Children of a Strange God

By Pedro Pujante

A phantasmagorical cemetery in the moonlight, a sad room in a hotel, an enigmatic canvas, an anonymous city or the mythical Homeric Ithaca are some of the bizarre settings in which the surprising stories - nightmarish, dreamy, dark or fatal - which you will find here will take place. But, despite the disparity in the situations and atmospheres, the characters collect common traits that turn them all into children of a strange god: loneliness, vital anguish or the need to mend their fragile identity.

The eleven stories that form part of this mosaic are impregnated by the void, exultation, hopelessness, mystery, death, and desires. The characters, sometimes afflicted by guilt, sometimes disturbed by love, sometimes nameless ghosts, walk immersed in their incessant search for themselves, trying to restore their precarious existences. And, in the end, they confirm that they're alone, that destiny is a trap, and that memory is a fragile and illusory shelter. Because, as one of the stories warns us: "we are weak puppets held up by the weak strings of chance. And upstairs, running this absurd theatre, only absent-minded gods."

Queer tales in which love, death, and dreams are confused. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Nov 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547552597

Book preview

A Woman In The Threshold

Strangers in the Mist

Children of an Absent-Minded God

When We Were Gods

Flowers for Ophelia

Perhaps Ithaca

Images of Yesterday

The Naked Voice

Portrait of Morella with a Blue Background

I Will Love You All Through Death

A Chance Encounter

The City Hides Your Name

A WOMAN ON THE THRESHOLD

He abandoned the cinema with the confirmed desperation of a Sunday. Sundays  

seemed as sad as life to him. Life is a tedious week, and an unsuspecting Sunday turns out to be the last Sunday of Sundays. An end which won’t be followed by a sunny Monday and new things.

He’d gone to the screen room by himself to see a fairly odd film in which a man returned from space travel and no longer recognized his wife or his dog or anything from his previous life. In the end, they implanted his old and made up memories and he carried out an old and false life, a substitute for the life his other self had managed to erase. Maybe he would’ve been happier without all those old memories. Maybe he’d gotten rid of them to forget God knows what. And maybe he’d travelled to the other side of the Universe with the sole intent of leaving behind a world, greasy like a kitchen cloth, with which no one wanted to wash their hands anymore. But now they gave him his memories back - the dirty cloth, wrinkled by time, and he stained his hands again with the same greasy and rancid memories. Alfredo didn’t really get the film. We all have a right to forget. And then he thought of Gema and his stomach turned as if a pit of snakes from hell rest in it. Forgetting was a treasure and memory was the dragon that guarded it with smoking breath.

The night was blue and Alfredo felt the loneliness of an ocean in his eyelids. He could almost cry, he told himself like one who recites an old psalm in a language no one can understand. Not even he. But it was Sunday, he was alone, and night had fallen on the city. A starless blue night like the tacit neon of modernity. An anachronistic night that didn’t belong to him, and Gema was there, somewhere in his heart, but everything was so complicated. If only destiny existed, if life was made up of days and nights, black and white, all or nothing...but no. Life is not a coin, heads or tails, and with no other choices. Gema or Patricia. Choosing one would be so simple it was frightening. But life is not an old friend with whom you can bet all on a dirty twopence, throwing caution to the wind. No. Life was a strange game of chess in which every instant, every movement multiplied the following ones until infinity. You could jump like a maddened centaur or take a long imperial trip in any direction. And there'll always be a better option. You always make a mistake, always. And there’s never a way back. Life’s tabletop is not made of wood, but of failure. It was Sunday and everything was blue. He was alone and  

maybe Patricia was already looking for him, calling over to Pierre or a workmate’s house, but who knows. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to be the lost astronaut on his lost spaceship. Away from it all, he’d be able to think clearly. And maybe he’d drive himself mad in a different way. His own madness. Not the madness this life imposed on him. Who had chosen that life for him? He hadn’t, of that he was sure. Not I, it was said. Others: his parents, his professors, later on Patricia, his in-laws, his superiors, routine...He didn’t entirely exist. He was an apparition. He appeared in family photos, in a framed photo of the Faculty of Education in ‘86, and in the colourful letters they sent him on the daily billing him for electricity, water, gas, and destiny...He appeared in databases for banks or traffic. He was a ghost. He existed in the improbable hearts of his two daughters and in the memories of that Polish girl who he met in Bristol during his youth. But now that nameless blonde was also a ghost without pictures and who he’d sadly forgotten. She was, then, the brief memory of a ghost. That is, nothing. And maybe a few numbers on the calendar, dates, days, minutes. In the ship, lost in the dark cosmos where the sound of traffic wasn’t heard. A slow traffic that died at Sunday’s nightfall. He couldn’t feel like ice. Even though it wasn’t cold, he couldn’t shake the icy sensation. He had learnt it and could no longer get rid of it. It was Patricia. And her eyes, blue as night, traversed him, and insisted for him to stop being himself. Be part of her, give up Gema and a dream of a million nights in the desert or at the counter of the bar on a luxurious sunken ship: beautiful, silent, and tranquil. Who was he aside from the shadow of another who had already died.

He lit up a cigarette and remembered he’d quit about a month ago or maybe it’d been a year. The bitter taste of smoke and burnt metal invaded his mouth. He tossed it to the ground and crushed it with the tip of his shoe. Two men dressed in yellow were changing the billboard in the cinema. They unscrewed the sign for man-without a memory-that-returned-from-space to put one up for thoughtful-and-in-love-blonde- woman-riding-a-red-bicycle which was a PREMIER.

Night gave in to silence. He walked along the hotel. It was always the same hotel. That evening he had walked along the carpeted halls of the sixth floor, the room key was a black card with a drawing of a white clover in the middle. The room was warm and there was a plastic rose in a patterned vase on the side table. Always the same room and fake flower. The half-cast curtains, the evening light filtering in, Gema’s naked silhouette appearing as if in a dream, but real. She looked at traffic or rooftops through the window. They looked like absurd and scared images. Erected building groves. Elegant skyscrapers. Counterfeit forests. Lies that extended into hotel rooms and hearts. They didn’t speak. She contemplated, who knows, maybe her own reflection in the window or perhaps nothing at all. He thought and sensed with an odd certainty that Gema was happy and that made him happy as well. A way to comfort his blame and his fear. Because Gema was everything in that moment but Patricia was there. She would always be there and why not. The television was on and the clean and ironed sheets awaited them.

They made love slowly. Savouring the words sweetly and without urgency. For a few hours, he stopped being a grey ghost and he slipped into Gema, into an unequal but certain hug. His light caress on her thighs, and sex, like a thin rope that almost hurt his fragile love, but she was so sweet...And Gema begged for another kiss, teeth and saliva, always the last one, she laughed, and in her eyes sparkled another reality no one could imagine. Tongue, more laughter, and Gema’s small feet flailing and laughing in the air like a baby’s arms. Prophet of the past, how fortunate, joked Alfonso when Gema reminded him where it all began. He invented a memory or coloured it to change the subject and eternity’s happiness was only for this day and this evening - get dressed. Hotels are a place where time stops. But time is false and when you leave them you find this out in the most tragic way. 

After turning the key in his house’s lock he felt the loneliness of his home which extended from the ground up like a cloud of tear gas. Everything flooded it, his eyes stung, silence and eternity on the steps to the entrance, steps rang like in the temple at the end of the world. The door gave way and he was already in the dining room, it smelled like a void, and he recognized it as if it were damp clothes or the perfume of his first love. The girls are asleep. Where are you coming from. Patricia’s voice was empty, like a recording, like in a different language but in Castilian and he understood it perfectly. Alfredo looked at his surroundings, to the ground, to the abyss of the parquet,  

and left his jacket on the coat hanger. When he looked back up, Patricia was still scrutinizing him. It was friendly and soft, like a beautiful Trojan horse that wanted to take his walls down and burn him from inside. Later, in silence, a pause that was worse than the quiet voice of that shadow in the threshold of the kitchen door. I went to the cinema. I went to the cinema alone. Oh, what film did you watch. I don’t remember the title. It was about an astronaut who wanted to forget his life and start a new one, but it wasn’t that simple...and while he spoke, another voice that wasn’t his spoke for him, but knew him better than he knew himself, and the film wasn’t the same one he’d seen that evening, there was a slight variation that improved the original or that somehow adjusted it and everything was real and terrible. I don’t know you, she said. Let’s go to bed, tomorrow is Monday and it’s late. And the silence of the house, home sweet home, adhered to loneliness like a sticky mess. An explosive, savage, dead mix in which things lost their shape and colour and became diluted in a sad and empty darkness, like a cemetery at sunrise. In the cold bed, among impossible dreams and the tick-tock of the alarm clock, Alfredo snored in the whistle of a flute and hugged the wrong body of Patricia. Stop snoring, I can’t sleep...I love you too, Gema. He gets elbowed, Gema is more than a name and then, a violent yank of the blanket. I’m Patricia. Alfredo woke up with no understanding, what’s the matter, nothing, go back to sleep. Then it was morning. He hadn’t touched Patricia’s body in months.

Monday was a breathless sigh. A mirror that returned a repeated and tired image. But polar and distant.

In the department, Alfredo remembered that phrase vividly: I don’t know you. In the dim kitchen light, in the threshold, the figure of Patricia, as unequal as a stretched Chinese shadow that scrutinized him, I don’t know you. I don’t know you either, no one knows anyone. I also don’t know Gema, and who can know anyone. If at least we knew what it takes to know someone. We recognize ourselves in pictures and we think it a given that we know who we are. It’s stupid behaviours that we learn from mirrors and other people who come into our lives. Illusions. Gema, I didn’t need to know her. For what. I only craved her mild presence, that she would filter in his life bit by bit and change it. Like the slow erosion of rocks against the tides. Cold hearts made of little

grains. Time and waves can do it all. Gema. Her dark hair brushed against his when they kissed. If it was less real maybe he would’ve tried to erase her in a single pull. Like the sheet for the month of March is pulled off and thrown into the bin when April comes.

But April never comes and it’s always winter.

The days and nights passed. In the study, the holes in his life acquired a different shape. The neatly organized books on the shelves, a faculty photo, and another one of Patricia and the girls and his comfortable blue fur chair. Papers, reports, circulars about the new education law, and blank report cards. An empty room. Loneliness takes the shape of wherever it sits. And in the center of the desk,