Was either still in prison or back in prison. Don had visited him once. The room where relatives meet men they are unfortunate enough to be related to was full of specialists of every criminal stripe. Tattooed, muscle-bound men whose stupidity sent chills down your spine. Don was full of hope that her father would at the very least become a more accomplished criminal during his stay. He was in for the second or fifth time, and at some point he’d just have to become somewhat more sensible. But if that ever happened, the little family would never taste the fruits of his newfound talent, because as soon as he was released he came to move out his things. During a visitation day he’d met a woman. She was fat and blonde and lived a few houses away from Don. “Goodbye, Father,” said Don as the uninteresting little man departed. Don’s mother took a fistful of pills.

Don’s father’s fat new woman subsequently gave birth to a fat little child, and Don was indifferent about the whole thing. Once in a while he came for a visit. First there would be fighting, always about the money he had invested in his new family, whereupon the father felt aggrieved, as he’d not managed to become rich, and this, naturally, caused him to become aggressive. Then the parents screamed at each other and drank alcohol; subsequently Don would hear noises from the mother’s bedroom that, thanks to porn, she could identify as the sound of fucking. Afterwards the parents screamed at each other again.

And

Don looked out the window at the sky. She wanted so badly to fly away. To a continent free of families. At least the sky looked like home.

PETER

Had arrived a short while before.

It was sometime before sunrise. Had been.

The ride had felt as if it had lasted one hundred days. Peter’s mother had managed to make things easy for herself, and whenever she awoke she’d taken a slug from the vodka bottle she’d brought along, quickly looked to make sure Peter was still there and the bus driver hadn’t dozed off, then she slumped down again. Peter had stared numbly straight ahead. His pupils didn’t move, he wasn’t fixed on any point, everything he saw blurred into an amorphous wash. Peter felt watched. And for good reason. The occupants of the bus who weren’t sleeping or drunk were staring at Peter. He was one of those people who gets stared at. Uninhibited. He knew he looked like an alien, but he was sure that people stared at him because of his repulsiveness. The way you’d marvel at a particularly disgusting insect.

People had grown accustomed to him back home.

Now there was no more home.