Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh

‘Do you feel sorry for the bandit?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why would you?’ ‘Maybe he was somebody’s father.’ ‘You think he wouldn’t kill his own kin?’ ‘I don’t know.’

Since he was little, a scraped knee or a whipped back, anything to make his body hurt, felt like the hand of God upon him. He knew that wasn’t right. So he kept it private, which made his father’s shameless display of pain and pleasure seem all the more perverse.

clear blue sky was hard to take. Marek saw it as emptiness, a place with no heaven in it. He preferred the clouds because he could imagine paradise behind them.

While tales of bandits marauding through the village may have given an honest lord cause to bang a fist on a polished table, Villiam’s hand was forever limp and unsurprised. He knew it was all planned, all theater. Death wasn’t quite real to him. He never once left the manor to see where the dead were slain or buried. He barely left the hilltop at all.

‘What about heaven, Ina? Don’t you want to go?’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I won’t know anyone.’

To Jude, the boy was a blight, a curse, something that had come to Earth to punish him for a sin he couldn’t recall. Hadn’t he been a good man? Hadn’t he prayed enough? Hadn’t he lashed himself correctly? It never occurred to Jude that the capture and detention of Agata as an adolescent was anything but his rightful duty as a man.