The Heart in Winter

by Kevin Barry

Do you believe in God the Almighty? No but I’m in discussions with Him.

Tom? I got a dose of the morbs. We could start up a club, he said.

You think things are directed, don’t you, son? How’d you mean? I mean by hands unguessable. I suppose I do believe that. Yes I do. Well I been directed here to tell you that that right there is an insane delusion of the mind.

She’d lie there and stare into the flames and it was a case of here we go again Lord Jesus I must have done something seriously fucking foul in a past life say what?

Oh this is surely a season of Noël for the all-time annals, Polly Gillespie, when you’re lying hogtied in a shotgun shack somewhere in the Idaho Territory gettin fed up like a vealcalf by a toothlackin Cornish gunsman of extreme mental dubiety and the wind is pickin up outside and offerin its slow yearnsome tales—go sell ’em somewhere else, fucker, I’m stocked—and you’re waitin on your sworn lover to come and find you and the fuck where is that boy? Sombre moments yeah for sure but she was never one for wallowing.

Remember this, she said. The other cunteen he wants your knife, she said. His chest want it, his belly want it, his face want it. He’s screamin out for it, she said. She moved, swayed, danced, folded up, opened out again.

But why look back is what she thinks. If she looked back she’d be eaten whole and alive by the past.

The past is not fixed and it is not certain and this much she has learned if nothin else. The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.