Homesick for Another World

by Ottessa Moshfegh Narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan, Richard Poe

Overview

An electrifying first collection from one of the most exciting short story writers of our time "What distinguishes Ottessa Moshfegh's writing is that unnamable quality that makes a new writer's voice, against all odds and the deadening surround of lyrical postures, sound unique." -Jeffrey Eugenides, in judges' citation for The Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Ottessa Moshfegh's debut novel Eileen was one of the literary events of 2015. Garlanded with critical acclaim, it was named a book of the year by The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle, selected as a BEA Buzz pick, and nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. But as many critics noted, Moshfegh is particularly held in awe for her short stories. Homesick for Another World is the rare case where an author's short story collection is if anything more anticipated than her novel. And for good reason. There's something eerily unsettling about Ottessa Moshfegh's stories, something almost dangerous, while also being delightful, and even laugh-out-loud funny. Her characters are all unsteady on their feet in one way or another; they all yearn for connection and betterment, though each in very different ways, but they are often tripped up by their own baser impulses and existential insecurities. Homesick for Another World is a master class in the varieties of self-deception across the gamut of individuals representing the human condition. But part of the unique quality of her voice, the Moshfeghian experience, is the way the grotesque and the outrageous are infused with tenderness and compassion. Moshfegh is our Flannery O'Connor, and Homesick for Another World is her Everything That Rises Must Converge or A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful. But beauty comes from strange sources. And the dark energy surging through these stories is powerfully invigorating. We're in the hands of an author with a big mind, a big heart, blazing chops, and a political acuity that is needle-sharp. The needle hits the vein before we even feel the prick.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

A character in one of Otessa Moshfegh's stories says of a Polish barmaid he drinks away Christmas with, "There was nowhere to hide in the eyes of this woman." The same could be said of Moshfegh herself. In her terrific debut short story collection, her dark vision misses nothing. What Moshfegh sees is often ugly. Her characters are alcoholics, drug users, compulsive skin pickers. They are self-deluded about their lives and their chances at love, capable of casual cruelty and callous judgments.

Yet Moshfegh treats this motley crew with compassion and dignity. She has made no secret in interviews that she has struggled herself with being a misfit. She was born in Massachusetts. Her mother was from Croatia, her father from Iran, and her experience as both an insider and an outsider in America deeply informs her work.

Homesick for Another World collects the stories that Moshfegh has published over the past several years, most frequently in The Paris Review. Her first book, McGlue, was an experimental novella about a drunken sailor accused of murder, published by the small press Fence Books. She followed that in 2015 with her novel Eileen, which was hailed by some as the next Gone Girl.

Eileen never approached the gonzo popularity of Gillian Flynn's runaway bestseller — though it received plenty of recognition and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Set in New England in 1964, its antiheroine, a bulimic twenty-four- year-old who lives with her alcoholic father and works in a boys' prison, is far too neurotic and self-loathing. Moshfegh has said that Eileen was her attempt to write a commercial novel that would sell. As wonderfully idiosyncratic as the book is, it does have a conventional story arc and even features a femme fatale of sorts.

Moshfegh's short stories are weirder, their narrative arcs more erratic, their characters more rebarbative. She's drawn comparisons to Flannery O'Connor, in part because of her obsession with odd, unsettling characters but also because she sets in motion events that are surprising, even bizarre, yet somehow feel inevitable. But Moshfegh's darkly comic voice — and her willingness to plumb the biological and even scatological in search of what makes us human — set her work apart. Moshfegh's stories feel like dark rooms in which someone has briefly turned on a light.

All of her characters are looking for love in one guise or another. "Bettering Herself," the story that won The Paris Review's prestigious Plimpton Prize, features a wine- soaked teacher at a Catholic school who's harassing her ex- husband. In "A Dark and Winding Road," a lawyer spends a weekend away from his pregnant wife, with whom he is fighting, and capitalizes on a case of mistaken identity when a visitor shows up at his door to form a brief connection. In "Nothing Ever Happens Here," a young man who's left home to seek his fortune as a Hollywood actor finds in his landlady a mother figure whose absolute belief in him belies his talent.

Moshfegh's stock-in-trade are bizarre, marginal characters — those people it might be easier if we just ignored — and yet she's equally capable of illuminating the poignancy of the kind of people who might fade into the background at a party. In "The Beach Boy," John, a dermatologist, finds himself suddenly widowed when his wife, Marcia, suffers an apparent aneurysm. At her funeral, he discovers, as we all do, that grief is not his métier:

Several friends told stories, boasting about how much Marcia had meant to them, how deeply she'd touched their lives. Marcia would have liked that, John thought — all these people discussing her, pointing out her best qualities, remembering her finest moments. She'd have eaten it up. But what did these people really know about her. What could one know about a person? John had known her best of all, had been able to predict her every move, the arc of her sighs, her laughs, the twists of her shadow as it crossed a room . . . Nobody would understand, John thought, how well he knew the sound of Marcia's coffee spoon hitting the saucer, how the sheets rustled around her when she turned over in bed. But were those things significant enough, he wondered, to boast about?

After the funeral, John discovers evidence that Marcia may not have been the person he'd always thought she was. His search for answers casts the conventional life they built together in a wholly different light.

The thing that's so thrilling about this story is its suggestion — the same one posed by the twisted young woman wearing the mousy outfits in Eileen — that the most vital parts of our lives are invisible to others, and sometimes even to ourselves. Ignoring our blind spots may make life easier. But easier isn't the point — not in Moshfegh's universe, and not in ours.

Sarah L. Courteau is an essayist and critic who has written for The New York Times, The Wilson Quarterly, and The Oxford American, among other publications.

Reviewer: Sarah L. Courteau

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Moshfegh's dark, confident, prickling stories are mostly about youngish men and women not so far out of college…They've taken a wrong turn somewhere and find themselves hunkering down in nowhere towns, dismal cabins, shabby apartments…Like Diane Arbus, Moshfegh lights things from below. Psychologically, you don't see well-set dinner tables in her fiction. You see the chewed gum and crusted snot stuck to the table's underside, the run in the hostess's stocking. If her work has echoes of other writers, her tone is her own. At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It's like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood.

The New York Times Book Review - David Means

A talented story writer can range an immense landscape—as Chekhov did in Russia—zeroing in on precise situations of intense isolation and, story by story, drawing what seems to be a map of national character. The bigger the country, the more necessary the short story form. In her excellent first collection, Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh…moves from the West Coast to East Coast (with a brief stop in China) and homes in on characters in states of weirdly dynamic paralysis, trapped between the pains of the past—bad childhoods, bad relationships, bad marriages—and dreams of the future. If there's a thematic thread weaving through this collection, it's the complicated relationship between entrapment in the physical body—her characters are often probing, picking and searching with their fingertips, as if seeking beauty and potential grace—and entrapment in social landscapes.

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/05/2016
In 14 expertly crafted stories, Moshfegh (Eileen) examines characters and situations too weird to be real and too real to be fiction, with themes of alienation, ennui, displacement, sexual neuroses, and addiction. A voyeuristic old man steels his courage to approach the beautiful, aloof woman working at the counter of the local arcade (“Mr. Wu”); an aspiring actor hooked on motivational clichés spins out of control in a breakup saga (“The Weirdos”); a high school English teacher has an on-again/off-again relationship with the drug-dealing “zombies at the bus depot” (“Slumming”); a grieving husband uncovers evidence of his dead wife’s infidelity and explores his own sexuality (“The Beach Boy”); an underachieving suitor embarks on a desperate quest for a cheap ottoman that holds the key to his quixotic romantic endeavors (“Dancing in the Moonlight”). There’s not a throw-away story in the collection. Each resonates with seemingly effortless, ineffable prose, rarely striking an inauthentic note—particularly memorable are the endings, which often land to devastating effect. The author’s acute insight focuses obsessively, uncomfortably, humorously on excreta, effluvia, and human foible, drilling to the core of her characters’ existential dilemmas. Moshfegh is a force. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

Dark, confident, prickling stories. . . . Moshfegh uses ugliness as if it were an intellectual and moral Swiss Army knife. . . . Her stories veer close to myth in a manner that can resemble fiction by the English writer Angela Carter. There’s some Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews and Katherine Dunn in her interest in freaks and quasi-freaks. . . . At her best, she has a wicked sort of command. Sampling her sentences is like touching a mildly electrified fence. There is a good deal of humor in Homesick for Another World, and the chipper tone can be unnerving. It’s like watching someone grin with a mouthful of blood.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times

“A fluent, deeply talented artist . . . Moshfegh quickly established herself as an important new voice in the literary world, and her concerns for those isolated not only in the margins of society but within the physical confines of the body itself mirrored the work of brilliant predecessors like Mary Gaitskill, Christine Schutt and, in some ways, Eileen Myles. Homesick for Another World continues that exploration but with a wider range, over a larger landscape. It’s a paradox that in order to locate a sense of national character—and that ever-elusive American dream—art must continually probe the places where that dream seems to have all but disappeared.” —New York Times Book Review

“I can’t recall the last time I laughed this hard at a book. Simultaneously, I’m shocked and scandalized. She’s brilliant, this young woman." —David Sedaris

“On second and third reading, these stories reveal coils of plain language and quick narratives tight as songs. What is at first urgent and disorienting becomes a hymn, improving with repetition, all of it worth memorizing.” —Village Voice

“[A] stunning debut short story collection. . . . Moshfegh displays a preternatural ability in short fiction, her stories impeccably shaped, her sentences sharp, and her voice controlled and widely confident; the stories of Homesick For Another World are near perfect examples of the form. . . . What makes the pieces composing Homesick so thrilling, in addition to their technical inscrutability, is their ability to surprise—with their ferocity, depravity, and casual violence, with their very ability to so consistently unsettle. . . . Amid the collection’s dark tone, Moshfegh imbues an equally dark humor, at times absurd, at others melancholy and bone-dry. . . . If you’re the kind of person who laughs when the grandma gets axed in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” you’ll be right at home in Homesick.” —AV Club

“Ottessa Moshfegh's story collection, Homesick for Another World, couldn't come at a better time. Notions of class and power are in an unpredictable flux. A new elite rises, flipping the deck into the air. Nobody knows where the cards will land. So here comes Moshfegh, whose imaginative writing about train-wreck characters, rich and poor, adheres to a relentlessly dim worldview where a divided America comes together in the muck. . . . The best stories in the collection, however, contain memorable, conflicting images of squalor and beauty, chaos and pattern.” —Associated Press

“All psychologically astute, astringently funny and wonderfully entertaining.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Startling and impressive new short story collection. . . . Despite her unsparing dissection of their paranoias, fetishes, and failings, Moshfegh doesn’t condescend to her characters; she is both gimlet-eyed and compassionate . . . there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.” —Boston Globe

“The characters in this collection are an unlovely bunch but make for an irresistible read. . . . Moshfegh—a Boston-born, Los Angeles-based writer whose Man Booker-shortlisted novel Eileen (2016) infused the same sensibility into a witty, skillfully told suspense story—has other tones and tricks at her command. She writes terrific, attention-grabbing openings, and impactful last lines that don’t strain for a lapidary effect. Her damaged-girl deadpan snark is second to none . . . the authority of her storytelling means that she’s able to bring the reader along with her on some surprising paths to her typically desolate destinations.” —Financial Times 

“Homesick for Another World will scorch you like a blowtorch.” —John Waters, New York Times Book Review

“Stunning short story collection. . . . There's not a story in Homesick for Another World that's anything less than original and perfectly constructed. Moshfegh's talent is unique, and her characters—unfiltered, cold, frequently pathetic—are all the more memorable for their faults and obliviousness. Anyone who's experienced the special kind of homesickness that lacks a home will find something to relate to in Moshfegh's unsettling, sharp stories.” —NPR

“These stories are Moshfegh’s deepest, darkest moments of introspection. Let them in.” —Electric Literature

“The title and cover of Homesick for Another World might lead you to believe Ottessa Moshfegh’s stories are set in outer space, but she’s done the opposite: approached Earth as if it were an alien planet. . . . Moshfegh imbues her anguished realism with equal parts murky dread and clever turns of phrase. But for stories about isolation and loneliness, they are also oddly funny . . . a short story collection that’s as consistent—and often brilliant—as they come.” —GQ

“Ottessa Moshfegh’s startling new stories are darkly, prickly, gross—and impressive. . . . Despite her unsparing dissection of their paranoias, fetishes, and failings, Moshfegh doesn’t condescend to her characters; she is both gimlet-eyed and compassionate. These are ‘sad. . . lonely and troubled’ people, but many are improbably appealing; even the most twisted and tortured have recognizably human qualities . . .  if you can stomach the discomfort, there is both piercing wit and unexpected poignancy to be found in Moshfegh’s original and resonant collection.” —Boston Globe
 
“Psychologically astute, astringently funny and wonderfully entertaining . . . Moshfegh's singular stories are unified by bold ideas, intoxicating detail and perfectly calibrated humor and pathos.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Sentences looped and pulled into perfect slipknots: Moshfegh’s ear is original, and her command of form, expert. I would read anything she writes.” —Harper’s
 
“Homesick for Another World showcases her mastery with tales of a range of creeps and weirdos in despair. . . . This cast of boors may not be the kind of folks readers would seek out to spend time with in real life. But in Moshfegh’s stories, their company is irresistible.” —Time

“Homesick for Another World is an impressive study of human vulnerability and self-deception, through which the reader is guided by a cynical and darkly funny literary voice.” —1843 Magazine

“Expertly crafted stories. . . . There’s not a throw-away story in the collection. Each resonates with seemingly effortless, ineffable prose, rarely striking an inauthentic note—particularly memorable are the endings, which often land to devastating effect. The author’s acute insight focuses obsessively, uncomfortably, humorously on excreta, effluvia, and human foible, drilling to the core of her characters’ existential dilemmas. Moshfegh is a force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“[Moshfegh] is fearless in her probing of her characters’ emotional wounds, proceeding with such a sure touch readers are compelled, not repelled. The directness of her style demands that we register the life 'stuffed between the mattress and the wall.' While it is not always an easy read, this collection will leave readers with a sharper, more compassionate sense of the human condition.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its discontents.” —Kirkus

Library Journal

09/01/2016
Drawing on personal experience, National Jewish Book Award winner Kertes (Gratitude) takes us along as brothers Robert and Attila Beck flee Hungary during the 1956 revolution for the Paris townhouse of their great-aunt Hermina.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2016-10-05
Dysfunctional relationships of many stripes—crumbling marriages, bad dates, slacker partners—drive this dark and quirky clutch of stories.Moshfegh’s most remarkable talent early in her career is to turn distasteful domestic situations into magnetic storytelling: her superb debut novel, Eileen (2015), is a Highsmith-ian tale of alcoholism, abuse, and unrequited love, and though the 14 stories in this collection don’t let much more sunlight in, their concision and gallows humor do give them a lift. In “The Beach Boy,” a longtime married couple returns from a vacation, and when the wife suddenly dies, her undeveloped vacation photos force the husband to reassess his understanding of her (did she really hook up with a prostitute?) and himself. In “A Dark and Winding Road,” a well-off man runs into his reprobate brother’s meth-smoking girlfriend, a meeting that proves (in quintessentially Moshfegh-ian phrasing) “disgusting—just as I’d always hoped it to be.” Youngsters are no more or less foolish, like the aspiring actor in “Nothing Ever Happens Here” who falls for his aging landlord, the broke Brooklyn hipster in “Dancing in the Moonlight” who schemes to seduce a high-end furniture designer, or the narrator of “The Weirdos” who can’t quite extract herself from her boorish boyfriend. For all these foibles, though, Moshfegh never approaches her characters from a position of cruelty, with an intention to mock them; they are for the most part ordinary people undone by their desires, just in more peculiar and Day-Glo fashion than everyday life. Moshfegh's prose is usually plainly realist, but “Mr. Wu,” about a man who devises a complex scheme to seduce a woman running a Chinese internet cafe, is a piercing fable of unrequited love. “Life can be strange sometimes, and knowing it can be doesn’t seem to make it any less so,” one character says, and Moshfegh has proven herself more willing than her contemporaries to dive into the muck of that strangeness. A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its many discontents.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170833962
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	01/17/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,157,869

Read an Excerpt

Homesick for Another World

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By Ottessa Moshfegh

Penguin Press

Copyright © 2016 Ottessa Moshfegh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-399-56288-4

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CHAPTER 1

A BETTER PLACE

I come from some other place. It's not like a real place on Earth or something I could point to on a map, if I even had a map of this other place, which I don't. There's no map because I the place isn't a place like something to be near or in or at. It's not somewhere or anywhere, but it's not nowhere either. There is no where about it. I don't know what it is. But it certainly isn't this place, here on Earth, with all you silly people. I wish I knew what it was, not because I think it would be great to tell you about it; I just miss it so much. If I knew what it was, maybe I could make something like it here on Earth. Waldemar says it's impossible. The only way to get there is to go.

"Waldemar," I say to my brother. "How do we get back to the place, to the thing, whatever?"

"Oh, you have to die. Or you have to kill the right person."

That's his answer now. For a long time he thought only the first part was true, but over time he's thought long and hard and figured out that there is a second way. The second way is much harder. I don't know how he figured it out, but thank God for Waldemar, who is so much wiser than me, though only a day older. I took some extra time to come out of the woman. I had doubts, even so early on, about this place here on Earth with all the dumb things everywhere. It was Waldemar who persuaded me to come out finally. I could hear his cries and feel his little fists poking through the woman's skin. He is my best friend. Everything he does, it seems, he does because he loves me. He is the best brother ever, of all brothers here on Earth. I love him so much.

"Well, I don't want to die," I tell him. "Not yet. Not here."

We talk about this from time to time. It's nothing new.

"Then you've got to find the right person to kill. Once you've killed the right person, a hole will open up in the Earth and you can just walk straight into the hole. It will lead you through a tunnel back to where we came from. But be careful. If you kill the wrong person, you'll get into trouble here. It wouldn't be good. I'd visit you in prison, but chances are slim that the right person will be sitting beside you in your prison cell. And the prisons they have for little girls are the worst. There, the only way to the place would be to die. So you've got to be really sure about the person to kill. It's the hardest thing to do, to be so sure about something like that. I've never been sure enough, and that's why I'm still here. That, and because I'd miss you and I'd worry if I left you all alone."

"Maybe I'll just die after all," I say. I get so tired of it here, thinking of how much better it is back there, in the place we came from. I cry about it often. Waldemar always has to soothe me.

"I could kill you," he offers. "But I'm not sure you're the right person. But wouldn't that be great? If you were?"

"That would be ideal!" I say.

I don't know what I'd do without my brother. I'd probably cry even more than I do now, and take poisons that make my brain weak and my body tired so I wouldn't even have the strength to think about the other place. I'd try to poison the place out of my mind. But I doubt that's even possible. Some nights I hate it here so much I shake and sweat and my brother holds me down so I won't start kicking the walls or breaking things. When I kick the walls, the woman gets angry. "What's going on up there, children?" She thinks we're fighting and threatens to separate us. She doesn't know about the other place. She's just a human woman, after all. She gives us food and clothes and everything, as human mothers like to do. My brother says he's sure the woman is not the person he could kill to get back to the place. I'm not so sure she's not my person. Sometimes I think she is. But if I killed her and I was wrong, I'd be sorry. Mostly I'd be sorry for Waldemar.

One morning as we lie in our beds, I say to my brother, "Waldemar, I think I know who my person is." I don't really know. I am still sort of dreaming. But then I think up a name to say. "His name is Jarek Jaskolka and I'm going to find him and kill him, mark my words."

"But are you sure?" my brother asks.

"I think so," I say. And then, suddenly, I am sure. Jarek Jaskolka is the person I have to kill. I know it in my bones. I am as sure about Jarek Jaskolka as I am about the place, and me and Waldemar being from there.

"You must be completely sure," my brother warns me. He rises from his bed and lifts the blanket over his head like an old lady going to the market. His face becomes dark and his voice suddenly low and frightening. "If you aren't sure, you could get in trouble, you know."

"You look like a witch, Waldemar. Don't make me laugh at you," I say. Waldemar doesn't like to be ridiculed.

"If you kill the wrong person ..." he begins.

But I am sure now. I can't go back and pretend I'm not. I have to return to the place somehow. I miss it too much. My brain hurts and I cry all the time. I don't want to be here on Earth for one moment longer.

"It's that damned Jarek Jaskolka!" I cry. It is just a name I've made up, but it is the right name, that I am sure of. I jump from my bed. I pull the string to lift the curtains. The room where Waldemar and I sleep looks out into the forest. Outside, soft gray clouds hang between the trees. Some silly birds sing a few nice notes. I miss the other place so much, I want to cry. But I feel brave. "I will find you, Jarek," I say to the window. "Wherever you are hiding!"

When I look at Waldemar, he has gone back under his covers. I can see his chest rising and falling. My brain hurts too much to try to comfort him. And anyway, there is no comfort here on Earth. There is pretending, there are words, but there is no peace. Nothing is good here. Nothing. Every place you go on Earth, there is more nonsense.

For breakfast the woman gives us bowls of warm fresh yogurt and warm fresh bread and tea with sugar and lemon, and for Waldemar a slice of onion cooked in honey because he has been coughing.

"Jarek Jaskolka," I whisper to remind myself that I will soon be far away from this place and all its horrors. Every time I say the name out loud, my head feels a little better. "Jarek Jaskolka," I say to Waldemar. He smiles sadly.

The woman, hearing me say Jarek Jaskolka's name, drops her long wooden spoon. It skitters across the kitchen floor, dripping with the tasty yogurt. She comes at me.

"Urszula," she says. "How do you know this name? Where did you hear it? What have you done?" She isn't angry, as she so often is. Her face looks white and her eyes are wide. She holds her lips tight and frowns, holding me by the shoulders. She is scared.

"Oh, he is just some person," I say, batting my eyes so she cannot see the murder in them.

"Jarek Jaskolka is a bad, bad man," the woman says, shaking me. I stop blinking. "If you see him on the street, you run away. You hide from him. Jarek Jaskolka likes to do bad things. I know because he lived on Grjicheva, next door to my house before they tore it down for the tramway when I was little. Many girls came away from his house black and blue and bloodied. You have seen my marks?"

"Oh no, Mother!" cries Waldemar. "Don't show her those!"

But it is too late. The woman pulls her skirt up past one knee and points. There they are, marks like swollen earthworms, enough of them to make a lump from the side, the poor woman.

"Jarek Jaskolka will do the same to you," she says. "Now go to school and don't be stupid. And if you meet that bad man on the street, run away like a good girl. And you, too, Waldemar. Who knows what Jarek Jaskolka is up to now?"

It is usual for the woman to get in the way of good things I want to do.

"Jarek Jaskolka made those marks on the woman, but so what?" I ask Waldemar on the walk to school. "What's so bad about some measly marks?"

"You don't want those marks," Waldemar answers. "You'll end up like Mother, always angry. She only has bad dreams."

"But I have bad dreams already," I say. "All my dreams are about this place here and all the boring, stupid things and people."

"You take it too hard," Waldemar says. "Things here aren't so bad. Anyway, what if the other place is no better? You could go back there and be just as troubled."

"Impossible," I say. But I wonder. "What do you think Jarek Jaskolka did to the woman? How did the marks get there?"

"There are things men do. Nobody knows. It's like a magic act. Nobody can solve it."

It doesn't sound so bad to me. Magic acts are easy to solve. There is an old man in the town square who eats fire and makes the crows that mill under the big tree there disappear in a puff of smoke. Any fool can see that they've just flown up into the branches to hide.

"Will you help me find Jarek Jaskolka?" I ask Waldemar. "I really want to get out of here. Even though I'll miss you when I'm gone."

"I'll try," he answers and frowns. He is angry at me, I can tell. When my brother is angry, he plucks the poison berries from the bushes on the road and puts them up his nose. Everybody knows that's where the brain is, up the nose there. Waldemar likes to poison his brain that way. It makes him feel better to do that. I myself like to swallow the poison berries like tablets. So because Waldemar is plucking berries, I pluck berries, too, and swallow them one by one. They are soft and cold. If I snag one on my fang, goop spills out and tastes bitter, like the poison that it is.

At school we sit at different tables. At chorus I can see Waldemar's mouth moving, but I know he isn't singing the song. When we file out of the big stone church, I ask Waldemar again. "Will you help me find him? Not just for me, but for the woman. Maybe if I kill him, the woman won't be so angry all the time. It seems she holds quite a grudge."

"I won't help you," says Waldemar. "And don't try to cheer me up. You'd better think of a way to kill him when you find him. I'm not going to help you do that."

Waldemar is right. I'll need some kind of knife to kill Jarek Jaskolka with. I'll need the sharpest knife I can find. And I'll need poison. The poison berries from the bush make our brains just a little sleepy, but that is all they do. If I make Jarek Jaskolka eat many poison berries, maybe he will fall asleep, and then I can kill him with the knife, step into the hole, and go back to the place at last. This is my plan.

On the walk home with Waldemar that day after school, I fill my skirt with poison berries. I look like a farmer girl holding my skirt up like that. I tell Waldemar to fill his pockets with berries, but he says they will get squished, and anyway, I have picked enough to kill Jarek Jaskolka already.

"Really? This is enough to kill him?" I ask my brother.

"Oh, I don't know. Don't ask me." Waldemar is still so angry. I don't blame him. I try to sing a funny song as we turn the corner and cross the town square, but Waldemar covers his ears.

"Sorry, Waldemar," I say. But I don't feel sorry. Sometimes Waldemar loves me too much. He thinks it is better I stay with him on Earth, rather than be happy in the other place without him. "When you die, we'll be together again," I say, trying to console him. "Or maybe you'll find your person to kill. Don't give up." My legs are cold as we walk the rest of the way home. But I have so many poison berries. I am happy. "I'll make poison berry jam," I say. "I've seen the woman do it with cherries."

"She will never let you use her pot," Waldemar says. He looks at me. I know I could persuade Waldemar to help me make the jam, but I don't want to. When he is angry with me, I feel he loves me even more, and that feels good to me, even though it also feels so bad.

When we get home, the woman is outside hanging wet clothes on the line of rope between the trees. I imagine the marks on her thighs again. They are like welts, like slugs crawling up her leg. My thighs are like my arms. They are just skin and flesh with no marks. They are clean blank skin and flesh. Nothing is ever going to crawl up them, not ever, I decide. I'd die before I let anyone give me marks like the woman's, I decide. Even if they are just marks of magic. I hide my skirt of poison berries behind Waldemar as we pass and wave to the woman. We go inside the house. I pull a big black pot from the cupboard and fill it with the poison berries.

"How do you make jam, Waldemar?" I ask my brother.

"Add sugar and cook it for a long time."

"Oh, I love sugar," I say. "I'll do it tonight while the woman is sleeping."

"You better not taste too much of it. Don't forget, when you cook it, the poison gets stronger."

"Will you help me remember, Waldemar?"

"No," he says and puts a few more poison berries up his nose. "I have to sleep at night. If I don't sleep, I feel sick during the day. I don't like feeling sick at school."

"Oh, poor little Waldemar," I say, mocking him. I swallow a few of the berries and drag the pot into our bedroom and hide it in the closet.

When the woman comes back in from hanging the clothes, she says, "Go play outdoors, children. Waldemar, go run around while the sun is still shining. Urszula, go and be energetic. You look so serious. You look like an old lady. Go out and have fun. It's good for you."

"I don't like fun," I say.

Waldemar snorts and goes outside to play. I want to play with Waldemar, but I have to stay in my room to guard my pot of poison berries in the closet. If the woman finds it, she'll start asking questions. She'll get in the way of my killing Jarek Jaskolka, and then I'll be stuck here on Earth with her forever. I can imagine what she'll say if she discovers my plan. "There is something wrong with you, Urszula."

"No," I will tell her. "There is something wrong with this place. There is something wrong with you and everybody here. There is nothing, nothing, nothing wrong with me."

And anyway, I still have to find Jarek Jaskolka. I can't kill him if I don't know where he is, after all. While Waldemar is still outside playing, I go to the kitchen. It smells like cooking rice and parsley.

"Hello," I say to the woman. "Jarek Jaskolka, does he still live on Grjicheva?"

"Of course not. Unless he lives in a hole in the ground. All the houses got torn down there. I hope he moved very far away. His sister is the lady in the library."

"That big fatso?"

"Don't be cruel."

"I think I need a book to read," I say.

"Then go, go," the woman says angrily. "I don't know what you're up to, but remember what I said about Jarek Jaskolka. Remember the marks. But go, do what you want, as if I care."

"You're angry at me now because I want to read a book?"

"Urszula is Urszula," is all she says. She leaves the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, and goes outside to watch Waldemar build a tower of pinecones. The woman is mean and stupid, I think. The entire world is stupid. I find a sharp butcher knife in the drawer and take it to my room and hide it in my satchel. I kick at the walls for a while. Then I start off for the library to find the fat sister of the man I am going to kill.

"Jaskolka?" the fat woman asks. "I don't use that name anymore. What do you want? Why are you asking?"

"I'm just curious. What happened when they tore your house down for the tramway? My mother lived on Grjicheva once, too."

"Whose daughter are you?" the fat lady asks.

"My name is Urszula" is all I say.

"Those houses on Grjicheva were all poor and ugly and it's a good thing they're gone now or else they'd just crumble down over our heads and kill us."

"Kill you?" I ask.

"We moved to a small apartment near the river, if you must know."

"You and your family? And your brother?"

She puts down the rubber stamp in her hand and closes the book on the counter. The sunlight through the windows falls on her face as she leans toward me.

"What do you know about my brother? What is it? Why are you asking me these questions?"

"I'm looking for Jarek Jaskolka," I say. The lady is so fat and lazy looking, it seems not to matter what I tell her. "I have to kill him."

The lady laughs and picks up her rubber stamp again. "Go right ahead," she says. "He lives up the street in the house across from the cemetery. He'll be pleased to have a visitor. You can't imagine how pleased he'll be."

"I'm going to kill him," I tell the lady. She just laughs.

"Good luck. And don't come running back here full of tears," she says. "Curious girls get what they deserve."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't listen to me."

"I will kill him dead, you know," I say. "That's why I'm curious."

"Do what you can," she says. "Now be quiet. People are trying to read."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh. Copyright © 2016 Ottessa Moshfegh. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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