Tag: short story

The Drowned City, Pt. 3 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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.

The Drowned City, Pt. 2 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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.

The Drowned City, Pt. 1 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

Through the train window flowed a blurry stream of single-family homes, their walls topped by conifers pruned into cloud-like shapes. As I yawned and dug a fingertip into my tear duct, two toad statues splashed green across the cement-and-asphalt vista. They perched on pillars marking the gate of a villa. Seconds after the train had passed them, their green lingered.

The headphones poured a deluge into my ears, a barrage of thunder. The soundtrack accompanied the queue of white cars and vans waiting at a railroad crossing, a woman trudging down the parallel road’s center laden with bags, and utility poles stretching cables over rooftops every dozen meters. To the left glided the occasional two-story cubic building, its facade blackened in streaks where years of rain had trickled. The train descended into a cement-walled trench with a grid-like pattern.

I slumped into the seat and blinked. Was I witnessing unfamiliar landscapes, or did my exhaustion—cracking my mind like an old rubber band—prevent me linking these views to my memories? I could have swapped this procession of villas and gray buildings for any within kilometers, yet I’d never noticed those crouching toad statues, green as amusement park props, poised as if to leap.

The train stopped at a station. Doors hissed open. When I stood, the work folder resting on my thigh slid to the floor. I scrambled to grab it and slipped through the doors just before they closed.

Hitachi. A city I’d never visited. On the route map, Hitachi lay as many stops from the office as my apartment did, but in the opposite direction.

As I wandered the station, I raked my scalp with fingernails but stopped short of tugging. Images of leaving the office and boarding the train had dissolved into a lagoon of identical memories. All day my eyelids had weighed anchors; three coffees barely kept me conscious. Why be surprised if, half-somnambulant as I lived, I’d boarded the wrong platform?

The next return train would arrive in forty-five minutes. The journey home would take twice as long. I’d eat dinner perched on my bed, sleep, and rise early to squeeze into another train bound for work.

The PA system’s echoes pierced my headphones’ wall of rain and thunder. A buoyant, game-show-host voice announced departures, arrivals, and safety protocols.

I drifted to the station’s far end. Before a glass wall stood metallic benches mimicking geometric shapes. A woman in a fitted suit pressed her phone to her ear while staring through her reflection. Two middle-aged men with hiking backpacks sat slouched on a bench. Trudging past, I glimpsed a strip of gray-clouded sky and ocean rising beyond. As I circled the benches, I realized the people had vanished. I collapsed onto a backless metal block.

Serpentine foam coiled around pillars of an elevated highway; waves slid in white ripples before dissolving against a beach’s gray stones. Plastic debris littered the shore. Cars materialized at one edge of the glass and vanished at the other. Beyond the beach sprawled a puzzle of single-story villas and gardens. No movement betrayed inhabitants.

I rubbed my face, numbed by fatigue. My limbs hung heavy as a school backpack. I’d tripped myself again, for the umpteenth time. Some presence within me loathed me, waited for weakened defenses to sabotage me. How it benefited, I didn’t know. Maybe it thought I deserved it.

Sitting forty-five minutes only to sit another ninety disgusted me. Days limped by in cycles of sitting and battling tedium—that dreadful crawl of minutes—until I earned a pause.

I stood and stretched. Exiting the station, I aimed for the overpass stairs leading downtown, but above the station roof loomed office towers and elaborate mall complexes. I envisioned streams of shoppers hauling bags, and white-shirted office workers. I’d exceeded my daily tolerance for people.

Walking away, I sought any appealing route. To my left, walled gardens bristled with pruned shrubs and trees; to my right, the station’s gray metal blocks striped with sky-reflecting windows. Passing a house half-painted green and beige, I found a dirt parking lot and an ocean band leveled with the horizon. For dozens of meters I walked past clusters of cars awaiting commuters.

My headphones sustained a wall of rain and thunder—a window to some parallel dimension silencing this world’s incursions. These telephone and power poles with their catenary cables arcing over the sidewalks, the two-story buildings housing ground-floor shops—they belonged to an immersive film powerless to touch me. Restaurants, a dentist, a costume shop streamed by as poles and wires multiplied. Beyond a hotel, I hurried through an intersection clotted with white-and-gray cars and truck hulks.

Wherever I looked, I’d missed by hundredths of a second how someone filled voids with this scenery. Every raised wall, every cleared path herded me onward.

In gravel stretches between houses, veins of green clung to facades and cement walls. Some residents kept pruned trees in bathroom-sized gardens, planters bordering sidewalks. Faded paint on buildings’ bases had eroded to bare cement. Bricks and concrete blocks supported AC units. In one entryway, two spindly shrubs—trimmed into stepped shapes—huddled against walls like doormen clearing passage.

I stopped before a row of vending machines nestled in a cement wall’s alcove. Alongside soda and water, one sold canned coffee, another whisky bottles.

Why had I stopped? Did I want a drink?

A presence pressed my back like a giant eye focusing on me. Across the narrow road stood two beige homes with corroded metal sheds. To their right hung an electronics store sign on rain-darkened wooden planks. And between the buildings, a metal sheet roofed a passage. The sidewalk beyond yielded to a path of flattened grass. I hunched and glimpsed ferns crowding the shadowed trail.

I glanced for witnesses. In a nearby lot, a man unloaded packages from a van parked inside a warehouse.

I crossed the road and hurried into the passageway as if sheltering from rain, crunching pine needles and twigs underfoot. It smelled of damp vegetation. To either side, a clover field faded into gloom.

I removed my headphones and switched off the player. A breeze hissed. As I pressed on, the darkness lifted. Hangar-ceiling-like light fell. The pillars ahead resolved into striated, wine-red pines soaring three or four stories. Scraggly trees filled gaps between them with effervescent green.

I followed the path, gaze turned to a granite-gray sky. Its light blurred leaves that a breeze stirred. Birds with sky-blue bodies and navy heads trilled from treetops. I climbed grassy slopes between ferns and plants that spilled onto the path, grazing my pants and arms. Leaves fluttered down like glowing snowflakes.

The forest thickened. Trunk columns alternated with shifting green patches in the undergrowth. Overhead, layers of branches choked the remaining white gaps.

I emerged into a clearing: grass and fern clusters like paused explosions. A swampy pond spanned half the space, its scum-coated surface feeding the encircling pines’ roots. By the bank, a moss-patched boulder—lounger-sized—bore an ethnic European woman in a white dress embroidered like a tablecloth, with circle sleeves and a knee-length skirt. Her pale-pink skin suggested years of avoiding the sun. Blotches mottled her skin as if splashed by color-burning liquid. Wet golden locks darkened her dress’s shoulders to her chest. Her bare feet, soles creased, clung with grass blades.

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

Today’s song is “Alison” by Slowdive.

This is the second of my Serious Six, the novellas I wrote back when I believed that if I did it well enough and insisted on sending them around, someone would want to publish them. It didn’t happen. Chronologically, the previously translated novellas Smile and Trash in a Ditch were the third and sixth respectively.

A few years before I wrote this novella, I exhausted my very limited energies as a programmer, working a 9-to-5 at a business park that demanded plenty of commute time. Back then, I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with autism nor had my pituitary gland tumor detected. I tried to pass as normal while constantly punishing myself because I couldn’t manage to do what seemingly came so easily to others. My hormones were out of whack due to the pituitary issues, and kept me in mental states similar to those of a woman during pregnancy and lactation (TMI: I also lactated). Anyway, I kept passing out on the train and the moment I returned home. I felt like I was sleepwalking everywhere. More often than not, when I stared at an approaching train, I fantasized about jumping onto the tracks.

One of those days, instead of getting on the right train, I ended up taking the one that led in the opposite direction. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, for a good while I stared at the views in an oniric state that prevented me from figuring out if I didn’t recognize those vistas or if my brain was out of whack. Once I realized the mess I had gotten myself in, I sat alone at an isolated train station about forty kilometers into the depths of my province, a town I had never visited. I remember a middle-aged woman approaching me and asking me a question in Basque; I’m from a border town where you’re extremely unlikely to be asked anything in Basque. Hell, these days you can’t even understand what a third of the population are saying.

Eventually my subconscious urged me to write this strange story, in which a perpetually tired salaryman found a sanctuary of nature, along with a strange woman, amidst cement and decay. This whole thing was like a fever dream. Because I hadn’t chosen most of the details, it took me years to come to grips with what that whole story was about, as well as the identity of the woman.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this one. It’s very different from Smile and Trash in a Ditch.

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 8 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

At the end of a chain with interlocking oval rings, a silver, antiqued pendant rested on the chest of Elena’s gray sweatshirt. Shaped like a moth with outstretched wings, it was engraved with intricate vein patterns and mirrored, trapezoidal marks. The moth’s abdomen segmented into tiers of carefully sculpted rings. In place of a thorax, a three-dimensional human skull stared through blackened eye sockets. An anonymous artisan had carved a tiny cavity to serve as the nose. This metallic moth evoked the design of an ancient aircraft, belonging to a civilization that leapt from worshipping nature to soaring through the skies, aiming for the stars.

I pointed at Elena’s necklace.

“That pendant you kept fiddling with… a striking piece of jewelry.”

She lifted it from her chest and held it up to admire it. Her fingers traced the moth’s wings as though caressing a lover.

“A gift from myself to myself, bought from a small business in England. Genus Cosmia, family Noctuidae.”

“You sure? There’s a family of moths whose thorax markings resemble a human skull. Death’s-head hawkmoths, I think they’re called. You know, like in The Silence of the Lambs.”

Elena narrowed her eyes at me. She opened her mouth with a smacking sound.

“Are you an expert in lepidopterology, questioning the taxonomy of my own damn pendant? Well, excuse me, master entomologist. I prefer to think of it as a Cosmia moth, if you don’t mind. I wear it to ward off idiots.”

“I’m guessing it’s not a hundred percent effective.”

Elena dipped her chin slightly and half-smiled while spearing me with her icy blues. Loose almond-blonde strands cascading near her cheeks framed her pale, oval face. She let the pendant drop onto her sweatshirt.

“Maybe not strong enough to repel the worst of them.”

“I didn’t mean to trigger an identity crisis for that cute, ominous moth of yours.”

“Hey, I understand them. They’ll keep flying into a flame over and over until their wings turn to ash. Like all of us who can’t stop destroying ourselves for something beautiful we can never reach. Funny how a piece of jewelry can carry the weight of one’s fucked-up existence.”

I emptied my glass, then set it on the table calmly. A breeze stirred the sago palms, making their fronds tremble.

“Can’t help but think that Siobhan is a fictionalized version of you, who also feels rotten and alienated. Are you suicidal?”

Elena leaned back in her rattan chair, arms crossed as she gazed upward at a sky that had turned a dull slate-gray, like a battleship’s hull. The air hung heavy with the scent of impending rain.

“Closing the blinds on a never-ending night… The ultimate expression of individualism, of a person’s sovereignty over themselves. I’ve been alive for twenty-eight years, but I usually feel like I’m seventy. Tired from the moment I wake up. I’m like a milk bottle forgotten in the back of a fridge for too long. If you open it, the stench of the curdled, rancid mess inside will tell you to dump it down the drain. Hell, throw out the bottle too. And how could I be surprised? Unless you belong to some lucky breed, this world will beat the shit out of you. It’ll leave you bruised and bloodied on a sidewalk, and if you dare to stand up and ask why, it’ll kick you in the stomach. That I still experience joy from time to time, despite the decay and misery, is a fucking miracle.”

“Have you ever found yourself that gone? About to jump, whatever form that leap would take?”

Elena wrapped her fingers around her glass of coffee and stared into its black surface like a scryer. Her voice came from a distant, hollow place.

“I wish I could do anything to prevent it, but one day my oldest friend will return for its next uninvited visit. Maybe it will find me, like other times, curled in bed. A hole will open in my brain. I will feel its edges expanding, reaching out to the corners of my mind. A murky, ravenous void devouring everything that makes life bearable. Its gravity deforming space-time, causing the bed and the apartment and the building and the planet itself to warp toward its blackness, one light after another winking out. I will find myself holding onto the bedclothes even though I know that once again the void will gobble me down, and inside of that pitch-black pit, the things I used to love will become as appealing as a pile of dead insects. Then the echoing mockery, speaking with the voice of those who have hurt me, of those I have hurt. Hey, you waste. Hey, you monster. All the ways you kept busy, all those words you wielded and songs you listened to, did you think they could stop me from finding you again? What are you but a scared little girl bawling for her mother?”

I swallowed. My throat felt as though I’d gulped sand. Elena’s shoulders rose and fell with a deep breath. She ran her fingers through her almond-blonde hair, disturbing its arrangement.

“Then the emptiness. A bottomless, sucking nothing that makes you want to crawl out of your skin. The only way to feel anything other than the void’s cold would be to tear the flesh off your bones. To bite your tongue until it comes off and blood fills your mouth. To gouge your eyes out. Pain is always real, always true. But even then, you would remain trapped inside your skull. A ghost haunting the ruins of a mind. Nothing to hold onto except the idea of it all ending. Then you find yourself with a knife pressed against a pulsing artery. Sitting on the floor of your bathroom, the tiles cold and hard against the soles of your feet, staring at a bottle of pills. Standing at the edge of a bridge, watching the cars pass below. Facing an approaching train and wondering if your legs will obey when you order them to leap. Unafraid of death but terrified of the pain that leads up to it, even as you tell yourself that the momentary suffering will lead to permanent silence, to a sleep so deep that the alarm clock of life will never jolt you again.”

Elena fell silent. Wispy blonde locks escaped around her temples, partially shadowing her pale blues as they fixed on me. Her lips trembled as if she were fighting to hold back a smile, but they betrayed her, curving into a slight grin that barely parted at the center, that dimpled her cheeks, and framed her mouth with black parentheses. Her smile looked like a jagged crack across the bone-white surface of a ceramic mask that hid a terrible visage. I reached for my glass to take another sip of decaf, but the bitter beverage was gone.

“So, to answer your question, Jon: yes, I’ve been that far gone. And I’ll be there again. I’m one day away from becoming Siobhan. I’ve never had someone to pull me back, I’ve never even had anyone tell me, ‘It’s going to pass,’ or ‘You’re not alone.’ So I’ve always had to claw my way out. And I can’t say that I backed away from the abyss because of some grand realization about how life is wonderful, or that I’d miss out on the taste of coffee, or the sound of a good song. I didn’t jump because I’m a fucking coward. Afraid of pain. Of the knife’s cold bite. Of waking up in the hospital with a tube shoved down my throat. Of the train only cutting me in half. Of the rocks only breaking my spine or my pelvis, leaving me crippled and helpless, to drown when the tide rises. Maybe that’s the worst thing: not being strong enough to take your own life. Not brave enough to die.”

A chill rippled down my spine, leaving a wake of goosebumps along my forearms. I couldn’t peel my gaze off the creature in front of me. I felt like I’d stumbled into a secret chamber where the world was stripped of pretenses and lies, and only the raw, pulsating heart of things remained.

Elena’s eyes, unblinking and intense—the pale blue of a sky filtered by a thin layer of smog, of an alien world’s sun, of loneliness—drilled through flesh and bone to reach the deepest part of me.

“There it is again,” Elena said, “that constipated expression. Maybe you shouldn’t ask girls about suicide before their coffees have cooled.”

“Thank you for trusting me with that. I’m sorry you had to go through it alone.”

“If I had shuffled off this shitty Earth, it would have been such a loss, huh?”

“There would be an emptiness where someone who brought beauty into the world used to exist. No more stories from you, no more of your thoughts, no more of your voice.”

“You think that’s what I do, bring beauty? I’m just a nutcase with an overactive imagination. Listen, Jon: my final revenge against the world will be a feeble fart in the dark. Or a shit stain. People who knew me in person will pretend to be sad for a week, maybe less, and then on to the next thing.” Elena sighed, and shifted in her chair. “If this is the point where you stand up and tell me that I’m too fucked in the head and too much of a lost cause, I’ll understand. Hell, I’d bail on me if I could.”

“No, I’m just glad I can sit here and listen to what you have to say.”

“A front-row seat to the freak show. Maybe you’re just glad you still have a chance to get laid. But hey, this emotional leper has survived for twenty-eight years. I might live to a hundred. They’ll have to stick me in a sarcophagus along with a warning not to open it ever.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “No Surprises” by Radiohead.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 19 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

I interposed a city block between my car and the police station. I wound through the streets like Pac-Man in a maze. Scanning for patrol cars, I tracked vehicles crossing my path and those in my lane. I anticipated sirens erupting from the engine whine. The two times a cruiser appeared, I hunched behind the wheel, looped the block like a roundabout, and resumed my route.

I veered toward the mall. The engine’s backfires—smoker’s coughs—drew pedestrians’ stares. When I reached the mall’s street, I parallel-parked in reverse, trunk facing the plaza, wedging my car between a Hyundai Sonata and a delivery van where two workers unloaded food crates.

My heart raced. My Adam’s apple lodged in my throat as if I teetered on a cliff’s edge. Vision blurred red at the edges. Leaving the engine running, I circled to the trunk, keyed the lock, and lifted the lid. A stench assaulted me—the defense spray of some cephalopodan cosmic abomination. I held my breath as I hauled out the corpse, stepped back, and set the dripping bundle on the pavement.

I uncovered the child by tearing through the plastic. It was like peeling a bandage from a festering wound—wet, sucking sounds accompanied the separation, as strands of viscous slime stretched away from the greenish, blistered skin. With every shred of plastic I discarded, pale worms tumbled out, writhing atop splatters of filth like mutilated figures. The corpse’s crumpled form expanded like a soaked sponge, while beneath it spread a widening pool of putrid fluid clotted with clumps of sodden soil.

Shouts erupted. I straightened to face the arc of a crowd resembling a parting school of fish before a shark. Their soap, shampoo, and aftershave scents, of this dozen of people who had taken showers and readied for work or to go shopping, formed a levee against the rot. A gallery of horrified faces glistened in the sun. A woman shielded a sobbing girl’s eyes and fled. A bug-eyed man alternated between gaping at the boy and me. A deliveryman insulted and shoved me, then stumbled aside to vomit.

I pointed at the corpse.

“That boy belongs to you.”

Some retreated; others replaced them. A man and a pair of teens dialed phones, eager to share the news with the police. Others aimed their phones horizontally or vertically to shoot their flashes or record. Each electronic imitation of a camera’s shutter click made me yearn to hide. My legs itched to run. Our ruin—the boy’s and mine—would flood screens nationwide, tethering my existence to these images forever.

The scream-weary left, leaving flushed faces demanding answers or hurling insults. A few smiled at their phones as if gifted a bonus. Strange people who needed to prove they’d been here and witnessed this.

I faced the lenses, let the flashes blind me. Let them see. Let it sear those lives that depended on convincing themselves that aberrations like the boy and myself didn’t exist, that nobody would run over a child and then parade its rotting corpse. Let this knowledge fester in their minds like the memories of shame, defeat, loss.

Darkness enveloped them like a net. Taught since childhood that light banishes horrors, they had forgotten the truth: our universe’s dark web, speckled with glowing motes and smears, teemed with monsters waiting for the day we forgot their forms and ceased to understand them.

Here I stand. I exist.

The crowd stirred. Two black officers, same ones from the station, shouldered through, ordering dispersal. They emerged like boxers entering a ring. Before the corpse lying in a pool of its own juices, one of the officers recoiled, the other covered his mouth.

I lunged toward the asphalt. The coffee-haired officer drew his pistol, but as he shouted “Stop!”, I ducked beneath the roofline, slid into the car, and hit the gas. Swerving through screeching traffic, I rocketed down the street. In the rearview, those shrinking officers piled into their cruiser. They activated the police lights.

The rear wheels of my car skidded on the curves while the cops’ siren howled from side to side like a giant in pursuit. I weaved through the vehicles, rigid in my seat, blood roaring in my eardrums. I was racing against the clock along the dirt roads of an oil field.

As we sped toward an intersection, another patrol car showed up in the perpendicular lane. Behind the windshield, both officers craned their necks. They flicked on their lights and sirens and surged into the chase.

Five blocks later, three patrol cars crowded my rearview mirror. The officers’ faces and the darkened lenses of their sunglasses loomed through the glare sweeping across their windshields. One cop pressed a two-way radio to his mouth. As we raced past, cars, SUVs, vans, and pickups veered aside like panicked animals, while herds of pedestrians scrambled across crosswalks as though fleeing an advancing torrent of lava.

Four patrol cars. Red and blue lights flooded my cabin. Voices barked through megaphones, ordering me to stop, their commands shattered by bursts of static. They kept shouting even though they knew I’d refuse.

On the deserted asphalt straights, a patrol car would surge forward, slamming its bumper’s edge into my trunk, trying to spin my car like a top, but I wrestled the wheel, keeping it straight. Through the curves, I skidded sideways. The vial filled with shrapnel, dangling from a string tied to the rearview mirror, swung at forty-five-degree angles—left, then right—mirroring how my torso lurched toward the door or the gearstick. The chassis groaned; my seat shuddered. Acrid smoke that reeked of scorched rubber streamed in through the window, masking the lingering stench of rot, the ghost of a corpse.

I merged into the route I took every afternoon on my way home. Why not? I entered the street where, three hundred yards ahead, five days a week, I would turn to park in front of my apartment building. Down the street, a photorealistic mural painted on the face of a cliff depicted a strip of road narrowing toward the horizon, where the asphalt rippled and the silhouettes of cars, pedestrians, signs, and traffic lights seethed together like food sizzling in a skillet.

I pictured myself swerving, parking in front of the building, and sprinting upstairs—my lungs searing—all the way to my apartment. The roar of policemen shoving one another up the stairs in a chaotic stampede would grow louder. I’d rip out a sheet of notebook paper, hastily write “sorry for the mess” in ballpoint pen, and set the sheet on the entryway table, next to the jumble of old keys and coins.

My fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone numb. My arms had stiffened into rigidity. The car was about to slam into the painted backdrop hurtling toward me. For a quarter-mile, the road snaked through manicured grass before emptying into a parking lot that encircled single-story buildings—structures resembling houses torn loose by a flood and deposited miles away, alongside a Mexican restaurant and a Jack in the Box. Behind them, a towering pillar bore the Chevron gas station logo, reaching skyward. Once I collided with that photorealistic panorama, the car’s frame would crumple like an accordion, my flesh and bones would shatter, and blood would jet under pressure from every orifice and gash.

But the car sliced through the mirage and continued down the street. The serpentine road lashed like a whip until it yielded to the parking lot. The Mexican restaurant and the Jack in the Box, behind whose windows shadowy figures shifted, slid past my left, unveiling the gas station they had concealed. There, a woman angled the nozzle of a gasoline pump toward her car’s fuel tank. The pillar swept across my window like an opaque band in a scanner’s pass.

Along both sidewalks, new shops lined the streets, their display windows alive with flickering glimmers. Pedestrians halted or turned to follow the commotion of the chase. A couple—the boy seated on a bench, the girl perched on his lap—craned their necks and tensed as if to stand. A woman pushing a stroller swiftly veered off, pressing herself against a building entrance. Two men in suits, one silver-haired and the other with a jet-black goatee, shook their heads as they watched the fabric of order unravel.

Stabs of light pierced through the darkness, and now that I sharpened my gaze, I could glimpse the lines linking those stabs, hinting at shapes. Patterns to decipher.

The speedometer needle quivered, the shrapnel vial swayed, the engine roared and backfired, and I laughed and laughed. A world was being born for me.

THE END

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

Today’s song is “3 Legged Animals” by Califone.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 18 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old man trudged away, brow sunk.

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

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

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

“Good morning,” I told the officer.

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

“Just a moment, please.”

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

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

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

I took a deep breath and regained my voice.

“I want to turn myself in.”

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

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

She studied my scarred cheekbone and dead eye.

“Fireworks mishap?”

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

“What’s that?”

“I’m surrendering for a crime.”

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

“What’d you do?”

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

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

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

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

“In the trunk of my car.”

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

I pulled out the key.

“You might want to cover your nose.”

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

“Just open it.”

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

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

The officer spoke as if stifling a cough.

“Something’s wrong with this boy.”

“He’s rotting.”

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

“One of them?”

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

“Where’d you say you hit him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There were others.”

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

A grimace seized my face like a puppet’s.

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

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

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

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

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

The next part will conclude this novella.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 17 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You kidding?” I said. “That hungry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m making it worse.”

I stepped back. Teetered until my legs steadied.

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

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

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

The Scrap Colossus, Pt. 7 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial1 Comment

I took an unhurried sip of my decaf, then settled back into the narrative. Its point-of-view character got dressed and left the house—perched near a craggy coastline—in pursuit of a woman named Siobhan. The narrator trudged through the windswept landscape, rain lashing their face, as the sea thrashed the cliffs’ serrated rocks in an echoing rumble. A cherry-red hood and windbreaker flashed sharply against the leaden sky, like a drop of blood: Siobhan standing at the edge of a cliff. As the narrator approached, she turned her head, that freckled and pale canvas. Her gaze locked onto theirs cold and unflinching, as though scanning a face she’d never seen. The narrator sat beside her. Roaring, white-capped waves crashed against the jagged shoreline below, bursting into plumes of salty spray. The narrator hesitated, then asked Siobhan what was she doing there. Siobhan said that she was mustering the courage to throw herself off, hoping the rocks would crack her skull open.

My gaze flicked up from the page to Elena, who was leaning back in her chair. One side of her ivory face lay in shadow—a counterpoint to the almond-blonde cascade of her hair—while the afternoon light traced white highlights along her nose and the arch of her upper lip. Her right-hand fingers rested lightly against her chest, cradling the pendant suspended from a thin silver chain. She had taken shelter in a cocoon of introspection. Her cool, crystalline irises were locked on a remote point beyond the coffee shop, past Irún. I would have gladly paid any price to accompany Elena’s mind as it meandered through unseen corridors of thought. Instead, I had to coax from her the elusive translations of her inner world, using tools as clumsy as words.

I lowered my gaze and resumed reading. The narrator, in response to Siobhan’s suicidal impulse, begged her not to jump. She argued that she knew she was crazy. Her senses distorted the world, making everything around her seem unnervingly artificial, and her thoughts twisted it further. She felt that she belonged to some remote place that didn’t exist. Instead of slogging through such a nightmare with a shattered mind, she’d rather die. The narrator replied that she’d get used to it, that she’d learn to live with the madness. Siobhan shook her head slowly. She said the world had always seemed absurd and alien to her, and now even painting, her refuge and salvation, had ceased to mask its rottenness. With every breath, she inhaled the rot as if the air itself was tainted. Darkness filled her stomach and lungs; when she gasped for fresh air, more blackness poured in.

Elena’s gaze lingered on my face as though she could see past the skin and bones to the neurons firing. Her lips were pressed thin around the tip of her thumb while she gnawed on the nail. Elena removed her thumb from her mouth to speak.

“Had enough yet?”

“No, but maybe I needed a breather. Intriguing so far: a stormy morning, the narrator trying to prevent their lover from jumping off a cliff because she believes herself to be insane… Atmospheric and urgent.”

“I’ll never get used to someone sitting in front of me and dissecting my darkness like it’s a normal way to spend an afternoon. Siobhan is his girlfriend, by the way.”

“Okay, so the narrator is a dude.”

“Although none of that matters when you’ve decided to become one with the rocks below. Please continue. I want to watch your reactions as you read. I’m sure the waiter will be back soon with overpriced coffee to wash down all this existential dread. Oh, as if summoned…”

The waiter reappeared by our side. He placed a glass of ink-dark coffee before Elena, then slipped away. The scent of roasted, earthy beans rose along with delicate curls of steam.

“They really take their time here to serve you a simple coffee,” Elena said.

She wrapped her slim hands around the warm glass, lifted it and blew on the coffee, sending ripples through its black surface. When it stilled, the steam washed over Elena’s lips, framing them in wispy vapors. Her eyes narrowed in a squint as she took a tentative sip, then a longer gulp.

I flipped to the next page and plunged back into Elena’s story. The narrator begged Siobhan to tell him what he needed to do to bring his girlfriend back home. One of her slippers, its sole mud-caked, hung limply from her toe, teetering over the abyss. Siobhan told the narrator to join her in death. If he loved her, he wouldn’t want to live after she jumped. Besides, they owed it to each other for the pain they’d caused through countless compromises.

Raindrops needled Siobhan’s eyes as she stared at the clouds. A lightning flash illuminated the contours of her forehead, nose, and lips. Calmly, she told her boyfriend not to stare at her like that, because she couldn’t be saved.

The narrator stood up and stepped back lest a dizzy spell cause him to stumble off the cliff. In one swift motion, he slipped his hands under Siobhan’s armpits and pulled. A startled whimper escaped her. As he dragged his girlfriend away from the ledge, Siobhan wriggled free, rose, and lunged at him to shove him, but he overpowered her, pinning her onto the muddy grass. He rolled up the sleeves of her cherry-red windbreaker and seized her wrists. Despite the burning ache in his lungs, the narrator continued hauling her toward their home while rain pelted them. Siobhan, after bucking and kicking and writhing for a while, went limp, leaving him burdened by her dead weight. Her bare heels carved furrows in the mud.

Once they arrived home, Siobhan let the narrator assist her up the stairs. In their bedroom, he removed her windbreaker and peeled off the wrinkled, mud-stained, foul-smelling dress. Her body a sculpture of freckled flesh and goosebumps. The narrator dried his girlfriend’s hair and wiped the grime off her skin with towels, then carefully placed her in bed. He tucked the blanket up to her neck. Siobhan’s forehead burned. He examined the yellowing bruises on her wrists.

Siobhan tracked her boyfriend’s every move with eyes wide and feral, like a wild animal that has found itself trapped. In a cracked tone, she asked if he planned to guard her around the clock. The narrator replied that once the fever subsided, she would come to realize her malaise had clouded her judgment. Before long she would return to painting, and this suicide attempt would be reduced to a painful memory neither of them ever wished to discuss. Siobhan scoffed and suggested that maybe she would eventually forget why she had rushed toward the cliff, and how she had found her way back home.

A dizzy spell sent the narrator reeling backward until he hit the wall, after which he slid onto the floor. He wrapped his arms around his legs and pressed his forehead against his knees. Siobhan declared, her tone suddenly laced with realization, that this storm would never end. The excerpt ended there.

I laid the stapled papers on the table and reached for my decaf. I swirled the beverage around, then took a long gulp as the excerpt’s words sent ripples through me like those of a stone thrown into a lake.

“You look constipated, Jon,” Elena said. “Did you cringe at my awful writing?”

Her pale blues were trained on me like sniper sights, unblinking, unwavering, as though waiting for a clear shot to the head.

“Quite the opposite,” I replied. “It felt intimate and raw, like I’d invaded someone’s private world.”

“As though you’ve entered someone else’s consciousness and noticed the seams and patches, the voids, the unhealed cracks, and the darkness that bleeds from them?”

I nodded.

“Your prose made me feel chilly. I mean, the way the narrator had to drag his girlfriend, Siobhan, from the cliff’s edge… And her trying to make him realize the pointlessness of preventing her suicide, given that she intends to escape and throw herself off the moment her caretaker falls asleep.”

“If the world is a lie and her mind a warped lens, then the only truth is her suffering.”

“You chose this particular excerpt. Care to talk about why?”

Elena picked at the fraying denim across her right knee, her head lowered, eyes veiled by her lashes.

“Why I chose it, or why I chose the others for that matter? Hard to put into words something that hasn’t been decided through words. First of all, I need to make sure you aren’t a tourist, that your soul has a similar stench to mine. Second, I want you to comprehend that when you’re trapped inside your broken mind… well, those rocks at the bottom of the cliff can start looking awfully tempting. But more than that, think about the futility of trying to save someone who’s determined to self-destruct. The narrator, well, he’s in love, and that means he’s a fucking idiot. Or perhaps he’s in love with the idea of loving her. He may believe he’s doing the right thing, dragging Siobhan back from the cliff’s edge, but in reality he’s just prolonging her agony because he can’t handle the truth of what she’s become.” Elena took a sip of her coffee. A faint, dark mustache stained her upper lip. Her tongue flicked across the smudge, erasing it. “I couldn’t write a happy ending for that one. Then again, I don’t know how to write happy stories. Or how to live them.”

Author’s note: today’s song is “Teardrop” by Massive Attack.

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 16 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I spoke, my voice croaked.

“Better that way, huh?”

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

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

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

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

Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 15 (Fiction)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Inteligencia artificial2 Comments

A throng of workers busied themselves smoking and chatting while other workers streamed out of the locker room like ants from a kicked nest. I staggered, nearly crashing into the back of a lumbering guy. My stomach acid churned. I was salivating profusely, and my tongue detected the taste of bile. I clutched my chest with my palm, overwhelmed as if the temperature shift after that fridge of an office had cut off my digestion.

I was hobbling through the cluster of workers when I discovered Caroline standing by the container. She regarded me with curiosity, then withdrew her empty hand from the heap of trash.

I wavered, dizzy. Caroline. I had quit the workshop, yet that woman would keep coming—and that would be the end.

My sight clouded. I gasped for air. As I approached Caroline, she turned as if to greet me, and I swept her into my arms, lifting her a few inches off the ground. When I pressed my injured cheek against hers, mine flared with a burning pain. Her hair smelled like some stuffed toy that had gathered layers of dust in a storage room.

It took all my effort to unknot my throat.

“It should have been different.”

Her small breasts were mashed against my chest, and the jagged contours of her ribs dug into my forearms. The woman’s hands clawed at my back beneath my shoulder blades, her broken nails sharp as razor tips. Caroline would shred my shirt and undershirt, slit open my skin, pry apart my flesh, wrench my ribs until they splintered like rotted timber, root through my entrails, and drag out my lungs and heart through the gashes. She’d cram the organs into her dress pockets until the seams split, then return home to scale her tower of shattered relics and perch my lungs and heart at the pinnacle. There, they’d bleed out, drenching the machine parts and her bronze horse in a slick glaze of varnish.

I peeled away from her like a band-aid. As I walked off, I fixed my gaze straight ahead. I was nearing the blurry line of vehicles and those waiting inside or out. The workshop, the yard, this daily crowd—they all receded into the past. Goodbye to this dump. Goodbye to the whir and thrum and squeaks of rubber dragging over dozens of rollers. I wished I could expel them from my mind, forget every second I had wasted here.

A gust of hot air swept dust onto the legs of my pants. I knew I was approaching my car, parked in front of the fence of the adjacent lot, because I sliced through a swampy stench that seeped through the gaps in the trunk and enveloped the vehicle’s body. When it invaded my nose, a retch struck me. I pressed my lips together and covered my mouth as I circled the car. After positioning the trunk between the workshop and me, I knelt on the gritty asphalt and retched violently, bile erupting through my nostrils and mouth like a geyser. Each spasm splattered the asphalt with a wet slap, pooling into a carrot-orange slick.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed cars passing by, and behind their windows, ghostly faces. I spat, then slumped against the curb. My throat and nostrils burned. Drenched in cold sweat and steeped in the stench, I pressed my forehead against the scorching metal of the car’s body. My consciousness floated like a rock in a stream of lava.

Come on, Alan. By now you should understand how it works. Life darkens in a gradual slip until the last light goes out.

I rubbed my mouth and wiped my dirty hand on my pants as I circled the car toward the driver’s door. I stepped into the cramped, closed compartment of the vehicle, which may as well have been a lit heater aimed at a rotting corpse. I lowered the window and breathed through my mouth. When I started the engine, it coughed like an old man.

A rear door swung open. I looked over my shoulder as if I suspected someone was pressed against my bedroom window in the dead of night. Christopher folded his giraffe-like frame into the seat.

“You can take me downtown, right?”

“No.”

The man, as if assuming I’d recited the correct line from a script, had gotten in and closed the door. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to settle into a seat with some loose spring that jabbed his buttocks.

I opened my mouth to order him out, but the SUV belonging to the supervisor’s sister was maneuvering to merge onto the road, and the mob of workers was multiplying as if about to engulf my car. I pictured them pounding on the windows and climbing onto the hood. I accelerated.

“You forgot to stop by the locker room,” Christopher said.

The purple sleeves of the work coat covered my arms.

“I’ll keep it as a gift.”

Half a mile from the workshop, I stole a glance at the man in the rearview mirror. He had lowered his window to let the air in.

Out in the desert to my right, oil pumps bobbed along like families of elephants. The muscles in my neck relaxed.

“Do you like this?” Christopher asked.

In the mirror, his brown irises floated in egg-yellow sclera. His eyelids were heavy, and his features a far cry from his usual imitation of a dog eager for its master’s attention.

“I often drive for pleasure,” I said.

“Working at the workshop.”

I shook my head. Why was he asking? Did I care? I paused at an intersection and glanced both ways before speaking again.

“How could I like it? Do you like it?”

“Somebody must.”

“Well, I’d like to meet that person and punch them.”

Christopher fell silent.

On the sidewalk, past evenly spaced decorative trees, beauty and clothing stores lined up. Dozens of people occupied the outdoor tables of cafés and bars, drinking and chatting under marigold-orange parasols. A woman browsed a storefront while clutching her shopping bags. A group of children shrieked and laughed.

At every bump, Christopher trembled. He scratched along the arched seam of his shaved head. My insides turned cold once more.

“Do you know what I worked as before the accident?” the man asked.

“You were a civil engineer.”

Christopher stiffened and his eyes widened as if I had unearthed a secret from his childhood.

“How do you know?”

“You’ve told me a couple of times.”

His face contorted. The man ran his fingers over the raised edges of his scar, and shrank as if wanting the backrest to swallow him.

“Sorry.”

“It’s alright.” I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. “It’s alright, really. Everyone does what they can.”

“Let yourself be carried by the current. Someone told me that. Act like the person you need to be, and eventually you’ll get used to it.”

“Sounds degrading.”

Christopher lowered his voice, talking to himself.

“When you can’t keep pace with people, they leave you behind. It’s hard to get someone to stop even for a moment.”

What had this guy meant by “downtown”? Did he expect me to know where they usually dropped him off, or had he forgotten that he was supposed to get off at some point?

“I mean, at the workshop I can talk to other people,” Christopher said, “and I’m getting paid. But is it worth it?”

I exhaled through clenched teeth. I shrugged.

The man wrinkled his nose, then cupped his palm over the lower half of his face.

“I have to ask. What is that stench? Have you left your lunch out in the sun for a week?”

“I’ve hidden a dead child in the trunk, and it’s rotting.”

I came to my senses as if waking up in a cryogenic chamber, and slowed the car in case it rammed into some obstacle. Had that sentence really come out of my mouth?

The sounds bubbled back as Christopher spat out a laugh. He had closed his eyes and leaned his head back, but his laugh was cut short, his face soured, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The man bowed his head. After a shudder, tears brimmed over, trailing along the wrinkles that bracketed his mouth.

I drove rigidly, holding my breath, in case any misstep tempted Christopher to get out of the car and extract the child. In the rearview mirror, the man had pressed his chin to his chest and was wiping away his tears.

A car pulled up so close that its bumper nearly slammed into my trunk. It honked like someone would ring a doorbell when being chased. Héctor. The oily bastard, taking advantage of a stretch where no vehicle came from the opposite lane, swerved and accelerated until the front of his car aligned with mine. He leaned toward the lowered passenger window to shout at Christopher.

“What are you doing, man? I’ve waited to pick you up after work, only to find out you’ve gotten into the car of this psychopath?”

When Christopher lifted his head, he furrowed his brow as if to burst a pimple. Two wrinkles on his forehead formed a V. In his eyes burned the anger of someone ready to break his knuckles against a wall.

“Shut up.”

Héctor recoiled, pale, and regarded his companion as if he were an impostor.

A truck from the opposite lane roared, and Héctor braked and maneuvered to return to my lane. At the next intersection, I turned to avoid him. Two blocks later, that man’s car had vanished from the rearview mirror.

For a few minutes I drove on autopilot. In the darkness of my mind, the child’s skin blistered into dozens of boils that burst, expelling a poisonous gas.

Through his window, Christopher pointed to a building. We were approaching the shopping mall, its facade rising like stretches of beige battlements adorned with the signs of a Bed Bath & Beyond, a J.C. Penney, and a Ralph Lauren. Along the facade, rectangular openings gaped, darkened by the angle of the sun.

“Right here.”

I parked. Christopher emerged as if from a dog kennel, and when he stretched, half of his torso disappeared over the car’s body.

“Thanks.”

I hunched to look at him through the window, but the man was turning toward the mall. I caught a glimpse of his neck.

“Take care.”

He walked away with unsteady steps among couples and parents with their children. Christopher’s figure—towering at least two heads above most, gangly like a tree grown crooked—vanished beneath the mall’s lights.

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

Today’s song is “The Rip” by Portishead.

Back then it wasn’t yet time to return to you, Caroline.