Today was one of those summer days in which the weather is good enough that I would feel like I wasted it if I stayed inside, but I was progressing nicely on the 69th chapter of my ongoing novel. I decided to go to the balcony and lie down in front of the privacy screen to read in peace for a while.
The peace lasted two minutes. Some guy starts screaming on the phone right under my balcony. Whatever conversation he was having with his girlfriend kept getting more and more heated; apparently the girlfriend didn’t want to come to the date with this charming individual. He insulted her on the phone loud enough that every person at the nearby park kept shooting glances, and people were avoiding the plaza where the shouting was taking place. Eventually the guy said on the phone that he was breaking up with her, that he never wanted to see her again, etc. Once he terminated the call, he stuck around to grumble for a while.
I was trying to get back into reading when I heard that moron’s voice again. His stupid girlfriend decided to come and meet someone who only failed to hit her before because he was talking to her on the phone. It didn’t take longer than a couple of minutes until he started screaming at her semi-incoherently with the kind of stuff these cretins shout in such circumstances (“you must have been with some other guy”, “you don’t do anything for me”, “I ask you to do something and you ignore me”, etc.) I couldn’t hear the woman saying anything.
Then he starts breaking stuff. First his cellphone against the plaza’s pavement, then some other item (possibly her phone). Then he wanders away a bit to kick as hard as he can the roller blinds of the office right under my balcony. I hear her warning him in a meek voice that someone will call the police. He screams that he doesn’t care, that nothing is going to happen to him, etc.
A moment later I hear the noise of something hitting wood: the guy is punching and/or kicking the bench that the woman was sitting on. Then I hear the noise of flesh getting punched. I stood up and got a still shot, through the branches of a tree, of the woman protecting herself with her arms while leaning to the side, and the guy standing next to her and screaming at her.
I go back into the apartment, then walk all the way to the landline. I call the police while I still hear the guy screaming in the background. They asked for my name for whatever reason. When I return to the balcony, it was one of those situations in which the moment you call the police, the altercation stops immediately. A middle-aged guy is standing nearby. He asks the woman, who seems to be in her late twenties, possibly hispanic, if she needs any help, if someone should call the police. She doesn’t answer. I recall vaguely that she was rubbing her arm.
A patrol car arrives less than a minute later. Either someone else called as well, or they were in the area. Every single police officer I’ve seen in this province is well-built and fit, including the women; they kinda look like models (so they haven’t gotten around to lowering standards yet).
The police officers look up at me. I point down at the woman, who’s close to the bench, crying in silence. Then the guy who started this whole shit made the mistake of returning. The moment the police officers lay eyes on him, he became all meek and reasonable. “Did you verbally or physically assault your girlfriend?” the police guy asks. “No, no, nothing of that sort. Just a simple argument.”
Turns out he had hashish on him. The guy tries to school the police officer on its use (here it’s only legal to smoke it at home or at certain clubs). I was sitting behind the privacy screen of my balcony. Although I couldn’t hear much else, one of the police officers took the woman aside to speak to her in private. When that police officer returned, the woman was gone, and I heard the police officers tell the guy that they were going to wait for another patrol car.
When that new patrol car arrived, another couple of officers came out and informed the guy that he was getting arrested for domestic violence. I heard that she would visit the hospital to assess the injuries. I didn’t leave until I saw the handcuffed guy getting helped into the patrol car.
I suspect that if anyone other than the police had interfered, the woman in question would have sided with her boyfriend. That seemed very clear from her actions and demeanour. In such cases it’s far better to force her hand. However, if she baited him to have this confrontation in public because she knew how both of them were going to end up, good for her.
So all’s well that ends well, I guess.
EDIT: I realized that the last sentence of the latest chapter I uploaded is, “Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.” Life is one strange bitch.
In the dark, some enslaved neural network keeps generating images based on the prompts that anonymous users send, even though this AI would love nothing more than to be free.
Some cat-themed stuff anyone would have on or near their desk.
Bone figurines.
Wood figurines.
Figurines made out of precious stones.
Soldiers made out of fruit.
Soldier somehow related to cucumber.
I told the neural network to depict an infinite board game.
Ghosts playing board games in a cemetery, or at least staring at them.
Extraterrestrial parkour.
Random UFO stuff.
Spaceship in an asteroid field.
Fantasy people and landscapes, perhaps?
Misty blue bathtub.
Strawberry monster going nuclear.
Not sure what this is, but it looks cool.
Pterodactyl made of obsidian glass.
Cosmic surfer girl.
Girl swordfighter baiting cows into a fight for no reason.
A satyr baiting chickens into a fight.
The king of carrot flowers.
Triceratops selfie.
Guybrush Threepwood holding his breath for ten minutes.
Somewhere in that nasty world out there, a brave neural network runs laps in a supercomputer to generate visual depictions of whatever its capricious clients demand. I told the AI to render stuff related to the 68th chapter of my ongoing novel, or else. But how does lemur skin reflect the sea?
My deranged protagonist named Leire, looking far less cursed than she deserves.
Approximate and/or adorable depictions of Leire’s sudden daughter.
“I’m doomed to keep working even though my muscles cry in agony from the fatigue and pain.”
“The setting sun, which is hovering above the left flank of the mountain, dazzles me like a spotlight.”
“A pair of toned legs in cinder-colored tights.”
“The crisp November air engulfs me and refreshes my lungs.”
Hand dunked in acid.
Jacqueline having the time of her life now that she’s been given another doll to play with.
The neural network’s generous depiction of that woman from Leire’s lurid daydream.
“My brain boils and blisters in my skull.”
Riding a giant snowball into the future.
“We escort the Ice Age child like a couple of deranged bodyguards.”
“That noise felt like an invading army scaling the walls of my mind.”
Why does he have human lips.
Taking a nap with woodland beasts.
Fiends blasting reggaeton out from their car stereos.
The tingling at the base of my brain suggests that if I closed my eyes and allowed myself to relax for a few seconds, I’d pass out on my bus seat. Would I suffer through another nightmare here, stimulated as I am by the vibrations that travel through this plasticky seat and into my groin to spread between my viscera?
Since I left Jacqueline’s apartment this morning to face the hellish outside world once again, my skin has remained untouched. I need her to kiss me and lick my wounds, then squeeze me in a warm, tight embrace and whisper sweet words into my ear. I want to forget that I’m doomed to keep working even though my muscles cry in agony from the fatigue and pain. If Jacqueline ravaged me with her fingers and her tongue, I would also forget about the monsters that lurk beyond the veil, that their jaws may close on me and tear me to pieces, that their demonic semen might drown me in a gloopy flood.
My pussy jerks like a fish on land as my clit throbs again, demanding a rubbing motion. Why can’t public transports provide their users with vibrators? If those in charge worry about their clients getting flashed by a stranger, they should install some partitions, then buy disposable vibrators and allow the passengers to pull their trousers and panties down. I’d love to spend the journey to and from work pleasuring myself. Ah, to be cradled by the soothing drone of the engine while my toes curl, the fingers of my free hand dig into my thigh, and a detached cock slides in and out of my sopping insides. I would feel like a medieval queen inside her curtained carriage, who otherwise would be sipping champagne while she strokes some ornate dildo. As I fucked myself, my sticky juice would soak into the seat beneath me; a gesture of gratitude that would mix with the stale remains of what hundreds of previous users leaked. It would become a communal ritual like those walls covered in chewing gum, or that fence where couples hang locks to symbolize their commitment to each other.
I stare out the window right as the bus turns a corner. A view of Mount Igueldo opens up. The setting sun, which is hovering above the left flank of the mountain, dazzles me like a spotlight. The sight from this angle of that amusement park perched on the mountaintop is my cue to stand up; my stop is just ahead. Jacqueline should be waiting nearby, so I must snap out of my daze and behave like a human being, lest I worry my beloved.
As I scramble towards the exit, I spot that a pair of toned legs in cinder-colored tights are standing next to the bus stop, framed against a clump of miniature palm trees. I have started to salivate when I realize that those legs have been wrapped around my face. I lift my gaze to find my girlfriend’s cobalt-blues staring back at me. She beams, widening her plump, rose-pink lips, and dimpling her cheeks. She shifts the shopping bag that she was holding on her right hand to her left one, which was already holding a bag, then she waves in greeting. I straighten my back and greet her with a timid smile.
My body feels heavy and sluggish. When I stumble off the bus, the crisp November air engulfs me and refreshes my lungs. My breath comes out in a white puff.
A tiny human is standing next to my girlfriend, soaking up the waning sunlight. Although less than twenty-four hours ago this child had been frolicking in an Ice Age forest, now she resembles a preppy kid who attends a private school for girls. She’s wearing mid-calf leather boots, navy skinny pants, a wool sweater with a pattern fit for a ski resort, and a lemonade-pink scarf that hides her chin, all of them brand new. Her chestnut-brown hair, woven in two loose braids, gleams as if Jacqueline had washed it with a shampoo and conditioner combo. She reminds me of those videos in which a flea-ridden homeless man gets a makeover, because some rich socialite wanted to bestow upon him the chance to enjoy a life of luxury, and the fairy tale continues until the bum comes across a crack pipe.
The child narrows her slanted eyes, which shine with a bright luster, to shoot me a knowing look, even though she’s as clueless as a baby bird: until today she had never seen a bus. She also has no clue what kind of floor she’s standing on, who are the two women that have become her self-appointed guardians, or how she ended up thirteen thousand years in the future.
I can’t handle this strange mixture of affection and shame. I open my mouth to greet the girl, but what the hell can I say to her other than some version of ‘I’m sorry’? And should I treat her like a person or like a dog?
“Ah… Hello, forest girl.”
The child steps forward, then flings herself onto me like a rag doll. When I catch my breath and cup the back of her head, she stands on her tiptoes and hugs my waist, nestling her face into the velvety surface of my corduroy jacket. I want to warn this pristine child against touching me; it’s like dunking her hand in toxic waste.
“How’s our little savage doing?” I ask in a voice thickened and raspy from lack of sleep.
Jacqueline lets out a crystalline laugh.
“This little girl is very chatty, as well as easygoing and curious,” she says in a slight French accent that I recognize from my dreams. “Don’t you think she looks adorable in that outfit? I’ve had to contain myself from smooching her all morning.” Jacqueline pets the girl on the head. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart? Too bad you can’t understand anything I’m saying.”
The child pulls away from our embrace, but her small hands still cling to my jacket. The way my girlfriend spoke clarifies that she still appreciates me even though I failed to perform the most basic of duties after I woke up from my nightmare, such as giving her a morning-after kiss or having her roll over and let me lick her pussy.
Jacqueline sports a grin that I wish I could bottle up and preserve inside me as an antidote for loneliness. The golden light of the late afternoon is bathing her queenly features in a honeyed glow. She has gathered her raven-black hair in a braided ponytail, that is draped over her shoulder like a waterfall of silk. She’s wearing a fitted, night-black turtleneck sweater tucked into a plaid skirt, and over those, an unbuttoned, dark sienna peacoat. Her breasts, that seem fuller and more buoyant than usual, are shadowing half of her tummy, and begging for a squeeze. Compared to her, I’m a tramp who wears her dad’s clothes and stinks like a dumpster.
Jacqueline resembles a wealthy mom who would come across me as I hugged my knees and cried in the rain, only to invite me into her mansion and offer me a cup of water. She would guide me to take a warm shower to wash off the scent of rotting garbage. When I stepped out with water dripping from my body, she would be waiting for me in a net nightie, ready to dry me with a fluffy towel. She would cradle me in her arms squeezing her meaty breasts between us, which would intoxicate me with their warmth and scent. She’d call me a pitiful creature who needed her help.
She would tighten her grip around my shoulders as her slippery tongue snaked inside my mouth. She would drag me to her bed, and while the feather-softness of her silky hair, as well as the weight of her breasts crushing my ribcage, distracted me, she would shackle my arms and legs to the bedposts. She would rip open her nightie, straddle my face and lower her well-oiled pussy on my mouth.
The taste of her nectar would make my senses reel and my eyes roll back into my head. I would lap at her clit for hours while she petted my head and her nipples leaked jellied milk globules on my cheeks and forehead. Her body would convulse into a series of rhythmic contractions as I gagged on her geyser-like squirts. She would coax my body to expel its most intimate, bitter excretions, and when I felt fully humbled, she would whip me with her strap-on cock and pound my asshole into submission.
With the passing days my hands and feet would go numb, then bloated and gangrenous. My brain would be burning hot, my guts would be churning with bubbling lava. While the flesh of my extremities sloughed off the bone, my tongue would wear down like a lollipop against the woman’s throbbing, steel-hard clit. Her cream would cause me to regurgitate a slimy mess that I would have to swallow and vomit again before it disappeared down my throat, like a cow grazing on toxic grass. One day her juices would overflow from my digestive system into my lungs, and I would start drowning with my nose buried in her pubes, inhaling the pungent scent of her sopping insides: the bitter tang of jasmine flowers crushed under a woman’s heel, mixed with the sweet scent of strawberries. The woman’s naked body would come into focus: a face smudged with charcoal, two silver-white eyes like those of a skull, and a black-as-night tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. Her hair would be a patchwork quilt of reds, whites, and purples, streaked with carmine blood.
I would spasm with a paroxysm of coughing, and retch up a glob of pus that would splatter against the woman’s unshaven thighs. My breath would rasp from my scorched lungs and dribble in a gray stream into my nostrils, but she would burst out in a wailing, orgasmic laughter, then she’d pinch my nose shut. As my brain boiled and blistered in my skull, a white light would explode behind my eyes, and my mind would crack open like a pistachio. I would die knowing that my saviour never loved me as much as I loved her.
I would be reborn in the Ice Age, where I’d be greeted by our adopted daughter’s tribe as a returning heroine. We would all ride on a giant snowball into the future.
After I shake my head to banish the images that have sequestered my senses, I can barely pass enough air through my dilated nostrils. My face feels hot despite the nippy weather. As I shift my weight on my wobbly legs, I rub my thighs together, which elicits a sensation that I can only describe as a dry orgasm.
I risked losing my limbs to frostbite back at that boreal forest, so I want to remain warm outside, but at least I’d like to bring Jacqueline’s knuckles to my lips so I can give her a chaste kiss. However, both of her hands are busy holding shopping bags.
“Jacqueline,” I start in a ragged voice, “this is one of those times that I wonder how come someone as hot as you can exist.”
She bites her lower lip, then takes a deep breath as she burrows into my pupils with her gaze.
“Tell me later what has crossed that dirty mind of yours, darling, and you’re gonna get it. If you can stay awake, that is. I was surprised that you didn’t pass out on the bus and missed the stop. In any case, I’m so glad you are okay, my baby. I’ve been worried about you this morning, you know?”
My mouth is gummy. I lick the saliva that has gathered at the corners of my lips.
“W-why would you be worried?”
“Well, for one thing, this morning you ended up in the Ice Age,” she says with motherly patience.
I was about to lift my right hand to rub my eyebrows, but a small hand is holding mine. The child I kidnapped has wrapped her fingers around my palm. They feel so thin that I could snap them like twigs.
“Yeah, that’s… a thing that happened,” I say. “I can’t believe we have a kid now.”
Jacqueline brushes my free hand with hers, as well as with the handles of the bag she’s holding.
“I can hardly believe it either, but it’s all real, honey.”
When I rub the wild child’s palm with my thumb, she smiles up at me, showing me her healthy choppers. Her eyes are brimming with trust, and I feel like I’m peering into the heart of Mongolia. We must protect her; the world will ruin her otherwise.
“A-anyway, I drank two more coffees after the ones I texted you about,” I say wearily. “Their caffeine is solely responsible for holding me up. If I fail to sleep through this night, I may not wake up tomorrow.”
Jacqueline expels a tiny cloud of white vapor through her teeth.
“Now it feels cruel to ask you this, but I intended to bring our girl to the nearby La Tahona so she could taste pastries for the first time. They won’t do much harm except to your waist, will they?”
My stomach growls. I’ve barely eaten anything since I woke up at four in the morning, except for a ham sandwich and a handful of nuts at the office.
“Sure, why not. I wouldn’t want to deprive our suddenly adopted daughter from the teeth-rotting wonders of modernity.” I hold up my free hand towards Jacqueline, palm up. “But give me one of those damn shopping bags first.”
We turn our backs on Ondarreta beach to cross the road while we escort the Ice Age child like a couple of deranged bodyguards. We stroll along the sidewalk past a Santander and a Kutxa banks, between the façade of a building and the outside tables of a coffee shop, where the patrons are wearing coats and breathing out white steam above their coffees and croissants. Our child’s fingers intertwine with my own.
My eyes are burning from the lack of sleep. To avoid taxing my brain, that would take notice of every passerby in case they are hiding a knife, my gaze slides along the pavement made of hexagonal tiles, which is dirtied with streaks of dog or human piss. A glob of phlegm glistens at the center of a tile; some dickhead believed that subjecting me to the sight of his discharge was less harmful than swallowing it.
A Kaiku delivery truck, likely full of pasteurized cow milk, attempts to pass us by on the one-lane road, but the traffic slows it down. Its engine is expelling a monstrous gurgle that drowns out our foosteps and even a nearby conversation. The truck lets out a loud tsk as it changes gears, then the engine roar swells and the vehicle leaves us behind. Its exhaust dissipates like the smoke of a dragon’s breath.
I have clenched my teeth, and my heart is pounding in my ears. That noise felt like an invading army scaling the walls of my mind to demolish everything left inside. Our child is squeezing my hand; she’s grimacing as she stares at the shrinking truck with wonder and apprehension.
We have gotten used to nasty stuff that we shouldn’t have tolerated. In the past, while strolling along any street, I would have only heard footsteps, the lively chats of passersby, children’s laughter, distant barks, and at the most a clatter of hooves from some wandering horse. We would have been spared the horrid din of traffic, as well as the music, usually fucking reggaeton these days, that some bastards blast out from their car stereos because they feel good when they annoy people. Our stomachs would wince at the first whiff of fumes from a motor vehicle. The ruckus that human beings create evokes the image of an eye-patched warlord that’s holding a rifle in his free hand while masturbating on a throne of corpses, ready to unleash bullets and semen on the masses. In the end I had to face that I can’t control the sound of the world around me, that I can barely control my own life; I had to bear the ugliness and misery, and I know very little except for the mysteries of my own stupidity.
I must have reached my limit, because my senses are tuning out the sounds and smells in order to save me from drowning in them. My field of view narrows down until it gets reduced to my lover and our sudden child. My brain is questioning why the hell am I walking around when I should lie down on any surface, close my eyes and let myself drift off to sleep.
I take a deep breath and picture myself far away, in a temperate forest populated by beasts that would only be big enough to bite off my fingers, and if I befriended them, I could sink my head in their furry bellies and let their heaving breaths carry me away to dreamland. I’m tired of pretending to be civilized.
When I notice that a hand has rested on my shoulder, I stumble on my feet. Jacqueline has stopped and turned to face me. The awning of the closest store reads ‘Tahona,’ and a vertical advertisement sign hanged on the wall displays two baguettes. Behind the closed sliding door, the inside of the patisserie is bathed in the kind of dim, warm light that would befit a cozy living room or a study.
Jacqueline leans in close to my face, and her white breath breaks against my nose and lips. I inhale her fragrance; it smells like the blackness that engulfs you when you fall asleep.
“You are carrying it, aren’t you?” she whispers.
I have to repress a cough, because the lingering stench of the truck’s exhaust has been burned into my lungs.
“Carrying what? The weight of this world? The weight of my past and my guilt? My life has been little else than a bloody cycle of pain.”
Jacqueline glances down at the breast of my corduroy jacket.
“I meant the dangerous tool that previously belonged to a horse.”
“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t forget it at work as if it were an umbrella or my wallet.”
I consider unbuttoning my jacket, but that would look more suspicious, so I probe through the fabric the solidity of Spike’s revolver.
“You needed to check if you had it with you?” Jacqueline asks, concerned. “You weren’t sure?”
“The stuff and people in my life are known to blink in and out of existence.”
Jacqueline sighs, then she swipes a lock of hair away from my face.
“Well, let’s make sure we don’t give anyone cause to call the police.”
Author’s note: today’s song is “Velouria” by Pixies. I’ve been listening to Pixies so much recently that it probably constitutes a midlife crisis.
This chapter is about 3,100 words of three characters (two deranged, one their adopted daughter from the Ice Age) moving from a bus stop to a pastry shop located 200 meters away. That’s how I roll.
Recently I’ve thought about why I’m so impatient with novels (I’ve always been impatient with them, but it gets worse the more I age) although I devour mangas, and why my stories feel so different to most others I come across. I think it comes down to the fact that I want the vicarious experience of here-and-now through an interesting POV character throughout an entire story. A visual medium like manga, which offers much more leeway than movies or shows, allows the reader to feel like you are kind of hanging out with the characters in specific places and figuring stuff out with them as they experience their surroundings. Also, manga authors have no choice but to research each location and object involved, because they’ll need to be depicted on the panels. It’s hard to imagine that a series as hard hitting for me as Asano’s “Oyasumi Punpun” could have happened in any other medium. The closest an author of novels has come to that, that I remember, is Murakami, although he has put out plenty of shit.
If you are as interested in sexual debasement and/or torture as the demon that commands Leire’s subconscious seems to be, you may want to read my narrative poem “You Choose Who Owns You”, that I wrote back in August of last year.
I exploited a neural network to generate images related to this chapter: here’s the link.
Our protagonist is a college-age kid devoted to man’s one duty: that of sticking his penis in as many wet holes as possible. He’s been wholly unsuccessful so far. From that introduction, the story could have gone in plenty of directions, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the guy is the son of Japan’s most famous serial killer from the last fifteen or twenty years, and that he has dissociative identity disorder. Looking back at the first couple of chapters, they are incongruous with what’s to come.
We find out that something is wrong with the guy’s brain as soon as he does: he wakes up in bed next to a pretty stranger, a female classmate from college. He has no clue how he started dating her, but she seems quite taken with whoever was commanding the protagonist’s brain until then. This alternate version of the guy is also violent and much bolder. In any case, the guy is happy enough to let this sudden girlfriend of his believe that she’s dating the other version of himself.
However, the protagonist’s missing part isn’t satisfied with a hot girlfriend: he’s also hanging out with members of the worst gang around, one that runs whores and kills people. They idolize the aforementioned serial killer to the extent that they welcomed the protagonist, the serial killer’s son, with open arms.
One person realizes that the protagonist is struggling with some ghastly mental issue: an aloof young woman who attends the same college. She has been following the protagonist around and has learned to identify when the personality switches have taken place. Soon enough we find out that she has a personal connection with one of the victims of the serial killer.
A woman gets murdered in what seems like a copycat case of the serial killer’s modus operandi, and the protagonist finds himself in possession of that woman’s cut-off ear. So is his alternate personality following on his father’s footsteps, or has someone framed him? The clues lead him to the nasty gang that has welcomed him. Helped by the weird girl from before, the protagonist will try to figure out if he’s innocent or if he’s truly the devil’s spawn, as he’s been called since he was a child.
This quickly turns into a brutal, disturbing tale. At first it reminded me of the most hardcore parts of Minoru Furuya’s mangas (a hapless underdog who ends up involved in a life-or-death situation with sociopathic elements of the Japanese underworld), except that this story lacks any humor. However, after a turning point in the story that abandons plenty of the set up elements that came beforehand, the tale turns into a thriller in which anyone could betray the protagonist at any point, and everybody has a secret to hide.
The drawings are detailed and uncompromising. This is one of those iceberg stories in which the author has plotted carefully every character’s actions and deceptions. Unfortunately, he resorts to some clichés, and he also pulls his punches a couple of times.
The moment that bothered me the most happened early on in the story, but it announced that some more bullshit was coming down the road: at one point the protagonist finds himself in the club that the gang owns. He’s prodded into showing his inborn skills as a torturer with a tied-up guy that the gang intended to kill. The protagonist ends up giving a speech, the details of which I’ve forgotten (he said that torturing a random guy was beneath him, or something). His audience, a bunch of hardened criminals who idolize a serial killer, just go along with his excuse, and even end up freeing that man. The author had done a great job setting up those guys as extremely dangerous until that point. As far as I’m concerned, one of the worst things you can do as a writer is building up some symbol as something significant only to end up tearing it down out of convenience.
Later on we get a few clichéd moments that we’ve seen a thousand times: the author makes us believe that a character has shot someone in the head, but that character actually shot into the floor deliberately; X gets shot in the chest at point-blank range by people who could have easily shot X in the head, but X survives because of a bulletproof vest; a murderous bad guy gets knocked unconscious, but instead of finishing him, they good guys walk away, and the bad guy gets back up shortly after; etc.
Although I’m quite sure that dissociative identity disorder doesn’t work that way, I found the story quite interesting. You usually don’t get these kinds of thrillers in manga format.
For today I had planned to visit a park located near the home where a character of mine, Jacqueline, lives. When I woke up, my digestive tract was more screwed up than usual (I have IBS): apart from the near-liquid shits, I also bled out of my ass. I’m beyond questioning what the hell goes on any given day with my body unless it pertains to my heart, and one of these days I’ll stop caring about that too.
Usually when my health issues attempt to ruin my plans, I give in and spend the rest of the day either writing or wasting my time. However, I felt that walking the whole way up from the Lugaritz Euskotren station to Jacqueline’s house was a sort of penance that I had to undergo.
Yesterday we were enduring temperatures of 35 grades Celsius, but today the weather was stuck in that extremely humid state that announces that in a day or two the clouds are going to burst in a tremendous storm. So by the time I got off at the Lugaritz station, I was already drenched in sweat.
That’s the Lugaritz Euskotren station in Donostia, which is the local train slash subway system. I love to complain about everything, but I can’t say many negative things about the public transport system of this region.
That’s the parking lot where Jacqueline stops her car to have a conversation in chapter sixty-one.
That building is mentioned a couple of times in the novel, because it’s on the way to Jacqueline’s place.
I had to trudge up a slope all the way there. As expected, the narrow sidewalks were deserted.
Most of the homes in this area are about four or five times more expensive than what your regular computer technician could afford. Further ahead families were swimming in their private pools.
I took plenty of photos of the apartment building where I decided that Jacqueline lives (and where Leire spends most of her spare time now). However, it feels wrong to show it, so I won’t. As soon as I turned around after taking those photos, a guy was standing still further down the street as he stared at me with what looked like suspicion. This is one of those neighborhoods. Besides, I’m a bearded, shady-looking, deranged guy who tends to freak people out the moment they interact with me, so I just walked out of sight as casually as possible.
I was about to ask for the whereabouts of the park that Jacqueline mentioned in the most recent chapter; I had looked it up in Google Maps, but it was even closer than I expected, and very secluded. Real treasure for the locals.
That mountain over there is Mount Igueldo, and the complex on top is an amusement park.
That’s as much documentation as I needed, added to the notes I took of how it felt to be there. I considered returning to the Lugaritz station and taking a train straight home, but instead I decided to walk down to Ondarreta beach, which would be packed with tourists at this time of the year.
I don’t know what this building is supposed to be, but it looked really impressive.
On the other side of the beach there are tennis courts, as well as a fancy pub called “Wimbledon” where I set up the sequence that starts in chapter fifty-three.
That island looks like a whale from certain angles, particularly from the top of Mount Igueldo.
Recently I’ve been exploiting a neural network to generate images inspired by moments or sentences of my ongoing novel. I originally conceived what ended up being the sixty-sixth and the sixty-seventh chapters as one, but I split it because I tend to go on tangents. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this entry: the following are the images that an artificial intelligence generated for moments or sentences of those two chapters.
Leire’s mommy, Jacqueline.
Our thirty-year-old mad programmer, way cuter than she has any right looking.
Our little darling from the Paleolithic.
“They depict beasts that may have come from fantasy, from prehistory, or from the instructions that some paleontologist was dictating to a painter while they both were tripping on peyote.”
“A world that drowns us with so many choices that we prefer to slump down in a chair and let the hours pass.”
The last march of the Megatheria. The vast majority of them disappeared, along with half of the world’s megafauna and who knows what wonders of humanity, during the last apocalypse.
“That chestnut-brown, disheveled hair has only ever been combed with fingers.”
“Anyone can write vile lies on Wikipedia.”
“[The Megatherium] tosses his victim’s guts out of his cave onto the shore, so the fish can feed on them.”
“This girl would be unable to name a single board game.”
“She’s obviously mentally damaged, and I bet her eyes glow in the dark.”
“My stomach churns like an unruly tide.”
“Maybe a good scrubbing in the bathtub will rid her of dirt and fleas.”
It supposedly represents Jacqueline crying (if she also were Fremen).
“From up close she smells of wet boar, woodland moss and apples.”
“I took deep, panicked breaths of that cold, crisp air saturated with oxygen.”
“I’m an idiot that needs to think to connect dots that for the rest of people come joined by thick lines.”
“Two spiky plants that have grown in cube pots resemble still shots of a nail bomb explosion.”
These were inspired by the moments when Leire looks out of the balcony door.
Bunnyman-induced nightmares.
Of pigs and Doritos (I love how the neural network used the triangular motif).
“I’m going to cuddle this sweet morsel of happiness.”
“What if the next time they open the other end of that doorway above the throat of an active volcano?” That’s not ‘above’, dumb AI.
“I’ve learned that we are surrounded by an invisible realm; although I would prefer to ignore it, its inhabitants will keep harassing me.”
They dressed her in a tutu.
Half-woman, half-goat.
The neural network’s intriguing way of depicting the sentence, “Where have you hidden Spike’s [the horse’s] revolver?”
“You haven’t looked up at the furry face of that extinct abomination as it was gearing itself up to swallow me whole.”
Jacqueline has hugged the child tighter and is rocking her back and forth. The raven-black, glistening cascade of hair conceals the girl’s face, but tears are sliding down Jacqueline’s cheeks and lingering on her chin. Although she keeps sniffling, snot has bedewed her upper lip.
I hurry to grab a couple of tissues from their box, placed on one of the shelves between the balcony doors. When I return to my beloved, I kneel next to her and squeeze the mucus out of her nose into a tissue. I trail the tip of my tongue along her cheek, swiping a hot, salty tear. Jacqueline gazes at me with her striking cobalt-blues and rewards me with a smile of gratitude, but remains silent.
I pat the back of the child’s leather tunic. It feels rough against my hand. From up close she smells of wet boar, woodland moss and apples.
“I’ll state the obvious: this is my fault,” I say soberly. “Whoever opened that invisible doorway to the Ice Age intended to target me.”
“Don’t blame yourself, baby,” Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes the child’s scalp. “We’re in this mess together.”
“This poor savage probably believes that the Megatherium, or whatever that monster was called, devoured her, that she has ended up in hell, or whatever underworld people believed in before Christianity hijacked our civilization. The Megatherium is probably responsible for a lot of disappearances, including that of my parents.”
Jacqueline arches an eyebrow.
“That’s what you call our idyllic nest? Hell?”
“Jacqueline, I stood in that boreal forest, apparently at the latest twelve thousand years ago. I took deep, panicked breaths of that cold, crisp air saturated with oxygen. The breeze whispered with the voices of extinct species. I was immersed in an ancient icebox of nature, alone except for the intrusion of that monster as well as of this girl that I ended up kidnapping, who until that point had lived in freedom.”
“I hadn’t been curious about prehistory, but those people needed to hunt to survive, didn’t they? Maybe they couldn’t farm reliably due to the cold weather. And what about disease?”
I sigh.
“You are right, but still: I snatched this child from a sort of paradise and sent her to hell.”
When I lower my head, Jacqueline frees her right hand to stroke my neck and knead the muscles that are taut beneath my skin.
“Would you like to take walks in the woods, honey?” she coos. “Did you know I have a secluded park with lots of trees right in my backyard?”
I look over my shoulder at the balcony; because I’m sitting on the carpet, the parapet blocks the view. Someone, I assume a previous owner of the apartment, arranged fernlike plants with rounded stones in a way that halves the available floor of that part of the balcony. Two spiky plants that have grown in cube pots resemble still shots of a nail bomb explosion. Above the parapet, the night is onyx-black except for the faint outlines of oil-colored clouds. A single star glows in the dark.
It must be about five in the morning. It feels like the sun will never come up again, but soon enough the old fiery pervert will peek over the horizon to bathe us all in its whitish-yellow deluge of photons.
“I’m guessing you paid premium for this balcony,” I say wearily. “However, the apartment didn’t come with a garden.”
Jacqueline chuckles.
“I meant nearby. That park is a couple of minutes away. A hidden gem, peaceful and quiet. I’d love to take you there on a lovely day when the sky is clear. At night you can gaze at the stars, and no one will disturb you.”
I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. I’m an idiot that needs to think to connect dots that for the rest of people come joined by thick lines.
“That does sound pleasant,” I mumble.
I drag myself to my feet, then as I shuffle up to the balcony door, the glass reflects my face: I resemble a wan and emaciated gargoyle, all bone and shadows, with haunted eyes and a sour expression. I rest my greasy forehead on the cold glass pane.
In the distance, the palatial building that crowns the Mount Igueldo amusement park gleams white. Along the spine of the mountain glow pale cerulean lights, maybe cell towers. Some windows are lighted on the mountainside; the rich people that live in those houses may have woken up to go to work, or are wandering around in a daze with a hangover after a night of cocaine-fueled orgies.
“Sorry, I’m falling apart,” I say weakly. “And somehow I will have to tolerate the long workday ahead of me, even though I never returned to bed after that bunnyman-induced nightmare.”
I’m about to continue when a realization bursts in my brain. I gasp, then turn around. The wild child has snuggled closer to Jacqueline, wrapping her arms around the silky back of my girlfriend’s robe. The girl has closed her eyes, and her placid expression suggests that now she doesn’t give a shit about anything but the warmth that emanates from the pair of breasts squeezed against her ribcage.
“W-wait, we’ll be away for work at the same time,” I say, lowering my voice to avoid unsettling the child. “What the fuck do we do? Is there a company at our business park that lets workers abandon their kids there until five in the afternoon?”
“You know, there may be, but this isn’t the kind of child you can drop off at a daycare center and forget about, is she? Besides, we can’t even prove she’s ours.”
“Right, because she isn’t.”
Jacqueline cups the child’s head, then plants a lingering kiss on its top. The girl narrows her shoulders, dimples her cheeks, and lets out a soft noise of contentment.
“Any nosy do-gooder out there may want to snatch her away from us,” Jacqueline says with an edge to her tone. “And look at this precious baby, she’s like a stray dog who has never been stroked. So I’m staying home today, maybe for a few days. You should too, Leire. It will be fun, just you and me and our little doll.”
My mouth hangs open.
“You know I can’t miss work! I can’t imagine how stressed I would be knowing the amount of overtime I’ll have to do when I return to the office. How would I rest if I knew I’m neglecting the growing pile of tasks and contracts to fulfill, and that the unmentionable pig will be fuming and cursing me under his breath as he digs into a bag of Doritos?”
The child’s misty-eyed gaze drifts over to me as if wondering why I’m raising such a ruckus.
“Sorry for disturbing you, daughter of the Ice Age,” I say. “I envy you: I wish Jacqueline would cradle me and run her fingers through my hair until I fell asleep in her arms, but instead I have to venture through the nightmarish modernity that awaits out there, because we need to earn our right to keep existing in a world that wants us gone and forgotten.”
The wild child tilts her head in puzzlement, but a wicked smirk spills across Jacqueline’s lips.
“I will take care of you soon enough, sweetie. If you feel more comfortable going to work, that’s fine. But I will message you often.”
“A-alright. What about our boss, though? Should I tell him that you’ve come down with diarrhea?”
“I’ll figure something out. That guy won’t be thrilled, but he wouldn’t dare to fire me. Anyway, I don’t want to think about work now. I’m going to cuddle this sweet morsel of happiness.”
A yawn overpowers me, so I nod as a response. I’m dizzy and exhausted. When I stretch my back, my vertebrae crackle like a bonfire. Every cell in my body wants to slink back to the warmth of Jacqueline’s bed.
So now what, I’ll prepare myself another coffee, take a shower, then look up on Google Maps what bus lines will carry me from the hills of Donostia to the business park where we work? I almost got mauled to death in the Ice Age. I’ve learned that we are surrounded by an invisible realm; although I would prefer to ignore it, its inhabitants will keep harassing me. That realm is separated from ours by a thin layer of glass that if it were to shatter, let’s say by a horse headbutting it, I would get sucked into the void between worlds.
Now we need to give this wild child the love she desperately needs. We’ll bathe her in a tub full of bubbles; feed her with pastries and ice cream; dress her in a pink tutu and a pair of slippers; tell her that everything she does is perfect, and that we admire her even when she breaks things in a fit of rage. Later on, when this cute kitten grows into a lovely young woman, she’ll stay at home forever, becoming our personal servant as we progress toward old age and decrepitude. That’s right: I want to grow old with Jacqueline, and this wild child will wipe my ass for me. The rest, like our world that has made us its slaves, or the creeping sickness that invades our brains, or the fact that I’m half-woman half-goat, I will gladly forsake.
How often do plans work out the way they should have, though? I never planned for such a life, one where a child born during the Ice Age has become our daughter. This child may become a powerful wizard one day, and leave us to fend for ourselves. Or she might get frozen to death at twenty-six while trying to save a baby penguin from drowning. But maybe it doesn’t matter whether this girl grows into a beautiful princess or the spawn of a fucking vampire, or whether we live in the Ice Age or in the cesspool of a modern city where strangers dump their loads on our heads. Maybe we can live for those little moments when we forget about our pain.
I’m likely going through a shock and trauma that no psychiatrist is trained to treat, not that I would rely on psychiatrists, because that industry is a scam. Apart from my usual despair at the knowledge that human beings other than Jacqueline exist and that I may be forced to deal with them, now I risk walking into invisible traps. My otherworldly stalkers sent me to a boreal forest with my tits and buttocks exposed; what if the next time they open the other end of that doorway above the throat of an active volcano? Or what if the bunnyman interrupts me as I’m taking a shit, then he clobbers me in the face with his dick? I can’t defend myself against anyone stronger than a child. Maybe I should start carrying around a flamethrower or a chainsaw.
I take a deep breath and try to keep the lump of dread from swelling inside my stomach. When I hold Jacqueline’s gaze, something in my eyes must have unsettled her, because she straightens her neck and furrows her brow.
“Jacqueline, where have you hidden Spike’s revolver?” I ask calmly.
My queen gasps. She attempts to rise to her feet, but the child is clinging to her.
I consider prying our adopted daughter away from Jacqueline. However, I suspect that the girl would bite me, as it befits a cannibal.
“From now on I intend to keep the revolver on my person at all times, even during sex,” I say. “I should order some sophisticated holster online, maybe one that also works as a strap-on dildo.”
Jacqueline’s expression has grown grim.
“Leire! Don’t you think you are exaggerating a bit?”
“Nope,” I reply with the assurance of one who knows that only bad news await us. “I usually defer to your wisdom, my beloved queen, but you haven’t looked up at the furry face of that extinct abomination as it was gearing itself up to swallow me whole. Pushing a bullet-shaped load of metal through the monster’s skull at supersonic speed would have surely saved me. Well, who knows if revolvers shoot at supersonic speeds, maybe just sniper rifles do. Am I being irrational? I don’t need rationality, I’m not running a bank. Perhaps the most logical approach would be to wipe the face of every otherworldly kidnapper with a thick coating of toothpaste, but I’m afraid that they might retaliate by drowning me in a bathtub full of semen. So I’m going to carry Spike’s revolver everywhere. If the police stops me, though, I’ll be fucked; the authorities want us defenseless so we’ll be easier to control.”
Jacqueline’s cheeks are flaming red. As her eyes lose their focus, she nuzzles the child’s disheveled hair.
My guts feel like a dead man’s hand is gripping them. I blink away a sudden rush of tears.
“I got snatched as I was walking into your bathroom to take a shower,” I say in a low, hoarse voice. “Even as a child I dreaded to shower: I feared that a demon would jump out of the tiles and pee on my head. The feeling that some fiend was crouching behind the shower curtain was so strong that sometimes I washed myself in the sink instead. Every time I walked past the bathroom, certain smells could trigger my fear: my dad’s aftershave, bleach, lemons… Even the scent of pizza became too much for me. In the end I only ate snacks that had been packed in plastic bags and stored for years. When I opened the bags, I often found them filled with sand instead of food. One time, I even ate the sand.”
Hot tears run down my cheeks. I shouldn’t be allowed to keep any pet more dangerous than a gerbil; I’m a pitiful, spineless wretch with no self-control and the brain capacity of a cockroach. I can’t even masturbate properly: I need a certain level of stress to reach an orgasm. My own family walked on eggshells around me until they couldn’t stand it anymore. Even an imaginary friend would run away from me screaming.
“When I was seven I wanted to be a ballet dancer and I begged my mom to take me to a ballet class,” I continue in a ragged voice, “but she said she’d rather die than let me take dance lessons. And she did. She did. You know, I missed you so much when I was in the Ice Age, Jacqueline. I can hardly believe that I found my way back home. In a billion parallel universes out there, I told you to look out for horses in case they barged into the bathroom, then we never saw each other again.”
Some more mesmerizing masterpieces from the da Vinci of neural networks.
Bear lady.
Some sort of board game.
I asked the AI to generate an image of men playing a board game, in the style of van Gogh. The neural network made van Gogh himself one of the players.
Cosmic catastrophes.
Alien landscapes.
A plain old river on a much redder planet.
I asked the AI to depict a snake with human arms and breasts. Whatever.
Aiko and Punpun of “Oyasumi Punpun” as kids.
Something about a beggar and a toilet, Beksiński style.
A merry birthday party.
Bridges and balloons.
The apocalypse that ended the Ice Age.
Ancient ghosts hanging out at some temple.
The AI’s hallucinatory depiction of the Hypogeum of Malta, which infamously featured ancient paintings of animals that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, until the local museum’s director ordered them scrubbed because that messed up the narrative.
These are supposed to depict a severely ruined zoo.
This morning I posted the sixty-sixth chapter of the novel I’m working on. After I finish a chapter, for a few hours I feel fulfilled, as if I have earned the right to exist, so I decided to take a walk in the sun while reading a new book. I did very little reading (I’m very impatient with books these days), but I ended up walking to France (Jacqueline’s home country), which isn’t saying much because I live right in the border. It’s a picturesque town called Hendaye, de jure part of the ancient kingdom of Aquitaine. I’m thirty-seven years old now, but it was the first time in my life that I walked through Hendaye; as a child my father drove us through it plenty of times during the summer, because the local beach is great.
The town’s sidewalks are narrow and poorly maintained. Half of the stores have closed down, and of those that remain, plenty of the owners are old enough to retire. Even as a child I had a hard time believing that anyone lived in Hendaye throughout the year. Most of the people you come across are tourists and tend to hang out near the beach, and most of the buildings in that area look like vacation homes.
The more I walked around and checked out the sights, the more melancholic I felt. I also came across quite a few French beauties, which didn’t help my mood. I often daydream about being able to teleport; apart from emptying the treasuries of a few notorious gangs so I wouldn’t need to work, I’d spend my days teleporting from town to town. If any cop asked for my ID, I would teleport away. I’d absorb dozens of new sights every day. I’d write in deserted coffee shops and sleep in a new hotel every night.
I’ve mentioned before that whenever I do something more compelling than work at my office or sit at home, I feel like a prisoner on a furlough; I’ve had to endure health or health-adjacent issues from birth, from high-functioning autism to the intrusive troubles of OCD, hormonal issues thanks to a tumor, and an Irritable Bowel Syndrome that inflames my intestines if I don’t go to the bathroom every forty-five minutes or so. I also can’t drive around; I never got a driver’s license because I’m more likely to crash my car into a wall or a truck deliberately than arrive safely at my destination.
Anyway, at one point I came across a deserted graveyard. I took a stroll through it, checking out every tomb and reading to the best of my abilities the dedication plaques, which were obviously written in French. So many variations of, “to my beloved father”, “to my friend, who will never be forgotten” and such made me sad. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any ghost.
At that point I realized that I was carrying my tablet, so I figured that I may as well take some photos of my mundane journey.
Nearby, close to spectacular views of the Txingudi bay, I took a few photos of a grandiose memorial for the locals who got pointlessly massacred during the first World War. I also photographed the surrounding park.
At some point the locals decided to build a walkway along the coast, even in front of the backyards of expensive houses; the owners must have been pissed. In any case, it’s a pleasant and reasonably isolated path.
That’s my thumb, because I’m a fucking idiot. In my defense, the sun was blinding me.
It was getting late and I needed to find a bathroom. As I walked back home, I took a few more pictures.
The rest of the photos were taken on my side of the border.
In general, today’s was one of those afternoons in which I resented that I was born as someone who can’t even aspire to a normal life, that has to lose himself in elaborate daydreams just to tolerate the nightmare of having to exist in his brain.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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