Sublime

The oldest of three children in a single parent family, Alan prided himself on having never caused his mother a moment’s pain.

I walked home with my deliquescing cock in my work pants, pretty much having forgotten I may have impregnated a very young girl, wondering what the fuck it was going to take to make me feel whole again, now that I knew it wasn’t sex. Enter drugs.

My first body. Not the last. Booby-trapped corpses left in the jungle to rot. Zipped-up bags enclosing teenagers with tags on their toes, waiting for transport home. Villages of the dead that you’d smell before they came into view. And later: called to the morgue by my father’s old colleagues to identify a naked woman on the slab. She had your card

Life is a battle between the Maker and His creation. Hoel grows expert at the fight.

My mother returned to County Clare afterward, as if America were just a dream she’d fallen into as a girl, who had awoken years later as an old woman in an empty house. She lived now in the stone cottage where she’d been born, writing me occasional letters of matters so foreign that they seemed written by, or to, a stranger: stories of stillborn sh

Before dawn the next morning I heard my father’s voice come through the answering machine. “Mum died, John. That’s all I have to say. Bye.” I felt a love for him and also felt that my mother had indeed said farewell in a completely satisfactory way.