. The minutes monitored by my wristwatch seemed frozen.

I approached the ticket machine and hovered my index finger over the button to print my return ticket. What if I bought a ticket to Hitachi? I’d leap the tracks to the opposite platform and return to the forest. I had to go—as if bound by a second job, with a contract so sacred that refusing would summon a lawyer to my apartment by morning.

My heart raced. My mind cycled images: the sinuous path through pines, the woman on a rock in the clearing, wringing a soaked strand of hair. The white blotches on her skin shimmered like watery reflections.

That woman, her figure pulsing with light, breathed the air of this cardboard world. I felt her presence like a second heart grown inside me and forgotten in the clearing, still tethered to my chest by kilometers of vibrant tendon.

She hid from others; I’d trespass her peace. Yet I craved to go like a diabetic needing insulin. I wanted to see her face, speak to her, hear whatever she’d share. I fixated on my desire, but why would she care about me? My life shuttled between apartment and office, trapped in a job that unraveled me. I returned home only to rest and repeat.

I crumpled the handkerchief in my pocket. She’d know I returned for her. Would she call me a stalker, phone the police? That she’d spoken to me felt like betting on a rigged race. My brain deceived itself to survive in a bubble of fantasy, but tomorrow I’d have to blast through two days’ overdue tasks while images of the passageway and woman yanked me like a hook in my cheek. If I retraced my steps and found her, how would I focus? I’d pile up overdue work. The acid of anxiety would corrode my insides.

I pressed the button for a ticket back to my apartment. To quell the nausea rising in my gut, I slumped on a bench, palms pressed to my eyes. Minutes later, the loudspeaker announced my train. The platform trembled. As the train braked, I uncovered my eyes and boarded, head low. Once the train lurched forward, my anxiety spiked. I imagined pulling the emergency brake.

I had met a beautiful woman who intrigued me, who spoke like a person instead of one of the million clones populating this world. Was that enough to make me feel like I’d betray a sacred pact by refusing to run to her side? For today at least, the encounter had shattered my gray routine. A routine I’d drown in for years—yet my survival depended on finishing my tasks.

That evening, and into the night, my mind would recreate her and invent conversations, daydreams swelling my skull until no other thought would fit. No matter how many scenes I conjured, scripting every word, would my stubborn fantasies lead to a radiant present?

How wrong I’d been to linger in the clearing when I spotted that woman. I should’ve abandoned the forest before she finished lifting her hand.

---

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 “Runaway” by Aurora Aksnes (who apparently, confirmed by her, is a fellow autist).

This is the first story, I believe, in which I tackled autistic obsession, a subject I have struggled with all my life. During my first couple of internships, my brain kept tugging me away from my tasks to the stories I was supposed to be working on instead, or at least to learn more writing techniques (I gobbled up books on writing back then). I ached every time I tried to focus on my job. I won’t get into how insane it feels to me that people who can bring new “things” into life are shackled at menial jobs, which programming websites felt most of the time (these days they’re almost trivial due to artificial intelligence; I doubt many programmers are going to get hired in the future).

I’m going even deeper into autistic obsession in my ongoing novel The Scrap Colossus, whose protagonist Elena is autistic, although I doubt I’ll mention it explicitly.

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The woman intertwined her gaze with mine. She raised her right palm from the rock to greet me. I froze as if the slightest tremor might dislodge the camouflage my skin had conjured. She might have been addressing someone else whose line of sight I’d trespassed into, but her gaze held mine and waited. My words had jammed in the rusted gears of some ancient machine. I said hello in a voice like sawdust. When sensation returned to my legs, I turned and retraced my steps.

“You’ve only just arrived,” said the woman in a fluting voice.

I stopped and offered her my profile.

“I came to be alone. This park seems designed for that.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“You must’ve come for the same reason. And you were here first—I’m the intruder.”

“Am I bothering you?”

I’d assumed so and readied a lie, but the tension in my muscles, the knots in my gut that usually urged me to flee, were absent. I stepped toward the pebbles fringing the lagoon. In the silence, they crunched like snapping bones. The water lay hidden beneath a pelt of algae, a mesh of lichen where insects glinted.

I’d trespassed into this secluded park, ventured to its core, and now, rooted at the lagoon’s edge, I blocked the woman’s view. I tainted the air passing through my lungs. Before my arrival, this clearing had endured as a sanctuary, a natural oasis she’d have cherished, its secret guarded. I’d ruined it.

“I stole your peace.”

“It’s good to speak sometimes.”

I scratched my nape.

“I suppose.”

Her gaze drifted to the grass at her bare feet as she finger-combed a damp strand crossing her collarbone. On her other arm, a droplet slid down to the blue veins of her wrist. An urge gripped me—like craving chocolate after a sugar crash—to unravel details about her, though most days I floated adrift, indifferent to whether life’s incomprehensible currents might stagnate.

She’d posed a silent question, granting me time to order my thoughts. I cleared my throat.

“You’re lucky the city preserved this park. They’re scarce where I live.”

“What replaces them?”

“Apartment blocks, shops. Fascinating varieties of concrete.”

She nodded, and isolated another wet strand.

“Do you come here often?” I asked.

“I never wander far.”

“I’d do the same.” I hurried to raise a palm. “But you found it first.”

“It belongs to whoever finds it.”

I chuckled, and the desperation to please her shamed me as if I had turned into a child stranded in a tree, needing an adult’s help to descend. The folder under my arm grew heavy. I set it on the pebbles. My eyes scanned the clearing for the woman’s belongings, maybe a purse, but she’d brought nothing beyond her meditative stillness. My gaze swung back to her, magnetized, as if she were a ruby glinting in dust. I needed to modulate my attention, or I’d scare her off.

“You can stare,” she said, “if you’re curious.”

My heart jolted. I felt like apologizing. How many people saw straight through me? I held her gaze in a silent vow of harmlessness.

Though a stranger had stumbled upon her in the park’s depths, the woman’s face stayed serene as if I were just another chirping bird. Honey-blond strands arched rebelliously over her forehead. Narrow brows melted into translucent pink skin above eyes whose irises, perhaps born green, had been conquered by pale blue, compressing the original hue against her pupils. The bluish shadows beneath her eyes resembled smudged makeup. Chapped lips, cracked by cold, had split into notches. Across her face, neck, and arms, plaster-white patches lay like peeled paint.

I observed the blotch spanning her brow to the right cheekbone. She’d hate others noticing. Hate herself. She’d anticipate questions she’d rather not hear. She had come on a weekday, and probably spent hours here. Unemployed. Alone, no book for distraction. Marooned with her thoughts amid trees and silence.

She smoothed a damp strand. Her gaze slid from my face to my shoes.

“Do you live nearby?” I asked. “Unless you mind me asking.”

“Close enough.”

“The locals must treasure this place like they’d planted it. Tourists would ruin it.”

She shook her head.

“No one comes.”

“I’m not surprised. They pass by, right? I came here to kill time, but most people would have headed to a bar. I needed some time alone.”

“I’m always alone.”

She’d said it flatly, like stating the time. Her patches exiled her; I at least warranted pretense before being sidelined. Every mirror stabbed her with flaws. Friends’ calls would have dwindled to monthly guilt offerings. Only the trees’ stillness remained, herself as sole company unable to abandon her.

I sat on the pebbles, my back protesting, and gripped my shins.

“What’s your name?”

“Depends who asks.”

“You must prefer one.”

“Call me what you need.”

I pressed my palms together, bowing slightly.

“I guard my privacy too. No offense meant.”

A branch rattled in the foliage. She tilted her head. The thicket seethed with shadows and cloud-filtered light. Her neck had stiffened, and for a moment I thought her ears, peeking through strands, would have pivoted toward the noise.

She lowered her gaze to the grass, and parted her lips.

“Over the years, I’ve had many names pinned on me. Names that flirted with meaning but never quite captured my whole. Language alone is too limited to understand one another; no word can encapsulate what I am—or what you are.”

I fell silent. She was accustomed to speaking only in soliloquies—her inner voice the sole interpreter of her untranslatable thoughts—yet now, she had opened a door for me.

“How do you refer to yourself?”

“The images in my head suffice.”

“What should I call you?”

“Who’d you speak of me to?”

I turned pale and grew cold, as if someone with a knife had accosted me in an alley. Eyes fixed on me, waiting for my response—just like when my office colleagues, discussing their weekend ski getaway, either trying to include me or to make fun of me, grilled me with questions: “Have you made plans with your friends?” In the few seconds they granted me to answer, I weighed the myriad lies I’d told for years to a blur of faces, and I was eager to concoct any story that might divert them from the truth: human beings—their customs, their impulses, their tastes—terrified me, and I longed to free myself from their presence like a rabbit crouched among the grass in a field where rabid dogs prowled.

But this woman sought solitude. I wanted to keep the forest, the clearing, and the woman a secret—a refuge that had survived among walls of concrete and metal closing in on every patch of green. I had been entrusted with that responsibility, and I would protect them.

“I won’t speak of you to anyone.”

“You see my face,” she said. “You hear my voice. No name holds the myriad details they contain.”

I waited, lips parted, eager to listen to any words that would flow out of her mouth. Today I’d steered our talk, but any other day, I may have heard her in the distance, woven into wind and birdsong.

“You mentioned killing time,” she said. “For what?”

I checked my watch.

“I took the wrong route—” A shiver struck. “Crap, I’ve missed my train, and I’ll have to run to catch the next one. Thank you for reminding me.”

She nodded. I grabbed my folder, stood up, and brushed the grit off my pants. My heart raced. I’d sprint sweat-soaked, praying to reach the platform in time. Otherwise, I’d be forced to wait another forty-five minutes.

“I’ve enjoyed this. Meeting you. Keep the silence.”

---

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

In case the dialogue seemed shoddy to you… yeah, I’d say the dialogue is the worst part of this story. The protagonist is an awkward loner and the woman is, well, something else. I don’t remember much of the story in that regard other than the fact that back then I wished I knew how to make the dialogue less awkward.