Homesick for Another World

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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“The Weirdos”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Weirdos” Summary

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). She is judgmental of their clothing and behavior but accepts their application. The next evening, the couple shows up to move in, bringing a year’s worth of rent. The narrator decides to steal the money and leave her boyfriend. Before she leaves, however, Moon offers her a long black feather, and tells her to sleep with it under her pillow and dream about her boyfriend. The narrator does as Moon says, but dreams instead about a crying monkey. She tries desperately in her dream to make the monkey happy and is heartbroken when she can’t.

The next morning, the narrator’s boyfriend returns home with a black eye. He calls the narrator a scourge and says he can’t be with her anymore. She takes the gun up to the roof and tries to shoot at the birds but is too afraid to do so. The story ends with the narrator wondering whether her boyfriend—who has developed an addiction to methamphetamines—could be the man of her dreams.

“The Weirdos” Analysis

The birds that live near the apartment complex are a recurring motif throughout the story, offering distinct meanings to the unnamed narrator and her boyfriend. The boyfriend sees the birds—which he describes as “Egyptian crows” (54)—as sentinels who watch his every move and “stare […] into our souls” (55). When he is hit by bird excrement on the way to the post office, he reads it as an omen. The fact that he is relieved when the narrator offers to kill the birds suggests he is intimidated by their power.

For the narrator, on the other hand, the crows are a more sympathetic presence. Her boyfriend’s paranoia and obsessively detailed conspiracy theories have drawn her ever deeper in to his Social Isolation. Until the new tenants arrive, he is the only person with whom she has regular contact, even though most of the time she despises him. In the complex personalities she grants to them with her imagination, the birds are both a symptom of this isolation and a means of relieving it. One bird seems to bow and offer her a candy wrapper; watching it dance, the narrator wonders if “maybe he was trying to seduce me” (60). Later, another crow seems to actually understand and sympathize with the narrator’s disgust as she watches her boyfriend: “I really hated him. A crow came and sat on the sill of the window. It seemed to roll its eyes” (64). Ultimately, the narrator is unable to kill any of the crows or even shoot the gun, suggesting that, unlike her boyfriend, she does not see them as a threat, but as a kind of ally.