Homesick for Another World

This story is narrated by an unnamed woman who hates her boyfriend, the manager of the apartment complex in which they live. The boyfriend is eccentric, telling the narrator on their first date that he has received a private message from God in her left pupil. His paranoia dominates their lives: He carves protective symbols out of soap and mounts them above their doorway, and he prays to a crystal skull she is not allowed to touch.

Despite the narrator’s disgust with the boyfriend (which she repeats explicitly throughout the story), she does not leave him because she loves the apartment complex he manages. The view from their bedroom allows her to look down into the city, which she loves because it is “ugly.” The complex itself has problems: All of the palm trees nearby are dead, and something in the trees attracts a huge number of birds. The birds’ excrement is everywhere, they are extremely noisy, and the boyfriend buys a gun, determined to shoot them all. Initially resistant to the plan, the narrator eventually volunteers to do the job herself, and the boyfriend accepts.

When the boyfriend’s auditions take him away from the complex, the narrator shows the apartment to two prospective tenants, Moon Kowalski and her husband, the titular “weirdos” (63).