“cut your way through everything, kid.” (death don't have no mercy)

Kiss Off, Violent Femmes

Anna Valenn x la Nouvelle / VO

I sat on the bed, my pack in my lap. I wasn’t tired anymore. What I did sometimes when I couldn’t sleep was write postcards in my head to all the people I’d ever known. I wrote to my old man even though he was dead, to my mother in Guatemala, to my aunt in Austin, to Uncle Harry, to Rosalia, who was my girlfriend from before I left Brooklyn, and to plenty of others. I imagined myself sitting down at a table with a blue pen. I’m not sure where the table was. I imagined sitting there with a stack of cards and I saw it like in a movie: the pen moving, words forming. My handwriting in my imagination was much better than it was in real life. I heard the words in voiceover, too. That also felt like a movie. I didn’t recognize the voice reading them. It was kind of sad and flat. The postcards were never long. Just how are you and do you remember the time and I’m okay kind of stuff. Now I was writing one to my mother, saying I was back in the old neighborhood and what was Guatemala like and did she have a job yet. 

My eyes were closed. I guessed I wouldn’t sleep all night. I wrote more postcards and then I thought about going outside. I wondered if Roy-Roy’s was open for a falafel or if it was even still around. I’d go there all the time with my mom when I was a kid. She liked anything that wasn’t Italian. Middle Eastern. Vietnamese. Indian. Anything that felt exotic. Roy-Roy’s was just okay falafels and fries, but it was a place that felt familiar. I doubted anything was open. I didn’t even know what time it was. It had to be the middle of the night. I didn’t know if Magnuson had arrived or how long he would be around. I got up and went out into the hallway. It was warmer. I sat down near a heat pipe. I could hear the heat coming up in the pipe and that was one of my least favorite sounds. I saw a roach on the floor at the end of the hall. It was the size of a mouse. I couldn’t sleep in the hall. I went back downstairs and poked around, thinking maybe I’d find a short dog of wine Uncle Harry or Holdout had stashed somewhere. One of the lights in the hallway was flickering. I could still hear the heat coming up. On top of that, I heard fucking noises from behind one of the doors. I couldn’t tell which door, and they weren’t normal fucking noises. The woman wasn’t moaning, wasn’t saying anything that you say during sex. What she was doing was kind of a prolonged grunt. It sounded like she was passing a kidney stone. And the guy, he was just whooping. Over and over. Whoop, whoop, whoop. 

Death Don't Have No Mercy, a collection of 8 stories by William Boyle - Recueil de huit nouvelles noires. Pas encore traduites en français, elles devraient. En anglais, la langue de William Boyle est un régal pour l'oreille et l'imagination. Huit petits films. Des mecs ratés et leurs choix, une ambiance, des odeurs, des surprises, une tension. C'est violent. Ici loufoque (Poughkeepsie), là émouvant (Here Come the Bells), et divertissant.

Excerpt from the 8th story : Here Come The Bells.