We Had it Coming
“This makes me want to shout 'amen,' call my mom, and punch a goddamn wall . . . if you’ve been looking for the great art that bad times are supposed to bring about, look no further.”
—Dave Holmes, Esquire“Enthralling, like finding scraps of poetry in the dust after an apocalypse.”
—Mattie Lubchansky, author of Boy’s Weekend and Simplicity“His stories make me feel less insane.”
—David Roth“Luke O’Neil is the poet of our shared doom.”
—Maria Bustillosabout the bookabout
“I’ve been asking myself just how it is that a person can go about their day to day life at a time like this and I keep coming back to another question which is how did we ever convince ourselves we had the right to do so before?”
That question runs through We Had It Coming, a collection of stories that pulse with both the familiar and the uncanny. O’Neil’s characters struggle to survive in a reality rife with violence, addiction, fascism, and the crushing weight of modern life. From the threat of mass shootings to the absurdity of predatory healthcare, his sharp observations of societal decay leave a lasting impact.
Yet even amid the chaos, O’Neil’s trademark wit cuts through, offering moments of unexpected levity. Jumping from CVS to the emergency room to a seaside Massachusetts town ravaged by the opioid crisis, and blending short stories, poetry, and micro-fiction, O’Neil’s stream-of-consciousness style and inventive syntax pull the reader into a mesmerizing rhythm.
Fans of his previous work will find a continuation of his unique voice, and new readers will be captivated by his unflinching portrayal of survival in a world gone awry.
“O’Neil's writing is like getting your ribs kicked in by a boot that you can't help but notice is beautiful—its stitching, leatherwork, shining eyelets, lace hooks—all its craftsmanship catching your attention, even as it crunches your bones.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
“What Luke O'Neil knows the answer to is a question both the straight world and the recovery community confronts every day—is anybody actually different from anybody else? And if so, what is addiction? The addict knows that being alive is the disease, a truth that science struggles to accept. We Had It Coming is not about suicide or addiction but the vivid, unmissable struggle of waking up, the only pain we are given, the first and last real gift.”
—Sasha Frere-Jones
“Reading these stories is like grabbing a beer with your friend who's smarter than you, and funnier than you, and knows way more than you do about how screwed up people are—and yet somehow, on the other side, he's made you feel better about the state of humanity, not worse.”
—Rax King
“It is easy enough for a bad writer to use a thesaurus; it takes quite a good one to write whole symphonies in plain English…”
—Linda Tirado
“Luke O’Neil has a degree in Massachusetts Studies and the human spirit. His stories imagine ‘a bill that will soon come due,’ in grief, in the wars we’ve waged on other countries and nature itself. His characters can’t quit smoking or the hope that the bill might still be settled. O’Neil’s stories will make you want to show emotion, even if your family didn’t really do that shit.”
—Daisy Alioto
About The Author / Editor
Preview
The closet
He was feeling around for the nest in the back of the closet and there it was just where his daughter had been saying it was supposed to have been all week. A certain amount of guilt came over him with that realization. That he hadn’t believed her. Worse he had lectured her on the unlikelihood. Well I’ve gotta take the L on this one baby he said which embarrassed her. A man his age talking like that.
He couldn’t afford a team to come haul it out to be burned in the pits considering what they were charging these days and the business with the robots so the only other thing he could think of to do was to fist wrist deep into the paper pulpy combs of it to show her that it wasn't so scary after all.
A friend of mine had had one of these whole deals in his apartment not long ago he told her. Before you were born he said. Look at this he said. Just a handful of bites he said. Showing her his purpling arm. Should clear up in a few days he said. If anything it kind of feels good.
Nothing to lose sleep over anyway.
Daddy is still alive he said. And I always will be.
Here come try it yourself.
It was incredibly lucky that I was here
I’m looking at a video of ___ on stage right now. He sounds like he sounds. Like how you remember him sounding from one day ago when he was still alive. The casually delivered growl of a man who has lived and also very much always almost not lived throughout most of that living.
I must have seen this at the time. I was still very young at this point even as old as I am now but this show was a big deal for the people like me watching and an even bigger deal for the bands playing although probably not for ___ who didn’t seem to be impressed by much of anything.
Sorry I’m making a singer’s life about me but that is the deal. They sing about their life and I take it to be about my life and then I write about it and the people reading it take it to be about theirs.
People love to deify a person on the day they die but then it diminishes incrementally over time. Unless they were a very big deal. Our man here seems like the type of guy whose stature will grow posthumously I’d imagine. People who sing about death and pain a lot become more important when they’re gone because now it seems like they’ve completed the final course prerequisite.
That’s a dangerous pattern for a certain type of person to notice.
Hold on let me look up how old he was at the time of that performance.
He was twenty eight. Old enough to not be too overwhelmed by it all but still.
God his voice sounds so good. Jagged but strong.
Let’s make a conservative estimate and say at around 20 smokes a day times almost 11,000 days since then that his voice was about 220,000 cigarettes younger than the day he died.
He’s got a black eye and he looks like the type of guy who would have a black eye as a matter of principle. Everyone loves this song. Everyone loves it and it’s still underrated.
The day before the band had been in a bar brawl and their drummer fucked up his shoulder which accounts for why there’s some other guy sitting in. ___ is wearing a very nice black leather jacket and his hair looks clean and I’m wondering if he washed it because he was going to be on TV and if so that breaks my heart a little bit. If he had at one point wanted to look his best for when people remembered him later on in these kinds of videos. The place he still exists.
How to live
We watched every snap of the game. Both of us. Me and you. Everyone else did too. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for an ongoing massacre by an evil country. We watched the whole thing which was itself a commercial for the entire concept of this evil country of our own. I was going to say it is our essence distilled but that implies something being made small and more potent which is the opposite of the Super Bowl and America neither of which can be diminished but instead can only expand.
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.
in the media
Related Interest
Related Interest
We Had it Coming
“This makes me want to shout 'amen,' call my mom, and punch a goddamn wall . . . if you’ve been looking for the great art that bad times are supposed to bring about, look no further.”
—Dave Holmes, Esquire“Enthralling, like finding scraps of poetry in the dust after an apocalypse.”
—Mattie Lubchansky, author of Boy’s Weekend and Simplicity“His stories make me feel less insane.”
—David Roth“Luke O’Neil is the poet of our shared doom.”
—Maria Bustillosabout the bookabout
“I’ve been asking myself just how it is that a person can go about their day to day life at a time like this and I keep coming back to another question which is how did we ever convince ourselves we had the right to do so before?”
That question runs through We Had It Coming, a collection of stories that pulse with both the familiar and the uncanny. O’Neil’s characters struggle to survive in a reality rife with violence, addiction, fascism, and the crushing weight of modern life. From the threat of mass shootings to the absurdity of predatory healthcare, his sharp observations of societal decay leave a lasting impact.
Yet even amid the chaos, O’Neil’s trademark wit cuts through, offering moments of unexpected levity. Jumping from CVS to the emergency room to a seaside Massachusetts town ravaged by the opioid crisis, and blending short stories, poetry, and micro-fiction, O’Neil’s stream-of-consciousness style and inventive syntax pull the reader into a mesmerizing rhythm.
Fans of his previous work will find a continuation of his unique voice, and new readers will be captivated by his unflinching portrayal of survival in a world gone awry.
“O’Neil's writing is like getting your ribs kicked in by a boot that you can't help but notice is beautiful—its stitching, leatherwork, shining eyelets, lace hooks—all its craftsmanship catching your attention, even as it crunches your bones.”
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts
“What Luke O'Neil knows the answer to is a question both the straight world and the recovery community confronts every day—is anybody actually different from anybody else? And if so, what is addiction? The addict knows that being alive is the disease, a truth that science struggles to accept. We Had It Coming is not about suicide or addiction but the vivid, unmissable struggle of waking up, the only pain we are given, the first and last real gift.”
—Sasha Frere-Jones
“Reading these stories is like grabbing a beer with your friend who's smarter than you, and funnier than you, and knows way more than you do about how screwed up people are—and yet somehow, on the other side, he's made you feel better about the state of humanity, not worse.”
—Rax King
“It is easy enough for a bad writer to use a thesaurus; it takes quite a good one to write whole symphonies in plain English…”
—Linda Tirado
“Luke O’Neil has a degree in Massachusetts Studies and the human spirit. His stories imagine ‘a bill that will soon come due,’ in grief, in the wars we’ve waged on other countries and nature itself. His characters can’t quit smoking or the hope that the bill might still be settled. O’Neil’s stories will make you want to show emotion, even if your family didn’t really do that shit.”
—Daisy Alioto
About The Author / Editor
Preview
The closet
He was feeling around for the nest in the back of the closet and there it was just where his daughter had been saying it was supposed to have been all week. A certain amount of guilt came over him with that realization. That he hadn’t believed her. Worse he had lectured her on the unlikelihood. Well I’ve gotta take the L on this one baby he said which embarrassed her. A man his age talking like that.
He couldn’t afford a team to come haul it out to be burned in the pits considering what they were charging these days and the business with the robots so the only other thing he could think of to do was to fist wrist deep into the paper pulpy combs of it to show her that it wasn't so scary after all.
A friend of mine had had one of these whole deals in his apartment not long ago he told her. Before you were born he said. Look at this he said. Just a handful of bites he said. Showing her his purpling arm. Should clear up in a few days he said. If anything it kind of feels good.
Nothing to lose sleep over anyway.
Daddy is still alive he said. And I always will be.
Here come try it yourself.
It was incredibly lucky that I was here
I’m looking at a video of ___ on stage right now. He sounds like he sounds. Like how you remember him sounding from one day ago when he was still alive. The casually delivered growl of a man who has lived and also very much always almost not lived throughout most of that living.
I must have seen this at the time. I was still very young at this point even as old as I am now but this show was a big deal for the people like me watching and an even bigger deal for the bands playing although probably not for ___ who didn’t seem to be impressed by much of anything.
Sorry I’m making a singer’s life about me but that is the deal. They sing about their life and I take it to be about my life and then I write about it and the people reading it take it to be about theirs.
People love to deify a person on the day they die but then it diminishes incrementally over time. Unless they were a very big deal. Our man here seems like the type of guy whose stature will grow posthumously I’d imagine. People who sing about death and pain a lot become more important when they’re gone because now it seems like they’ve completed the final course prerequisite.
That’s a dangerous pattern for a certain type of person to notice.
Hold on let me look up how old he was at the time of that performance.
He was twenty eight. Old enough to not be too overwhelmed by it all but still.
God his voice sounds so good. Jagged but strong.
Let’s make a conservative estimate and say at around 20 smokes a day times almost 11,000 days since then that his voice was about 220,000 cigarettes younger than the day he died.
He’s got a black eye and he looks like the type of guy who would have a black eye as a matter of principle. Everyone loves this song. Everyone loves it and it’s still underrated.
The day before the band had been in a bar brawl and their drummer fucked up his shoulder which accounts for why there’s some other guy sitting in. ___ is wearing a very nice black leather jacket and his hair looks clean and I’m wondering if he washed it because he was going to be on TV and if so that breaks my heart a little bit. If he had at one point wanted to look his best for when people remembered him later on in these kinds of videos. The place he still exists.
How to live
We watched every snap of the game. Both of us. Me and you. Everyone else did too. The commercials for Jesus from an evil church and the commercials for an ongoing massacre by an evil country. We watched the whole thing which was itself a commercial for the entire concept of this evil country of our own. I was going to say it is our essence distilled but that implies something being made small and more potent which is the opposite of the Super Bowl and America neither of which can be diminished but instead can only expand.
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.