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Back Homesickness Save as PDF
Chapters (16)
  1. Homesickness
  2. Also by Colin Barrett
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. For
  6. Contents
  7. A SHOOTING IN RATHREEDANE
  8. THE WAYS
  9. THE ALPS
  10. WHOEVER IS THERE, COME ON THROUGH
  11. THE SILVER COAST
  12. ANHEDONIA, HERE I COME
  13. THE LOW, SHIMMERING BLACK DRONE
  14. THE 10
  15. Acknowledgements
  16. Back Cover

PussySlayer112 had gone to the effort of typing up the commission as a Word doc, and when Bobby opened it he saw it was almost five thousand words long. He ­skim-­read: elvish princesses from a ­video-­game franchise Bobby was unfamiliar with, fisting, a dash of coprophagia, an extensive and almost clinically dry segue hypothesising how best to depict a dragon’s ­hard-­on. The usual. Bobby reminded himself, once again, that he needed to up his rates. The people who wanted this could only get it from him. He would start the job tonight, he decided, if he could just take the edge off his drunkenness with a bit of a smoke. He went over to the window. Out front of the building he could see the apparitions of his elderly neighbours, the blankets swaddling their hunched frames making them look like poorly pitched tents. The thought came to him, as it often did at night, that he was already dead, had been dead since the world began, just like every­one else, and that he was in heaven and that he was in hell, that heaven and hell were in the end the exact same place. He set the joint on his lip and brought the lighter to it. Friction: he looked out across the city sky and flicked the lighter’s wheel, prepared for the night to go up all around him, but the night, as the night was wont to do, rolled massively and impersonally on. After a while, Bobby could hear the Dopplered gulling of the sirens as the fire engines made their approach.

THE LOW, SHIMMERING BLACK DRONE

I was crossing the street with Caber’s dogs, two big, pale-blond Labrador retriever ­half-­brothers named Linus and Buddy, when I made a mistake. There was a coffee place across the road and in the coffee place’s window there was an illuminated green sign that said OPEN but which, distracted by the dogs and with my head all muddled up on account of my father, I took to mean GO.

I stepped off the kerb and felt a car coming right for me. I turned to face it and the car braked, screeched, there was the awful sound of metal seizing precipitously up, I didn’t move, I couldn’t, but the car wasn’t hitting me and it kept on not hitting me; after a moment I realised the car had come to a stop, its trembling grille close enough to reach out and touch.

Around my knees, Caber’s dogs muscled and yowled, the leather of their leashes biting into the joints of my clenched fist.