A short story I got published in the University of Edinburgh Journal, 2019. This is the draft I submitted, so the real thing might be slightly different.
The Man Who Died in Eight Ways
(1) George Jefferson, professional merchant, finished arranging his purchase and descended from the carriage to thank the store owner, at which point he stepped on a rattlesnake hiding behind the trough.
(2) He jumped with a scream towards the porch, where the alarmed owner stood up to help, dropping from his lap a shotgun he had been cleaning.
(3) George was thrown by the blast against his carriage, which wobbled and caused some tools to fall from the roof, starting with an axe blade.
(4) The horse, startled by the agitation, bucked and reared, breaking the cheap hinges and spluttering the vehicle against the man on the ground.
(5) A crowd surrounded them, hands and voices raised in an attempt to contain the commotion, but the horse only retreated onto the carriage and its contents, stumping and neighing and splashing with his hooves.
(6) The horse’s reins got tied in the trampled residues below him. He tried to run once more, but a pull held him back, and then a crack of bone was heard.
(7) The townspeople gave way with another scream, and the horse, seizing the opportunity, galloped away, ripping in half that which had been entangled between his bridles.
(8) Eyes lost in madness, the horse charged directly against the front wall of the church across the street, bringing windows and oil lamps down with him. Behind he left, in a pile of burning wood, what once had been George Jefferson, at least in part.
(9) The town buried all they could of him, but soon turned his grave into an attraction. There was no better way to commemorate a man of trade than in his own fashion.
a day after christmas, 2019
I walk out in the garden
and wander
mom can no longer work here
the sun hurts her
so it’s all messy
and overgrown
without meaning to I walk
to the part of the yard where,
merely a year ago,
I burned my best friend’s clothes
they had his mom’s blood in them
he didn’t want them anymore
but I had to bury them
I had to bury the little piece
of his mom
stuck to his shirt
so now, a year later
I stop near the place
pray he had a good night
and love him from afar
‘what use do I have for them’
he had told me
so I kept them
burned them
buried them
for him
for his mom
for me
and my mom
who can’t go out to the garden anymore
so it’s all messy
and overgrown
but alive
my father’s gifts
it is said that a person’s love language
is what they lacked the most as children
father says i love you
he doesn’t like fixing the sink
father wants to know how’s work
he doesn’t like cleaning the house
father jokes with mom
but does not help her unless she asks
father puts a clementine in my hands
“eat,” he says. “it’s just like grandfather’s fruits”
father makes juice out of tangerines
“i made tangerine ice cream,” he announces
“just like grandfather”
father buys pizza in the middle of the week
smiles when he sees us munching it down
father sits next to me
and tells me stories
about the old house
brimming with chickens and dogs
the kitchen
so small
it could not hold them all together
the soft requests
to get a new pair of shoes
the meat
his own father
was only allowed to eat
father gifts me his memories
fishes them out like delicate silk shrimp
slowly unravels them
precious gems trapped within
father didn’t have gifts
so he bestows gifts now
and forgets
I do not need them
Pride 2019, or How I Rediscovered Touch Starvation
Touch.
I don’t remember touch.
Yet I hold to his face with my hands as I paint him. I try to focus on the pattern, instead of the skin. But I can see the sweat, I can see the pores and feel the texture of his bones. I’m not used to being so close, to no one at all. I dust off a small speck of dried cream from his eyebrow. He asks me to paint his friends.
One I know, the other is his boyfriend.
I start with the one I know, do the same. I focus now on the painting, the pattern of his cheekbones, the way they curve and the way his mustache tingles.
I move to the boyfriend. His bones are sharper, leaner, his skin less greasy, his eyes shut. He can’t bear to look at me. I’m too close, but I focus on the flag I draw. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue. One stroke after the other, on both cheeks. I try not to think on the way his hair tickles, the way my own skin screams at the months, years where I haven’t had it. Touch.
The streets are packed and I hold hands with my sisters as we walk. I know those hands, the fingers. I remember when they were smaller, more fragile. Baby’s fingers that grew to touch friends and lovers. That grew to steady my own hand.
Another girl yells my name. I turn and hug her, and when we separate, I’m high on touch, so I coup her face in my hands, look her in the eye. I’m so close I could kiss her if she allowed me to. But neither of us wants it. I just want to assess her, make sure she’s ok. It’s been a year. I ask all the unimportant questions, she nods, doesn’t flinch away. I trace her new tattoos across her arms, her wrists. She tells me she needs to keep going, I send her forward, setting her free. She has other people to go to. Other people to touch.
I feel a tap on my back. It’s the other girl in our group. She taps on my back marking a rhythm. She doesn’t think about it, but it’s all I can concentrate on. I can feel it through the backpack, the shirt. I sense her relaxation, the easiness of her movement, the distraction in her head. I’m part of her motion, a secure presence, a comfortable spot in the world.
We all sit on the floor and dance and sing, and I think I’ll leave and they won’t follow. But they do. They follow me and we eat together. We laugh some more, and take selfies.
When we leave I realize I have to return for my umbrella. My friend says she’ll go so I don’t go alone. She runs. So I break into a sprint. She’s too full and falls behind, so I turn around, stretch my hand. I expect her to pretend, to make a joke, a dramatic gesture of the ridiculousness of the situation.
But she takes it. Runs by my side a bit, begs to stop. So we do.
We return with the umbrella, and a smile on my face. We all hug goodbye. And I hold tight, locking their warmth, their sweat, their laugh.
On the ride home, alone in my seat, I can barely hold my breath, the tremble of my hand.
Touch.
Subtext
“What are you doing in the holidays?”
“You know, going home to my family. What do you want?”
“I have a job offer. Pro stuff. Pays double than your usual rate.”
“I’m listening.”
“It’s high-end, very protected. The target itself shouldn’t be a problem, though.”
“Mm. An elder?”
“… a child.”
“A child?”
“Yes.”
“How old?”
“About six.”
“Oh.”
“Like your eldest.”
“… I know.”
“We’re looking for something quick, as painless as possible.”
“What did the parents do?”
“Rather, it’s a matter of what they didn’t do.”
“I see.”
“Which is why we were thinking somewhere public.”
“An execution?”
“They think they can refuse to cooperate.”
“I see.”
“We can’t afford other parents to think the same.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Do you want some time to think about it?”
“… I need to talk it with my wife.”
“Certainly.”
“And you sure you want it done during the holidays?”
“Yes. Here, we have their itinerary, you can look it over. If it’s not enough we can get more intel.”
“This is for Christmas day.”
“We need them to remember.”
“These are not just public spaces. With this amount of people out…”
“We can give you a bonus, if that helps. But double is more than generous.”
“… Quick and painless?”
“Yes. Maiming the child won’t cut it. This way he becomes a martyr.”
“Eternal suffering?”
“There’s nothing worse than being a victim forever, is there.”
“… No, I don’t think so.”
“I knew you’d understand. When can we formalize the answer, then?”
“… Tonight.”
“That works perfectly, thank you. Tell your kids hi from me.”
“… Yes, I will.”
Dance of Death: A Lullaby
The night trembled with resounding fear:
the thunder, the lighting, the childish tear.
I knew well enough there was nothing there,
I knew well enough I would see it, if I dared.
“Nothing good ever came from the dark,”
my father with careless tone used to bark.
“All the unseen, the unholy, they always hide.
Mark my words, silly boy, and you’ll be fine!”
Oh, how dreadfully mistaken was he!
How awful the terrors that plagued me!
Upstairs, in the old attic, was my room,
with some toys and dust and joyless gloom.
It had the sepia smell of yore and a bed that creaked,
and only one window that overlooked the sycamore tree.
A menacing wardrobe also stared from the left,
with some invisible eyes that watched out for theft.
Never I dared to take or increase what it contained,
never I dreamed to defy a king that ruled so plain.
For I knew my nightmares were not my own,
I knew, exactly, where my torment came from.
When I tried to sleep I heard at night,
shivering under my sheets, full of fright,
the awful wardrobe shriek, twist, and snarl,
but its occupants would never from it crawl.
Yet one full-moon the wardrobe door opened at last,
and a green ghostly mist spread everywhere with a blast.
I gasped with horror when I saw a small, fleshless hand in the frame;
I cried out loud when a skull and its skeleton followed it all the same!
The skull’s grin and empty eyes fixed on mine,
and it made a little bow, boney hands intertwined.
Then the skeleton threw its arms in careless fashion,
and with no more set up to dance with fiercely passion.
Trumpets and drums and trombones all sang after his pace,
and from the wardrobe came a ghoulishly faceless parade.
I shrank in my bed, too coward to move,
but the line of dancers kept on with their groove.
Out came tiny clowns and buffoons in full garment,
and rich ladies and farmers sat down on the carpet.
I noticed at once they all made a circle in the room,
and looked expectantly at the wardrobe’s proud jewel.
From the wardrobe’s darkness came Queen Death,
with a black dress that made you hold your breath.
She was perfectly triumphant and perfectly still,
but with a snap of her fingers she set out to sing!
Everyone cheered and danced in all nooks:
Nobles, commons, soulless, christians, and crooks.
Every single person was invited to the Dance of Death,
and every single skeleton would comply without spare.
A beautiful lady danced till she came right at my feet,
and with a friendly gloved hand invited me to join in.
I shook my head at once and smiled to say no,
and the beautiful lady understood with a nod.
I was only five: it was not my time or my place,
but I surely would dream with that stunning parade!
The fears of night and the tears never came again,
and the thoughts of death and ghosts were never in pain.
I was blessed with a small taste of the precious and dark afterlife,
and happily dancing forever, my friends, who wouldn’t that like?
It is what it is, but I won my university’s writing contest with this small thing in 2016.
Witchy Tales #1
~The Cursed Man~
There was once a careless boy who lived next door to a witch.
This witch was particularly nasty with nosy children, because they became meddling and pretentious adults. She had little patience and was known for casting curses on almost any living soul that had the misfortune of bothering her in any way. Curses, as everyone should know, are not always the same. Some of her courses made people suffer from smelly feet throughout their lives; some made several generations prone to excessively long frontal teeth. Some of her curses could get fixed sometimes (a woman swore it was the witch that made her bloodline hairy on the chin) and some of them were mortal (the men from a particular family all died from an undetectable type of liver disease). Some of them even were just plain nasty and ugly, like the curse she placed upon some nosy twins that their families would all bear twins and that the eldest of each pair would never get past five years old (why the witch chose this curse in particular nobody is certain; after one generation of deceased firstborns the family stopped reproducing and they all died out), and there were even many, many more curses that could be traced to her.
However, the witch’s young neighbor wasn’t nosy. He was careless. Not careless in the sense that he lacked care on the way he behaved himself, mind you. He was very, very careful on that respect. He was careless because when things went wrong, he didn’t care. His life seemed to have been created to be free of any care in the world. He had been the easiest of his litter to be brought up and dealt with. He never worried about the future, or had ambition beyond enjoying whatever little he had at the moment.
Particularly, he loved to enjoy an afternoon sitting in the boulder wall that divided his family’s small yard from the road. On one very specific but forgettable afternoon he sat there, balancing his feet from one side to the other, while his hands entertained the possibility of carving a little something from a piece of wood he had found. So it happened that at that very moment, the witch was inside her cottage, attempting her hand at a new potion a sister of hers had told her about. It failed miserably, and out she dashed amidst dust, fumes, and coughs. She was angry and began kicking around the grass, her small gray frame tumbling funnily in circles.
The careless boy, careless as he was, didn’t see any harm in paying attention to his neighbor who, after all, seemed to be in a bit of a pickle and might want some help. He didn’t stop to think that staring at people, especially when they rant, is a sign of terrible manners and nosiness.
The witch caught a glimpse of the boy and raged in fury. She believed his clueless, questioning brow was a sign of mockery and instantly produced a curse upon him. The years of practice had made her quick and the boy, careless as he was, didn’t even realize she had spoken to him and by the time he wondered what on earth she had yelled, the witch had already entered her cottage and had forgotten about him.
The careless boy returned to his attempts of carving unaware that he was now a cursed child. He failed miserably, shrugged nonchalantly, and went back inside.
Years passed and the careless boy became a careless man. He carried on very much in the same way as he had done before the cursing. He hadn’t become anything worth of mention. He was not a wealthy man, or a famous one, or even a well-regarded one. Everything he had tried to do or learn had been fruitless. Nothing seemed to go his way, ever. His friendships all failed at some point, his pets all died young or didn’t love him. He never seemed to be good at any trade he attempted. But he was a careless man, he thought, and he didn’t worry about what needn’t worrying. He always shrugged nonchalantly and moved on, thinking something might work next time, and if it didn’t, there would always be a next time after that.
One day, after he had narrated the story of his failures in the mines (his workplace of turn), a coworker suggested that he might be cursed. The careless man frowned in confusion and thought the suggestion through. “Nah,” he concluded. That same afternoon an accident occurred where he was trying to unearth a stone vein. The careless man survived, but the works at the mine had to be interrupted until the tunnels were cleared and any suspicions refuted.
The man found himself not so carefree anymore, and for the first time considered in all seriousness the possibility of his being cursed. The idea was tempting enough, but he refused to believe it. Curses were a ridicuolous thing, they didn’t really exist! There was one sad truth to be drawn from all this, and it was that he was, simply put, an average man with no talents.
This conclusion produced a melancholy in him that was difficult to shake. He tried to get drunk that night, but couldn’t find enough ale to do so. Then he tumbled around town until he arrived to the closest river (although he was aiming for a tavern), where he sat, contemplating the water with an utter feeling of devastation inside him. There truly seemed nothing left for him anymore.
He tried to look for a big stone to hold so he would sink to the bottom of the river, but couldn’t find one big enough. He decided to collect all of the smaller ones and compensate, but when he submerged into the water, he suddenly felt a burst of energy that drew him out. No, he decided at that moment. He would live, however hard it was to do one single thing properly!
He returned to the mines on the following day, and found some were whispering about him and how cursed he was. The careless man sighed and decided this had been just another thing that hadn’t worked out, and it was time to move on. However, as many of us realize often, he was in need of some money, and decided to complete the day’s work, although disdainfully.
The careless man set to work, and as he did so, he realized that for so many years he hadn’t been truly careless, that he always had wanted to succeed. He prided in his relaxed manner, and yet he had done exactly the opposite, for many years. Failure was always a possibility he hadn’t truly believe in. He wanted to succeed in things. Maybe it was about goddamn time he accepted that everything he did would not bring him success. Feeling much more peaceful and more careless than even before, the careless man felt more at ease to shrug at the possibility of a well done job, and began cutting stones as badly as possible.
Nevertheless, soon he was surprised at how easily the task seemed. The stones cut like nice butter, and the pick practically swung itself around. He felt no fatigue at all, and when lunchtime came, he decided he would just keep cutting stones with as little effort and skill as possible to take just one more hour of salary. He went all the way through the afternoon, and by the end he had cut more than any other miner had ever cut in the foreman’s many years.
The careless man was beyond happy. He had always hoped his careless view on life would get him somewhere, and it had! He became a renowned and respected miner.
After some time of carelessly working, he had saved enough money to buy a poor, small farm. He had grown up in a one, and loved the idea of returning to his father’s trade. He knew this new scheme would fail as well, given the fact that he couldn’t be as lucky as in the mines. He bought the house with the intention of selling it soon when his cows would not milk and his crops would not grow. He decided, however, that he would enjoy his time by putting as little effort on his possessions as possible, seeing that, after all, he would lose it all soon. He just wanted to live in a small farm one more time before he died.
The cows and the crops thrived, even though he barely batted an eye for it, and soon he received offers from his neighbors, who had put their own farms on sale. The careless man’s possessions multiplied and his small farm became a big one. He was beyond happy with the result, and decided he would live as modestly and carelessly as possible, given that he had more than he had ever wished.
Regardless of his attempts to anonymity and privacy, the careless man became known in his town and throughout the county as one of the smartest farmers of quality products. His name was respected and his reputation clean. He even managed to develop new friendships, whom he was sure would be shallow and short-lived, and was gladly impressed when they weren’t so.
Then, one day, an old woman knocked on his door and asked if she could rent a small cottage on the edge of his terrains for her own business. The careless man thought he recognized her, but said nothing. The old woman, who was the witch that had cursed him long ago, didn’t even think he looked familiar. She simply promised she wouldn’t make a noise and that she would pay on time. The careless man agreed to rent her the cottage, deciding on that moment that the old woman was probably lying and that she would be a nuance. In the end, the witch was gladly surprised when everything started going her way. Her potions were nice and effective and her clientele regular. She was so surprised she stopped casting curses as often and, given her prosperity, she actually behaved as promised with her landlord. He was, after all, charging very little, and she liked that he wasn’t meddling or pretentious.
The careless man was always pleasantly surprised at how things had turned out. He couldn’t quite shake away the fear that it would all disappear one day, and lived with the conviction that every decision he made would lead to eventual failure. But he was always ready to set out to fail. Always.
There were rumors in the village, of course, gossip about how such a talentless man had become so prosper and enjoyed such a good life. People even visited the witch asking for the secrets of her landlord, wondering how they could achieve the same kind of life. The witch, who had no time for greedy imbeciles, always shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s probably been cursed, is all,” she would say, and dismiss the dumbfounded client.
Ode to Not Being in Love
A poem that doesn’t rhyme and that I wrote some time ago.
I’ve never been in love
Not really
I’ve never craved for another person’s soul
Or body
Or touch
I’ve never felt my heart racing
The happiness of his presence
I’ve never understood it
Not really
I can listen
And nod
But I cannot know
And it is hard
Because I’ve seen love
Although never experienced it
And I’ve learned
That although love is all
Sometimes it’s not enough
Most of times it ends up bad
And most of times it wasn’t love at all
Sometimes I tell people these things
And they think
I think
I’m immune to this kind of love
I tell them now
Of course not
But I speak from experience
And experience is the lack
The lack of falling in love
Is this pathetic?
I don’t know
Sure as hell none has made me feel that way
Is it my fault?
How could it be, if I’m open to all?
A world that tells me I’m wrong if I don’t know
How could I force it on me?
How to lie to myself?
To others?
Why should I?
Life is what it is
And I am what I am
And I have never loved
And I have never been loved back
Am I missing out on something?
Perhaps
But how could I not,
if it just doesn’t happen?
Am I bad?
Am I wrong?
A cynical,
probably the most.
It’s not as if I didn’t want to feel love
We all want to love
And to be loved back
But how could that happen
If I never feel close as that?
Sometimes I wonder
If it’s me that’s wrong
That something’s missing
That I’m not complete
But here I am
With a heart that craves to understand
With a mind open to hear
I may not get you
When you tell
Of your lovesick heart
But I love you, too
Maybe in a different way
And I care
If you care
About whomever
Or whatever
Your heart aches for
So don’t hurt me
Telling me I don’t care
Telling me I don’t understand
Like it was on me
‘Cause all I want
Just like you
Is to be happy
With whomever
And whatever
Is willing to spend time with me
«Life Is a Queer Thing»
Life is a queer thing.
Not that it is odd and weird.
It’s that it is obnoxiously queer. Like, it came out a few millennia ago.
We say it is a ‘queer thing’ because Life prefers to be addressed as a ‘thing,’ since it does not have a favorite pronoun or anything. Life prefers to be called a ‘thing’ because it feels it reflects who truly Life is, more than simply be referred to as ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’.
‘It’ allows Life to be whatever it desires to be, because anything can be a ‘thing’.
So let’s respect Life’s decisions, and call it a thing.
But not only a ‘thing’, for it may imply it is like any other thing you can find.
No, Life is a queer thing.
So if you disagree with Life, do everyone a favor and try not to interact with it.
But, then again, you’d lose all the valuable and interesting and precious things Life has to offer.
Because Life is a queer thing, and queer things are amazing.
Or so Life says.
storage attics 