Icarus lXIV.III (April 2014) - Online Edition

ICARUS

by Leonard Boyle 1

Editorial “The soul’s divine and the work never done.

This standard signals to the wind and skies That, of the work dared, mine is the part done: With God alone the still-to-do-lies.”

– Fernando Pessoa, from “The Standard” in Mensagem (trans. J. Griffin)

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mid the sentimental spring blush of the closing year, allow us a cliché: Icarus has been a labour of love, and if these three issues can at the very least attest to a balancing of the love with the labour, a leavening of the mechanical with the beautiful, then we may pass the flame contentedly. We thought it fitting that our final issue forgo the Featured Writer section and contain only the work of Trinity’s undergraduates, postgraduates and alumni, who are the true inheritors of the 64-year Icarus legacy. As always, the volume of submissions far outweighed the available space, and it is important to remember that for every surprising, fierce, and graceful voice that we print, there are a dozen more yet to be heard. Icarus has many fine friends who have supported and guided us through our year as editors, and we thank them all. We are proud to welcome next year’s team, headed by Niall McCabe and Susanna Galbraith. May the road rise to meet them. It has been a long year’s editing, tiring, challenging, engulfed in paper and drowned in ink – but we wouldn’t have had it any other way.

The Icarus staff acknowledges Trinity Publication and the School of English, as well as Brunswick Press, for making this issue possible.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, House 6, Trinity College, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland.

Editorial Team

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Chief Editors: David Lynch & Claudio Sansone Deputy Editor: Niall McCabe Layout Editor: Thady Senior

Contents Illustration

by Leonard Boyle Editorial a memory

by Susanna Galbraith Rest

by Michael Kemp What’s Ketchup in Quechuan?

by Andrew Stephens Baby, clarity is my core competency

by Erin Fornoff Photograph: [Untitled]

by Claudio Sansone Dirty Phoenix

by Ronan Murphy Key West

by Ronan Murphy Photograph: [Untitled]

by Susanna Galbraith The Hills: Returning

by Eoin McKevitt boat sea sky

by Susanna Galbraith Your Sea Legs

by Will Fleming Pique

by Will Fleming Mrs O’Grady

by Liam Wrigley A Reflection on Kilimanjaro – The Lesson

by Edward Teggin Cajun mama

by Erin Fornoff

1 Caramel City

by Ronan Murphy 2 River and Feauntin 4 by Patrick Hopkins Excerpt from a novella 5 by Andrew Stephens Sinkhole 6 by Jack Gibson Photograph: [Untitled] 8 by Claudio Sansone Bear, Blue 9 by AlisonVanderkruyk Christmas Break 10 by Niall Brehon Photograph: [Untitled] 12 by Susanna Galbraith The Dirigible 13 by Eoin McKevitt Contributors 14 Photograph: [Untitled]

by Cee Hazzard 15

22 24 27 28 31 32 36 39 40 46 48

16 18 19 20 21

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a memory heavy on my lap I remember your head was a mossed stone and I a new mother pregnant with black and swaddled in black forest fungi huddled on loose ground curled like moss and milk pale watching my fingers stirred the damp tufts above your brow burning green and sweating with trauma, a new moth beating wildly at your collarbone.

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by Susanna Galbraith

Rest

by Michael Kemp

The white night has ridden me until I’m dun - waifish wah widow, feathered at Coole or Coolbeg, Her patter all palpitations I, I, Ich, Ich, Echt, Echt – Where is her other On which she is written?

Not some eternal tattoo But a brave body buoyant

Alack Alack!

We are no clairvoyant & my house is but a hollow barrel chest

Couché is Cauchemar

Heimat is Heimgang Come come a demi-god who can fuck it all & order this rest – Wish for long winters For we need our dead.

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What’s Ketchup in Quechuan?

I Xanthan Gum pudgy up my fun Yes squeeze. Muddle up lobes Quick lick at the toad’s Burmese.

What’s it to be? DMT. 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine For me. Climb into sky I high on Yggdrasil. Slide over the side I Lope like Judee Sill.

Ketchup in Quechuan Quechuan Ketchup Quechuan covered in Ketchup and Quechuan.

Quechuan dripping in Ketchup and Quechuan Quechuan drowning in Ketchup and Quechuan.

Xanthan Gum would you pudgy my Fun, say please. Hurry up lobes Would you speak in the key of leaves.

What? Lake Isle of Innisfree?

Whoever sold you that is your enemy.

Something has begun.

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by Andrew Stephens

II Time Curved A line, a Slow drop hit, Fell down a soft Corner, saw wider Than the sky. Brother, O my Brother King of the Conkers I offer my shoelace To Thee.

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Baby, clarity is my core competency

A co-branded win-win.

Value-add brought to the table and optimized.

Action it. Maximize it.

Facilitate a process integration and get a few more eyes on it.

Streamline our best practice processes in a shared platform. Drill down and build up a strong feedback loop.

Allow me to task you with liaising.

Apply metrics to the deliverables to ensure cost effectiveness.

Benchmark towards the blue sky.

Touch base once you’ve optimized the low hanging fruit.

Pro-actively leverage alignment for competitive advantage. Incentivize and empower strategic synergy.

Just take it on board.

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by Erin Fornoff

Photograph: [Untitled]

by Claudio Sansone

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Dirty Phoenix

(song by The Sweet Naive) As time rode pillion to that Million Dollar Bash for louche Garcia with the Gioconda tash We were all high and dry Harry Caul Jacques Derrida Croft & I...

In anarchies and Arkansaws we screened our eyes at Heaven in disguise Ambi and Tweezer in their Caesar Salad days make like the space inside a Grayson Perry vase Ampersand in her shoes...

How to brand these 21st Century blues...?

She throws her weight “No black and white No me and you Just different shades of blue�

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by Ronan Murphy

Tearing her thesis into pieces, just to stare through Quango White’s eyes at a bite-size Russian bear In a swirl out of sight with a girl called Parody every night...

As cyclone leaves he sighs and moves the cursor round his only stomping ground These self-styled highbrows arch their eyebrows and burn green “He’s Laura Nyro meets Wan Me(ro), he’s routine...”

Hat in hand cool and coy Who could brand this 21st Century boy...?

In anarchies and Arkansaws he bleats his I’s like Heaven in disguise...

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Key West

by Ronan Murphy

(song by The 1922s) Under Saturn and the go-go dancers...

Can’t prise an eye for Pepe, Lance or Zak away from that Kentucky ‘toon cat I’m hipped on...

See the possum in the peaked cap breezin down Duvall with all the rare beauties in tow while I bogart a piece of your heart and sip Don Quixote Blue But dude, I might as well scrawl a goatee on your face or read for Carousel cos Timothy I can’t keep pleading it upstream...

Awry in Mr. Calamus’s evergreen call till I feel like a cypher somewhere in between the Philip of your Big Sleep, the Bottom of your Dream Margaritas in the peacock twilight chase the river in a Midian while I turn to tuck away the fiddleman playing Stardust And though the stars shimmer like the eyes of Ray Liotta, Mr. Thomas don’t you know I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues... no Hebe nephews regard us tonight...

The lion’s on the lemon, he’s all politeness with theWallaces and Tennessees but Timothy I can’t keep pleading it upstream...

Awry in Mr. Calamus’s evergreen call till I feel like a cypher somewhere in between the Philip of your Big Sleep, the Bottom of your Dream

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Photograph: [Untitled]

by Susanna Galbraith

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The Hills: Returning

by Eoin McKevitt

When I was toddling I ravaged these hills To answer the question: What is a hill?

Was a hill just the smushing Of many small hills?

And how many sub-hills Made up a hill?

If a hill was just formed Of a sub-hills slewing Was it then just a Smushy squelching sloping sprinkling rosy poppies daffodilly

/up to bobbing backwards hilly bluing?

Or were there still hilleens I’d not considered?

Ah, little me.

Pity he Who listened to the boy that hilly dithered.

And when I came down (Feet: Little blue hills On the green breezy back Of the great breezy hill) Was I then unhilling?

Dishilling the hill?

Or simply - a toddler No longer uphill?

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boat sea sky

by Susanna Galbraith

a small boat on a pale sea broken rudder, impatient waves twisting land clumps together to slide away beneath the horizon the water looks up at the sky

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Your Sea Legs

by Will Fleming

Wayfarer, When you, at last, scorn the palatial expanse

of Mother’s earth– terra firma– tread carefully, for you will be amidst your faithful sands no longer.

The wind whips stronger upon the broad lap of an aqua swell, and whispers

softly to the surf, “I shall never venture down to the vaults where you

hide your prize of stolen history.”

Let the wind remind you that the water renders destiny redundant: death does not discriminate between a mariner

and one misled.

No– instead she drags you to the depths, where you may see her several unlikely servants.

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I have often heard-tell of more than one life,

spared of the Titanic’s demise, seeing Neptune’s mighty trident silhouetted in the starlit black Below– Above, a sailor sings a song of forbidden love, and offers his flesh and blood

to the labour

of the bellows; Below, swings a pallid body in a blue gallows, bereft of the acrid

of the happily embalmed earth-bound.

Wayfarer, do you still wish to risk being drowned?

Perhaps you are enticed by deceitful solace you

seek in the sea’s discreet sounds.

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Pique

by Will Fleming I am a paragon of enveloped youth.

I am,

despite the truth, a pawn upon a plinth– long since repossessed by that tyrant,

Cypselus of Corinth.

My four limbs have felt the hot lick of the funeral pyre;

the fire melts the echo in my

martyr’s bones.

Yet over and over And over have I heard irksome groans from virginal doves of Aphrodite:

She favours me;

But I,

within my chrysalis, must wait for grapes to grow,

and rot.

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Mrs O’Grady

by Liam Wrigley

She was a recent sight in the village, And her son was a doctor she said, White-toothed, kind, and wealthy, And that he could save the dying with a kiss.

None of the ladies believed her, The details were vague and pretty like a mist So she rambled the country lanes at night And told her stories to the prairie wind And together they mumbled and hissed.

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A Reflection on Kilimanjaro – The Lesson

Following still, the day not yet done, under the lash of impure heat climbing and striving.

Kilimanjaro, majestic in the distance, yellow-lit at the height of day.

Orion himself knows not the glow.

Utopian delight of the unworthy, thoughtless in our giving.

Hunger pangs for the life ahead.

Against the dimming light dusk clouds my conscience, yearning to feel pride’s embrace.

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by Edward Teggin

Cajun mama

by Erin Fornoff

This is the Holy Trinity, she says these three together make something better than how they’d taste alone play off each other like the brass section in a band.

She chops a medley of onion, bell pepper, and celery stirs them until they melt to translucence.

They’re the basis for everything, she says.

This is a roux, she says.

It’s what you start with.

Anything based off this will make you moan it’s so good.

She stirs flour into simmering butter, spoon drawing an even, constant circle, a meditative stance, until the sauce darkens.

It’s the basis of everything, she says.

This is a gumbo, she says.

It means ‘everyone talking at once.’

She boils a chicken, picks out the bones throws in shrimp and crabmeat, hot andouille sausage, slimy rounds of okra. The secret, she says, is to double the spice.

You will eat this every single week of your life until you pack bags for college.

It’s the basis of everything, she says.

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Caramel City

by Ronan Murphy (song by The 1922s) Dreamed I’s a bitten-up jellybaby crying in yr belly for you I kaboomed like an aerosol firefly to get a third eye view Between the litter and the letter the latter made the literal man You’re in Caramel City so don’t die as if you really can...

You gotta know you gotta no holds barred life down your leotard life So I’ll say nay and aye beta phi Goodbye salt Goodbye caramel Kiswahili sister with the monocle masokissing ass’n’no eyes If I ride the metaphorical landslide would you believe I’m wise I let the little iamb you are remeterate the trochee I am You’re in Caramel City so don’t hide behind yr blondewigwam

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You gotta know you gotta no holds barred life down your leotard life So I’ll say nay and aye beta phi Goodbye salt Goodbye caramel

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River and Feauntin After Michael Longley

by Patrick Hopkins

I Auld Micko’s walking arse-ways lookin’ like a pissed Socrates, crossin’ eternity with feck all to say and feck all to describe.

It’s nointeen nointy foive, de story was: snow falls on Front Square, yer man scribbles away as boords scurry all-over-the-shop. He’s reminiscin’ about thoorty years ago and I’m still a little gurrier with donkeys appearin’ in the back garden, hee-haw, as snow drifts inside this whopper sea creature.

II ‘Leviathan’, Micko and his fellow Trojans would probably say. God trun ih from de bleedin’ sky and ih landed face foorst, scarleh for ih, on top of a massive feauntin: dark spot in the little dark pool that’s my city, bulgin’ silhouette of a complex equation. I enter its shadowy troat, not inside a wooden horse but roidin’ atop woords like a mad yoke, ye-ha. Half waitin’ for ‘Chancer!’ covered in stamps and sent packin’.

III Oscar shouts from the top of the stairs, bee bah bee bah, it sounds sumtin like slum-dweller. Howaya, I say back, why so cold? Ye wha? Oh you don’t seem to speak de langwitch that shuffles its doorty feet and roides around insoide me head, the brick-hit musical teeth just as yar pushin’ a river outtaya with yer tongue.

Maybe in thoorty years from a half empty marmalade jar I’ll raise a toast te you, the Sophists and all these crusty doorsteps.

IV He does be here, the yet-to-be-bearded Ulster culture vulture. Me da’s ma a fellow Ulster vulture but without the culture, arrivin’ in the city in spring the same year, hopin’ for a better life to meet the soon to be da’s da workin’ out at the Pigeon House beyond Irishtown. After he died she tried to pop as many pills as it’d take to join him: lexicon of his dusty voice bottled up and played like the hymns of Sibelius.

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V I-I, the ‘I’ of Micko before he showed his maroon noted outpourins yet still the same I when I showed me own juvenile ramblin’s and the same I even before God trun Adam outta Eden with a ‘gerrup outta that garden I told ya not te be takin’ the mick when I’ve put down in me precise classicist’s hand what yar allowed to love and what yar feckin’ not te. Stammer and I christen ye te doom!’

VI C’mere and I’ll tell ye. It was bleedin’ freezin’. Grand though. The Christmas tree was brutal, the queue massive for gargle. It was the first snow party, without the snow, of the village eejits that thought dey could be more dan college scribblers.

Some would be, but most would fall on der arses, left givin’ der own names to constellations above the campanile and forever ruminatin’ on the shadows of mushrooms, swans matin’, and a fox eatin’ its own leg.

VII From the grey hinterland of vanishin’ faces, poor strung out feckers left to roam like the urban fox, where neighbours would be boxin’ de head off one another at yer front gate, and where each month one hundred wing mirrors lay like shrapnel along the pathways.This raw experience of hitch-hikers that didn’t require a thumb or a driver, just a covered elbow trun through its own reflection and a match to build bonfires on the streets of poetry’s townland.

VIII It was nointy foive when the uncle called his knife ‘nasty nasty,’ messin’ of course (let’s pretend he never used it). He’d a snore that musta cut the sky from de college square up to Belfast. Did Micko hear it in the snow? The fields behind the auld bingo hall were his hangout patch. But this city held no dreams of liberty: on the Molly Malone, the Physeptone, but couldn’t kick the gargle. He defied the doctor, tried to flap his yellow wings towards the sun and melted.

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IX Daddy Mick’s at the dinner table. What’s he markin’ in the Irish Times?

I try to pull meself up te see. Being distracted I take me chance to pick fag butts from his pockets but pull out sumtin with a tail. ‘Myodes glareolus’ he goes, ‘a vole, a wee sprout of a rodent.’ Kek-kek-kek-kek ‘And that outside...’

‘I know mister,’ I go, ‘a Sparrowhawk of grand design. Me heart beats like a red flag!’

X Sing to me, lads and lassies, of a reckless Odyssey, the twist and turns of a plunderer, sackin’ a sacred citadel. But remember, he never devoured de cattle of de Sun, and heartsick, spat it back up onto de clear ship floor: shape of his breath and teeth now upon the carcass. Bluntly, I ask meself for a definition for all this flux: ‘Sri, if all existence is a river, then this body is a feauntin.’

XI Imagine a child’s face as he skulls himself with the butt of an axe in the lip, the blue iron taste of blood, the day the ma’s da dropped from his bike and I was sent to the neighbours in the park. They met each other at a Legion of Mary seminar, first and only loves: a whole history of ghosts waitin’ for’em to kiss.

The bollix Thanatos with his icicle touch must’ve turned to a smilin’ Eros and said, ‘another set of eejits comin’ me way’.

XII Saunterin’ forward into the past in Micko’s slippers, the history of every foot that has stood here unfolds in me. I want te say te all the souls that seem to me inseparable from my own, that existence is a river still - the universe conserves with itself and this body a feauntin that plays in an imaginary Front Square. When snow falls it is the feather-filled lakes of yesterday.

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Excerpt from a novella

P

by Andrew Stephens

ale was the colour of his face as peace was scarcely approaching. Vincent Knowles, deep in meditation was sitting in the Lotus position with his eyes closed and breathing evenly. It was already noon and he hadn’t moved since some time before the first glow of morning. Everything in his mind appeared golden and weightless. A familiar flash was descending from overhead and becoming lighter, brighter beyond reason.

Mined, Bodhi and Sole (a failed enlightenment) ॐ I search for the word for the way of the universe.

What is the word for the way of the universe?

I am what I am am what I am what I am i am Am

Achieving a certain level of awareness had been what Vincent had dedicated more than nine of his years. His breathing suddenly shifted and trembling had taken to him in the wake of an ancient thunder.

‘Da’ said Vincent carefully. Tears were dropping like diamonds inside him.

Lucidly, still in meditation, he felt compelled to move his mind away from the light expanding.

‘Da’, he repeated, his pallor growing paler turning to retrace his steps as he knew he must. And as he set out to tread he envisioned that all that lay behind him held a fall, a heavy rain of flowers that covered every square inch of the circular garden.

‘Da. Farewell’, Vincent said finally, silently sobbing to himself and rubbing the crown of his head. He opened his eyes with cheeks all awash and looked around to find no victory, just a cold and a broken room. It was the guest room which had been turned into a silent room. It was there where he had spent many hours each day in the centre of an aching altar.

Vincent Knowles rose to his feet, thumbed away his tears and cleared his throat in preparation for a worthless war, another day.

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Sinkhole

S

by Jack Gibson

he had never heard the word karst before the sinkhole. It jutted out peculiarly, alone from the slew of words pouring from the expert’s mouth on 9 o’clock special on WBKO that night. Perhaps it was it’s abrasive, harsh sound that stuck her, like the dry, deep cough of a hacksaw through lumber seasoned by a long summer. She would later find out that the man speaking was a professor of hydrogeology (another word she would become familiar with) at Western Kentucky and that the plant, the whole town of Bowling Green and indeed much of the state was situated, precariously it would seem, atop a limestone bedrock, fraught with underground caverns, abscesses which had never seen the light of day, filled with a terrible dark.

Alone, seated in the bleached smoking chair whose leather now flaked away like dry skin, the verses she had learned in Sunday School echoed dull around her head.

Who was it who spoke about building your home on sand? Her memory, like hands cast out in the dark groping for a lightswitch, found the words. Matthew: “And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand.”

Muttering, these words came back to her mechanically and in monotonous drone, with no more joy than a schoolroom recital of the pledge of allegiance.

Even then she understood it to be nothing but a cautionary tale, to be taken no more seriously than nursery rhyme or the fable of the Cicada and the Ant. This her father would tell her every year whenever the louts’ first deafening song was heard in the late, high summer. Even after those endless days spent on the fields, making provision for the winter to come like the noble hero in his tale, when the indefatigable sun finally gave way to the brief breath of night, he would come and sit by her as she drifted off to sleep. They would speak of their days and he would tell her stories and tales long committed to memory as the dark slowly filled the room around them. Those nights were kind, shy things, who moved in noiselessly beneath notice, did what they were to do and left without troubling anyone.

Nothing like the dark that troubled her now. The dark she knew had betrayed her, taken him, pulled the rug out from under her, and the floor and very foundations 28

underneath him. The ground had given in and swallowed him whole, leaving him crushed by the heavy, treacle dark.

From the very beginning, the plant had made her father nervous. Heralded for months as the very thing to end Bowling Green’s economic stupor and give rife unemployment the kick it needed, the arrival of The General Motors Assembly Plant was the cure­all tonic for the towns woes. Boys fresh out of high school and long­unsatisfied farm labourers wandered in their  droves to the factory gates hoping take part in this most dreamy and all­ American of enterprises: building Corvettes. It broke her fathers heart to see these young men vacate the farms and fields that had surrounded the town since before living memory and fit like new little cogs into this machine. He couldn’t understand it. “The air’s funny in those factories” he’d say, “s’not good for the mind and they’re noisy as hell too, I don’t know how they can think straight ne’er mind build cars . Them boys need to be out in the fields, with the sun and the air, toilin’ like me and their fathers did ’fore ‘em.”

Although many miles through thick corn rows away, the plant seemed to seep into life on her family’s farm more and more as those early months and years passed. It lay to the east of their land, metallic, robust and impervious, whirring away and singing its distant, dissonant, tinny song incessantly. At first it was the water. The lazy saturdays her father spent fly­fishing by their creek proved less and less fruitful, his catch smaller, often mangey and covered in ugly boils, their scales plucked leaving their exposed crepe paper bellies, their eyes mere opaque bubbles protruding from swollen, misshapen forms.

Soon, finding strong, knowledgeable workers to help on the farm was impossible, and little by little, to cover costs he began to cede his furthermost acres to the plant as it expanded, building new construction lines, showrooms, even a national museum for their old, famed models. It paid a good, fair price but no amount would alleviate his dolor in seeing them go. The harvest yield was dwindling, and eventually even the very earth gave up on them.The rich clay which had once been as dark as rosewood waned and dried up, and the August soils famed for their retention and vitality grew as ashen and lifeless as terracotta. She had not known then that plant had been eating through their lives, poisoning the rain that fell on her home, leaching her father and the farm, his life’s work, of everything.

She looked to the phone. It would take a few more hours to investigate the integrity of the earth before they could even move in to begin the retrieval efforts. Workers had said they had heard muffled groans and shouts from below immediately after the breach. This was the word they had used, the engineers, the 29

police, as if someone had infringed upon a right, acted mala fides. But this was so much more. This was punishment, retribution nothing short of biblical. A mouth opened in the earth, one of God’s plagues setting the count right.

By the time her second semester at school in Louisville came around, a 2 hour drive away along route 65, it had already happened. The plant had been buying up more and more land around the farm and the corn weakened more every year.

Their home had been mortgaged and re­mortgaged to cover the mounting losses.

This she already knew, but it wasn’t until the arrival of one of the rare letters sent from home (her father generally prefered to make the drive) that she learned. It was done. The last acres were gone and her father had taken up part time work assisting the plant’s specialist vintage mechanics thirty years his junior, his years of tinkering with and constantly restoring the farms ancient trucks proving of use. The summer had ended. The diligent worker ant had succumb to the brassy, insouciant, singing cicada.

Sinkholes were apparently natural corollaries, common karst features gouged out over time. It was the rains acidified by the hydrogen cations unceasingly pumped out by plant which had caused the subterranean caves to form so quickly.

These fetid, rancid rains had choked their fish of life, stung and burned their crop, dissolved all good from their soil and now eaten like a cancer through the very ground beneath where her father stood. The news reports could only confirm the eight vintage corvettes which had slipped from existence into the craggy abyss.

Nothing had yet been said about workers who had been by them at the time.

She sat in the dark in her fathers home, advised by the police to stay away and rest, that a call would be made as soon as their efforts had begun and they had anything to report. The dark had slowly flooded the room like it used to on those late August nights, the only light coming from the iridescent newsroom projected from the television. How could this happen? He had built his house on stone, he had worked through the summer. Her home had been washed away, her father was beneath the earth, under the foot of that factory, crushed like an ant.

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Photograph: [Untitled]

by Claudio Sansone

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Bear, Blue

by AlisonVanderkruyk “She had blue skin, And so did he.

He kept it hid And so did she.

They searched for blue Their whole life through, Then passed right byAnd never knew.”

– Shel Silverstein

D

onald Harrow left everything to a “blue-eyed boy in a bear mask;” as such was the identification in the will. After two days of inquiry for a name to be found, the screen was held back in screeches and the cold wooden door knocked upon to be opened by a bear. Sure enough, as Donald had meticulously (albeit disturbingly) illustrated, appeared eyes “soulful, like they were taken from a man who had seen torture of the hands, of boils in chemicals, and fervent missionary sex between compulsory partners – only to lose his memory, be dipped in an Icelandic bath, and released to the sun on a pink cloud spattered morning of dirty, hot-dog inner city air.” Those eyes gazed at everything with a despondence that only a lover could one day understand, and even then only maybe. Such was not an unusual reaction to his gaze, for even the boy’s teacher believed he could be a brilliant poet, model, architect of cityscape or architect of death, but she only told that to her pillow, and even so, only once.

It was curious why Donald engineered his presence to linger in triangular proximity of the home in which he’d spent so many years in intimacy, for it was almost as though he planned to exist in conversation for ever. *** The body was found on one of those mornings when nobody wanted to venture outside. Wind whistled, rain stammered, and bereavement was laid at the foot of a willow, solitary and centered in a cemetery atop a hill, across a small river from a lonely house. A spot a young boy could always gaze upon from the makeshift attic

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window he created – a hole from which he peered consistently. Under a tightly wrapped patched blanket, holding a worn copy of The Phantom Tollbooth and his reading glasses, Donald must have closed his eyes for an afternoon nap, shaded from the rain.

It was a Sunday.

Two young boys discovered him, racing ahead of their parents in an annual walk with daisies to a grave. Being half the size of a human full-grown, the cemetery proved perfect for hide and seek, and after four years, they knew where to go.

Here, they were never admonished not to run, because no one around would yell (quiet neighbours). So, one flew around the tree while the other tramped around slow like a tiptoeing French criminal, arching and thrusting himself forward.

Anticipating, the first dashed fast back and held the tree without looking ahead; a blind topple launched over legs covered in a blanket. The boy, heart low, was reminded of home, as the blanket was identical to one of their own. He soon realized his mistake – some blankets are made and bought bulk. Immediately and naturally, he looked into the eyes of his victim, as people often do, seeking blame inherent in his mistake for the possibility of forgiveness. He was met neither with frustration nor surprise. Only a numb blue bath shot back, failing to follow his movement as he picked himself up, cold.

“Did I kill him?” His heart was at his feet and his skin hardened but he was also amazed at his newfound superhuman power.

“No, love.”

Their Mum, upon hearing the unusual silence, had approached her boys, the blanket, and the body. Immediately and naturally, she gracefully cried, wiped her tears, and stroked the cold blue head with a cool, damp hand, taken tenderly. The skin reminded her of a puppy’s coat being stroked for the first time, and was silent at the thought that his cheek was likely exactly like a puppy in every virgin way.

It was a beautiful place to die, beneath the willow. The chosen daisies were left at the foot of the tree, between their visited grave and the man. The grave beauty and the man; the grave beauty of the man.

From the car, pulling away, Laura, the woman and mother, could see him wrapped up in the blanket cocooned into the back of a hospital car. A colourful baby brought the other way. Not an ambulance, but a hospital car employed for such purposes.

“I knew him, love. I knew him.”

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A wave of her mother’s scolding rushed back to front, from juvenilely asked about the freak of a man who never spoke, only gazed, to the present.

All she could see were blue eyes she was always in constant anticipation of; frightened they would change from apathetic to horrifying and incessantly on her.

She had only once knocked on his door, in the darkness at 10 years old, to ask for an extra candle in a blackout. All she saw were the wet, empty glass marbles and the candle beneath as he screeched open the door. An illuminated blue burned her, brought her back into the splashing cold. Not refreshingly though, as he gave her his only light. The unwavering nature unnerved her consistently to the sharp opening of her eyes to her husband screeching on the brakes, making the kids momentarily squeal and collapse back, almost hitting a stranger who stepped out into the rainy street right. Laura screamed only slightly, and not because they were directly in front of her old home.The unplanned girl waved sorry and kept walking, marching in thick blue rubber boots, like numb eyes, choosing to go through mud rather than pavement (perhaps to fulfill their purpose).

The home presented a man smoking outside, veiled by heavy drops joined together on the porch roof.

“Mum, there’s a bear in the window!” A rubber mask stared at them, peeking over the sill, concealed by the smoke. Laura wanted the car to run over the house then run out of gas so she could go next-door and peer in the windows. The threestory saltbox was always perfect with curtains, departed colour, and a knocker askew; she wanted to make sure it was maintained.

Laura remembered watching once from her window her mother walking over to the house, to borrow two eggs for baking her cookies in the winter, wearing only her gown, a scarf, and slippers. Always coming back with more, and in this case, a whole carton, her mother staggered back only to have her dad broke all the eggs she did not need. Even when she caught her mum at the kitchen window, the one facing south towards the Harrow house, on early weekday afternoons just as he would be leaving for the local university library (as the sole employed shelfer), she would remember how mistaken her father was in his calling Donald “Harrow only Marrow” when he should have instead seen his mother as “Emma with the Dilemma.”

“Donald,” Emma used to say, before he was a stone laid cold beneath a blanket at the ass of Laura’s fallen child and then lifted into the loneliness a sad getaway car, “was the kind of quiet that perpetually smelled flowers and noticed the fall of every eyelash on a person’s cheek, stranger to relative, so he could tell them and provide 34

them with a wish.” She said, however, that, “he could never say that he observed with such love and loved more than he could act on.” Laura had never repeated any of this, and truly never was reminded of it until now. *** The blue raincoat with matching blue boots belonged to the body who also owned the cough at the porch man’s smoke, causing her to take a step into the street (because the body could not adequately multi-task), and nearly getting pancaked by a car. She, beneath the rain, gathered herself, smiled and waved, goofy like a fish tail, and trenched on through the squelching yard to the house next door. After a full-length count of “Happy Birthday” was knocked unanswered, she, with the book under her arm, the one she purposed to come with and deliver in person, left the porch with a note and a smile doodle folded inside the leaflet of the hardcover.

It is necessary to report that Donald Harrow was, in fact, loved by this individual (who was Frances, Frankie, rather). She thought she loved him when she noticed his dependence on cleanliness and protection of the books he shelved, but knew for certain when she picked up a book that fell from his pocket, which held simple and fantastical poems of a children’s writer, and with illustrations drawn with the able assistance of the blue ball point pen he kept in all his breast pockets. Each drawing corresponded to each poem, from top-hatted dancers with banana canes to sleeping tigers with canaries on their eyelids. Finding this a sole comfort and relief from hated readings and lifeless days in the library, she vowed to find him, and maybe to have him read her one. Now realizing his drawings matched the wet, beautiful and partially uncomfortable house before her, she longed to see inside and maybe even sit in there forever.

She had always felt, watching him in strobes, shelf to shelf, that there was happy French pop music blasting his head, with interruptions for a thought of a game. Of course she was mistaken because nothing was in his head but a whir of a wheel getting closer to the end of the day; but, they shared a blue look once that confirmed such incorrect perceptions for her nonetheless.

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Christmas Break

A

by Niall Brehon

s November approached and his vision worsened, he reflected that once upon a time he had been in love with Lyla, but their love had grown weary after the traumas of their shared past and they had stayed with each other for so long after because who knows, inertia, stability, and soon, as the wind swirled and his vision worsened and the sky went grey and his vision worsened he became concerned as time passed and his vision ever worsened, and as November began the colour drained from the earth and tones of darkness began to shudder their way across his left eye and he began to fear that he wouldn’t remember what Lyla looked like as macular degeneration took hold, there, and she walked towards him down the street, cherry, walking along like a spider, cherry red, and her forearm was drained of the kisses of the sun and freckles were showing like chocolate chips in uncooked muffins, and his right eye strained to compensate for his left, lips cherry red, and she held up her hand as if to say hello and he looked at her or tried to, red veins wending across his left eye in raggy striations, and knew he didn’t know her anymore and that things were coming to a close, and she was eating a peeled banana which was the same colour as her skin, there was a grey dot in the middle of her face as she approached him and he approached her and everything came to a halt.

By looking at the things that weren’t her face, he could see it past the grey dot, out of focus in the periphery of his vision. He dug into his memory, and emerged with images of her cherry red lips, and her eyes were blue he thought but could no longer verify, and the retraction of the sun had revealed freckles that stood out clearer than during the summer when she was tanned and they had fallen in love, and her hair was black and messy, and her face once reminded him of apples or was it roses. But now the grey dot in the centre of his vision like a tennis ball meant he could no longer see her properly.

Having tolerated this slow decline for a week throughout a number of embarrassing episodes, he decided to save face and went to the doctors. They were stumped. They reasoned that, as he was still young, they would wait for his eyes to fully develop before taking any course of action, and that things would be clearer when his eyes were fully grown. The doctors gave him a cane to aid his walking, and he left their office with Lyla in one hand and the white cane in the other, tapping the ground in Morse code that I tried to translate but nothing makes sense.

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Day by day, as his vision worsened and the dot grew and things became less and less clear, he found himself wondering why his vision was going. He felt bitter that he had to go through the trauma of losing his sight and that things were sort of repeating themselves. As he could no longer read, he began taking lessons in Braille, and was soon competent enough to start reading a story Lyla gave him about men and women.

One night, he had a vision of a homeless man called Billy whose wife had kicked him out for cheating on her, just once is all, and who, heart aching and broken, died when a wrecking ball crashed through the room of the abandoned flat he slept in and smashed his bones into paste and crushed his body into jelly. The rays of the weak November sun streamed in through the hole the wrecking ball had broken in the wall.

That morning when he woke up the world was red. He felt for the raised bumps of Lyla beside him in the bed and stirred her from her slumber. He turned to face her and saw a grey dot in the red, not perfectly round but flattened slightly, like a basketball with stab wounds. The grey dot screamed. I saw that his scleras were bright, cherry red, and that bloody tears squeezed themselves into a dark paste in the corners of his eyes, like cayenne pepper.

Lyla brought him back to the doctors. On the journey he tripped three times.

They walked down the road, and the wind lashed and burst about them. His eyes burned and he felt cross that his vision was worsening as they walked through the red-tinged late November. Before they went in Lyla kissed him and though her face was a grey dot he could still find her mouth. He tasted salty tears and cherry chapstick on her lips.

The doctors assessed him, and came to the conclusion that his body was rejecting his eyes. The doctors assured the couple that it was time for radical action, and scheduled a surgery for the following month.

He had a vision that night. Across town, a man found out that his wife Lisa was cheating on him and laid his midriff across train tracks until a train came and cut right through him, brakes squealing. His heart broken in two and his body torn apart, Lisa decided to donate what was left to medical research in the hope that something good would come from the whole affair.

As he lay in bed, Lyla like comforting Braille under the duvet beside him, there, he could see the terror in the driver’s eyes, and the red aura of Lisa’s husband stretched out over the tracks was a mix of anger and sadness, and he woke up once more with blood in the corner of his eyes and a grey dot wherever he looked.

Bloody tears were not a bad sign, the doctors reassured him. Luckily he couldn’t see their faces as they looked at each other. After a glance, I chose not to.

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When a person dies, the first sense lost is sight.

Christmas is always darker than summer.

Cayenne pepper is red.

He saw less and less of Lyla throughout the month before the surgery because his vision continued to worsen and the grey dot grew to the size of a beach ball, but also because Lyla began to avoid visiting him. It was too difficult. He sensed that they were growing terminally apart as a result of his narrow vision. He began to regret that he had never taken a picture of her and felt sad that he had seen her for the last time with his old eyes. He hoped that his new eyes would function properly, though the doctors warned him that his eyesight would never be quite the same.

The day finally arrived, with Christmas almost upon them, and snow fell on his shoulders like dandruff as he tapped his way to the hospital. The doctors gladly sourced fresh eyes from Lisa’s husband, thanks Lisa. Billy’s body had been found and kept on ice in lieu of its identification and his optical nerves were deemed a suitable match for the operation.

He wished that Lyla was there. He sat on the operating table and he felt himself go under and between his head a bright pain bloomed as the doctors placed forceps on his cherry red scleras and pulled and all goes black…

As he comes to consciousness and his sight returns, beginning at the edges and wending across the left eyeball, colour comes back to the world and he sees blurrily but gradually more clearly someone sitting there in the chair beside him as machines beep about them and blood hums its way around his body and through his itchy eyes, pink, her lips watermelon pink, and her green eyes come into focus and her hair is brown and freckles stand up on her face and he can’t believe his eyes and she, who is she, looks at him with somewhere between fear and is it disgust or the end of love they’re all the same and she has Lyla’s voice when she speaks but it’s not the girl he loved once, and she says to him that she’s glad he’s awake and he looks at her and sees with his new eyes what she has become and knows this is all coming to a close, they were bad for each other and he feels blessed relief at the end but there’s emptiness in the death of love, he says to her and breaks two hearts I’m seeing someone else, and rosesoft blood hums through machines as it all blurs a final time death at the hands of others and the blur is tears and she says me too and the world ends and comets fly through loops of fire about the sun it’s all necessary death and birth Merry Christmas and she gets up out of the chair legs bending like a plastic fork and a Happy New Year snapped and broken breaks once again breaking everything breaks and he and I break and breaking watch out of focus as she breaking walks away.

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Photograph: [Untitled]

by Susanna Galbraith

The Dirigible

“T

by Eoin McKevitt

he dirigible was a sight. Unstoppable in its time. Would be unstoppable now, if they’d not had the balls to retire it on me after the breakages...” the captain said, half-wishing for a sudden whir of the engine to contradict him. But it was a tattered husk, incapable of showing signs of even the most rudimentarily conceived second life; a grunt, a mild spasmodic inflation.

Glum overhead lighting, dangling low on a circuited chain, seemed to be the one source of reliable energy in the hangar; the captain included. It could be relied upon, unwaveringly, to spume acrid smoke, and garnish the dirigible below with a burst of phosphorescent sparks by the hour. When this happened, as it had done twice so far, the captain was the only one unshaken by the rasp. It was an ugly sound, halfway on a dubious scale between a matchhead ground directly into an eardrum and the red-hot rent lurch of the Hindenburg’s internal girders.

The captain remained undaunted. He could divine the spirit of the hangar by now, living squalidly for so long as its pet recluse. Often he would try placing his ten fingertips on the wall to commune directly with what he had noted to be a certain irrefutable elan.The dirigible had a presence, almost an unspoken bombast, or a radiant intelligence. He had roamed for years in the wilderness of spirituality, picking up obscure and poorly translated holy books by the spine and leafing through them at a restless pace. He had promised himself - years earlier, while trying to conjure up a fully-functioning visual tableau of Milton’s Hell, his bleary reckoning of most demonic figures aside - that there was strand of metaphysics already in existence which would answer to his intuition. Objectophilia was the closest he had come, he would cleave his gonads into the wastebasket before blimps began to arouse anything more than fascination.That, he felt, would be walking the fatal breaking point of his sanity.

Presently, however, under the four semi-querying eyes of his guests, he was more restrained. A winsome couple, Sarah and Jack, had driven to the airbase for a skydive, and had haplessly knocked on his shutters. He had always secretly wanted, very humanly, to be cicerone to his own shortcomings, and insisted on a brief tour. There were only a handful of artefacts remaining from his aviation days - “the skyfaring days”, he had named them, to himself, emboldened by hindsight but, by God, he would make them into a pageant if it meant a little recognition. If he’d been able to mould this conceit into something a little more profitable, like dedication or self-control, the hangar might not have fallen into such a state. But it had, part by part, become a monstrosity. Even the air was haggard. Wing shards

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and blunted gears were crustily mounted on the wall. Scruffy utensils and tow knots lay sparingly in whatever floor space remained untouched. The body of the breathless dirigible had flumped over the years, and was now washing a yellow and purple hue over the floor, like a bruised banana skin sheeting a lumbering toad. Sarah and Jack, the now-captive spectators, had nearly to flat their backs against the stucco to avoid tearing the envelope. Jack felt spiderlike. Sarah felt like a homing pigeon encaged.

The spitting old captain hobbled closer to the wreck to further the eulogy. As he leant over, like a gypped hunter inspecting an worm-ridden carcass, his white fringe droopily met his nose. He was becoming aware of a lull in the mood. Needing to amend, or excuse, the anticlimax he felt he had inflicted, he lifted a flap of wasted, rubbery fabric, and told how it was yearly restitched by the phthisic hands of his otherwise unaccomplished wife: Mairead. He was still, even on the back of his years as a near-isolate, a virtuoso conductor of emotion. Sarah’s pity swelled to a rapturous sympathy; Jack was distracted, for a moment, contemplating cankerous mitts and fungal nails, under which colonies of mites bedded and spawned. He had a glum imagination, which the cramped room did nothing for. The mood was too funereal. Nobody was happy to be there anymore, not even Sarah, and it was felt in the air. The captain winged a finisher.

“See, even if I was to run into the office and take up me old captain’s hat - which I do still have, thank you very much -, the fuckin’ thing is missing more lumps than a chinaman’s teacup”, Sarah’s pursed lips plead Jack’s stun into silence, “So even if Mairead thinks taking the spool and the needle to it every now and again, turnin’ it into a pincushion, is going to be any use, I know the reality of it too well.Too well”.

He knew many things too well. Troubled with insight, he could trace the curvature of life back to its peak, and could, unprompted, identify the point bespeaking the nosedive’s beginning. ‘92. Only yards above the ground the craft had crapped out, fidgeted, toppled over and buckled under its own weight. Its own stupid weight. For an hour it bubbled on the tarmac, hissing air through unjammable holes.Then it quieted, finally at rest. Repairs were out of the question.

Giving blimp rides to tourists had never really been lucrative, and the unfootable bill, was enormous enough to permanently put his business in the grave; the single bright side being that his final customers weren’t litigious enough to tighten the pinch. The years had taken pot-shots at his teeth and yellowed his skin. Even in this solemn light there was an unmistakable ghoulishness in his eyes and mannerisms.

Stasis is always, in one way or another, a depletion. Action had shrunk to curation; his memories had outlasted their value.

Sarah couldn’t shake the feeling that he had withdrawn. He appeared to dawdle between worlds, staring at the dumb and insensibly spread aircraft as it simmered 41

in the hot shadows, flexing the weak tendons in his hands. Jack knew something had been pent up, and had no avenues to take. The silence came too often for everything to be peachy. The captain lost his capacity for care in the moment. He was wondering, at the end of a protracted train of confused internalised meanders, whether or not to give it another kick as, alone, he had done time and time again in frustration. He scrapped that notion. Why be maudlin? Why be so consumed with regret? There world was teeming today; new thing were happening, new people were bearing witness to his losses. And what a spick couple they were; the young lady; like an unparsed impression of divinity lost in the final seconds of a dream; the young man: hazel, receptive, implacable kindness swimming in his eyes. Once again there was reason to be bold, to be bright and witty, and perhaps with these kids - emblematic, to his uncritical eyes, of TheYouth - interested in his mouldering old relic, today would be the day to shirk the immovable gloom, scrape the dust from the scattered tools, scour the rubber, tighten the dangling bolts, check the hinges for damning cracks; and then, after repairs, just one stop over to Air Traffic Control and the long-couched behemoth could stagger back into the sky. He leant on the wall, mentally paring away the problem, layer by layer, until really all that stood in his way was the possibility of a spangley, light-headed blackout, or a gooey, dehydrated mouth.

What a story it would have been though, assuredly newsworthy: forlorn, neglected ‘old sack of loose bolts’ - Mairead had taken to calling him -, in the company of the youthful, once again, steals their gusto via osmosis, leeches their latent intensity for his, albeit psychosomatic, restoration. Then, with vitality abounding, his out-of-action dirigible, the prime of his skyfaring days, would be dashing the clouds again. Sure, limitations would impede his efforts; his poor handeye-coordination; his lack of any real (or even specious) understanding of how the faltering, scringey parts might cohere; the absence of anything even remotely identifiable as moxy or covert ingenuity, but with this level of conviction, surely a gallon of elbow grease, an hypomaniacal bravado, a submarine need to veil the present with the past, and the tarry bellows of his failing lungs would suffice. A little longwinded for a headline; it would work better as the caption to his grinning snapshot. With all of this build-up, the captain was brewing the perfect departure.

“Y’know, I don’t mention this to everyone who comes here...”

“Mention what, man?”, said Jack, knowing how to mollify a bashful withholding, though clipped a little by the return of conversation.

“Well, you see, this place is my life. It owns me, in a way. And, y’know, I feel like I need to be here, maybe more than I should be.”

This piqued Jack.

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“How dya mean?”

“Well”, the captain squirmed for a moment, under pressure to inspire, “Y’know, fuckit. It doesn’t need to make sense, OK. It’s almost an appendage or sanctum; I’d say both, but that’d be lurid and squicky.

“So, I guess what your saying is, it was really important for you to show us this?”

The captain couldn’t help but recoil.

“If you want to get completely namby-pamby about it, yeah. I mean, Mairead is kind of just on the edge, somewhere, ranting about, well, unswept floors and holes in bin bags. She isn’t really here,” bringing a hand to his left temple, “in the same way that this place”, using the other to realise the essence of the whole room in a gesture.

Sarah’s expression made, with a wheeling of the eyes and lips, the rounds of sympathy and scepticism in an instant.

“This is where life really happens for me.”

She settled on pity. `“Do you do much else?”, she asked, now genuinely attending.

“No. I can’t say that I do. Well I mean, I have other ways of doing what I do”.

Jack was both uncertain and reeled in.

“What do you mean?”

“I write, on occasion. I’ve been reading a lot in my spare time, under whatever light I get in here”, he looked accusingly at the gently swaying overhead, “and writing must just be like the hangover you get” Jack had memorised ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in school, and so knew almost everything about poetry.

“Anything like Keats?”, he asked.

The captain squinted away the question.

“Milton’s more my guy”.

“Oh right, OK. Well... do you want to show us any of it?”

The captain had been banking on this. His hands were already feeling around beneath his lapel for an inner pocket. He lifted, slowly, a murky slice of rounded paper, clipped from a moleskine, covered with squiggles and blotches.

“I need a rostrum or something”, he said, underplaying his nerves.

“Why don’t you get up on that big lump”, said Sarah, pointing to the covered gondola.

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“Fitting”, he mumbled, and made his way to the centre of the room, catching himself as he tripped over the sliding rubber. It took him a minute or so to scramble to the top, but he dutifully managed, letting out only a few expletives, and was soon surefooted on the crown of the craft like a rough diamond.

“Hear me well enough?”, he asked, gruffly, backed by tinny harmonies from the rafters.

“Yup”, Sarah and Jack replied, nearly in unison, negligibly off.

The captain shook away fright, stiffened, checked himself, clenched his toes, restiffened, collapsed his shoulders, made to get down, checked himself a second time and, finally, found an oratorical poise.

“Oh Man, among us who can count the days ‘Fore Beauty’s glinting lode dawned, new with care For Beauty’s ways? And remedied Malaise With nursing fins brushed kindly ‘twixt his hair?”

“Fucking Jesus”, whispered Jack between his teeth, arrhythmically fingerdrumming on Sarah’s hand. The captain had become another man; a livid and histrionic preacher, flapping and gesticulating, the streaks of spittle now lolling from his lips like feelers.

“And what fair cherub made, avant, new hours, Awaking Mirth and making her toilette With ample eyes? Dirigible, your powers Invoked Delight’s sweet hand, while this soubrette” The clasped hands of Sarah and Jack grew tighter; more communicative.

Sarah, who had, until this juncture, been able to sympathise with the old codger enough to let this grim diorama continue, began to fear for her life. She snuck an uncomfortable look into Jack’s gaze. Get us out of here glistened in her eyes.

“Was cowed, supine, beneath your spinning blades Where gusts of sniggering Auster flaked amain In sundered slews of beauteous fusillades.

Your meagre death impressed the mark of Cain!”

Jack dropped Sarah’s hand, scanning for the handle which would be their release.

“Attack, attack, attack again the skies...”

He shimmied around to the shutter door, where sunbeams passing through 44

teensy chinks were spottily nudging away the dim orange darkness.

“And gift the shepherds with your soaring grace...”

With a few crooked, uncomfortable tugs...

“Aglint, alive, aslant no more; my sighs...” .... and a brief slip on a grimy, oily residue...

“Defeat. O, roost atop thine Jovian place!” ... the handle slid across, and the shutters slunk upwards into the axle bracket.

“Ah what the fu-”, came the captain’s jerky response. Warm sun blanched the room like a marble coating, exposing the dirigible even more. It wasn’t just repatched and floppy, it was verging on decrepitude. The sprightlier aircrafts outside would, if the opportunity arose, have parcelled it away to a nursing home where, in brief intervals of lucidity, it would have scabrously decried its confinement, heaved repeatedly out of its leather bedstraps, and upset the other, more vulnerable residents. Its metal frame had rusted, dinted and chipped through years of the captain’s mercurial behaviours. He was reputed by the neighbouring engineers and pilots to lunge, spontaneously, into sentimental fondling, fingering the hasps and the tines of the frame, or to drink excessively, and assault the sideboards with a cross wheel spanner. Tales seemed to orbit the captain, and few could be seriously believed, but the hulk itself was testament to at least one or two strange incidences. One arch (once a majestic streak of steel; a sternum to the contraption) had collapsed completely, and was stamping the gores like a silver, toothy bow. The gondola rose from the pile like the oblong lid of a butter dish, the captain standing atop, looking clownish and beaten. Sarah stifled a gag, thinking about what might be living, or dead, inside. It may have been harbouring something ferocious and predatorily biding; lithe, hirsute tarantulas, piggybacked by bundles of gunky eggs, maybe, or the messy, bitty bones of an opossum crypt.

Jack had scarpered, saying nothing to the captain as he tried, vainly, to take in what had happened. She skipped, grey-shoed, from one uncovered pool of concrete into the next, following Jack onto the landing strip outside.

“Don’t you want to hear more about his flying days?”, Jack snarked out of earshot.

“Jesus, I mean we came for a skydive. Remember that? If I’d wanted dank and moist I would’ve suggested spelunking”.

“Well, I wouldn’t have-”. Sarah interrupted with a lip-pressing finger. Blame was senseless. The ordeal was over.

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Contributors Alison Vanderkruyk

Alison (Ali) Vanderkruyk is a Canadian student of Literature, a visitor to Trinity for the year.

Andrew Stephens

Andrew Stephens was born and lives in Dublin. He closely studied Dante’s Commedia while studying Italian at Trinity College Dublin. He also has a degree in Sociology.

Cee Hazzard

Cee Hazzard is an international postgrad student in the MPhil in Irish Writing program.

Claudio Sansone

Claudio Sansone has published creative writing, translation and critical essays in Ireland and abroad.

Edward Teggin

Edward Teggin is a final year student of History, with a research interest in late c.18 Indian governance. A part-time youth rugby coach. A one-time financial journalist.

A lover of Darjeeling tea.

Eoin McKevitt

Eoin McKevitt, in the red corner; three stories tall, weighing in at one hundred and seventy five thousand pounds.

Erin Fornoff

A native of the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, Erin Fornoff is a poet living and working in Dublin. Called a “story-telling poet,” she has performed her poetry at Glastonbury, Farmleigh House, Electric Picnic, and other festivals across Ireland. She is a regular at many spoken word nights around Dublin, and has been featured on RTE Arena Stage.

She has been published in The Stinging Fly, New Planet Cabaret, Red Lamp Black Piano Anthology, Wordlegs, Bare Hands, Burning Bush, The Irish Times, and The Cellar Door. She won the 2013 StAnza Digital Slam, won Third Prize at the Strokestown International Poetry Award, and won First Prize for Poetry in The Cellar Door. She was Highly Commended for the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year for 2013. She is participating in the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series for 2014.

Jack Gibson

Jack Gibson is a Junior Sophister Law student.

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Liam Wrigley

Half man, half walking cup of tea, Liam likes books, James Taylor’s more sexual music, and that magical turtle island from Aladdin 3. [wrigleyl@tcd.ie]

Michael Kemp

Michael Kemp is from Cabinteely, Dublin and is a Senior Freshman studying English.

He writes poetry, short fiction, and is developing different ideas for a novel.

Niall Brehon

Niall Brehon is a Senior Sophister student studying English. Outside of college he is currently working on a collaborative project to update James Joyce’s Dubliners to a modern setting for television.

Ronan Murphy

Ronan Murphy is a Trinity graduate currently based in Italy. He is lead singer with the Sweet Naive.

Susanna Galbraith

Susanna Galbraith is a Senior Freshman in English Studies. She has been the Editorial Assistant at the poetry and art magazine Abridged for two years and coordinates the Beginners Creative Writing class with the TCD Literary Society. In addition to poetry she has a number of creative interests including visual art and dance.

Will Fleming

Will Fleming is a Junior Freshman English and Philosophy student from Wicklow.

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Photograph: [Untitled]

by Cee Hazzard

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www.icarus-magazine.com Š Trinity Publications 2014