untitled..novel rough draft excerpt...

1
“Well are you going to sit there all day or are you gonna drink” said my very drunken, very obnoxious drinking partner, who hadn’t even the slightest idea that I wasn’t even halfway drunk or even planning to get inebriated that night, which was mainly because id have to consume an entire years worth of guaro for me to at least feel the screws at the back of my tongue starting to get loose. My drunken friend whose name I think is Juan bobbles back and forth in the wooden stool, the one with the shaky legs that barely support my behemoth of a friend, who’s currently eyeballing me from head to toe, which I suppose is his way of intimidating me into another drink, hoping this meant he would get another one for himself on my tab, I was happy to oblige.
It wasn’t long before my friend had passed out on the floor and the bartender started calling some locals to help him out of the place and onto the curve, while this is happening I pulled out a cigarette and placed the filtered end on my lips, then I proceeded on putting the tip of my finger on the opposite end thus lighting it, everybody is too caught up on Juan’s indecorous removal of the establishment to notice me doing this, and even if they did the talk about town would still revolve around poor Juan.
I begin to breathe in the charred smoke and start feeling the radiating heat from the cherry on the lighted end, I stare fixatedly at the brown beer bottle I’m clutching in front of me, then the feeling suddenly hits me and I feel this humanity starting to grow on me. The smoke fills my mouth and the scorching heat it produces begins to burrow into the floor of my mouth and digs out this protuberance that slowly starts developing into my tongue, next the heat starts opening a cavity in the back of my mouth, and begins shaping my pharynx and larynx, this continues until my entire respiratory tract is formed.
I exhale.
I am dizzy.
This human transformation is always uncomfortable; my lengthy body starts to shorten, my hair loses its glow and my nose begins to protrude, my lips start forming and my eyelids open slowly. At first I cannot speak the way humans do, and do most of my communication by suggestion, a wink here and a wave there, most humans get it without much problem. Its not until a few hours that I get my respiratory and digestive systems, alcohol and cigarettes usually help speed up the process at first I thought this was what people refer to as pain, but when I describe it to most humans they say that my symptoms resemble a mild case of dyspepsia and nothing more.
Then the hearing starts kicking in, and I feel like a boot stomping on my face for all eternity, and the searing trumpets destroy the little fleshy parts at the side of my head, until my brain receives the so called music humans twist and turn to with such joy, almost like invoking God and the Devil into one same mix.
“Yo soy el cantante”
“Mi negocio es cantar”
With these sounds reverberating inside my hollow shell of humanity, they start materializing all the primitive nervous systems these meat puppets need to exert their will on their environment, to interact with their surroundings.
I am human.
Its funny how these so called modern and advanced mammals are so oblivious to what their eyes fail to see, as if all that lives and all that exists is visible to those rudimentary camera boxes the old creator saw fit for them. This is not an opinion of mine but it’s proven fact, or how else would a room full of people ignore a 3 meters tall humanoid with no face and feathery wings sprouting from the back of its hulking body. They’re incapable of feeling all that exists, all that doesn’t exist, all that will exist and all that will cease to exist, that is their burden, that is their reason of their unhappiness.
I have been human many times before in various different shells, this one is most definitely the strangest body I’ve inhabited. My skin is the color of mud not really black or brown but somewhere in between, my hair is straight and jet black not unlike the strands of a broom, and for the full grown man I’m supposed to embody, my stature is the same as a child of ten. My dress is peculiar as well, with a pair of strappy sandals that show my ash colored feet with their crooked, yellow, dirty nails, a pair of discolored jeans obviously too long and too large to fit my scrawny body, a shirt with more holes than the bible and big as a kite, and sitting like a crown on my head is a big straw hat with rough edges, making look like the king of the eyesores.
I take a final swig of beer, the foam sticks to the whiskers on my upper lip and as I lick it off with my new tongue, I give the bartender a few pieces of paper to pay for my tab and take care of whatever disaster Juan might have done while I had fun poisoning his body with alcohol. Apparently the quantity of alcohol a male human being could consume reflected the extent of his virility, his success with women and could even decide who the alpha was. According to this unspoken rule of human behavior I had a bigger manhood than Juan, and if it needed to be corroborated by any type of authority I could show the appendage that had just painfully sprouted in between my legs.
The raucous music continues to play and the rhythm becomes more frantic, motivating people to gyrate their pelvises towards other pelvises, and begin grinding on each other when they finally met. They all shout when the singer shouts, they all jump when the beat makes them jump, some kiss, some laugh, some extend their arms into the sky and some slide theirs onto the behind of some fellow dancer. I could probably stay all night and watch them enjoy their miniscule lives go by, but I wasn’t sent to do that, was sent to go look for tortillas.
I step out of the bar, which is colorfully named “Rey del Bongo”, and begin moving on the dirt-paved roads, without a single sign to tell me where I was standing at, looking for some tortilla stand in that clear black night. People passed by me; without a single look of joy in their eyes, their footsteps marching to rhythm of the hunger pangs in their stomachs, no one acknowledging one another, this was the loneliest place in the world, where only flies and sickness could make a living. There where mounds of garbage that were piling all around the town, where parentless children played with broken soda bottles and newspaper scraps, competing with bony dogs for whatever little left over food they could find in those endless mountains of pestilence.
In one of the heaps I saw one of these damned infants had a bony dog by the throat, slicing its body with a shard from a broken bottle, the dog had a piece of rotten meat in his mouth, which was probably the main reason for the pain the boy was putting him through. I began to walks towards him and saw the boy had a deformity in his back that made him much more morose looking than the other kids lurking around, the dog’s skin had shed all the hair in its back and emanated the same stench of death the boy did.
“What are you doing to that dog, you little grunt? He didn’t do anything to you!” I demanded from the boy as I placed my hand on the hump that was probably a sign of his malnourishment.
“I didn’t do anything to anybody either, and I was left to die anyways,” answered the little hunchback with a calm and vicious ferocity “the day I was born they tried to drown me in a bucket, but I could make it long enough to run away and live like this dog scrounging for food in the trash.”
“But how will this cruelty make your life any better?” I asked with a strange embarrassment at myself after what the boy had told me.
“It will give me pleasure, because cruelty’s pleasure is all I’ve known, I was denied love, a home and a name. Who could love a little hunchback anyways? But if it’s the dog you care about, here, you can keep his skin and bones,” said the little hunchback while he snapped the dog’s neck. After the dog breathing stopped, the little hunchback threw the lifeless body at my feet, his eyes looking as dead as the dog’s, as this happened I realized that the trash diving children where just specters of this world, where life and death is one and the same. The little hunchback took the piece of meat from the mouth of the deceased dog, and started chewing on it not caring for the taste or the smell it had, then he looked at me with his hollow eyes and smiled wickedly showing me his cavity filled teeth and all the little sores around his lips, his face and hair caked with dirt, this was the face of the nobody people.
As I walked away I could no longer tell the difference between the trash divers and the bony dogs.


2

Finding tortillas in a place like this is not a hard feat, for some people it’s the only food they’ve ever known and all you really need to do is just go to the park, which is where im heading to right now.
Parks in this place are funny things, because there are no trees, there are no beautiful flowers or happy lovers walking down a meadow, that’s a sight for people with better luck of being born in other places. What we have here is no man’s land,there are bums and drunkards laying on the street (as a matter of fact Juan is sleeping off his drunkenness here), young girls who may or may not be prostitutes, the ever present sketchy character who may or may not be a drug dealer and of course, the lovely tortilleras, who keep all these lovely, seedy people well fed.

left to right,right to left

anyways i dont know if somebody reads this or not but i made a new short story yesterday which i think is pretty decent, if somebody is out there i would like it for you to comment on the story, be it good or bad but not offensive.

There’s only three of us left and the room is still spinning, the bell’s ring keeps reverberating inside my ear canal, it feels as if the little paper like membrane inside is about to explode like a drum that’s been beat on too much. The haze from the smoke ascends from the table, and were still laughing maniacally, the game is almost near its end, which is only going to make the next round even more intense and thrilling, the anticipation sends chills down my spine and raises all the hairs on my arms, my hand cant even keep straight long enough for me to deal the cards to the other two people at the table, I’m so giddy I don’t even mind the smell anymore.
The air is stuffy and I feel sort of dizzy, my eyes feel like pin-balls and my tongue feels like a fish, the whole room melts into one point making it impossible to focus my eyes on the faces of the other players, whom I don’t really remember what they look like or at least how they’re named. It feels like its been us playing the same thing over and over, left to right and right to left, but I’m pretty sure there where other guys and girls sitting with us, I don’t know if they left or if they’re still sitting there. All I can see like new clear days is the toothy smile of this black blotch standing in a corner of the room, I suppose he’s only watching us play and it looks like he’s enjoying it, but I cant recall if he was there all this time or if he just appeared.

The room is on fire.

What is that smell?

After I finished dealing, I grab the hand dealt and lift the cards so they can meet my eyes. I scan rapidly between the various figures and see that I have eight matching card and two odd looking cards, a feeling in my gut tells me that this is not good for me, then the feeling turns to searing pain which can only mean that I have to get rid of one of the cards. These odd looking cards have peculiar drawings in them, one contains a bear fishing salmon skeletons in a dry river, the bear looks very haggard but his eyes contains a vicious ferocity, as if the hunger had dulled his lucidity and sharpened his furor, while the other contained a very calm and collected eagle perched on a wilted tree, with an olive branch in his beak and a dead prairie dog clutched in its claw, the other eight cards where frightened deer with their eyes and mouth sewed tightly, as if the person who made the stitches did not want any light to come into their virgin pupils and no sound to bleat from innocent mouth.
The room is white noise.
The smell reminds me of the deer on my cards, maybe the smell is why they’re so afraid.
The faceless smiling inkblot stretches what seems to be a very languid out of focus limb from the center of his body and rings the little bell in the middle of the table, this is when the game begins and when all hell breaks loose. Then me and the other two melts begin yelling numbers and exchanging that amount in card between each of us yelled, trying to complete the suit we have in hand, and in my case trying to get rid of one of these cards odd looking cards. The inkblot smiles more and more, until his voice begins to break in a cackle, which only reminded me of rustling leaves in autumn, the sound of bones breaking and gushing blood.
As his laugh begins growing more intense, a feeling comes over my body and I loose what little sight I had left, all I sense now is the smell flowing in my nose, the noise of our yells and the inkblot’s cackle echoing through the room. My mind becomes one knot of ecstasy, I don’t know if I’m even playing anymore, my heart races and I feel a very warm and inviting light coming through every orifice in my body, this what a resurrection probably feels like.

The room is transverberating.

The room is dinging.

The room is seeing double.

The room is filled with the stench of rustling leaves, crackling bones and dry blood.

The game is over.

My eyes recover its focus on the cards and I can see I don’t have the bear anymore; I only have the eagle and nine deer. This means I win, I was the one who wrung the bell and the inkblot turns quiet but still keeps its smile, my hands bring down the cards in them onto the table, as to show my opponents that I was the fair winner of this round. I look at the table and see the other players clearly now, their hair is all messed up, full of sweat, the eyes look swollen with the conjunctiva full of little tiny red vessels and the pupils look dilated beyond belief, sweat covers their sardonic smiling faces. Then I see the people sitting besides us, slouching, with their faces covered in dry blood, with the same sardonic smile that the other two players had, this is when I realize that the smell filling my nostrils is nothing but the smell of lead and blood, death and pestilence. This makes me want to throw up, but is I try to open my mouth I realize I cant, because its trapped in the same smile the others, I tried to yell but only maniacal laughter came from my mouth.
The inkblot is the only thing not in focus except for that toothy smile of his, which seems to enjoy what is occurring to me. Then he stretches his languid limb again and gives a gun to one of the players, who doesn’t hesitate in grabbing and pointing it to his temple, the player begins laughing like a morbid hyena and then he pulls the trigger, leaving behind a smiling corpse. His hand becomes limp and drops the cards it was holding, and I can see he has the bear I used to have, this meant he was the loser for the round. My prize for winning was this new clear daze I was having, this crazy lucidity of figuring out what was happening, I tried to scream in despair again but there was only laughter, horrible laughter.

The inkblot stretches his hand.

The bell dings.

The room is spinning

There’s only two of us left and I’m giddy with excitement.

Thoughts on "Kafka on the Shore"

It has been awhile since i have been excited by an author, one that makes me want to become lost in someplace around the world and shut down from all the things going around in it. This list has been populated by authors like Vonnegut, Palahniuk, Wilde,Camus, Sallinger,Hesse, and now they are accompanied by Haruki Murakami an amazing writer who i stumbled upon by coincidence, ironically enough one of the main focal points of the book itself.


The book follows the story of a teen age Kafka Tamura,an intelligent, well cultured and good looking 15 year old, who has run away from home trying to escape what appears to be his destiny and embarks on a journey that at first seems to owe a lot to JD Sallingers novel of perpetual adolescence "Catcher in the Rye" but in reality is more in debt with Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" and to (obviously) Franz Kafka's multiple metaphysical and patricidal musings, but these comparisons fall short to a book whose greatest achievement is the juxtaposition and contrast between Kafka Tamura's coming of age story to the illiterate Satoru Nakata' magical dreamlike adventure(where pieces of Gabriel Garcia Marquez "100 Years of Solitude" can be picked up), him being the other main character whose actions greatly affect Kafka's life giving the reader the feeling that they are somehow in sync, even beckoning us to assume they are the same person.
One of the highlights of this book is the way it unseemingly blurs the lines between reality and dreams, and makes us wonder if fishes can really fall from the sky, cats can really talk or if our spirits really can project themselves to perform acts of love or hate. Murakami also tries to explore the meaning of fate, decision and coincidence trying to get the reader to ask how much really is up to our own free will, how much is up to fate, god or buddha and who is the one overseeing such relationships. One of the best examples of this is how Kafka runs away from the fate his father has placed on him and how it slowly catches up to no matter how hard he tries to run, because he somehow wants it to happen, or how Nakata accepts his fate and tries hardly to fullfill his destiny, but yet is saddened because he did not chose to be like this saying that he is an "empty library, being this the ying and yang of the novel.

This book is one that is not meant to be read casually, it needs your full attention and does not ask for it kindly, it demands it violently. One needs to understand that this book is not going to be easy to understand on a conscious level but in a way you will feel that you have just encountered something that will change the way you subconciously view things, making you feel as if youve entered a brand new world.

Currently listening to: Animal Collective-Fireworks