Word Choice features original works of fiction and poetry. Read an excerpt from Lars Iyer’s Exodus.

He has things to tell me, W. says when I meet him at Newcastle airport in the morning. Great things! But first he needs a pint. He needs to regroup.
W.’s plane was full of obese children, he says. — ‘When did everyone get so fat?’ They ran up and down the aisle, unhindered by their girth. But W. got down to some reading despite their bellowing. He underlined passages and wrote in his notebook.
And what was I reading, as I waited for him? When I tell him, he nods and murmurs. — ‘Mazzarri, oh I see. Flusser, ah that’s far too complex for Lars. . .’

I’ll have to pay for the beer, W. says in The Trent. He no longer carries money, he says. He’s like the Queen.
W. wonders why I always make my lips — my great fat lips — into a funnel as I lift my drink. No doubt it’s all the better to pour it down, pint after pint: a funnel for the two pints I always neck at the bar before I sit down, and for the dregs of pints that other people leave behind. . . .

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