The following three stories are excerpted from Luke O’Neil’s new story collection, We Had it Coming and Other Fictions, now available from OR Books. 

Join Luke O’Neil for the launch of We Had it Coming at the following events:

The rules

♦

How to live

Devour.

I don’t know.

Something so garish defies metaphor. Something so large defies metaphor.

If a towering beast appeared on the horizon laying waste to everything in its path right now you wouldn’t think to describe it as being like something else you would simply and dumbly perceive its horrible mass.

Unless that exact thing happened in a foreign movie in which case it would typically be a metaphor for America.

Hold on someone is at the door.

It was some guys delivering our new mattress. I asked them if they would help me carry it up the stairs and they said no. So now I have that burden.

There were pummeling civilians in a densely packed area of Gaza that people had previously been told to go to for safety. You could tell it was a bad one this time because even CNN was assigning agency to Israel in their reporting.

I had a brief notion that this tension I was feeling was something remarkable but it wasn’t at all. It was just how every day is anyway for those of us lucky enough to live how we do.

A matter of course.

I scrolled by an image of a little baby Palestinian boy whose head looked like a smashed jar of tomato sauce and had to immediately avert my gaze. I thought that this has to happen for some reason. Every day this has to happen.

Even though I only half saw him I can still see him now like a bright red migraine aura when I close my eyes.

Then a picture of me and you came up in my phone memories from the Super Bowl years ago in Houston. The greatest comeback in history!

Look how happy we were. Like nothing else mattered.

I need to be distracted again like that. I need to be distracted from this. They should have the Super Bowl again tonight.

I’m just thinking out loud here.

Tomorrow too. Make the entire year out of Super Bowls. An entire country of it. Spreading and swelling. One game after the next. Script it like that. So that our easy lives may never be interrupted by new word from the world.

I don’t think I know how to live correctly. If there is a correct way.

What does a person do?

The next morning it was a sunny February Monday in Massachusetts. I should have been hungover if I could still get hangovers. They were saying that we were supposed to be buried under a surprise foot of snow overnight. It was probably going to be a day off for the kids.

♦

Something that was once potentially good

I wonder how long it will take for the fruits of my specific labor to be processed into a neighbor’s anguish? Watch as this brutal machinery transforms the written word into abductions. Something like bureaucratic sublimation. I don’t know if they know how to track that sort of thing and if they ever did they must have fired everyone at that particular agency by now anyway.

I wanted to look up some details about firing squads just now and one of the first things that came up was an article in People magazine from a couple days ago.

“S.C. Man, Who Was Convicted of Killing a Cop, Chose This Upscale Final Meal Before His Firing Squad Execution” is the headline.

Upscale final meal is a new phrase for me to have to know and think about now.

“On the evening of Wednesday, April 9, he ate his last meal: a fine dining offer made up of a rib eye steak, mushroom risotto, broccoli and collard greens, with cheesecake for dessert and a sweet tea drink…”

“According to the AP, Mikal Mahdi cried out as the first bullets hit him, before flexing his arms and groaning.”

Thank you for letting us know People magazine.

I have always despised these kinds of stories but apparently they remain very popular. I guess the publications think it’s a good excuse to get readers riled up about what their tax dollars are being wasted on but it’s usually the condemned man’s steak not the state sanctioned killing.

I obviously revile capital punishment but I just had this strange new thought that I may not have ever had before which is that at least this man was given a trial before being disposed of by the government.

Remember the good old days when that was a given?

Mostly a given I mean.

“At around noon on April 14 2025, America ceased to have a law-abiding government,” the Financial Times announced today.

“Some would argue that had already happened on January 20, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. On Monday, however, Trump chose to ignore a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling to repatriate an illegally deported man. He even claimed the judges ruled in his favour. The US president’s middle finger to the court was echoed by his attorney-general, secretary of state, vice-president and El Salvador’s vigilante president Nayib Bukele. The latter is playing host to what resembles an embryonic US gulag.”

Embryonic US gulag is another of those new to me phrases.

“I said homegrowns are next,” Trump told Bukele.

“The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.”

Homegrowns.

How does that word make you feel? It makes my fucking skin crawl man. It makes me feel how it feels when you find maggots in the kitchen.

When you figure out what that smell behind the wall is.

They finally managed to come up with a slur for citizens that matches illegals in its grotesqueness.

I just saw a GoFundMe being shared around for Kilmar Abrego Garcia the innocent man being tortured in El Salvador by Trump and Bukele and all of their goons. Sorry I pointed out that he is innocent. I do not care that he is innocent. I do but you get it. No one either charged or convicted of a crime in the United States should be shipped off to be tortured in a foreign country.

I had two thoughts about that fundraiser which are that like every GoFundMe ever this one should not exist. It is being made to exist by our government.

The second thing is that I had this brief shudder over whether or not they would consider anyone donating to it as engaging in material support of terrorism. Would you put something like that past them at this point?

After that I read an interview with Deborah Lipstadt who was until recently Joe Biden’s Special Envoy for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism.

“To depict some of these people as martyrs and heroes is ludicrous,” she said of students like Rumeysa Ozturk and Mahmoud Khalil who have been kidnapped by the government for the crime of opposing Israel’s genocide.

They are no angels in other words.

“I’m not opposed to the administration rescinding the student visas of some of the people that they’re rescinding the student visas of,” she said. “But I just think it should be done properly, according to the laws of the country.”

She just wants the disappearing and renditioning to be done in an orderly fashion. Still sounds pretty bad to me but I’m not an internationally renowned holocaust scholar like she is to be fair.

I have had this strange tension inside of me for a while now that I can’t relieve myself of by turning it into words which is the course of care that I typically prescribe myself. When it is too early yet to have a drink that is. Something about how it feels to have been shouting for so long that we are already well on our way to fascism and in fact in many ways have always already been there and now that it has officially arrived a sense of my own obsolescence comes with it.

Suddenly everything I ever wrote feels as useless as a weather report from five years ago.

Or a shitty old flyer for a concert that has already happened.

Here’s a post I just read:

“The reporter from MyPillow asked the White House press secretary why the president looks so healthy and robust…”

RIP David Foster Wallace you would have hated still being alive.

The president’s doctor reported this week that Trump was 6’3 and 224 pounds. The measurements of a guard in the NBA. Marcus Smart’s build in other words.

I suppose it makes sense that a lot of people would call the time of death on April 14. It is Ruination Day after all. The day “the iceberg broke and the Okies fled and the Great Emancipator took a bullet to the back of his head” as the song goes.

Perhaps at the very least we’ll get an updated verse from Gillian Welch. If not maybe we can ask “A.I.” to make one for us.

There was an article in the Times yesterday about how many students and teachers alike are using “A.I.” to both complete and grade assignments

“Writing is one of the most challenging tasks for students, which is why it is so tempting for some to ask A.I. to do it for them. In turn, A.I. can be useful for teachers who would like to assign more writing, but are limited in their time to grade it.”

I can’t come up with the correct metaphor for how that makes me feel. I already used the thing about maggots earlier.

For some reason I keep thinking about an inert sex doll using a dildo. No not in a horny way.

Technically a kind of sex is happening there right?

But it sort of removes the main point of the enterprise.

Ok here’s a better metaphor I saw posted:

“I’m sorry but if your students use A.I. to write papers and you use A.I. to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel.”

Zero school is happening.

And another:

“Even accepting the premise that A.I. produces useful writing (which no one should), using A.I. in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.”

I like that second one a lot but if you’ve spent enough time in the gym you know that the weights do actually yearn to be lifted. If you listen closely they are begging you to do it.

My elbows are fucked and I haven’t been able to lift for a couple months so could be that’s just a me thing.

Hold on I’ll be right back.

I went outside and I saw my neighbor fucking around with the foundation of his home and I said hey buddy what have you got cooking over there and he said he was spackling it or whatever it is with some kind of repair goo for the cement. So it doesn’t collapse. Kind of punting on that problem til later on.

I’m not sure if any of this “A.I.” business is connected to anything else I’m talking about here. Aside from the fact that they’re using it to decide who to kidnap and rendition or fire.

How about something along the lines of:

Democracy much like writing or making art is a discipline that must be practiced continuously rather than an achievement one unlocks?

Talk to any great guitar player and they will tell you they still do not know a thing about playing the guitar.

Meanwhile people on my Facebook can’t get enough of those dog shit “A.I.” action figure memes. They love this shit so much. They’re having the time of their fucking lives posting them. What if I looked like this lol? What if I had three little toys that came with me?

Then instantly forgetting about it and dumping it on our doorsteps for us to have to reckon with. Like emptying the bucket of piss out the window onto the street below.

I’ll be back in a few sorry hold tight. I gotta go out for a bit.

Ok I just got home from physical therapy. I sat there the whole time doing slow and exacting work trying to heal my malfunctioning body. Something that I’m worried I’ve already ruined beyond repair. But I’m just not gonna do all this shit man. I can’t do this shit. Doing wrist curls with 2 lb. weights and shit. I’m sorry to everyone but mostly to me. Fuck it.

On the drive back I had to stop for a couple of school buses to let all the kids get off to cross the street to get home. Bopping around with their backpacks on. Not long after a bunch of ambulances and fire trucks came flying down the road and me and everyone else around all pulled over to let them pass. I kind of cried a little. I felt briefly like I was a part of something that was once potentially good. ♦