Free Three Messages and a Warning by Eduardo Jiménez Mayo, Chris. N. Brown, editors

occurred to me that I’d gotten negligent, because my telephone from a year ago was in better shape than the one I have now.

Photophobia
Mauricio Montiel Figueiras
    Translated by Jen Hofer
For Juvenal Acosta and Andrei Codrescu
Is that not why ghosts return: to drink the blood of the living? —J.M. Coetzee
    The apocalypse, for him, was an everyday concern–corroborated each morning by the light which pierced his pupils with thousands of pins shot out from a mute atomic explosion the moment his eyelids opened like floodgates to scatter the water of his dreams all over the floor. The pain was so sudden, so brutal, that it forced him to close his eyes again and grope for his dark glasses on the bedside table, his pulse at a gallop and his temples pounding fiercely in prelude to a headache. Once the shades were settled—then, only then–he ventured to blink, to untangle the skein of information which his vigil cast before him. Panting and sweaty, while the phosphenes readapted themselves to the blood-red gloom out of which they had blossomed, he began the work of reacquaintance: there were his legs, joined in a mountain range tangling the sheets into peaks which angled down towards the foot of the bed, and beyond that was the profile of a chair, the dust dancing in a diagonal of sun, particles of matter concentrating around forms which would end up being the bathroom door, the curtains which did not quite cover the only window, the stains on the rug—his sense of smell, with feline keenness, detected equal parts of semen and liquor—left as a legacy by former guests. Little by little, as his eye deciphered that resplendent chaos, converting it into a legible code, he understood that the atomic explosion was simply his mind’s dirty trick, part of a dream which day after day he tried in vain to reconstruct. Little by little, the sense of apocalypse was bursting into the world with its useless cargo; the omens disseminated in the press and on television were nothing compared to the ocular catastrophe to which he had been condemned for all eternity—eternity, he thought, a smile twisting his mouth, another useless word for the great dictionary of human vaguenesses. What was eternity if not the weight of the sun on his naked eyes, the seconds it took him to find his glasses on the night table, the lapse that was necessary before the phosphenes would disappear? Let’s talk about eternity, he thought, addressing an invisible interlocutor; let’s talk about the instantaneous blindness it has been my task to eradicate since time immemorial. Let’s talk about how frustrating it is not to be able to recall the last time one awoke without fear of pain and panic about the light, without the primitive terror brought on by the first solar arrows boring through one’s eyelids. Let’s talk about the dark, that inverse light where our eyes ripen like slow-growing fruits.
    That morning, however, he awoke with the sensation that something had happened to the light. At first it was a subtle intuition, a change in the periphery of his visual field inducing dark ruminations, a certain parsimony in the dust attracted by the ray of sun filtering in through the window. Once he had his glasses on and his breath under control, he inhaled vigorously until he thought his lungs would explode; his sense of smell, once again he could confirm it, was a reliable ally: the air was charged with an electric tension which he had only sensed on late afternoons in summer just before a deluge broke. A strange density had slipped into the atmosphere like a swarm of insects; it was, in fact, easy to hear a remote buzzing, a generator-like murmur reminiscent of thousands of elytrons soaring into the distance. He pricked up his ears. There they were as always—as every morning, as every night—the sounds which populated his auditory universe: cockroaches scurrying in the corners of the hotel, the whisper of spiders weaving their webs, the screech of rats