Locust House Variations, A Weekly Fiction Column by Adam Gnade, “Your Friends Will Carry You Home”

Note: Listen to the audio version of this here.

“Where no counsel is the people fall, but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.” Your friends will carry you home. You will get drunk and you will get sad and they will sit with you on gray curbs under yellow street lights and they will let you talk. Your friends will carry you home. Your friends will sleep with you once and you’ll think it was often. Your friends will get you high. Your friends will have babies. They’ll work jobs you look down on, but don’t you judge them. Your friends will carry you home. Your friends will carry you home. Your friends will succeed and they’ll fuck up, and they’ll find god or drugs, and none of this is wrong. Your friends will call you unshaven and scared shitless in Texas, and they’ll want bail money, saying, “God I’m in bad shape right now!” Your friends will carry you home. Your friends will date each other and write each other’s stories. Your friends will die and so will you. Your friends will return to the earth and sing as skeletons in the shifting, churning soil.
–Adam Gnade