That Old Country Music: Stories

by Kevin Barry

What kind of a maniac could fall for the likes of me, he wondered. The question was unanswerable and terrifying.

And suddenly he was without life or pain.

There is a belief, of course, that the love of nature is a type of spilt religion and to develop it later on in life, in one’s forties, is suspicious stuff indeed.

I have very little of the language, even after all this time, but the solution to this is straightforward—I don’t talk to people.

Shall I lead you through the caverns of this fat old skull then? Dank, oh dank places! Caverns full of black hissing water through which sometimes still I rise up to myself.