Blackbird 2025 - Bumper Digital Edition

EDITED BY TARA WEST AND DAWN WATSON

BLACK BIRD

NEW WRITING FROM THE SEAMUS HEANEY CENTRE

AT QUEEN’S, 2025

BL ACKBIRD 2025: Extdended

Digital Edition

Edited by Tara West and Dawn Watson

Blackbird showcases new writing from the Poetry and Creative Writing programmes at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. This edition features poetry and prose from graduating classes of 2023 and 2024. Thank you to Bebe Ashley, Ida Boardman and Maria McQuillan for their diligent work in the production of this anthology.

Julie-May

Poetry

Alanna Offield

Amy O’Brien

Emma Buckley

Joshua Beatty

Kali Joy Cramer

Kate Morgan

Maeve McKenna

Matthew Rice

Niamh Twomey

Sarah Michaelides

Shakeema Edwards

Claire Harrison

The Cure

The Seventh Son of the Seventh Son lived in a big house on the flank of a faraway mountain.

I knew this because my mother told me all about this mystical man who, like his father, claimed to hold a gift for healing—The Cure as it’s known.

Mum had enjoyed The Cure from the Seventh Son before, for her arthritis. Now she was suggesting there would be benefit in bringing a baby tortured by eczema into his healing hands. She was suggesting that a farmer with no medical training might be able to solve a chronic skin problem that no dermatologist had cracked yet.

‘It’s better than a prayer to Saint Alphonsus,’ she said. ‘C’mon darling, a wee day out might do us both some good too. If it doesn’t work, sure what harm has been done?’

Indeed. What harm was there in dragging an agitated baby across the country in a hot car? What harm could there be to a baby who rarely slept as her soft skin slowly dried, itched, erupted, wept and bled in cycles? And what harm was there in asking a new mother surviving on two hours sleep a night to drive 89 miles there and 89 miles back again?

Sane reason does not matter when weighed against the prospect of a day out for my mother. So, as the sun strengthened, we set out from Belfast in my three-door car to take the baby to an appointment with the Seventh Son of the Seventh Son.

We were on our tenth mile west when Mum decided to share her views on weaning.

‘She’s five months old now,’ she said. ‘She’s ready for some solids. Why don’t you try her with a big floury spud mushed up with butter? It’ll help her sleep. Then you can get some sleep.’

The baby had been bawling since we left, her face bursting with shades of red and purple as she strained at the straps of her car seat. Both Mum and I had learned to ignore this type of cry, knowing there was little we could offer to comfort her burning skin. When the cries rose and shifted a pitch, I knew this was a hunger warning and pulled the car into a roadside picnic area. I clambered into the backseat, clipped the baby out of her seat and perched her on my lap.

‘Hello, wee darling. Are you hungry?’

Wailing, she leaned forward and scratched her flaking forehead against my chest. I rummaged up my t-shirt to unfasten my nursing bra as the baby wriggled and worked against me. I tried to lay her sideways to latch on, but she reared her head back and kicked her legs over and over, finding solace in the scratching motion. Finally, she began to root for me, shaking her head from side to side as she latched on. The crying subsided to make way for a furious glugging noise.

‘That’s her now,’ Mum said, as if I hadn’t noticed. ‘That’ll do her the

world of good, the poor wee pet.’

As she waited, Mum produced a flask of tea and talked, talked, talked. The opening of the flask was performed like a ceremonial rite.

‘This is the best moment of every journey,’ she said. ‘Never, ever drive to see a man halfway up a mountain without an emergency cup of tea about your person. Isn’t that right?’

She lifted her blanket off her lap and held it up.

‘It’s chilly today. Would you like my blanket to keep you both cosy?’ she said.

‘No, you keep it,’ I said. ‘Your need is greater than mine.’

‘I’m getting out for a wee stretch anyway,’ said Mum, pushing her blanket back to me through the front seats.

I watched as my mother pulled herself slowly out the car door and onto her feet. She took a few stiff steps forward and, leaning on a picnic table, shook out her 80-year-old bones. Then she turned and headed back to the car, carefully lowering herself back into the passenger seat before lifting her flask again.

‘You won’t offend this man, will you?’ she asked. ‘He’s a good man. They helped me when I really needed it.’

I heard the scrape of the flask being opened.

‘Evelyn … ?’

‘Mother?’

‘Remember—just because a thought enters your head doesn’t mean it needs to come out your mouth. Promise me you won’t offend this man.’

I opened my mouth and closed it again.

After the early deployment of the emergency flask, we weren’t long back on the road when Mum declared a toilet stop was needed. Then another twenty miles later. In the end, it took three hours and 45 minutes to traverse three counties west and cross the border where our roads became narrow and steep.

On Mum’s directions, I drove up a grass-covered road before turning into a tight laneway. It took us sharply upwards into a forest where an enormous farmhouse appeared in a clearing. It was a long, low bungalow with pebble-dashed walls and solar panels, framed by full leaf trees shifting in the high wind. There’s big money in the curing game if this home is anything to judge by, I thought to myself.

‘Pull up there,’ ordered Mum, pointing to an outbuilding she declared to be ‘the home house’. This whitewashed and thickly built cottage was where, she said, the Seventh Son and his siblings were all born and raised by a valiant mother. A generation before, his own father had entered its walls as the pioneer seventh son.

Now sitting in the shadow of the new-build farmhouse, it’s what I’d imagine any other farmer would use for equipment or feed. The Seventh Son, being a gifted man, used it instead to run his side business of curing.

A smiling Mrs Seventh Son appeared from behind the bungalow— presumably alerted by the screaming baby—and invited us into the old cottage.

‘John’s held up by a few minutes,’ she said. ‘They’re just gathering in the last hay from the bottom fields and it’s taking longer than expected with this awful weather. Isn’t it like autumn already? He’ll be here shortly and sure, don’t I want to hear all about how the arthritis is going since we last saw you?’

Mum outlined in forensic detail how arthritis continued to blight her bones—‘I’m pure riddled but, oh, The Cure definitely took the edge off!’—as Mrs Seventh Son took the baby for a tour of the kitchen on her hip. The baby resisted at first, crying and pushing against her. Mrs Seventh Son bounced the angry guest on her hip, singing an old song about a farmer who lived on a mountain, until a teary smile erupted.

‘How many children do you have yourself?’ I asked.

‘Just three daughters. No seven sons for me, thank goodness!’ she laughed.

The door latch lifted and in strode a farmer, kicking off green wellies and throwing his cap onto a chair. It was the Seventh Son of the Seventh Son himself.

‘Girls, I am so sorry to keep youse waiting,’ he said. ‘Gimme me two seconds to wash my hands and then we’ll have a look at this poor wee lamb.’

Mrs Seventh Son retrieved from the fridge what looked like a small

roll of butter wrapped in baking paper and set it on the kitchen table. She handed an unusually quiet baby to Mum who settled her on her lap and turned her towards the Seventh Son.

The Seventh Son of the Seventh Son returned with a bowl of murky, oily water and kneeled before the baby. He chose the angriest patch of eczema on her cheek, dipped his thumb in the liquid and rubbed it gently on the oozing, raw sore. The baby cried at his touch.

He did the same again, this time on a clear patch of skin sitting perfectly in the middle of the baby’s forehead. He circled and soothed this spot with this thumb, whispering words I couldn’t hear. The baby began to quieten as he continued to whisper and circle his thumb on her forehead. Now completely calm, the baby snuffled and smiled at this funny man.

Mum looked profoundly moved by the ritual. Her eyes were closed and her always-busy face was at peace. I, too, began to feel a strange sense of serenity, broken when the Seventh Son stopped and stood.

‘There you are now, see how that goes,’ he said.

‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you do every patch of eczema?’

‘No. Treating just the one spot does the trick,’ he said. ‘All the patches will be gone soon, and that worst one will be the last to fade.’

I made a face. Mum made a face at my face as Mrs Seventh Son handed over the wrapped roll of butter.

‘Once the oozing clears a bit, rub this on the same patch once a day

until you run out,’ she said.

I reached for my purse and asked how much I owed them.

‘Oh goodness no, we don’t take payment,’ Mrs Seventh Son said, her hand flying to her chest. ‘John has a gift. It’s his duty to help others.’

Mum glared at me as she pulled a large Tupperware box and something covered in a pristine tea towel from her bag.

‘I would be delighted if you would enjoy some of my own traybakes,’ she said, handing the box over. ‘There’s a fresh wheaten for you too.’

‘Oh, delicious! The bread is still warm. Thank you so much,’ Mrs Seventh Son said.

The journey back to Belfast, as is Mum’s rule for every day out, cannot be done in one go. I reluctantly agreed to stop at a border hotel for a late lunch. I knew the request was coming, as it did every time we passed this hotel, and I reneged only out of needing to feed the baby.

We were surprised, on this Monday, to see the bar packed with scores of young men, suited in black, as a waitress greeted us like old friends.

‘C’mon in, ladies,’ she said. ‘Ach, look at this wee one. Look at those big blue eyes! I’m afraid we’ve no room in the bar at the minute, but, if you don’t mind, there’s a lovely fire lit out in the foyer and I’ll set you up a table beside it.’

We ordered soup, sandwiches and tea before Mum clipped a babbling baby out of her car seat, wincing as she hoisted her onto her knee to sing a song of sixpence.

We ate in silence. Mum let me eat first while she jiggled the baby, before gifting her back to me only for the duration of her own lunch.

‘Did I ever tell you about all the times me and your daddy used to come to the dances in this old hotel? Before we moved to Belfast… before we had you.’

‘Yes, Mum. Many times. Every single time we pass here, in fact.’

More silence.

‘What did you make of the Seventh Son?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t they such charming people?’

‘You mean apart from it being a load of old nonsense?’

‘Ach now, don’t be harsh,’ she said.

‘It reminded me of the time you and dad trailed me 200 miles around the country after that con woman’s bones,’ I went on.

‘Saint Thérèse? But sure didn’t we have a great day out then too?’

We smiled at exactly the same time, breaking into laughter just as the waitress appeared.

‘What has you ladies so amused?’ she asked, lifting away our bowls.

Mum asked if she remembered the time Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s bones had toured Ireland.

‘I do indeed. Sure I went to see her myself,’ the waitress said.

‘Evelyn here does not believe in the healing power of Saint Thérèse,’ she said. ‘She really, really did not want to come with me and her father to see her. So you can imagine her face when we made her queue for hours in a chapel to touch the casket. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, her father pretended to have a limp as he walked towards the bones.’

My face reddened as Mum recalled my embarrassment when daddy touched the casket glass, ever so gently and devoutly, before pretending that an uncontrollable shaking had seized his limping leg. The same leg on which he danced out the chapel door.

The waitress was still laughing as she walked away.

‘He sounds like some character,’ she called back.

‘He certainly was,’ said Mum.

With the tension dissolved, I decided to ask the hard question wedged between us.

‘Have you come to a decision on the chemo?’

Mum gazed down at the baby. ‘I’m not doing more chemo, darling.’

Silence.

‘I’ve had a blessed life and it’s greedy to ask for more at my age. All chemo can do is buy a little extra time. We both know it wouldn’t be good time. I can’t face chemo again. I want to be as well as I can for the time I have left with you. I want to make the most of this wee one here for the short time I have her.’

Silence.

‘I’m sorry, Evelyn. I miss your daddy desperately.’

Mum stared into the baby’s eyes as though her words had never been spoken. The baby stared back, devotion and adoration flowing between them.

I sat back in the high winged chair, clasped my hands across my lap, closed my eyes and tried to steady my breathing. I realised I already knew this decision was coming. When the burning deep behind my eyes faded, I opened them to find Mum rubbing circles with her thumb in the middle of the baby’s forehead, whispering words I couldn’t hear. The baby’s eyelids grew heavy and her breathing slowed. Her little arms kept fidgeting and fighting. One arm jerked up and down and a final attempt to put her fist in her mouth was abandoned. She took one deep, shuddering intake of breath before breaking their eye contact to search for something, anything, more interesting than sleep. The soft, thin wrinkles of Mum’s thumb kept circling and soothing, circling and soothing, circling and soothing. The baby’s eyes closed, fluttered open and closed once more as she tucked her hand under her chin and sighed.

I closed my eyes again and, in the heat of crumbling embers, I too began to feel sleep tug at me. I thought about the roll of butter sitting

on the table, melting. As I let sleep pull me away, I knew my mother would sit there as long as it took. She would drink in the baby’s perfect face, the turf fire and her memories of young love. Until one of us woke, she would sit as still and as peacefully as was needed.

Clare Duffy

Lost Boy

Today is his seventeenth birthday. He sits in a cafe in the city. It is one of those chain ones that make a go at making this city-that-isnothing-like-Italy look Italian in here but in a franchise- impersonal way that makes people feel comfortable and trusting of their order here. He picked this spot because it was close to where Grace lives and far from where he lives and he has text Grace to confirm the plans about four times to make sure she still wanted to commit to this plan that they made to meet here.

So he’s sitting at a table by the window waiting for Grace and wondering what being seventeen would be like.

His mates were excited for this birthday. They said things like you’re a proper man now mate and his Ma didn’t like those mates and maybe didn’t like the idea of him being a proper man either.

He’s getting a bit nervy now waiting for her. He’s thinking he should have picked somewhere nice not this shithole. He thinks about the last time he saw her and he starts fucking blushing. He rubs his hand over his head fast all mortified and raging at himself and he shrugs up his coat to make sure anybody who just saw him blush like a melt knows he’s hard actually.

He thinks about the first time he saw her. When his Ma took him to

work the odd time because she’d nobody to mind him. His Ma worked for Grace’s Da and sometimes Grace would be picked up and come to her Da’s office after school for an hour or two. So they were just tiny kids and she was a little girl with patent shoes and frilly socks and he was in gutties that were scrappers. She wore pretty pastels and she was so pretty he’d never seen anything like it. She said;

Hi, I’m Grace.

And he was floored there and then. Wee kid him thinking well you are fucked now mate.

He thinks about how different their lives got since then.

He does things like vape and sign on and sell weed about the estate for a bit of extra cash like boys his age did where he lived.

She does things like swim in cold water for fun. She is at university now. He makes a mental note to ask her about this. Then he takes out his phone and types an actual note so he won’t forget.

His Ma worked there cleaning until his Da who was a bit of a prick turned up and got into a fight with his Ma’s boss, Grace’s Da and then his Ma ended up losing her job and he didnt get to see Grace every week.

He started going out in the city as a teenager and one night she came up to him in a bar and said;

I have a photo of me and you as a toddler in my parents living room. Do you remember me?

He remembered her. He was lucky he was only a bit drunk and knew not to say what was running through his head as he looked at her all grown up and gorgeous and smiling all coy thinking he’d no idea who she was.

Grace remembered his drunk Da beating up her suit wearing BMW owning Da. He said; Sorry about that.

They got talking and she told him about her friends and her plans and he said his Da like a lot of Da’s left him and his Ma, not long after his Da hit her Da and got his Ma fired. They had him young and his Da probably didn’t know how to deal with a son, he reckoned, and had smacked him about a bit and his Ma too. They weren’t together any more and he couldn’t remember them being together ever anyway or what he looked like. He remembered his fists though. So did Grace’s Da.

He knew from mates and from people about where he lived that his Da had been in prison for something he didn’t do but because of the name he had no one believed that he wasn’t involved in the thing that happened that he wasn’t part of. So for that he was tortured a wee bit. Now in the cafe he spots Grace out the window he thinks that she is like flying. He feels himself get a bit lighter and like he could take flight himself any second just looking at her.

He can’t stop fucking smiling but she smiles back and rushes over to him.

They talk for so long and about everything.

She asks how his Ma is. No one asks him that because his Ma had been in the hospital that everyone named with eyebrows raised as if you were giving a secret away. It was a hospital for people who were mad in the head like his Ma. And not like having anxiety or some wee mental health problem that people had nowadays, his Ma was mad back in the day and sort of a wee bit off-her-rocker a lot of the time and he was well used to it and everybody in the estate knows about his Ma because she dhad to be in-and-out a lot of the time and like medical and social worker people had to come see her on account of her being a-headcase and where he lived people knew who was coming in-and-out- of-the-estate and took note of that.

But when Grace asks about his Ma now, he tells her that she’s not been in hospital for a while and that this is a relief.

He hasn’t said that out loud to anyone before.

Grace tells him that she is on antidepressants herself and she gets it. Not completely she didn’t want to sound like she was being dismissive, she said, but she can imagine how hard that was for him growing up, she said. She says she’s sorry she wasn’t there.

He doesn’t know what to say to this and for a second he might cry and he hasn’t cried since he was a tiny kid. He asks her if she is OK now.

She said the doctor told her that her problem was existential and he didn’t know what this meant but it sounded serious and she said he’d sent her home with a prescription that would sort her out and fix her and let her get some sleep.

He finds himself telling Grace about four boys the street away who had died around the same time last year like dominoes of dying like it was catching. He’d sold to them and the fact that they used was made a big thing of but he couldn’t help but think the real problem was that they only saw a way through on something and when they couldn’t, they died. He hears himself say to Grace stuff like;

Life mustn’t have been easy and sure like it’s all well and good saying go to your doctor about your head but even the ones who feel up to talking just go on a list like.

And sure they just tell you to go to A&E or to take a prescription drug and not weed and try not to think about the past and try not to drink too much like that’s not what everybody here does — and it’s not like he’s an alcho it’s just how things are you know? And it’s just what you do with your mates like and sure it’s all good. Sure he saw his doctor in the pub last week.

And how would you even look for a therapist or how would you even know you needed one like it’s not as if he has it as bad as other people and sure he knows what his own Da went through and he never fucking told anybody. And Da’s are in short supply around here but your mates Da’s all have shit they saw or went through and sure look at your own Ma and you’re not like her so count yourself lucky because you handle shit and even if you feel like you can’t you fucking have to kid.

Grace asks him how he is and he thinks;

Jesus why is she asking such a big and complicated question.

She reaches across and takes his hand.

He stops talking but they sit in silence. Her holding his hand like this for a bit. It’s nice like.

He is thinking there should be AA but for lads whose Mas were tramps. He doesn’t say this to Grace.

He got into this highfalutin grammar school where boys from where he was from didn’t go to usually and his Ma really wanted him to go to fly away. He dropped out after his GCSEs but when he got in his Ma was so proud. Men he never saw before were in the house a couple of days before he started that September. They told him that he worked for them now and saw this new school as a new market for their supply and his Ma was saying it’s-OK and don’t-worry and she was smiling at him and nodding as they were talking but she was picking at skin around her fingernails and her hands shook when she tried to light her feg.

He worked out later that his Ma borrowed money from men with guns for his fancy new uniform and his fancy new life and she didn’t know that these men would rather own her and have her on a retainer than get their money back. And he thought he was paying them back with selling at school but he realised they made her work for them to work back her debt and they made her a fucking tramp like he used to come home from school with another stranger man in the house and he fucking hated her then.

He didn’t tell Grace this. But he thought that he maybe could. You couldn’t trust your shadow where he was from but he thought he might like to trust her.

They are staring into each others eyes now and he wants to knock on Grace’s bedroom window and say to her let’s get away out of here to fuck. She was so pretty with her peach dress and her daintyhands holding his and he bets she has the best stories and would like adventures if he asked her on one. +

He was kind of tired from talking and he had got used to not saying a lot and he didn’t look people in the eye really and even though he was a tall lad and a broad lad, he sort of folded himself into spaces and made himself look less big. He hadn’t seemed to do that here with Grace.

They said goodbye and she leant up and looked him in the eye and put her arms around him;

This was nice.

Yeah.

And then she kissed him — on the cheek like, but then he kissed her. Proper like. +

He is walking home.

When he left his Ma was watching one of her shows that was named after the English detective that the show was about. She had set out a cake and a present for him and he shouted thanks Ma and she said he can open them later and they’d get a takeaway.

He forgot to ask Grace about uni. Shit.

He lights a smoke.

He thinks about how he’s doing now. Since she asked. He’d kind of worked his way up he supposes.

The men-with-guns sent him to the food bank and asked him to make a list of people in the area that he saw in line so he went there and made a wee list. He didn’t want to think about the why and the Ma’s of the boys he knew from about the estate that he wrote the names of. Maybe they were going to help the families. He tried to push away words like target and hook and scouting out. He’s angry out of nowhere and tries shrug it off as he forwards his list.

Most vulnerable. On a retainer. Scout out.

On the hook.

You are lost, boy.

Lose lips. Don’t talk, talk is cheap but therapy is so fucking dear and getting high is easier and cheaper anyway.

Now he’s walking home and his favourite song plays and it sounds like her.

It sounds plans he wants to make

It sounds like a life he can’t even dream up

It’s about runways and making it out and to another place faraway where you didn’t have to grow up until you wanted to, and not when you were eleven and men told you that you have a job now you were part of a chain now you’re part of this big existing adult ugly thing now. It is raining and then he smiles broad like smiling is something he does easily or often. He thinks of Grace. +

He gets home. The birthday present is still there but his Ma isn’t. Her bedroom door is closed and her light comes through the bottom dim. Shit. She only sleeps in the daytime when she’s in a bad way. He didn’t see any signs of her having an episode and he’s thinking he probably should call her doctor when her door opens and there is a man he’s never seen before. The man leaves her bedroom and catches his eye awkwardly as he passes him in the doorway. Head down but chest puffed up like he has every right to be there, son.

His Ma comes out, she holds a couple of twenties. I thought you’d be later darlin’—

He doesn’t want to hear it. Fucking slag. Fucking joke. He can’t stand her right now. He thought she’d stopped this. He turns his back on her leaves slams the door in her as she tries to follow him throwing lies at him.

He walks out of the house in the rain sees his Ma’s new wee shitty flower beds all nice and he’s thinking where does she get the time to do that when she’s busy tramping about? He goes to annihilate a pile of these flower-fuckers, walks through deep puddles of water like a tantrum, like the anti-christ fucking the miracle-job up, feet all wet

but does he give a shite?

He gets out his phone. Gets up Grace’s number, thumb hovering over her name.

She’s like a wendy-bird and doesn’t Wendy get shot down for being associated with somebody like him.

He puts his phone away. He stamps out petals flying all about the place. Fuck. This. He walks through rain kicking it up and bangs the door of his mate’s house across the road, until his mate answers putting a T-shirt on, taking in him all soaked and raging;

Want to get fucked up?

Conal McManus

The Fad

Anna sat on the rug, crossed-legged, like a figurine clad in the blue jumper, skirt and grey tights of Birchill Primary. The youngest in her class, today she turned ten. Naturally, there was only one present she wanted, but since her Dad had stopped going to work, spending his days out in his shed, Anna hadn’t asked him for it. She’d hoped he would guess.

Mum sat on the settee showing her clenched teeth, making wide eyes as if to say ‘exciting’. Anna was about to tell her she was worried for her Dad when he came into the living room carrying something black and white and rectangular. As he sat down on the settee, Anna saw that the cuffs of his tartan shirt held curls of wood shavings. He handed her the present, wrapped in The Daily Mail, and she caught a glimpse of the headline:

‘MIRACLE WORKER: PM PASSES NEW LAW ON MIRACLES’

As she tore into the pages stuck here and there with tape, her Dad said:

‘I had to send away for it specially off the internet. From a fella — I mean a fella with a shop far away. You can’t get it in any shop here, so you can’t. That’s why it has no proper packaging. But don’t be telling anyone that. It’s a secret.’ Her Dad put his fingers to his lips. Mum was staring at him, and when she saw Anna watching her, she smiled.

‘They might get jealous,’ Mum said.

Anna shifted, rustling the shredded tabloid in her lap. It had been covering a black shoebox, the white letters of ‘FILA’ on the lid. She opened it, reached in and took out a small, smooth piece of carved wood. An idol. It was about the width of a Freddo and the length of a Twix. The wood it was made from, though, was far darker, like dark chocolate. It wasn’t like the ones the rest of her class owned: it was only partly human. In the torso, its arms were crossed like Tutankhamun. The head was a squid, with a beard of tentacles, while the legs were two snakes, intertwined.

Anna glanced up at her Dad. He was flexing the fingers of his right hand and rubbing the wrist.

‘It’s funny looking,’ she said.

‘But it can do everything the others can,’ Mum said. ‘Right, Hugh?’

‘Oh aye,’ her Dad said. ‘Even some things they can’t.’

‘How much was it?’ Anna asked.

‘Oh,’ Dad said, ‘it cost enough.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

Anna rubbed the smooth, oily wood.

‘It’s a big responsibility, honey,’ her Mum said.

‘I know, Mum,’ Anna looked at her Dad. ‘Does it have a name?’

He drew back into the settee. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘A very rare name. Urnal.’

Anna stared at him. ‘What?’ she said. ‘UR-NAL?’ She squeezed the idol in her hand. She couldn’t help it: the tears came out. ‘They’ll call it ‘urinal’! Like what boys wee in!’

‘No they won’t.’

‘Yes, they will! Everyone’ll laugh at me! It even looks like a willy!’

‘Now now,’ Mum said, turning to her husband. ‘Is there no way to change it?’

‘I can’t, it’s final,’ Dad said. It’s what makes the whole thing work, sure. The naming of it.’

‘Well,’ Mum said, ‘I think it’s a grand name. I’ll have it if you won’t.’ She reached out to take the idol, but Anna drew it to her chest. ‘Will we give it a try then?’

Anna rubbed her eyes with her palm and nodded. She looked at the idol in her fist, studying its finish, its quality, only to find the tiniest depression in the grain below the squiddy eye. Like the residual mark of a chisel.

The next morning, Anna hung her parka and schoolbag up in the cloakroom. She’d asked her Dad to drop her in early, so only the breakfast-club kids were in.

Leaving her zip-folder in her bag and taking only her pencil case, she made her way down the cold linoleum corridor. The school was quiet except for the slam of a door, and through the windows that looked out onto the playground, there was a clean morning mist.

Doing her deep breathing like Mum showed her—in, oooouuuttt, in, ooooouuuttt—Anna turned into her classroom. Instead of Miss O’Connor at her desk, there was one of the lunchtime supervisors. The one who was half deaf. She was reading The Big Issue and the clock above her mass of curly blonde hair read eight-thirty.

Anna sat at her desk that was part of a larger group-table. Across from her, Ben was sitting picking crumbs off his blue jumper, lipping them down. Before him was the maths worksheet set for homework. He tried a sum. After a minute, he itched his buzz-cut and reached for his pocket.

‘Shit,’ he said and looked up at Anna who smiled. ‘What’re you gawking at, Weasley?’

Ben had first called her it in P4 because she was ginger, before he saw her Dad in his ripped jeans and bleached Lacoste polo on parents

evening. After that, he’d made sure the whole class called her it purely on a financial basis.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Anna.

‘My idol’s in my bag.’

Anna felt her breath shorten, but she got the words out: ‘Want to borrow mine?’

Ben stared. ‘Go on, then.’

Anna unzipped her pencil case and took out her idol. Urnal. Setting it on the table, Ben laughed.

‘Look at the hack of that!’

Anna ignored him. With her idol, she’d help. Then he would see. The whole class would see her differently.

She took the worksheet from Ben.

‘Urnal,’ she said, ‘what is thirty-five percent of one-thousand-twohundred?’

Nothing happened.

Ben laughed again, harder now. ‘Whatever bin your Da found that in, he should’ve left it there, Weasley.’

Anna felt the tears coming. She scribbled down ‘420’, flung the page across the table and rushed out of the classroom.

She didn’t understand. She’d tried her idol at home. It had worked. It had turned a bag of salt into caster sugar.

Heading for the toilet, she passed the cloakroom where Caoimhe and Meave were hanging up their coats. They saw Anna and quickly scarpered away, giggling. When they were gone, Anna saw that her bag, in some cruel miracle, had been turned from canvas into ermine. Now it had no zip and she had to tear it apart to get her folder out.

By break-time, word had got around. Anna heard Caoimhe whisper across the table to Orla, saying that the reason Anna’s idol was so different was because it wasn’t second, but third-hand. She stared into

her tattered pencil case, at the idol hidden behind her few stumpy colouring pencils and scavenged rubbers.

Orla sniggered, but catching Anna’s wet glance, replied with: ‘No. That’s fibs.’

Standing nearby, tree-like in her long, brown, loose-fitting gown that hid her body, Miss O’Connor scolded all three girls for talking.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘who can tell me what faith is measured in? You remember yesterday when we talked about units?’ Miss O’Connor looked around. ‘Anyone? John, you must know seeing as you’re so content staring out the window.’

‘Is it tons, Miss?’

‘Nope. Anyone else?’

‘Watts?’

‘Nope. Someone must have been listening— ah, yes Anna?’

‘Nietzschums, Miss.’

‘That’s right! Nietzschums. After who? Does anyone know which philosopher?’

‘Marcus Rashford,’ Ben said.

The class laughed; all except Anna.

‘Quiet down,’ said Miss O’Connor. ‘I’m going to hope that was a joke. Come on, someone else. Much older. The clue’s in the na—’

‘Friedrich Nietzsche.’

‘Put up your hand to answer Anna, but yes, that’s right. Nietzsche. Who can tell me why he mattered?’ Miss O’Connor began to walk round the room, her shoes slapping the linoleum. ‘Orla.’

‘Did he say God was gone?’

‘Almost right. He said God was dead. And why does that matter?’

‘Cause it opened the market, Miss.’

‘Hands up, Ciaran. But yes, that’s right. It opened the way for other gods to come in.’

Anna looked over her shoulder at Ciaran. Him, with his blond hair,

round face and his dad who dropped him off in a Jaguar. Him, with a new idol every month.

Miss O’Connor brushed her hair off her face. ‘And how do we regulate so many gods?’ She looked around the pencil cases. ‘How do we stop it from being total pandemonium?’

Ciaran’s hand shot up. ‘Licences, Miss.’

‘Yes, and regulated production. Only allowing certain necessary features. Like in cars. But unlike cars, it’s only legal to buy them through registered shops. No one is allowed to make a god-of-one’s own, so to speak.’

Anna stared at her idol and remembered what her Dad had said about the internet; about the way he had been rubbing and flexing his fingers and wrist, like he would when he’d come in after hours in his shed.

She stuck up her hand but as her fingers poked the air, the bell rang for lunch and there was the scream-choir of chairs.

Through the window of the canteen, the day was clear. Only some clouds, wispy as the principal’s hair.

Anna sat with Orla and the rest of the girls. She watched as everyone took out their lunches, then, with a cacophony of knocks, their idols. Theirs were the standard omnipresent omniscients, bought from the shops in blister packs.

She watched Susan beseech Fubraxa and turn her water into orange juice. Since Caoimhe had a Babybel, she agreed to multiply it with her own Fubraxa and feed the throng of onlookers. Orla, being lactose intolerant, whispered to her little man in a bowler hat: Gregorak. Her Petits Filous changed hue from pink to white, presumably now free of milk. But Anna knew from sitting beside her that some days that miracle failed.

Slowly taking out her own idol from her skirt pocket, she set it on

the table; the squid head and serpent legs looking even stupider than before.

All went quiet with everyone watching — even Ben and the rest of the boys at the next table over.

With a shaking hand, Anna placed a banana on the table before the idol and spoke its name, asking ‘Urnal’ to make it an apple.

There were giggles, then laughter when nothing happened. Anna felt her cheeks get hot. Planning to leave, she went to pick up her banana. There was a rumble of thunder. Orla shrieked. The sky outside turned grey and the yellow fruit melted into a crescent of sugar. Anna smiled, sticking her finger into it, and looking at the crowd, brought it to her mouth.

Her face screwed up. It was salt.

Back in class, they moved onto maths. On the board, Miss O’Connor wrote out questions of long division.

Ten minutes in, Anna was still on question one. She tried to focus, block out the whispers. With her pencil, she carried a two and put down a three. That was wrong. She reached into her pencil case for her rubber, making her idol clack onto the table.

Miss O’Connor turned and tutted.

‘No idols out in class, Anna.’

Anna nodded. Miss O’Connor came and stood over her, brushing her long gown.

‘How far are you? Oh, still on the first question?’

Everyone was watching. Through bleary eyes, Anna grabbed the idol and went to shove it back into her pencil case, when a cracking sound outside shook the windows.

Miss O’Connor gasped, as if all the air had jettisoned her lungs. Leaning on the edge of the table, her face drooped as she looked at Anna with dilating pupils — a pulsing black rot in rings of hazel.

Suddenly, the teacher’s irises became fixed and with a gush she fell out of her gown into a mushy pile of bone and blood.

Orla screamed the loudest, right in Anna’s ear, while the others were backing away to the far corner. Caoimhe screamed ‘Murderer!’ while Ciaran used the emergency phone in his sock to call his dad, crying.

Anna pulled her feet up onto her chair, away from the mess spreading out over the linoleum, the smell like ‘off’ burgers. Just as the fear came over her proper, she caught sight of the idol in her hand with its dark eye.

With another rumble of thunder and a deafening slurping sound, the bloody mush reformed into Miss O’Connor, albeit naked, wideeyed and with her hair blitzed. She really was very thin.

.

In one corner of the vast walnut desk, a small dehumidifier droned, while to the right of it stood the idol. Principal Flannagan learned forward, resting his hands flat on either side of it.

‘I hope you both understand,’ he said, ‘given what happened earlier, certain questions are invoked.’

On her right, Anna saw her Mum nod slightly; on her left, her Dad hummed in agreement. He was dressed in clean jeans and his one fancy striped shirt.

‘Not only did Anna smite her teacher, but she also resurrected her.’ The principal’s hands stood upright, like two walls on either side of the idol. ‘All because of this.’

‘It brought her back, right enough?’ her Dad said.

‘It did.’

‘So,’ her Dad said, ‘no harm done.’

‘You know well enough that that is not the point, Mr Reilly. This thing broke the law.’ The principal took his hands away and clicked twice on his desktop’s mouse. ‘Anna tells me you acquired it via the internet.’

Anna stared at her Dad. He didn’t look at her. ‘That’s right. From a licenced company.’

The principal’s hands rested on the keyboard. ‘What’s the name, if you don’t mind?’

Her Dad tensed his jaw. ‘I forget.’

‘Do you care to admit, Mr Reilly, that you made this thing yourself?’

Her Dad was silent.

‘You’ll understand, then, that I have certain legal obligations.’

Mum gasped. ‘No, wait! He was just trying to keep Anna happy. All the bullying she gets, it’s all because you allow these bloody things in here … and all this snobbery. He just lost his job — how could he afford one!’

‘I’m sorry Mrs Reilly, but the children have their rights. Our school is no different.’

Her Dad was staring at the idol on the desk. He was rigid, like a figure himself. Anna tugged at his shirt sleeve. He finally looked down at her and smiled that half-smile that meant ‘don’t worry.’

The principal’s landline rang, and he answered. ‘Yes, Geraldine. Send them through.’ Flannagan put the phone back and looked to Anna’s Dad. ‘I told the Bishop-Constable you’re a rational man, Mr Reilly; that you would go willingly.’ As the principal stood up, he cleared his throat and puffed his chest. ‘So please don’t—’ he began, but stopped as the dehumidifier trailed off into the silence. He looked at it, then back to Anna’s Dad, then to the idol on the desk.

From outside came the unmistakable rumble of thunder.

Connor Donahue

Buffalo Hides

There were signs all over Yellowstone showing little stick figure men being gored and thrown bodily through the air by bison. The animals’ tracks left deep gauges in the mud of the campsite, wending neatly, almost daintily, through the hundreds of pitched tents. We saw one in the gloaming on our last night, a monolith blocking out the moonlight in the middle distance, and I froze with fear. My girlfriend carried on ahead of me, heedless, and after waiting for a backwards glance I followed her.

Her hips were boxy and she had been a model and now she made paintings about drowned witches. I was twenty-three, my father dead a little over a year. I’d wanted to go camping on my own the week after his death, a low cunning directing me to the woods, but somehow I’d ended up here with her. She stuck out sorely like alabaster in the darkness as she walked ahead. We left Yellowstone the next day.

We’d seen things. The Grand Tetons rising mauve and austere, 10 million years of vertical clawing, a nascent mass of sheer drops and razor spires scraping against the clouds. Old growth forests that rippled and swayed in the ocher, pitching and rolling across the hills in ceaseless waves. Technicolor thermal pools in parched cracked earth that spit and hissed in some dim, prehistoric tongue. I was glutted and wanted more, always more.

But we were leaving, pointing south towards Colorado. We had everything we owned in the back of my car—the camping equipment we’d been living out of for almost a month, leather jackets and art

supplies, a stash of weed big enough to get us all the way from Seattle to New York. Somewhere better, somewhere else. My car had engine trouble but so far it had been fine.

My girlfriend sat in the passenger seat and I drove; not that she couldn’t have.

‘Which way?’ I asked her.

‘My phone isn’t working,’ she said.

We were at a T-junction at the south end of the park, eight hours to go to our next destination and just enough light to get there. Cece pulled out the road atlas.

‘I think we need to go right. Work around the edge of the park to catch 191.’

‘Can I see?’

She slid the atlas onto the center console and looked out the window.

‘It might be quicker through here,’ I said.

I traced a line to the left, along a skinny mountain pass barely visible in the thicket of veins and arteries criss-crossing the page.

‘That looks pretty sketchy,’ she said.

‘Could save us a couple hours, though.’

‘Maybe.’

That last had come from her chest, a challenge attached to it. I recognized the rumble, felt it rolling through the silence she left hanging.

‘What do you think we should do?’ I asked.

‘Whatever you want,’ she said.

I knew. I knew then, with the rock-solid, reasonless certainty normally only found in dreams what to do. I turned left anyway.

We weren’t speaking as we turned onto the mountain road. We’d almost missed it, kept rolling straight into the pastureland that abutted the forest. As we crawled up the asphalt, gaining grade with each passing tick of the odometer, I felt the apprehension mounting. It rankled me.

I kept looking forward, straining to see far enough out to anticipate our route. But the dense crowd of trees, hunched and whispering beside to the pass, revealed only the next bend and kink of the road ahead.

After twenty minutes the asphalt gave way grudgingly to gravel and the forest cut the guardrails off abruptly. It was twelve noon but the thick canopy turned the world to charcoal, an ashen sketch of grays smudged into vantablack the deeper we went. My grip tightened and the muscles in my neck bunched from the wariness.

‘I think we should turn back,’ she said.

‘It can’t be that much farther,’ I said. I looked in the rearview but the forest had gobbled up all of our progress. ‘And I don’t know if I’d have room to turn around.’

Which was true. The road had narrowed considerably and the drops to either side were harrowing.

‘I can try,’ she said.

‘It’s okay,’ I said.

‘It’s not that far.’

‘Let’s just see.’

We pressed on. Further up and further in, the clock on the dashboard ticking off minutes like petals being pulled from a flower. An hour and a half in, the first raindrops began pattering against the windshield.

They were a trickle at first, a light tapping from without. Soon, though, they became more insistent—unseen clouds, ovate and expectant, were unleashing fat drops that landed with a splash and clatter on the metal roof. As the storm increased in intensity it became all I could do to see the next five feet of road through the snap and rattle of my wipers.

Cece was quiet. Her eyes were no wider than normal but watching intently ahead too. I considered stopping, but who knew what could come bounding around the bend from before or behind and send us careening straight off the mountain? There was no choice. I ground us further on.

That time was frozen, bonded. I could feel her next to me, both of us peering into the gloom.

We came to the clearing twenty minutes later. The squall had passed on somewhere to the east and weak tendrils of sunlight were penetrating the cloud cover. There was open ground to either side of the road now and I pulled over.

‘This doesn’t feel like a shortcut,’ Cece said.

‘No it doesn’t,’ I said.

‘You always do this.’

‘Do what?’

But she’d gone mute again. She got out to use the restroom and I thought wildly of leaving her there.

‘Are you ready?’ I asked, when she got back in.

We’d only been driving another ten minutes, not yet out of the clearing, when a herd of cows blocked our path.

Free range mountain cows—something I didn’t even know existed—came streaming from left to right and clambered down the slope in search of pasture. We stopped in the middle of the road and watched them. Some of them were frightened, most didn’t seem to know we existed either, and all but one kept their distance.

A baby, maybe a year old, had squared up to the car. He saw us as a challenge and was ready to charge. I revved the engine but he made no movement. I let the car lurch forward slightly and still he held his ground. Finally, as we got within a couple of feet, he snorted and turned, sauntering off slowly after the rest of the herd.

‘You didn’t win that, you know,’ she said.

‘Alright,’ I said.

We continued on and gradually transitioned to a downslope. It was getting later and the light was weaker but the rain had stopped and there was nothing in the forest besides Cece and me. The going was easier, the weight of our things in the back of the vehicle pressing us on. Finally, after four hours, we came out of the forest.

As I stopped the car at another T-junction I could see the sign welcoming people to Yellowstone a few hundred yards to our right. I didn’t speak on it and Cece didn’t have to. I turned left, out onto the main road around the park, hoping to catch 191.

We were only a couple miles further on when we came upon a string of cars parked on the side of the road. I thought there’d been an accident but when we got closer we could see people standing about with cameras. To the left, in a field on the other side of the road, was a herd of buffalo.

We pulled to a stop. They were grazing in a field on the lee side of the mountain, the setting sun casting all in bronzed relief. It was hard to make out their horns from this distance, even in the light. I leaned back in the seat so Cece could collect a picture.

‘They’re really beautiful,’ I said.

Her polaroid clicked.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

I pulled back onto 191 and we drove on.

Darlene Corry

Terminal

It’s the dead heart of night. My lover Connie sleeps on her front, sprawled across the bed, her black hair splayed like a mermaid underwater. She’s utterly relaxed, soft as butter. I sit bolt upright, muscles rigid. I see a little girl in Pakistan, standing by a river. The swollen waters burst their banks, sweep her away, sweep away the village. I see towering infernos in California, the roaring flames eat and blacken the land. Devouring beavers, coyotes, wolverines, foxes, bears. I see thousands of miles of bleached coral in the Great Barrier Reef, spreading every year. I see the Amazon, endlessly burning. Ancient trees go up in smoke. I didn’t want to rent a cottage without Wi-Fi for the week. Turns out I don’t need to be in front of a screen to see the racing loops of footage. Eventually I drift off. I get up after a couple of hours’ sleep and make coffee. From the doorway I see Connie roll over and reach for me. There’s nothing but emptiness. Her eyes open and find mine. I can’t read them. When the coffee is ready, I pour us both a cup and sit beside her on the bed. We look out the window at lush green fields. The sea beyond is blue and silver glints, in constant, graceful sway. Something loosens inside. Connie moves our empty cups and wraps her arms around me. She holds me too tight. Even knowing it’s her, that I’m safe, that she loves me, I feel trapped. I stick it out as long as I can before I have to pull away. Too long for me, too short for Connie. Distance between us is given form, already. It’s a bad sign for it to start this early. Make or break holiday, she said. Connie doesn’t know I’m already broken.

Both of us are eager to leave the cottage. Connie drives fast and well, zooming around tight corners, up and down narrow, hilly roads. The sheep graze in fields sloping down to the sea, sturdy dry stone walls separating one parcel of land from another. Rain comes on, sudden and vicious. I pity the sheep, though they must be used to it by now.

‘Shame it’s turned out so wet,’ I say.

‘You know me, no bad weather, just bad clothing.’ Connie is the epitome of the outdoor dyke, eternally upbeat.

‘Not according to —’

‘Don’t say your data.’

‘I was going to say your customers.’

‘Wimps. Last month eight of the fuckers pulled out of a hike. I’ve half a mind to remove their cancellation option. I’m being bled dry here.’

I can’t help but laugh. ‘Seriously? You think that’s what’s wrong with this picture? It was an amber weather warning.’

‘It wasn’t that bad! Just a bit of wind and rain.’

‘We had the wettest July on record last year —’

‘Here we go Grace. Back to the fucking data.’

We drive the rest of the way in silence. When we get to Malin Head the sea is wild, currents smashing into one another. The rain has softened to mizzling. The rocky land underfoot is treacherous and wet, here at the end of the world, the most northerly point of Ireland. We soak up the thin, meagre sun, feel the pull of the wind down the cliff towards the sea. I can’t resist going right to the edge - a short step, and down I’d go. Connie gently takes my hand and pulls me back on the path to face her.

‘Do you remember Tenerife?’

I smile. Memories tumble in, a sprung leak in my brain. Staying in Puerto de la Cruz, cobbled streets and salt-smell off the water alongside the city. How good the food was. Honeyed goats cheese,

those garlic mushrooms. Such fresh fish. Doing yoga on the balcony in the morning under the sun, the sea below like a balm. Having sex in the same place in the evening, under the stars. That hot black sand at Playa Jardin, how it burned the soles of my feet, if I was stupid enough to walk on it without sandals. How we were happy.

Love floods me. I pull her into a quick hug, quick release.

She holds my hands tight. ‘God I miss the heat. Let’s go somewhere hot again soon.’

I look down at my feet.

‘Sorry, sorry, thinking aloud. No air miles.’

‘I just can’t do it, Connie.’

‘Right.’ Connie turns and kicks a stone in frustration, which ricochets off the uneven ground and straight into my shin.

‘Ow! What was that for?’

‘Shit, I didn’t mean it to hit you. Look, let’s just go to Kinnegoe now.’

We stop on the way to eat our lunch at the viewing point. I wish we’d never left Inishowen. But I needed to be closer to my work.

I walk my favourite beach with a sense of contentment that feels alien. Connie climbs the rocks with ease. A young couple walk ahead, singing to a baby in the woman’s arms. The sand is heaped high, no one would guess there were so many rocks underneath, exposed at neap tides and other moon-pulling events. I’ve never known a beach change as much as this one does. Even the armchair rock is almost submerged, just the tip of it showing. No sitting in that remarkably comfortable stone seat today. The sea calls me and I turn to it. The clouds above are mackerel scales, the wide bay cups so much life below the surface. There are more kinds of blue in the water than I have words for. Further out, the polar caps are melting, far faster than we predicted. Unlocking ancient stores of methane, flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The seas are rising worldwide, unstoppable. I see the tidal

wave rise, with a massive, sucking sound, the wall of water impossibly high. It hovers at some equidistant point for a second, then thunders down with such violence, smashes me and Connie, the couple and the baby—

‘Hey Grace!’ Connie holds up a small, perfect, conch shell. ‘Come check this out!’

My heart beats wildly, but the sea is calm. My mind is no longer objective, logical, rational. I’ve lost the qualities that make me a good scientist. My job is to collect and assess data, make predictions. But I can no longer reduce events to graphs and numbers. I kept watching the footage at work, news reports or shaky phone footage. I’ve had two verbal warnings and a written one, with the word ‘obsession’ in it. It came with an almost-order to see someone, which I’ve ignored. I’ve told Connie none of this. Now I watch at home, late at night, while Connie sleeps. I’m called to it, compelled to bear witness.

I may be losing my mind. Certainly I may lose Connie, if I can’t pull myself back from this brink. Her face is red from the climb, eyes sparkling. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, still pulls my heart like the moon pulls on the tides. I try to relax, to sink into this moment, this here-ness.

‘In a minute!’ I stride to the water’s edge and plunge my hands into the cold sea. The shock catapults me back into my body. I take a deep breath, the air cool on my face, and for a moment I know peace. Sand squeaks agreeably under my feet. The beauty of this place calms me, as always.

It’s good to be somewhere this remote. I can imagine it surviving long after humans have wiped themselves off the planet, like someone scrubbing shit off their shoe. Though the place will be pretty empty, 60% of animal species already annihilated. The names of the dead, the long and recent extinct are a litany in my head: the Crescent nailtail wallaby, the Caspian tiger, the Siamese flat-barbelled catfish,

the Pyrenean ibex, the Pinta giant tortoise, the West African black rhinoceros… the list goes on and on, and I can tune back into it like a radio playing softly in the background, always on. Each week I add more. There have been mass extinction events before, but none so brutally quick, none with the earth’s core temperature rising so fast, and it will keep on rising, and rising —

‘Are you coming then?’

I try and be here, I do, over and over again. My feet take me to Connie, who hasn’t given up on me yet. I pull myself back to now, like snapping an elastic band into the core of me. It twangs, fucking painful. Being present isn’t easy—those mindfulness books are full of shite. She hands me the shell and I listen to the sea, a world within a world. The sun is out now, strong and full, and we throw our heads back to bask.

‘Glorious, isn’t it?’ He’s walking towards us with a vacuous smile, already I don’t like him. ‘No fires or floods here. Look at this sunshine!’

‘Grace, don’t.’ Connie is already pulling me away, but I can’t, I can’t let this one lie.

‘You tosser, this isn’t a suntan event. The climate crisis is reaching all corners of the globe!’ I shout the last words as Connie drags me towards the car.

Our next stop is near where we used to live, a decade ago. It feels like it’s been much longer than that, and also like I could have woken up here this morning. I’ve missed the bog, the pitted earth, the tufty grass concealing the dangers below. If you don’t pay attention to the contact between your feet and the ground, you can easy turn an ankle. The dank fertileness of this place, the rich smell. The purple heather spreads like tapestry. Tall hedges border the winding path, and twisted trees atop of gnarled roots thrust their naked branches to the sky. I remember how like bones they looked, white and exposed against a blood-red sunset. The gorse is thick in the fields and hedges, such

iridescent yellow. Connie crushes the little flowers and brings back the delicious smell on her fingers to my nose.

‘Why does it smell like coconut?’ she asks.

‘There are many things about the natural world I actually don’t know.’

That elfish grin that I adore emerges. Then it fades away, completely. I don’t like the look in her eyes.

‘We need to talk Grace. You keep pulling away from me, emotionally. Physically. Any further and I don’t think we’re going make it.’ The wind rustles the hedges. She tucks her hair behind her ear. And waits.

‘I don’t know what you want from me Connie.’

‘I want you to talk to me, help me work out how we can keep going. The planet isn’t the only thing in trouble.’

‘We’re not in trouble!’ My voice is harsh, loud. I can’t talk about this; her love is the only thing that sustains me. I turn and walk away fast, ignoring her calls. She’s not wrong about the planet. I study ecosystems. I see the destabilisation of major planetary systems, usually in perfect balance, now spinning further and further out of true. Circles stretched into unstable ellipses, wobbling dangerously. The Gulf Stream will collapse soon, between seventy-five years away… or in 2025. Then this part of world will plunge 10 degrees, permanently.

Is she right, is that us too? Are we at a critical threshold? I can’t bear to think about it.

I’m past the hedges now, the bog spreads for miles in all directions. A few years back some idiots set fire to the bog, deliberately. Almost impossible to put out a bog fire; the peat below smouldered for months. I see flames rise around me, pure fuel under my feet. The heat is too much, we’ll be burned alive, skeletons to match those bone trees. I get down low but can’t breathe, there’s not enough air. Connie is beside me—when did she get here?

‘Breathe, Grace. Just breathe. In through the nose, out through the

mouth, that’s right.’

I come to, rocking on my haunches, saying ‘Forevermore, forevermore, forevermore.’ Her palm is on my back, steadying me. The rocking slows, the words dry up. She pulls me to my feet.

‘Can you not just put this down Grace? Can you not just have a holiday with me, be with me?’ Connie holds my hand loosely.

I lean into her face. ‘I see it all the time Connie. The baked earth, floods, fires, rising waters, millions displaced, poverty, wars, death, I see it. All of it. All the time.’

Connie stares at me. ‘What do you mean?’

I jab at my head. ‘I mean it’s in here. It never goes away, never stops playing. The world is burning, Connie. We’ve already passed so many tipping points and this fucking Government is handing out new fossil fuel projects like candy. Never mind 1.5, we’ve had so many days at 2 degrees already, and then —’

‘Stop, just stop.’ Connie’ voice shakes. ‘I knew you weren’t okay, but this… I didn’t know how bad it was. Fuck.’ She looks at me, and I imagine my tear-stained face, huge eyes staring back at her.

‘You know what you need to do. Take a leave of absence, and get your head sorted. Or leave, for good.’

I stare at her. ‘You want me to stop saving the planet?’

‘Jesus, Grace.’ She glares at me. ‘Stop being a fucking martyr. Other people can do this work. What good are you going to be to your work if you’re insane? What good are you going to be to you? To me? Us?’

I look at the ground. It’s true. It’s some time before I can look into her eyes.

‘I’m trying to buy time Connie.’ My voice cracks with tears, hitches in my throat. ‘But I could throw myself at this until my head cracks open and I spill out—and buy no time for the planet at all. We’re not being listened to.’

‘But the activists are listening Grace. They’re using your evidence.

They’re winning legal cases. They can stop the Government burning the planet.’

Maybe. It’s too hard to believe in. What matters to me right now?

‘Grace?’ Such worry in those deep, dark eyes. I grab at her so suddenly we both nearly go over. We’re holding each other like two people drowning, clinging to a sinking life raft. How can we keep each other afloat if we’re both in the water? But she is a lifebuoy. Safe.

‘Connie,’ I stroke her hair. When did my eyes get so wet?

‘You’ve been so far away’ she says, into my shoulder. ‘Stay with me now.’

Her warmth has never felt so good, and I relax into it for a moment. Then my eyes fly open. What if her temperature drops 10 degrees? Or what if she keeps heating up and up…

Eamonn Duffin

Too Late for the Alliums

It’s early; sleep is still a struggle. A faint grey light unfolds over the rooftops and through the kitchen window. The plastic box is in the cupboard. The pills rattle in their little compartments as I lift it out, setting it on the worktop. I run my fingers around the four smooth sides and corners slowly, before I lift the keys for the backdoor.

Standing on the patio, the cold seeps through my fleece and the woollen hat pulled over my bald head as I look across the garden. Is it not meant to be spring? Thin patches of frost look embarrassed to still be there, that winter drabness hangs on.

The garden is long and thin: beds either side and front and back of what remains of my lawn—the lawn more moss than grass now, but at least it’s green; a concrete path runs down the middle almost to the shed.

It’s quiet out here. It can’t be good that I’m starting to enjoy this early morning loneliness, but the quiet is broken by noisy, hungry house sparrows filling the garden, flitting around the clematis with impatient chirps. They study the neglected bird feeder swinging miserably on its pole and turn their busy heads to watch me, expectantly eyeing the bag in my hand, but it is allium bulbs. The machine gun call of a bullying magpie, menacingly perched on the neighbour’s chimney, scatters the disappointed birds.

Taking a deep breath, as deep as I’m able, I enjoy the crispness of the air. Even now, after all this time, I still feel the need for a smoke, that dark pull always there first thing. A cough starts, and I hold my

fist over my mouth, forcing it onto my lips until the coughing stops. Life is returning, slowly. The green fingers of the lupin leaves are unclenching. A brushstroke of purple peeks out under the trumpeting daffodils, standing to attention, as shy, indecisive crocuses lounge among the scalpel tips of the gladioli which already pierce the flesh of the flower beds.

Cold creeps into my feet as I start to shift and move things. Piles of leaves squat over by the fence, taunting me, raking them up another thing I didn’t do, another reminder of a long list of tasks undone. I had forgot to put my clay pots in the shed, and I can see that they are cracked from frost: the broken shards thick with spiderwebs. Clumps of leaves and abandoned, brittle, empty snail shells are glued in a star pattern among the shattered pieces.

More cobwebs, heavy with dew droplets, shiver in the gentle breeze on the swaying unpruned roses in the front bed. I watch the morning light shimmer on those droplets, glad to have neglected one job.

The coughing starts again; the wracking wheeze making my eyes water.

The clouds are starting to clear a little more and the sun comes out. I lift my face to soak it up.

The cat flap rattles and the cat walks towards me sleepily, rubbing her head on my old gardening jeans. I repurpose old clothes for the garden; three musty, dirty pairs of jeans sit on a shelf under the stairs—I can feel the dust on my thin legs. My wife thinks they are ready for the bin, but I think there is life in them yet.

The cold grass crunches under my feet as I force open the wooden shed’s door. It creaks with a dreadful moan of protestation, like someone reluctantly being shifted from a bed. It has been months since I have dared to check inside and the smell of damp wood tumbles out: there is black rot in one corner, a hole as big as an orange. A new shed

needed, more for the list.

I reach for the spade, hanging expectantly on its hook, it’s galvanised handle cold in my hand. Where are my gloves?

Tapping the ground a few times with the spade, I see that it is still like concrete, so I return to the shed for the fork and start to break up the soil before reaching for the spade again, thrusting deep: cutting, slicing, surgical stabs. The cat watches me, passing judgement on my ineffectual efforts, but I ignore her. What skill is there in digging holes?

Soon, there is a sheen of sweat on my forehead, and I’m short of breath, but an old strength is returning to my arms.

The first bulb is probed into its hole, a thick scar in the bed I hope is deep enough. I push the soil on top with my hand and then with the edge of my boot. It’s probably too late for alliums. It will be a miracle if they come up, but I’m all for miracles.

Dishes rattle, and I look up to see my wife smiling out at me from the kitchen window. I hadn’t realised she was up, and had hoped she would sleep on a bit longer. She makes a T shape with her hands. I sigh, knowing she won’t hear and smile back weakly with a thumbs up, my fingers dark from the earth. A sharp twinge of pain shoots up my side as I lift my arm, but I hide it as best I can and hope she hasn’t noticed.

She opens the window.

‘Do you want the tea out there?’

I nod towards the summer table by the back door, and she comes out and sets the cups down, the porcelain chiming on the dirty glass tabletop.

‘I’ll rinse these.’ I hold up my hands. The water from the outside tap is ice cold as the brown dirt flows away down the blackness of the drain.

‘Do you want a biscuit?’ I shake my head, blowing on the steaming tea, no appetite.

She surveys the digging.

‘Are you putting any in the front bed, with the roses?’

‘I don’t know if they’d do well there.’

I shift my feet.

She points towards the Japanese maple in the corner, close to the fence.

‘Do you think it will last another winter?’ she asks, sadly.

I’ve avoided the tree this morning. Among the thicker, lower branches, sparse red leaves grow, but dead, white stems haunt the higher, thinner branches. That ghostly paleness has spread down the branches for years now, but still the tree hangs on; each spring some inner will drives it to spread its meagre leaves on what branches remain.

My wife had chosen the tree. It had been our first purchase for the garden; extravagant and exotic. I have always loved the simple colours of those light red leaves, with their rusted edges, but now I struggle to look at it. A lifetime of memories, rotting from the tips.

‘Is there not some spray we could get?’ she asks.

‘No more chemicals.’ I know she is watching me, but I don’t turn. Cutting it will not be a job I do today, but I can’t put it off for too long.

I feel unmistakable worry emanating from her. She is a worrier. Long minutes of silence pass as we stand watching, hypnotised by the steam rising off the top of the wooden fence as it warms in the sun.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

‘A bit tired, just.’ I offer nothing more, but I lean into her, giving her a playful nudge with my bony shoulder as we look down the garden.

I hadn’t wanted this house. The garden was a disaster, a forgotten wilderness, with fence-to-fence weeds, wild grass, and thistles up to our chests, but she could see past the mess; knowing what I would find in there. We had hacked and slashed all the weeds down with two hand saws: two explorers searching for their blank green canvas. I had dug and planted all the beds myself: slow, satisfying work. Each summer

the transformation still surprised me as the colour climbed towards the sky before it collapsed into dull brown heaps in the autumn and winter. I’ve kept one little wilderness patch at the back though, a reminder of before, of all that work, of all that change, telling me, she was right.

I blow on the tea again, and take a sip, but I can’t really taste it; it sticks in my throat. I don’t want to upset her and hold it for the warmth on my cold fingers.

The sound of children playing in the street behind the house drifts over, the dull thud of a ball being kicked off a hedge. Our own children are due from university tomorrow. I’m glad to see them, but they are visiting a lot.

‘Did we leave the chicken out?’ I ask.

‘You left it out last night. Do you not remember?’

‘Oh aye.’

‘Hopefully it’s enough. They’re all coming.’

Over by the bins, two sagging heavy bags poking out catch my eye.

‘We should get some fresh compost for the potato bags.’ We love to roast potatoes, with garlic and olive oil. I can almost taste them. It was the first vegetables we grew together, squealing with the children as each earthen, golden globe was discovered, little pieces of treasure spilling out as we tipped up the growbags. I must plant some vegetables this year. I say that every year, but this time I mean it, I will.

‘We could hit the garden centre tomorrow,’ she says, ‘maybe get some stuff for the hanging baskets, maybe get some seeds and a few more bulbs. Some garlic would be nice.’ She pauses a moment. ‘We could maybe even get another maple.’ Her voice catches.

‘Sure, we can see.’

My head is feeling a little sore now, a little light. My back a little stiff, my fingers a little numb. Where did I leave those gloves?

‘I may get the rest of these alliums in the ground.’

She wants to say something, but she just takes the cups—no

comment on my full mug—and heads back inside, glad of the warmth. I shake the bulbs out of their bag on to the grass and make my way around the beds, planting methodically. The cat grows bored and sleepy eyed and sashays away, slipping through her cat flap with style, leaving me alone. I’m relieved.

The beds smell healthy as the spade probes and opens each hole, probes, and opens. I am digging automatically, lost in myself, when I turn the soil and two halves of a worm wriggle either side of the sharp metal blade of the spade. The two pieces flop and coil helplessly across the soil. The tea rises in my gullet. I put my hand to my mouth, hoping my wife isn’t watching. My sight blurs as tears well up and I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of my fleece, feeling damp earth rub against my skin. Worms can regrow from both parts, can’t they? Did I read that somewhere? I cover both pieces up with the thick soil.

I start coughing again, my back to the kitchen window. My chest is spluttering when the sun splits the remaining clouds, and a golden spring light bathes those remaining, few red leaves of the maple. I watch the light pass over the tree slowly as my cough subsides, and again, I admire the simple beauty of its colour, and that fight to emerge each year.

I lift another bulb, and head towards the roses in the front bed.

The spade is hung back in the rotten shed, and I scrape the muck and grass from my work boots, removing them slowly at the back door, my fingers fumbling with the laces. The kitchen tiles feel slippery in my socks as I fill the washing bowl with warm water, almost to the brim and wash my hands, scraping the soil from under my fingernails with the brush my wife uses for the dishes, hoping she doesn’t catch me. I let my hands soak in the sink, the soothing warmth seeping into my skin, into my joints, into my bones; the feeling creeping back into my fingers.

My lunch and a glass of water are sitting on the counter beside

the plastic box. I eat the clagging ham sandwich standing at the sink, looking at the garden through the window. There are thirty alliums planted in all, the fresh dark soil betrays their resting places.

I click open the lid of the box, noticing that there is still dirt under my fingernails; more precision needed; there is always a chance that some will be missed. I mechanically place each pill in my mouth, feeling the grit of earth on my teeth. The pills are tasteless, and I swallow each hard with a drink of the water. The plastic box with its little compartments reminds me so much of a seed tray; a compartment for each part of each day, until there are no days left.

My wife offers me more tea, but I shake my head.

‘Are you sure? I’m having some.’

‘Aye. Go on then.’

She starts to wash some dishes in the sink while the kettle boils. Her hands move quickly, the plastic brush darting around each dish.

‘It feels better,’ she says, her eyes on the garden. It looks so much greener this afternoon; life is returning, slowly.

‘It will be good to be able to see it,’ I reply, taking the last of the pills.

It will be spectacular if it works. The alliums will float above the other plants. Tall purple balls, nodding in the wind, a cortege for the garden. The thought of that beauty rising slowly over the early summer feels good.

‘It’s hard not to love a garden.’

The sun comes out again and it catches her face as she looks out, lost in thoughts that I can guess, but don’t want to ask. Her face looks warm and new. She feels my eyes on her and turns towards me.

‘What?’ she asks with a little laugh.

I grab a tea towel and start to dry.

‘Maybe we could get another maple,’ I say quietly.

She smiles and reaching over with wet fingers, starts to wipe away dirt on my face that I’ve missed, and I hope that it doesn’t spread.

Grace Kully

Blueberries

My boyfriend packed blueberries in the tote bag. I will discover this later when it is unsalvageable. I call him my boyfriend because we have been seeing each other for eight months. We haven’t talked yet about if we are putting a label on it.

Boyfriend placed these blueberries at what is essentially the Mariana Trench of the tote bag. He was in charge of packing. I didn’t ask him what he had decided was important for our beach day. If I had, he would have said that’s micromanaging.

Well, I always pack a blanket for the wind, and sunscreen for the UV, and sunglasses for the same thing, and a book for the boredom, and my headphones for the screaming children. I hoped these would be obvious things to boyfriend and he would pack them without me asking him to pack them. It’s when he does things that I wouldn’t do that the fights always start.

The tote bag is bumping along in the back seat of his beat-up Honda Civic, which doubles as the place where we eat our takeout, and he throws his laundry, and we have sex when his nosy roommate gets home early. He could have cleaned his car before putting the tote bag in it.

As it turns out, I took too long to get ready and now we are running behind the imaginary schedule that boyfriend made for us to follow on our day off. I’m late because my tits look great in this bikini and I thought maybe I would have boyfriend take pictures of me on the sand before I go swimming so I had to spend time on my makeup.

I tell him this.

I’m not complaining about the way your tits look, boyfriend says.

But he is complaining about being late and aren’t all complaints about the same thing, in the end? It’s the afternoon now and he’s all: didn’t you say yesterday you wanted to tan? I don’t want to hear it if you’re hungry when we get there. Straight to tanning. We’re going to fry ourselves.

The air conditioning is warm at best, and it is sputtering at me the same rate that boyfriend is. I reach over to turn the radio up and drown him out, but the seatbelt catches, and I am stuck in my spot. The fabric tugs against my bare shoulder. I undo the belt, so that I can turn the song up.

Will you put that back on?

Boyfriend is a stickler for safety. I was told that he gets it from his mom, by his dad, who hates his mom. I think it may be the fundamental difference between us, me whose mother died versus him, who learned it is okay to hate your mom.

I turn the radio on max volume and redo my seatbelt. Boyfriend is muttering a spell of curses under his breath now. I have half a mind to turn the radio back down and ask him to just say what he wants to say, but then I’d be giving him the reaction he wants.

I put my feet up on the dash. I take my time with it, admiring them as I cross my right ankle over the left. White nail polish is peeling off of my big toes and missing from the little ones. I’m not sure if they were ever painted in the first place, little stubs that they are.

The cops are out on the Parkway because it’s the end of the month and they have quotas to meet. I see boyfriend glance at my propped-up feet every time we pass one. I’d like to see them try to pull us over for feet. The worst part is they would have to tell him the truth, about why they pulled him over, and that would be embarrassing for all of us. His car can only ever reach 60 MPH, so they’d never get him on speeding. He’s New

Jersey’s most hated driver, and we’re perpetually in the right lane.

I’m barely listening to the music, but it is the loudest presence in the car. I wonder if I could go on like this forever, next to boyfriend, driving somewhere, not saying anything, mildly mad about something. Maybe this is love.

The shore begins to reel us in. I feel that I can taste the ice cream and the salt in the air. The ice cream, in particular, which we won’t get on account of my being late. We cross the bridge from the bay to the boardwalk, Earth’s own pearly gates. Boyfriend reaches over to turn the AC off and then rolls the windows down.

He doesn’t bother with the radio. Here, you can play anything you want as loudly as you want. It’s an announcement that you are alive. I look to the other cars, trying to play their music over ours. People are filled with the emptiness of summertime.

We are late, and the streets are aching from it. Vacationers and students home for the summer line the sidewalk. The cheap parking spots are full, tanning time is dwindling, and I’m longing for a lobster roll. But I can’t mention any of it to boyfriend.

He drives around the crowded streets for fifteen minutes, circling the other cars like a vulture. I worry about what he would do if he saw an open spot.

He gives up his hunt after I beg him to a few times and then he pulls into one of those $50 For The Day! parking lots that is closest to the beach. He will ask me to cover the cost tomorrow. When he turns the car off, we let the silence linger. My ears pulse where the radio beat for the last forty minutes.

Alright, grab the bag. I’ll get the cooler.

I turn around to look at the bag I’m supposed to carry. It’s not anything special, this tote bag. I forgot he had even packed a cooler. Probably mostly his beers. I get it now, why he was annoyed I was late. He thinks he did a lot more than me in the time it took to get my makeup on.

I slip my feet into my Birkenstocks and open the passenger-side door. From the backseat, I need to maneuver around some old blankets and a microwave he was supposed to bring to the dump three weeks ago. I pull the tote bag toward myself and sling it over my shoulder. No blanket, I notice that right away.

Ready?

Boyfriend has pulled the cooler from the trunk. He locks the car and we start making our way to the boardwalk. From here, on the parched wood, we survey the beach like we’re claiming land. I say that I see somewhere to the left, away from people but near the bathroom. I watch boyfriend glance to where I am pointing. He stares at it for as long as is reasonable before saying no.

Boyfriend has a thing against the left, I’ve noticed, which I think might have something to do with always driving in the right lane. We settle on the spot he picks out, pay for our beach passes, and then make our way to our territory.

Ah, forgot a blanket. He says it flat. Guess I’ll just go for a swim then.

Boyfriend peels off his sweaty shirt and then jogs away. He disappears amongst the mass of people who have descended upon the same place on the same day for the same escape from the same life, and eventually, I can’t locate his head between all the other heads bobbing in the water.

I look around for the beach chair rentals, but then remember the $50 parking and think I better not. Instead, I dig a groove in the sunscorched sand with my toes and sit down.

I peel open the tote bag like it’s Christmas Day. He remembered the sunscreen and the sunglasses. I begin to apply some to my arms. Then I smell something vaguely familiar, close to rotting. I rummage back through the bag and my hands close around a hardcover book.

I pull out The Glass Castle, flipped upside down inside the bag. It

was my mother’s copy. Inside, she had written a list of all the pages she enjoyed the most. One of those habits that you tell people they don’t need to do, but then when they die, you think you’re so glad they’ve done it.

Now, her note is a smear of ink and blueberry guts. I panic and toss the book aside into the sand. I rummage furiously through the rest of the bag. It is just blueberries, in an opened Ziploc, oozing out. I scoop up the few intact berries and throw them into the cooler, where they should have been in the first place.

My eyes fall back on my mother’s book, smeared by boyfriend’s mistake. I want to be angry. I feel so angry that I can throw up. But I can’t remember if I told boyfriend that the book used to be my mother’s. I wonder if the boy who learned that it was okay to hate his mother would have packed blueberries in the tote bag, even if he had known. His head emerges from the mass, seawater dripping down his soaked locks. He waves from the distance. I will have to speak with him, in a few dreadful seconds. I feel tears beginning to run down my cheeks. They are hot like the sun and salted like the ocean. They belong here.

Matthew Hopkins

There Are Too Many Flowers

I.

You are standing in the doorway. I am foetal on your sofa. The room is dark, the night is hot, you aren’t sure if I’m asleep.

You flick the light on: it pins me down under off-white. Grey carpet, white walls covered in dents and scrapes, a clenched-fist brown stain on the ceiling. Green sofa, rainbow knitted blanket tangled around my bare legs. Shoes trailing from the door. Flatpack for a cot, delivered today. It’s why I’m down here. You’re always one step ahead of me.

We make eye contact. Sometimes I can’t believe you’re you, you’re here, you’re looking at me. Who else would? I glance at the light, meaning turn it off.

You do. When we have sex and I tell you to stop, you stop. I think you give yourself too much credit for this but I’m grateful anyway. I shouldn’t be, but it was out of my hands before you.

Your hands hush against fabric as you feel around in the dark for me. I sit up as you sit down on the edge of the sofa, drawing my knees to my chest, awkwardly dragging the blanket with me. I can hear your hand worming closer. My t-shirt is sticking to my back.

‘I know you’re mad at me, but I– these thoughts, I couldn’t, compulsions, I did everything–’ a breath out like a curt, red underline ‘–I just wanted to make sure you were okay.’

I am stuck waiting without knowing what I’m waiting for, like a

dog in a hot car.

‘Can I put the little light on?’

When I don’t say anything, you do.

‘There you are.’ You smile. Then your brow furrows. ‘Are you sleeping in your binder?’

Caught.

You say, ‘is it getting that bad again?’

You say, ‘it could permanently damage your ribs. I read about it.’

You say, ‘say something.’

You say, ‘please just say something.’

II.

You don’t have a garden. You have a patch of concrete big enough to stand on and nothing else, green weeds, neat lines of ants. The woodlice. The sun doesn’t hit out here, it’s dirty and cool in the shade of neighbouring brick walls, a broken-shut gate. You smoke out here when you’re stressed. You think I don’t know this. I don’t know why you think I would care. This is your house. I just live here.

Every night I crouch down the dark, backlit by the kitchen light, and splay my hands flat against the ground. The woodlice run over. They like rotting things so I give them rotting things. Ants march in their lines and the weeds hum. You say when we have our second kid, we’ll move somewhere with a big garden, greenhouse at the bottom like my Grandma had, and they’ll run around, make potions, have the childhood you didn’t. We’ll get a dog for the kids and at first you’ll pretend you don’t want it but you’ll love it most. We don’t have the first child yet. I don’t want to. I crouch there and watch the woodlice play over my hands until you open the door and look at me funny and say baby, baby, what are you doing?

Steam rises from the bathwater. Your hair is wet, skin glistening. I can feel you looking at me. Through me. The door is unlocked. Underwater, your hands shake. Late night, early morning, I wear your clothes, sat on the edge of the bath. It’s too hot in here.

Cradled in my palm, a woodlouse. His tiny swollen feet.

‘If that’s a bug again, I swear to God,’ you say, smiling to show me you’re joking.

Technically they’re crusteaceans. When I smile I think I just bare my teeth.

I wash your hair with one hand, the woodlouse ticklish in my fist. The extractor fan whirrs. In the kitchen, the washing machine is running. You ask me what I’m thinking. You say you’re sorry. You lie back and free the soap from your hair. We are quiet. The sound of the water, moving.

I’m thinking of a haunted house. Shoeless little ghosts in the dirt. I would survive on sour sweets and iced coffee if you left me alone. When I was nineteen I thought I was pregnant and I cried so hard I got sick all over myself like a child. You look at me so much but you won’t see me.

I climb into the bath, on top of you. My clothes swell and bloom and darken with water. I keep my clenched fist away from you. I rest my head on your chest. Your wet hands stick to my hair; it feels awful.

You tell me what you’re thinking. That you raped me and you don’t remember it or you’ll drive your car off a bridge or you drowned that girl they found in the reservoir. There are tears in your eyes. You don’t cry in front of anyone else.

‘I’ve thought about killing you before,’ you confess, hushed like this demands the quiet rather than just exists in it. ‘I’m scared of myself.’

I imagine your hands covered in blood. I imagine tear tracks down your cheeks. I imagine the knife.

IV.

There’s so many of them now. They like the mould and the cool and the damp. They are in the guttering and under the sinks and all over the rotting things in the not-garden. I mist the quiet dark mouldering spaces like they’re Japanese peace lilies and I smile nearly every day.

V.

‘Baby, I know this is a weird question and I’m not accusing you of anything, but have you been leaving food in the garden? Like, fruit and stuff. I’m not mad, I promise—if you don’t want to eat it I’ll stop buying it. I was just going out to have a– well, doesn’t matter, but there was just, piles of rotting fruit, and mushrooms, I think. Place was infested with woodlice, never seen anything like it, they were so big. Size of my thumb. And there was a dead rabbit, its neck broken or something, and they were just… it was crawling. I know you like your bugs but Jesus. Makes me itch thinking about it, had to wash my hands like seventy times. Got rid of them best I could. A bunch got into the house as well, I hoovered them up though so we should be fine. And I don’t know if it’s just me losing my mind again but there was so much mould everywhere? I deep-cleaned the place but I read that it can make you ill, not seriously ill, but, yeah. Tell me if you feel weird. Please. Oh, I built the cot. My mum’s friend’s daughter had a baby a few months ago and she said we could have the newborn stuff for free when we, yeah. Do you still like Sammy? It’s gender neutral so, you know. Nothing to worry about if they’re like you.’

I cry like I’ve lost a limb, then like I’ve lost a child.

VI.

It’s sunny out. Bright blue sky like a cathedral ceiling. The wardrobe in your bedroom is built into the wall. I curl inside it, in the dark, knees to my chest and barefoot. I do love you. I am sorry. I think about leaf litter and tiny feet and smaller hands. There’s little orange-scented sheets you hang up between the clothes in here and you’re so type A it kills me. I think about being torn apart by wild horses and my last six months at my flat where I would sit on the fire escape looking out-up and sniff glue and how didn’t I fall, break my neck. How blank I was. No life inside me, just killing time. I never outright say I’m hungry, just that I could eat. On our third date, you took me to a restaurant and paid for it because it’s what the man should do then apologised until it got annoying. I thought you were going to cry.

I hear your footsteps coming towards me and I curl up tighter, my back to the door. I shut my eyes so tight I see green-pink noise, fuzzy like rot. I hear you open the door. I hear you crouch down. Funny how when the pair of us started living again we could only bear it with each other. I feel your hand on my side. You kiss my spine.

VII.

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VIII.

So that’s it, is it? Can set the terrarium up all nice in the kitchen and read up about humidity and cover the airholes with really fine mesh so flies can’t get in and talk at me like you know better I didn’t fucking want these get it through your thick fucking skull I do not want your children. Now I have them anyway.

IX.

I sit on the kitchen counter, watching you cook. You have a tea towel over your shoulder because you’ve been watching too much Queer Eye and you are singing along to the radio. You asked me if I’m hungry, what I want for tea. I could eat, sure. I’ll eat anything.

Across the room, the woodlice rummage through dying bark, damp earth, old leaves.

‘You’ve been looking after them so well,’ you say, making a vague stirring motion in their direction. ‘Are they supposed to get that big?’

I see one fall from a height, see it land on its back, its animal-white

underbelly teeming with scrabbling legs. I nod at you.

‘We’ll need to get them a bigger… box? Cage? Terrarium, soon. Maybe we could get some new ones as well. Did you look at that website I sent you?’

It’s not that I don’t like them. It’s not that you’re wearing me down. I skinned a rabbit in the not-garden last night while you were asleep. Used my phone as a torch. I was wearing flip-flops and blood got all over my feet. They haven’t eaten it yet, but they will. They said thank you, at least. Must get their manners from you—I hear you talking to them, too, at a distance.

‘For what it’s worth.’ You decant pasta into two bowls. ‘You’d be a great mum.’

The quiet.

Your eyes go wide. ‘Fuck, baby, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean–’

X.

I think about leaving. Go back, drink wine, get too invested in daytime TV. Get high sat on a fire escape six floors up with my feet dangling through the bars and watch the moon. But who will come looking, who will kiss my back, who will like me? I think about leaving like you think about killing me. We could, but we won’t.

XI.

Dead rabbits. Dead cats. Rotting stems. Black mould, spores nestling in our lungs. I covered the windows with black t-shirts so the light can’t intrude. With no sun I don’t exist. My hands are someone else’s hands. The soft damp earth. I cut the tip of a thumb off for them, I hurt myself and bleed for them, you tell me it’s okay but I don’t want it to be.

XII.

We can move house. We can have our first child, then the second. We can get a dog. It’s like IVF, you tell me, or adoption. Just different. A summoning. You read about it. I can still have my woodlice.

You’ve been so scared, so sure something would go wrong. The ritual wouldn’t work and you’d just have killed me, I’d have just left you. I thought you were going to back out until I saw the blade in your hand turn to point down. When the sun hit it, it shone.

I lie on your bed beside myself, t-shirt rucked up around my armpits. I look at the ceiling, I look at the open window, out at the empty sky. From this angle, it looks like that’s all there is. No basement, no candles, no sigils painted in blood. Just the bed we sleep in, just us.

After this, I’ll be infested with children. After this nothing will be the same. If I told you to stop, you would. Wouldn’t you?

Your hands covered in blood. The tear tracks down your cheeks. The knife. It’s not like I imagined.

XIII.

There is something living in me. I cannot gouge it out.

Melissa McPhillips

Lone Girl

Eimear footers with her new navy hairband trying to hide the worst bits. Her ma got up at 5am to go to another bloody Hyrox comp. She’s left Cheerios on the worktop with a bowl, spoon, and a smiley Post-it note. Eimear storms past them, drops a slice of bread into the toaster, whacks up the temperature, and waits for her cremated breakfast.

An hour later, she climbs the steps to Mount Lourdes, dwarfed by girls who have shot up over the summer. Mr O’Reilly pulls Aoife Cassidy aside and chastises her for wearing brown shoes instead of the obligatory black. Eimear sniggers but drops her eyes as she passes Shauna, who waits on Aoife. Last year Eimear would have been with them but that was before.

At breaktime, Eimear’s supposed to check in with Miss Rooney, a veiny old vulture who calls herself a counsellor. Eimear hides in the toilet, ready with the excuse of a dodgy stomach if she’s caught, and at lunchtime, eats her sandwich in the sports hall, not brave enough for the canteen. Everyone has an opinion on Friday, and she can’t handle the head hopping between Aoife and her, as people decide who to feel sorry for.

She halts at a framed photo on the wall. Her and her old teammates. Jumping off the podium after they won the Irish Schools’ Cross-Country Finals two years ago. A smile escapes. Eimear resets her mouth, yanks a clump of hair from her head, then another. The memory fades.

She has a text waiting on her when school ends.

Ma: Came first! Going for drinks with a few from the gym to celebrate. There’s shepherd’s pie in the fridge. x

Eimear trudges home, grabs a box of Jaffa Cakes from the kitchen, and flops onto the couch. She rises at 5pm when she knows McKenna’s opens, mumbles hello to Paul Breen, who she went out with for five months last year, then shrinks into the corner to wait for her order. She goes home by Main Street instead of cutting through the park, in case she bumps into Paul again, and eats her curry chip in the dark sitting room of 4 Finn Park, with Gossip Girl for company.

tuesday

Peckish, Eimear nips into Spar when she gets off the bus. She checks the time on her phone. 4.32pm. Her ma should have left by now for her work conference. Two whole days without nagging. Yasssss.

Eimear grabs a packet of salt and vinegar crisps from the rack under the till and steps back onto someone’s foot by accident.

‘Oh sorry,’ she says turning, one hand holding the crisps, the other outstretched in apology. Hugh Cassidy stands in the queue staring at her, like a hare about to scarper. Decimating the crisps in her hand, Eimear bolts from the shop and runs straight across Mrs. Wilson in her red Enyaq. Eimear doesn’t hear the screeching rubber, see Mrs. Wilson’s silent yells, or feel the bumper touch her leg. She sprints down Church Street, slowing only when she reaches the chapel wall.

People potter around the graveyard, getting ready for the Blessing of the Graves. On the right, wee Joe Boyle pounds a football against the community centre. A derelict asbestos riddled factory sits beyond it. Eimear pushes through the blackthorn hedge and sinks to her hunkers against a crumbling wall. Tears and snot smear her face. Rain pelts down. She notices faint tyre imprints on her school tights but

she’s not physically hurt. She snaps off strands of hair until the shower passes and midges attack her. Then she drags her soggy body home under a grey Fermanagh sky.

She texts her Uncle Eoin, who she’s supposed to stay with while her ma’s away:

Have a cold. Gonna stay at home 2nite. If I need anything I’ll ring. Tks.

She’s five texts and two missed calls from her ma. Ignoring them, she flings her phone onto the carpet, collapses onto a faded love hearts duvet cover, and stares at the blank ceiling, enjoying the stillness. Three sleeps ‘til Friday. Til that Cassidy prick gets what he deserves. Three sleeps and everything will be better.

wednesday

Eimear looks at the clock between nightmares. 1.01am. 3.11am. 5.57am. When her alarm finally goes off at 7am, she decides she can’t face school. She shuffles into the kitchen, boils the kettle, and texts Uncle Eoin.

Hey. Feel loads better. Gonna go to Shauna’s after school for a sleepover so don’t worry bout me. Ma’s bk 2moro so I’ll c you Friday.

After breakfast, she doodles for a while, practices her new flute tune, and does a bit of homework, but by 11am she slumps in front of the telly. At noon, she danders into the kitchen. She’s about to lift wheaten bread from the fridge when she notices a bottle of wine in the door. She grabs the bottle, takes one of her ma’s Galway crystal glasses, the ones that usually only come out at Christmas, puts the Foos ‘But Here We Are’ album on Alexa, and drinks and laughs as she scrolls through old family photos on OneDrive.

Three hours later, she gets up to go to the loo. Her legs buckle, her stomach spits, and she swears off alcohol for life. She scours the larder for paracetamol, guzzles a pint glass of water, and doses on the

couch. When she wakes, it’s dark. She unclogs the sink, cleans puke off the toilet seat, and stumbles into the shower, ignoring the regrowth shampoo her ma bought her. Twenty minutes later, with a fresh towel wrapped around her puny body, she wipes steam from the mirror and stares at her mangled hair, her dead eyes. She plucks a few strands of hair half-heartedly, wraps them in a tissue, and hides them in the bin as usual.

thursday

Eimear hears the backdoor open. She puts down her pen and shuts her history textbook.

‘Eimear. You home?’ Lynn Callaghan calls.

‘Up here,’ Eimear shouts back, walking out to the landing.

‘Come down love. I wanna see you.’

Eimear sighs, walks downstairs, and shirks when her ma hugs her. ‘Oh, I’ve missed you,’ her ma says, kissing her head, then adds with a scowl, ‘Why have you not been answering my calls? I was worried sick, and then Eoin told me you were sick. You do look pale love.’

Free of her ma’s arms, Eimear heads into the kitchen. Her ma tuts. ‘Eimear, you’ve got to start looking after yourself. Honestly if your da could see the state of yo -’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ Eimear yells, rushing to the back door.

‘Jesus Eimear, calm dow-’

‘Leave me alone,’ Eimear says, pushing her ma aside.

‘Eimear Callaghan, get back here this instant,’ her ma shouts but Eimear is half way down the alley, every muscle in her body tingling. When she reaches the end, she hesitates. She hates the nosy biddies on Main Street, and there’s always gobshites rallying on the Skea road. She can’t face the factory again and she can’t bear to look at her ma. Fecking off this week of all weeks and just home and starting on her.

Eimear rips a clump of hair clear off her scalp and winces. She wipes her eyes, drops the hair, and sprints toward Spring Grove, the forest she went to every weekend with her dad. Before he left her.

Within ten minutes, she reaches the metal barrier and pedestrian only sign. She’s shaky. Unsure. She steps forward with slow exaggerated movements as if the needle covered ground will slice her. She ignores the nagging doubt that she’s not ready and jogs through the trees until she reaches her favourite spot - Bluebell Grove.

It’s flowerless this time of year and the tickly breeze and mouldy leaves make her cold. She’s about to tug her hair when a blur of colour catches her eye. A tiny blue tit darts from one branch to another. It soothes her and she allows herself to remember her dad -holding her half zip when she got too warm, wearing that comical headlight in winter like an eejit, letting farts rip when he thought the coast was clear. Encouraging her, pushing her to beat her personal best, cheering her up when a race didn’t go her way, grinning. Always grinning.

Two paws whack Eimear’s thighs.

‘Misty, here girl,’ a man shouts. The springer looks at Eimear, back to its owner, then leaps on Eimear again.

‘Hello,’ Eimear says, petting the spaniel who laps up the attention.

‘Blasted dog. She’ll be the death of me,’ the owner says out of breath.

‘She’s gorgeous,’ Eimear says.

‘Aye, plenty of energy this one,’ the man chuckles.

Back home, Eimear’s ma has put the wellie bin out for collection in the morning. Eimear steps around it and goes inside. Her ma leans on the kitchen table, a bundle of damp tissues next to her. She looks old. When she spots Eimear, she wipes her face with her sleeve, embarrassed. Eimear goes to her, throws her arms around her, and whispers, ‘I’m sorry Mammy. I’m sorry.’ friday

Eoin arrives early. He drives Eimear and her ma. The journey takes the guts of an hour from door to door thanks to Google Maps. They enter Dungannon Courthouse and shuffle past the Cassidy clan into Courtroom 2. Eimear reaches for her hair but stops herself. She takes a bobble from her wrist and twirls it between her fingers, hoping the case isn’t adjourned again. Mr. McAloon perches on the media bench, ready to put whatever slant he wants on the trial. The wall clock gets quieter as the gallery fills. Eimear’s ma talks to the prosecutor. Eoin goes for a fag. Eimear sits and watches suits whizz in and out. Hugh Cassidy enters with his wife Teresa, and his kids Cathal, Shea, and of course Aoife, in her unrepenting brown brogues.

When the judge is seated and the jury sworn in, the prosecutor begins. Eimear tries to listen, to take in every word, but she’s so hot and sweaty, she misses bits.

‘Blood sample’ …’back calculation estimated Mr. Cassidy had alcohol’… ‘Pedal fully depressed at time of impact’…

Eimear finds it hard to follow but there are some words that parrot on repeat in her head - ‘95mph.’ ‘Serious head injuries.’ ‘Died instantaneously.’

Hugh Cassidy’s barrister speaks with authority. ‘He had an argument with his wife. Was not thinking straight.’ … ‘Denies alcohol was a contributing factor’… ‘Was upset by his wife’s divorce threat’… ‘had money problems’... ‘is doing better now.’

Excuses. All Eimear hears are excuses. She shoots Aoife a look. They‘ll never be friends again. Ever.

Eoin takes Eimear and her ma to a poky canteen to wait while the jury deliberate. Eimear sips at tea but has no appetite. She fidgets with the bobble on her wrist and listens to music while her ma and Eoin discuss the trial over toasted sandwiches that have way too much cheese. At half two, a Maybin security guard comes to get them and

they hurry back to the courtroom.

Eimear doesn’t look at the jittery jury foreman, the sombre judge, or the fat flushed head of Hugh Cassidy. She watches Aoife sink into the hard wooden bench as the verdict is read. Eimear’s ma squeezes her hand. Her uncle pats her back. The judge adjourns the case for reports and warns Mr. Cassidy that a custodial sentence is inevitable. Eimear’s ma cries. Her uncle exhales loudly with relief.

Eimear has imagined this moment for months. Justice. Finally. For her dad. She has hated Hugh Cassidy. And Aoife by association. Yet she doesn’t feel joy. Actually, she feels a weird affinity with Aoife. Both lives mowed down. Both futures tainted.

Eimear tails her ma and uncle into the corridor. They thank the prosecutor. The Cassidys huddle close by with their legal team. Eimear’s ma opens the heavy oak door and light floods in. The air is warm, the September sun strong. Eimear steps outside and glances over her shoulder. Aoife is coming behind her. Since the accident, Eimear has blanked her. She could shut the door in her face now. Walk on in triumph. She thinks about it but she doesn’t. Instead, she holds the door open.

Olivia Rana

Good For a While

The man who came to pick Declan up from Enniskillen bus station was dressed in a pink sarong. He held a card above his head with Mr McKenna written in black ink, and Declan contemplated walking in the opposite direction, but the man was approaching him, arms held out wide.

‘You must be our young visitor from Belfast.’ He clamped Declan firmly by the shoulders. ‘My name is Mohana Gopala, after the protector of cows, but everyone calls me Mo.’ He steered Declan across the road to a carpark.

‘Listen, mate, I think there’s been a mistake,’ Declan said. ‘I’m Catholic, so I am.’

‘I was Catholic myself, an altar boy for three years at Saint Oliver’s in Navan, then an atheist.’ Mo opened the back of a white builder’s van and slid Declan’s rucksack in on top of two new shovels. ‘The path to enlightenment is a winding one.’

The stupidest thing Declan could do was to get into that van, but he thought of the letter he’d received the night before. It had been laid out very clearly. If the judge didn’t lock him up for what he’d done, the selfappointed police were coming for him; ankles, knees, punishment for antisocial behaviour. His mother had run to the downstairs bathroom and vomited, and when she’d returned, she’d cooked him a gammon steak with eggs and chips and told him that he had to disappear. By the following morning, it was all arranged.

Declan opened the door of the van and climbed in. He had no choice anymore.

They drove out of the town, the distance between houses widening, the fields dotted with cows and sheep. Mo leaned over the steering wheel as he drove, as though the car was about to take off. His head was cleanshaven, apart from a ponytail, and Declan remembered seeing people like him down at Cornmarket, playing drums and handing out leaflets. Hare Krishnas, that’s what they were called. His Ma had stopped to speak to them, telling him how she’d seen them as a wee girl in Royal Avenue. ‘Everyone was spellbound,’ she’d said. ‘It was a curious thing to see in Belfast back then.’

Now she’d packed him off to stay with these melters in culchie land. He’d kill her, so he would.

‘Your mother is worried about you,’ Mo said, as though reading his mind.

‘I’m just looking to lie low for a while, that’s all.’

Mo nodded. ‘We’re all lost souls, my friend. But the great thing is we can all change because the spirit is eternal.’

Declan didn’t want to change. He liked the buzz of being behind the wheel of a stolen car, tearing up the Springfield Road with Big A and JoJo, all off their heads. He’d failed at school, and after that, there was no future for someone like him. But out in the cars, he felt invincible. It was the only thing that made Declan feel good inside himself.

They pulled in at a filling station, and Mo got out to fill up on Diesel, leaving the keys in the ignition. Declan watched as he walked towards the shop, that stupid dress billowing around him. One minute, that’s all he needed. He could sell all that shite in the back of the van, a couple of hundred pounds worth at least, and live on the road. But then?

He hadn’t moved when Mo returned with two Choc Ices. ‘My guilty pleasure,’ he said.

They drove on, eating their ice cream and listening to country music on the radio. It was the kind of crap his Granny listened to, Daniel O’Donnell or Nathan Carter. He imagined his Ma telling her what

had happened and the pair of them up at Clonard Monastery lighting candles and praying to Saint Rita, the saint of impossible causes. Their wee Deccy, throwing his life away.

The trundle of the van down a narrow road shook him out of his thoughts. When they came to a stop, he could see a yellow barge out on the water with the name Hare Krishna painted across the side in red lettering. Declan felt a tightening around his neck.

‘We have arrived.’ Mo jumped from the van and went down towards the water. He pulled a couple of wooden planks from the barge onto the slipway.

Declan scanned the desolate fields on either side of him. They were in the middle of nowhere. He took his mobile from his pocket, frantic now. He thought to call the police, but when he looked at his phone, there was no signal.

Mo hopped back into the van.

‘What’s with the boat thing?’ Declan’s voice was pinched.

‘This is how we get to Inish Rath.’ Mo pointed out over the water.

‘It’s an island?’

‘The Hare Krishna Island, our beautiful centre of consciousness.’

Declan couldn’t believe it. He’d never even learned how to swim.

Mo drove down onto the jetty and up the makeshift ramp. ‘You should get out and enjoy the scenery,’ he said.

While Mo made his way up into the barge’s cabin, Declan stayed where he was. He could feel them turning in the water, heading towards an island shrouded with trees. He wondered if Krishna Island was where all the disappeared boys ended up, if this was a business of sorts for Mo, harbouring young fugitives from West Belfast, or burying them.

When they pulled in against the wooden pontoon, Mo hurried out and lowered the ramp again. The mainland seemed a long way away, Belfast and Iris Drive unreachable. The van moved back onto dry land and through the thicket of trees. As the sun was eclipsed, Declan’s heart

pumped faster and faster, like those nights when he woke up panicked and scared. That feeling like he was about to die.

The trees gave way on either side, revealing a mansion, the kind of place you’d see down one of those streets off the Malone Road. Two people were waiting at the entrance. The woman had a garland of flowers in her hand, and she hooked them around Declan’s neck when he stepped from the van. ‘You’re very welcome.’ She dotted his forehead with a red powder. ‘My name is Nan.’

Declan thought of the ribbing he’d get if his mates could see him now, looking like a muppet.

‘I’ll show you to your room, and you can freshen up before dinner,’ Nan said.

Declan grabbed his belongings as she ushered him into the house. The hallway smelt of incense, and there were pictures on the walls of a blue god playing the flute, Krishna, he supposed.

‘The day starts at 3 am with chanting and meditation,’ Nan said as they went upstairs.

‘Breakfast at seven and then tasks for the day.’

There was no way Declan was getting up at three unless he was catching a flight to Magaluf for a rager. No way.

At the end of a corridor, Nan opened a door. The room was like one of the cells at Woodlands Juvenile Centre, a low bed with two folded towels, a desk and a chair. Declan held his phone in the air, but there were still no bars. ‘What’s the Wi-Fi password?’ he asked.

‘We only use telecommunications for work-related matters,’ Nan said. ‘Coming here is a chance to break free from technology. No phones, alcohol or illicit drugs.’

He waited for Nan to say she was having him on, but instead, she handed him the key to the room. ‘You can wash up and join us for dinner. Take a left off the hall.’

When Nan had gone, Declan looked out the window. Instead of

seeing the roofs of other houses and walls topped with barbed wire, he could see the garden spread out below, walkways twisting through flower beds and rockeries, all circled by trees and the glistening flatness of the water beyond. Declan spotted two peacocks sauntering along, their little mohawked heads bobbing up and down as they pecked at something on the ground, and it made Declan feel strangely calm, as though he’d just popped a couple of buds. He wondered if some mysterious powers were already at work, if this was what it felt like to be brainwashed.

He might have stayed in his room all night, but he could hear people talking and laughing down below, and he was famished. Nan waved him into the dining room. ‘Come join us,’ she said. They were all older than him, some women, but mostly men with buzz cuts who were dressed in orange or pink shirts, looking like inmates in a high-security wing.

Declan dug his hands into his pockets, awkward and misplaced in his North Face hoodie and Nike cap. He thought to take his cap off, but he had too much hair for a place like this, his shock of dark curls dusting the tops of his eyebrows. He wondered if they’d make him shave it, if that was another rule.

‘Don’t be shy.’ Mo got up and handed Declan a plate and nudged him towards bowls of food on a serving table.

Declan searched for a sausage or a chicken goujon, something he might recognise.

Mo lowered his voice. ‘You are what you eat, and Krishna devotees support a vegetarian diet.’

Declan thought of his mother’s Sunday roast, the Yorkshire puddings and gravy. He could feel his jaw tighten and knew he needed to leave before something happened. He pushed past Mo, but when he reached outside and saw the water, he remembered that he couldn’t go anywhere. ‘Stupid bloody island.’ Tomorrow, he’d make Mo take him back to the mainland. He’d face up to the beating and be through with it. But then he thought of what they’d done to that boy a few weeks back, up at

Seymour Hill, and he knew he hadn’t the guts. He kicked at the loose stones on the drive and headed around the back of the house, hoping he’d find something he could smash or break to relieve the vice-like pain in his head.

He made his way into one of the polytunnels, planters bursting with beetroot, broccoli, and cauliflower, all the stuff he hated. He thought of pulling them out onto the ground and ripping the place apart, but he spotted a girl at the tunnel’s far end. She was bent over a wheelbarrow, dark curls bunched on the top of her head, and dressed in jeans and a purple hoodie, normal like him. He wondered what she was running from, drugs, maybe. She jumped when she heard Declan.

‘You frightened me.’ She sounded like Jakob, the guy who worked in Russell Cellar’s and let them buy drink from the offie.

‘You not eating either?’ Declan asked. ‘Can’t blame you because it’s all rank.’

‘My mother is the cook.’ He could see her smile as she removed her gloves. ‘I lost the time, that’s all.’

Declan noticed the wooden beads wrapped around her neck and the red mark on her forehead. She was the same but different.

‘It’s called a Tilaka,’ she said.

Declan touched his forehead, regretting that he’d washed off that mark.

She walked on past him out into the garden. ‘Are you coming or not?’ she called back. ‘I will ask my mother to make you cheese on toast.’

He discovered that her name was Alina, and she was running not from herself but from the war in Ukraine. She lived on the mainland in the village of Ballyconnell and came to work and pray on the island three days a week with her mother.

A week passed, and then a fortnight and even though the barge went back and forth every day and no one held him against his will, Declan didn’t leave. Instead, he fell into a pattern alien to him, rising

at seven every morning for breakfast and grafting with the other men for the rest of the day, refurbishing some outbuildings into new guest accommodation. It felt good to Declan, the physical ache in his body and the fresh air, and he liked how they called him Deva instead of Declan, which meant Lord of all the demigods, like something from Stranger Things. It freed him from all his name had come to represent. Hood. Low-life. Scum.

Declan didn’t do the prayers or chanting, or shave his head, but he underwent a metamorphosis, slowly emerging from a hardened chrysalis. In the evening, he sat by the water with Alina and watched the sunset over the lough. He told her things that he’d never put into words before, about what had happened to his brother and the terrible things he’d done through anger that kept him awake at night.

‘You were stuck,’ Alina said. ‘You didn’t know the way out.’

Declan felt that the island had saved him, and he wasn’t sure that he would ever leave, but then, towards the end of the summer, his mother called to tell him he had to come home.

‘I’ll take the bus down myself to fetch you,’ she said.

Declan couldn’t imagine being back in Iris Street, hemmed in by concrete, steel, and traffic. He’d have to go on being his old self because to change was to say that you’re better than them when it wasn’t that. ‘I think I’ll stay a while,’ he told her. ‘I’m a nicer person here.’

His mother started to cry on the other end of the phone. ‘Deccy, something bad has happened,’ she said.

‘Is it granny?’ Declan thought of how she’d been in hospital that time with pneumonia, how frail she’d looked in the bed.

‘It’s that woman you put off the road, Deccy.’ His mother’s voice was breaking again. ‘She died.’

The woman had been on her way home from a night shift at the Royal when he’d smashed into her on the Glen Road. He thought he’d got away with it until that letter in the post. Until this.

‘She had two wee ones,’ his mother said. ‘It’s been on the news and all.’

Declan felt like his head was underwater, his mother’s voice muffled. ‘I want to stay here with Mo and Nan and Alina.’ He sounded like a child who wanted five more minutes in the park.

When he came off the phone, he entered the temple room and knelt before the altar. He cried for that nurse and for all the pain he’d caused, and he wished he’d got up early every morning to pray with the others and learned all the mantras, that he’d tried harder. He offered prasad to the statues of Radha and Govinda, a feeding ritual Nan said allowed Krishna to see inside your heart. He was desperate for this now, for someone to know that he was good for a while, that if the island had found him sooner, he could have been a different kind of boy.

Alexandra Ward International

You look like a pack-mule.

Frances shifts slightly, hitching the tote bag higher up on her shoulder so that its thin straps cling to the edge of her collar bone. I didn’t wanna pay for a larger luggage allowance.

Is it not heavy?

It’s fine. Frances’ left hand lingers on the straps. We can sit down in a minute.

Martina grimaces. Hopefully, if that tit doesn’t get us all locked up in a room somewhere.

They both look towards the X-rays, where Lucy is being patted down by one of the female security officers. Lucy chats away to the poor woman, who is clearly just trying to get the job done and keep the endless queue moving. She waves Lucy on, who hurries over to meet them at the end of the conveyor belt.

What d’you get stopped for?

I dunno. I thought maybe it was me nipple piercings, and I am wearing all me rings, and I don’t usually wear this many rings, you know, but I thought that because we’re going on holiday I wasn’t sure which ones I’d want to wear, and some go better with different outfits, but I didn’t want to lose them in me bag, so I’m wearing all of them now, and I asked the lady over there if she thought that’s what did it, but she just said it was fine and I could go now.

I don’t blame her, Martina says.

The three of them head through the double doors that lead into the waiting area, which surprises Frances every time with its smallness. Being in an airport is almost like being in another country, one where

everything is strangely expensive and it’s not looked down upon to have a couple of pints at ten in the morning. Belfast International reflects its city perfectly: it’s compact, easy to navigate, and has only a handful of things to do. Frances prefers that to some of the airports in England she’s flown out of; her mum always says Manchester airport feels more like a shopping centre that just happened to offer flights.

They head into the Boots. Lucy starts picking up various items from the shelves and wanders further into the shop, whilst the others linger beside the entrance.

Martina drums her fingers against her thigh. Where d’you think the nearest smoking area is?

I dunno. Can’t you go a couple of hours without one?

You know I don’t like flying. I just wanna calm my nerves; and besides, I can hardly focus with all these kids screaming, and it stinks of airport in here.

Well, it’s unlikely they can do anything about that, considering it is an airport.

Maybe they could light one of them scented candles, Lucy suggests.

Martina huffs. Well, if I can’t find a smoking area, you’ll find me in the loos.

She rolls her suitcase away, its broken wheel squeaking.

Lucy picks up a travel-sized bottle of Factor 50. Frances, d’you reckon I should put some suncream on before the flight? Since I’ll be sitting in the window seat and all. I don’t wanna start the holiday all red so I won’t look nice in the photos.

Frances sighs. You’re not gonna get a sunburn on the flight.

Me mam’s got sunburnt through the windows before, and you know I’m delicate - remember when I got burned by the heat lamps at Town Square?

I don’t think that’s the same thing, really.

I’m just tryna be cautious. We’ll be flying over Spain, won’t we, and

it’s well hot there. They get a lot more sun than we do.

We’re going to Amsterdam, Luce. Why would we be flying over Spain? It’s not even in the same direction.

I thought since Brexit Irish planes couldn’t fly over the UK anymore. That’s what me mam told me.

Frances hitches her tote bag up on her shoulder. Right, I’m going over to look at the books, I’ll meet you at the gate.

Whenever Frances goes on holiday, she thinks that she never sees so many babies out in the world as she does at an airport. She would see some at her shop, where parents would struggle to manoeuvre their prams up and down the narrow aisles, and make a fuss of showing their very ordinary-looking babies to her when they came up to the till. Frances had never really liked babies. They were OK, as people go, considering they hadn’t formed any real opinions yet, so it’s not like she’d met any babies that she disliked on a personal level. They were just boring, and a bit loud. But her coworker Róisín loved babies, and fawned over each and every one held up for her inspection, which Frances felt was only encouraging people to bring them in and let them drool over the counter. It was nothing to the amount of babies here, though. Everywhere she looked, there was one shoving a fistful of Burger King fries into its mouth, or bashing an iPad against the floor, or just crying buckets in the Duty Free. It was a great advertisement for both earplugs and contraception.

She wandered past a toddler chewing on the edge of a Gruffalo board book and walked up to a wall of bestsellers. Frances was never one for snobbery, but the closest she came to it was immediately dismissing any book she knew you’d find in a Tescos, so she went deeper into the WH Smith’s to look for something a bit more interesting. She picked up a random Discworld novel and scanned the back of it. There was no need for her to buy any more books; there were three in her bag and she’d also brought her kindle, but they had two hours so she thought

she might as well have a look.

Hey.

Frances looked up. A man stood beside her, around her age, with one of those cylindrical sports bags slung over his shoulder. He looked at her, waiting for her to speak, but she wasn’t sure why. No one had ever come up to her in an airport bookshop before.

Um, hi. She looked back down at Carpe Jugulum, hoping he would go away.

You like fantasy books?

Yeah, I guess. Frances smiled as politely as she could manage.

What’s your favourite?

I dunno really.

FRANCES!

Lucy barrels towards them, the plastic bag in her hand swinging so close to the small child’s face that it begins to cry. Lucy doesn’t notice. Frances! Look at all the nail polishes I got. They had a three for two deal so I got us one each.

Aw, Luce, you didn’t have to do that.

It’s no bother. You owe me two pounds thirty three though.

Ah.

Lucy looked at the man beside Frances. Hello. Who are you?

The man smiled. My name’s Michael.

I have an uncle named Michael. He’s not very nice though. Lucy leaned in and whispered,  He doesn’t believe in climate change.

Michael looked between Lucy and Frances. Oh. That is unfortunate.  And you’d never want to get him started on the vegans.

Right. Michael clears his throat. It was, uh, nice meeting you two. He nods awkwardly and leaves them alone in the WH Smith’s. Frances puts the book back on the shelf with a small smile.

He seemed nice, Lucy says. I wonder where he’s going on holiday. Hopefully not Amsterdam.

They look up at the sound of wheels squeaking towards them, and Martina yanks her headphones around her neck.

Can you believe they charged me a quid for a smoke?

I thought you had your own cigarettes? Lucy asks.

Martina rolls her eyes. If only I’d thought of that, aye?

Frances takes Lucy’s arm. Can we go sit down somewhere?

The three of them wander over to an overpriced café on the other side of Duty Free. Lucy gets momentarily distracted by a tea towel with a watercolour rendition of the Lanyon Building printed on it, but Martina says she couldn’t possibly let her spend twenty pounds on a touristy piece of crap like that in good conscience. They take a seat beside the window, and look out at the planes lined up outside, somehow reminding Frances of toy cars lined up on her parents’ carpet when she was younger. Her and her brother John had always treated them like planes anyway, picking them up and driving them through the air, up walls and along the mantel. It was strange to be going on holiday with friends; she’d never gone away without her family before.

I need a drink, Martina says. You guys want anything?

Frances and Lucy both shake their heads, and Martina heads to the end of a very long queue. Frances spots Michael accepting an iced coffee from barista and looks away in case he sees her and tries to start their conversation up again.

Which plane d’you think is ours? Lucy asks.

Frances thinks, I don’t know. But she looks at Lucy, who is carefully scrutinising each one. She points at the one furthest away. I think it’s that one.

Carol Gribben

Eli’s Chair

I have an armchair. My favourite chair. The comforting configuration of the floral pattern faded yet soft, pleasing to the touch. In a certain light its strong and sturdy structure looks weary sitting by the fire. Weathered by years of love, and worn with many happy memories, this chair is a roadmap of my life, and I the cartographer. I know every bump, every pattern, every corner, and curve. Every loose, pulled stitch, every scuff, and every mark I know like the back of my hand. Babies were cradled in this chair. Children squealed in delight. Plasters were applied and kisses given to cut and scratched knees. Tears were dried, hearts were mended, and laughter was had. An armchair that coaxed one to curl up into the warmth of its body.

Now I sit here by the flames of the fire and gaze out the frosted window. The ground outside, a carpet of silvery white, like broken glass, glinting and scintillating in the cold December sun. White covered treetops and rooftops bear the weight of a heavy snowfall. Once a picture-perfect scene bursting with colour and life, now drained by the harshness of the season, and stiffened by the limitations of savage weather. A blue flashing light the only oddity in the bleak yet beautiful winter wonderland scene. The chest pains from moments ago ease. Death has loosened its grip on me momentarily. Either that, or I have relented and agreed to go.

As a young man I was gripped by fear and doubt. Had I been a good man? A decent man? A good husband and father? Reflecting on my younger years I know I always tried my best. Always endeavouring to do the right thing, even if I wasn’t always successful. I had done nothing grand or spectacular with my life. I could not lay claim to

having saved lives or cured ailments. I owned and ran a greengrocer’s, had married Hattie and had three children, who now had their children. I held my children in this very armchair and have been fortunate enough to hold my grandchildren here too. I was sat in this armchair when I received the news my father had died. I had not seen him in twenty years. I did not cry at his passing. It would have been a welcome blessing when I was a young child.

Another stabbing pain sears through my chest, like lightning, setting every nerve on fire. Everything feels hazy and distant as if I’m submerged underwater. Pain sweeps me off into a labyrinth of long forgotten memories. I can hear my daughter sob. I hear voices I do not recognise. I want to tell my daughter that it’s okay. I want to tell her not to cry. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. I’m frozen, wax-like, in the chair. I see fear etched on her tender face. My mind gently carries me back to when she had the chicken pox as a child. She was three, maybe four years old. I cuddled her the whole night in this armchair. She wouldn’t sit with her mother, only daddy would do. I’m filled with an overwhelming sense of love for my children, and I want to tell them I’m sorry. I’m sorry if I didn’t always get it right.

Through the fog of pain, I can make out anguished cries as my daughter pleads. I’m uncertain with whom but then I realise, it’s me. My daughter begs me not to go. And then, nothingness. Silence.

The crying stops. No more muffled voices asking me questions I’m unable to answer. The whirring and droning noise has ceased. The only sensation is that of the armchair. Warm and reassuring like a hug from an old friend. I grope for the armrests, but my arms are tired and heavy like I’ve been swimming through quicksand. I open my eyes in the small dimly lit room. It’s familiar, like a dream long ago forgotten. I try desperately to grasp at the threads of the memory, like a child grasping at the string of a balloon threatened to be carried away by a gust of wind. Floral fawn coloured paper covers the walls and heavy

curtains block out much of the light save for a slither spliced through the middle of the room. It is decorated wall to wall with clocks of all shapes and sizes. It’s mesmerising. Loud ticking in time with my beating heart. I gaze around my surroundings as my eyesight adjusts to the softly lit room, I’ve been here before. Someone speaks.

‘I wondered when you’d pop by my boy!’

My eyes widened; I suddenly recognise the voice.

‘Arthur!’ I turn round to face him.

There stands Arthur. Tall in stature, hair neatly combed as always, the same kindly smile on his tanned face and laughter lines round his deep-set eyes. His familiar grey woolly cardigan on. Arthur and his wife Rosa had lived about three quarters of a mile from us. They were surrogate parents to me. As a young boy this place was like heaven. Homemade baking and a menagerie of beautiful timepieces. Arthur was a horologist. Fixing timepieces, watches, and clocks for everyone. His work study had shelf upon shelf of clocks newly fixed, and those waiting for Arthur to work his magic with them. Arthur often talked me through the process of restoring life to the exquisite keepers of time. He was kind and intelligent, and well read on history. Rosa was gentle and soft spoken and baked the best treacle scones I’d ever tasted. They never had children of their own and their home quickly became my haven. Especially when my father would have too much to drink, and my mother would give me ‘that look’ and tell me to go outside and play. I’d hear her cries as I raced down the lane to Arthur and Rosa’s house. Terrified yet not fully understanding why.

I recall once telling Arthur.

‘It’s good you have no children, because I hate going out in the rain when Da shouts and Ma cries when she falls over.’

Arthur stopped what he was doing. He sat me down and with glistening eyes he told me.

‘Eli, no man should ever hit a woman, do you understand? It’s wrong.’

‘Is that why ma cries then, not because she has fallen over?’ I ask, already knowing the answer on some level.

‘It is my boy’ sighed Arthur.

‘It is.’

Rosa would place a cosy blanket round my legs in the armchair by the fire. Even back then it was my favourite chair. I felt safe and warm. As I grew older, I noticed the love and tenderness between Arthur and Rosa. How he would kiss her on her forehead and call her his sweetheart. The way she smiled back at him. This differed greatly to the way my father glared at my mother, the way she’d flinch when he’d go near her. One day I proudly announced to Arthur and Rosa that I wished they were my Ma and Da. Rosa cried in a soft way that was her nature. I was confused as I hadn’t meant to make her sad. Arthur patted me on the back and told me not to worry. He said if they ever had a son, they would want him to be just like me. I recall feeling so proud. That sensation of pride made me walk taller, a pride that embraced my life.

Rosa got sick. She was sick for a long time. She grew thin and pale. Her voice weakened. Like a clock winding down to a stop. When Rosa died Arthur was heartbroken, as was I. Arthur wasn’t the same after that. The sadness never left him. It took up residence in his home, seeping into every crevice of his house. I still called with Arthur, but not as often. As I grew older my visits lessened. Being comforted now by a visit from Arthur I feel a burning shame for having abandoned him when he needed me the most. In my own family a serious fall meant my father wasn’t as handy with his fists anymore, although the atmosphere between my parents remained poisonous till the end, like an ever-present disease in our house.

Hurled back to the present I’m shocked and confused once again by Arthur’s voice.

‘Come on boy, aren’t you gonna help me fix this piece?’ smiled

Arthur, standing over his workbench with his eye loupe in hand.

‘I don’t understand?’ I stammered.

‘Well, there’s not a lot to understand.’ he replied with a kind smile.

I heard a noise to the right of me and a door I hadn’t noticed suddenly opened and Rosa walked in wiping her hands on the tail end of her flowery apron. She was as dainty as I recall. Dark hair swept up in a bun, except for a loose lock that hung down the side of her slender delicate face. Azure eyes as blue as the clearest ocean. A waft of delicious smells waltzed out of the kitchen and swirled round the room, making me sway with childhood memories. Rosa held out her arms to me, the comforting scent of Camay soap so familiar, like a tender gesture from a loved one.

‘Hello my pet.’ she smiled.

‘Rosa!’ I cried.

When she hugged me, I felt like I was seven years old again.

‘Now,’ she said ’I’m going to make some tea and I’ll let you two boys catch up.’

I turned to Arthur.

‘Am I dead?’ I asked.

He bent over his work bench with a small pocket watch in front of him. The precision and care Arthur took when he was restoring timepieces rivalled that of a surgeon.

‘Do you see this watch here?’ he said, motioning me over beside him. ‘Saul Henry started manufacturing these after the Second World War from a shed at the back of his house. These are masterpieces. When I look at the workings of an exquisite timepiece such as this it is like staring at a Van Gogh or Grant Wood painting.’

‘Arthur!’ I pleaded. ‘Am I dead?’

Arthur sighed.

‘Soon’ he replied. ‘Soon.’

I feel a tight grip of my chest again, like a shower of exploding

stars. My head is light, swimming between two worlds, the past and the present.

‘I’m not ready Arthur, I’m not ready…not yet.’

Arthur set his eye loupe on his workbench. Placing a hand on my shoulder he tells me.

‘It’ll be alright my boy, you’ll see. Not long now.’

With that single touch a calmness sweeps over me. So much so I feel giddy. My body is cocooned in my armchair. I can hear my daughter’s voice. I know she’s holding my hand and crying. With the last breath in my body, I squeeze her hand.

A way of saying goodbye.

A way of saying ‘I love you.’

A way of saying ‘I’ll see you again.’

My motionless hand lays cradled in my daughter’s. Ticking clocks beckon. My heart tires of trying to beat. It slows to a stop. I slump sideways in my chair. My favourite armchair.

Darcey Youngman

Fly Away

Birds cry as Dad takes a slice of bread from the packaging. He scoops the jam out of the jar with his fingers. Spreading it thick as he folds the bread. He passes it to me. I take it and bite.

We sit on the park bench. Our plastic bag swings side to side underneath. Leaves battle with the overwhelming breeze. The red ribbon tied in my hair becomes undone.

Dad empties the contents of our shopping bag onto the seat. A loaf of bread, a now opened jar of raspberry jam and a can of lukewarm Fosters. He licks the gooey filling from his fingers and takes the loose ribbon from my ponytail. He wraps it around the handle, his hands shaking as he secures it with a bow.

He holds the ribbon, as he throws the plastic bag into the sky. The wind beats it as it rises. Jam spills out of the sandwich, I suck it up, trying not to waste any.

“I had a kite once. Real nice looking it was. Pale blue fabric with a sturdy wooden frame. Real, it was.”

The bag’s mouth opens wide, resembling a fully belly, just without the food. I wipe my mouth, while Dad picks at his. His lips dry and cracking.

A group of kids pass by. I notice Dad. The hole in his shoe. Joggers covered in mud. His coat zipper broke. I hear them snicker.

Dad beckons me to join him. “Come El.” He takes the ribbon, binding it around my wrist. My hand begins to tingle.

“You’ll have your own room. You want your own room, right?”

The crackling of the opening of his beer can sounds like thunder. He slurps in his first sip. The first is always the longest.

A flock of seagulls dawn, their wings creating large shadows over us. They notice our makeshift kite and crowd around it.

Dad watches, one hand carrying his beer, the other in his pockets. Safe from the wind’s vicious sting.

“Vicious shites.” He goes to take another swig but stops himself. “I’m just not good, El.”

The gulls take hold of the bag, nestling its skin into their beaks. Then, following the winds current, they flee. My feet slide across the grass. I scratch at my hand, trying to untie the knot. I dig in my heels. But the rubber on the sole has worn away.

The ribbon remains like a tattoo on my arm. My feet begin to lift. Dad chases me, reaching out towards my leg. He holds my leg in one hand, the can in the other. He pulls down but doesn’t have the strength. He looks at me. His eyes like a full bucket. He tries to speak, but only a whispered murmur manages to come out. He lets go.

I fly. The air is above me, as it is below. It’s bitter. Colder, as we go higher, as we reach the clouds. I twist, unable to steady myself. I feel disoriented like a child lost in the woods.

The gulls change formation, unravelling me from my entanglement. Winds lessen, as the clouds clear. My stomach growls. Travel sickness. I hold it in, I swallow it down. I embrace the new. I embrace the sky.

A honking comes from behind. The gulls take the warning, and scoop downwards. A group of swans sail overhead. Their bodies move like boats, crashing into the clouds, gliding through the blue. Their wings rise like steam and drop like rain patters.

They see the kite. Our kite. Like playground bullies, they nip at it. Pick on it. Their wings hit it, punch it, abuse it. Their jeering knocks the gulls off course. We dive down. Falling instead of flying. The gulls escape into the mist. The bag still present, but a little worn.

We remain low. A city emerges. Concrete towers and fluorescent lights. The wind cancels any noise. It plays like a silent movie.

I use the ribbon to swing left to right, scraping past buildings and looking through windows. I see TVs and full fridges. Fruit bowls for display. Rooms with beds and toys. No piled-up bins or built-up ash trays.

I allow my feet to dance off the rooftops. Like a yoyo, I’m drawn in and out. Never staying in one place.

We halt. Tangled in a pylon. I dangle in the air like shoes over a power line. The gulls flap forwards, but we’re pushed back. They become more aggressive, flinging themselves at the wires. The pylon is like a spider. We are the flies, stuck in its electrical web. I twist like a spinning top already spun. The sickness comes back. This time I cannot hold it, nor swallow it down.

All the motion, the movement, the turmoil, the chaos rips the bag. I await my faint. For the first time I am scared. I fear what will happen. I hold my head up, trying to find a figure. Someone who will help me. Someone like God or Allah. Anyone.

I do not pray for a new mattress, nor a kite with a sturdy wooden frame. I pray I land, and Dad will be there. We’ll have jam sandwiches with two slices of bread, instead of one.

I’m still in the air. The ribbon is knotted around the gull’s yellow feet, while the bag lies defeated, hanging over one of the spun threads. I remain entwined in the sky. The gulls dodge the spider’s silk, finding a reluctant opening. I mould my body to fit the gap.

A patter.

A shower.

Lashing, violent, sharp.

The gull’s feather’s become damp. My clothes soaked, I become heavier. The gull’s struggle. My hands slip. I slide out of my roots; the ones Dad had tied to my wrist, and I fall. I finally fall.

Air is below me, as it is above. A fog descends. Structures fade. Blue

transitions into white. I cannot hear the gulls squawking, nor the swan’s heavy wings. I cannot hear the winds raging lament. I cannot hear my Dad slurping. I only hear my breath. Inhale, exhale.

I land back at the park. The spit where we once stood. I look around and he’s not there. The jam, the bread are gone. All that remains is his empty Fosters can, crushed on the bench. I call out for him. I feel he hears me, but he will never respond. I look down at my hand and see a ribbon tied around my wrist, yet the bag is gone. Nothing is permanent.

A woman approaches, rolling a suitcase behind her. Birds call out, and I cry. I want to stay on the ground and never fly away.

Emilia Siletto

The Gardener

In the quiet center of our golden coast, there was a valley full of gardens. Roses bloomed in springtime, soft and fragrant, peaches and cream. In the summer there was lavender, a dreamlike carpet of delicate purple, soft under ancient oaks. Autumn brought the dahlias with tangerine petals and blooms as big as dinner plates. There were manzanitas too, leaves green and glossy and my mama liked those best because they tolerated drought. A river ran through the center of it all, crystal clear and gurgling down from the hills into the sea. And every single night, a blanket of fog would roll its way up from the ocean covering the flowers, the rivers, the houses. And every single morning it would roll back out again so that the sun could rise up bright in all its glory. The fog kept us temperate and the river kept us lush with emerald all the year round. This was our valley.

José came on Wednesdays, sometimes Saturdays too if mama needed extra help. He would trim our hedges, mulch our beds, weed our herbs. There was always something that needed doing in mama’s garden. Oftentimes she was right there beside him, gloved hands, knees in the earth. Gardening was her passion and José was her right hand man. I don’t know what they talked about out there in the dirt. Mama didn’t speak Spanish and I’d never heard José say anything at all. ‘The love of my life is coming today,’ she used to joke, and whenever he was here she would bring him fruit and water and they would smile a lot together. Sometimes she would ask me or Bruin to bring the fruit but we would shake our heads. We were too shy, ‘no, no you do it, he’s your gardener.’ Bruin would wave at José through the window but I wouldn’t. I would walk by fast, close the curtains of my room and pretend he wasn’t there.

Mom and Dad paid José twenty dollars an hour which they said was very good. They also paid for his gas because José lived in Salinas, the next valley over, and had to drive all the way over the hill into Carmel Valley just to get to our house. We hardly ever went to Salinas. It wasn’t safe. There were gangs there and people got shot. Mostly we would drive through, on our way up to San Francisco or Santa Cruz. The first time I got out of the car and really walked around, I was twelve. It was our 6th grade service trip and we were going to a soup kitchen.

The afternoon before the trip our teacher, Mrs. Dana, sat us down and in her usual bright voice explained that we could wear ‘free-dress’ the following day but we must not wear any red or blue. These colors, she said, could ‘mean bad things to certain people.’ Her vagueness was later clarified by classmates who exchanged hushed whispers about ‘gangs’ over cheese sticks and bagels.

‘Red is for the Bloods, blue is for the Crips,’ Mira said seriously. ‘If you wear the wrong colors, they will shoot you. Sometimes they will shoot you just because.’

‘It’s like initiation,’ Martin added, mouthful of applesauce. ‘To shoot someone.’

I sat there and listened but I didn’t say anything. I knew nothing about these things.

The next day I did not wear ‘free-dress,’ I wore my uniform. Black and white and gray. Safe colors. It was overcast and muggy and we drove for what seemed like hours through fields of lettuce planted in long straight rows. Out the bus window they looked like long legs running, faster and faster as we sped by. I watched, hypnotized. Here and there were the farmworkers, bent at the hip stacking the lettuce heads into wide wooden crates. They wore ball caps over bandannas and thick denim jackets.

‘Why are they wearing so many clothes? It’s not even cold,’ Martin asked.

‘Clothes protect from the sun, Martin. Sunscreen can be expensive and not everyone can afford it,’ Mrs. Dana explained.

‘But why can’t they buy sunscreen? Don’t they have money?’ Martin asked. We had never heard of someone who couldn’t buy sunscreen. Mrs. Dana looked across the aisle at Mrs. Cook then, which meant this was a question with a grown-up answer.

Eventually the fields faded to trailer parks and then to gas stations and large square buildings. The town of Salinas was gray and concrete. McDonalds and Best Buys and Costcos lit up the bleakness with jarring neon signs. As we drove deeper into the city, tents began to line the streets, men in ragged clothes draped themselves over park benches and elderly women pushed overflowing shopping carts down littered sidewalks. My classmates were silent, faces pressed against the glass. We pulled up to a large empty car park and the teachers began handing out aprons.

‘Ok everyone, stick together today. Absolutely no wandering off. If you go to the bathroom, one of us will accompany you. Bring your water bottles, oh, and remember to smile. These are human beings just like you.’ Peering out the window, we saw a line of figures wrapping its way down the street and around the block. Many had on the same bandanna wrapped denim jackets we had seen in the fields.

‘Are they all here for the soup?’ Mira whispered quietly. They were. All of them.

We spent all morning in that empty car park dishing out watery lentils to a never ending line of young families, men with wives and small children running about, teenagers whispering Spanish to one another, and old men with skin like worn leather smoking cigarettes under broad brimmed hats. Some of them were fresh from the fields. Some still had dirt clinging to their clothes, packed under their nails. Others had splashed themselves with water, washing away the filth. I felt ridiculously overdressed in my collared shirt and new black shoes.

I did my best to scuff them up a bit so they wouldn’t shine so bright.

We took our own lunch in the bus. Mama had packed me strawberries and a Whole Foods tuna melt, and Mrs. Dana passed out chocolate chip cookies as a treat. She told us how wonderful we had been and how grateful St. Mary’s Kitchen was for our service. We felt proud. As she spoke, a group of children gathered outside the bus. They were our age, maybe younger, and I recognized some of them from the soup line. They pointed at us through the windows giggling and Mira raised her arm, cookie in hand to wave. They waved back, some of them still held soup bowls. None of them had cookies.

We drove home the way we’d come, over the hill and into our own little valley. I felt relieved to be back. Here, where houses were all warm brick and sandstone and everything was beautiful. The hills were green with golf courses not lettuce fields and none of the stores had neon signs. That night I asked dad if José went to soup kitchens.

‘We pay him well enough that he doesn’t need to, honey,’ dad said.

‘Does he have kids?’ I asked. ‘Where is his family?’

‘I think they’re back in Mexico.’

‘Why didn’t they come too?’ I asked. ‘To California I mean.’ Dad looked at mama then. This was another question with a grown-up answer.

‘Maybe they will one day, sweetie,’ mama said. But later I heard her talking to Dad about ‘green cards,’ and how José didn’t have one. I knew enough about ‘green cards’ to know that they were important, hard to get and highly coveted. Little green tickets to this land of flowers and emerald. José came the next day and this time I didn’t run to my room and close the curtains. Instead, I sat in the kitchen and I watched him. I was curious now. Who was this strange man from the valley over the hill where people picked lettuce and ate soup in parking lots. How old was he? He looked about dad’s age, face creased from the sun and hands worn and calloused. Did he have children? If he did,

were they my age? Bruin’s age? Did they miss him?

All morning long he delicately wove wisteria vines into the arbor that framed our garden. It was April. The sky was blue and the sun had begun to swell with warmth, washing the valley in gold. Soon the purple buds on those vines would burst open from the heat, fragrant with their sweetness. Then it really would be springtime.

Carmel Valley was most beautiful in springtime, when the giant oaks began to leaf and wildflowers washed over the hills. Everyone wanted to come here then, and so everyone did. Carmel was a place people got married, went on honeymoon, vacationed. They drove up and down the valley in tractor drawn wagons and rented vintage cars, tasting wine and pretending it was the olden days. They never went to the valley over the hill. Salinas was not somewhere you went on vacation.

José finished with the arbor and I watched mama bring him sliced watermelon and ice water in a glass mug. He noticed me watching and dipped his head in greeting, smiling wide. I decided to be brave and raised my hand to wave. The next time mama prepared his cup and plate of fruit I told her I would bring it out myself. ‘Oh?’ she asked, surprised. ‘Alright then, sweetie, just don’t spill!’ I carried the plate in my left hand and the cup in my right, careful so as not to spill. It was raspberries this time, purple and dripping with juice. They were from the bush out back that José had put in the ground last spring. All of mama’s friends thought it a miracle she could grow her own fruit. They would come for tea and you would think they’d never had a raspberry in their entire life.

‘These are incredible, Mary, so sweet and juicy. The ones from Whole Foods are never this good. Tell me how’d you do it?’

‘Well,’ mama would say, ‘José helped a ton. He knows things about plants they just don’t teach in botany school.’

‘Oooo José?’ they would say, ‘am I pronouncing that right? Does

he have extra time, this José? Greg and I have been looking for a new gardener.’ He always did. José always found extra time for mama’s friends and soon they were all raving about his fruit.

I arrived at the trellis where José was standing on a small ladder stringing peas against the fence. He looked down surprised. ‘Ellie, oh thank you,’ he said, making his way down the ladder and taking the raspberries and water from my hands. His accent was thick but I understood him just fine.

‘You know my name?’ I asked. He sat down on the bottom step of the ladder so that his head lined up with mine.

‘Your mother tells me. I have a daughter too, you know, same height.’ At this he held a hand up next to my head and smiled.

‘You have a daughter?’ I asked.

‘Three! I have three. Sophia, Carmela, Ana,’ he said. ‘They live in Mexico. One day I will bring them here.’

‘Will I meet them?’ I asked.

‘Si, por su puesto. Yes, they will like you very much. You want to see?’ I nodded and from the pocket of his brown canvas pants he pulled a photograph, worn at the edges and faded from the sun. In it were three girls. One, a toddler with chubby cheeks and shiny black curls. One looked about the Bruin’s age, seven or so. She wore an oversized soccer jersey. The oldest was my age with a ball cap and deep brown eyes.

‘They are very pretty,’ I said. I wanted him to know that I thought so.

‘Si muy bonita,’ he beamed.

‘Bonita?’ I asked.

‘Beautiful. Just like you.’ In that moment he reminded me of my own father. I thought how me and Bruin would miss dad if he moved away.

In Spanish class that Thursday, I asked Mrs. Smith what ‘por su

puesto’ meant. I asked her how to say ‘Hello, how are you?’ and she told me. ‘Hola cómo estás? Hola cómo estás? Hola cómo estás?’

‘Stop it. Mama, make her stop it!’ Bruin complained, but I did not stop.

Saturday morning I waited by the kitchen window for José’s rusty red truck. But noon came and noon went and José had not arrived. One o’clock came and one o’clock went and still no sign. At two mama started to worry. I could tell because she began to pace, eyebrows furrowed and hands on her hips.

‘Jerry, we should call,’ she said to dad. Dad looked up from his crosswords.

‘Give it another hour, Mary, he may have just forgotten.’

At three mama had her phone book out and the landline in her hand. I sat watching her as the phone rang and rang. No one answered. Dad said not to worry, but mama said José always called when he was going away. Wednesday came and went. Saturday came and went. On Sunday mama rang his number again and this time a man picked up. It was José’s brother. When she hung up the phone her face was pale.

‘It was the green card,’ she whispered. ‘They sent him back. Oh my god they sent him back.’

‘Well can’t we go get him then?’ I asked ‘We can get him a green card can’t we? And bring him back?’

‘It doesn’t work like that, honey. He wasn’t legal,’ she said sadly, definitively. I didn’t understand. Legal? He was her friend.

‘He was your friend!’ I shouted suddenly. Why was she being like this? There were tears in my eyes now. Hot tears.

‘Gardener, sweetie, he was our gardener.’ She said this softly. I stared. The tears flowed freely then and I opened my mouth to speak but what was there to say? I had my grown-up answer.

Emma Kane

Connection

I pull back the corner of the welcome mat to reveal a single key. The only predictable thing she has ever done. Closing my hand around its shape I look up at the leaden clouds hanging over the house like a shroud, feel their weight. Key finds lock, turns clockwise. Pushing open the door, I step inside. Pink floral wallpaper, green high pile carpet. Outside in. I’m uncomfortable, uneasy at being here uninvited. I’ve never lived in this house. It’s entirely her space. It isn’t a family home. There are no pictures of me. There are pictures of my mother and her lover everywhere. His photograph in full uniform eyeballs me from its resting place on the wall. The clock has stopped. I call out. No answer, no sign of life. The smell of stale smoke hangs in the air. Dirty cups, glasses, overflowing ashtrays. Making my way to the kitchen, I put my hand to the kettle. It’s cold. The cooker, unused. Inside the fridge, half a tomato, fur growing around its edges, a piece of mouldy cheese. Opening the spoiled milk, I wrinkle my nose at its reek, replace the lid. Hanging back in the hallway it’s hard to breathe. The air is static. Her door has always been shut to me. Today it’s ajar, creaks as I push it open. Clothes, shoes, make-up, jewellery, strewn. Time reversed, I’m nine years old.

I’d appreciate it if you’d stay out of my room sweetie. I want to back out, cover my eyes. But I can’t unsee the little pink pills, the empty vodka bottle. I move closer, hesitate, glance over my shoulder. A pyjama clad arm, strawberry blonde hair half-covering an ashen face. I could retrace my steps. Return the spare key to its hiding place. Go back, pretend I’d never been here.

Bad with her nerves, the wife.

Da’s explanation when she took to her bed. Endless tears. A diet of Smirnoff and fags. There only in body. Looking back, the two month stays with my aunt on the farm made sense. Good memories, for me. The eighties. I wasn’t old enough to understand. For her? Complete blank. Hotel strap-me-down. Electro-convulsive shock treatment. The norm, back then.

They protected me. Not such a good thing. It might have been less shocking, if I’d ever heard a row, but my parents never argued. She didn’t ask me to go with her. Maybe she thought I’d be safer with Da, in a home I knew. Had I gone to live with her maybe we’d all have been safer. Hindsight. I might never have met you.

My mother had been sad for as long as I could remember. Being around her was like tiptoeing through a field full of landmines. One wrong move. Too much for a teenage girl to manage. Too much for Da. Too much for anyone. But not him. He made her happy. Had to give him that. I was eighteen when we were finally introduced. He wasn’t going anywhere. If Da could acknowledge him. Not that my father was innocent. He’d ignored her for years. Couldn’t deal. Wasn’t sure what to do with me. Bottom of the list, his family. I suspect he was relieved when she left. Glad to be free of some of the responsibility.

I asked you to come with me, for moral support. I was dreading it, for more reasons that I could count. I gulped it down. Didn’t confide in you. Didn’t think I had to. She was my mother, I loved her for that. He was part of her life now. We sat stiff, my hands tucked under my thighs, you with folded arms. My mother served us tea. Visitors. The fancy-man arrived late. Held up at work he said. I freed my hands, studied them, chewed the skin around my nails, afraid to look at you, at him. He approached me all smiles. Stretched out his big spade hand. I got to my feet. Didn’t want him looking down on me. The upper hand. He held my palm in his. Strong handshake, confident. Clear blue eyes. Deep, like water. I scanned the colourful display of tattoos on his arms,

ready to judge, to oppose this man. But I couldn’t help feeling what can only be described as admiration. He’d taken on my mother. Difficult. He had a way about him, a sense of security. For a moment I could see it, what she saw. I glanced in her direction. She blushed with pleasure. A connection finally made. Was that hope in her eyes? God, her face. Role reversal. She was the teenager. I swallowed the bile.

Stepping aside, I turned to you, hand outstretched. Da da! I presented him to you. He flashed his pearly whites, extended the spade a second time. You uncrossed your arms, got to your feet. He looked you straight in the eye, friendly like. His hand hung in mid-air. You glared, shoved your hands in the pockets of your Levi’s, raised your chin to meet his gaze. Lips tight shut, jaw square, mouth a slash, shoulders hunched, eyes dark like raisins. The smile slipped from his face. He saw you for the first time. Chests puffed out, fists tight you squared up to one other. My mother looked at me in despair, panic stricken, her expression wild. I grabbed your elbow, tried to settle you. The two of you, boring holes, neither willing to back down. He let it go first, you wouldn’t let it drop. My mother fussed over him. I encouraged you to sit, take it easy. Stalemate. The atmosphere was as sharp as dandelion greens. My mother, half paralysed. I handed you the car key, suggested you go ahead, start the engine. I’d say my goodbyes.

We drove home in silence, my head resting on the windowpane, cold against your rage. Later when you’d calmed down I confronted you. She wasn’t your mother. It wasn’t your family she’d betrayed. A difficult situation, made worse. I got it. You had my back. He’d hurt me, so he’d hurt you. Right? But I knew even before you opened your mouth, that wasn’t what it was about.

‘While there’s breath in my body, I’ll not be shaking the hand of a pig!’

You were twenty-two. A townie. Catholic side. You’d seen things I couldn’t imagine. Youngest of six. More than half your siblings were

connected. The eldest in prison. Just cause. Me? Only child. Grew up in the country. New money. I couldn’t change your mind. No idea what you’d been through. The subject of my mother, her lover, was avoided. Ceasefire. On everyone’s lips. A new Northern Ireland. Putting a hand on my bloated belly, I told myself our child would think differently.

Date night. Pulled from a self-help book. You didn’t turn up. I was in bed by the time you got home. Dinner in the dog. I heard you come in, sat upright, turned on the light. Go back to sleep, you told me. Where had you been? It was past eleven. You couldn’t have been at work till that time, I’d been worried.

‘Got caught on the wrong side of it. The riot. Couldn’t get through. Had to wait in the pub.’

I’d watched it on the news. Petrol bombs. Arrests. A wall of antiriot shields.Your face was flushed. I guessed you’d had a skinful. Glad you were safe, I lay down again. You climbed in beside me, turned off the light. I fitted my shape into yours. Your skin smelled of smoke. I rolled over, turned away. Couldn’t sleep. Inebriated snoring. Got up to use the bathroom. Picked your clothes off the floor. The stench of petrol. Baby began to cry.

You asked me again where my mother was going. I told you. For the third time. Birthday party. Bar in the next village. The fancy-man’s nephew’s twenty-first. My mother was a bag of nerves. Who could blame her. Pub full of Protestants. All judging. Wasn’t even sure she’d been invited. She was still a Fenian. A married one. Another man’s wife. Catholic in her didn’t believe in divorce. The fancy-man would drive. They wouldn’t stay long. An hour or two. You were heading out. Jamesy needed advice. Women trouble. You promised to take me out at the weekend. You’d get your Ma to babysit. I wondered what

relationship advice you could offer Jamesy.

It was just past 8.30am when the phone rang. You’d rolled in late, left for work early. Theme tune of Button Moon filled the front room. Our wee son sat on the floor. Fist full of sugar puffs. I picked up the receiver. Heavy breathing down the line. A loud whisper.

‘Is it you?’

My Da. I rolled my eyes. Who else would be answering my house phone?

‘Car bomb. Peeler blown to smithereens.’

So…what’s new? Always trouble in this Godforsaken town.

‘Turn on the television. Your mother…’

They were everywhere. Crawling all over the bungalow, knocking on the windows, doors. Tripods, cameras, boom microphones. Peeler minding the door was struggling. He wasn’t much older than me. Looked petrified. The curtains were shut. I put up my hood. It wasn’t raining. A coded knock. Door opened a fraction.

‘The daughter.’

I’m weighed up, waved in. Ceasefire. My arse.

I imagined my mother at the party. Wondered if anyone had shaken her hand. Or did they blank her, like you had him. The fancy-man was supposed to pick her up. He was always late. Work. He’d called to let her know. She didn’t want to be late. It would be hard enough showing her face. Change of plan. She’d take her own car. Meet him there. Outside. Save time.

They went in together, her hanging off him. It had gone as well as could be expected. They’d been politely received, in Protestant terms. Some gave them a wide berth. They’d stayed an appropriate amount of time. Passed themselves. Left before eleven as planned. The relief. Once outside their laughter filled the ether. They were glad to be alone again. Excited to be able to show affection. Away from judging eyes. He’d stay the night at hers. He stayed most nights, had his own top

drawer, his own key. True love.

His car turned the corner a little too fast. So eager to get there. He climbed the hill she followed close behind. Nearly there. The night was still. A waning three quarter moon. Until. Night lit up like day. Burnt orange. Sky shuddered. Stars staggered. Moon paled. Ground shook. Birds catapulted from trees. Violence against nature. She slammed on the brakes. Her ears rang. White noise. Her eyes shone, unblinking. Like a wild rabbit with uveitis. Photophobia. She fell out of her car, ran towards a ball of flames. The heat engulfed her, she retreated. Fire licked the grass verges, bits of burning steel scorched sod. Hell on earth. For a second she couldn’t comprehend, wasn’t able to piece it together. And then - the understanding. He hadn’t checked the car. He always checked the car. Cataclysm. Apocalypse. Eschaton.

She was consumed by an overwhelming desire to get to him. Back and forth, she ran towards the fire away from it, head in hands, panicking, sobbing. She found him eventually. What was left of him. He’d been spat out. Purged. Like lava from a volcano. Lay convulsing among the flowerbeds in a neighbouring garden. She wept, into his singed hair, rocked his smoking torso. Stroked his blackened face. Watched as his light went out. Ambulance came. Too late.

I looked at her as though I’d never seen her before. My mother. Unfamiliar. She sat in an upright chair, hands in her lap. She’d not moved, not said a word all night. She just stared at nothingness. I said her name. Softly, louder. She didn’t hear me. I knelt before her, held her hand. She didn’t feel me, see me. Peeler told me deafness was common. How could any of this be common? Getting to my feet, I wandered towards the fireplace, picked up a framed photo of my mother and her lover from the mantel. She’d left her husband. Turned her back on her family, her religion, me. He’d gone against everything he stood for. Easier for both of them to have walked away. Admit that it was too hard. Yet they held on. Determined that together was where they

belonged.

I kept thinking, he was supposed to pick her up. She should have been a passenger in his car. Intervention. My mother was spared. Left with a void. A black hole that couldn’t be filled. Every day for the rest of her life she’d wake up with an instinct. A feeling that something awful had happened. Then she’d remember. ~

I sit in my mother’s bungalow staring at the telephone. Two years since. She’s stuck here in the land of the living. Dying to be with him. I couldn’t save her even if I tried.

‘Hello, ambulance please. My mother. Overdose.’

When I was sixteen years old my mother told me that you can’t choose who you love. Someday I’d understand, meet the one. My Anam cara. All you need. Connection, she’d bubbled, you can’t fight it, it’s not a choice. I’d never seen her so animated. I was hurt that she was leaving me behind, upset that I wasn’t enough. I was envious of him, of what they shared. Not long after she left, I met you. I wanted what she had. Longed for it. Unrequited love. I was vulnerable. We got together quickly. You were older than me. You were my first. I wasn’t yours.

I sit on a soft chair, my toddler fast asleep on my lap, listening to the beep beep of the life support machine. Tubes up her nose, cannula in her arm. Tomorrow they’ll scan her brain, her organs, to see how extensive the damage is. In the dim light I look at the face of our slumbering son. So unaware of the world we brought him into. He’s the image of you, God love him. I vow that when she’s gone, free from the pain of this life, I’ll find a way. Get my son as far away from you as possible. From this troubled island we call home. In the silence of the hospital room, I face the truth of it. Your connection was never to me.

Ian McDonald

Women’s Christmas

Eleven days of rain and on the twelfth, on Women’s Christmas, it broke. I took Rosh down to the hotel in sharp low winter sun. We were half-blinded and sun-dizzy by the time we arrived in Newcastle. It was a good thing the car was doing the driving. We left early to get as much spa time as possible in before dinner but Sara had beaten us. She waved to us from the whirlpool. She was the only one in it. Women’s Christmas fell in the lull between New Year and the Christmas present discount voucher breaks. We had the old Victorian pile almost to ourselves and we liked it.

We sat neck-deep on the long, tiled bench and let the spritzed water play over us. The big picture window looked out on the beach and the mountains. The low sun was setting. The sea was a deep indigo and the lights were coming on along the curve of the bay. The rain had washed the air clean; we could almost smell the day ending. Those eleven days of rain had been eleven days of snow, up on the mountain tops. They glowed cold blue in the gloaming, paler blue on dark.

‘It’ll be up soon,’ Rosh said. Then Dervla appeared in her swimmers and we turned away from the window and waved and whooped.

‘Did someone remember to bring them?’ Dervla asked, as one of us asks every year.

‘They’re in the back of the car,’ I said. Every year someone asks, every year Rosh picks them up from the airport, every year I sling them in the back of the car.

We soaked in the pool and steamed in the sauna and tried the new spa devices, which pummelled you and tormented you and beat you

down with powerful jets of water.

‘I’m not sure about those,’ Dervla said. This was our tenth Women’s Christmas in the Donard.

It’s not a northern thing, Women’s Christmas. It’s a thing from Cork and Kerry, where the feast is still strongly observed. January 6th is the day: the Feast of the Epiphany, Twelfth Night, the night you have to have your decorations down or face bad luck the whole year. It’s sometimes called Little Christmas, or Old Christmas Day, a name I find spooky, like something sleeping deep and long that you don’t want to wake. It’s to do with different calendars, I believe. If Christmas is turkey and sprouts and meaty, wintry stuff, Women’s Christmas is about wine and cake and sweet things. Eat sweet and talk sweet, Alia in work says. She’s Syrian – well, her family came from Syria. And we talk. Five sisters scattered all over the island have much to talk about. Afternoon tea and cakes, and cocktails help, but the talk’s not always sweet.

Men traditionally look after the house and make a fuss of the women at Women’s Christmas, but luck with that from the men in our lives. The hotel provides reliable pampering, has the spa and serves decent cocktails. We didn’t even have a name for this little family gathering until Sinead mentioned our Epiphany sojourns in a five star hotel to a neighbour and she said, that sounds like Women’s Christmas. We took the name but it was our own thing: these women’s Christmas. The Corcoran sisters.

Sinead came cursing in from Cork. The good weather had stalled somewhere in Kildare; she had driven through one hundred and fifty kilometres of rain and flood, maintenance was overrunning and road speeds were down to sixty. She was pissed off at having missed the spa. It part of the ritual.

‘Tell me I’m in time for the cocktails.’

‘You’re in time for cocktails.’

Sinead would always be in time for cocktails.

There was a new thing, from up there: a cocktail everyone was drinking. Blue Moon. I liked the sound of that, so Rosh told us what was in it: gin and blue Curacao. We asked the barman to show us blue Curacao and Sinead screwed up her face and said, Oh I don’t much fancy that. We stuck with what we knew and liked. Fruit and straws. Non-alcoholic for Dervla. She’s been three years off the drink and looking better for it.

‘First thing,’ Dervla said. She was the oldest – twelve years older than me --the baby-- and assumed she was the natural leader of the Corcoran sisters. We raised our glasses and drank to Laine.

I forget that not every family has an aunt who went to the moon. I was twelve when Laine left. I told everyone at school that an aunt of mine was going to work on the moon. They weren’t as impressed as I wanted them to be. When Laine launched, I imagined it would be on every screen in the country. I still thought space and the moon were big, unusual things. We got private feed from the launch company and had to pay for it. Dervla brought prosecco to cheer Laine up into space. Back then, Dervla would have celebrated the opening of a letter with prosecco. We had hardly a glass down us before the thing was out of sight and the smoke blowing away on the wind. The thing I remember most was that I was allowed a glass of fizz. My excitement had become embarrassing and when I went to look at the Moon, trying to imagine anyone up there, let alone Aunt Laine, I made sure no one saw me. It’s easier now there are lights, but twelve years on, at the new moon I can see the lights but I can’t remember clearly what Aunt Laine looks like. She wasn’t that much older than Sara, a good sight younger than Dervla. More cousin than aunt. Ma never really approved of Da’s side

of the family. That’s not really her name, she said on those rare times when Laine came to stay. Her name’s really Elaine. I tried playing with her, but she was into outdoor stuff like bikes and building dams in streams and getting muddy. That’s ironic seeing as she’s permanently indoors now.

Then the money came.

The food really isn’t so great here but the service makes up for it. Good service means so much. By tradition, we took a late afternoon tea. Sandwiches with the crusts cut off and mushroom vol au vents, sausage rolls, cake and fruit loaf. Fondant fancies. Tea, or light German wines, not too dry. We ate while the staff took down the decorations. We were glowing from the spa and the cocktails.

We save all our news for Women’s Christmas.

Dervla’s oldest was in a show in Las Vegas, middle Jake was rolling along in his middling way and the only thing Eoin would have was GAA all day every day. The laundry was ferocious, but, in these days when qualifications count for nothing, football was as valid a career path as any.

Sinead’s Donal was settled in San Francisco now. The company had moved him into the materials development section already. He’ll be the next one off to the moon, Rosh said and we all looked at her. Three Cosmopolitans or no, a Corcoran woman is expected to follow the rules. He’s found himself a nice girl, Sinead said and the mood lifted like the Christmas weather.

Sara would have gone on all night about the divorce but the Women’s Christmas rule is eating sweet and talking sweet and no matter the settlement it was better than Bry.

Rosh’s news was old news to me because I saw her every other day. New house new man. Again. New job maybe. It was new and exciting to the others. Dervla gave the company report. Corcoran Construction

was in better shape. The losses from the previous two years had been reversed. Her talk was of finance I didn’t understand. I never had a head for business, and I mistrusted Michael around all that money so I asked the rest of them to buy me out. Wisely as it transpired with that gobshite Michael. Sinead was a silent partner but Sara positively revelled in the boardroom battles and corporate politics. I put the money in safe investments, let the rest of them run the empire and saw them once a year, at Women’s Christmas.

Aunt Laine sent us money from the moon. She was making a fortune, something in mining. That was what she had studied. Her idea had always been to get to the Moon; that was where the work was, that was where the opportunities were. Make your fortune, send it back. The streets of the moon were paved with gold, except I heard once that gold has no value up there. Send home the money; buy the slates for the cottage and a decent headstone. Laine set up her brother and her parents, and then looked around for others whose lives she could transform with her money: her cousins, the five Corcoran sisters. She wanted us to use it to encourage women in science and engineering. We did: we set up Corcoran Construction.

The money still came down from the moon, quarterly. We hadn’t needed it in years. Corcoran Construction had made us safe. Aunt Laine was our indulgence fund: West End musicals, weekend breaks, shopping sprees, family holidays and every year we blew a whack of it on Women’s Christmas.

The Baileys was on the second bottle, and Sara had an audience now. I didn’t want to hear about the bastardry and the fuckery. Michael was five years back but certain times, certain places bring him close. Like angels, he stooped close to Earth at Christmas.

I went out for a smoke. The sudden cold took my breath away; the air was so clear it seemed as brittle and sharp as glass. I lit up and sat

on one of the smoker’s benches, listening to the night. Sound carried huge distances on the still air. The sea was a murmur in the dead calm. Car engines, someone revving. Shouts from down on the promenade. I tracked the course of an ambulance siren through the town and up the main road behind the hotel. I heard a fox shriek, a sound that spooked and excited me in equal parts. The wild things were closer than I thought. I shivered hard and deep; the alcohol heat was evaporating and I was in party frock and shoes. There would be frost on the lawns in the morning and ice where yesterday’s rain lingered. I was glad the car would be driving us back up north.

The three-quarter moon stood above the town. There were artificial lights up there, machinery and trains and stuff, but the moonlight outshone them. Half a million people lived there, building a new world. Laine went there. Someone I know went there, and was there, and would remain there for the rest of her life. Everyone knows the rule. If you don’t come back after two years you don’t come back at all. She’ll be back, we said, before even the smoke from the launch had cleared. She didn’t come back.

I opened the car. The gifts were in an Ikea bag. The money was not Laine’s only largess: every year for ten years she sent gifts from the moon. We held Women’s Christmas because that was how long it took her gifts to arrive. It was complex process; tethers and orbiters and shuttles. Devices I didn’t understand. Every year we would pick up the gifts from the airport and bring them down to the hotel.

We never open them. They are stowed, nine bags, in Rosh’s storage unit.

The gifts were small but exquisitely packaged. They looked like kittens in the bottom of the big blue bag. The labels were handwritten. I sat in the back seat of the car and ripped open the one addressed to me.

Laine Corcoran’s gift to me was a small, plastic figure, the size of

my thumb. It was a big-arsed, big-boobed girl with the head and skin of a leopard. She wore hot pants, a crop top, pointy ears and big hair, and she carried a ball in her right hand. I thought at first it was one of the action figures Conrad used to fill his room with, before he went to his dad, then I noticed a tiny logo on the back. It was a mascot for a sports team. I couldn’t recognise the sport.

I never thought of sport on the moon.

A 3-D printer had made it. 3-D printers made everything on the moon. Corcoran Construction was experimenting with them in the building trade.

It had cost Laine a fortune to send this from the moon to me. I put it back in the box, refolded the packaging as best I could, and hid the gift under the others. No one would ever know I’d opened it. No one would ever know I’d broken our rule. I was cold to the bone now and shivering hard. I closed the car boot and went back into the warm, bright hotel. Sara was opening the third bottle of Baileys.

Isaac Cave Sigma

The podcast studio was a chamber, panelled with sponsor-stained walls and worn down carpet. Snakes of cables covered the floor and the air was chocked with thick musk and exclusive fragrances. Expensive cameras and microphones were assembled carefully. Three people sat around the coffee table in the centre, bare chested and bearded like Greek statues. The presenter, Tyler Boros, held a tumbler of Macallan in one hand and his microphone in the other.

“Listen to me! How can you call yourself a man if you aren’t independent, if you aren’t self-made? You know what I’m saying?” Nods and affirmations came from his guests, their chiselled, tattooed frames were adorned with gold chains, ornate rings and overdesigned watches. “I started this very podcast from nothing and grew it to what it is now! Too many young men today are just coasting through, living in their parent’s basement, not earning, not investing in themselves.”

“Damm right,” a slab of meat in dark sunglasses cried. “Our ancestors were hunters, we would have to go out, kill our food and bring it back for the tribe. That’s man shit right there. Who was protecting everybody from wolves and shit? The men. They put themselves out there!

“People got it so fuckin’ easy these days,” the third character cut in. “So much easier to start a business than ever before and they just don’t take it.” Tyler nodded and sipped from his glass, the whiskey burning his throat. Ignoring the taste, He held up a set of car keys to one of the cameras fixed on him.

“I got a Ferrari 458 in the parking space outside. That’s my dream car man. I got a ten thousand dollar watch, luxury clothes and my own

business. I’m twenty five and I’m living the best fucking life. And you can too, go to our page, sign up for the “Main Man” course and become truly independent! Stay hard!”

Tyler woke up at 5:00am. Here we go again. The air in the pristine, barren room was cool, inviting him to sleep on. He rolled off the futon, straight into a press-up position. Down and up he went for five minutes, followed but crunches and squats. He groaned throughout the workout, his body protesting at the sudden exertion. Every muscle became tight like a wound spring. He showered and began shaving his beard exactly how he liked it, thin but with presence. He started with his cheeks and neck, clipping away any straying hair, then around his lips, between his eyebrows and ridding himself of his burgeoning sideburns. He moved on to a nose hair trimmer and worked around both nostrils and his ears, as it worked well for both. Lastly, he took a pair of scissors and manually trimmed away anything that had escaped his notice; one on his left eyebrow, a little one below his lip and a stray on his neck. Grooming finished, he lavished his face in Hugo Boss and brushed his teeth to a mirror shine.

“Tyler? You in there hun?” came a knock at the door. Tyler sighed, exasperated.

“Busy grandma!” he shot back.

“Okay, breakfast’s on the table,” she sang.

Tyler ran downstairs in a white Calvin Klein T-shirt, Armani blue jeans and the latest Nike Airs, a pair of Ray-Bans tucked into his V-neck. The kitchen of his grandmother’s had been designed in the nineties and hadn’t had much update since. His grandmother busied herself boiling a kettle on and old-school AGA stove. Her hippy era, flowing brown and green wide-leg trousers and a matching top glowed

in the morning light. Despite being seventy, her hair still had flecks of gold amidst the white and she stopped to let the sun pouring through the window land on her face, filling her like a sunflower. She hummed California dreamin’ as she watched the kettle and swayed gently like a willow. Tyler, by contrast, marched into the kitchen and ignored the assortment of cereal and toast on the table. Instead, he grabbed a banana and rammed it down his throat.

“You want a cup of coffee hun?” his grandmother asked him. Tyler shook his head. “You talk to your mum?” The probing made him grunt testily.

“Gotta get to work,” he blurted as he grabbed his keys and placed his shades over his eyes. She shook her head as she poured herself a green tea.

“Still doing your little show then?” she mused. Tyler rounded on her, irritation bleeding from his face.

“It’s not a little show! It’s a podcast and it’s helping men be their true selves!” he barked. “It’s making me money and my “Main Man” course has taken off!” his grandmother gave him the side eye.

“Are you really the one to talk about men being their “True selves” she said in air quotes. Tyler growled and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. With her peace shattered, she clasped her mug and strolled over to a window-sill littered with photo frames. Some of her own husband, some of family pets and friends. The end frame showed a young boy with bright blonde hair and a beaming smile. She picked it up and sighed. The boy was surrounded by boys and girls his age, all matching his smile and wearing party hats. The boy was holding a brand-new toy sword and holding it high, carefree and full of life. “Where did you go hun?”

Tyler sat behind the wheel of a Ferrari 458, its glossy red paint shining in the morning sun. The engine purred as he put it in first and sped out of the driveway, onto the main road. The car wove its way

through traffic, smooth as silk. Tyler grinned as he seemed to glide over the road rather than on it. A call from the hands-free came through, an unknown number. Tyler let it go to voicemail. “Mr Boros, this is Lesley from the rental service, I’m calling to remind you that you still have several payments left to be made on the Ferrari 458. If you aren’t able to pay, the car will be repossessed and you will still be liable for all unmade payments.” Tyler turned the hands-free off and sped down the road.

“Today, I wanna talk to the women who listen to my show. About their place and how you can serve your man better.” Tyler began, a cheap cigar in one hand. Opposite him sat his guest speakers, dressed and groomed like mannequins. They nodded and smoked silently. “Women were never meant to be the providers in a household. They were meant to be caregivers and mothers. That’s just basic nature!” Tyler spat, his voice filled with vitriol. “Women. If you’re in the workplace, bringing home money, you are not helping your man! Our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. Men would hunt, women would gather, it’s that simple. Providing is a man’s job and I know that all my partners agree, it’s better and more natural for them to be submissive. It’s about respect!” Cries of “hell yeah” filled the studio. Tyler took a lungful of cigar. It was like ash down his throat but his smile held. “Dominance is the man’s natural position in a relationship. It’s the best way for him to set the boundaries! For example, if you say to your woman, no more nightclubs, and no more guy friends and so on, that’s a boundary for her to follow. That sets the precedent for the relationship where you’re in charge! With me today is fellow main man, Marty De Santos. Marty, any thoughts to add for the young men out there?” Marty, all tightly packed lean muscle with a face of marble, leant into the mic, his face dead serious.

“Guys, you never want to pleasure a woman. That is her responsibility to you. Never go down on her, never show affection and never show any weakness. The moment they see that, the relationship will be broken. Men belong at work, women belong at home. End of fucking story.” Satisfied, he sat back and blew out a smoke ring. Tyler nodded as if listening to a wizened sage.

“Good stuff right there. Now guys, if you’d like more dominance in your relationship, head over and sign up to our “Main Man” course, it has all the links you’ll need to be the leader in a relationship and keep your woman around longer. Stay hard!”

Tyler woke at 5:00am. Here we go again. He left the house and took the train into central London. The car was gone. He stood in line at a niche artisan coffee shop and waited silently. A newsflash buzzed on his phone, he had to thumb the cracked screen several times before it would open. The headline made him sigh irritably. Marty De Santos Caught in dominatrix dungeon. He fired out a text to his producer about it. More trouble for today it seemed. No, another challenge to overcome. Had to be a way to spin this.

“What would you like sir?” The young barista behind the counter asked. Tyler snapped back to the present and directed his eyes to the options, ignoring the lump in his throat. Her slender face and cropped dark red hair that matched her lipstick made him swallow hard. “Sir?” She repeated, an eyebrow raised.

“I, I’ll just have…” He eyed the bubble teas and hot chocolates, with all the trimmings, chocolate shavings and whipped cream. A new flavour, honeydew milk drew his eye. He lowered his head, “An Americano.”

“Sure thing.” The barista smiled and got to work, her jet black

tattoos dancing across her arms. Tyler hung his head and kicked the side of the counter softly, his eyes darting to the line of people behind him. “That’ll be five, fifty. Any milk or sugar?” she asked. Tyler shook his head and fumbled for his wallet. “I like your jacket,” the girl said. The comment made Tyler blink and he paused while handing over a tenner.

“S-sorry?” He stuttered.

“Your jacket. Very nice.” The barista clarified as she took the money and opened the till. Tyler simply nodded, grabbed the coffee and rushed to the door. “Your change sir!” The barista called. Tyler didn’t look back.

The lawyer’s office was lavishly furnished, one entire wall taken up with a mahogany bookshelf end-to-end full of heavy law books. The wide desk was thickly detailed and dotted with all manner of trinkets and office toys. A photo frame filled with two smiling kids was stuck in one corner. Tyler sat opposite a stern looking man in his fifties with greying hair and thick eyebrows. He had the look of a man who knew the task he was about to undertake was both arduous and completely avoidable.

“Can’t you read the writing on the wall Tyler? The kid followed the advice you gave and now his parents, who make more money than you could ever dream of, are very pissed off,” he explained, a look of exasperation blanketing his face. “You can’t keep doing this!” Ignoring the protestations, Tyler slumped and folded his arms.

“I never once told him to do anything,” he protested. “The podcast only gives men advice. They can’t sue me for giving advice right? What he did was his choice.” The lawyer looked at him like he was an idiot.

“You’re an idiot! The kid groped a woman in a bar because, and I quote from you; you should hunt for a mate the way a lion hunts a gazelle. Don’t give up simply because she says no. The lawyer removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Do you not realise you could face

jail time for this?” Tyler sat upright at that threat.

“Fucking soft society. Fine, fine, fine. What can we do? What do we need to say?” he asked. The lawyer leaned in.

“Three options: one, you publicly apologise for what you said.”

“Never gonna happen,” Tyler replied.

“Two, you settle with the claimants out of court,” the lawyer continued.

“That would be admitting defeat and I don’t admit defeat.” Tyler scoffed.

“Three, we take it to court and the only way you avoid jail time is I prove legally, that you’re an idiot. It would be enshrined in law that you are, unequivocally, stupid. Even then, it’s no guarantee and it’ll cost you.” That last point made Tyler sink into his chair and really weigh his options. His lawyer put his glasses back on and picked up his phone and passed it to Tyler “Do the smart thing, for once in your life,” his expression grim, Tyler dialled the number.

Tyler woke at 5:00am. Here we go again. He and the others stood in a semi-circle in a gym, sweat steaming off them and their breathing heavy. Their shirts were gone and the cameras were fixed on their rippling torsos, under the lighting illuminating the muscles better for the cameras. They finished their circuit and lay on the ground. Tyler shakily stood upright and spoke straight down the lens of the nearest camera.

“That’s how you do it! Discipline… effort… real fucking effort,” he spat out and the nausea returned to his throat. He placed a hand on a treadmill to steady himself and his vision was blurred. “If you aren’t dying after every workout… you aren’t working hard enough! No one’s gonna carry you through life!” At that moment, the gym manager

rounded the corner and stepped in front of the camera.

“I’ve warned you lot before about this before. This is a public gym and people are getting uncomfortable with you all. I’m asking you to leave, nicely.” Tyler and the others made a fuss but in the end, packed up their cameras and equipment. Tyler gave silent thanks to the manager as he sat outside, still out of breath.

In his grandma’s bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror, Tyler turned from side to side and pinched his stomach and waist. The sight of his bulging muscles slipped by him and he scoured every inch of his body for the slightest imperfections; a roll here, a mark there, that stubborn lower belly fat that just wouldn’t go away. Have to go back. Have to do more. Not good enough. Never good enough! Never! Tyler stormed from the bathroom and threw himself on his bed, the light off and the door closed. He could feel them coming again, like a brewing storm and braced himself.

Tears fell from his face, running down his cheeks like rivers. Tyler buried his face in the sheets but the tears kept on coming. He heaved and tried to muffle his own voice as he wept into the night so his grandma wouldn’t hear him. He curled into a ball and his face became drenched as the raw emotion took hold. No more. Please. No more.

Tyler woke at 5:00am. Here we go again.

Jasmin Awoodun

Dear Clare

In the study that belonged to her late husband, Mairead sits at the inkstained desk, a small lamp pooling light over a blank page. What is there to say, after twenty years? Too much; words clog the pen and refuse to transfer onto paper. She presses the nib down harder, wills the ink to flow.

Mairead’s youngest son visited on the first Sunday of every month. It was the one day she could reliably look forward to, and she always made Colm’s journey across the Liffey worthwhile. Mairead prided herself on her cooking, especially her roast potatoes, the crispiness of which she credited to Jamie Oliver. The food, at least, kept Colm coming back.

Today, though, she almost wished he hadn’t come.

At the dinner table, Colm’s news sat heavy on her shoulders. For a while there was only the sound of his knife scraping across the plate.

“You aren’t going, are you?” Mairead said at last.

“Mam, I can’t miss it. She’s my sister.” He paused. “I know she hasn’t told you, but I think Clare wants you there, really.”

Mairead sawed a piece of lamb off the bone and guided it to her mouth. She chewed slowly, dreading the moment she’d swallow and have no excuse but to speak.

“I’ve met her fiancé,” Colm carried on, speaking slightly too fast, as though afraid of silence filling the gaps between his words. “He’s a good man, and he’s great with Kathleen, even though she’s off at college now.”

Off at college. Mairead couldn’t picture Kathleen as an adult, had only seen her once, a tiny child in Clare’s skinny, freckled arms. She must only have been a few weeks old at the time.

“Why don’t you just phone her?”

“You know I don’t like telephones.”

“Then write to her. She’ll be glad to hear from you, Mam.”

Would she? If Clare wanted to hear from her, why hadn’t she reached out? Why did Mairead have to extend the olive branch?

But come the end of the meal, Colm pressed a folded slip of paper into her palm, and Mairead couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.

Mairead copies the address onto the envelope — it is strange to think of Clare having an address, ever since she moved to Cork and didn’t pass on her new one. Mairead hasn’t seen her since. She no longer remembers the last words she and Clare said to each other, but she’s sure it wasn’t goodbye.

When Colm told Mairead he was moving, not long after his father’s funeral, she felt as though the last part of her had been carved away.

“I’m only moving to the south side, Mam,” Colm reassured her. Mairead did not feel reassured. First he would move across the Liffey, then across county borders, and then perhaps to different countries, continents.

“You have to visit,” Mairead said after a while. “Who will drive me to Mass on Sunday?”

“Nothing is going to change,” Colm told her. “I’ll still come by every weekend.”

Mairead selects a stamp for the letter. It is close to Christmas and she has a wide selection of festive ones, purchased in bulk sometime around the millennium and still going strong several years later: Mairead greatly overestimated how many Christmas cards she writes. She has already sent one to America, knowing it will take a while to cross the Atlantic. Eoin and his wife aren’t coming back for Christmas this year. They are waiting to come over for the wedding.

When her eldest son turned thirty, Mairead didn’t attend the party, on account of Clare being invited. Instead she asked Eoin round her house one afternoon for a cup of tea and a slice of cake that he barely touched.

When Mairead asked what the matter was, Eoin announced his engagement.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Mairead said. “It’s about time I had some grandchildren.”

Eoin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The thought of Kathleen fluttered in through the window and out again, like a lost butterfly.

“The thing is,” Eoin said, “we’re moving to Illinois, so she can be closer to her family.”

What about me? Mairead wanted to ask. Your brother? Your father?

Instead, she said, “You’ll come back and visit? Every Christmas, every Easter?”

“Of course,” Eoin said.

On the bus into the city, Mairead clutches the letter in one hand and her empty shopping bags in the other. She wonders what Clare must look like now, her once-round teenage face sculpted by age. She must have a few grey hairs of her own. But no matter how hard she tries, all Mairead can see is a frightened eighteen-year-old, waiting outside the home in Bessborough.

When Mairead last spoke to Clare, it was the summer of ninety-two. They hadn’t seen each other for months before that, not since the news and the crying and the words that fell from Clare’s mouth, jagged and uneven and tearing through the family Mairead had built. Mairead had gone to meet Clare in Bessborough, to take her home now the whole messy business was over with. When she arrived, however, Clare had a baby in her arms.

“I’m keeping Kathleen,” Clare said.

“Kathleen?” Mairead looked at the baby, wondering how Clare had been permitted to keep it.

“That’s what I’ve named her.”

“So this boy of yours has proposed?”

Clare shook her head. “But he was a right eejit anyway.”

“The baby needs a father,” Mairead said.

“Kathleen doesn’t need anyone but me.”

“And how will you afford to keep her?”

“I can find work.”

“What will I tell the family?” Mairead hadn’t mentioned Clare’s pregnancy to anyone other than her own husband and sons. The rest believed Clare was staying with a distant cousin in Cork.

Clare drew Kathleen closer to her chest. “I don’t care. I’m not coming back to Dublin.”

Mairead sometimes wonders whether she should have persuaded

Clare to come home, offered to help her raise Kathleen, promised to protect her from the opinions of older relatives. Instead she left Clare with a baby in one arm and a suitcase in the other.

It is nearing last collection. Mairead doesn’t know how long she’s been here, but each time she tries to drop the letter into the postbox, invisible strings pull her back, puppet-like. She thinks about all the words in the letter, the shameful things she admits to thinking and feeling.

She thinks about the rest of her family at the wedding, her two sons and her daughter-in-law. She sees herself slowly being erased from the picture.

Mairead puts the letter into her shopping bag, turns away from the postbox, and begins the walk back to the bus stop.

The sun sinks closer to the horizon, and dusk draws in.

John Moriarty

“Dominion”

When the bells woke him for Prime, the bed opposite was empty, the sheets stripped and neatly folded.

In the sacristy, the older lay woman was sorting the mail, the smell of porridge intruding from the kitchen beyond.

“Your co-editor?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said. He became nervous of his English. “He is James. We were in chapel for Lauds, now I cannot find him.”

She motioned to him to sit. The chair was wooden and wicker. She pulled her own chair in close to his, close enough that her words did not carry beyond the room.

Her breath carried the acidic smell of one who has been fasting beyond a day.

She told him that James had, as she understood it, been called upon the day before to speak with the abbot and been told he was no longer welcome.

“I hardly need to tell you what the issue was,” she said. No, she didn’t.

“And the abbot, he has the final word? There is no way to appeal?”

She snorted as if he’d told a fantastic joke.

“What about the anthology?”

“You have no need of a co-editor. Oh, and that reminds me –” She passed him three heavy envelopes. “Now. Best get yourself down to the chapel.”

The envelopes lay across his lap as the abbot led the final Kyrie.

Having no appetite for either porridge or company, he bypassed the dining room. Upstairs, he kneeled at the foot of his own bed, closed his

eyes and said ten Our Fathers aloud, the first in English, the remainder in the language of his mother and of his ancestral forefathers.

At the desk, he read the first manuscript. It was dry but on point, probably publishable with some improvements. He wrote a short paragraph of notes. James would of course have dismissed it as dirge, called its anonymous author some inscrutable Irish insult, and playfully teased his notes and his general tolerance of mediocrity.

Another glance about the room. No sign of any slip of paper, a phone number, anything. He got up and filled his glass from the tap, since his pitcher was stale and he hadn’t the inclination to walk the cold marble corridor again.

The second manuscript… oh now, what was this? A Meditation on Ravens and Sparrows. Three verses quoted at the top, from Job, Luke and Matthew. The author imagines, first, the young raven chicks in Job, crying out, panicking, then beyond relief at the sight of their mother and the smell of her beak. Then, Luke’s raven, scouring the land from above, assured through her lineage that there is enough on God’s earth that there will always be ravens.

It was beautiful. The words perfectly placed. The maternal bond between the texts, written centuries apart. The vividness of the birds.

He wiped away the first tears, but feeling the rest push their way forwards, leapt from the desk, plunged his head into the folded sheets and sucked in the fading scent of his friend.

An icy knock on the door then.

He swallowed, stemming the salty deluge, turned the pillowcase over to hide the wet. He righted himself, stood and faced the door.

“Yes?”

The abbot entered in silence, locked eyes instantly.

Through the customary quiet and direct syllables, it was conveyed that a change of rooms may be required, depending on the flow of visitors over the winter months.

“I may bring my desk?”

“There are plenty desks.”

The query drew attention to the ongoing task, and the abbot lifted the open manuscript. Within the first sentence, his face was pure disdain.

“It surprises me that you have read this far.”

“Oh?”

“Perhaps we could redirect this brave young author to some literary journals.”

In that instant, he wanted to tell the abbot that, in his homeland, to describe a person or their work as ‘literary’, or the equivalent adjective, was to pay them the highest possible compliment, and that, if his services were no longer required by the abbot, he would pack his bags and vacate the room entirely, even though he knew he had nowhere to go.

He cleared his throat.

“Abbé, I am interested to read the author’s interpretation of Matthew’s verse on the sparrows.”

“Two sold for a penny.”

“Yet neither will the Lord let fall from the sky.”

The abbot pursed his lips. “You think this important.”

“I cannot say without reading.”

“You have read the Lord’s word already. This is the thing of greatest importance. When I came here first, those words were all we needed.”

“Yes, abbé.”

“Yes.”

For the first time, the older man’s eyes moved, toward the bed beneath the window, lingered upon the disturbed bundle of sheets.

“You have a third submission, I understand.”

“Yes. On the Terrible Beauty of Delilah.”

“That sounds more promising,” the abbot declared with finality.

“See to that, won’t you? I’ll read your editorial notes after Sext.” And he turned and shuffled away without pleasantry.

The door hung open, slightly.

He turned. He hadn’t checked the bedside locker. The drawer squeaked. Nothing there. Just his mother’s face, her half-smile in the old frame, beneath the rosary beads she’d pressed into his cold hands on the morning of his First Holy Communion.

Beyond the window, out in the grey somewhere, a solitary raven cawed.

Julie-May Noteman

Do I Know You?

Forty-three Dinsmore Gardens was unremarkable, a rust stain ran from the bare hook where a hanging basket once flowered. On the lamp-post, outside the front gate, was an election poster, slightly askew, where an image of a woman of indeterminable age, dyed-blonde hair, multi-coloured glasses, scarlet lips, smiled encouragingly. The words printed on the poster were bold and unmissable.

‘INDEPENDENT: PUTTING THE PAST BEHIND US: BRIEGE DONAGHY’

In the back garden, where one white sheet flapped on the clothesline, Walter Shields was attacking the side hedge with clippers. Despite his age, he had retained a bulky athleticism, his unzipped waterproof coat rising and falling like dysfunctional wings. His ashgrey hair, stubbornly thick, stuck up like that of a tousled child. The brown wheelie-bin, lid open expectantly, stood waiting beside him.

Walter’s wife, Marjory, was in the kitchen, the phone on speaker, as she searched for car keys. Her hands sifted through Walter’s cricket trophies causing dust to flit like delicate insects, close to diapause. The caller’s perfunctory voice called out a number. Why couldn’t they leave them alone? She was coping fine! She tutted, scribbling the Social Services’ number on a scrap of paper.

“Yes… I’ll ring…if I need help. Goodbye.” She stared at the silent phone. An image of her and Walter, leaning on a cruise ship rail, stared back — smiles…and optimism. Marjory pressed her fingers into her eyes, her breath jerking through her nose as a sob was stifled. The car keys winked from below the photo frame on the sill above the sink; Walter shaking hands with a high-ranking PSNI officer — the

retirement photo. She took the keys, eased her shoulders and headed into the garden. Lumpy ridges of cut grass scattered themselves recklessly before her.

“You didn’t attach the basket Walter,” she shouted over the noise of the static mower, engine running, “you have to pick up the clippings.” Marjory switched off the lawnmower. Walter turned to face her. It was his eyes that had changed the most, now startled, as though processing unexpected news — a cancelled flight or perhaps a death. She took his big hand in hers. “You need to fill the brown bin and take it to the gate…it’s brown bin day tomorrow, remember? I’ve to nip to the shops.”

Walter’s eyes drifted down the side of the house. “Why is there a poster on the lamp-post?”

She followed his gaze. “I’ve told you, it’s an election poster.” Marjory walked briskly up the drive towards the car. “I’ve to get bread… sandwiches for tea.” Walter walked behind wringing his hands.

“Who is that woman?”

“For goodness sake Walter, how many times? She’s a politician, Doherty…or Donaghy.”

“I don’t want her living in our house Marjory.”

As Walter glanced furtively over his shoulder, Marjory clamped her lips, impatience rising like a wave before a foaming crash.

“She wants us dead,” he hissed, pushing past her, checking under the car, running his hand along the lower rim; actions ingrained, memorised.

“Stop it Walter!” Marjory heard her voice, shockingly shrill. Across the road, Mrs Kilpatrick peered like a meercat from her front garden. Marjory gave her a cheery wave. “Nosy cow,” she muttered. She got into the car, slamming the door. Walter stood, hand pressed to the glass. Marjory sighed, her breath steadied; she rolled down the window. “It’s just a picture, she doesn’t want us dead. Fill the brown bin …I’ll be

back soon. Bring in the sheet if it rains Walter.”

As Marjory left Dinsmore Gardens, Briege Donaghy was mincing her size six figure confidently down the footpath, election leaflets in hand, self-assured with her new ‘Independent’ status; confident that people had short memories — the whole COVID incident had been blown completely out of proportion. She rang doorbells, smiled winningly and edged ever closer to number forty-three. The sky darkened above her and she wondered if she would get home before the rain.

Walter had wandered back to the garden. He looked at the brown bin and thought briefly about leaves, and sandwiches…he checked his pocket for a pen. He liked to have a pen in his pocket in case he needed to…his old cricket bat caught his eye, resting against the garden seat. Walter picked it up, tracing his fingers lovingly over the engraved letters, ‘W.P. Shields’. He stood legs slightly bent, swinging the bat at an imaginary ball.

“I have a cricket match Marjory,” he shouted towards the drive. Walter studied the back of the house. “Send their players out, we’re starting…did anyone bring sandwiches?” He stood side on gripping his bat and held his breath, squinting, waiting for the ball to be bowled. The wind lifted slightly, the sheet flapped against the brown bin. Walter looked to the house for help, gesticulating towards the bin. “Somebody take it away. The match has started.” There was no movement and no reply. Walter hesitated, uncertainty catching him like a draft from below a door. He slumped into the seat, hugging his bat, staring fixedly in front of him. Thoughts whispered and floated, his eyes closed and his head nodded forward.

The woman with vivid red lips startled him into semi-wakefulness, multi-coloured glasses too big, eyes grotesquely distorted. Her voice sounded blurred, as though coming from under deep water. Walter backed into the chair as a bejewelled hand waved a leaflet in his face.

The words on her lanyard swung, pendulum like, in front of his nose; ‘Briege Donaghy: Independent’. Terrified, Walter leapt up, lifted the cricket bat and hit her hard over the head. The body crumpled beneath him. He stood, shoulders hunched, mouth oddly contorted listening to his heart thumping in his head. A wasp whined and landed on the bat, he watched it wander into the fresh blood then take off, suddenly.

Walter approached the lifeless body on the grass. “Do I know you?” he asked.

The body and the blood sharpened a memory— like reading glasses focusing small print — precision and protocol. Walter smoothed his hair then took an old envelope from his pocket and wrote ‘BRIEGE DONAGHY 4-15 pm’; he signed it ‘W.P. Shields’. A scrunched plastic bag was pulled from his pocket into which went glasses, a lanyard and an ID card; the bag was returned to his pocket, carefully. Rain began to fall. Walter watched red rivulets trickle down the grain of the bat and seep into the grass.

When Marjory returned, Walter was standing in the pouring rain, sentry-like beside the bin, the cuttings and leaves had gone, the lid of the brown bin shut. A corner of her white sheet hung from the edge of the bin. She moaned and ran outside.

“Why didn’t you come in Walter?”

“It’s a crime scene Marjory.”

Marjory pushed a tail of wet hair from her eyes. “You retired Walter. You are not a detective anymore.”

“I am a detective,” he shouted, into her face and into the rain.

Marjory glanced at the bat gripped tightly in his right hand. “Where you playing cricket today Walter?” she whispered.

His face brightened. “Yes…great game, 210 all out. We showed them!”

Marjory tried to smile. “Let’s go inside,” she said, taking his hand. Evening came, streetlights were lit and at 11-30 pm Walter found

himself staring out his bedroom window. Rain splattered the glass making the election poster appear garish under the harsh light. He squinted at the image. Did he know her? As he watched, two youths jostled up the footpath, unsubtle in their intent as one climbed onto the shoulders of the other and cut down the poster.

Walter rapped the window, shouting at his wavering reflection, “You have committed a crime.” He squeezed his hands together.

“Are you fucking well coming down?” shouted a hooded youth, face turned upwards, leering, white.

“Marjory?” he called. No reply — the television hummed from the living room below. Walter’s eyes searched the room, lighting on the wardrobe. He knelt. His police-issue boots sat at the back — leather and polish. He pressed them to his nose and breathed.

“Gather the evidence,” he mumbled, “report the crime.” Walter sat down and put on his boots.

At the same time, close to Dinsmore Gardens, Declan O’Neill stood unsteadily in McAlinden’s Pub. He had been drinking since 7pm; after Kathleen died, it had become a regular thing. He steadied himself in the doorframe, the rain hitting the top of his bald head.

“Pissin down,” he muttered into his chest as he staggered off in the general direction of home. He had reached the corner of Church Road before the smell of curry drew him to the broken wall outside the Chinese takeaway. He sat down and inhaled. Two youths exited nosily, picking up election posters they had left propped against a bin.

“Are yous canvassing lads?”

“Aye, fucking canvassing,” their laughter exploded into the night.

“You forgot one,” he yelled after them, but he wasn’t heard, or was ignored. The rain eased. He noticed a man walking hesitantly towards him from the opposite direction. “All right?” Declan called, companionably. It was Walter.

“I’m off the cruise ship… I’m on a tour,” said Walter, frowning.

Declan looked Walter up and down, coat dripping over his dressinggown, cricket bat and plastic bag in hand. “You’re at the Lucky Star mate,” he said. The neon sign above their heads flickered. The ‘S’ went out.

“Do I know you? “asked Walter.

“Declan ‘O’ Neill.” Declan thrust out his hand, tipping himself off the wall. He regained his balance and studied Walter carefully. “I know you! You live in Dinsmore Gardens…I do your bins. You stand there every Friday.” He slapped Walter on the back. “Every Friday! What’s your name?”

Walter looked down at his boots, the light from the takeaway bounced in the puddles around his feet, one lace trailed like a dying worm. “Detective,” he said, “Detective Walter Shields.”

“Do you fancy a curry chip Detective?” asked Declan.

As the two men sat inside eating with plastic forks from a polystyrene container, Declan pointed at the Perspex screen, the words ‘cash only’ were sellotaped unevenly to the side nearest the fish tank.

“Last time I saw my Kathleen was behind a screen like that one. That screen is for the COVID…that’s what killed her.” The rolling news rumbled at low volume on the TV, Declan’s eyes welled up, “…lying there under a white sheet.”

A red fish in the fish tank swam past Walter’s elbow. His brow furrowed. “…I put the sheet in the…”

Declan wiped the back of his hand across his nose. “Her boss made her serve drinks in the council offices. Lockdown my ass. They all got COVID. She murdered my Kathleen!” His voice rose unsteadily.

Walter took a pen and a battered envelope from his plastic bag and wrote the word ‘murder’ carefully and slowly on the bottom corner.

“Are ye undercover?” whispered Declan.

Thoughts of cricket and blood and election posters flickered across Walters brain like images from an ID parade, his mind bobbed, revisited

and settled. “It’s a crime to do with an election poster,” he said.

Declan put his finger to his lips pointing conspiratorially towards the door. The remains of the curry chip were tipped into the plastic bag, Walter followed Declan out to where the forgotten election poster lay slanted and wet against the bin. They tilted their heads, studying the image.

“That’s her. Briege Donaghy…Kathleen’s boss. Never even sent a card — bitch!” Declan kicked the poster hard, steadying himself on Walter.

Walter looked at the red-lips, the multicoloured glasses and the winning smile. “I will report the murder,” he said with conviction.

With the poster tucked under Declan’s arm they turned, tall and short, arm in arm, wandering up the middle of a deserted road in search of the police station.

At 1-20 a.m. Marjorie woke on the settee with a jolt; she remembered watching the ten o’clock news. She turned off the living room lights, wearily going into the hall. A cold dampness wrapped around her, panic gathering in a knot below her ribs — the front door was ajar, the cloakroom open, light on. Eventually, she phoned the police.

“He has dementia,” she said, her voice sounding strange, not her own — ugly, obscene, a betrayal of sorts. Marjory sat down on the stairs and wept.

Later as she waited, time hanging, vague and protracted, she remembered about the sheet in the bin. She went out to the garden, feet padding silently; a dreamscape of moonlit grass. She opened the lid and tugged to release the sheet from a tangle of foliage. It snagged. Marjory tugged harder. Something glinting caught her eye, she moved the cuttings. A ring attached to a finger, attached to a hand was eerily illuminated. Marjory fell whimpering to her knees.

It was well into the night shift before Walter and Declan entered

the station. Walter’s shoulders relaxed — a familiarity of sounds and smells. He approached the desk-sergeant, confidently placing his cricket bat and plastic bag on the counter, curry sauce oozing from the corner.

“There has been a murder, Sergeant.”

“I do his bins,” shouted Declan, slumping into a seat. He pointed at the poster of Briege Donaghy. “She’s a bitch.”

“The body’s in the bin,” said Walter, staring straight into the sergeant’s eyes, “I killed her.”

The sergeant looked away — awkward, embarrassed for Walter. He had worked with Walter years ago; the body found in a wheelie bin, case never solved. Walter retired soon after… shame about the dementia. Walter was given a cup of tea. The sergeant peered into the plastic bag at the polystyrene container and cold brown gloop, sighed and threw everything into the bin. The remains of the curry sauce were wiped from the counter.

When Marjory arrived Walter was sitting quietly hands clasped over his knees, cricket bat against his leg.

“Came in with him,” said the sergeant, pointing towards the snoring Declan, “says he’s your binman.” He nodded towards the election poster. “That’s the politician who went missing today…”

Marjory shivered, tightening her coat around her. Walter started to speak but his words were lost in her hug. She led him by the hand out of the station. A crumpled envelope fell from his pocket onto the floor.

It was late morning before the crunching and grinding of the bin lorry was heard in Dinsmore Gardens. Walter and Marjory waited with the brown bin, side by side, watching the binmen perform their rhythmic tango. Declan approached, sobered and silent. The lid was not quite down. He lifted it. At the corner of the bin a bit of wooden handle protruded slightly above the leaves and grass. He forced it down and shut the lid. The bin was heavy — dragged, attached,

hoisted, tipped, returned. Empty. Marjory turned her back. She pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket on which a number was scribbled then headed slowly back up the drive. Walter was left, staring up at the empty lamp-post.

Kerr Chandler

Great Mossy Rocks

The castle at Fofane was no more, a scattering of stones easily mistaken for the outcroppings of the hill it once stood upon. Moss covered much of what remained. A few stray gulls hopped about, crying, as if the seabirds had happened upon a green whale. Above them, the grey sky dulled any sense of wonder. Put simply, it was old. It was ruined. May Aran had been dropped off by a taxi; she wouldn’t have driven. She watched the vehicle lurch away, feeling a familiar guilt remain. The bracelet and rings on her hands failed to shine and her short hair was stiffened by the breathy drizzle. The place certainly had a way of draining her. This last part of her trip, a visit to Fofane, accompanied by her old friend Sarah Gill, was a formality at this point. Soon, she’d reluctantly return to London. Thirty years away from Ireland, and not even three days back. She’d hoped for more than this, to find something more than this. Or was it something else? Her son, Cillian, had liked visiting the castle.

She sighed and started the path which would take her from the tarmac to the ruins. The ground was smeared in gravel and muck, and not for the first time May wondered if she was overdressed. She pulled the hem of her navy suit trousers up and began climbing the hill. One small blessing was afforded to her: the lack of cell service meant her phone wouldn’t tune into the perpetual hum of post-meeting updates and job offers.

She saw a sign for tourists rendered illegible by bird droppings. A bench with a plaque surely bearing some kind of dedication sat just across from her. Aside from the damp which suffused it, the bench was otherwise untouched. Perhaps the gulls respected the dead more than

the lively tourists and their coteries of children. Sarah wasn’t here yet, which was unusual as she lived nearby, and May had needed to wait for a taxi. The lack of punctuality from the both of them frustrated her.

Surveying her surroundings, May noted the gently rolling hills and the gaps between them where they dipped as pale nothing. As she did so, someone scuffled down the slope above her. Short but broad, they limped onto the plateau wearing a parka only a few shades of green darker than the ground behind them. A white scarf worn like a shawl crested their head, held proud from sloped shoulders like the breast of some squat sort of bird. Beneath it, May recognised their flat face and the now-white curls which framed it. A woman who was once her best friend. A woman who had been Cillian’s godmother.

“Ciara, is that you?” said May.

“It is.”

May wasn’t sure what to say.

“Look, Sarah’s had to cancel. She forgot about a dental appointment, or at least that’s her excuse,” said the woman.

“Oh. Right.”

“I can give you a lift back if you need. You won’t get any signal here.”

“No.” May paused. “No, that’s all right. You have a car?”

“It’s round the other side. There’s a small path off the road, just ahead. I normally use it to park.”

The rain pattered softly on May’s anorak. She watched Ciara, her slight hunch. “I didn’t know you were coming. I mean, Sarah didn’t say.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Ciara shifted slightly. She began toeing some of the coaly rocks scattered around her feet. It was like she did when they’d been girls, like how she’d rub small circles in the earth when her mother would scold them for being out playing too long. Her eyes as flat as her face, it was as if an old woman’s head had been put on that young girl’s body. “It’s terrible weather for the castle, isn’t it?”

“How are you?”

“Oh, well enough.” Ciara grunted slightly. “Sorry, cold’s more of a pain with all my arthritic bits these days. But yeah, well enough. How’re you?”

May straightened, drifted off, becoming the self she was away, at work. “Yeah, I’m okay. It’s strange being back, but nice to do some catching up, seeing all the old faces.”

“Some very old faces, these days.”

May stared and wondered what she’d hoped to find coming back. What had she come looking for? For the honeymoon of her retirement, or a break to consider what next? For the ghost of her dead son? For the mother of the man responsible for his death?

“I should go. I told my taxi to come back in an hour. I’ll just ask him to come back, I’m sure I’ll get some signal down the road a bit.”

“There’s no signal all round here, I’m sorry to say.” Ciara looked at her and May wanted to retreat not just a polite front but also back down the slope of the hill. And yet, what else was there? What was there back in London, an insipid board position to keep her busy postretirement? “Look, I’ll just give you a lift back.”

“Are you going up?”

“Yes. But it’s not a bother, really. I come up here almost every week now.”

“Well, do you mind if I join you?”

Ciara hesitated, then stopped moving her foot. “No, of course not. We were supposed to go up with Sarah. There’s nothing exciting though. Just old ruins, I’m sure you remember.”

“A bit of history, eh?” She felt the blood drain from her face. They set off up the hill, and it was quiet between them. The resultant silence and rich smell of the moss soaking up the rain seemed natural to this place. Her corporate instinct wondered if many tourists even bothered coming here anymore, especially since she knew the fair

they’d frequented as girls had closed down. Between teenagers looking for somewhere to down peach schnaps and the smattering of tourists the fair had attracted, the castle at Fofane had never been a busy spot. May and Ciara had loved it once, though, and they’d passed on that joy to their sons. It wasn’t the eighties anymore, she supposed. Times change. Coming upon the first stony foundations of what was once a wall or guardhouse of some sort, the sound of the gulls began to break the silence.

“You mentioned it before, but are you coming here often?” said May.

“I do, yeah.” Ciara paused, and for a moment May didn’t think she’d continue. “I like history. And you know me, I’m a creature of habit.”

“I remember. Did you ever go to study?”

“No. Still a seamstress. Nothing’s changed. Was plenty else going on, after everything.” Ciara didn’t face May as she spoke, her voice sounding older as she did so. “And what about you? Take it from the suit and hair you’re doing well at Lloydsman’s?

“Mm. Executive manager.” May looked closely at the rocks, saw tiny pale flowers budding amongst the lichen. “My hair?”

“You’re blonde.”

“Ah, I am. Dyes easier that way.”

Ciara turned back, a girlish smile on her face. “Don’t have to say you’re strawberry blonde anymore either?”

“Don’t pull my leg, now.”

“Well, I’m glad things have been good for you.”

“It’s been odd recently, to tell you the truth. I’ll have to see how retirement goes.”

“Oh, right.” Ciara walked ahead. “This bit was the courtyard, I think.”

They continued their ascent, walking on the ancient path into the ruin, as they’d done in the past, as mothers taking their sons on a day out. The bones of the castle were all around them now, ranging from gnomic lumps to proud but soggy monuments. She remembered Cillian

crawling up a crumbling arch just on the left. She imagined him years later sneaking cigarettes behind a lingering wall ahead, strands of smoke slipping away into the sky.

“So, are you staying?” Ciara hunched next to the uneven square of what could have been a column, wall, or statue.

“No, I’m just visiting, I think. My colleagues reckoned it was a little holiday to the Emerald Isle. Retiring exec hoping to find her faith or the fairies, whatever comes first.

“The monastery is a few miles that way, if that’s the case.”

“Hah. It’s maybe a bit out of character, as far as they see it.” A lot had been. She wondered what kind of person she’d be now, outside the persona she’d assumed for so many years across the water. She wondered if she’d be any less guilty. To stand as they did now, May knew they’d both given up and taken on countless things as they moved through the stages. She’d taken on a whole new self, confident and sparkling, to escape to London years ago. She had tried to give up another self, a mourning one, to return to Ireland at all. “I suppose it might look a bit like a whim, coming here.”

“Do they not know it’s your home?”

“Well… no.”

“Did you not tell them?” Ciara asked.

“What about you? How’s work.?”

“Sure, it’s alright. Been doing it long enough.”

“Suppose so.”

“Can’t do it much longer, though. Hands are knackered.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ll just have to figure it out. No retirement for me,” said Ciara.

Having walked through the outer bounds of the ruin, they now stood among a gathering of thicker, taller fragments, as if rounded by a more intimate, more weathered, version of standing stones. When last she’d spoken to Ciara, May had hurled and received her fair share of abuse.

The two of them had clambered over the wreckage, same as they did now. Things were the same now as they were then.

“It’ll end one day,” said May.

“Somehow I doubt that.”

“Well, nothing’s set in stone, is it?”

Ciara stepped ahead.

May guessed this would have been the court, this strange space they stood in now. Various flowers and mushrooms occupied it, growing in the dewy air. Where once there might’ve been seats, now there lay a wash of foliage. In the summer it would be vibrant, a heraldry of bright flowers. These processes were natural; the castle’s decay was a blameless predecessor to the flora which now ruled it. But beneath the emerging life, the cracks were all she could focus on. She imagined they ran deep, that they reached out beneath the land from the castle to the hills to everything round. Nearby they’d gather, fusing together, until they found the fissure where Cillian and Niall had crashed the car, just a few miles away, where the wet earth had opened up. They’d left the car, and even now it’d be a flowering wreck, submerged in a bog. They’d dragged May’s son, Niall, from the site. They’d left her Cillian buried.

“How is Niall? He’s out now, isn’t he?” said

“He’s been out a few years now, they’ve changed it to fourteen for drink driving.”

“Has he been home?”

“It’s the only place he has been. That lump might as well still be in a cell. Can’t get hired; can’t get a car to leave even if he wanted to.”

“You still have him, Ciara.”

“Ack. I’m the mammy of the boy who killed your boy, and that’s all I’ll ever have.”

May was silent.

“It’s not easy, May,” said Ciara.

“Better that than the lying. I’ve spent thirty years lying so I don’t have

to tell people what I’m missing.”

“You can’t say it didn’t help, May, the big job and the chance to escape, to get away from it all.”

“I was just filling a hole.”

“Niall went away for years. And guess who had to wait and be there for him when he got out? Me. My poor son did us both in.”

“Is there a point in arguing, Ciara? We’ve got what we’ve got.”

“Aye, and you’ve got plenty.”

“I’ve got bloody nothing.”

“You’ve got everything, you stupid woman. You’ve got a new life in a place where you don’t have to think about,” she raised her arms, “all of this. I’ve not got any of that, May. I’ve got the same job I had then. The same problems. I’m down a dead husband and a few decent children who left for the same reasons you did. And at the end of the day, when I come back home, there’s my son. And god help me, but it doesn’t matter how much things change or stay the same, he got your Cillian killed. And I’m his mammy.”

Ciara began to cry.

“It’s just as painful, Ciara. Letting go of him. Pretending it never happened. It leaves you hollow.”

“What about a wound that doesn’t close?”

May watched her and thought about the nights after the crash. One hundred dreams which started with their white Vauxhall driving away in the dark, red rear lights retreating, stupid young boys off to a party. Had she known they’d been drinking? Could she have stopped it? The questions buzzed like the drone of an engine. That whole world was cut off, as if she’d relegated that night itself to the morass of a dream. She never really intended to return. Cillian’s death was a marshy wound which spread outwards to consume all of Ireland and any connection May had with it. She had run from that wound. Ciara had endured it.

“I’m sorry, Ciara.”

Ciara wiped away her tears.

May continued. “This thing. We should’ve faced it together.”

“Maybe it would’ve been different.” Ciara swept her feet in circles. May felt as though she saw too much of her at once like multiple laminates overlapping on a projector. But for a moment, and just a moment, the combined image was clear, or maybe all of them were stripped back, and this was some truer view than she’d even seen her with before. Behind her those wretched hills rippled into the horizon. She’d left him here; she’d left them all here. And she had needed to return, to see this wound, and see it become a scar. May stood here, and stared out at the scene around her, and at the hills, and knew then that ruined they were, and ruined they’d stay.

“It’s in the past now,” said May.

“It is.”

They both stood a while, watching the gulls come to rest upon the ruins before climbing higher, leaving them behind as they journeyed on.

“You wouldn’t take me up on that lift, would you?”

May traced a gap in the fractured wall next to her upwards until it opened to the sky. The last gulls had departed, scattered through the air like skipping stones. She looked out across the ruins, tried to make out the shape the castle once had. There was nothing there. Just some great mossy rocks.

“I’ll have to turn you down, May. I’m sorry.”

Next to her, Ciara nodded and fastened her jacket. “Fair enough.”

“Let’s go.”

Ciara nodded. They descended the hill as the ruins at Fofane got older behind them.

Mark Mullan

Generation Rent

No, please don’t. Shit. Broken. One yolk ruptured and the water not even boiling. 89p down the drain. Why the fuck did you buy Burford Browns? Britain’s favourite hen, the box said. Hazel shells and sunset orange yolks. Sure, they’re not gonna care. Alright, it’s fine, get the other three cracked into the cup. You can do that fancy lowering in like the chefs on YouTube.

You should’ve accepted the kindness of a free meal. The government wouldn’t give you anything beyond a Thursday night bang of the pots, and a “pay rise” that forced you to shop at LIDL but your friends, they would’ve taken you out for brunch. You proud ejit. Now you’re stuck ruining overpriced eggs and hoping avocados will ripen before your eyes.

Laughter behind you, the low hum of scandal, shenanigans; shits and/ or giggles.

There had been no resistance to your pitch – “a fiver, a bottle and we’ll do our own.” - like selling time to a clock. Five brunchees had arrived with eight bottles, the maths both did and did not add up. You contributed your Blue Light discount and a bottle of cava that was a Christmas present. It had only survived this long thanks to dry January.

They were the last six avocados in a war-torn vegetable aisle. Two are still so hard they’d be best used to bludgeon their brethren. You turn

away so you don’t cough into the ingredients. Problem is the dining table, unfolded to seat six, is a hop and skip from your left bum cheek. “Everything alright?” “Your palms are dry, here, let me.” She reaches into her clutch, locates a cream that costs a day’s work and there follows a gentle scrub on your hands. “Hey, you need a drink.”

You accept a glass. “Thanks for having us, you’re a star.” “It’s nothing, thanks for letting me host.” You take a sip and smile as you turn back to the stove, then hear a conversation about going back to university, part-time, to study fucking poetry. Twenty hours a week as an osteopath and he earns more than you. Private healthcare. Not his fault the NHS don’t hire his brand of medicine, he argues.

Two bottles down and the volume rises. You feel a twinge in your temple, but you can’t ask friends to keep it down. With the mug tilted gently you hold the handle between your thumb and index finger, then lower the cup full of eggs into the simmering water. You hear your name, a question maybe? But you’re consumed by the coming together of roiling water and primordial ooze. Goosebumps rise on your arms as the whites solidify into ethereal strands like tentacles on a cosmological jellyfish. They want to escape, to explore, to have a life of their own.

You feel dizzy, and let out the breath you’re holding. Your heart races as you tip the cup and the yolks slide gently into the saucepan. Three out of four survive the journey. You look into the pot, and it’s a crystal ball containing tiny galaxies, spiral arms of stars spinning around nuclei made of good cholesterol.

Lather, rinse, repeat, you’re in the zone. You crack five eggs into the cup, feeling confident, two yolks break. £2.67. No matter, you’ll eat

those. Resisting the temptation to stare into the crystal ball, you mash the four avocados that are edible. Well one was on the turn, but threeparts scrumptious flesh to one-part tasteless paste is, you reason, an acceptable result.

Your shoulders and neck jerk as a sharp laugh erupts from the rising drone behind you. You tune in briefly to the conversation, just in time to hear Niamh and Grant talking about a second honeymoon, then a first child. Joe’s barely listening, he’s waxing lyrical about the hero’s journey in Greek poetry.

You look at the band of white skin on your finger. Two years of saving. You had a date, June 2020, deposits paid and gone. The irony of course, is that living alone is more expensive. The heroes of the pandemic years, those who risked their lives and for whom arias of clapping were raised; those heroes don’t get mentors or a sunset ending, they get sore backs and a pat on them.

Further baby talk drifts over your shoulder. Imagine - Mortgage. Child. Children - Maybe in the seventies. Granny and Granda raised a family of four on nurses’ salaries, paid off their mortgage and bought a little land on the side. And you, you can’t afford brunch. Bottomless or otherwise.

Pathetic.

You add the spices, pre-mixed in a ramekin and it’s like you’ve breathed life into the inanimate. The guac shimmers with the sea salt, peppered with chilli flakes like parrots roosting in a jungle canopy. You check the two pots of eggs and remove the first from the heat. If they’re to gently ooze like the adverts they can’t be overdone. You must let go

‘The Nightingale Pledge’ for an afternoon, and allow that salmonella is preferable to an overcooked yolk.

The stars align. It’s time. You pull the sourdough tray halfway from your lacklustre oven and realise, you didn’t turn it at the seven-minute mark. The front four pieces are just warm bread. The middle four would make a Welsh choir burst into song. The back four are black around the edges with centres cooked tough. No matter, you’ll eat those.

Two pieces of sourdough each. The guacamole will spread, shit, no it won’t. One piece of sourdough each, that way you don’t have to eat the burnt ends. Once generously coated in guacamole it starts to look something like brunch. Two eggs each for Grant, Niamh and ahh shit. The first set of eggs is a hard-boiled disaster.

You fish them out and leave them to one side while the kettle boils. The second set of eggs are food porn. ‘Oohs’ and ‘Ahhs’ are oohed and ahhed as you deliver three believable plates of smashed avocado and poached eggs. You even introduce it as such. “Tuck in guys, the other three will be ready in a moment, there’s been an egg-cident.” Peals of laughter, you could cry.

You’re in the groove, five eggs cracked into the mug, none break. The kettle is rumbling but can’t seem to reach a climax. You look at your drink then decide you’d better clear up a little. By the time the squeal arrives the counter is clean, the sink is three quarters full, and you turn on the hot water tap.

Okay, temperature up high, water in, eggs in. Gently. Now temperature down low. You deliver a punnet of strawberries to the table along with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a large glass teapot of cool green tea

flavoured with lemon and cucumber. “Oh, this is lovely.” “Thank you.” “What a babe.” “Etc.” Their chorus follows you back to the kitchen.

You extract the eggs, or rather you butcher them. All five yokes are undercooked and they break one by one in the ladle. Another £4.45 for a total of 712 pennies pissed away by your culinary inadequacy. Your ears prickle and a hum rises, your skull a hornet’s nest. You get a yolk drizzle with which you dress the toast and avocado. There’s no time for a fourth attempt. You avoid eye contact as you bring to the table three plates of tepid bread, smothered in avocado topped with the first run of eggs; lukewarm and solid.

“This is lovely.” They say it in various formats. A deafening echo chamber. “You forgot your drink,” Niamh says, pointing to the countertop. When you return, she’s swapped her perfect brunch for the disaster you served yourself. Your chest reddens. A meaningful look, one that chases the swarm away, insists that you will eat the perfect plate. “Now you’re double parked as well,” Joe says. He laughs as he sets a second glass of Prosecco beside your plate.

“I love how open plan the place is.” You agree. “And the south facing window really warms the room.” You had the heating on for three hours before they arrived. Normally in February that would mean sleeping in two pairs of socks. Thankfully, your grandparent’s place is never cold.

Even now the conversation is a reverberating mass. You struggle to break in, but questions come your way and the barrier softens. It’s like scaling a prison wall, but they’re throwing you a bedsheet rope reinforced with two decades of affection. “Oh, work is as it is,” you say. “You should try agency,” Joe suggests. He continues “Why be the only

cog spinning in a broken machine? I treat a few agency workers and they say it’s a new lease of life and I, well we, would love to see more of you.” He means well.

Conversation moves on, you eat. Burford Browns, wow. You thought it was poultry propaganda but these eggs are something different. “You’re still double parked.” Caroline observes. A war cry is raised that culminates in James’s voice, “Finish it fresher!” “Oh, to be a fresher,” you say, and you do finish it.

Something wrong with the guacamole, the avocado that was on the turn? Nah, doesn’t make sense. Shit. Spice mix for six, four avocados. Your heart races and you’re sure you see James wince like an advert for sour sweets. You wonder if anyone else noticed. Duh, Niamh would brunch five Sunday a month if it were possible and Caroline works in a restaurant that has four rosettes, whatever that means. Caroline and Niamh are discussing a tarot reader they both visited on separate trips to Dublin.

Your cheeks warm and your brain tingles. “Is the water meant to be running?” Shit. You spring from the chair, slipping in the advancing water. You turn off the tap and reach for a tea towel but floor is drenched. Small waterfalls cascade over the faux marble worktop and the pond at your feet is expanding malignantly towards the table.

“Where’s your mop?” You point towards the boiler cupboard as a third tea towel reaches saturation. Despair rains down upon your bent neck. “Don’t worry, it’ll be grand.” You look up to see Joe, holding a bucket and haloed in light. A thrill rolls through you.

Two minutes later you and Joe are laughing as you ring out a bath towel into the bucket. He’s now pantomime mopping for the entertainment of the room, nudging around the table leaving Caroline and James with wet ankles; then pretending to flick mop water at you. You wind up a tea towel and whip it gently at his thigh.

Once the towels have been hung and the mop stored you catch sight of the sink. The scene of the sin, a moment of lost concentration that almost ruined everything. You reclaim your seat, eyes low, cheeks burning, muttering apologies which go un-noted. You look up to see Niamh using a finger to clean her plate.

Clear crockery, satisfied smiles. Caroline is slapping James gently on the wrist as she laughs at his joke, something about not being able to get the staff these days. You say something vague about checking the towel cupboard. As you rise Grant puts a glass of Prosecco in your hand. “Take this,” he says, “There’s monsters in the long grass.” Your core shakes but the laughter can’t make it through.

From the corridor you hear scrapes and bangs and return to find Grant and James clearing the table. You try to intercede, but Niamh pushes out your chair and offers her hand. Fear shatters, like a sugar-glass window that’s had a spaghetti cowboy thrown through it.

A clean table, crowned with six empty bottles and a glass teapot. “Shall we head out for the day then?” Murmurs of assent circulate, then grow to exclamations and the verdict is unanimous. The hum rises and for a moment you are part of it. No one says they’ll cover you, but they would.

“I’m sorry guys, I’m due for Ballycastle.” It’s a convenient truth, your

parents will indeed arrive in at four, to drive you to a free dinner. A carefully planned sequence of events so that you could avoid them offering to take you out. “Not to worry my dear,” Niamh says, “Grant honey, there should be another bottle, can you check?”

“Hold on you don’t need to do that, sure - we hardly see you anymore.” Niamh silences Joe with a look, and the normally steady table wobbles at the exact same moment he inhales sharply through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t,” He fumbles. “I mean, we’ll take you out.”

You thank him. “That’s really sweet Joe, but I haven’t seen nan since Christmas, and she wasn’t in good form then.” Questions whistle towards you. You pluck them from the air like Mr Miyagi and when the dust settles there is a heavy silence.

Time slows, painfully. Then Grant asks from left field “James, what exactly did that psychic tell you two at Glastonbury?” James and Joe switch into performance mode, taking up their favourite story about the palm reader and the orange umbrella. The photo made it onto the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, and the story is so well worn that Caroline and Niamh can continue their astrology conversation on the side. The last bottle of prosecco lasts well over an hour.

In the flurry of smiles and hugs as they leave you are joyful, and you hope they’ll have a wonderful time.

Before you wash up you sit a moment. There’s a little mess left on the table. Silence weighs heavy on you. The moment stretches on. A raw solitude.

On the table you find a thank you card containing two five-pound notes

and a tenner. It’s addressed from all, signed and messaged intricately. The card directs you to the fridge and not only is your bottle of cava still there, but it now has a friend. A smile guides a tear to your chin that would have otherwise run into your mouth.

Your phone dings. A banking app announcing a five-pound payment from Joseph Bradon. The reference – ‘Services rendered’ - with a semicolon and a right-sided parentheses. Cheeky bastard, but you smile and laugh as another tear falls.

Why be the only cog spinning in a broken machine? Well Joe, how about because it’s the right thing to do? The moral superiority brings on a rush. You feel a little lightheaded.

You start to clear up, but find yourself gazing at the glass bottom of the teapot. Spilled leaves trail down from the strainer forming mandalas, and something that could be a snake or a half-moon.  You turn to look at the kitchen. Grant and James cleaned the pots, and the drying rack is full. The sink remains a dark swamp of delph. Above and below water, the crockery is stacked precariously. Plates piled inches above the waterline, cutlery atop like spines on a dinosaur. Teetering. Ready to fall.

Mary Guiney

“An Intangible Quest for Passion”

A holiday to heal, results in sleepless nights. When Brigid reaches Ninh Binh, the voices grow louder, accompanied with a surfacing of her strangulated heartbreak, but instead, she is strangling herself. She feels a shake run through her body, full of vigour, but she is weak. Her knees are dotted with small scrapes, and she attempts to haul herself further up the limestone peak. She clenches tight with delicate fingers; the small cracks are scattered around the rock face. Scrambling up the pillar, Brigid is determined to make it to the top. Stiff and rigid, jamming her fingers into the crevice, her heart races, as Brigid grits her teeth. ‘She has slender…’ almost ‘scrawny arms.’ New muscles are required. Her fingers and toes have to perform intricate tasks, which is a completely new sensation. The glory-feeling of making it to the top echoes in her mind, but her ambition is squashed. Brigid imagines the fall, bones splattered on the sand, purple bruises, and blood orange scrapes all over her fragile body.

Adamant to make it to the top of the limestone pillar, but her mind is filled with noise. She is aroused, feeling a little delirious, and stays in the same sad spot. The instructor puts more friction onto the belay. Unclenching her teeth, Brigid is intimidated, and is unable to listen to her guide attentively. Highly pressured at this point, yet she is committed to inching herself closer towards the sky.

“Hey, come on, I know you can move a little further up.” Brigid’s belayer is becoming impatient with her now, her voice penetrates her concentration.

Brigid is also distracted with the conversation flowing into her eardrums. A loud voice screeches through the funnel of her sensitive

ears, as she hears Clare’s deafening and high-pitched voice blare. Clare’s tone, not very pleasant as she sits on the sandy coastline with Blaze. The ocean lapping against their toes, yet Clare’s words pierce Brigid’s soul. Voices funnel through the vessel of Brigid’s spongy mind.

“She is rowing the Corrib River,” Blaze yells.

A treasure she may find.

But the river is stagnant.

Brigid is dumbstruck, immersed in a psychotic dance, she is experiencing pure ecstasy, yet her judgement is blurred.

Glued to that rock face, high up above, where she can almost touch the wispy clouds, she wants to fly down and slap Clare in the face. Hard! Swivelling her head awkwardly, she scans the bay, trying to locate Clare and Blaze. The wet sand continuously being washed from their feet as the water weaves in and out between their toes. A private conversation between Clare and Blaze, yet all Brigid can hear is the echo of the Corrib.

The setting at Ninh Binh is tranquil. The limestone pillars peak above the surface of the turquoise ocean forming individual islands, most of them have enviable green shrubs mounting the rock landscape, providing tropical forests for wildlife. They are like a Rock band Brigid’s brother taught her on the guitar in Latin, during Y2K, but the World didn’t crash then. She wants the perfect body and a perfect soul. Is it Fake Plastic trees?

Having made it to one of the seven wonders of the world, she listens to the waves of the undulating ocean crash against the white sand and into the lazy dilapidated fishing boats. As boats rock gently from side to side, Brigid hears tinkling bells whistling in the wind. The sea is incaved with several limestone peaks, standing tall in the distance. Several huts punctuate the sandy coastline, with enchanting straw thatched roofs. The splendour of the scenery is intoxicating. A

secret cave, where a Goddess set fishermen sail, who returned wooden penises if fertility issues were answered. The hot noon sun bakes against Brigid’s back; she is amid the most ferocious heat. Heavily exposed, wearing only her bikini and harness.

Brigid’s belayer holds her securely while pulling slowly at the rope, secured to the rock with clips and bolts. Guided up the limestone pillar, Brigid sits into her harness gripping around her waist and under her. The harness is attached to the rope and connected to rock and the instructor. It is tight and secure, but Brigid is clammy. Thick leather straps run down her waist towards her bum, and her mind chatters at breakneck speed. Straining like an amateur against the harness, her belayer says something different, something Brigid knows not to be true in that instant. “You’re a good listener.” WTF. Brigid knows her belayer has been speaking words but doesn’t hear a single one of them. Instead, all she hears are the words echoing from Clare. Blaze is now mute. It is bizarre, Clare is far, far, far away in the distance, her bikini clad bottom washed from the rocky waves, quietly speaking to Blaze. More to the point, Clare isn’t speaking kindly. Her tone is malicious. Brigid’s fingers grip the rock. Desperate to cling onto it, they glue themselves to the crevice. The rock face is rugged, and she struggles to find a foothold. Her foot scrambles to find the next crevice, and as she straddles in her harness, she clenches tight onto the ridges, to gather strength and propel further up. Brigid’s belayer seems pushy. Her scratchy high-pitched voice is irritating, “You can do it! You can do it! You can do it!”

Brigid is ready to implode, nonetheless, her belayer is encouraging. Her voice moves Brigid onwards and upwards, more in an effort to get away from it as fast as she could. Giddily at that moment, her interest in the climb is reignited, catapulting herself further up the rock. Though she is still confused as to how she can hear Clare so distinctly,

as she is a long way away. Though slightly frightened, the moment is exhilarating and powerful. Vibrant, alive, animated. Aroused at that moment, Brigid’s ears ring, as she develops more flights of fancy. On board an inexorable psychotic voyage, she is no longer captivated with the climb. Things go into a complete whirl from that moment on, and Brigid’s judgement is clouded. Her ego loses all boundaries, and her mind expands. Slowly falling into a deep psychological vacuum, she cannot fathom her inner psyche, and is caught in crossfire of chaotic turbulence in Ninh Binh. Embedded in an imaginary world, she treads a waking dream. Is Einstein speaking to her now?

As some of the boats in the distance set sail, Brigid’s imagination takes off. Totally perplexed, but also completely immersed in her chaotic dance, she tenses in her harness, frustrated with her feeble grip, and yells,

“I’m gonna abseil back down.”

“No, stay there, shimmy your right foot a few inches above you and to the right,” her belayer shouts.

“I just wanna come down.” Brigid’s fingers shyly slide away from the crevice.

Desperate at this point, she has no intention in moving further up the rock.

“Honestly, just move your right foot slightly above you.” At this moment, Brigid feels like slapping the instructor instead, but her life depends on her.

Pleading with her belayer, Brigid is afraid and volatile. The feeling of the solid sand touching her feet consumes her thoughts. She is no longer able to weave her toes and fingers through the crevices. Without hesitation, her belayer slowly lets the rope loose, as Brigid leans into her harness. She dangles with her legs stretched out in front and pushes with force against the rock. Safely brought back down to the sandy

coastline, her feet touch the soft white sand, she is safe. The feeling of the solid ground below Brigid’s feet is warm and soft. Brigid’s belayer no longer irks her as she helps shimmy the sticky harness off her waist, while slowly dragging it down towards her feet, she steps out of it and pierces her feet into the sand.

The echo of James’ voice takes over. A proposal on her hand? Her mind wanders across the Atlantic, the most Ancient city separated from California. Tectonic plates moving rapidly and splendidly slow. A crater moving her closer towards fire. Reflecting on the Aran islands, heavy metals and limestone ridges buried underground. She is sure of an earthy fiery explosion down the line. Giant’s Causeway protruding upwards with force.

Almost four years on, Brigid rolls along the Pacific. An intangible Quest of that young man. God is really that terrific! Valley’s carved, mountains moulded, is the sea gossiping about her now? No more transforming landscapes. Another leap year that February, and she reflects on the snake tattoo inked on her little soul, to incarnate into her womb. She holds the baby boy, Daniel safely in her hand. A buzz of purple hearts, a romanticist with Lilly’s, Red Roses and Sunflowers from that young Aboriginal man.

Oh, the Naval ship sailing through the Pacific sank on Brigid’s birthday. In Amed, she dived with her Latino brother. A sinking ship en route from the Philippines to Indonesia via the TAO Express. Captained by Daniel, the neat tattoo inked in Thailand. Her future baby boy? A little soul to incarnate into her womb. She screams with joy.

But both dreams come crashing down.

Her spiritual Quest, God assuring her all will be okay. Or is God’s voice a symptom of delusional psychosis? Trying desperately to make sense of the external world, her Eastern surroundings assuring her of

sanity. The God who speaks at ease, a man she would now meet. Her supraconscious explores tantalising fantasies about her future. Amid a poetic moment, has she departed from logic? A psychiatrist she must now greet. The spiritual sphere, a mere symptom of insanity, her explanation of the voices rendered invalid. Western medicine to silence her and bring her back into tranquillity. No longer searching, no longer dreaming, no longer hoping. Her curiosity crushed. The tranquillity is more like the Corrib. Grey, bleak, dull. Rattling her brain about God’s message that day, she shivers. Eleven years on, she wonders was it an intangible quest? Reverting to insanity, must she clean up her mess? Brigid leaves her soul, there, down by the sea. She passes it back to the Corrib River.

The ninth battle. Of the coral Sea. Went to the Southern Hemisphere. Was Australia awake the whole time, while Ireland was asleep? She stops in at the Seven-11, Bono echoing a drum into her hyper ear. James is the one, the seventh child from a family of eleven.

The man she thought she would meet. The year for magical thinking. But Blaze interrupts her liveliness again, by telling her she has Capgras Delusion. Brigid’s mind hacked, yet her spirit is free. She is tranquillised, she is drugged, she is suicidal, but she never gives up. On the twelfth year, the twelfth child, Brigid’s mother is born. Another leap year, will she propose? The Pacific dream of that adventurous man who is awake will find her.

Inching her way toward the ocean and smothering herself in the warm, crisp waves, she cannot hear Clare anymore. Thrusting herself further through foaming water, the sun beating down on Brigid’s bare face, she is free. Full of sparkling energy and vitality, the feeling of the soft waves crash against her skin is sensational. No longer feeling the heat emanate from the noon sun, she flails about in the ocean,

surveying her surroundings, and observes idle dilapidated fishing boats with dinghies and rowing oars parked beside them. The melody of the tinkling bells whistling through the wind is comforting. The fleeting moment dissipates in the blink of an eye; a cheetah chasing after her prey. Brigid’s linear thought process is restored. The chatter vanishes, a wasps buzz gleefully moving out of her realm.

Sleeping Satellite is lost.

Brigid is shooting for the stars.

The perfect match.

James is six feet apart. Still six feet under?

Alanna Offield

Tsip’in

after My Front Yard, Summer, 1941 by Georgia O’Keefe

Empty summer weekends, I drove my new college friends to Abiquiu Lake and taught them to pronounce Cuyamungue, Pojoaque, Okhay Owingeh. We stopped at Bode’s General Store for 40s of malt liquor and cigarettes, viejitos gawking at our tattoos asking que piensa tu familia. I bought Marlboro Reds and my friends bought American Spirits. I knew Pedernal’s outline like a neighbor’s silhouette behind a curtain. I was never brave enough to test my footing on the chert, the mountain stayed a backdrop. Like a flat-topped north star. Sunburned drunk off Olde English 800, we jumped from the cliffs, smacking our bodies against the water below ignoring the stinging skin, noses choked with water. Passing her house on the way home, I told my friends that Georgia O’Keefe said Pedernal was her own private mountain, that it belonged to her. She said God told her if she painted it enough, she could have it. She loved Pedernal so much she had her ashes scattered there. She painted it in every light. Georgia, in another time, your dust up there could have been an arrowhead, a knife.

Amy O’Brien

Will Harris Predicts the Future

Homemade tomato and mascarpone tagliatelle  has sat at the bottom of the fridge for nearly long enough to go out of date.

Last week’s Sunday roast  was enough to feed four people and that was one person too many.

When I told you over breakfast  that I’d read a poem about breaks  before we had that conversation

you said something about serendipity.  I told you the writer did an interview and said the gaps between things are potential.

I hope we fall back into each other like Will Harris and whoever.

Emma Buckley

Checkout Operator

this isn’t who i am outside of here / though i do match the colour scheme / blue and white / dentist bright / practised smile / selling cigarettes / and scanning groceries / if i made a joke now / would you understand me / do you secretly think i’m kind of pretty / but you’re too shy to tell me / because we’re strangers / and i’m on the clock / do you maybe want to fuck / do you want to tell your friends about me / yes the cashier with the hair / the lipstick / yes crooked teeth / yes that one / polite but sort of overly keen / i remember her / i think / i’m feeling my way into this poem / i’m writing it on a receipt / i’m saying yes / thank you / please / i’m saying would you like a bag / i’m saying they’re 30p / there is so much plastic in the ocean / i imagine my blood under a microscope / little tiny shopping bags / floating in the red stream / little promises of future cancers / my rib cage is tightening / like a hug / around me / it’s getting harder to justify the words that come out of me / i try to be a cool cashier / i tell you to have a great day / but i don’t know if that makes me nice / or if i just want you / to think of me that way / when i say fuck this place / and you laugh / it makes me think / we could have something special / you can stay longer / i can scan these oranges and peppermint gum / a little slower / i want to tell you / i’m trying to be something special / i’m trying to write a masterpiece / but i just keep wrapping my teeth around wine bottles / and the pavements / in front of my friends’ houses / and having breakdowns / that are getting too old to be endearing / i want to tell you / i know you’re packing up your groceries / bagels / oat milk

/ spinach / cereal / honey / but could you wait just one second / i’ll give you the receipt / but could you just tell me / one beautiful true thing / i want to tell you / if i had everybody’s money / like / if i was jeffrey bezos rich / i wouldn’t do anything interesting / i would just sit here / and scan groceries / just like i always did / just like this

How to Not Write a Poem

Order a new party dress in an online sale.   Picture yourself looking delicious. Eat an   all-butter chocolate croissant. Stand tiptoe on the scales. Read other people’s poetry.   Stare at your phone for a fucking eternity.   Send memes to your dad. Click the ads,   all of them, like sticking your fingers in   the mouth of the algorithm. Give them a  taste of you. Queue at the self-service till.   Pay half-card, half-cash, check out your   ass in the security camera, wink. Drink   a Coke Zero and feel good about yourself.   Cry at the movies. Cry for help. Back to the  electric blanket. Back to sleep. Production of   King Lear with one man, eight sheep. See?   You can do anything. Dye your hair. Give   yourself another hypochondriac scare:   cancer, heart disease, parasites. Read  poems by teenagers who are better than   you. Stay up all night. Get creative, but   not like a verb, like a noun. Creative as a   synonym for down and out. Pathologise.   Catastrophise. Learn to laugh about it.

Climate change, private airplanes,   269,000 tonnes of microplastics in the  ocean. Dream of an atom bomb explosion.

Live life like it’s something to get through.   Hide your emotion, like this: don’t say I in the poem, say you.

Barry’s

My dream job is to be one of those lads who spin you about on the Waltzers.

One hand on my cigarette,   the other throwing strangers into oblivion.

The smell of candyfloss and buttered popcorn,   the shrieks and screams ringing in my ears

till I don’t have to think about anything  except the next cigarette, the next spin,

the sticky warmth of those pink plastic tokens  and the din of teenagers puking their guts up.

Laughing my fucking head off   when they tell me to slow it down.

Joshua Beatty

Babble

You sit low to river and river sits low to its bed

You spit in it, desperate to measure heaviness   that of glob  and that of river

You time spit’s  swim down to silt

The low bank lacks light

You need light to make out bank’s cast   of shapes

Birds resting their wings perhaps

Carrier bags packed with wet clothes   or trash   Stones

You hear song

You remember song?  Bird song or stone song  sang by choir of river’s making –   Tune forgotten with ebb Remembered with soft progress black water makes in drift

Can water  suck out light?

Can water  achieve true black?

Can you  hear this forgotten song

babbled by birds or stones or –

You sit low to the teetered swell

Water draws itself to your legs

When wet halfway to the knee

You listen

The something song   quivers and clacks

Once a bird’s whistle

Once a grey rolling slab

The tide settles

You skim a stone

It bounces

Up

Kali Joy Cramer

Florida Oranges

Mama turns to gold in the sunlight, her Diana bob fluttering under a helmet as I follow close, pumping the pedals on the first bike I ride without training wheels just to catch the breeze of eucalyptus soap and saltwater still woven into her smell from a seaside youth, before she traded freshly plucked Florida oranges for the kind you can buy in Chicago at the corner store on Clark and Division and she fell for a sailor who sold his boat on Lake Michigan for a lawnmower and a two-car garage.

But under the July sun, I imagine mama younger, finding the sandbar halfway out to sea as Kokomo plays from a boombox she brought to the beach on a drive over the Sanibel Causeway, before she slips into the waves like the wind that stirs the trees in its current as we bike down the woodland path that empties into a Jewel-Osco parking lot, where we pick up a bushel of Florida oranges and some Vienna Beef, because we already have all the fixings of a Chicago dog at home.

When we return, daddy will fire up the grill, the boys, just babies, will giggle, all bliss, and I will set the table, listening to mama hum The Beach Boys and peel oranges like she has never known the sea.

Mama turns to gold in the sunlight, her Diana bob fluttering under a helmet as I follow close, pumping the pedals on the first bike I ride without training wheels just to catch the breeze of eucalyptus soap

and saltwater still woven into her smell from a seaside youth, before she traded freshly plucked Florida oranges for the kind you can buy in Chicago at the corner store on Clark and Division until she fell for a sailor who sold his boat on Lake But under the July sun, I imagine mama younger, finding the sandbar halfway out to sea as Kokomo plays from a boombox she brought to the beach on a drive over the Sanibel Causeway, before she slips into the waves like the wind that stirs the trees in its current as we bike down that woodland path that empties into a Jewel-Osco parking lot, where we pick up a bushel of Florida oranges and some Vienna Beef, because we already have all the fixings of a Chicago dog at home. When we return, daddy will fire up the grill, the boys, just babies, will giggle, all bliss, and I will set the table, listening to mama hum The Beach Boys and peel oranges like she has never known the sea

Mama saltwater still once traded But under the July sunwind as path that empties into a dog at home. When we return, will just babies, will giggle, all bliss and I hum and oranges like she has never the the sea

After the pool party

we’re in the backseat when you lean over to kiss me I giggle because Wendy, that’s what boys do! and our lips brush like backstrokes your gaze flees to the driver’s seat check if your mama noticed, she hasn’t so you give me a thimble sew us the memory swallowed with pool water: your hand slippery in mine as we brave the diving board at the deep end defiant to the whistle of the lifeguard miles below  pretending we can’t hear the crocodile that ticks in the gutter the two of us on a pirate ship over treacherous water walking the plank

Kate Morgan Shrooms

The dirt is cold but ours. We live upon dank earth, make love upon dewy air, like steaming tethered balloons.

We are bloodless organs, ashen softness breaking earth. Feed us shit, keep us in the dark— still, you’ll see us here tomorrow.

Creeping, ghosting the loam, under late-summer blooms and the glut of cherries that trace the ditch and open drain.

Small closeted puffballs,  magicians, upright stinkhorns,  frilly honeycomb morels, brilliant little buttons.

Pull off our caps, flake us with a daft irreverent thumb. You cannot say we were not here, perfectly at ease with nothing.

A Close Shave

You insist I go first, help explain  how I want my undercut shaved. The Turkish barber grins when I tie my longer layers up in a topknot, safe from harm,

and I pretend I’m unsurprised  that a barber will cut a woman’s hair, but business is business, I think, eyeing the pomades, hair gels, oils lining the shop-length wall shelving.

He apologises for his poor English and takes a blade five to my scalp,  retraces the V-shape from my ears to the nape, where he strips the fly-aways to neaten the line

and I daydream briefly about the blade slipping and taking my high bun off, the perfect excuse for me to crop it without a second thought and say oops! if anyone asks, it’s a funny story!

But seconds later he sprays my neck with some sweet cool mist and the dream is over—no tomboy pixie cut for me. Instead, I watch the other barber blend your fade,

answer your questions about his family’s holiday plans this summer. You tell him  how high you want it cut in the back where it’s grown so thick since Spring,  but not as thick as when we first met,

and you wore it like a winter-coat for weeks until it got so unruly you nearly got your whole head shaved— leaving some hair at the top— because it was the easiest thing to do.

Maeve McKenna

Fykiaphobia

I write dead eels, limb, salt, choke. I write the stairs are steep.  I write Retreat, with a capital R.

Dementia in nursing homes; a manual on the education and training of care staff.

Who tended my father’s itchy nose, his cold feet? I write care, not in capitals.

What should I do if every doctor refuses to treat my fear of seaweed? I write Lexapro, Xanax, weed.

I had counselling with a woman who held scissors between her thumb and index finger like a catapult.

It’s snowing. I grieve for black angels.

My mother drank vodka straight. In 1976, the corporation planted Ash trees outside our front door.

In 1989, they shovelled lorries of tarmac onto the roots.  My brother dragged my mother by the hair through the hall one Sunday morning.

She was fussing at our ringlets for mass just after.

I should revisit my poem about Medusa. I write this in red.  I write central heating and something I can’t read.

Solicitors invest the souls of bereft clients.  Frogs never make it across the road. I write imagine.

The spine of a kitten under the wheel of a car. I held that body over the toilet, squeezed the abdomen to empty its bladder. I write silly kitten, motherhood, Google.

Writer’s retreats are overrated. Read on.

Esther, who works at the retreat, said I should take the estates High Nelly to Newbliss.

I bought strange food; twelve bananas, one boil in the bag rice, a net of blood oranges, microwave popcorn. (I consider Garamond)

The retreat has a lake but it has lakeweed. ‘Residents swim at their own risk’

Is it called lakeweed? I’ll ask someone in the Big House. I write ask.

My father isn’t here to carry me in and out, but I announce my new name—Fykiaphobia— to his face on my keyring, keep saying it. I like it. I am sophisticatedly deranged.

My father had dementia. Bruises on his arms. My father’s radio went missing.

I went to counselling after the counsellor lady with the scissors.

My journal is so close to my elbows my armhair has papercuts. I don’t write this.

My mother smoked Silk Cut Red. She beat us. My mother loved Liz Taylor.

Snow sounds like grief underfoot.

If I held a match to my hair, could I burn just my hair?

My father’s eyelids lost the blinking reflex three years before he died. The village shop sells wine and cider.

My brother grew his red hair and beard for three years. Didn’t wash. My brother died two months ago. When I send my sisters emails Gmail gives me the option to ‘add’ him.

If there’s a God, show me him blinking. I write — happy with that line.

Horses are huge. I write about huge horses.

The counsellor lady with the scissors told me to cut through the crap.

In 1999, council men cut down the trees, left the roots, the tarmac bulging, shiny.

I write single-glazed windows. I write anthracite, condensation, lovehearts.

Why did my mother beat us? I write, occasionally. I write ventilation.

My mother is dead all over again. When the parish priest visited

he wore a herring-bone overcoat, cravat, hand-made Italian shoes.

I draw her lips between the lines, pink as my highlighter.

My niece stole my mother’s sadness. I write sadness. I miss my children. The shop sold out of wine. At night I hear other writers whimpering.

I write, ink is the ghost of the white comma. I write slap. I write wrist.

For breakfast I make banana pancakes then run 5k into the forest.

A Vauxhall Corsa in a clearing near the woods  beside Annaghmakerrig lake. I write handbrake. Scribble over it. See!

Does lakeweed make me lakeaphobic?  I am a. I am the unnecessary ‘ a’.

I think of tadpole in my ears. I write amazing(ly).

Mouth ulcers are spitefully soothing. I write milk. I  write blink. I write Xanthophobia, Otophobia, Ailurophobia.

All those.

Leaving

December 3rd, 2020

Today, I buried my father, as well as finding myself lost on the M50, oblivious to direction, heading the wrong way—northbound, with the procession of busy cars packed with people, although a few cars had just one person. But, I want to believe every car was full and found its way home because I am sad to think of the driver, alone in the next lane for several peripheral moments, leaving a graveyard, the coffin carved with the figures of the twelve apostles, lowered, the colossal depth, the green felt mat that couldn’t mask the scent of fresh digging and the undertaker placing a makeshift cover of two bouquets of lilies in the shape of hearts over the open grave, the tombstone with space for one more name, the hearse leaving too, with only one driver. We were five, me driving, my husband, front-seat passenger, three almost grown children, tight, really tight, in the back, every single one of them fast asleep.

Matthew Rice

The Rangers

Cypresses of dark   geld in the rising sun  the morning after   the night of quiet eyes  where, hey presto,

Mr Jack-in-the-box

opened up an artillery  to rival his great rival,  Mr Ali Baba,  who, open sesame,  conjured the genie   of Robin Williams  from a bottle of Redbreast 21.

And all of this while Willie  searched in vain for his penis  behind the bar  and Deedee made more  than a passing acquaintance

at a chair balanced just so  against the far side   of the mahogany.

The moon set her face  to the patio doors   as the waves outside

jeepers-creepered in the bizarrity   of her fullness, and perhaps she  was the cause of it all.

Knee-breakings and punishment   beatings notwithstanding  the lost four decades

resound meticulously   in the yeoos and   duh duh duh duh duuhhs

of the dancefloor which throngs  with the wiggling  of cheap thongs  and knock-off Ben Shermans,  fading into the past tense  where the air

from the mouth of a Redbreast   vibrates by the window  someone forgot to close.

The Common Convention

And all the children are now sorry for Napoleon.

– Miroslav Holub

1.

Byron’s reversal of Don Juan is up there  with Bonaparte’s march on the Sphinx, so photographically conveyed  by Gerome, while the rumoured death by syphilis of Schubert at 31  is up there with the death of Joe Gans (actually Gant) by tuberculosis   after 158 wins with 100 knockouts from 196 fights, at 35;  and Cockney costermonger Willie Smith’s rise to music hall fame   following his win at the Calcutta sweepstakes is up there  with the Parisian hypnotist’s purported mastery of the dark arts  earning him the stage name ‘Diablero’;  which is up there with Catherine the Great’s accession   leading to the establishment of Russian America.

2.

Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times was true to form  when sticking with the convention in the early decades  of magazine and newspaper film-reviewing to include in the write-up  the entire storyline, notably that of Seven Faces,   in which the aforementioned were integral to salving,  through their own philosophical advice on the intricacies of courtship and love,

the hearts of Georges and Helene in the imagination of the wax museum’s caretaker,  each waxwork, bar one, having been portrayed by Paul Muni,  who, five years later, would rip up the screen in the original Scarface.

3.

Had Hall not detailed in his write-up for the Times the ending of Seven Faces, (the film now lost), we would never have known,  at his trial, that the caretaker claimed to know nothing   of Napoleon or his achievements,  having merely formed, he said, a close bond with the statue,  replying, ‘A kind of murderer’,   when asked who on earth he thought Napoleon was.

Niamh Twomey

The Outside World

If I step into the world’s open jaw who can say a car won’t round the corner, swipe my body like spilt gravy from an oilcloth? That I won’t slip from a platform onto iron tracks or my bones snap against a cracked pavement? My heart races my hand to the phone when it rings. I think of my press full of canned chickpeas for when snow climbs the walls, silos me in. my houseplants– cacti– for fear native buds would shrivel. The calendar hung from a safety pin where every day is boxed up neat and tidy. Grant me a promise my life will stay intact and I’ll put on my coat, open the latch–

Sarah Michaelides

Roots

I

Your house is nicer than mine, windows that will open wide in summer so the sound of the street comes in. I’ll have packed myself into a bag by then, rolled the chrysalis of my belongings into the back of my parents’ car, carted myself off to Donegal. I wonder will I cry, will I read. You’ll still live with our friends. I’ll write. I’ll finally have something worth missing enough to leave a mark.

II

This time we cook together is better than the first. No flour falls into the curry like white paint on a still-life. The recipe is taken from all the times you bought tinned tomatoes in Tesco, from the wine you choose on the middle shelf rather than the bottom, from the stains on the plastic chopping board the colour of puce.

III

You don’t know how to say tzatziki.

IV

I slice sourdough. You simmer tomato sauce with green olives, mince garlic with the back of a blunt knife. I’m pescetarian because fish

don’t have feelings. I watch the fish. I flip its soft white flesh, season the underbelly with salt. When pieces flake off, I feel I’ve defiled it. I imagine bruising beneath the surface, dark-blue, black.

V

You thought capers were a sort of mollusc, meaty sludge inside slick wet shells.

VI

There’s a plant on your table that droops like a dead thing. The leaves are still green, but they swell down, defeated. Every time you have people over, someone pours alcohol in the soil.

VII

It’s the best thing we’ve cooked together. The fish is fresh and fried golden. The air smells like olive oil, incense, a candle that’s burned down to the bottom of a glass green holder. Even the flame is alive.

VII

You take the plant to the skip and prise it from a pot painted with ceramic shapes. Shake out soil, pull the lid of a big blue bin. At first, I don’t notice. Not until you exclaim about the mould, fine as peachfuzz. You toss the whole thing in the bin and slam the lid down, dark.

VIII

We drink water that doesn’t turn into wine.

Showering

Take me back to the years I hurt myself & stood under the spray in penance. When the water was hot and everything stung. Take that girl and tell her about this moment.

I take off your clothes. I fold both your white socks by my bed. The towel I give you is worn and rough as the family members which grew into it.

There’s nothing rough about you. Take that girl and tell her the way I rub Dove into the bones of your back & circle the notches of your spine like braille.

Tell her she will learn the language of trust, the place between the hinge of your jaw & the hipbone my hand is allowed to grace.

Now the surface of your skin smells like me. Now I hold my best pyjamas to the space-heater & warm them for you to wear.

Tell her someday, being alive will feel like warm water on someone else’s skin.

Tell her the air smells like incense.

Tell her there’s no going back.

Shakeema Edwards

When I think of van Gogh, I think

of his yellow visions, the afterimage of a foxglove overdose, of his sunflowers drooping under the weight of lead chromate, of his wheatfield, with reaper, painted at Saint-Paul, of his house in Arles, of sundance chrysanthemums outside the psychiatric hospital in Belle Mead, which I’ve seen on four occasions, of chartreuse, jasmine, champagne, aureolin, ripe plantain, black pineapple, passionfruit, witch hazel, honeysuckle azalea, verbascum, Indian bullfrog, golden poison, dyeing dart, cod liver oil, plasma, citrus, Saturn, of leprosy in Leviticus, of jaundice, of dengue, of water damage—the fractured pipe that drips, the drip that seeps into the ceiling, the seepage that stains, of the things we inherit, of autumn rain over Ainielle, of fledgling beak and broken egg, of sunshine in the albumen.

Delicatessen

When my body dies, I’ll miss the taste of guava jelly smeared on Crix crackers,  crushed bananas folded into batter, soursop leaves boiled into bush tea and sweetened with brown sugar.

I’ll miss rolls of avocado and crab roe from the sushi place on Botanic Avenue, where I ate often with that boyfriend, holding chopsticks at awkward angles to lift slivers of pickled ginger into our mouths.

After, we slept with shoulders touching under a scented duvet’s anjou and vanilla blossom, and nocturnal creatures in my follicles woke to feed on sebum, multiplying unnoticed in my pores.

It is enough to live and be wanted by microbiota, to hold ecosystems in my eyelashes and be assured the mourning of one million mites when the kitchen of my body closes.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Alanna Offield is a Chicana from New Mexico now living in the north of Ireland. Her poetry has appeared in Howl, Cyphers, Abridged, and other publications. She is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast and owns Seaside Books, an independent online and travelling bookshop. Her debut pamphlet, They Wish They Had What We Have, Kid was published with VIBE Press in 2024.

Alexandra Ward is a writer from Merseyside who lives and works in Belfast. She graduated from Queen’s University with an MA in Creative Writing and a BA in English with Creative Writing. Her work can be read and heard in various places, best enjoyed with a cup of tea.

Amy O’Brien is a Belfast-born writer and recent graduate of the Poetry MA at Queen’s University, Belfast. She is one of the founding editors of EASCAIR, a literary & visual arts magazine which publishes work in both English and Irish.

Carol Gribben has always been drawn to creative writing. Having graduated from Ulster University, she is currently studying for an M.A. in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast. Carol has had two stories published: “Eli’s Chair” in Blackbird and “The Road Home” in The Paperclip.

Claire Harrison was a news journalist with The Belfast Telegraph for 15 years before moving into criminal justice communications. From Maghera in County Derry, Claire lives in Belfast with her family. She is

a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast and is currently completing the MA in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre. Claire has had two short stories produced by BBC Storytellers, including The Cure.

Clare Duffy is an Irish writer for screen and other things. She has most recently been commissioned by BBC Radio 4.

Conal McManus is a writer based in Belfast. His work focuses on childhood, social class and the surreal. He has been published by Tower Magazine, Faerie Press, and The Apiary. He was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the CRAFT Eco-Lit Challenge. Currently he is completing his first novel.

Connor Donahue is an aspiring novelist who recently completed his MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. He particularly enjoys writing character-driven suspense stories with strong gothic undertones, as he’s read far too much Shirley Jackson and simply can’t help it anymore. He lives and writes in Kansas City.

Darcey Elizabeth Youngman is a Manchester-born writer, based in Belfast. She graduated from Queen’s University Belfast in 2023, studying an MA in Creative Writing. Her published works include, ‘Eureka!’ performed by BrickFox Theatre, ‘Pride, Prejudice and Pansexuality’ with Tenby9 and ‘the Meaning of a Flag’ with Slugger O’Toole. She currently works at The Seamus Heaney Centre, acting as editor and coordinator for the critique platform: The Saturday Matinee.

Darlene Corry is a disabled Aussie dyke who lives by the sea in Northern Ireland, with her lover and furry family. She completed her MA in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2024. Her work has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic.

Eamonn Duffin is originally from Co. Tyrone. He now lives with his wife in Belfast along with two cats, one of who is on a diet. He graduated the creative writing MA in 2023. He has had stories published in The Belfast Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Four Faced Liar.

Emilia Sarah Siletto was born and raised on California’s golden coast and is now studying in beautiful Belfast, Ireland. Storytelling has been a part of my life since childhood and always will be.

Emma Buckley is a writer and poet from Ireland. She recently graduated with a Masters in Poetry from Queen’s University Belfast, where she was a recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award 2023. Her work can be found in The Honest Ulsterman, Bath Magg, Crow & Cross Keys and the Lumiere Review.

Emma Kane’s published work appears in On The Grass When I Arrive, The Bangor Literary Journal, The Cormorant and What Could Be Carried. Her short stories have been broadcast on Radio Ulster and BBC Radio 4 Shortworks. She was a script editor for Danu Media’s Greenlight Screenwriting Lab 2024.

Fiona Anderson, a 2023 QUB MA in Creative Writing graduate, is a Frome Festival Short Story Prize winner and has been published in the Seamus Heaney Centre’s Blackbird 2022 Anthology. Her story ‘Itchy Luke’ was broadcast as part of BBC Radio Ulster’s Storytellers series in 2023. Fiona currently hosts the biennial Jigsaw Youth Writing Prize for young writers in Northern Ireland on behalf of local charity Start360. Fiona is also an Ulster University MSC graduate and holds a senior management role in the voluntary sector.

Grace Kully (she/her) is a rare disease advocate from rural New Jersey.

She studied Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast. Her prose centres around human connection, the mind/body/society trifecta, and family intricacies. You can find her work in Kaleidoscope Magazine and Sans PRESS.

Issac Cave is an aspiring novelist and has recently completed my Masters in Creative Writing at Queen’s. Issac has a great passion for satire, sci-fi and fantasy and love to share my love of writing with others!

Jasmin Awoodun studied BA English Language and Creative Writing at Lancaster University and MA Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She was an Irish Writers Centre Young Writer Delegate for Belfast Book Festival 2024, had a short story broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster, and has published in The Honest Ulsterman.

John Moriarty is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and drama. He has contributed stories to The Honest Ulsterman, Profiles, and BBC Storytellers. He is currently working on a debut collection of stories and essays, and on his first novel. Originally from Dublin, he has lived in Belfast for fifteen years.

Joshua Beatty is from Ellesmere Port and recently completed an MA in Poetry at The Seamus Heaney Centre. He most recently edited The Apiary, a student-led literary magazine at Queen’s. His poems appear in EASCAIR and The Ogham Stone, among other publications, and his criticism appears in The Apiary.

Julie-May Noteman is a retired teacher. She is completing her final year of a MA in Creative Writing at QUB and enjoys writing human interest stories combining both humour and pathos. Two of her stories, ‘The Virgin Mary and The Wee Skitter’ and ‘Fiona Lightbody is Up and

At It’ were selected and recorded for the BBC Storywriters’ Project. Her interests include drama, youth-work and sport. She is a wife, mother and grandmother.

Kali Joy Cramer (he/she) is from Chicago. He was a 2024 Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award Winner while completing an M.A. in Poetry through the Seamus Heaney Centre. She has been published in Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith, The Penwood Review and The Apiary.

Kate Morgan is from Carlow. She recently completed the MA in Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She received an Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award in 2024.

Maeve McKenna lives in Sligo, Ireland. Her work has been published widely, including Poetry Ireland Review, Mslexia, Rattle and Southward. She is the author of two pamphlets, A Dedication to Drowning, published in February 2022 and Body as a Home for this Darkness, published in September 2023.

Mark Mullan is an Irish writer working in prose and script. During his time studying an MA at QUB Mark was published in The Apiary Magazine, the BBC Storytellers project, featured in The Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News and remains a member of the Seamus Heaney Centre’s emerging writers scene.

Mary Guiney began writing when she was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder after the death of her mother. She is an associate member of the Irish Writers Centre and has participated in creative writing workshops and also received mentoring from acclaimed author, Arnold Thomas Fanning in 2023. She is currently finalising her memoir on her journey with bipolar. She has completed her MA in Creative

Writing at Queen’s University Belfast.

Matthew Hopkins (he/him) is a trans writer and semi-professional bad boy from Derbyshire. His work has appeared in TOWER, The Nottingham Horror Collective, the anthology Letters for the Dead. You can find him at linktr.ee/swearjaragain

Matthew Rice was born in Belfast. His debut collection, The Last Weather Observer (2021), was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection is forthcoming with Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK) and Soft Skull Press (US) in 2026.

Melissa McPhillips: I’m a student on the MA in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast and volunteer with Fighting Words NI. I completed Curtis Brown Creative’s ‘Writing Young Adult and Children’s Fiction’ course in 2021 and my short story Move was broadcast on Radio Ulster and BBC Sounds in August 2024.

Niamh Twomey is a poet from Clare. Her work won the 2023 Desmond O’Grady International Poetry Competition and the 2022 Trim Poetry Competition. She has been published in The London Magazine, Rattle and Banshee, among others. She is a PhD student at the Seamus Heaney Centre.

Olivia Rana is undertaking a creative writing doctorate at Queen’s University, with her PhD novel, The Heart’s Tongue, exploring the asylum experience and intergenerational trauma. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, Fish Publishing Short Memoir Award, Wild Atlantic Words (2023), and Ennis Book Club Competition (2024). She has also had work broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster.

Sarah Michaelides is a poet from Belfast. Her work focuses on periods of transition, using moments of mundanity to examine themes of love, loss and adolescence. Her work can be found in An Capall Dorcha and The Apiary magazine.

Shakeema Edwards is an Antiguan American writer living in Belfast. She has received an Ireland Chair of Poetry Student Award and was shortlisted for the 2023 Manchester Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Magma, Poetry Ireland Review, New Isles Press, Channel, Propel Magazine, and The Apiary.