The cathedral bells of Saint Paradoxus rang backward, their bronze tongues licking time into spirals as Inspector Abelard the Unblinking arrived in the village of Nonsensica, a place where the river flowed uphill on Tuesdays and the blacksmith forged swords from solidified whispers. His mission was simple: to investigate the theft of the Sacred Chicken of Contradiction, a fowl said to lay eggs containing either profound truths or terrible puns, depending on the phase of the moon. The chicken had vanished from its gilded coop during the annual Feast of Unanswered Questions, an event where villagers debated whether silence was a color or a flavor, and the local bard had been arrested for rhyming crimes against nature.

Abelard, a man whose left eye saw the past and whose right eye wept ink, made his way to the Paradox family estate, a castle built entirely of doors—some leading to rooms that didn’t exist, others to the same room but with different lighting. The Paradoxes were notorious for their inability to agree on anything, including which direction gravity should pull, and their household was a cacophony of clashing realities.

At the castle’s heart sat Patriarch Zeno Paradox, a man who communicated exclusively in unsolvable riddles and wore a cloak stitched from unfinished sentences. His wife, Matriarch Hildegard of the Floating Head, had divorced her body years ago and now existed as a disembodied voice that emanated from the chandelier, offering unsolicited advice in iambic pentameter. Their children, the twins Tweedle-Debt and Tweedle-Doubt, were conjoined at the wallet and shared a single pair of pants, which they argued over daily on philosophical grounds.

But the true chaos simmered in the presence of Uncle Quixote the Literal, who insisted that metaphors were a government conspiracy, and Aunt Scheherazade the Never-Ending, who had been telling the same story since 1247 and refused to die until someone guessed the ending. The grandparents, both natural and by marriage, loomed like malfunctioning gargoyles: Grandfather Oedipus the Self-Made, who had legally married his own shadow, and Grandmother Lady Lazarus, who rose from the dead every fortnight to complain about the quality of modern resurrection.

The investigation began with Abelard interrogating the last person to see the chicken, Cousin Hamlet the Indecisive, a man who took twenty minutes to choose which foot to step forward with and had recently rewritten the Ten Commandments as a series of maybe-suggestions. The chicken, Hamlet murmured while staring at a skull he’d found in the garden (which may or may not have been his own), had grown tired of being a symbol and fled to join a troupe of anarchist mimes performing The Divine Comedy in interpretive dance.

Meanwhile, the family’s debates reached a fever pitch. Zeno declared that the chicken’s theft was both happening and not happening simultaneously, while Hildegard’s floating head countered that existence itself was an overrated plot device. The twins, ever the contrarians, insisted the chicken was a tax evasion scheme disguised as poultry, a theory they demonstrated by attempting to pay the castle’s rent in existential dread.

But it was Grandmother Lady Lazarus who derailed the central theme. She rejected the chicken’s sacred status outright, claiming it was actually a soup ingredient that had gotten delusions of grandeur. In defiance, she exhumed a spoon from the cemetery (where it had been buried next to a turnip named Destiny) and began stirring the air violently, creating a vortex that turned the castle’s moat into a broth of unanswered prayers. Her rebellion caused the sky to rain footnotes, each one critiquing the narrative’s pacing.

Abelard’s ink-tear eye spilled prose as he documented the madness. He noted the cathedral bells now ringing in sonnet form, the twins’ pants becoming sentient and filing for divorce, and Uncle Quixote’s duel with a dictionary he mistook for a heretic. The inspector soon realized the chicken was irrelevant—the true crime was the family’s refusal to let reality settle into a single version. Without consensus, the world began to fray: the drawbridge melted into a puddle of bad metaphors, and the portraits in the great hall blinked out of existence, one by one, as if erased by an unseen critic.

By the witching hour, the castle had become a tangle of conflicting plotlines. Abelard fled with only a single clue clutched in his fist—a feather that smelled of irony and bore the chicken’s final words: This was never about me.

Carlos del Puente relatos

The Voss manor stood crooked on a hill that leaned westward, as though the weight of its secrets had warped the very earth beneath it. Its walls, papered in faded maps of nonexistent continents, hummed with the static of unresolved arguments. Inside, the air smelled of burnt lavender and the metallic tang of paradoxes left to rust. The family had gathered in the Hall of Unanswered Questions, a room where the chandelier dripped wax tears onto a carpet woven from the hair of dead philosophers. At the center of it all sat Mortimer Voss, his left eye socket sutured shut with sheet music from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, his remaining eye—a jaundiced marble floating in a broth of burst capillaries—fixed on the monstrosity looming before them: a nine-foot-tall mirror framed by the ribs of a whale that had, according to family lore, swallowed a meteorite in 1723.  

The mirror did not reflect. Not exactly. Instead, it regurgitated.  

Mortimer’s twin sister, Calíope, had knitted the mirror’s drapery from her own split ends, her fingers moving in time to the arrhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock, which birthed minuets like stillborn calves. The clock, like the Voss lineage, was a relic of contradictions: its pendulum swung in Fibonacci spirals, and its face bore no numbers, only the smudged fingerprints of ancestors who had tried, and failed, to wind it backward. Today, the mirror had coughed up something new—a creature stitched from mismatched reflections, a patchwork of eyes, elbows, and existential dread. It stood in the parlor, dripping liquid silence onto the floorboards, while the family debated its provenance.  

Father Aloysius, a cartographer who now charted only the borders of his migraines, insisted the creature Frankenstein was a byproduct of Mortimer’s insurrection ocular. He jabbed a trembling finger at the thing’s chest, where a locket hung containing a miniature of their great-grandmother Eustacia, who had spontaneously combusted during a séance. This is no mere reflection, he rasped. This is a cartographic error in the atlas of the soul! Mother Seraphina, whose body shifted between states of stained glass and steam depending on her mood, countered by lobbing a teacup at the mirror. The cup passed through the glass and returned as a moth with Euclid’s axioms etched into its wings. Nonsense, she hissed. It’s a metaphor in search of a wound!  

The twins, Castor and Pollux—conjoined at the index finger and perpetually debating whether time was a rhombus or a trapezoid—offered to dissect the creature using a spoon bent by existential doubt. Their proposal was vetoed by Uncle Ignacio, an inspector with the Bureau of Surreal Crimes, who arrived wearing a trench coat lined with moth wings and a hat that wept expired ink. He circled the creature, prodding it with a revolver that fired tercets from Dante’s Inferno. This, he declared, is a case of recursive identity theft. The mirror hasn’t reflected—it’s plagiarized.  

The creature  Frankenstein, meanwhile, had begun to molt. Its skin sloughed off in sheets of sonnets by Pessoa, revealing a skeleton of fused cutlery. Its left femur was a soup spoon engraved with the Ten Commandments; its ribcage, a nest of butter knives chanting Gregorian hymns. When it spoke, its voice was the sound of a vinyl record played backward through a seashell. I am not Frankenstein, it intoned. I am the echo of his echo. The specular image of a question no one thought to ask.  

Grandmother Ophelia, preserved in a jar of her own sighs beside the fireplace, rattled her glass prison. You’re all fools, she bubbled. The mirror didn’t create it—Mortimer did. He tore out his eye to avoid seeing himself, and now the void has grown teeth! Her words pooled on the floor, crystallizing into tiny replicas of the Tower of Babel.  

Mortimer, slumped in a wingback chair upholstered with rejected operas, laughed—a sound like a accordion being murdered. You misunderstand, he wheezed. I didn’t remove my eye to escape the reflection. I removed it to make the reflection see. He gestured to the creature, which was now using a fish fork to scratch existential equations into the wallpaper. It’s not me. It’s the accumulated gaze of every ancestor who ever judged a spoon immoral.  

Aunt Calliope, who communicated solely through origami spiders, folded a note from a page of Paradise Lost and launched it into the chandelier. The paper burst into flames, spelling out in smoke: The eye sees what the mind vomits.  

The debate disintegrated into chaos. Castor and Pollux dissolved into a fistfight over the plural of apocalypse. Seraphina began composing a symphony for theremin and weeping viola. Ignacio declared a state of metaphysical emergency and fired a sonnet into the ceiling, which rained down haikus about existential dread. Through it all, the creature wandered the manor, picking up objects and absorbing their histories: a hairbrush that had combed the beards of dead kings, a taxidermied owl that whispered conspiracy theories in Aramaic. With each absorption, it grew more coherent, more real.  

By dusk, it had reached the attic, where Grandfather Eustace’s portrait hung—a man who had burst into flames mid-debate and now existed as a smudge of ash in the shape of a scream. The creature pressed its fork-hand to the canvas. Eustace’s ash shuddered, then reconstituted into a sentence: Identity is a corpse stitched from borrowed pronouns.  

The words ignited, spreading fire across the attic. The flames, however, did not burn—they unwound, unraveling the wallpaper’s maps into primordial chaos. The Voss family, momentarily united by panic, formed a bucket brigade, passing jars of grandmother’s sighs, vials of moth dust, and a single expired coupon for salvation. The creature  Frankenstein watched, its cutlery bones clinking in what might have been laughter.  

As the last map dissolved, the mirror cracked, spewing forth a tidal wave of paradoxes that flooded the halls. The grandfather clock choked on a final minuet. The chandelier’s tears hardened into amber containing fossilized sonnets. And Mortimer, his remaining eye reflecting the fractal flames, whispered: Now it sees. Now it knows. The horror isn’t being observed—it’s being observed by yourself.  

The creature  Frankenstein, now fully formed—a collage of every Voss’s unlived lives—stepped into the mirror, shattering it. In its wake, the family found themselves staring at their reflections for the first time in decades. But their images were wrong. Seraphina’s glass body showed cracks she couldn’t feel. Aloysius’s face was a map of a country that didn’t exist. Castor and Pollux, still conjoined, now shared a third eye that blinked in iambic pentameter.  

Ignacio holstered his revolver. Case closed, he muttered. The specular image was constructed from the debris of discourse never received. He adjusted his monocle, inside which a goldfish scribbled poststructuralist critiques on the glass with its tail.  

In the garden, the topiary Freud whispered to the dahlias: Trauma is just a metaphor with a tenure. The roses, blooming in non-Euclidean geometries, disagreed.  

And Mortimer? He smiled, his sutured eye leaking a melody only the moths could hear. The creature  Frankenstein was gone, but the question remained, echoing in the hollows of the house: If identity is borrowed, who pays the overdue fines?

Carlos del Puente relatos

 The day Uncle Mortimer plucked out his left eye with a melon baller, the family was gathered around a dining table shaped like a dissected clock, its gears fossilized into the mahogany. The table, like the family, was a relic of contradictions: half Baroque grandeur, half junkyard scrap. Mortimer’s remaining eye —a jaundiced orb floating in a soup of broken capillaries— rolled toward his twin sister, Aunt Calliope, who was busy knitting a scarf from her own hair. Meanwhile, the plucked eye rested on a saucer, staring fixedly at a portrait of Grandfather Eustace, a man who had spontaneously combusted during a debate about the moral weight of spoons. Mortimer’s act was not an isolated incident but the culmination of a decades-long feud with his reflection. You see, the Voss family suffered from a peculiar affliction: their mirrors reflected not their faces, but the collective regrets of their ancestors. Recently, Mortimer’s reflection had begun reciting limericks about the Spanish Inquisition, something he found distasteful. So he did what any reasonable man would do: he gouged out the offending eye, seeing it as blatantly contradictory to the other, reasoning that if he could not silence the past, he might at least force it to witness the present. His brother, Inspector Ignatius Voss of the Surreal Crimes Division, arrived wearing a trench coat lined with moth wings and a hat that wept ink from centuries-old decay. Ignatius was a man who interrogated shadows with endless inquisitions worthy of any state agency of torture in service of good and order, drafting lengthy reports in iambic pentameter in the manifest style of the famous Don Quixote by the renowned friend of humanity, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, though my memory falters due to thirty centuries having passed like a fierce stampede of mad horses over my frail recollection. He examined the eye on the saucer, which now sprouted tiny cilia and hummed a Gregorian chant. A textbook case of ocular insurrection,  he muttered, adjusting his monocle, which contained a live goldfish. The eye, sensing accusation, blinked once and recited a line from  Don Quixote  in perfect ancient Castilian. The family convened in the Parlor of Unanswerable Questions, a room wallpapered with love letters, styled after those of the writer Gabriel García Márquez, never sent and smelling of burnt thyme. Mother Seraphina, a woman composed of equal parts stained glass and vapor, argued that Mortimer’s eye should be pickled in regret and displayed beside Grandmother Ophelia’s jar of preserved sighs. Father Aloysius, a retired cartographer who now mapped the contours of his own paranoia, insisted the eye be mailed to the Vatican with a note reading  See attached heresy . The twins, Castor and Pollux —conjoined at the index finger and perpetually at war over whether time was a rhombus or a trapezoid— proposed using the eye as a marble in their ongoing game of existential skittles. Only Cousin Lenore,  a girl of thirteen who communicated exclusively through origami cicadas, understood the gravity of the situation. She folded a crane from a page of  Paradise Lost  and launched it toward the chandelier, where it burst into flames, spelling out in smoke:  The eye sees what the mind denies. Mortimer, now sporting a patch stitched from a rejected opera libretto, leaned back in his chair. You misunderstand,  he said, his voice a wheeze of accordion bellows.  I didn’t remove the eye to silence it. I removed it to make it watch.  He gestured to the saucer, where the eye had grown legs and was attempting to crawl toward the salt cellar.  Now it sees the horror it refused to acknowledge. The horror of being perceived. The horror, as it turned out, was this: The Voss family’s ancestral home stood atop a wrinkle in time, a place where history bled into the present like ink into linen. Grandmother Ophelia had spent her life stitching the fraying edges of reality with thread spun from her own dreams, but Mortimer’s act had torn the fabric anew. Now, the walls oozed memories. The grandfather clock gave birth to minuets. The pantry stockpiled revolutions. Ignatius, ever the pragmatist, drew his service revolver —a weapon that fired sonnets— and aimed it at the eye.  In the name of the Absurd and the Beautiful, I charge you with treason against the narrative!  The eye, now the size of a grapefruit and sporting a handlebar mustache, hissed and recited Article 3 of the Surrealist Manifesto. A duel ensued. Meanwhile, in the garden, the topiary hedge —trimmed into the shape of Sigmund Freud— whispered to the hydrangeas about Mortimer’s childhood trauma. The roses, which bloomed in hexagons, argued that trauma was merely a metaphor in search of a wound.    By nightfall, the eye had escaped through a keyhole, leaving behind a trail of liquid paradox that crystallized into miniature replicas of the Tower of Babel. Ignatius declared a state of metaphysical emergency. Seraphina began composing a symphony for theremin and weeping viola. Castor and Pollux dissolved into a fistfight over whether the plural of  apocalypse  was  apocalypses  or  apocalypi. And Mortimer? He smiled, his remaining eye reflecting the fractured light of the chandelier.  At last,  he sighed,  I see what I could not bear to see.

Carlos del Puente relatos

The town of Ventriloquist floated on a lake of mercury, its cobblestones glinting like misplaced teeth in a cosmic jaw. Its inhabitants, a genealogy of contradictions, resided in houses that leaned away from one another in perpetual disgust, their roofs sprouting chimney smoke that curled into cursive profanities. At the center of this delirium stood the Pándemo family, a clan whose bloodline was less a tree and more a thorny shrub grafted with radioactive lichen. The patriarch, Don Cosme Pándemo, had a face like a crumpled map of a war no one remembered, his left eye replaced by a pocket watch that ticked backward to spite linear time. His wife, Doña Serafina, communicated exclusively through the language of moths, their wings dusted with phosphorescent pollen that spelled out prophecies no one cared to decipher. Their children—twins Lázaro and Lázara, born conjoined at the shadow—argued ceaselessly over whether existence was a palindrome or a poorly written limerick.  The uncles and aunts were no less peculiar. Tío Ramón, who believed himself a reincarnated chandelier, hung from the ceiling during dinner, rattling with indignation whenever someone mentioned electricity. Tía Clemencia, a woman made entirely of expired lottery tickets, wandered the streets reciting numbers that corresponded to the screams of distant stars. The grandparents, a blend of biological and marital accidents, included Abuelo Fortunato, a retired anarchist who planted bombs filled with confetti in mailboxes, and Abuela Griselda, who knitted sweaters from her own hair and claimed they could ward off meteors.  The central tension arose from the family’s feud over The Slumbering Eye of Dreams, a mythical eye embedded in the town’s cathedral, said to gaze into the void where lost thoughts congregated. The eye, according to legend, could awaken only when someone dared to walk backward through the seven dimensions of errancia—a state of purposeful wandering that defied all maps. The Pándemos had spent generations debating whether to rouse the eye. Don Cosme insisted it would restore order to the town’s liquefied chronology. Doña Serafina’s moths fluttered in dissent, spelling out catastrophe in glowing loops. The twins, meanwhile, dueled with spoons, each clang punctuated by existential axioms.  It was Lázaro—or perhaps Lázara; their voices merged like radio static—who first suggested prying the eye open with a crowbar forged from existential doubt. The uncles and aunts erupted. Tío Ramón’s crystals shattered in protest. Tía Clemencia’s numbers spiraled into a Fibonacci scream. Abuelo Fortunato tossed a confetti bomb into the fireplace, turning the room into a snow globe of futility. Amid the chaos, the youngest cousin, Amadeo, a boy with a head full of tumbleweeds and a heart full of misplaced commas, slipped out to enact the heresy himself.  Amadeo’s journey to the cathedral was a ballet of absurdity. Sidewalks yawned open to reveal basements where pianos played requiems for extinct insects. Clouds rained tadpoles that sprouted legs midair and scampered into sewers. By the time he reached the The Slumbering Eye of Dreams, his pockets were full of dehydrated tears and a parrot had nested in his left ear, reciting sonnets in reverse. The eye, a colossal orb veined with fissures resembling subway maps, loomed over him. Its pupil was a vortex of static, humming a tune that made his bones vibrate at the frequency of regret.  He raised the crowbar—a relic he’d stolen from the attic where the family stored its grudges—and struck. The eye shuddered. A sigh escaped its cornea, carrying the scent of burnt dictionaries. Then, it opened.  What poured forth was not light, but a thick syrup of errancia, a liquid paradox that dissolved the cathedral’s walls into origami cranes. The town of Ventrílocuo began to unravel. Don Cosme’s pocket watch exploded, spewing gears that burrowed into the ground like metallic ticks. Doña Serafina’s moths combusted into miniature supernovae, their ashes spelling I TOLD YOU SO in the sky. The twins, mid-argument, fused into a single being that spoke in perfect iambic pentameter, a harmony that annoyed even the clouds.  Amadeo, now half-solid and half-metaphor, stumbled through the collapsing dimensions. The awakened eye pursued him, its gaze turning sidewalks into quicksand and citizens into abstract sculptures. Tía Clemencia’s lottery tickets decoded into obituaries. Tío Ramón, unhinged from the ceiling, rolled through the town square like a tumbleweed of glass and regret. The grandparents’ sweaters unraveled, releasing a plague of metaphorical moths that devoured every perhaps and maybe from the townsfolks’ vocabulary, leaving them stranded in declarative doom.  By dawn, Ventriloquist had become a diorama of its former self, a snow globe shaken by the hand of a bored god. The Pándemo family, now a collective of mismatched limbs and unresolved arguments, huddled in what remained of the town square—a patch of grass that grew in hexagons. The The Slumbering Eye of Dreams, having exhausted its wrath, closed again, but its lid remained slightly ajar, a perpetual wink at the folly of seeking direction in a universe that preferred to meander.  Amadeo, now more metaphor than boy, sat on the edge of a nonexistent well, listening to the parrot in his ear recite the final sonnet. It ended with a line that tasted of salt and unsent letters: To wander is to breathe; to awaken the eye is to drown in the breath.

By Carlos del Puente relatos

 The eclipse arrived uninvited, like a dinner guest who refuses to leave and instead begins rearranging the furniture to suit its “aesthetic of perpetual dusk.” The sun, reduced to a tarnished copper coin glimpsed through a keyhole, cast shadows that pooled like spilled ink in the corners of the world. Towns dissolved into rumors. Clocks grew moss. And the Pemberton family, who had always been mildly unhinged, embraced the madness like a long-lost relative—specifically, Uncle Thaddeus, who claimed to have invented silence by bottling the gaps between heartbeats and was currently suing the Vatican for copyright infringement.  At the center of this cosmic farce was Barnabas Pemberton, a man whose beard had begun to sprout lichen and whose left hand had recently unionized, demanding weekends off and a pension plan. Barnabas’s parents, Reginald and Esmerelda, were locked in a decades-long debate over whether time was a ladder to climb or a hammock to nap in. Reginald, a retired horologist, spent his days disassembling sundials with a crowbar, shouting, “You’re all complicit in this chronological fascism!” Esmeralda, a former ballerina who now believed herself to be the reincarnation of a Victorian lampshade, curated a museum of expired candles in the attic, whispering to their wicks, “You burned too brightly, darlings. That’s why they snuffed you.”  The twins, Felix and Felicity, were Barnabas’s siblings—or rather, his “temporal anchors,” as they insisted on being called. Born conjoined at the earlobe, they shared a single auditory canal through which they eavesdropped on the future. Their hobby? Hosting salons where they recited next week’s obituaries as spoken-word poetry. “Mrs. Henderson will choke on a metaphor,” Felix would intone, while Felicity mimed CPR we blew. They adored the eclipse, having long argued that daylight was “garish” and that humanity’s greatest achievement was the invention of curtains.  The extended family was a menagerie of malfunction. Aunt Drusilla, who married a scarecrow to spite her ex-husband (a botanist who left her for a particularly seductive Venus flytrap), communicated exclusively through limericks composed of farmyard noises. Uncle Hieronymus, a self-proclaimed “astronomer of the subconscious,” the moon’s dark side using only his dreams and a sextant made of gnawed chicken bones. The grandparents, long deceased but refusing to acknowledge it, haunted the parlor as a pair of sentient dust storms, materializing occasionally to critique the wallpaper or lament the decline of polite haunting.  The trouble began when Barnabas declared the eclipse “bad for business”—specifically, his business of selling existential reassurance door-to-door (“Guaranteed meaning in 30 minutes or your despair refunded!”). The family, who had been hosting nightly eclipse-viewing parties featuring moon-cheese fondue and existential bingo, revolted. Esmerelda accused him of “solarphobia.” Reginald threatened to disinherit his left hand. The twins composed a dirge titled “Ode to a Coward’s Retina.”  Undeterred, Barnabas allied with Aunt Drusilla’s scarecrow husband—now a radicalized anarchist after years of crow attacks—to build a “luminary liberation device” from stolen streetlamps and the angst of middle-aged clowns. The contraption, shaped like a dandelion gone monochrome, aimed to “renegotiate the sun’s contract” by blasting light into the sky like a ransom note.  Meanwhile, the grandparents’ dust storms coalesced into a manifesto titled “The Aesthetics of Eternal Twilight: Why Shadows Deserve Health Care,” which Felix and Felicity set to music using a theremin and a kazoo orchestra. The family’s debates crescendoed into operatic absurdity:  “The eclipse is a masterpiece!” shrieked Esmerelda, hurling a candelabra at Barnabas. “You’re just jealous because your beard photosynthesizes better than your ideas!” “It’s a celestial dictatorship!” Barnabas retorted, ducking behind a taxidermied wombat. “Even the moths are writing suicide notes!” “Moths are overrated,” sniffed Felicity, adjusting her eyepatch made of smoked glass. “They’re just winged nihilists.”  The device’s inaugural test flooded the town with a light so harsh it caused existential sunburns—patches of skin that glowed with the unsolicited wisdom of Socrates. Reginald’s sundials burst into flames, screaming, “We told you so!” in ancient Babylonian. The twins’ ear-conjoined brains short-circuited, leaving them temporarily convinced they were a failed telepathy experiment from 1967.  In the aftermath, the eclipse retaliated by birthing a second eclipse, smaller and petulant, which nested inside the original like a Russian doll with a grudge. Time curdled. Tuesdays became Wednesdays’ drunken hallucinations. The family’s parlor rug grew teeth and ate Aunt Drusilla’s favorite limerick (“There once was a hen from Nantucket…”).  Barnabas, now a pariah, took refuge in the attic with the expired candles, who comforted him by whispering, “Every flame dies, but the darkness? The darkness is tenure-track.” He opened a vein and let his blood ink a treatise titled “Apology to the Shadows: A Coward’s Manifesto,” which the family used to line the birdcage of their anarchist parrot, Nietzsche Jr.  The eclipse, satisfied, settled in for another few centuries. The Pembertons adapted. Felix and Felicity opened a blackout-themed bed-and-breakfast. Reginald took up knitting timelines out of unraveled sweaters. Esmerelda married the scarecrow in a midnight ceremony officiated by a moth priest. And Barnabas’s left hand, having secured its union demands, retired to a beach in the Bahamas that didn’t exist anymore, sipping margaritas made of existential salt.

By Carlos del Puente relatos

 The octopus’s name was Cephalo, though no one ever used it. His family referred to him exclusively through a series of guttural clicks, which he transcribed in his journals as “the one who wastes ink on questions that dissolve in water.” Cephalo lived in a submerged Victorian parlor, its walls papered with kelp and its chandeliers strung with bioluminescent jellyfish that sighed in B-flat whenever someone mentioned mortality. His mother, a zealous collector of shipwrecked teacups, had arranged the room to mimic her childhood home in Prague, if Prague had been flooded, populated by eels, and governed by the strict laws of absurdity. She often floated near the ceiling, her tentacles knitting sweaters for lobsters no one had ever seen, while humming Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” backward.  Cephalo’s father, a rigid bureaucrat of the abyss, spent his days stamping permits for krill migrations and filing complaints against the tides. He despised his son’s treatise-writing, which he deemed “an unsanctioned use of cephalopod resources.” “Ink,” he’d lecture, jabbing a suckered arm at Cephalo’s latest manuscript, “is for contracts, threats, and escape—not this… this noodling about despair! Do you think the anglerfish worry about Heidegger? No! They glow and bite. Be practical!”  The twins, Cephalo’s siblings, were conjoined at the beak—a rare condition that forced them to share a single thought, which they wielded like a harpoon. They’d hover near the parlor’s clavichord (which no one played but everyone accused of playing itself), screeching in unison: “Existence is a poorly tied sailor’s knot! Stop untying it!” Their contempt for Cephalo’s work was rivaled only by Aunt Medusa, a sentient jellyfish who’d married into the family by clinging to Uncle Barnacle’s left ventricle during a hurricane. She pulsed venomous critiques from her gelatinous throne: “Your treatises lack sting! Where’s the venom? The urgency? You write like a shrimp with a thesaurus!”  Cephalo’s existential masterwork—Being and Ink: A Cephalopod’s Guide to Drowning—had begun as a pamphlet on the futility of crab migration. But after a hallucinogenic encounter with a disoriented sea cucumber (who mistook him for a psychiatrist), it metastasized into an 800-page indictment of oceanic consciousness. His central thesis? “To exist is to be perpetually dissolved by the very medium one calls home.” The family reacted as if he’d vomited ink on the sacred altar of clams.  Grandmother Coral, a stoic matriarch who’d petrified herself to avoid participating in conversations, cracked her limestone jaw to hiss: “You’ve confused depth with sinking, boy.” Grandfather Mangrove, a tangled mess of roots and grudges, erupted through the floorboards to roar: “Existentialism is a barnacle on the hull of productivity! Scrape it off before I disinherit your tentacles!” Only Cousin Anemone, a rebel with a cause who communicated through color changes, offered support—though their endorsement involved stinging Cephalo repeatedly while flashing the shade of “radical solidarity.”  The treatise’s completion triggered a chain of disasters. The parlor’s walls began secreting pages of Cephalo’s manuscript, their text dissolving into the water like suicidal ideations. The jellyfish chandeliers started reciting Camus, their B-flat sighs warping into dirges. Aunt Medusa attempted to eat Chapter 12 (“The Abyss Gazes Also”), only to regurgitate a swarm of existential tadpoles that immediately questioned their purpose. Uncle Barnacle, ever the pragmatist, glued himself to a walrus skull and declared bankruptcy.  Cephalo’s father retaliated by summoning a congress of squid lawyers, who inked subpoenas accusing the treatise of “emotional piracy.” The twins organized an intervention, binding Cephalo with kelp ropes and screaming, “If life is meaningless, then this”—they gestured to a nearby pufferfish bloating itself into a sphere—“is art!” The pufferfish, overhearing, deflated in existential shame.  By the time the treatise’s final page dissolved (its last line: “We are all ink, pretending to be words”), the family’s reality had unraveled into pure metaphor. The parlor became a Möbius strip of ennui. The clavichord grew teeth and ate the jellyfish. Grandmother Coral crumbled into a haiku. And Cephalo, now a spectral blur of ink and inquiry, realized his fatal error: he’d written the truth, and truth, in a surrealist universe, is the one thing that cannot float.  This excerpt condenses the absurdist tone, familial chaos, and thematic conflict while hinting at the escalating surreal consequences. Expanding to 70,000 characters would involve deepening each character’s backstory (e.g., Aunt Medusa’s failed career as a venomous haiku poet), amplifying digressions (a 2,000-word tangent on the “taxonomy of melancholy” as debated by bioluminescent plankton), and layering sensory excess (the smell of ink mixed with regret, the taste of unresolved arguments). The narrative would spiral into increasingly derailed metaphors—e.g., a subplot where Cephalo’s treatise manifests as a sentient ink-cloud that seduces the twins into a cult of “nihilist origami”—while weaving in philosophical parodies (Kant’s Critique of Pure Tentacle, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Ink). Dialogue would devolve into non sequiturs (“Your epistemology smells of low tide!”), and every object (a sentient armchair made of octopus skin, a grandfather clock filled with existential brine) would rebel against the plot’s coherence, embodying the collapse of meaning Cephalo’s treatise unleashes.

By Carlos del Puente relatos

The first notice came in an eggplant envelope. Inside, an invoice detailed the minutes of silence that I had "consumed" that week: 34 minutes and 12 seconds of uncomfortable pauses, non -monetized sighs and empty looks without declaring. "Silence is a luxury," prayed the motto of the City Council, stamped next to a logo of an ear tacted with an X. When protesting in the window, an official with an unresoluble equations tied. "Lord, even the disapproval gestures have a cost," said, pointing out a bubble graph where my frown was priced at € 0.23 per wrinkle. I asked him if the mental lagoons also tribute. "Only if they exceed 10 seconds," replied, giving me a brochure : "How to turn their forgetfulness into tax deductions." When leaving, I ran into a manifestation of Summary furniture  (chairs that claimed pensions for emotional wear). A Chester sofa shouted : "They sat about Nietzsche and did not even give us a compensation cushion!". The riot police, armed with presocratic philosophers feathers, tried to disperse them. At home, my fridge had started a hunger strike. "I do not store more vegetables without existential purpose," announced, spitting a cucumber that immediately began to recite Unamuno. I decided to exile to the park, where the banks charged for minutes of introspection and the birds sang jingles of life insurance.  In the end, I paid the fine with secondary coins stolen from sun watches. The official whispered me : "Next time, he laughed in hexadecimal. It is deductible." And so, I learned that in a world where even the vacuum is price, the only rebellion is yawning in binary code.

By Carlos del Puente relatos

 The city breathed with the rhythm of a sick pulse. Between the smoke of the escapes and the murmur of the hurried crowds, the traffic light raised its three -eyed lighthouse on the corner of the avenue of the forgotten. It was not an object, but an iron and cable witness, a sentry who had learned to measure time not in seconds, but in human sighs. Its red, eternal and bleeding light was the scar that divided the chaos of order.  One day, when the sky was torn in lead and orange tones, a pedestrian stopped in front of him. It was not anyone: he wore shoes spent by hurry and a tie that strangled his dreams. He looked red with disdain, as if that incandescent circle was an arbitrary judge.  "Why do you insist on stopping me?" Asked the man, his voice full of the bitterness of those who have lost too many trains. Red is just a color. You have no right to govern my time.  The traffic light flicked, not by electrical failure, but as a metal eyelid that tried to contain centuries of stories. His answer came in the form of static, a whisper that sprouted from the entrails of the city: "Red is not a color ... it is a mirror." It reflects all those who, like you, believe that life is a career. Stopping is not to surrender: it is to remember that even the rivers make curves not to exhaust their channel.  The pedestrian leaned against the post, feeling the cold of steel penetrate his jacket. A rain drop slipped on his forehead, mixing with the sweat of impatience.  "But I ... I need to get there." It is always now. It is always urgent, ”he murmured, more for himself than for the traffic light.  The red light intensified, turning crimson, like an open wound at night.  "Do you think that green will give you what you are looking for?" He replied the traffic light. You will run, yes, but towards another corner, another red, another wait ... Do you not see that the true destination is not at the end of the street, but here, at this moment where you breathe without hurry?  A bus roughly, splashing puddles that drawn ephemeral rainbows in the asphalt. The pedestrian observed his own hands, marked by stress stretch marks, and for the first time noticed that they were trembling.  "And if I stay?" He asked, almost in a challenge. What I win with your rusty cable philosophy?  The traffic light issued a serious buzz, as an ancestral laugh.  —Gan the silence. Red is not a cage ... it is an altar. Here, in this forced pause, you can listen to the heartbeat of your own heart, the one that drowns with the noise of your steps.  When the light changed to green, the man did not move. He remained there, under the drizzle, while the crowd dodged him with reproach looks. Someone shouted "Crazy!", But he didn't hear. He had discovered that, sometimes, staying motionless is the most radical way to move forward.

By Carlos del Puente relatos

 The Isle of Poplars was not an island at all but a floating argument, a quarrel-shaped landmass where trees grew in the geometric patterns of unresolved family debates. Its roots coiled like the entrails of a clock swallowed whole by the earth, and its leaves whispered gossip in dead languages. Here, the wayfarer—known to his mother as *“that ungrateful echo”* and to his father as *“the tax deduction I never claimed”*—was buried beneath a cairn of mismatched cutlery, for spoons, in this family, were considered holy relics of indecision. His coffin, a repurposed grandfather clock missing its pendulum, ticked backward in protest, as if death were a meeting adjourned prematurely by a particularly petty uncle.    The parents arrived first: his mother, a woman who wore her grudges as hats (today’s was a feathered tricorn from the Great Quarrel of ’87), and his father, a man whose mustache curled into the punctuation marks of unsent letters. They stood at the shore, where the water was not water but liquid algebra, lapping at their shoes in quadratic equations. “He should’ve been buried in a teapot,” hissed the mother, adjusting her grievance-hat. “A teapot!” echoed the father, though his mustache twisted into a semicolon, suggesting he’d planned to say something else entirely.    The twin siblings arrived next, conjoined at the opinion—a two-headed hydra of contradiction. One head insisted the wayfarer’s death was a metaphor for capitalism; the other argued it was a poorly timed pun about existentialism. They carried a wreath of deflated balloons, each printed with a different political slogan, because nothing said *“eternal rest”* like a helium-free manifesto. “He hated balloons,” sighed the left head. “He hated existence,” corrected the right. Together, they lobbed the wreath into the algebraic sea, where it dissolved into a syllogism.    Then came the uncles and aunts, a parade of malfunctioning metaphors. Uncle Mortimer, who’d replaced his skeleton with a filing cabinet, clanked forward, drawers spilling overdue invoices and a petrified owl. “Burying him here is *economically unsound*,” he intoned, slamming a drawer shut on his own thumb. Aunt Eudora, whose skin was a patchwork of expired warranties, cackled as she released a flock of bureaucratic starlings from her handbag. “The island’s zoning laws forbid melancholic interments!” she screeched, though the starlings immediately unionized and began picketing the coffin.    The grandparents—both natural and in-law—emerged from a fold in the horizon, dragging their respective baggage. Grandma Natural, a woman composed entirely of unanswered *“Why?”* questions, floated inches above the ground, her hair a storm cloud drizzling rhetorical inquiries. Grandpa In-Law, meanwhile, was a walking lawsuit, his limbs bristling with cease-and-desist orders. “This burial violates subsection 12-B of the *Universal By-Laws of Grief*,” he thundered, though Grandma Natural interrupted by materializing a gavel from thin air and banging it against his left kneecap.    Amid the chaos, the wayfarer’s ghost sat cross-legged atop his coffin, nibbling spectral toast. *“I told them to cremate me,”* he muttered to a disinterested seagull (which was, in fact, a reincarnated philosopher cursed to critique existentialism through squawks). *“But no, they had to turn my death into a committee meeting.”* The seagull retorted with a Kierkegaardian screech, which roughly translated to *“Subjectivity is a landfill,”* before stealing a crumb of ectoplasmic bread.    The central conflict erupted when Uncle Mortimer—whose filing-cabinet ribs rattled with fiscal resentment—declared the Isle of Poplars a *“hostile workplace environment.”* “The trees are unionizing!” he bellowed, pointing at a poplar that had begun distributing pamphlets titled *“Roots Against Exploitation.”* The family splintered into factions: the parents formed the *Coalition for Aesthetically Appropriate Funerals* (motto: *“Death is a décor choice!”*), while the twins launched a guerrilla poetry campaign, scribbling haikus about class struggle on the coffin with permanent marker.    But it was Aunt Eudora who acted against the execution of the central theme. “The wayfarer isn’t *adrift*—he’s *misclassified*!” she protested, hurling a stapler at Grandma Natural’s storm-cloud hair. “He’s a contractor, not an employee! No severance package!” Her dissent manifested physically: the algebraic ocean solidified into a spreadsheet, trapping the coffin in a cell labeled *“Unpaid Overtime (Eternity).”* The Isle of Poplars shuddered, its debate-shaped geography collapsing into a flowchart, and the wayfarer’s ghost sighed as his toast turned to dust. *“Typical,”* he groaned. *“They’ve managed to bureaucratize the afterlife.”

By Carlos del Puente relatos