The wind comes down from the mountain like a mouthful of broken glass; the north howls until it deafens me and the others, boxed into this small neighborhood of cloned houses. Nobody heard the gunshot. Or maybe they did and filed it away with the other noises that mean nothing here. I killed Santa Claus, and the wind kept its counsel.

I lived alone, but not in any singular way. Solitude was communal property, parceled out with the mortgages. The suburb lay like a grid of teeth sunk into the outskirts of a city that had forgotten how to work. Unemployment gnawed us from the inside; it gave us identical postures, identical silences. We wore the same jackets bought from the same clearance racks, drank the same beer that tasted of metal, and drove cars that differed only in the scratches we pretended were individual. Our houses were nearly the same cube, repainted every few years in sanctioned shades of beige, pale blue, and a yellow that apologized for itself.

For thirty years, my life was the sausage factory. I arrived before dawn and left after dark, stuffing intestines with meat whose origin no one questioned. The work did not ask who I was; it only required my hands and my back. On weekends, I went to the stadium to watch my team lose with dignity. I drank until the days collapsed into each other. There was a comfort in repetition, the same comfort as chewing the same tasteless food. The world did not surprise me, and I did not surprise it. This was considered a success.

When the factory closed, there was no drama. A notice on a bulletin board, a meeting where a man in a clean suit spoke about inevitability. I walked home with my hands empty, astonished by their uselessness. My routine ended not with a scream but with a silence so complete it rang. That was when I understood, with an almost gentle clarity, that nothing had been promised to me, that no one had stolen my thirty years. I had spent them. This thought should have crushed me. Instead, it floated. There was an absurd dignity in it. The days continued to arrive without instruction, and I accepted them like a clerk accepts forms: without belief, without revolt.

My wife disappeared on a day when the heat pressed down like a hand on the skull. She left no note. She had no relatives to look for her, and I had no language to ask. She worked at the factory too; we met in the locker room line, smelling of fat and disinfectant. The neighbors said she must have grown tired of me. They said it with the relief of having an explanation that did not implicate them. I nodded. It was easier than inventing a mystery. In truth, I did not know if she had left or evaporated. She had always been slightly transparent, even to herself.

Christmas Eve arrived without ceremony. I drank because that is what one does when the calendar insists on celebration. The television murmured about joy. Sometime after midnight, I heard a sound in the kitchen, glass whispering against the frame. My body reacted before my mind. The gun was on the small table next to the sofa, where it always was, a dark punctuation mark in the room. I walked toward the noise and fired.

The figure fell. When I turned on the light, there was red fabric, white fur, and a beard soaked into itself. Santa Claus lay on my kitchen tiles, a myth punctured and leaking. For a moment, I laughed, a thin sound that scraped my throat. Then the thought arrived, sober and brutal: this was a man in costume, perhaps drunk, perhaps stupid, perhaps convinced that surprise could still exist. Someone had gone to the wrong house. The alcohol drained out of me like a tide reversing. My heart began to batter my ribs as if it wanted to escape judgment.

Destroy the body.

The idea was not moral; it was mechanical. I fetched a huge black bag from the storage room and an old blanket from the living room. My hands shook, my mouth spoke without permission. Thirty years, I said to the walls, thirty years of meat and noise and whistles, thirty years of a plan that was never a plan, only a corridor. Everything failed, everything— marriage, weekends, hope—except that factory, that hated cathedral of sausages where I prayed with my hands. Why now, why this red ghost, why this joke of blood? The body resisted me with the stubbornness of flesh. It protested being wrapped, being hidden, as if it had opinions. I cursed it, I cursed myself, I cursed the factory for teaching me how to pack things efficiently.

I carried the bag to the car parked behind the house. The night smelled of wet asphalt and pine. I drove through the city, Christmas lights smeared across the windshield by a few raindrops. The colors bled into each other like bruises. For an hour, I drove without a destination, my thoughts ricocheting between logistics and memory. As a child, Christmas had been identical each year: the same tree, the same forced laughter, the same sense of waiting for something that did not arrive. Fifty-nine Christmas nights, interchangeable as coins. I used to tell my wife that Christmas was a despair the size of the world. She would nod, relieved to have a phrase she could agree with. I never felt the family. I never learned the choreography of closeness. Every relationship felt like a costume one puts on for a photograph.

I found the ravine after two hours, a mouth torn into the forest. I threw the bag down and listened to it tumble, a dull impact against stone. I climbed after it, slipping, cursing, my breath ragged. I soaked the body with gasoline. The smell was sharp, almost clean. When I set it on fire, the flames licked the red fabric, and the white beard blackened. Rain began to fall harder, a disagreement between elements. I left without watching the end. I did not look back. I started the engine and drove in no particular direction. I did not ask who the person was, because names have no traction here. I felt a contempt rise in me, viscous and warm. Others are always intrusions, always mistakes. They wear their costumes and knock on the wrong windows, demanding to be recognized. They insist on being seen, on being included in narratives. I have seen enough bodies to know that we are all packages waiting to be mislabeled. Society teaches us to line up, to sand down the edges, to be proud of our similarity. Deviance is treated like a disease, difference like a malfunction. I despise the others not because they are cruel, but because they are content to be replicas. They accept the boredom as a virtue and call it peace.

The road thinned. The forest gave way to scrub, then to a wide, empty place where the land flattened into resignation. I stopped near a desert, where nothing waited. The sun was rising, not as a promise but as an exposure, dragging light over the horizon like a blade over skin. The sky opened in pale layers, indifferent to costumes, factories, guns. The colors did not console; they revealed. Day arrived without asking whether I was ready for it, and the land accepted the light with a mute obedience. I stood there while the cold loosened its grip and the world resumed its breathing.

Death, there it goes. Every day, it walks past my shop window around nine thirty in the morning. At first, the sound of the scythe scraping on the cobblestones had me on the brink of a nervous breakdown, but now, it is part of the background noise. I no longer look up from my desk when it passes. I hear it, acknowledge it, and return to pretending the papers in front of me matter. Lately, the illusion has begun to fray. There is no ink in the pen I use, and the papers no longer bear any writing.

My name is Mason Norman. I owned an insurance agency. It’s a place I have inhabited so long it feels like a husk I slide into rather than a building. My father founded it, though I was never sure why. Insurance is a business for those who fear loss, yet I’ve never been sure I had anything to lose. Thirty years ago, I brought the agency to this neighborhood, following my wife, Claire, who had been placed at the local school to teach literature. It felt temporary then, but the days piled on top of each other like dust on old furniture, and now I can't remember being anywhere else.

Claire has been dead for five years. I know this because I remember the cold morning when her absence started to feel heavier than her presence ever did. But sometimes, when I go home, I still quietly push open the front door, thinking she might be grading papers in her chair. I don't speak, because I never spoke much. I check the living room, and of course it's empty, yet part of me expects to see her there, sitting beneath the yellow lamp, surrounded by stacks of essays about books no one will remember.

Here is the thing: I do not feel different since she died. Not emptier, not sadder. Just more certain that nothing in life was ever meant to feel large.

When Death passes my window, I sometimes hear pigeons fluttering above the rooftops. They make a more vivid noise in the cold. The scraping of the scythe and the patter of wings—it’s all become one indistinct murmur. It blends with my breath, with the creaking of my chair, with the humming silence of a telephone that never rings.

People don’t come in much anymore. Insurance is a habit, like everything else. They only come when they’re forced to remember that someday they, too, will end. I see their faces, anxious, alive, pulsing with worry. They try to prepare for accidents, illness, and catastrophe. I sign the papers, knowing full well that catastrophe doesn't make appointments. It simply arrives and sits quietly in your favorite armchair, and you only realize much later that it's been there all along.

I used to think the dark figure was mocking me. Several times I chased after it, wheezing like an asthmatic dog, my coat flapping behind me. It always outran me. It never looked back. I wanted desperately to see its face. At some point, I stopped chasing it. One morning, as it passed, I just nodded to it, as one nods to a neighbor. It did not nod back. But I swear I heard it chuckle—or perhaps it was just the pigeons.

Nowadays, I close the agency at five. I don’t lock the door anymore. No one steals from insurance offices; there is nothing inside worth wanting. I walk home in the fading light, the same hundred yards I’ve walked for three decades. That walk is the most vivid part of my day. It is a narrow street lined with sagging houses too tired to decay. The air smells faintly of laundry and rust. There is a lamppost near the bakery that flickers but never turns fully off.

I pass the school where Claire used to teach. The windows are milky now, like cataracts. I imagine the children inside raising their hands, their voices full of meaning. Claire used to come home proud of the ones who understood the books, but I always thought the ones who didn't were better off.

Some mornings, I arrive at the shop and feel as though I have forgotten something — though I can never quite say what. My chair is pulled out, my papers arranged, my cold cup of tea waiting patiently. I sit. I wait. For what, I don’t know. But waiting is what days consist of, in the end.

Yesterday, I stood in front of the small mirror in the agency. I scarcely recognized myself. My face looked lighter, somehow. The edges blurred. As though I were fading from the world, or perhaps the world was fading from me. My hands were pale. When I pressed my fingers to the desk, I felt nothing. The wood felt like an idea of wood, a memory of weight. I removed my coat, hoping to feel cold. I did not.

At nine thirty, Death walked past again.

But this time, it stopped.

It didn’t look at me, nor did I look at it. We existed side by side for a moment that stretched beyond measure. The scythe rested on the ground like a walking stick. The figure stood still, almost politely. There was no fear or surprise in that moment—only a sudden sense of recognition. Not of it, but of myself.

When it finally walked away, I did not chase it. I walked to the door, stared out at the street, and, for the first time, wondered why I kept opening the agency at all.

Later that day, an old friend of Claire’s stopped by. She glanced through the agency’s glass window and murmured, “They should really sell this place. It’s been empty ever since Mason died last winter.”

I didn't feel shock. I didn’t feel anything at all.

At nine thirty the next morning, I stood by the window, waiting for Death the way one waits for a bus that never comes. The scraping on the cobblestones felt almost familiar. I straightened my papers, though there was nothing on them. I waited because waiting was all I had ever done.

And in that moment, I finally understood: I had died long before I stopped breathing.

I was so happy, or so I thought. The thought returns with a strange regularity, like a sentence caught in the tide, always coming back. I don’t know why I am lying here at the foot of this cliff, the cold seeping through my clothes and gnawing at my bones. I don’t understand. I cannot grasp how I ended up in this place, or the silence that surrounds me as though it were a final argument.

I was so happy.

I try to lift my head. There is a faint warmth beside my arm. My wife. I can smell her perfume.

Did we both fall?

And why were we near this cliff?

My memory offers fragments with the indifference of a bureaucrat. A dinner. Dim light over the sea. My wife with a tired smile. We wanted to celebrate the end of a long struggle — debts, struggles and more struggles, and the slow erosion of dignity that comes from counting every coin and still falling short. We had decided that tonight would be different. A victory. A beginning. An ending to a drama that had lasted years.

If that was the beginning of a new time of happiness, it now seems distant, almost like an empty feeling. The cold is pressing too hard for me to go on pretending otherwise.

My wife used to talk about winter. About escaping to some country where the cold was biting and honest. She said that in frozen places, people could no longer pretend their emotions were warm. I laughed at her dreams, but never unkindly. They were part of her. And it is strange — lying here — I can almost feel the winter she longed for. A world reduced to essentials: pain, breath, the awareness of one’s own body against an indifferent rock.

Was it an accident?

I never much believed in accidents. People tend to call something an accident when they refuse to see it taking shape; disaster announces itself more than once, sometimes subtly.

I search my memory again. I remember the sea as seen from the restaurant terrace. I remember being near the cliff afterwards, perhaps to breathe in the sea air. But I do not remember fear. I do not remember slipping. I remember falling, but the fall seemed short, more like a misstep than a leap.

The silence around me grows thicker. It has a quality I recognise — an emptiness that asks nothing, promises nothing. The kind of silence that remains after a truth has been spoken, whether you want to hear it or not.

It cannot have been suicide. I was so happy.

Yet even as that feeling of happiness repeats itself, something inside me comes loose. Perhaps happiness is not the opposite of despair. Perhaps it is only a pause, a brief interval.

For years I placed my trust in my mind, in its routines, in the quiet conviction that life could be controlled if I observed it logically. I believed in plans, in careful steps, in vigilance. And yet here, faced with the cold ground and my wife’s stillness, those beliefs seem to have vanished. They explain nothing. They never did.

Perhaps the mind had grown too exhausted to resist. Tired of the effort required to sustain hope, to contain the awareness that what we had built did not have foundations strong enough to withstand time. Hope itself may have weakened, not through malice, but through attrition — like a medicine taken too many times, until its effect becomes the opposite.

I think again of our dinner. Of the way we insisted on celebrating, despite having little reason to believe in a lasting victory. It was not a trap, but perhaps it was a kind of final attempt to find meaning. A gesture made in defiance of the absurd.

If the mind betrayed us, it did so silently, without hostility. It simply followed its own logic to the end, and we — trusting it — followed too.

My wife’s warmth is fading. The night is drawing to an end. I am lying here, trying to piece together the fragments of a story, as though it were a puzzle, to construct a meaning that will satisfy my mind. But meaning is not something the world offers freely. It is something we invent and, sometimes, abandon. I was so happy.

Or perhaps I only believed I was, because believing was easier than facing the emptiness that had flooded our lives.

The cold intensifies. My thoughts slow. What remains is a simple fact: I am here, at the foot of a cliff, and whatever brought me here is already beyond explanation.

There is a strange peace in that. A clarity stripped of hope, stripped of illusion. A truth without consolation.

I was so happy.

There's death everywhere. We destroyed everything. Everything is scarce, even oxygen. Sometimes it is even hard to breathe. Do you ever feel this struggle? Well, you're a lucky man. Can't you even smell it? Well, I see, your nose has had better days.

You know, my last chicken died yesterday. It was in better shape than we are. Part of the good water and our ration went to it, hoping for just an egg. We made fricassee. The sauce was good, but the meat was tough. My wife said the chicken was as dry as she was. I didn't get it. I'm the dry one; my soul is dry. Women are never dry; they are tied to the source of life.

Yesterday, the last chicken died, and with it, my vision. Not the sight of speculation, but the eyesight — everything was blurred and narrow. It is the hunger. In the fields, nothing prospers, water is dead, and the shadows have left.

I try to use the whip on imaginary animals. In ancient times, it was said that with sufficient imagination, we could create beings. I need a pair of oxen to plow that land, let the air in. Even if it is nauseating, it might bring out the worms that hide and suck the poor ground. Water feeds them, you know? It has been so ever since the day the disease invaded the world.

Debts have been piling up ever since. Debts to the State — well, just to the State. The bills are astronomical, as if multiplication were the only arithmetic operation those people had ever learned at school. It has become intolerable, the color of life. We have lost almost everything but the earth, the earth that crackles under our feet. We were lucky, my wife repeats every morning, as if it were a ritual or a prayer: we were lucky that the lands are in my mother's name.

But the land is languishing, and where has our luck been? — I always say. Are we lucky not to have had our lands taken away? But what luck is that?! We can't do anything with it. But in just one day, just one hour, life can be pretty fucked up. Everything can slip into a sequence of demonic events, driven by blind gratuity, in a tangle of uncontrolled impulses, ordered by things hidden in the mind. And yesterday was that day — a day of blind violence.

As soon as she dropped the fricassee dishes into the sink, my wife asked me, without taking her eyes off the sink, whose hands were the earth returning near the pigsty?

I reached for the whip and struck her back with such force that it swiftly cut the flesh. The flesh opened like a zipper in a tight dress. The tear immediately began to bleed.

I grabbed her head and sent her against the door, and added several punches and knee strikes. Whilst I beat her, I shouted that I had done everything, everything so that we could survive.

I didn't hear what she said. I know she said things — or rather, she screamed things — and certainly called me names. In the midst of violent adrenaline, even the eardrums stick to the bone; we go deaf, you know!

Then they came for me. All the colors of the state filled our little farm entrance: they were yellow, red, blue, and even white. The ones in red turned yellow in the head. The blues were armed to the teeth — mostly kids, kids with no future. The siren lights gave the farm shadows a different color.

Just like that, you ask? I'm not sure, but I know they were fast. She managed to escape my fury, ran towards the neighbors, and screamed for help.

And after? Well, after that, they put me in this hospital. Well, I think this is a hospital. Is it not? By that shrug, you are not sure either.

Yes, I lost it again with my wife. She recently accused me of destroying our lives. She blamed me for not doing business with the big shopping areas. In the early days, I just listened to her. But there was no room left in my already small box for the same accusations, day after day. I beat her. I shouted at her that the business was about to come to an end. What did she want us to sell?! Poison?!

When you put this dead water on the ground, poison is the only thing you can get out of that hot mud. You see, she even said that we should do like everyone else: sell poison. The hospitals are full, the morgues clogged, and the governments are crumbling at the first breath. Everything's dead.

What did my wife discover in the fields? The two guys I killed. They were tax inspectors.

Yes, do not look at me with that apprehensive look. Even in a country in turmoil, this machine never stops.

How did it happen? Is that what you're asking me?

It was simple. As soon as they came to my door and identified themselves, I told them to wait. I went to get my shotgun and poured the lead into them.

And then? Then I buried them near the pigsty.

If I still have pigs? I'm sorry, I'm laughing. No. On my farm, as everywhere else, there is only death.

Since that crap has fallen from space, they say the world is sick. The disease is everywhere, and honestly, no one has a clue what it is — not even those with titles of authority. My wife doesn't understand that. Even though she is aware of this sad reality, she thinks it's my fault. She does not understand and is always saying that, despite the disease, our neighbors continue to make money.

And I tell her that we cannot poison others. We cannot, for the sake of our own survival, kill others. It will only be a matter of time before the death we sell others reaches us. To think that we are separated from everything and everyone is pure blindness, don't you think?

How do the neighbors do it? Oh, you have no idea. But have you noticed the color of lettuce for sure?

They used to be bright green. These days, you can only find yellow lettuce. What these guys are doing is replacing water with lab-created liquids. This crap is either killing people or stuffing them with fulminant diseases.

No, it's not the fields in this world — it's the water. The water that's dead. I know this because I've been in agriculture ever since I can remember. My father was a farmer, and I followed in his footsteps. And in recent years, I've seen that everything dies where water touches. Something destroyed its structure.

Yes, no one found the reason for this, either on land or in water. Humanity has neither the ability nor the knowledge to observe what lies beyond measurement. If it cannot be measured, then it does not exist.

But I tell you — this misery is happening because of the water. The water is dead.

Yes, it is true: they were filling the news with the story that the thing had fallen from space, entered the atmosphere, and spread with the help of the seven winds. At least that's what they want us to believe, but I don't. It's another group of opportunists, as always, trying to profit from calamities, and to do that they invent causes tailored to their solutions. I think the disease that destroys our soils did not come from space. The disease is within us, and the water absorbs this force — the force generated by our thoughts. The disease is within us, and the water absorbs this energy — the energy generated by our thoughts

Don't laugh, because that's the way things work. Everything is connected. The water feels our vibrations, my friend.

You know, the human mind is programmed to end — to end the species. It was just a matter of time. None of what we do makes sense. So much misery. So many wars. Our instinctive need for security drives us toward the most absurd conclusions and the most distorted reasoning. We justify the unjustifiable merely to feel safe, turning that sense of security into an illusion of our own making.

I tell you more: what we've been witnessing is a deaf revolution.

Why does no one ever pass by this pavilion?

You know why? You don't. I think they forgot about us.

I'm thirsty and would like a drink.

She was here this morning.

Who? My wife.

We sat on those beds. We faced each other. We said nothing for a while until she told me that she was forgiving me once more.

No. We said nothing more. I have no words left to defend the indefensible.

In the dark of night, a few hours after I hit her, in a corner of silence, I slit one of my arms and let it bleed. Hoping that the pain would alter the hidden structure of my thinking, and that the lack of blood would weaken the tangled connections in my brain.

No, it was not remorse. I mutilated myself every day because I knew that by beating her, I was waging the great revolution. My hidden thoughts could still generate waves of uncontrollable anger. If only I could watch them the same way I watch my hands move, maybe I could stop them and let the revolution pass. This fury that was born hidden was leaving me off balance, and mutilation was also a way of seeking balance back. If she suffered, I would also have to suffer in my own flesh. If we are united, we are united also in flesh and pain.

If she knew I mutilated myself? Yes, of course. The marks, as you can see, are not easy to hide.

Look, here comes someone — must be the helper. I'll ask for something to drink.

Do you want anything?

We have been here for hours, and no one has yet appeared. We must be forgotten.

What revolution? Are you thinking about what I said a moment ago?

The revolution was one no one saw or predicted. The one that everyone fought in without knowing which side they were on.

No, it was not an ideological revolution. These kinds of revolutions are fantasies of the mind.

I do not know where this revolution came from, but it certainly did not come from human thought.

Long before this disease flooded our planet, I was already telling my wife that something was changing. I was watching movements I had never seen before. I began to notice that the feminine aspect in men was expanding, while the masculine side was retreating. The same was true of women.

The masculine side of women, which for the past hundred years had been fertilized so that they could survive, was regressing, and their feminine side — far superior to that of men — was also expanding. You didn't have to be a neuro expert; you just had to look at society. There were many examples of this change happening. Men in the Western world began to feel the pain of women in their own flesh.

What has this got to do with revolutions?

It is very simple, my dear friend.

Western society was becoming increasingly matriarchal. An entire patriarchal system was being abandoned — not because societies had decided by decree, but because the brain was changing by forces unknown to us. Wars, economic crises, and conflicts between religions and civilizations were driven by a profound transformation unfolding beneath the surface. Although justified with nonsense, the root cause of all this was the transformation from a patriarchal to a matriarchal society. All of these riots were caused by resistance on the masculine side of the brain.

Can't you see the powerless man? Or rather — you can't see the powerless masculine side?

Is this what you're telling me?

The male side doesn't know how life would change for the better — I mean, much better.

A matriarchal society means tranquility for the masculine side and the redemption of the human species.

So why did I beat my wife? That's the question I see in your eyes.

The answer is simple: the resistance hidden in my thinking. There are things so deeply ingrained within us that we remain unaware of them until they are stirred, and then they can turn everything into misery. But all this resistance began to turn the water.

No — not just me, but all of us.

Our minds are programmed to destroy our species. And when it seemed as though the path of change and salvation was within reach, the thought system that circulates in our minds began to seek new solutions, new methods of annihilation. It has been a brave effort on our part, in terms of avoiding collective extermination — yes, collective extermination — for the last few hundred years. Individual extermination hangs over us all like a fragile web that swings without wind. But that of the collective — that of humanity — has been avoided with great effort. And this evil system, hidden and imposing itself on us, has created plagues, viruses, and all sorts of critters. Worst of all, it has fueled the war between brothers — fortunately to no avail for us all. Without resources, this harmful system turned to this planet's precious asset: water — water and its structure.

How can our thoughts destroy water?

Is that what your unconvinced gaze looks for in the damp patches on the wall?

It's simple. Everything — but everything — in this world is connected.Some believe that other beings throughout the universe will make contact with us only when our civilization has become truly matriarchal.

Do you think this is nonsense?

I'm not sure about this either.

And what are you doing in this hospital?

Any ailments or afflictions?

Certainly, they'll be related to the current times, no?

Oh, I'm sorry — I didn't even ask your name.

What's your name?

There is a bucket of shit beside me. A presence so absolute that it eclipses everything else. The stench clings to the air with such tenacity that my nostrils feel soldered shut. Imagine: a man and a bucket of shit, keeping each other company at the bus stop.

For more than twenty years, at precisely eight-thirty in the morning, I have held the honorable position of third in line. Today, fate has promoted me. I stand first—or perhaps second, if one is generous enough to count the bucket, leaning proudly against the pole as if it, too, were awaiting transport.

The others stand fifteen feet away, united by their cowardice, their eyes sliding from me to the bucket and then anxiously toward the curve where the bus will appear. They are careful to betray no emotion, except when a gust of wind delivers to them a share of this unwanted inheritance. Then, their faces twitch with silent accusation, as if I had conjured this odor for their torment.

At last, the bus arrives. We all rush into it without hesitation, like fugitives fleeing a crime scene. No one dares look back. Our only hope is that none of us has carried inside even the faintest trace of that intoxicating perfume, which might follow us faithfully through the day like an unpayable debt.

Second Day.

I skipped breakfast this morning. To eat would have meant missing the eight-thirty bus, and missing the eight-thirty bus is unthinkable. The next one comes at nine, and nine o’clock is already the hour of disgrace at work.

At the stop, my eyes fall immediately upon it: the bucket, faithful to its post. There it stands, more punctual than any of us. The two ladies who usually precede me in the queue have again taken refuge fifteen feet away, as though distance could shield them from destiny.

I join them, my expression studiously neutral. We say nothing, but our silence is heavy with the bucket’s presence. At last, curiosity pries me loose from my place in line. I approach the intruder and lean over. The contents are fresh—indisputably so. The stench rises with renewed vigor, almost triumphant.

I turn back toward the two ladies, my face arranged in an expression of theatrical astonishment. They mirror it instantly, their heads shaking with disbelief, as though the universe had conspired to test our endurance. Thus, we form a small chorus of mute amazement, rehearsing the same gesture over and over, until I retreat to my position among them.

Two minutes later, three more companions arrive—the same companions who, for more than twenty years, have shared this ritual of waiting. Sometimes we are six, sometimes five, sometimes four, depending on the whims of illness or holiday. But the essence of the scene never changes. And now, added to it, the bucket—an actor who refuses to leave the stage.

Third Day

I had breakfast with the bucket still haunting my thoughts. The taste of cereal floating in milk turned to nausea as I imagined the bucket waiting for me. I kissed my family goodbye, collected coat and umbrella—the sky already threatened betrayal—and set out.

During the short walk from my house to the stop, my mind gnawed at the mystery. As I turned the corner, there it was again: faithful, inevitable, the bucket. I had left earlier today, determined to be the first. The bus was still ten minutes away. No one else yet. Just me, the pole, and this unwelcome custodian.

The first drops of rain tapped against my umbrella as I drew near. I peered inside. Fresh again. Always fresh. Someone deposits a bucket of shit here daily. But who? I scanned the houses around the stop. Only two were hidden by shrubs: one belonged to a family abroad; the other housed two elderly relics who could hardly lift their own feet, let alone a bucket like this. And what a bucket it was—no flimsy beach toy, no mop pail. A construction bucket. A five-gallon monster, brimming with warm mystery. Not even a family, united in their digestive labors, could achieve such a feat. From where did it come?

“Someone is mocking us,” came a voice behind me.

I turned. One of the women—the one who always arrived first—stood there. Never had we spoken before. In truth, none of us had. Years of efficient timetables had robbed us of conversation. A bucket of shit had to arrive to grant us the gift of speech.

“I don’t know. This is very strange,” I answered, still gazing into the abyss of brown matter.

She pinched her nose with two fingers and approached with exaggerated grimaces. Through a nasal voice she suggested, “Maybe it’s the kids?”

“Which kids?” I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the bucket as though it might divulge its secret. “The few children in this neighborhood are glued to their computers. If school didn’t drag them out, they’d never leave their homes. This is not like when I was young.”

The smell had begun to trickle into my saliva. I stepped back. Enough exposure.

Another of our companions arrived, groaned softly, pinched her nose, and joined our mute congregation. Minutes later a man appeared, and—without hesitation—took his place the customary fifteen feet from the pole.

“Maybe if we moved the pole somewhere else, we’d solve the problem,” he chuckled.

I allowed myself a small laugh at the absurdity. The women did not. They muttered disapproval almost in unison. But the thought lingered.

That evening, I returned from work earlier than usual. In the garage, I gathered the tools I would need. My family looked on with a mixture of concern and amusement, as if watching a man preparing to rob his own house. At three in the morning, I loaded everything into the car and drove leisurely to the stop. There it was, waiting as always. The bucket. Its contents were dry, an old carcass of a previous day’s delivery.

I dug a hole a few feet away and uprooted the bus stop pole, planting it in its new location. The bucket was left behind, solitary, abandoned, no longer part of our line. I looked around—the night was empty, the world indifferent. Satisfied, I returned home.

As I drifted toward sleep, my wife’s voice pierced the quiet:

“Wouldn’t it have been simpler to stake out the stop and catch whoever brings it? Or tell the police?”

“I doubt the police would care,” I murmured, already feeling consciousness slip. “For now, this remains a matter citizens can resolve among themselves.”

But sleep no longer came.

Fourth Day

I did not sleep. I spent the night turning like a key in a lock, and at dawn the household gathered as if for a festival. Not for my sake, exactly, but for the spectacle: a man at war with a bucket of shit is a rare thing worth rising for. My wife and the children insisted on escorting me—part curiosity, part the small cruelty families reserve for one another. They crammed into the car, voices a riot of speculation, then fell mute as we rounded the corner.

There it was: the pole, the stop, the bucket—neatly reunited. My family erupted into laughter the instant their eyes took it in. I told them to shut up. This was not a joke. Someone had moved the bucket near the new position of the post. My blood went cold.

“Either someone’s making a fool of you,” my wife observed, “or they simply don’t want the stop here.”

“Who would do such a thing?” I shouted. “Nobody lives near this stop. I’ve stood here for twenty years and never seen a single protest. Why now?”

I stepped out to inspect. The usual congregation kept its distance, fifteen feet as always, their faces pale with practiced restraint. The woman who never speaks muttered, “This is getting weirder. First the bucket, now the post?”

I peered into the pail. Fresh, steaming. For a moment the smell wrapped around me and the world narrowed to brown and air. My family closed in—children leaning, my wife pinching her nose—each eager to confirm the reality of what I had been fretting over alone.

“Wow! What a ginormous bucket of shit!” one of the children declared with solemn delight. “Must be from a horse or an ox.” The laugh that followed was honest and childish; for a second, the absurdity felt like a game rather than a conspiracy.

I boarded the bus, and the muddle followed. One of the women complained to the driver. He blinked, bewildered by the ordinary litany of our tiny civic catastrophe. “What a bizarre thing you’re telling me,” he said, then, after a pause, promised to report it to the depot.

Guilt pricked me for having moved the pole—had I not only rearranged the scenery but provoked something larger? Yet what else could I have done? To leave the post in place was to accept the indignity; to move it was petty rebellion. Now the evidence suggested design: the bucket, the post, the daily choreography. It felt less like a prank than a plan.

And so I rode to work with the smell in my head and a new conviction growing: whatever this was, it was not random. Someone intended us to notice. Someone intended to displace us.

Fifth Day

Saturday. I granted myself the rare luxury of waking late. The week had exhausted me, though not with work so much as with the silent duel I waged against the bucket. I spent the morning in trivial chores, all the while haunted by the same question: Is it there today?

Before lunch, I yielded to curiosity and walked to the stop. The first thing I saw was its absence. The bucket was gone. The second thing I noticed was that the pole had been returned to its original place, as if my nocturnal labor had never existed.

I returned home. My wife met me at the door.

“Well? Was it there?”

“No. And the post is back where it was.”

“Maybe the bus company took care of it. Perhaps even with the police,” she said, smiling with an air of mischief.

But I could not share her optimism. It smelled too much of calculation. The disappearance of the bucket was not resolution but strategy—an interlude in a larger plan, its purpose still concealed.

The rest of the weekend unfolded like all the others: a carousel of small outings with the children, family meals, the mild ache of boredom. Ours is a household where nothing is left to chance. Problems, when they appear, are neatly shelved, labeled, and dissected until the solution reveals itself. A solution that always includes safeguards, so the same trouble never visits us twice. Life here runs like a Swiss watch, precise and predictable, each gear in its place.

I confess, I have always taken comfort in this order. Its routines shield me, though they sometimes suffocate. But the bucket—it was not a problem like the others. It did not belong on any shelf. It resisted our system of explanations, our tidy arsenal of solutions. It arrived like an insult to reason, mocking my rest, shaking the little truths I had polished for myself.

It was a bizarre intrusion, yes, but worse than that: it was a problem without precedent, and it was mine.

Seventh day

The following Monday, I was the first to arrive at the stop. Yes, I did it on purpose. The bucket was there once again. I was right; this bizarre story was not yet finished. I walked away from it, and from a distance I stood contemplating such a container. What is the purpose of this? This has been going on for too long to be a prank. There are no loose ends, nothing to lead us to the guilty party or parties. I’ve always hated mysteries, strange phenomena, or hidden things. To me, everything had always had a rational explanation; anything that defied explanation brought fear and insecurity.

- “Apparently they put the post back in the right place,” said the woman, who usually comes before me and who appeared silently behind me. - “Good morning. Yes, it’s true ...” - I answered without taking my eyes off the bucket.

A whimsical thought crossed my mind: maybe one of these characters waiting for the bus is actually doing this. They are filming all this, and then they’ll put it on YouTube and make a load of money. If they filmed my scene the other night, when I came to change the position of the bus stop post, if they did such a thing, in the next few days or hours, I would become the big national joke, the last Idio-Saurus of the Iberian Peninsula.

I looked at the tree branches and streetlights around me, but I couldn’t see any cameras on them. It could have been one of them; I could only speculate. But these conspiracy theories led me to another plan. I was sure that now I had to watch the stop and had to set up a surveillance system. I thought about hiding cameras, but it would have cost a great deal of time and money. Worse still, I risked being caught and ridiculed for the attempt.

There was only one way: to watch the damn stop all night long. And that’s what I did. I got to work and told everyone I wouldn’t be in the next day. At the end of the day, instead of going straight home, I crossed the road and walked to the bus stop. There are two stops in this neighborhood. The departure stop is on one side of the road, and the arrival stop is on the opposite side.

As soon as I reached the stop, the bucket was there, and the shit was dry, a sign that there were no changes; no one had moved the bucket. I made my way home at a brisk pace. When I arrived, I told my wife that I would be guarding the bus stop post. At first, she made a slight smile, and when I was preparing some sandwiches and drinks for the long night, she asked a question:

- “Why don’t you tell the authorities and let them do their thing?”

- “I have to find out ... I have to find out the reason. And I think the police won’t do anything, or they won’t find anything out. As soon as they realize the police are after them, whoever is behind this will surely stop. We need to know who they are and what their motivation is. We need to know whether they are locals and what they hope to achieve by putting on this performance. After all, we live here, and we need to know what kind of people we share this space with.”

I grabbed the bag of sandwiches and drinks, loaded my phone with some movies, and off I went. I took the car so I could be more protected from the night. I parked the car around the corner so I could see what was going on at the stop without being seen. I got out of the car, looked around, and walked to the bus stop. The bucket was still there, and the shit was even drier than it had been a few hours earlier. I got back in the car and spent a few minutes watching the stop. “Today’s the day”, I thought as I positioned my phone on the dashboard so that I could watch movies while keeping an eye on the bucket.

Three hours passed, and no one had approached the bucket. The street was deserted, the cold was beginning to peel my bones…I was becoming stiff with the cold. I decided to get out of the car to stretch my legs; it was four in the morning. I walked to the stop, and the bucket was in the same position with the same shit in it. I took a picture of the bucket so I could later confirm it was the same one. He looked the same, but they may be different buckets. I went back to the car.

I think I must have fallen asleep for a few minutes, enough to distrust the time when I woke up. I got out of the car; it was six thirty in the morning. The air was cold and the sky slightly red, and I felt a pang and a chill in my chest. I walked up to the bucket, and it was the same as before; there was no change. I went back to the car shivering and physically uncomfortable. No one had touched the bucket, the sun was beginning to rise, and the first people of the day were starting to circulate. It could be someone who took the first bus, I thought. The eyes weighed not for lack of sleep but for lack of strength.

At seven thirty, the first bus appeared, and the only two people at the bus stop boarded. During the short time they had been at the bus stop, they stared at the bucket and commented something to each other. But no one had yet touched that excrement.

It’s eight twenty. My fellow commuters began to appear. First the two ladies, then the men. The bus arrived at the same time as always, and off they went to face another day at work. As soon as the bus left, I went to inspect the bucket. There were no changes; the poo was even drier than before. No one had touched the bucket. Suddenly, the thought of being seen at night crossed my mind. If the culprit had seen me, he might well have abandoned the plan.

I arrived home determined to keep a diary of what was happening, hoping that the details might eventually help unravel the mystery. I found a little book on my bedside table that one of the little ones had given me on Father’s Day, and I began to write. I started on the first day I saw the bucket. I was so wrapped up in writing the diary that for several minutes I didn’t notice my wife watching me from the bathroom.

- “So you found out who the culprits are?”

- “No. I think they must have seen me.”

- “How so?”

- “The day I set up surveillance, nothing happened to the bucket. Isn’t it odd?”

She takes a towel and rubs her hair.

- “Don’t you think someone could be playing a trick on you?”

- “Yeah, but who?”

- “I don't know, maybe your coworkers?!”

I didn’t answer that. My colleagues are boring creatures. They are people who were born depressed and work in something they loathe. The only time they ever manage a faint smile is when it’s time to leave or when they’re heading off on holiday. They don’t give a shit for anyone or anything related to the department. I feel a slight headache, and I lay down.

Eighth Day

I fell ill. The diary collected a few more entries—little memorials to a sanity that was thinning. My wife, practised in small domestic catastrophes, held the thermometer between two fingers and took on the face reserved for emergencies.

“You have a high fever. I’ll call the doctor.”

Her voice was efficient, unromantic, perfect. I was the one betrayed by a fever that felt less like infection than like punishment: a body revolting for spending too many nights watching a bucket of shit.

Ninth Day

Two days in bed. The doctor pronounced the name of the illness as if reading from a list—bronchopneumonia; a precise, bureaucratic malady. My wife chastised me between spoonfuls of broth for having kept vigil in the cold over a pail of excrement. Her reproach was half worry, half practical calculation: foolishness has an economic cost.

Tenth Day

I am slightly better. My wife has stayed home to care for me; we move through these domestic emergencies like a well-rehearsed team. There is no dramatic passion in our marriage—no cinematic crescendos. Our love was planned in an undergraduate seminar, calibrated and budgeted. Romance, for us, has always been an exchange: safety for fidelity, affection for shared strategy, warmth for the consolation of not being alone.

I became a civil servant because it fit our life-plan: calm, predictable, with enough pensionary promise to keep anxiety at bay. Holidays are timetabled, breakfasts are efficient, emotions are politely scheduled between dentist appointments and parent-teacher meetings. This is the secret of our quiet triumph: to refuse improvisation, to resist the siren calls of disorder. Humanity, one might argue, advances by such small renunciations—by the collective abstention from romantic ruin.

Yet the bucket intrudes like a saboteur of that order: a small, obscene anomaly that refuses to be shelved. It testifies that life still has the power to surprise us, and that surprises can be revolting.

Eleventh Day

I am well enough now to resent the interruption of my illness. But the bucket gnaws at me like a bad tooth. Has it returned to its appointed place at the stop? I avoid asking my wife to check for me. She has already done more than enough, and I don't want to burden her with my obsession. I worry that, in her eyes, I am beginning to look petty. Still, the question throbs louder than the consolation of health: does the world conspire in silence, or merely continue its puzzling indifference?

Twelfth Day

“They asked for you.”

“Who did?”

“Your morning companions.”

“Did you go?” I asked, lifting my head, the pillow still warm with fever.

“Yes. I was curious,” she admitted.

“And the bucket?”

“Since you’ve been off sick, it hasn’t appeared,” she said.

A cold certainty passed through me, a theory forming its teeth around the facts. “It must be a plot against me,” I muttered, sinking back into my pillow.

She sat on the bed, placed her hand where my heart was weak from fever and obsession, and asked: “But who’s behind it?”

“How the hell should I know?” I answered, and the question was louder than the reply. In that instant the mystery ceased to be merely a nuisance; it became an act of aggression, a deliberate orchestration aimed at displacing me from my appointed, comfortable life. Whoever orchestrated it dared to challenge the small architecture of my days.

I have never considered existence a gift; it weighs on me like an affliction that renews itself with every breath. I wake each day only to confront the corrosion of time, the slow erosion of my being under the tyranny of the timetable.

What others call life feels to me like a rehearsal without performance, a cycle of gestures repeated until they lose all sense. Even despair, once sharp and alive, has dulled into routine, as if my suffering itself has grown weary of originality. I carry on, not from conviction, but because interruption never comes soon enough.

Whenever I search for meaning, I stumble upon its mockery, echoes, fragments, absurd justifications that collapse under scrutiny. Happiness visits me only as an anesthesia, a fragile deception that vanishes at the first crack in the facade.

Suffering, however, remains loyal; it has never betrayed me, never abandoned me to illusions. My thoughts circle the abyss until reason begins to blur, and I suspect that to think at all is to trespass into madness.

Still, here I remain, chained to consciousness, haunted not by the certainty of an end, but by the dread that there may be none, only an infinite prolongation of shadows where even silence refuses to conclude.

One does not "have" a devil. He does not take possession of us. He changes us from within. In the castle of our mind, an architecture we confuse with our identity, each dark corner becomes a concession to an uninvited guest. He requires no force; he seeps. He occupies, by insinuation, until his presence feels identical to our own.

The so-called door between cognition and action is not a threshold, but rather a mechanism that he creates. We call it freedom, but it is merely the smooth functioning of his apparatus. The more convinced we are of our autonomy, the more perfectly his device operates.

Every memory we once held is gradually being rebuilt in his script. We become the archivists for a history that no longer includes us. The illusion of self-control is his most exquisite cruelty; he makes us believe we have a choice when in reality we are only reciting lines he has penned.

The devil does not destroy us. Destruction is overly honest. He molds us into his reflection, and rejecting him means rejecting the only identity left. That is the ultimate victory: when the prospect of removing him feels like self-destruction.

There is no escape from this guest. The castle is not ours to protect; it was created for him.

I once saw mountain people shed him in their sleep. Their eyes, wide and milk-white, flickered in a silent, spasming trance. From them, the creature rose, slowly, weightlessly, like a pale balloon of light, drifting upward into the night.

Mornings made of pure dew tear open the sutures of a mind shackled in fear, bleeding not blood but ideas, a poison of thoughts too jagged to speak. I awaken in screams that belong to no throat, to a sky that devours itself with the ferocity of dying angels.

These dew-laced dawns are not born of light, but vomited from the belly of a machine god who has forgotten his purpose, whose entrails I suckle for warmth. There is no sun, only a great blind eye watching my hallucinations curl like burned paper in the corners of a cell without walls.

The pain comes not from memory, but from memories that never were, phantom recollections with teeth, gnawing at the bone of my sanity. A hollow theater where shadows perform mutilated gestures with limbs that are not theirs. I do not recall; I invent pain, over and over, crafting horrors from the marrow of silence, sculpting screams with fingers that no longer bend.

Each droplet of dew is a blade, each blade a chorus of violated time, stabbing into the flesh of thoughts that refuse to exist. And in this opera of infection, I, the shrieking priest, baptize myself in phantom wounds, naming each one after a god I have butchered in dreams.

I have ceased to differentiate between the sacred and the obscene, between mornings and the void that births them. I have fed the dew to my mouth until my tongue blistered with visions, until the sky fell through my skull and nested in my spine.

There is no end to this; the theater of my mind is on fire, and the actors are blind, stumbling through ash, reciting lines written in the bile of extinct stars. I am not afraid, I am the fear, multiplied, devoured, spat out in syllables that splinter like bone.