Kevin Barry - There Are Little Kingdoms

‘I think you’re a very attractive woman. For your age. And I don’t mean that in a catty way. Age is only time. And what’s time? I’m reading a lot of cosmology at the moment. Your idea of time might be completely different to mine, which is going to be completely different again to what the goat farmer in the Andes is thinking. I mean what’s a day? What’s a year? Who’s to say everybody doesn’t have a different idea of a minute? But then I think, should we even think about this stuff?’

‘It’s a condition called ductalsis. It’s a morbid compulsion to weep. They’re after isolating a gene for it.’

‘When I’m making bread, I’m not just kneading dough, ‘kay? What I’m doing, I’m puttin’ the love in.’

‘This is nothing. One time I was flying from Ukraine? You know like Kiev? On this piece of crap Aeroflot plane? And they’re saying we got to make a stop in like Belarus? I’m, like, Belarus?’

‘When your time is up your time is up.’

‘Everything is predestined.’

‘Jesus’ love never failed me yet.’

Night-time comes and the talk fades. We continue to circle as we eat the crackers and pretzels that are the last of the food and we drink the last of the miniatures. Alvin leaves us. I comfort Rose, or try to at least. She says, don’t be sorry, it was a very gentle thing. The sky is enormous with many stars. The aurora borealis shows up and does its thing — superior discothéque — and everybody is wowed. An army of snowmobiles arrives from Upernavik, buzzing over the snow like some kind of giant sleek ice beetles. They are in pastel colours and the atmosphere they make is festive, like an adventure snow weekend. We are all congratulated because two dead (a young Italian man, also) is an amazing result. Everybody is pretty drunk. Alvin and the Italian lie in bodybags on the ice. Rose is making sound use of the bagful of pills. Rose is seeing the lights.

Later, a fresh plane. We cut down past the Scottish isles, we can see the green boxed fields and great swathes of the bleak cities. And then it’s rainy London, finally, in its shockingly humdrum morning. There is a sense of hush and terrific pride. We open the doors. We give the signal. We keep on smiling. We say: Thank you! You have a great trip now! Thank you!

Everybody is hungover and newborn. Fear climbs in fearless ascent but always it fades, it breaks up like jet trail in the air. Now everybody is greenlighted. Now everybody is bulletproof.

Kevin Barry won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for There Are Little Kingdoms , his debut collection of stories. His novel, City of Bohane , won the 2011 Authors’ Club First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Costa First Novel Award. His most recent collection, Dark Lies the Island , was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and includes stories published in the New Yorker and Best European Fiction as well as the winning story of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award; it is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2013. He also works as a screenwriter and a playwright. He lives in County Sligo, Ireland.