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Jacqueline has wrapped her left arm around my waist to guide me along the pavement, towards Ondarreta beach. I wish I could say that a myriad stars twinkle in the cloudless night sky like a shimmering crystal veil over an enchanted realm, but instead the sky has blackened as if it were suffocating in woodsmoke. Above the low wall that prevents boozers and even stupider people from falling into the freezing waters of the Cantabrian Sea, the string of glowing streetlights along the opposite coast of Donostia are projecting hazy, swelling pillars of citrine-yellow light onto the wrinkles of the waves, transmuting the bay into an agitated pool of piss.

The breeze is pushing its atoms of cold through my exposed pores, forcing me to shiver in the grasp of my beloved. I’m exhaling puffs of vaporous breath. Although Jacqueline is keeping me upright, my legs are trembling. When an elderly couple and later a group of teenagers passed us by, I feared that I would trip and faceplant on the pavement, imprinting a bloody smear.

I’m venturing through the barren, boreal interspace between a sweltering, vis-à-vis encounter with my girlfriend and the holy moment in which I will slide under her sheets. I need to kneel and plead to the vaginal vaults of heaven for a blessing upon my wretched self. I hope that it will rain menstrual blood, that I will feel those warm drops running down my face, that all the earthworms will drown. In the end the earth will go dark and silent like in a blackout. I yearn to meet the bottomless blackness that waits outside of time, for a cataclysmic storm to erase my life, rubbing out even the shadows. The only things left to worship in this world will be the glowing spheres of our love-spoilt flesh.

As I narrow my eyes to shield them against the headlights of an incoming car, Jacqueline leans in to whisper in my ear.

“Leire, you are shaken up by something. And don’t pretend it’s about the cold.”

“I’m having a fit of despair,” I blurt out in a hoarse voice.

Jacqueline stops walking, which causes me to stumble. I’m about to dismiss my comment with an exaggerated gesture when she unlinks her arm from my waist, grabs my hand and pulls me towards the long stretch of public gardens that run along the beachfront, dragging me at her pace as if I were her pet. Gravel crunches under our shoes as we walk past a sculpture that resembles three upright, five-meters-tall rolled-up newspapers shoved into the ground.

Jacqueline stops us next to one of the scattered benches with a view of the sea. Distanced from the closest streetlight, the grass and trees from the adjoined garden have been drained of colors, giving way to a shadowy monochrome world, lifeless as the inside of a grave. A gust of cold air whistles between the branches of a nearby tree, and sends leaves scampering around like a squad of tumbling pawns. In summer, this spot would make for a suitable trysting place to indulge in some lewd act or another.

The backpack’s weight is pulling down on my shoulder. I figure that we will stick around for a while, so I take the backpack off and drop it onto the bench. When I dare to lift my gaze, I expected to face Jacqueline’s annoyance, but she’s scrutinizing my expression with the fathomless affection of a mother for her child.

“So the sexual videos of those other women didn’t bother you that much,” Jacqueline says. “What is it, then?”

I avert my gaze. Jacqueline runs her fingers along my jawline, then she turns my head towards her.

“Are you having suicidal thoughts again?” she asks with a tremor in her voice.

“Ah, you know I’ve tried to kill myself before… W-well, not more of those thoughts than usual, I don’t think. I’ve always been terrified of that abyss, and of the darkness that it wants to drag me into.”

Jacqueline takes a deep breath. She cups the back of my head and rests her forehead against mine. Our lips touch each other, but I restrain myself from sucking on hers or even letting my tongue wander out of my mouth, in case she shuts me down.

“I won’t let you fall in,” Jacqueline says.

My chest trembles. A rush of warmth behind my eyes forces me to take a labored breath.

“The truth is, Jacqueline, that if I were to fall in, not even you would be able to prevent it.”

She tightens the grip on my nape.

“We’ll see about that. Now tell me what you’ve been dying to share for the whole afternoon, you idiot.”

Although her hot breath is tickling my lips, my spine keeps shivering. I’m growing numb. My tongue feels as heavy and paralyzed as an anchor stuck in the muck of a deep-sea trench. I hear the low, ruminating murmur of the waves against the shore, as well as the ticking of time’s clockwork winding down my life.

I should remain obnoxiously quiet and wait for Jacqueline to grow bored of my personal pains, but I’m sick of worrying her.

“I-I used to watch my parents commit slow suicide day after day. They lived without a shred of passion or compassion as they drowned in mediocrity.”

Jacqueline pats my nape.

“Oh Leire,” she coos. “I meant about what’s going on with you now.”

My teeth are chattering, my lungs filling up with cold air.

“M-my hometown has become unrecognizable. Someone has stolen my door handle, and now my living room window is broken.”

Jacqueline pulls back and grabs my shoulders. I had never seen her this outraged.

“Holy shit, someone broke into your house? What did they steal?”

“Maybe I’m misrepresenting the situation,” I mumble. “Someone did steal the door handle of my apartment building. The culprit was likely a fiend, some insane monster, a vile child murderer who just appeared in town as if summoned by the most malevolent sorcerer of the nine hells, or maybe by a rabid dog. He stole our door handle to sneak inside and inflict unspeakable evils on us.”

“Okay, Leire, calm down. But your living room window broke, right? Did someone throw a stone at it? Some drunk asshole maybe?”

My legs are trembling like the tectonic plates of a fractured planet, my heart is leaping wilder than a rabbit on cocaine.

“I-I mean, I saw who broke it, but it… couldn’t have happened that way.”

Jacqueline furrows her brow and turns her head slightly.

“You mean that maybe you were the one who broke it, during a peculiar state of mind perhaps?”

I let out a pained groan and bury my face in my hands.

“I don’t know, Jacqueline. That would have made sense, but if I faced the proof that I’ve lost my mind to that extent, I don’t know how I would be able to continue living. That wasn’t what I saw. I didn’t headbutt that damn window.”

I flinch at the sound of a passing car, then at the feeling of warm hands closing around mine. Jacqueline lowers my arms so she can look into my eyes. The breeze is making her raven-black locks flap around her neck like a bird trying to escape its cage.

“Tell me who did it then,” she orders me calmly.

My lungs have been vacuumed out; my body forces me to take in a big gulp of air, inviting the stink of burnt gunpowder. A wind is sweeping through the cracks of my mind. Jacqueline as well as the ruthless world that surrounds her go blurry, then two hot tears roll down my cheeks.

“It w-was a h-h-horse. A h-horse who had failed to kill himself with a murdering implement, so he headbutted the window, shattering it. Then he threw himself out the same way some filthy smoker would discard a cigarette butt.”

Jacqueline softens her expression. She reaches to wipe my tears away.

“I-I told the honest truth,” I say in a desperate tone. “That’s how insane I’ve become.”

Jacqueline sighs and nods in resignation, as if I shared that our preferred vending machine at work had doubled its prices overnight.

“The world is a strange place, far stranger than I would have considered years ago. So maybe a horse did break your window.”

“Huh?”

“You had been strangely fixated on horses recently. How did that animal end up in your apartment, then? Tell me about it.”

I let out a painful laugh, which causes more tears to leap from my eyes.

“It was just a run-of-the-mill, worthless horse. But he was my friend. I once saved him from a slaughterhouse; I carried him on my back when I rescued him, and for many years I helped him regain his dignity. He has ceased to matter, though, because he’s dead. We shouldn’t be talking about him or even remembering him. Being a horse is a way of life, Jacqueline. Sometimes I’ve thought about becoming a horse myself. You would prefer to die as a horse, wouldn’t you? Your demise would be more honorable than a human’s. But the world is better off not being filled with horses. Besides, I’d better die in obscurity rather than become a beast that has to put up with people like me.”

“Oh, honey,” Jacqueline murmurs as she strokes my hair. “You’re much too hard on yourself. You know I’d prefer for you to live as long as you can, don’t you? You’ve become precious to me in so many ways.”

“There’s no other way to deal with the world but with utter hopelessness and disdain for your fellow humans.”

Jacqueline presses her index finger against my lips, as if to suggest I should shut up.

“I guess you haven’t called anyone to fix the window, have you? I’d hate to lose you for another night, but maybe you’d feel better if you spent it at your apartment? I wouldn’t be comfortable sleeping away from home if one of my windows was broken.”

“No!” I cry out in horror.

Jacqueline flinches and steps back. Her lovely features, that would bring joy to anyone’s heart, suggested for moment that she was facing a battle against a hellhound.

I press my hands together as an apologetic gesture.

“I didn’t mean to… I want to stay away from my apartment!” I cry. “That dreary ruin has long become a fetish room for my sick delusions. I’ve rolled down the shutters anyway, so nobody will even notice that the window is broken. My living room will turn into a fridge and my board games will freeze, but I have only played a third of them.” I grab onto Jacqueline’s arms and I step closer. “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d rather do now than to go to your apartment, get naked and jump into your bed so you can order me what to do. Those are the only times when I’ve ever felt free, when I can forget for a while that I’m forced to exist among horrifying monsters. I’ve been dreaming for decades, Jacqueline, but nothing ever changed. I’m sick, I’ve been sick for as long as I can remember, of living in terror. Maybe… Maybe others should fear me instead.”

Jacqueline places a kiss on my forehead, then she wraps me in a tight embrace, snuggling her cheek against mine. Her body heat envelops me. I clutch the back of her suede trench coat like a drowning woman would cling to a floating log.

“You are a creation of flesh and blood that has the right to love,” she whispers in my ear. “You don’t need to be a monster to be a person.”

I bury my face in her neck and choke back a sob. When I finally pull away, her turtleneck must have absorbed plenty of my tears and snot.

“P-please, Jacqueline, give me your purse and close your eyes until I tell you to open them,” I say in a hoarse voice.

My request confuses her, but she slides the strap of her purse off her shoulder and gives it to me. She closes her eyes and stands there as if expecting a present.

I open the purse. As I reach inside my jacket, I look around warily. The few human-shaped silhouettes framed against the distant, darkened bulk of the island are busy strolling along the beachfront.

I pull out Spike’s revolver and put it in Jacqueline’s purse, on top of her wallet, her keys and some paper handkerchiefs.

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Author’s note: thus concludes the sequence I’ll refer to at this moment as ‘Leire’s Got a Gun’, that has taken me fifteen days to write. According to the 11,793 words of notes left to render into coherent scenes, things are going to get far weirder from here.

Spike headbutted Leire’s living room window back in chapter 51.

Anyway, it’s six o’clock in the afternoon on a Sunday, which means that the day is almost over; I go to bed at ten to wake up at six for work. I’ve spent this weekend writing, lifting weights, shedding tears and masturbating, so I’m fully prepared to face a series of five new workdays filled with meaningless drudgery and unknown horrors.

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My gaze traces the vermillion border where Jacqueline’s pearly-white skin meets the rounded, jasper-red vermillion zone of her lips, but I wish I could close my eyes and chart with my own thin skin those millimetric grooves and wrinkles. Her mouth opens, exposing that sultry cave to the evening chill. It’s a forbidden, slippery topography that could swallow me up with ease. As the lips part, they unveil two shiny frontal incisors, cast like premium tokens for a beloved board game, as well as the saliva pooled in the basin between the dorsal surfaces of her watermelon-pink tongue.

From the bottom of the frame rises a roughly cubical potato chunk, its yellow-ochre skin crispy and smeared with a swath of alioli sauce. I’d like to have you inside me, Jacqueline thinks to the potato chunk. She guides the fork towards her mouth, and when her lips slide over the chunk to enfold it, they get coated in a greasy sheen and spotted with flecks of paprika. Those two voluminous, glossy surfaces curve around each other as she purses them to rip the potato away from the fork. She bites into the chunk, cracking its skin to expose a bright layer of flesh. Her cheeks dimple while she chews. A yellow-ochre dribble runs down from the corners of her mouth to meet at her chin, where they entwine into a long, oily strand. I want to reach with my stretched fingers to scoop the mixture up. I’d let that elongating strand hang down from my palm like an elastic stalactite, so it would trickle slowly onto my face and the warmth of Jacqueline’s saliva would seep through my pores.

She lets out a juicy grunt as her throat swells and the mashed potato slides down the cozy tube of her esophagus. Her tongue riffles along her teeth, dips and weaves its way across her lips, and swabs at the corners of her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed with a mix of crimson and coral, her cobalt-blues are glazed with potato lust. She has swallowed a secret message, one that reveals that she has become more than human and that the world of pleasure is at her doorstep.

As a child I dreamt that Jacqueline would offer me a bite of such a spiced, fried, tumefied tuber. That fantasy had fueled many an evening of masturbation, but now my memory fails to conjure up how my lips would feel on that flesh, creamy like the supple lips of an oyster.

“I’d like to have you inside me,” I mumble.

Jacqueline’s eyelashes flutter. When she exhales my way, her hot breath is tinged with the scent of garlic and pepper.

“What did you say? You better stop focusing on my mouth so much,” Jacqueline says in a voice that suggests that I should keep focusing on her mouth, “or else I’ll snarf through the rest of the potatoes before you know it. Was your stomach gurgling for nothing?”

I’ve gulped down my latte to combat the growing chill of the evening. The setting sun’s fire has dyed the sky a scarlet shade, turning the clouds into a fiery display of crimson and gold. On the opposite side of the chain link fence, the remaining tennis players, two middle-aged men that look like they own a collection of suits and spend their mornings shouting into phones, along with two dwarf-sized children, are engaged in a doubles match. One of the kids, whose face has the shape of a pizza, waddles towards the net as the racket wobbles in his right hand, to volley the descending ball. However, it whizzes past the kid and strikes the ground with a dull thud.

The world’s babble gets drowned out by a deep grumble coming from my stomach. The potato lover in me is screaming to go for a bite. I want to drown in a tidal wave of potatoes and alioli sauce, so that I’ll be able to forget the pangs of despair that are stabbing my insides.

I jab a chunk, but as I hold it to the evening light, it has transformed into a satanic totem, an offering to be consumed by some demon. I shove the food into my mouth and I gnaw on it in an effort to masticate my anxiety. The chunk’s skin is crisp and slightly charred, its insides are meaty and unctuous. I devour my fourth potato in one minute.

“My mouth is burning,” I say with a strained voice, “and I’d really like to have you inside me.”

My girlfriend laughs.

“But, Jacqueline…” I continue timidly.

Jacqueline has rested her right elbow next to her coffee cup and leaned her head on that hand. Her kindly expression suggests she had been waiting for me to gather enough courage to open up.

“Yes, baby girl?” she asks in a mellifluous voice.

“About your external hard drive…”

Jacqueline perks up.

“Ah, did you forget it at home? Is that why you are so tense?”

I pat the top of my backpack, that is resting against one of the rear legs of my chair.

“No, I got it right here.”

She sighs in relief.

“To be honest, I would have been a bit annoyed if you had forgotten it, because I’ve wanted to revisit some of those videos. But even if you had forgotten to grab it, we can make new ones, right? At least a couple more tonight.”

“I hope so. But I meant to bring up that… ‘Misc’ folder.”

A roguish smile of recognition lights up Jacqueline’s face. She starts twirling her fork around in her fingers.

“Yeah? What about it?”

“Well,” I say, trying to keep the tension out of my voice, “why did you include the videos of other women masturbating?”

“Oh.” Jacqueline snickers. “Partly so they would make you horny. Those ladies were delicious, weren’t they?”

She said it in the same tone I would have praised gummy bears as a kid. I want to bring up that she filmed those strangers in her apartment, that they doused with their girly juices the same fabrics that kept me warm at night, but as I try to push some words together into an objection, the words congeal into a thick clot of panic. I give up and let the air out through my mouth.

“That was me also opening up to you,” Jacqueline adds. “Are you troubled because you rubbed your sensitive little button to someone other than your girlfriend?”

My shoulders have drooped. I have to make an effort to remain upright in my seat, and it feels unfair that Jacqueline is demanding that I spend my limited energies talking.

“I don’t know, Jacqueline,” I say in a weary voice. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel.”

A tennis ball rattles the nearby chain link fence, then it rolls back into the court. I take a sip of my tepid latte. Jacqueline grabs a potato chunk with her thumb and index finger. She rotates the potato as if inspecting whether or not it deserves to get shoved into her mouth.

“You aren’t supposed to feel in any particular way, baby,” she says in a calm, motherly tone. “People don’t experience the feelings that they are expected to or would prefer to have; they feel whatever chemical mix their brain produces. They sometimes pretend otherwise to fit into someone else’s idea of how a human being should feel.”

She slathers alioli sauce from the plate on the potato chunk, smearing it too on her nails and fingertips. The chunk has transformed into a savory weapon.

“Does it bother you that those videos made you horny while you were struggling with other feelings?” Jacqueline asks as she shoots me a sideways look.

What little remains of warmth on this October evening is evaporating into a bitter chill.

“I don’t think I want to know that far more attractive women than me have lain in the same bed where you and I have made love. I want you all to myself. I wish you had always been mine, and me yours. But yes, those videos made me feel guilty because I couldn’t stop myself from abusing my genitals to them.”

Jacqueline breaks into a gentle laugh, and when that melody stops, her satisfied smile suggests that I have overcome some hurdle.

“That’s what I want, your authentic self, full of contradictions and confusions. Some poor fools spend their whole lives repressing themselves, even in the solitude of their own minds, just to please cowards who have wasted their existence straitjacketed. Isn’t that a shame?”

I shift my weight in the chair.

“Apart from my feelings, whatever passes for sentient thought in my rotting brain fails to understand the purpose of presenting those past lovers of yours to me.”

Jacqueline chuckles, then she stares down at the piece of potato she’s holding, as if she expected it to start talking.

“They aren’t my lovers, at least in the strict sense.”

“Huh? Just business partners then?”

“Yes, something like that.”

“I know for a fact that you mix business and pleasure. So do I, for that matter.”

Jacqueline squares her shoulders and holds my gaze steadily with her cobalt-blues.

“I promise you, sweetie, that this mouth you see, and that you were previously salivating over, has never kissed any of those ladies, nor has this skin felt theirs.”

My muscles loosen up.

“You may have found your vocation in the porn industry, then. I haven’t seen you this serious about anything else.”

“I would respect anything that brought me so much dough.”

Jacqueline scoots her chair closer to me, then she guides the potato chunk through the air until it waits in front of my lips like a car at a toll booth. I inhale its spicy, smoky scent.

“Open up, baby,” she says as her smile broadens.

I want to be stuffed so hard with potatoes that my blood turns into potatoes. When I part my lips, Jacqueline pops the potato chunk into my mouth, which gets filled with the taste of salt, oil and garlic, and a hint of lemon. My tongue relishes the rough texture of crisp skin.

“Good girl,” Jacqueline adds huskily. “I’m curious to know, though, which among my starlets was your favorite.”

After she lowers her gaze to my mouth, she slides her lower lip against her two maxillary central incisors in a way that makes me want to swallow before I’ve finished chewing the potato chunk.

“I was partial to that redheaded… girl,” I mumble sheepishly.

Jacqueline’s eyebrows shoot up, and she beams like I just praised one of her proudest accomplishments.

“She’s really something, isn’t she? A legend in certain circles. Unfortunately, hers is not a look that can be exploited for long before strangers on the internet start getting nosy.”

My stomach acid has started dissolving the bolus of tuber when I attempt to understand Jacqueline’s words, but a searing memory flashes in my mind: that sylphlike, freckle-spattered girl lying in a pool of cum, her burgundy mane blotched and her frozen grimace of agony concealed by a daisy-white crust.

A cold shiver runs down my spine. I rub my face with both hands to regain my composure.

“May she rest in peace,” I utter gravely.

Jacqueline lets out an unusual noise of confusion.

“What do you mean? She’s alive and well.”

I shake my head slowly. I won’t clarify any of the horrors burned into my brain, lest I traumatize my beloved. Anyway, I’m a wilted violet; I can’t be expected to make sense.

“Hey,” Jacqueline says calmly.

When I look up, she’s holding the index finger and thumb of her right hand in a pinching motion in front of my mouth. Those fingertips, as well as her short, almond-shaped nails, are smeared with sauce. Jacqueline’s cobalt-blues twinkle like a naughty schoolgirl’s.

“Clean them up for me, sweetheart.”

Despite the growing cold, my cheeks puff up with heat. I close my eyes and I lean in to house her fingers within my warm mouth. I lap and swirl my tongue around her fingertips and the edges of her nails, spreading the alioli sauce on my tastebuds.

My mind draws in its darkened theatre the outline of nearby seated patrons by the babel of their conversations. A child lets out an enthusiastic vocalization, and someone follows it with the whap of a tennis racket hitting a ball. A blaring motorcycle passes by the entrance of the pub’s grounds.

I want to taste more and more of Jacqueline; she’s bread and water for my starving body. But she must have noticed that I’ve removed every trace of the oily coating, because she withdraws her two fingers from my mouth, scratching lightly the surface of my tongue with her nail on the way out.

When I open my eyes, Jacqueline’s gaze threatens to drown me. I’ve learned to recognize her two moods; as she ordered me to suck on her fingers, she was a house cat that alternates between playfulness and carefree lounging, but now she has become a relentless predator aching to pounce on her prey to rip a juicy throat out. She breathes deeply through her teeth while her moist lips quiver. As she narrows her shoulders, overcome by some swell of emotion, a thick lock of her lustrous, raven-black hair bends against the turtleneck of her blouse. My skin erupts with gooseflesh.

“I missed you so much last night,” Jacqueline says, lowering her voice to a husky whisper. “But tonight I’ll have you back in my bed, won’t I? And that bottomless hunger of yours will devour me until I can’t walk anymore.”

I nod fervently as my crotch warms up with sticky, creamy desire. Once again Jacqueline will allow me to gnaw on her flesh with the vigor of a desert locust. I’ll provide the most sensitive patches of her skin a feverish tongue-bath. Unfortunately, this pub is populated with families that would be disturbed by the sight of a couple of women openly indulging in sex on top of this rickety table, although some of the men would likely offer the two of us free drinks.

“I’ll choke on your saliva as your hot tongue rambles around my own,” I say between gasps of air, “I’ll lick your tits wet and shiny, I’ll kiss and nibble on your nipples, I’ll bury my face in your pussy until I suck up your juices to the last drop. Just tell me when and where I should drop to my knees. I exist to pleasure you.”

Jacqueline chuckles throatily as her lips curl into a smile that would make any hardened criminal fear the end of the world. She lowers her head to stare at me through her eyelashes with an air of bloodthirsty divinity. Her pupils have become wide-open tunnels to the bottom of an ocean.

“Alright, you may have your wish. It’s going to be my treat to take you away from this stressful life of yours. You’re all mine now, and I won’t let you ever forget it. But I’m afraid that your behavior needs some polishing.”

My heart is thundering in my chest, and the needy pressure in my clit is increasing uncontrollably.

“Maybe you need to try harsher methods, mommy,” I utter in a rough voice. “Spank me with a tennis racket. Carve my flesh with a rusty knife. Chain me to your bed using high security combination locks with codes that you’ve long forgotten. Make me disappear from the world. I want to shit in a bucket for the rest of my life.”

Jacqueline rests her elbows on the table, pushing her coffee mug towards the remaining potatoes, and she shuts her eyes tight. A bead of saliva grows at a corner of her mouth until she dabs at it with the tip of her tongue. When she holds my gaze again, her cobalt-blues have become pools of burning lust.

“Baby,” she starts hoarsely, “you are such a good girl that I regret having asked you to spend the afternoon anywhere else than at my place.”

“Nothing will prevent me from ending up naked at your mercy tonight, Jacqueline. You are the only person who has ever made me feel like I’m human.”

Jacqueline stands up forcefully, nearly toppling over her chair.

“Fuck the rest of the potatoes. Let’s leave.”

I leap to my feet. I lift my bulky backpack and I sling it over my left shoulder. Jacqueline is rubbing her cheeks with one hand as if to hide the traces of her frenzy. She retrieves her purse and clicks the clasp to open it, then she takes out her wallet. I hurry to fish mine from whatever pocket of my trousers I shoved it in. Under such pressure, carrying a purse would have helped me, but I’ve never been a fan of them; I fear that I would lose it, that some fiend would snatch it, or that I would leave incriminating evidence inside that would lead me to prison.

“Wait, I can pay for this one,” I say.

Jacqueline raises my chin with her thumb, and her gaze shuts me up.

“You will never have to worry about money with me, doll. You’ll repay me by letting me do to you whatever I want.”

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Author’s note: as I wrote most of this chapter (and the following) these past couple of days, I mostly listened to compilations like this one on YouTube, which are helpful if you want to feel like you are writing at an empty coffee shop during the thirties/forties while it’s raining outside. But throughout this past week, on the train to and from work, I listened to Jackson C. Frank’s stuff. Songs like ‘Blues Run the Game’, ‘Milk & Honey’, ‘October’ and, of course, ‘Marlene’. He was maybe the cursed songwriter of the sixties.

Jacqueline’s infamous external hard drive and its contents were developed back in chapter 45.

As it has happened before, I originally believed that this part and the following one would fit into the same chapter, but I eventually decided to divide it. I’ve already written about two thousand words of the next part, that will conclude this sequence, so I’ll likely be able to upload it in a couple of days.

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The cerulean sky, bedecked with the indigo silhouettes of amorphous clouds, has been ripped open as the October sun falls, aching to incinerate me into ashes along with this whole planet. My chest has constricted, and an itchy sensation keeps crawling between my shoulder blades like a centipede.

I’m hunched over and tapping my feet anxiously when I realize that Jacqueline is returning through the corridor between the tables. The leafy canopies of the palm trees are sliding their shadows over my girlfriend’s luscious body like some greasy pervert on a crowded train. When our gazes meet, her mouth stretches in a smile, bending the pink bow of her upper lip. Her eyes shine like a riverbed of sapphires.

My heartbeat kicks up. I leap to my feet, then I walk to intercept Jacqueline.

“Gotta empty your bladder?” she asks.

“That’s right, I’m going to the bathroom.”

I rest my hands on her shoulders, I stand on my tiptoes and I press my lips against her cheek. Jacqueline chuckles and draws her head back, confounded by my sudden warmth.

“Oh? Have I taken that long?”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“Thirty years,” I say in a quavering voice. “Thirty years of suffocating in this suit of bones and blood. But thank you for being so nice to me.”

She cups the back of my head and kisses my forehead.

“I’m not done yet, idiot. Go to relieve yourself, will you? You’ll feel better.”

I nod, then pull away from her towards the watermelon-pink building of the pub, but I’ve just passed by two occupied tables when I look over my shoulder. Jacqueline has retrieved the purse with which she claimed a chair, and she’s sitting down gracefully.

When I turn my head forward, I’m forced to sidestep two dickheads wearing pit-stained T-shirts and shorts that parade their hairy, masculine legs and their cloven-hoofed feet. Their stench reminds me of the flatulences my grandfather spewed out as he sat on the toilet seat, even before I helped him unbutton his trousers and pull down his underpants. The tennis players have slung their bags over the shoulder; they must have bought them too small on purpose so the racket handle would stick out. Surely they noticed that I was distracted, so they intended to march their way through me.

I shudder, then quicken my pace. The itching between my shoulder blades has spread to the back of my neck; my skin crawls as I imagine the human vermin skulking behind me. Their calloused hands will rove over me, creeping up my armpits and thighs. I’d love to close my eyes to shut the world out and grope my way to the bathroom, but I have to keep an eye out in case some barbarous child sets itself on a collision course with my legs.

I pass between the counterfeit Greek-style columns that guard the front door, and I find myself in a dim room. The recessed lights mounted above the bar counter, as well as few globe lamps, light up the varnish of the rosewood tables. Long-dead tennis players from the beginning of the Age of Modernity have been captured in faded, black-and-white photographs. Regarding a row of flags mounted on the wall, their colors have waned as if they were medieval paintings displayed in a cathedral. The air smells of beer and wine, and of Spanish omelette and crab meat from the small portions on sale behind a sneeze guard.

I approach the bar counter. The two men working behind it are middle-aged, grey-haired and broad-shouldered, their iron-colored shirts smooth and ironed. I flag down the closest bartender, who takes his time chuckling at whatever comment the other dude made. He places his hands on the counter and locks my gaze.

“What can I get’cha, miss?”

“Bang,” I say.

The bartender draws his head back and blinks twice. His lips twist in a smile.

“That a shot? Sounds like one helluva hangover cure. I don’t think we serve it, though.”

He shuts up, likely because my eyes have gone wide and the color has drained from my face. My tongue swells inside my mouth like a fat slug. I swallow a gulp of saliva to quell my sudden nausea.

“You don’t have bang?” I ask in a rough voice. “I was looking forward to it. Bloody brilliant drink.”

The bartender knits his brows in suspicion.

“Would you like a beer instead?”

“You know I’m a non-drinker.”

“I know nothing of the sort, miss.”

I catch him staring at my crotch through the bar counter, so I quickly cross my legs.

“W-well, can you point me in the direction of the nearest bathroom?”

The bartender leans in and lowers his voice.

“You’re looking a tad unwell, like you should go to a hospital.”

I straighten my back and furrow my brow.

“How dare you? This is my regular look. Besides, it’s nothing that peeing won’t fix.”

The bartender crosses his arms over his chest, then he stares me up and down.

“You’re gonna pee to make that green look disappear from your face?”

My heartbeat hammers at the base of my throat. Why does every random human I come across have to make my life more difficult?

“I’m sure you guys don’t have bang because you’ve stocked that stockroom of yours full of crystal meth,” I say in a dry voice. “So how about you point me towards the nearest bathroom, you insensitive prick, before I call in an anonymous tip to the authorities?”

The bartender glances at his buddy, then he chuckles as if he was the victim of a dumb joke. He points somewhere behind my left shoulder.

“Right around the corner. Can’t miss it.”

I sigh.

“Sorry for insulting you, but pricks piss me off.”

Both men laugh.

“Aren’t you special?” the bartender asks rhetorically. “Don’t forget to wash your hands, miss.”

I spin around and tramp my way towards the toilets. My head keeps spinning, my body withering. When I turn the corner, I come across a row of decrepit, wooden lockers that show, through a wire mesh fit for a chicken coop, the caveman’s version of a tennis racket. The bathrooms are identified with framed, drawn depictions of a member of each gender; the woman is brushing her black mane with her fingers while she flaunts her naked, rotund backside.

I go into the ladies’ room and lock the door behind me. I flick on the light to dazzle the dark, but the claustrophobic space feels suffocatingly full of blood and vomit. A taste of copper lingers in my mouth; I turn on the tap and take long gulps of chilly water.

When I straighten my spine, I dare to face the tarnished mirror, which is streaked by tiny cracks that form a fine web like a spider’s. My hair is a mess of brown snakes. The wrinkles on my forehead have deepened into crevasses. My eyes are bottomless pits except for their whites, that have become two pieces of blood-spattered glass swirling around in a soup made of stagnant water and bits of rotting vegetation. A sickly hue stains the skin beneath my eyes, and I can discern the capillaries that crawl under the surface. The bones of my cheeks are protruding like those of a months-dead corpse dug up by a necrophile. I’m as fragile as a brittle-boned baby bird fallen from its nest, who waits for someone to step on it carelessly.

What did I expect to see when I opened that pair of face holes? A comforting vision of myself as an innocent baby? No matter how I imagine the person in the mirror, she will always remain a stranger. All I’ve achieved in my thirty years of living is a form of self-exsanguination.

A flurry of sparks runs through my brain. I plop down on the toilet seat and rub my face.

Spike, whose equine existence had become a permanent vacation as far as I can tell, decided that I was responsible for his despair; when I proved myself impervious to his charms and tricks, the horse demon, devastated, chose to kill himself. I’ve had enough of men of any species believing that they have the right to manipulate me.

I’m a thirty-year-old female programmer. My first instinct is to shrug off the notion. I want to be something else: a horse, or a wolf, or a basilisk. I want to be an alien, to have my own spaceship with which to land on pristine worlds so I can terraform them to suit my tastes. Spike had wanted to be an angel, and thus he seduced me with the promise of eternal peace, but I’m a human. I’m meant to suffer for eternity.

My hands are trembling. I slip my right one under my jacket, reaching into the interior pocket where I’ve felt a conspicuous weight pulling down throughout the whole date. I draw the revolver out. Its shiny, metallic frame feels heavy and warm against my sweaty palms, solid like an erect penis encrusted with steel. With my fingertips, I trace the contour of the engraved skull and bones. I open the cylinder; its chambers are loaded with lead. I push the cylinder closed.

My whole skin is sweating like an armpit. I get the urge again, a mental command, to shove the barrel of the revolver in my mouth and pull the trigger. Dying would solve every problem I’ve ever had, along with the thousands of problems I can only anticipate in horror. I’m going to save myself from the consequences of my abysmal luck, my rotten genes, and my own actions, by walking out of this dream.

I close my eyes and I rerun the simulation: the muzzle of the revolver presses into my palate and the trigger resists against my finger as I squeeze it first slowly, then all at once. A deafening blast shakes the toilet room. The force of the explosion propels me against the ceiling and sends bits of porcelain flying. I fall, landing face first on the floor with my neck twisted. A black, sticky substance spills from my mouth, and my lips are dusted with gunpowder residue, but I’m wearing my sexiest smile; I’ve succeeded in blowing my worthless head off.

I scratch the edge of the revolver’s muzzle with the bitten nail of my thumb. I should shoot myself now. I won’t have to see what face Jacqueline makes when they find my corpse. She won’t love someone like me. Nobody could.

A fresh wave of nausea takes hold of my innards. No, I don’t want to put Jacqueline through such grief. And if I die, I’ll never see her again. I won’t feel her skin against mine, nor hear her heart beating within her chest.

I slide down the toilet seat until my knees hit the floor. I slump forward. The revolver slips out of my hand as my face lands on the cold ceramic tiles, which are moist as if someone had splashed water from the sink, or pissed on the floor. My chest hurts; I have a splinter lodged in my heart.

If Jacqueline likes me, if my company improves her day, I guess I can keep on hanging on.

I haul myself to my feet, but my back spasms and I eject a mouthful of bile. After I wipe my mess up, I grab the revolver and shove it under my jacket. I wash my hands and my face thoroughly with cold water.

If I could, I would have walked out of the pub’s main building with my hands over my ears and a hood pulled over my head. I feel like I’m walking for the first time after I’ve spent a week lying in a hospital bed.

I’m dragging my gaze along the floor of the terrace; the voices coming from the occupied tables that I leave behind judge and mock me. When I dare to look up, Jacqueline is leaning back against her chair. She has entwined her fingers behind her head and she’s staring sideways at me. My mommy would have thrived as a fifties pin-up model. That raven-black mane of hers looks dark and mysterious like a bat orgy at midnight.

When I reach the chair I chose for myself, I fear that my flesh will pass through any solid material, so I lower my ass carefully. My head hurts as though a couple of crows have built a nest inside my skull. I guess I can’t subject myself to the prospect of annihilation without earning a headache.

“You’re always so pale,” Jacqueline says.

When her warm hand strokes my cheek, I restrain myself from bawling like a child. It takes me a few seconds to compose myself.

“I’m a glassy-eyed, naked baby bird whose wings are still wet,” I say in a thin, squeaky voice. “I’m a fatigued soldier whose tank was knocked out in the war. I’m a rusty key for a long-decommissioned lock, waiting for its owner to retrieve it from a chain that has been thrown in the ocean.”

Jacqueline chuckles as a courtesy, but I’ve learned to recognize whenever she grows concerned about me.

“You are the strangest person I’ve ever met. But what has been troubling you today, Leire? I can tell you are dying to open up about it.”

I avert my gaze, then I lean forward to rest my arms on the table, but it wobbles. I adjust my elbows to even out the motion.

“Leire,” Jacqueline says in a tone that harkens me back to the times I’ve lain sideways on her lap and latched on to her breast. “Look at me, baby.”

I shake my head weakly.

“I couldn’t bear the sight of your splendorous face right now.”

“Well, that’s nice of you to say. But surely you know that you can tell me anything, right?”

Although if someone were to prick my skin with a needle I would implode, I hoist my gaze to Jacqueline’s lips.

“H-half of it is the usual business. I’m being controlled by a stranger, someone who doesn’t care for my comfort or consent. A person who despises me for having been born.”

“That’s horrible enough, Leire. What about the other half?”

As I struggle to gather my thoughts, an electrical discharge shakes my brain. I shut my eyes closed and suck air through my teeth.

Jacqueline squeezes my right hand, that I had rested on the table.

“Baby, people don’t get zapping in the brain for no reason,” she says, worried. “Maybe you should call for an appointment with a neurologist.”

I lean back in the chair and open my mouth to speak, but a man’s cheery voice violates our privacy.

“Coffee and spicy potatoes, coming up.”

Our waiter is a South American guy with coffee-colored skin, who’s wearing tiny hoop earrings and that has ruined his hair with frosted tips. More importantly, he’s striding towards us while holding a tray with two lattes and a plate of steaming, spicy potatoes.

I sit upright.

“Ah yes, we came here to eat…”

As the waiter sets the two cups of latte and the spicy potatoes on our table, he dares to speak to us.

“How are you two doing this evening?” he asks in a too-friendly tone, as if we chose this establishment to have sex in front of him and his fellow staff members.

“Very well, thank you,” Jacqueline says.

“Is it okay if I call you Gerard?” I ask him.

The waiter tilts his head, then his cheeks dimple as he smiles.

“Gerard is fine. My name’s actually César, though.”

“Are you a time traveler from the nineties?”

Jacqueline lets out a noise of surprise. She taps my right shoulder with the back of her hand.

“Leire, don’t be a dick for no reason.”

“But that was an honest question.”

The waiter seems more amused than disturbed.

“I was born in ninety-three, back in Brazil.”

“Like anacondas and Brazilians.”

He chuckles.

“That is true. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your food, ladies.”

Gerard saunters away from us like we’re no longer worthy of his time.

The mound of fried, roughly cubical potatoes is sprinkled with gunpowder, and covered in a cum-colored alioli sauce. Its aroma invades my nostrils and delivers a tangy, spicy kick to my brains. My mouth fills with saliva, so I hurry to close it in case I start drooling.

Jacqueline pours sugar onto her latte, then she stirs it until the powder dissolves. She’s smiling warmly at me like a parent at Christmas.

I grab one of the forks. Instead of stabbing myself in the neck again, I impale one of the potatoes and I bring it to the cavernous hole in my face. As I taste the hot, spiced potato and the oily, garlic-based sauce, I feel like I’m going to tear up, so I close my eyes.

“They look so small,” I mumble with my mouth full, “but they’re so fucking heavy.”

My limbs loosen up, and I sink into my chair.

“That’s the stuff, isn’t it?” Jacqueline asks softly. “Despite our worries and pains, we can look forward to tasty delights, and in our case, we can also care for each other.”

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Author’s note: This week I’ve been listening to one of my favorite albums from fifteen or so years ago (most of my favorite albums are from at least a decade ago, because I’ve grown old): The Unicorns’ ‘Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone?’, particularly the ghost-themed songs ‘Tuff Ghost’ and ‘Sea Ghost’. They were also favorites of Irene, the protagonist of my previous novel. Self-promotion!

Anyway, I’ve had a hard time getting through this scene. I thought that by working in the afternoon this week, I would wake up early and write for a few hours until I was forced to abandon my post to waste my time and energies at the office. But my brain has been a muddled mess recently.

I’ve decided to hyphenate what I call color qualifiers like ‘watermelon-pink’ from now on. I use that stuff a lot, and I refused to hyphenate it because it didn’t look good to me, but it looks better to me now, so that’s what I will do. I will revise all the other instances whenever I finish this novel.

How come Leire, one of the most dangerous people in the world to own a revolver, suddenly has one? If you don’t know already (why are you reading this?), you should likely read through the entirety of the previous sequence, that started back at chapter 43. It actually happens right at the end, but just read through the entirety of it, will you?

Yesterday, a Friday, I returned home from work at eleven. I fell asleep like a couple of hours later, and woke up at six in the morning for my solitary shift on a Saturday. Thankfully, for a few hours my desk looked like this:

I’ve gotten back to the ‘Arkham Horror’ LCG, probably my favorite “board game” ever. I played through the first scenario of the ‘Edge of the Earth’ campaign, with the decks I made for Zoey Samaras (a vicious damage dealer who gets rewards for engaging enemies), Monterey Jack (who mostly travels around doing his stuff), and Jacqueline Fine. Of course, I have no choice but to play with an investigator named Jacqueline, but apart from that, her ability to manipulate the Chaos Bag tokens is very powerful. The links go to each of my public decks at ArkhamDB. I prefer to build thematic decks that mainly focus on the one or two things that an investigator does that nobody else can; however, that requires a good team. My Zoey got screwed bad in Agility-based treachery cards because she doesn’t have a single related skill card.

Anyway, I wrote about this board/card game because it keeps me entertained and distracted from the shittiness of the rest of the world, in a similar way that writing does. I feel like crap otherwise.

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Jacqueline and I stroll through the sand back to the promenade. I thought that we would cross the stretch of gardens, but instead she guides me along the low wall that delimits the western edge of Ondarreta beach, past the open courts of the tennis club, which are half-filled with players that intend to sweat their way through the remaining hour of sun on this October afternoon. We leave behind two teenagers on their bikes, a group of seniors walking their dogs, a mother pushing a pram. All thankfully absorbed in their own little worlds, without a second glance to spare for the couple walking past them.

Jacqueline tugs on my arm to stop me. On the opposite side of the narrow road, a canopied entryway flanked by tennis courts leads to an outdoor café, although a sign next to the entrance calls it an English pub. To the right of the overhang of palm trees that line the outdoor café, the apartment buildings built on the terraced slopes of Mount Igueldo look so close that I want to figure out how crazy rich I’d need to be to afford them.

“Have you been here before?” Jacqueline asks.

“Are you kidding me?”

She chuckles.

“But it’s nice enough, right?”

“And likely expensive.”

Jacqueline takes my hand and pulls me into the pub’s grounds. Past the tall hedges meant to offer some privacy to the tennis players, the spread-out tables and chairs are white and plasticky; likely promotional items from some brewery. The folded parasols stick out like erect, hooded penises.

I choose a table distanced two empty ones from a family that has come to watch their kids play, judging by the flamboyant tennis bags. Our table has been placed next to a hedge, but on the opposite side of the terrace, only a chain link fence separates us from two ongoing tennis matches in which men wearing shorts are pursuing a bouncing ball to whack it severely.

I take off my backpack and put it down next to my picked chair. I roll the sore shoulder that had endured the weight all the way from my apartment. Jacqueline observes me as I exaggerate a grimace of pain.

“Are you into tennis?” she asks.

I narrow my eyes at her. My girlfriend has seen me cry during the strain of merely exercising to a YouTube video in her living room, yet she asks me if I would enjoy witnessing a more gruesome torture.

“I don’t know much about tennis except that it’s a sport, a horrifying fact, and that it involves two men hitting each other’s balls.”

Jacqueline giggles.

“It can also involve two women hitting each other’s balls, or a combination of genders hitting each other’s balls.”

“I was unaware of such crude details of the game.”

“Oh yes. Men are not the only ones who get their jollies from other people’s pain and humiliation.”

Spike’s stupid horse face flashes in my mind, and I find myself scratching my cheek anxiously. I clear my throat.

“Well, if the sport also mixed species, I may have found it intriguing. What, does tennis get you off, Jacqueline?”

“Oh, I wish,” she says, sounding wistful. “But I do love to see two people compete over something, it’s fascinating. One of these days I’ll drag you down here to play.”

Although Jacqueline smiles, my skin prickles with unease, to which also contributed the loud thwack of a racket hitting a ball behind the hedge that separates us from another tennis court.

“I think you meant bring.”

She crosses her arms and tilts her head as if she intended to look stern, but the silly grin betrays her.

“You know what I mean, don’t you, sweetie? The same way I got you to sweat with me in the living room, you’ll learn how to whack tennis balls.”

My muscles complain in anticipation.

“A simple glimpse of you, with your graceful yet commanding presence, suggests that you were born with the tennis skill and an instinct to use it as a choice in warfare.”

“I know I’m gorgeous, Leire, and you are just changing the subject.”

“What I meant to add is that, in contrast, I’m lucky if I can rely on enough energy to remain coherent throughout a whole workday.”

Jacqueline shrugs cruelly.

“Well, now you’ll have to adapt to a life in which you play tennis all day long. But don’t worry, I’ll show you the sport in the most unusual ways.”

A ball hits the chain link fence, making it rattle with a metallic sound.

“Once you experience such a level of second-hand embarrassment, you’ll regret it,” I say wearily. “In any case, please let’s sit down. Gravity is torturing me more than usual.”

When I plop myself down, the plasticky chair creaks. Jacqueline rests her hands on the back of the closest chair, which is facing the hedge.

One of the tennis players behind the fence shouts incoherently; sportspeople believe they have the right to annoy others in such ways. The man swerves to intercept an incoming projectile, and I imagine his sweaty penis flopping around inside his shorts. The glans must be shaped like a tennis ball.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to enjoy this place…” I mutter. A chill shoots up my spine, and I go wide-eyed. “W-wait a second, tennis?!”

“What sudden realization has horrified you?” Jacqueline asks patiently.

“Is this where you met…? I mean, you did date a whole lot of tennis players…”

“I’ve never dated a tennis player. However, I have fucked a couple of them, and yes, I met them here. One of them was trying to lose his virginity.”

I sit bolt upright as if someone just offered me a cupcake.

“What does that have to do with anything?!”

Jacqueline’s eyes shine with mischief.

“He wanted to have sex with me, I wanted to have sex with him, and we happened to play tennis together.”

I try in vain to suppress a shudder.

“I’d rather not hear about your conquests. So why have you brought me to this restaurant in particular? To see how I’d react? To hurt me?”

“No, baby! I just like this place and it’s relatively close to my apartment, plus, I didn’t think you’d mind.”

I lower my head and rub my temples.

“I’m in no shape to pass any type of test. I’ll warn you: if those men approach us to greet you, I may implode.”

“Don’t worry, they wouldn’t recognize me looking like this. But if we had to avoid the locations where I met my lovers, we’d barely go anywhere.” I feel the blood drain from my face. Jacqueline reaches for my hand and squeezes it gently. “Oh, you know I’m joking, right?”

When I take a deep breath, my belly growls.

“You sound like a hungry bear,” she says. “I’ll go order two lattes and a plate of spicy potatoes.”

Jacqueline takes off her purse and leaves it on the seat of the chair next to me, claiming it for herself. She struts away down the corridor between the tables and its occupants, as well as palm trees, towards a two-story building, which is painted watermelon pink, has Greek-style columns guarding the front door, and features a signboard that brings attention to the word ‘Wimbledon’. A toddler totters into my girlfriend’s path, but Jacqueline, instead of punting the tiny creature, crouches enough to pat the toddler’s head. The kid keeps waddling away until a man in his late thirties, presumably the father, hurries after her and scoops the toddler up, to the little girl’s displeasure. The father glances at Jacqueline, who’s walking away with a spring in her step, and my girlfriend’s long legs clad in thigh-high tights must have registered in his depraved mind, because he does a double take.

At the table where that toddler originated, a pair of nine-or-ten-year-old kids are running around and taking turns hiding behind chairs from the other’s murderous impulses. Meanwhile they scream and laugh, oblivious of the lives being crushed around them.

A weight is pulling down the inside pocket of my jacket, as if I had stuffed in there a block of lead. I slouch in the chair, take a deep breath of the sea breeze, and close my eyes.

My nose gets molested by the smell of salty food, hot coffee, perfume and sweat. My ears are assaulted by the hubbub of nearby conversations, the brouhaha of strung-out children, the whaps of taut nets getting abused by errant balls, the grunts of men who’ve just hit a projectile into someone’s sternum, and the cries of their opponents as they fight for their lives.

The sound of a tennis ball smacking hard rubber reaches me muted, as if I were sinking to the bottom of a lake. A rumbling is building up under my consciousness: a herd of stampeding horses bearing down on me. Once it reaches me, my body will crumble like made of cardboard and plaster.

At the edge of hearing, someone whispers my name: the gurgly voice of a female who needs to swallow a build-up of phlegm. I sigh, then dig out my phone and hold it to my ear; nobody would consider me crazy for talking to a phantom as long as they can picture a presence talking from somewhere else on this wretched planet.

“Who’s there?” I ask weakly.

“I am a caryatid,” the female voice whispers.

“And what the hell is that?”

The female presence remains silent, but I feel her breathing near my nape.

“Are you a friend?” I ask.

“I am not a friend.”

“A stranger, then?”

Something hits the canopy of a nearby palm tree. When I open my eyes, a tennis ball bounces on the terrace between the tables. A smiling kid runs to grab the ball, then tosses it back over the fence.

“I asked you something, intruder,” I say gruffly. “Are you listening?”

“I’m always listening to you, and I answered: I am not a stranger.”

A few gulls scream as they fly past. I wipe my sweaty palm on my denim trousers.

“What do you want from me? Do I have to take revenge on these tennis players? Or are you the vengeful spirit of someone I killed in a past life?”

“I am not a spirit.”

An electrical zap makes my brain tremble. My eyelids twitch.

“You aren’t any fun either,” I say, my voice cracking. “I’ll tell you what you are, though: a burden that I carry on my shoulders. And I’m sick and tired of carrying it, you’re just too heavy to bear. So tell me, what can I do to get rid of you?”

The horses are galloping towards me. Their hooves are thundering, their nostrils foaming. Their eyes are hollow and hungry.

“You think that your suffering will end if you get rid of your consciousness,” the caryatid whispers.

I cast my gaze down at the fossil grey tiles of the terrace. My shoulders sag, my vision blurs. I blink the sudden surge of tears away.

“Well, it would end. What else do you expect me to do?”

“You might find a cure for your malaise, but you’d miss out on experiencing the world.”

I groan.

“How about showing yourself if you are going to insist on bothering me?” I complain in a croaky voice.

From behind me, a tan-colored bust creeps sideways into my field of vision. Her Hellenic face resembles a cliff. Despite the serenity of her expression, her nose has been chiseled off, her cheeks are worn like rubbed with sandpaper, her lips and chin are nicked like pecked at by crows. She’s marred by downward, soot black streaks as if someone had toppled an inkwell on her head.

I roll my eyes.

“Oh, fuck off.”

My backhanded swat pops the vision like a bubble.

I draw a deep breath, inhaling a cocktail of smoky smells that are getting drowned in the sea breeze, then I place my phone on the table.

As I sink in my chair and I rub the bridge of my nose, I grow paranoid: what if someone witnessed me assaulting a hallucination?

Seated near the trunk of a palm tree as wide as an Egyptian pillar, two middle-aged women, both sporting a layered bob and a chiffon scarf around the neck, nod gravely at each other’s words. A woman in her early twenties beams as she hunches over to feed with a spoon the concealed baby inside a pram. A bald guy dressed like an electrician guffaws and slaps his knee while his mate slugs a pint of foamy beer. A solitary woman in her mid-forties, who’s wearing a gingham dress and white sandals, pours wine in her glass. On the other side of the fence, a sweaty man twirls his racket, then he strikes a pose and swings at an incoming ball.

Why would I be surprised that otherworldly apparitions feel familiar, or at the most annoy me for invading my personal space? I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by incomprehensible monsters. I’m stuck in a low-budget horror movie, doomed to witness it while drooling all over myself in a state of undiluted panic.

For how long must I walk the same ground wearing this human costume, for how much time must I endure being me? Three more decades going by averages, four or five if I’m unlucky, six or seven if the universe despises me like I’m sure it does.

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Electric trees flash in the velvety darkness of my mind. The zaps come more frequently when I move my eyeballs from side to side, even behind my eyelids. I take a deep breath, filling my lungs with fresh, brine-scented air, and I try to forget about the crackle and sparks inside my skull.

Fifteen meters ahead, a wave breaks with a languid whoosh. Beyond the Cantabrian Sea that washes over the bay, the ocean burbles and hisses like the stomach of some leviathan that swallowed a whale. I would have thought that after millions of years of unabated hunger despite having gulped down one giant beast after another, its belly would have bulged with blubber until it exploded, which would have drowned the entire planet in black sludge.

The beach is covered in bits of rotting wood, sun-bleached bones and blistered flesh. Torn, traumatized ships that have drifted from the oceans are stacked in a floating graveyard that gets rhythmically pounded against the rocky shore like driftwood. The wreckage and their dead crews are shrouded with a layer of muck and algae. Colossal squids propel themselves around the hulking carcasses to gnaw at the rotting corpses, leaving trails of coagulated blood and viscera in their wake.

When I open my eyes, a bright world assaults me: a pitted, banana-colored carpet of sand slopes down to the opaque, teal seawater; nearby, four students have gathered their backpacks on the sand and are lounging with their backs to us, although they are wearing coats and jackets to protect themselves against the October chill; and in the distance, a town-sized island stands against the horizon like a rocky, green sideways boob. The island’s tiny spit of beach, jutting out from the rocky shore, must be littered with bones: the destination of an arduous pilgrimage where every traveler is bequeathed a bone by a weary skeleton that has stood sentry for millennia.

I start rubbing my temple, trying to relieve a tingle of pain. A hand strokes my left shoulder tenderly. The sea breeze ruffles Jacqueline’s raven black hair as her skin glows faintly in the afternoon sun. She’s wearing a chocolate brown, suede trench coat over a white turtleneck blouse. Her scarlet skirt has a tapering hemline and is decorated with white dots; a cum-stained tulip.

Jacqueline deepens the creases at the corners of her eyes in a warm smile.

“Are you getting a headache?”

“Brain zaps,” I say wearily. “Even worse than I used to get years ago, when I stopped taking serotonin reuptake inhibitors.”

“I don’t know what that is. A drug?”

“Uh-huh. The kind that a psychiatrist prescribes to you when you say that you regret being alive.”

Jacqueline’s eyebrows come together in concern. My throat tightens, and I avert my gaze to the apartment buildings that are clinging to the forested face of Mount Igueldo, past the far end of the beach.

“I guess I was using them to suppress my existential dread,” I continue, “but they didn’t do shit. At least not remotely enough. Once I dropped them, the withdrawals taught me how it feels to experience short circuits in your brain, and I’m getting an echo of them now.”

“Do you think they are stress-related?”

“Who knows? I’m always bobbing in an ocean of anxiety and stress, and I can’t tell when I’m going to start drowning in my own mind. It’s a bit like thirst: by the time you feel it, you are already dehydrated.”

The strap of my bulky backpack, filled with clothes I grabbed from my apartment, is pulling down on my right shoulder, but as I shift the strap, it gives me the chance to avoid Jacqueline’s gaze; if her expression suggested that she’s getting sick of broken old me, I would start wading through the sea until I reached Iceland or I drowned, whichever happened first.

But could I admit that my recent spike of anxiety may be related to the self-murder that I witnessed yesterday? That horsey scoundrel’s only crime was looking for love in the wrong places. Who would have suspected that I, a creature that otherwise passes for human, was born an unlikely abomination: a living being with a cavity instead of a heart? I knew that my unwieldy backpack would burden me throughout our date, but what will I be for Jacqueline as her girlfriend but a humpback whale draped across her shoulders?

The students lounging nearby laugh, and their exuberance floats to our ears along with the lapping of the foamy breakers on the shore.

“So… this may turn out to be an abysmal date,” I say guiltily. “I’m sorry.”

Jacqueline raises my chin gently so I can meet her cobalt blues.

“Come on now,” she coos as if dulcifying a child, “you don’t need to apologize for having a brain meltdown. Why, I am pretty much used to it by now. And look at those waves rolling in. The sea’s alive here. We all are, in fact.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh, really? Well, I’m sorry then,” she says with mock annoyance.

I gulp to ease my growing sense of dread. My memory flashes with an image of my grandfather’s face back when the rusty shard of a ship’s anchor impaled it, because he bludgeoned his skull against the anchor during a psychotic episode. He had daydreamed that he was steering his beloved battleship to fight against evil spirits that were trying to destroy the world. When the ship ran out of fuel, he ordered his sailors to murder everyone aboard so he could set sail in a great voyage into space. His final words before he threw himself off the stern deck were, “Take me to the stars, men!” I never found out what made my grandfather snap, but I was transfixed by his gruesome act of self-mutilation.

“H-have you ever felt that the island over there has been unduly haunted by the restless souls of drowned sailors and abducted mermaids, who are longing to break free?”

Jacqueline grins as she gazes out at the island with a captivated expression.

“Not particularly.”

“Neither do I, but it’s what they say,” I mumble, aware of the desperation in my voice.

Jacqueline pats my back.

“I’m not sixteen years old anymore, you know.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” I say as I dig my sneaker into the sand. “But what do you mean?”

“You don’t need to impress me by organizing some mind-blowing outing. I just want to spend time with you. Maybe even do some necking.”

I rest the side of my head against her shoulder, then I sigh.

“Don’t you think you pamper me excessively?”

“Don’t you need to be pampered to that extent?”

Maybe so, but I don’t know why you would want to, it’s what I was going to say but didn’t dare utter.

It’s far easier to pull someone down than to pull them up. Those misguided souls that want to help the depressed should flee and save themselves.

Jacqueline slides an arm around my shoulders. Her warm breath tickles my earlobe.

“I happen to know just what you need to shut down that self-harming mind of yours,” she whispers.

Jacqueline turns my head towards her, leans in and kisses me lightly on the mouth. I close my eyes; the warmth of her silky lips and of her face lights up in shades of red against the pale blue of the autumn breeze. Her tongue finds mine, and I turn into a kid standing up to my waist in a strong tide that’s receding from the shore. I step closer to Jacqueline, bumping my hips into hers, and I wrap my arms under her coat, around her lower back, while her hands move down to cradle my ass cheeks through my denim trousers.

My heart thuds against my ribcage, my blood becomes electrified, my brain turns to jellied oatmeal. I long to be swallowed by my woman, to dissolve in her insides and become part of her.

I’d love to let myself fall backwards onto the sand and pull Jacqueline down with me. Instead, she pulls back a few centimeters, elongating a catenary of saliva between our lips.

For a moment we had constructed our own universe, an impenetrable bubble of spacetime, but now my brain is absorbing a flood of prickly sensory information as if the outside world was trying to reclaim me. The breeze is cooling my exposed skin. A salty scent tickles my nostrils. The distant shrieks of gulls pierce through the noise of the sea. Two of the students, both girls, are looking over their shoulder to pry into the private affairs that we’ve conducted in public. One of them, petite, with short-cropped auburn hair and ivory skin flushed pink, makes a point of holding my gaze.

My cheeks burn, and I’m forced to dilate my nostrils to pass enough air through them. I let go of Jacqueline’s hips and I step aside. I feel like a tween again, back when I was caught masturbating in a public park, a misadventure that concluded with me passing out in a puddle of my own pee.

Jacqueline wipes my lips with her thumb.

“Oh, come on now. Don’t look so shy. Does it bother you that others may find out that you are mine?”

“I… dislike when strangers stare at me for any reason.”

“They are thinking how nice it would be to join us, you know.”

“It’s none of their business,” I mutter.

Jacqueline chortles, then she shakes her head.

“You are an incorrigible nutjob.”

“And you’re a diva!”

Her grin displays a row of straight white teeth that glisten against her rosy gums.

“How about we move somewhere else, huh? Do you want me to treat you to an ice cream?”

I sigh.

“We could take a nap in some quiet cove until sunset.”

“You do sound tired,” Jacqueline says, and wraps her hand around my nape. “I know a nice place nearby to sit down for a cup of coffee and an appetizer. How about some spicy potatoes?”

I open my mouth to answer, but my stomach interrupts me by gurgling loudly.

“I just have to mention food with you, huh?” she asks, amused. “Let’s go.”

When we turn around, Jacqueline runs her hand down the back of my jacket and grabs my ass. I flinch.

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Author’s note: These last few days I’ve been listening to The Stone Roses almost exclusively, particularly to ‘I Am the Resurrection’ and ‘This Is the One’. I’d like to leave the country / For a month of Sundays / Burn the town where I was born.

I intended to upload this chapter and the following as a single part, but I got carried away with nonsense, as usual. Although this chapter by itself is far gentler than I’m used to writing, it was a nice change of pace. The next chapter is mostly finished, just needs another pass, so I’ll likely upload it tomorrow.

I’ve been in a bad mood recently. I grew even sicker of human beings and ended up doing a spring cleaning of contacts both on Goodreads and on WordPress.

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I step closer to Spike, although he stinks like shit and rancid death, and I glare into those protruding eyeballs that are the color of storm clouds.

“Do you want me to cry, you horsey cunt?” I sneer, my voice sounding like a rusted-out door. “Do you want my tears so you can feel superior? Get your fill then! Witness my pathetic self in all its ugliness! But I can make you cry too with this little mouth, and I don’t mean biting down on your tongue to fill my oral cavity with blood! Although you dared to call me a child, I’m an adult who will make the best of her life despite having been born in hell! How would you know what it means to be human anyway, huh? You’re a horse-shaped demon. You don’t even have a pussy! Life must have been so easy for you, spending your whole day eating hay and having your legs stroked. And you called me a bad person! What about all those times you chased me through the city’s streets? As I attempted to reach a shelter, you would snatch me up and throw me onto your back, then you carried me in circles as I flailed to keep my balance. You galloped and galloped even though I begged for mercy! Every one of our encounters ended up with me returning home covered in mud and shit and bruises. You even tried to strangle me on occasion.”

Spike stares down at me like a deaf, silent beast who doesn’t understand why the strange human keeps scrunching her face and making wild shapes with her mouth hole. Then he smacks his lips and speaks calmly.

“You can’t use stuff that has never happened as an argument in your defense.”

“It may have happened. Who can be sure? What I intended to convey is that it matters little whether you’re bad or good, even if you are a horse, a whale or a worm. I’m just a whore who needs a hug. But soon enough I’ll get to kneel at the altar of the goddess of depravity, and one of these days I may never have to masturbate again! Now, trot off to your grave, you deplorable ungulate! Lie down in that hole and get buried in your own shit, you stinking corpse!”

Spike hangs his head low and sighs.

“Like me, Leire, you’ve been dead since you were born.”

His words hit my face like a sharp punch. I step back until the pile of board games blocks my escape.

“Stop saying things that hurt!”

Spike averts his gaze, running it over the eggnog yellow wallpaper of the living room, as if he himself were hoping to find an exit and return to his horse paradise, to the love of hooves and the never-ending gallop.

“You are lucky, regarding Jacqueline I mean,” he utters in a mournful tone. “I’ve never experienced such intimacy. I never would have, even if I had existed for centuries.”

Until a moment ago, I wanted to slap him across his stupid horse face, but now I’d rather hug him so hard that his eyes would burst from their sockets and his ribs would shatter. I’m left with nothing but the taste of shame.

“Spike, don’t sell yourself short. You pretend to be an ordinary horse, but you are the one true horse, because nobody else will ever speak to me with such disrespect. Do you remember all the good times we spent together? I would ride you along the seaside, play on the beach and use sticks as lances to fight pirates. We swam with dolphins in the ocean, we bit into seashells, we cooked seafood, we sank in quicksand up to our noses, we explored caves beneath ancient castles, we wrestled goats then shot them with crossbows. You once told me that you would die for me, that you would always be my faithful horse. Those days will never end, they will remain with me forever.”

“Yeah, none of that happened either,” Spike murmurs in a voice that is breaking apart.

“In any case, when you come out of your horse trance, you’re still Spike. I don’t think anyone is really the master of their life except Jacqueline. As for me, I can only act out of desperation.”

Spike’s lips tremble while he struggles to formulate a sentence, as if he had to wrench the words out, but he gives up and teeters away, nearly toppling over the coffee table.

I want to brush the dirt and caked blood off his mane, then place my hand on his round belly to feel the coarse coat as well as the blood pulsing through him. I’d let him lick my fingers one by one with his warm, viscous tongue, which must smell of rot and death. But I fear that any physical contact with this creature would transform me into an equivalent equine abomination.

I take a tentative step towards Spike’s trembling, scarred back.

“I can see that you’re very depressed, and I’m here for you if you want to open up about it. Let me tell you that, although you stink like rotten dung, you surely are one of the most impressive horsemen in history. In fact, you’ve never been a horse for me, Spike, but a unicorn in disguise.”

His hind legs twitch, his shaggy tail jerks around in a way that reminds me of a puppy, then he tilts his bulky head back and lets out a blaring neigh, raw and deep and full of grief, the first note of a requiem that will be played over the grave of our civilization. I’m astonished at how readily my pal can transform into a beast that could have only crawled out from the underworld.

As my eyes get watery, I stagger to the sofa and I plop down. A throng of words is jostling in my throat, and I want to claw them out as if they were wasps trapped under my tongue.

“The world has become a twisted place,” I say in a brittle voice. “I wish I could return to my distant childhood, to those brief moments in which nothing mattered except for how the warm light bathed my body and how the birdsongs filled my soul with a gentle harmony. But ever since, I’ve never been able to shut my eyes to the truth: we’re trapped in an insane asylum with no escape route, surrounded by demented monsters. We have ended up at the mercy of blackguards who consider themselves human beings, although they’ll provide us with a hundred thousand ways to suffer, to be humiliated, and to die in our own homes.”

I’m enveloped in Spike’s fetid, sickly stench, but I take a deep breath, then I wipe away the salty streaks on my cheeks.

“Who knows if I was born with a chance to become a normal person,” I continue. “When I was little, I felt like something was missing inside of me. Then one day I realized that it was my humanity. I understood that I could never become a girl or a boy, and instead I grew up into a verminous slug that crawled along the cracks of this world. How could I have the slightest notion of what it means to be a human being, when the most basic things have been stripped from me? If Jacqueline hadn’t diverted my destiny, I would have shambled through the rest of my life like a mindless corpse with a hungry heart and empty guts. In my final day, lying in bed and covered from head to toe in dried piss, feces and semen, I would have wasted my last energies masturbating until my heart gave out. What I mean to say, Spike, is that I understand your plight perfectly well: every second feels muddy and heavy as if you were wading through a swamp, and you’d do anything to drown out the agonized squeals from your festering subconscious.” My voice has been choking and cracking, but I take a deep breath and I brace myself to continue, because I must explain to Spike how utterly hopeless he is. “If I ever get my hands on a computer that runs on real horses instead of the synthetic ones that the humans have shoved into their pathetic machines, I’ll transfer every treasure in my mind onto it: memories and feelings, programs and board games. Then I’ll abandon this insane world where people run around with their heads cut off, and from my eternal shelter I will contact you so you can join me in paradise. But for now I remain trapped in this cage of flesh and bones, hopeless and terrified of dying alone as you are of turning into one of the insane horses that roam through the night. So I can’t save you from your pain. I had only been able to stifle mine through masturbation, which requires a functioning set of genitals.”

When I gather the strength to look up, Spike is standing near the coffee table. His drool-soaked lips quiver as he stares at me unblinkingly with those bulging, crazed eyes of his. I’m overwhelmed by the harrowing thought of becoming another victim of an equine rampage, but he’s wobbling like a drunk guy on a rooftop.

“Throughout my life, I always did what I was expected to do,” Spike says in a thin, dry voice that reminds me of dead leaves fluttering in the wind. “Maybe I believed that self-sacrifice was noble. Maybe I believed that by following the rules, I was making the world a better place. I performed my duties with nary a complaint, I wore myself down to the bone like a workhorse, and what did I get in return?”

I hoped that Spike had intended that as a rhetorical question, but he’s prolonging the silence. I shrug and look down at my pitiful hands.

“Please, don’t stare at me with those bulging eyes or I’ll scream. You know we are the slaves of some colossal evil, and we’ve never had any choice but to obey monsters. And then there are all these ghosts, the voices and visions that assail me as my brain torments me with a relentless stream of horrors, which I wish I could ward off with a hammer. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, Spike, is that people are merely bags of flesh and bones that contain all sorts of shit. No one is an exception, except for Jacqueline. As for you and I, we’re freaks of nature, abominations that have been thrust into solid frames.”

Spike shuts his eyes tight, and as he shakes his head, a string of drool flings towards me and sticks onto my corduroy jacket.

“Nobody ever cared about me,” he mutters, “let alone love me. I was always treated like an outcast. For my entire life I was only valued for what I could provide for others, and even then, they noticed me reluctantly. Once I was gone, most of the people of whom I was fond forgot me and carried on with their lives. So what was the point?”

I swallow the lump in my throat. I scoot closer to the edge of the sofa cushion and I press my hand against my chest.

“In the name of your filthy, scarred, decomposing hide,” I say earnestly, “I want you to know that from now on I’m going to work towards a world that makes sense, a world that won’t contain a single thing that could make me think of death, rape or destruction.”

Spike shoots me a look of incredulity as the thick vein that stretches down his neck squirms like a squid’s tentacle. His hind legs must be struggling to keep him upright, because he staggers backwards towards the window, making his hooves clatter on the hardwood floor. He takes a deep, tremulous breath.

“If only you weren’t all talk, Leire,” he says bitterly. “So many times I’ve tried to warn you about what’s about to happen, hoping that we could prevent it together, but I couldn’t get you to care, or even to listen. I shouldn’t have volunteered to convince you. What the hell did I know about anything? I’ve always been helpless. I waited for someone to come and whisk me away. I just wanted… to be special somehow.”

“You are special, Spike. You are my friend.”

As he stares at me befuddled, his lips part slowly in a grimace of anguish.

“Is that worth anything?”

I hang my head low. A pulsating darkness spreads from the center of my chest. I should have known better than to open my heart even to this horse. Now I want to lie down on the floor, hug my knees and sob uncontrollably.

Spike sways as he widens a demented smile, but a single tear rolls down his bony jaw.

“In the end you were right, Leire. Everything is rotten to the core. Why would I care about our future? The whole world can go fuck itself.”

A ropey strand of saliva dribbles from his muzzle onto the silvery barrel of a revolver precariously perched on top of his frontal hooves. The weapon has a checkered wood grip and deep shade in the flutes of its thick cylinder. The frame is engraved with a skull and bones. He must have also coated the bullets with rat poison.

I sit bolt upright as a storm of screams racks my skull.

“Spike, where were you hiding that gun?!”

He gazes at me with a mournful, almost apologetic expression. His front hooves fumble to tilt the barrel upwards, but as he attempts to pull back the hammer, the revolver springs from his grip, lands with a thud on the coffee table and slides off onto the hardwood floor.

I gawk at the inert weapon that’s lying close to my sneakers. I imagine the click-click-click of the hammer’s firing pin striking the primers, and the thunderous blasts of gunfire, and a bunch of bullets ejecting into the air like a metallic bouquet of flowers. I also picture the self-inflicted wounding of a bullet to Spike’s craggy face. Not even a horse would have survived such an assault.

My breath comes in heaving gasps and my pulse is thumping in my veins. Spike’s hoofsteps clattering against the floor snap me out of my daze: he’s tromping towards the window. When he reaches it, he leans his forehead against the windowpane and lets his shoulders droop.

In the moonlight, my friend has become a shadow in the shadows, the silhouette of a horse made of darkness and of the cold chill that clings to its presence. When I squint I can almost make out a saddle and stirrups and the buckles of the leather straps.

I’m struggling to come up with words, but Spike lets out an ear-piercing howl. He slams his head against the windowpane, shattering the glass. Blood-dyed shards and bits scatter over the floor like hail. A cold draught comes in through the empty window frame, curling the curtains.

Reality has mixed its essence with equine blood. The abominable potion must be seeping through all dimensions, leaving behind a residue of madness and despair.

I leap off the sofa. Spike has turned towards me. The ragged fur coat of his elongated face is drenched with red, and glass shards are embedded in his forehead. As he sways on his hind hooves, he splits his lips open, showing his dagger-like incisors, and spits bloody foam.

Spike lifts an atrophied, trembling foreleg. He angles that hoof so it points at the groove of his chin. I see myself reflected in his black eyes, that are wide and puffy with sorrow as they leak copious tears.

“Bang,” he says.

Spike throws himself back, somersaulting through the empty window frame, snagging his hide on shards of glass still attached. He disappears into the night. A gasp later, I hear a muffled, sickening splat of flesh and bone.

“Spike!” I yell.

My legs feel numb and slow, but I race over to the window. I clutch at the edge of the frame and I lean out.

On the street below, a large pool of dark blood is spreading under my friend’s broken body and splayed limbs. His black eyes, that have rolled back in his mangled head, are staring at the night sky.

The cold October wind whips my hair around my face. My heart is about to burst. I want to crumple on the floor. I cradle my head in my trembling hands and I listen to the roaring in my ears.

Spike had made himself small to escape his pain, but there are no bottoms of despair so deep that they can’t be reached. I should tell myself that he’s found peace and solace in death, that he has nothing left to fear. I should feel elated because he has been liberated from his prison as I wished to free myself from mine. But instead I’m weeping for my friend and for all other horses who have died like this; for every poor soul who’s being crushed under the clattering hoofsteps of despair; for this world that has become a crumbling madhouse of horrors; for everyone, because one day we will all disappear in an endless black void, never to be seen or heard again, never to feel the warmth of the sun, never to hear a melodious song, never to smell the sweet aroma of a mother’s milk, never to feel the delicate fingertips of a loved one caressing our skin.

The metallic-tasting darkness has started to lap at my consciousness like black water swirling through a sewer grate. It will become a cool shadow enveloping my flesh, a dark mist settling in my mind. Soon I will be sucked down as well.

I pull out my phone from a pocket of my jacket, but as I try to remember the emergency number, I realize that talking to a professional about this debacle would end up with me dragged to a psych ward. What else can I do now but abandon Spike down there, to be picked apart by carrion birds and scavengers?

My friend’s body convulses. His limbs twitch. Inch by inch, Spike rolls over and retracts his legs. Although chunks of his flesh and bloodied hide are plastered across the pavement, he pushes himself onto his hind hooves and raises his mangled head. As if being pulled by invisible strings, he takes a faltering step, then another and another. While he wheezes out inky blood-foam, and blood gushes out from his wounds like a red rain, my old friend continues shambling down the street into oblivion.

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Author’s note: this chapter concludes the sequence that started back in chapter 43. Plenty of far crazier stuff to come in the 12,500 words of notes left to render.

Tomorrow I’ll start a six-workdays-long week. Most if not all of my coworkers will be absent due to a strike. I was going to go to work anyway because I’d rather not get involved with that stuff, but in any case I’ve been forced to work as the token “guy that needs to be present at the office in case some nasty shit happens”. My boss even gave me an official note that states that if I decide to stay home anyway, I would be prosecuted for a criminal liability. I work at a hospital, after all. So tomorrow Monday I’ll be on phone duty as well as handling whatever stops working in our hospital complex and in nearby outpatients clinics (we serve like half of the province). Apart from this madness, I’m also the sole technician for next Saturday.

So this may have been the last chapter for a while.

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“Holy shit! Spike! I haven’t seen you in ages! Are you alive?!”

Spike grunts as his sleep is shattered by the joyous tone in my voice. I consider tickling his exposed anus to stir him awake, but the horse’s long-lashed eyes flutter open. He lifts his cumbersome head off the armrest, and the fleshy ridges of his nostrils quiver as he snorts a gust of snot.

Good thing I didn’t dare touch any part of his anatomy; I could have contracted untold plagues.

“It’s okay if you’re dead,” I say.

Spike jerks his body into an upright position, then he lowers his head to wipe the rheum from his eyes with his front hooves. It looks like he’s crushing his eyeballs into his skull.

I rest my fists on my waist and I nod approvingly.

“You look good! Your face is getting longer. But dude, you’ve never stunk worse! Have you passed the time farting up a storm?”

Spike shakes his head vigorously to jumpstart his brain, as if he had been soaking it in a tub of toxic waste. Otherwise he remains silent.

I press my index finger against my nostrils, and I realize my predicament.

“I was supposed to grab a bunch of clothes to store them at my girlfriend’s apartment, but how am I going to wash this stench off the fabric?”

Spike glares up at me through his eyelashes. Those moist, black eyeballs reveal a madness as deep as my own.

I’m taken aback by his malice. Can I blame him, though? I must have awoken him during the sweetest part of his slumber: visions of bloodshed and decapitation, of nipples carved out by vile blades, of mares slithering through a pool of entrails.

“I may be dead,” Spike grumbles.

“Maybe you’re just dreaming that you’re dead. Or maybe you’re one of those creatures whose hearts have been removed for medical reasons, then replaced by a fake organ made of silicone.”

As he taps on the hardwood floor with his right hind hoof, he dilates his nostrils, which are shaped like a fat, upside-down comma, and he takes a deep breath.

I contain a fit of nervous giggles.

“I swear, I must be the most weak-minded human who ever lived. A single afternoon without Jacqueline, and my brain fills her absence with hallucinations. Alright, I may as well take advantage of my derangement!”

I skip to my pile of board games, a collection of colorful cardboard boxes with exotic names: Terraforming Mars, Dead of Winter, Pax Pamir, Viscounts of the West Kingdom, 51st State, Labyrinth, Shadowrun Crossfire, Arkham Horror, Mansions of Madness, Through the Ages, Twilight Struggle… Their illustrations promise hours of fun, but nearly half of the games remain wrapped in plastic. Except for Renegade, their exposed upper sides are also coated in a layer of dust that resembles lustrous velvet.

“How about this time we get through more than a turn in Renegade? Our old nemesis, Shadowcluster, remains undefeated.”

“I’m done playing games with you, Leire,” Spike says bleakly.

I was about to lift Renegade’s box off the top, but I hear Spike’s hind hooves clack on the hardwood floor as he heaves himself off of the couch. When I turn around, a horse-shaped demon is towering over me. His lips are grey and decayed; they must taste like the dried-out meat of a slug. A hot, fetid gust of exhalation blows into my face. It’s the stench of a corpse that has been rotting in a well for a century.

“I had expected you to neigh in delight,” I say weakly. “You would turn your back on an activity that offers a temporary relief from reality? Are you trying to tell me that you prefer to live in the stupor of insanity?”

I make the mistake of holding Spike’s gaze, and I feel myself getting sucked into the frothy whirlpool of his delirium.

“Everything is going to shit,” he mutters in a hoarse, guttural voice, “and you are out there having sex.”

He must have waited for me in my living room, but these last few days, instead of returning home from work, I escaped my routine to get fucked over and over by the goddess of depravity. I wish that Jacqueline was here.

“W-well, does anything else matter when you’re having sex regularly?”

Spike lets out air explosively through his buttery teeth, which causes a gout of drool to squirt from his mouth and splatter on my pile of board games. Wobbly, he staggers back while his horse tail swishes along the floor. His chin drops to his breast, then he closes his eyes as if he were worn out from looking down upon mankind for far too long.

“I guess not, Leire. Sex is the only thing that matters.”

Spike averts his gaze; his shoulders are starting to tremble with repressed sobs. He must have been stewing in his insane horse thoughts for days, alone in my dreary apartment.

“You don’t understand how one’s life changes after Jacqueline has ravaged your body,” I say carefully. “She’s only been missing from my life for a single afternoon, but it’s like trying to breathe after someone has slit my throat.”

Spike’s lips curl up in a snarl, and his dark nostrils twitch like a dilated asshole. He shakes his girthy head dismissively.

“Don’t patronize me, Leire. I know how it feels to be you, I can read your mind. And you are a bad person.”

Why can’t my brain conjure up hallucinations that wish the best for me? I could have been given visions of a long marriage and a family, but I’m cursed with treachery instead. The mute parts of myself that dwell in the depths of my subconscious must spend their existence pleading silently for me to self-destruct. When will anyone apart from Jacqueline treat me as if I deserved to feel good from time to time?

“Yes, I’ve done bad things, I know,” I say icily. “I’m a bad person. But, Spike, isn’t it true that we all do bad things sometimes? I don’t think it matters whether we’re good or bad as long as we do our best to be happy with whatever little time we’ve been granted by our fickle universe. That’s why I’m trying to get my life together and have fun while I can.”

“Yeah, that’s a bunch of horseshit,” Spike snaps. “You’re so obsessed with pleasure, you live like a child.”

My teeth clack in frustration. I’m tired of this horse’s bizarre behavior. I’m tired of waiting to feel Jacqueline’s arms around me again.

“For your information, I was the one who asked Jacqueline out on a date. I was masturbating in bed when I came out with the idea, so I called her! Would a child dare to do that? Would a child want to spend time with someone they love on their own terms, or would they want to live a life that’s completely based on their parents’ whims? And you probably want to sabotage my sex life to steal my turn at the board games!”

The old, cracked horse merely stands there as he breathes into my face like a toxic bag of spoiled roadkill.

“No, you’re wrong, Leire,” he whispers. “You are like a child because you’ve never been loved.”

His acid words seethe through my brain and clench my heart. I’m the daughter of a man who shat me out in jail after another inmate fist-fucked him. When he died, I was thrown into a dumpster on a snowy night. I believed I would perish to pay for the sins of my father, but instead I was scooped out of the dumpster by a crackhead who first tried to snort me and then took me home. This woman, who insisted that I called her mom, was too strung out to care for me, so I was left alone to fend for myself from the age of seven. A couple of years later, mom was murdered by a cop who found her dealing drugs. My father, my mother, both dead from stupidity, sin, or the ravages of this insane planet. After a year of living in squalor, I was passed around to different foster families. One of my new sisters beat the shit out of me whenever I wanted something, so I hid in my assigned closet and masturbated. I became addicted to it because it took away the pain. Another foster family threw me out after I ate the last slice of a chocolate cake. By the age of thirteen I was sleeping in the hallways of a psychiatric ward because I’d become convinced that I was a ghost. My only friend was a psychotic squirrel that hoarded nuts in a cardboard box.

In truth, I’ve forgotten most of the details that would allow me to understand who I am. I only remember how it feels to have love taken away, to be hungry for it, to yearn for it, to cry in vain for it. I was abandoned. I can’t forgive them for failing to take care of me. And now I’m being condemned by a horse.

I feel like a scab, oozing blood and pus for all to see. No wonder I’m a reckless woman who’s never had the ability to take responsibility for anyone, even herself. I’ve only had one true love in my life, and that’s Jacqueline. She’s my mommy and my lover and my closest friend. Without her, I would revert to my natural state as a lab experiment who shouldn’t have been.

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Author’s note: it has taken me about a week to work through this scene, because I couldn’t get it to flow right. I ended up splitting the scene into three parts; this is the second one, and I may be able to finish the third one tomorrow.

The issue is that I’m working full-time. I have never been able to concentrate properly at work to write, because I’m surrounded by technicians and the general chaos of working at a hospital, and besides, writing is something you need to do alone. However, whenever I’m working the morning shift, I can only write for about two or two and a half hours in the afternoon, but I tend to be so exhausted, mentally drained from merely being around human beings for hours upon hours, that I can end up dreading the act of writing; getting through any sentence may involve wrenching the words out of myself. As expected, it took me waking up at eight in the morning on a Saturday, and spending most of the day on my writing, to finally shape this thing.

For me, writing is as physiologically necessary as sleeping. I need to write to stave off the tide of meaninglessness that the rest of reality forces me to sink in. I never know if the next period of depression is going to catch me at my lowest. So I’m dreading the day when I finally end up with a permanent contract at my job or any other, which would also pile up more responsibilities on me.

Anyway, I’ve been feeling the itch to play board games. Every day of this week, right after dinner, I’ve grabbed one of my game boxes and I’ve had a good ol’ time. Yesterday was Viscounts of the West Kingdom, and tonight Marvel Champions. I’m also waiting to get back to Arkham Horror; they’ve changed their distribution method, and they’ll release a whole expansion box with an entire campaign based upon Lovecraft’s story ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (link to the expansion’s page at the BGG). The fuckers used to sell each campaign mission individually, which ended up making the campaigns much more episodic because they couldn’t rely on the player having any of the other cards.

So yes, Leire is into board games because I’m into board games. She’s also into other stuff because I’m into that other stuff. Here’s a secret, though: her urge to masturbate is my urge to write. Mostly. But writing about writers is fucking lame.

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The stench of rotten eggs has blocked my nose, and an acidic taste lingers in my throat. Instead of standing in the pitch-black corridor, I should be lying on the floor and vomiting my guts out.

I grope blindly for the light switch, sliding my fingertips over the bumpy wallpaper. I locate a smooth, familiar shape. As my hand hovers over the switch, my heartbeat pulsates in my throat. A thousand shades of darkness await me on the other side of the beam of illumination.

During my absence, my apartment must have gotten infested with pests, mutated ones that grew resistant to bug spray. If I had been cursed with rats, I could learn to cohabitate with them. Although they would feast on my furniture, scratch my monitor’s screen with their claws, and make the crumbling plaster crackle as they gnawed through the walls, I could come to love those tiny, long-whisked furries. They would lie on my lap while I petted their fuzzy bellies. I would let them suckle from my bosom. I would take care of their offspring until they learned to fend for themselves. My biggest threat would consist in sleeping with my mouth open, as I may end up choking on a rat.

When I was younger and stupider, I used to dream about being a cat. I would cuddle up with a warm blanket and sleep at my leisure. My claws would dig into the hardwood floor while I basked in the sunlight. I would hide away in dark crevices. I would slink through tall grass in search of prey to kill and devour. Whenever anyone approached my hideout, I would hiss at them and spray them with a ferocious flow of piss. But I have grown old and wise. My eyes burn and my hands shake. I wish that I had never returned to my apartment.

What if I flip the light on and discover that swarms of invertebrates have overrun every corner of my abode? Dozens of cockroaches, those love children of giant beetles and flies, are clinging to the wallpaper of the corridor; they are scrunching themselves together as if intending to coalesce into a single exoskeleton. The floor is covered by a carpet of centipede corpses, their gray bodies bent at awkward angles from the holes they drilled into their own carapaces to escape into oblivion. The toilet bowl is coated with a layer of slimy slugs. The bathtub is festering with bluebottles that must have laid their eggs before they drowned in the mildew-ridden water. A lone scorpion scurries out of the bathroom, its stinger raised in the air. The desiccated carcass of a cat-sized tarantula is sprawled over the kitchen counter, and the penny-colored paste that the critter contained has seeped down the drawers. The bedroom has turned into a nest of spiderwebs, living tissue of sticky gossamer strands, and thousands of arachnids are crawling over my sheets as their eyes flash like alien stars. In my wardrobe, clusters of wasps are feasting on my hoodies and sweaters. A dozen ants are marching across the hardwood floor towards some unknown destination. Once the horde of invaders sniffs out my disdain, they will throng to my frame and burrow into my flesh in droves. The scurrying arachnids will embed their legs in my bones, and my hair will become a mass of cockroach antennae.

My limbs are turning into wings, my fingertips and toenails are growing into scythes. I hate insects and arachnids, and I’m sure I’m despised by them. As the only exception, a female praying mantis is one of the most beautiful creatures on Earth; she looks like an artist’s rendition of an angel, with her translucent wings and those bulging eyes that resemble fern-green gems. Otherwise, I never learned to like the creatures that I find horrifyingly disgusting.

As a child, I witnessed my mother transform into a black widow spider. She had consumed a bowlful of canned peaches, and she was lying on her bed. Her abdomen swelled until it split open, revealing her viscera and a single black egg as big as a pigeon. It hatched: a huge black widow crawled out of the eggshell, then it sprang at me. Its fangs poked into my skin and broke through my sternum and sank into my heart. The venom erased every good memory, and although I continued to live, I forever wished I hadn’t.

I’ve hesitated in this opaque darkness for so long that the world may have ended. I shake my head as if I could dislodge all the filth from my mind, and I steel myself for the upcoming war between insects and a human. As soon as I find a machete, or maybe a hammer, I’ll manage to massacre any number of creepy-crawlies.

When I flick the light switch on, the corridor gets filled with light as if a flashbang had burst into it. I squint my eyes at the glaring brightness, and when they adjust, the illumination provided by a single flyspecked lamp reveals a hellscape: my apartment. Instead of an insectoid invasion, I find myself facing the eggnog yellow wallpaper. It drags me back to an era during which people believed in a future of prosperity and plentiful sex; if they had envisioned our harrowing present crammed with vermin, they would have chosen different colors for their walls.

As I rub my gummed-up eyes to recover from the assault of light, I hear a muffled rumbling that comes from the living room: the snoring of some hibernating beast. I totter towards the source, tracking the noise as well as the stench of festering flesh.

I peek into the living room. The moonlight pouring through the window traces the contours of the room’s bleak contents: the haphazard pile of board games that occupies the gap in the middle of a birch wood cabinet, and two empty ramen cups I left on the coffee table. A boulder of meat and bones is lying across the sofa, snoring heavily as it dreams of slaughter.

Some foe of mine must have discovered my terror of whales, and has heaved the beached carcass of one of those fiends of the deep into my apartment. My enemy may have timed the build-up of gases inside the bloated corpse so it would reach its peak at the moment of my entrance. The blast will obliterate me in a Big Bang of entrails.

My heart is a drum about to burst, but I shan’t face my death in the dark. I flip the light switch on.

The bulky mass of a sleeping horse has occupied my sofa. Its malformed skull has caused its eyes to protrude as if they were about to pop out of their sockets, and its long, droopy ears look like they’re melting. The muzzle is drooling mucous saliva onto an oily puddle on the hardwood floor, maybe due to the phlegm this beast accumulated from gobbling up my rotten foodstuffs. The strands of hair of its shaggy mane seem clotted with mud and blood. Its forelegs are retracted and atrophied as if evolution had forgotten to uproot them from its torso. His horse dick and balls have been removed and replaced by a jagged scar like a sword wound.

Although the living room stinks as if I had dived into a full dumpster that everyone forgot for a decade, and any glimpse of this horse-mongrel would suggest he has escaped from a nightmare, I loosen the grip on my nostrils and grin like a child. Only one castrated horse that I know would cloister himself in my apartment: my personal equine stalker, Spike.

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Author’s note: this is just half of the scene I’m working on, maybe even less, but I won’t be able to write at all tomorrow.

Spike’s last appearance was back in November of last year, precisely on the 20th chapter of this idiotic tale. At least that’s the last I remember of the guy.

I have kept track of word counts. This novel is already about 125,000 words long, and it will easily go as high as 160,000. It’s a good thing that I will only release it as an ebook that nobody will buy; if I bothered to produce the physical edition, like I did for a couple of books I wrote in Spanish like four years ago, I would hate to carry such a brick around.

I’m on phone duty this whole week, and my next week is six workdays long. I hate it all.