Every night the same nightmare gnawed on my mind. Cold sweat and my own yelling were the only things that waited for me at the end of the tunnel of sweet unconsciousness. That, and Mariana’s snoring. I swear, she could be used as a torture method for war veterans.
Encroaching darkness, a warm mound of fluff and noise, and the bed cover. Only those were my companions in that moment. Oh, and the belts, who were well awake.
“So, let’s say, if we are floating in a half muttaburrasaurus, half corgi butt island… are volcanos, then, volcanuses?” pondered one belt.
“If they are, then, the type of lava would determine if the half-muttaburrasaurus-half-corgi deity that makes up the world has a good —acidic lava— or bad —basic lava— diet,” added another.
“Yet volcanos with acidic lava are more explosive, so none of the diets are good: one causes too much gases, the other pure diarrhea.”
“The HMHC needs to strike a dietary balance, in that case.”
“I agree; the world needs a nutritionist.”
This had to be my punishment for behaving like the king of cunts. Well, prince of cunts, the king would have at least one baubellum.
But what use was a baubellum to quell my guilt? I was now a murderer. The circumstances had forced me, yes, and most of the murders were due to Mariana’s absurd rise to power. Three earthlings had died due to my affiliation with Mateo, even if one of them was a LoL player. And a psychopathic murderer who killed his own mother, too, yes, why not mention it. And none of it would matter if Mateo was right. I’d wake up at the bottom of the stairs, concussed, with Mariana maybe conscious or maybe not, and think it was all a deranged dream of a shaken brain. I’d go to the hospital if my hit were something serious, and take Mar to the vet, too, were I able. No Lucas, no Mamotreto, no Kinslayer. Foreclosing this world and never coming back to it, and just dreaming with it; what would be the difference between them? Maybe I’d write about my adventures here, and say the idea came to me in a dream. Were Mateo to be wrong, however, and if the universe got destroyed, then we would just die and there would be no guilt, nevermore. The worst outcome, of course, I thought, would be the universe not ending. A failure so massive it would make me face the people whose lives I Intended on ending for my egoistical benefit and say “Sorry folks, the apocalypse got cancelled. Go back to your homes, and remember to never confuse your cute cat photos with your hellrider supremacist manifesto: that’s how he got got.”
A lollapalooza of methane and sulphur emissions broke free from Mariana’s bowels. It was the kind of stench that made mothers choke their children with a pillow so they didn’t have to suffer it. The odor of a swamp filled with rotting corpses and tannery waste would have been considered the equivalent of air freshener compared to her heavy fartillery.
Gasping for air, I kicked her off the bed and rushed for the door. Oxygen, I needed oxygen.
Bolted. In my self-destructive hubris I had locked the door, and now, in the dark, my hands desperately probed for the bolt. Time was running out, the room becoming a lethal trap as Mariana’s posterior proudly sang its national anthem.
My HP began diminishing slowly. My belts began betting on how long it would be until I died. A single tear rolled down my cheek: I was so proud of those small leathery cunts.
Once I found the bolt, I rushed to slide it. The damn thing was stuck. I shook it, struggled to make it budge, revived the wood of the door.
The door had opinions about breaking down to let me out. Those opinions were, mostly, negative. Some of them included my mother. If she would have approved of what the door said, It’s impossible to know. My mother is a very strange woman. Or was. Depending on when you are reading this and/or if she got killed for about four dollars and seventy cents worth of Argentinian pesos.
My strength sapped away, I couldn’t battle it no more. Still clawing at the bolt, I slid down the door, my escape route slipping from my grasp as my body stopped responding. Why? Why did it have to end like that? Done in by my own pet farts… What had I done to deserve this?
Please, don’t provide a comprehensive list, it was a rhetorical question.
I closed my eyes and waited for the end. I could not even properly control my belts anymore. They had gone rogue.
“My favorite chemical compound? I don’t know. What’s yours?”
“Butanal.”
“A terrific choice. Made up of my two favorite words, too!”
I loved and hated them monothematic motherfuckers.
Wet, tepid drops on my face prompted me to open my eyes despite my hazy mind and generalized grogginess. Amidst the darkness I beheld the shining eyes of the face of god, but mirrored. She was drooling over me.
“I want food.”
“I am dying,” my voice trailed off.
“Die after feeding me,” proposed Mariana, forfeiting the chance to say “Hello dying, I am dad”.
Closing my eyes again, I let even Mariana’s droning drift away.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
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The most pressing question was when the fuck had I sat at the table, followed by why. The answer would probably explain, too, why the table was made out of grilled meat cuts. I stared at my hand. There was something wrong with it. Having been an otter all of my natural life…
“Wait, I’ve never raped a baby seal...” I began to realize there were several things that did not fit with the narrative my current reality presented.
A gaucho whose body and clothes where wholly composed of grilled meat, including chorizos and pork ribs, rose from the underside of the table.
“That’s what everyone says,” he said with a sensual, masculine voice. Each word sent wafts of smoke and grill scent to my mustelid nose. It was alluring, but not as alluring as the prospect of grilled fish.
“But I haven’t, truly. I don’t even remember being born a… I died again, didn’t I?” I finally asked with pleading, otter eyes.
“No, Mariana toppled down the door to go search for food. You are just agonizing in the floor. Defenseless. Prone to be mauled by a pit bull. But alive,” explained the gaucho, and then his image flickered, revealing the demiurge underneath the meat for mere fractions of a second.
“This whole thing about invading my dreams… are you hoping to catch me in a wet one?” I tried to do a facial expression to accompany my question but otter muscles were not my field of expertise. At least the teeth were excellent to bite fingers off.
“I blocked them off. You have no capacity for wet dreams no more.”
A beat of silence followed. That son of an entire guild of needleless seamstresses.
“You stole everything from me!” said a very angry otter, jumping over the table, ready to maul the meaty god stand-in. He caught my slender and long body with a deft hand and then casted me in the fires of hell. Or on the grill. The grill itself was made of sinew, and behind the grate, instead of coal burning, there were small cows being turned into metal as they released silvery smoke.
“I am about to get cooked alive, yet the most offensive thing here is your constant disregard for common sense ontology. Amazing.” I managed to dedicate him a clumsy otter-clapping.
The gaucho produced vegetable cooking utensils from beneath his poncho. “It would serve you to not antagonize your adversaries when they have you between the fork and a hard place.”
“I cannot respect an enemy that interrupts me while I am committing a mistake out of sheer egocentrism.”
“Walter, the world does not revolve around you.”
I stood on two tiny, pathetic legs the best way I could. It felt weird to step barefoot on sinew.
“Of course it doesn’t, look at me,” I pointed at my new, lightweight body with two paws who bore the weight of disgust. “I don’t have enough mass for that, Sir Demiurge. I am in the bones, not even chubby enough to attract an otterfucker who isn’t also a necrophiliac degenerate.”
The gaucho drove his long carrot-knife into my skull. I crossed my tiny paws, offended. Pouting was impossible, being an otter. Fuck mustelid life.
It’s a weird sensation to be split in two right down the middle. Wet, warm, and slightly painful. Like a mosquito bite, really, it only gets weird when the gray and white matter mixed with blood and other bodily fluids start dripping on your face, it gets uncomfortable. Halfway down the act your eyes get desynchronized as one side falls and your world, too, splits in two. Each half starts arguing with the other, as it is natural, about which one has the right point of view. Of course, the left never has a chance. It cannot have, by definition, the Right point of view. When you have different eyesight conditions affecting each eye, I’m sure it gets even weirder, but I wouldn’t know, because otter eyesight is, at its core, a mistake that God regrets ever making. We humans don’t appreciate how good we have it with 20/20 as a baseline.
When the carrot knife reached my neck, cutting cleanly through my vertebrae, the left side of my head was basically resting over my shoulder. I took a peek at my wristwatch, because otters always have wristwatches despite never buying them. Body shaking seizures had to be on holidays, otherwise, my mutilation made no sense, and readers hate that, as mutilations are a hard magic system for most people.
And so the carrot knife went through my body like it was fish-smelling butter full of shit and blood. Never mind the fact sharpening a carrot enough to cut through bone should be impossible, no. This wasn’t only a dream; this was reality being brutally murdered just to be replaced by a sock-puppet god politically aligned with the people behind the assassination. I just noticed that assassination includes two sets of butts, egocentrism, and patriotism, all in the same word. Nature is beautiful, isn’t it?
“So… oh, I can still talk despite my throat being peeled like a banana.”
“Yes, we will fix that next patch,” commented the gaucho, shaking his head, defeated. He then lowered his stare. “I still say ‘we’. Even deities have problem with old habits, la puta madre.”
He finished filleting my body and placing the slices on the grill. My fluids sizzled with a pleasing rhythm, and my flesh released a delicious aroma when turning to metal.
“How many of you were there?”
“Never bothered counting until humanity killed enough gods to make me get out of my football watching ass and manage the universe.”
“And you keep bringing humans here. Why?”
He sat and pondered for a few seconds. Then gazed at the white, featureless sky. “So you can kill me. There will always be a demiurge, until the end of times. I cannot shirk my duty on my own.”
“Do… do you guys go to…” I began muttering. Had I had an entire stomach, it would have been growling.
“No afterlife for a Demiurge. The end is the end is the end is the end.”
“Then why? why die and let all the work of your colleagues—”
“Siblings,” he corrected me, and there was anger in his voice. “For millions of years we were a big family, with its quarrels and conspiracies whatnot, but a family in the end. Being alone for just a few decades has been maddening. When they summoned the U.S demiurge for a duel, I prayed to our creator for intervention. But our progenitor forsook us long ag—”
“Yeah, you sound like the kind of motherfucker with no father figure.”
He slapped and impaled a slice of me with the fork. On our second date, no less! I felt used. What would my mother say? What would she say, huh? She gave birth to no hoetter.
“What do you get out of sassing a god, Walter?”
“Satisfaction. Pleasure. Dopamine, even.”
Then it was just me, the defeated sigh of the demiurge, and the delicious sizzling of my entrails slowly becoming the inspiration for Silver Surfer’s perfectly chromed buttocks.
“Be this as it may, let me continue with the narration of our tragedy…”
I tried to interrupt again, but my mouth had already become metal. I had no mouth, I mustelid steak.
And so, for what seemed an eternity, even after I became half-otter-shaped ingots, I had to listen to his monologue. Turns out several thousands of millions of years narrated day by day are not good for one’s mental health.
“…then the first Eukaryote leveled up and, you wouldn’t believe this, it became a fucking ranger. All animals, plant and fungi, plus several microbes, descend from this original Legolas wannabe…” he droned on and on and on.
The cows kept on mooing happily as they metalized. I envied their incapacity to understand language.
The demiurge started ranting about the Iberian Spanish dubbing of ALF. Only then I was able to stop thinking and be blessed by unconsciousness.