Micah Webber’s Reviews > A Long Long Way > Status Update

Oh, it was darker now in the room. There was a poison slipping easily through Willie's veins. The poison of disappointment and new horror. Never in all his days had he seen his father so chill and strange, the deep voice corrupted by anger, sounding like the terrifying voice of a stranger, of another. Never in his life had he even heard any such speech from his father, using words out of parades and ceremonies.

But he fell down between the boards of memory and sleep like a penny in an old floor. He lay there in the dust of nowhere, sunken and alone.

The water touched them like a mother, soothing their backs and legs, and flowed around their genitals like the long hair of a lover.
“Jesus, that’s better,” said Christy Moran.
“Fucking hell,” said McNaughtan.
“Holy Mother Church and all her saints,” said Smith.
“For the love of Jesus and his Divine Mother and the Holy Ghost too into the bargain,” said another slightly submerged voice.

“That was the night of a storm that would not be a famous storm. But. . . it drove the wet harvest along the gutters and into the gaping drains and down into the unknown avenues of the great sewers. The blood of births was sluiced down there too, and all the many liquids of humanity, but the salt sea at Ringsend took everything equally.”