I am the second poet, sipping water, hoping that our conversation won’t die a death from my shyness. I can see the landscape gnarl itself into dark green and, whirring down my window, I smell rank, sweet ditchwater. House windows flash the black shine of shadow and sun. I wonder if I shall spot anyone from another century. There are farming sheds still standing from the seventeen-hundreds.

Cows turn their big faces, and I am afraid of how life goes on until we die. All those dead tucked into the ground as the ancient Mercedes purrs by.

‘The Normans are coming soon,’ the Other Poet announces as we head towards Thomastown.

The land grows bright green in the Norman fields of the south-east, and Thomastown is seventeen-centuries-old and older, as is Grennan, a ‘Sunny Place’ in which the Other Poet’s black Mercedes parks.

His friend, the artist, lives here.

The artist’s house is pale blue and cut-in-two. One half is down and the other half up, where the artist’s ex-wife lives. And it overlooks the small, in-between courtyard full of rusting iron, bicycles, an old rowing boat, and a pear and an apple tree.

He insists he comes from Vikings. No, from the knobbled dark bog, the Other Poet says.

The artist shows me how to pluck a pear from its branch, my hand under its belly; once ripe, it will drop into my palm. I bite into it. The flesh is hardly soft, yet sweet.

Mind the dog dirt, the artist warns me.

There is a knocking on the window of his ex-wife’s half of the house. It opens and a blonde woman sticks her head out. You’ll get a stomach-ache and a bug from that pear!

It’s fine, the artist yells up at her.

When she’s throwing up she’ll have you to thank. Did he offer you tea or coffee?

He did, yes thank you.

Did he offer you anything else?

No, not a thing, the Other Poet says.

Well, come up here and I’ll offer you something.

Can I come up too? The artist says.

This time, yes.

Her kitchen-sitting room is painted mustard yellow with a cherry-red AGA and cherry-red cushions strewn across a Chinese golden-coloured sofa and chairs. Three cats spread themselves on the sofa, black, white and brindle. The dogs amble in and settle on the sitting room carpet. There are framed landscape paintings on the walls.

Hers and mine, the artist remarks.

Mine, she says. Mostly mine.

She sets out teacups, saucers and milk in a jug. Do you like marmalade cake?

Lovely, the Other Poet says.

Poets, the artist introduces the Other Poet and me to his ex-wife.

Well, I didn’t think you were his usual type of visitors. Mad, streeling banshees, the women and their badly dressed feral men.

They’re headed to Wexford to read at a festival.

How lovely for them. You’ll enjoy yourselves, won’t you?

Thank you, I say. We will.

What made you stop here?

He’s my friend isn’t he, the artist says as he folds over a slice of cake, then pops it into his mouth.

Don’t dare sprinkle any crumbs on the floor for the dogs, you.

Hasn’t crossed my mind at all.

It’s a nice set-up you have here, the Other Poet says. Great-looking AGA.

She did well out of me, the artist says.

We both did well out of each other. I gave you love and two children.

I taught you art.

You did not. I knew it already. I just needed some techniques.

The marmalade cake is delicious, I say.

The Other Poet winks at me. It is. You’re right.

The artist’s ex-wife insists on giving me a posy of Goat’s Willow, from a large shrub near their gate. She strokes its silky catkins.

It’s for sadness or mourning. But the Druids called it ‘sunshine fire’ because the male catkins turn golden when they are ripe.

We say goodbye and, while the Other Poet drives the Mercedes, the dark sunlight lies over the land with its last warmth, recycled from all those centuries ago, and the world is miasma and all the others of us are still here.

*

There are little thatched cottages in Kilmore Quay village but there isn’t enough daylight to see the full spread of sea. A seafood fishing restaurant is for sale. A great place for fish, the Other Poet tells me, then steers his Mercedes towards our destination. We are late and all the food is gone, except perhaps there might be a basket of chips if the catering staff are roused from their coffees or whiskey and wine. The Other Poet is friends with a few mountaineers and sea-swimmers, who sit with us and agree that these days the sea is changing, and the mountains are abused. No one wants to just feel the world about them, a mountaineer says. To stand alone and feel what every other animal or living plant feels.

A basket of chips is placed in front of us all, straggly and thin, threaded through crispy onion rings, and a sea-swimmer douses his portion in salt. I suppose he would, being from the sea. He laughs at me watching and asks if I have ever dived down, no air tanks, to the bottom of the ocean. I answer no, but I can imagine it. She’s good with words, the Other Poet announces. So, tell me how it goes, the sea-swimmer says. Here out from Kilmore Quay.

I’d be well used to it, I say. I’d go out beyond the Saltee Islands waters, beyond the resting seals and puffins almost to open sea, sit on the edge of my boat, gather the air into my lungs, then dive. I can hold my air for five minutes, so I presume for here it is long enough for me to reach the bottom of the sea or as close as possible. I enter the water and my lungs drive me down while my centre of gravity turns heavy as a cannonball. The water rushes through my ears, pounding on my long burst eardrums, burst intentionally for balance and in order to dive five minutes and, perhaps one day, longer. The water is a darker blue-green and some diving seals move by me, silent and flowing and lower still, where the sunlight still reaches, where their shadows resemble those mermaids from the rhapsodies of old-time sailors.

I tread water rather than touch the bottom of the sea because I am experiencing a different world and I dive for nothing more. Layers of warmth and cold flow beneath my arms, my ears, into my hair. My scalp prickles at the sight of Ling fish and there is coalfish too. I wonder if a blue shark may appear. Further beneath my feet, the sea floor is the graveyard of a thousand ships, down to sixteen fathoms or more they lie hollowed out, bereft of the humans who used to live in them atop the waves.

My legs hover above this graveyard and a cold burning begins in my lungs. I motion upwards, slowly dissolving the cannonball gravity of my lower belly, mindful of the air releasing through my nostrils, the seawater pressing my face flat against its bone. There is always a fear of too fast and I will break the water, maddened with pain from my burst eardrums. Pressurised blood will jettison from my eyes; my gums and my lungs will rupture against my heart.

*

The Other Poet pours me a little red wine to best reimburse my blood; he laughs as does everyone else and talk turns to the Other Poet’s Mercedes. I let the talk rattle over my head, while I wonder at the vast room before me, brimful of poets and writers chewing chips and swallowing wine, laughing, climbing the stairs to the festival’s reading room and back down again. The Other Poet talks about his love for his Mercedes. Black is the best colour for her and she’s well over fifty years old. She drove down these roads to here as if she always knew them, drove past every bit of history along the way. Imagine, she was made when I was about twenty in London, before the eighties.

I think of the black Mercedes pristine in somebody’s sunshining day, in a street in London, perhaps Plaistow or East Ham, somewhere seedy so her shine would make people stare. Some last remnants of the Kray’s world may have glanced at her and thought not bad by half, but have had better.

*

I once stepped into a pub near Plaistow that had been frequented by the Krays long ago in the sixties. I was trying to be a poet and kept a notebook and pen. There weren’t any black Mercedes to be seen, mostly well-used ordinary cars, just as well-used as the people in that pub I stepped into out of the sunshine and it was quiet there, a dark, shadowed gangsters’ set piece.

The pub lady looked at me Yes, love?

A cup of tea, please.

My accent caught her. She raised an eyebrow and switched on a nearby kettle kept especially for hot whiskeys she told me, not many cups of tea here. I drank my tea at the bar counter, and I tried to write a poem but my tears got in my way. I was crying for no reason, but I was crying for all the lost things I could not name.

The pub lady came over and put her hand over mine.

Go home, love. Go on now and be safe.

*

The Other Poet and I climb the staircase to the festival’s reading hall while the sea-swimmers and mountaineers follow, grasping their own books. The Other Poet reads first. A dark story of return, an image in my mind of a pair of siblings’ history stretching back in time over years upon years, an old battle with Unc, the uncle, culminating in violence and in peace.

I read my story about a Jewish artist whose art I have loved for years. I entered her head, her body and her painted life; like the way I dived down into the sea, down and hovered there above the shipwrecks, I hovered my fingers within Charlotte Salomon’s own fingers, and I asked her, how can you create when you know death is coming? She replies, it is either do something wildly crazy or kill myself.

But why did you leave her there, a woman in the audience asks me? And I try to reply that in real life she was murdered; in real life she was gassed in Auschwitz. The woman presses my hands and repeats, Why did you leave her there?

*

The Other Poet and I return to the hotel, which is quiet except for a cleaner pushing a floor polishing machine. It whirrs and turns and the cleaner glances, sees only strange people staring at him, nods, then continues on his way.  The Other Poet and I say good night. He takes the lift and I take the stairs.

I make tea in my room and eat all three packets of complimentary biscuits while sitting on the bed, rubbing my bare feet into the carpet. I begin to wonder at how we all live in this world until we finally die, and at all the dead lying in the ground beneath us, yet I see them still wandering in and out of those seventeenth-century sheds, watching us purr by in the Other Poet’s black Mercedes.

I remember the Artist’s pear in my palm, the bottom heaviness of it sitting there, and my fingers reaching up to stroke its neck, while the Artist’s dogs snuffled at my legs, licked my knees and pressed their fur against my legs as I bit into the pear.

My feet dig into the hotel room’s carpet, and I see black clay dirt squeeze upwards through my toes, stuck with hay husk. The clay embraces my heels and ankles, so cold that the ache in my head is comforted.

*

The Other Poet approaches my breakfast table to say farewell. He and his mountaineer friends are driving to the Blackstairs Mountains, on the border of Carlow and Wexford. They will hike there for a while, look over the land, and feast their heads with memories for poems.

There are stewed pears for breakfast sprinkled with star anise. I write in my notebook as the room begins to fill with people and their eating, until my taxi to Wexford train station arrives.

I think of the black Mercedes approaching the Blackstairs Mountains and, as the taxi enters Wexford, and before I step into the train station, I place about me my aura of don’t touch me or you die.

*

You see Vikings and Normans here amongst the present-day Irish of many colours, and one of them sits opposite me in the train. He glugs water from his special drinking flask, his yellow fingers scissor fast against each other. He says he needs a cigarette. He’s conscious that might be disturbing for me, but it is psychological for him. Sometimes he believes it is driving him mad. He yearns to no longer smell of nicotine smoke.

My aura of don’t touch me or you die does not work on a train with a talkative person. He is from a little place in Kiruna, high up near the Arctic Circle. Have I ever been to Sweden?

Yes, Stockholm.

What did you do there?

Walked around. I liked the swing seats put out for the public on the harbour. When did you give up cigarettes?

Yesterday, after my wife left me.

Is she Irish?

French. What are you reading?

C.S. Lewis.

I don’t read much. I don’t think much, according to my wife. I smoke. The book?

It’s about how we put on faces for the world.

What is your face?

The one I have is always the one I am.

You are lying.

I suppose I am, but I am trying to have the one face. What’s your face?

It’s gone with my wife.

You have a big face with red hair. Big eyebrows.

It is swollen because I cried so much. Do you like men who cry?

I don’t know much about men who cry, but I don’t think I’d mind it.

Where are you going?

Galway. You?

Dublin Airport. I am going home, back home to Kiruna. It’s Sami land. You’ve heard of the Sami people? Lapland?

Yes. Are you one?

No. I told my wife I was. She wanted me to bring her back there. She said I refused to share her with my family and that is why she was leaving me.

She might have been happier if you lived in Paris rather than Wexford in Ireland.

She is from Brittany. Navarre. She is not a bit Parisian. She has long fingers and is a linguistics professor. I am a plumber and a sculptor. I sculpt from wood and sometimes stone. I travelled to Wexford because my ancestors maybe arrived there once and my father had died and the house was empty and I loved my father. So… I left. Now I am going back.

You?

I am a poet. I am going back to Galway after reading my work at a festival. Another Poet in a black Mercedes gave me a lift to there.

Mercedes?

A big, lovely car.

I prefer Audi.

Audis are nice.

He leans his big face forward. I like your cheekbones.

Thank you.

This is you, yes? I have drawn you while you were speaking.

Oh yes, that’s me. That’s good!

Wood, yes? Because when someone holds your face, it will be warm in their hands. I will send it to you.

Thank you.

*

The Viking turned to the scenery moving past our train window.

Perhaps you will make up with her, I say.

His right eye glances at me. No. Then he resumes his stare at the window view.

What is home in Kiruna?

An empty house. Frozen pipes, probably.

Will you be happy to be back?

No, but I will be back. I will fix the house, the pipes. I will visit one or two neighbours. I will visit my father’s grave. I will do several things.

What about your mother?

I don’t know her. She left when I was young. Two months of twenty-four-hour daylight were not enough for her.

I’m sorry.

He turns back from the window. A poet?

I am.

A poetess?

I like that, thank you.

Make a poem about me. Send it to me after I send you your face.

I will.

I’m going to sleep now.

He sleeps right to the end as the train pulls into Heuston station, and I have to reach forward to shake his yellow fingers. He stretches, yawns, peers at the queue of people in the aisle, anxious to disembark, then smiles at me.

We wait until the aisle is clear and he helps me with my suitcase, then onto the platform where we walk towards the ticket machines. Pigeons fly over our heads, people jostle, kids watch their phones and nothing else. He has to catch the airport bus and we exchange emails. We look and smile at each other.

My name is Aero. Yours?

I tell him mine.

We shake hands first, then he grasps my elbows, searches my face, then lets me go.

For the slight lines on your forehead, he says. I need to memorise them. Goodbye.

Goodbye Aero.

*

I am solitary now in Heuston Station. The pigeons fly, waddle and peck at sandwich crumbs on the ground. I walk and wait for the Galway train to be announced. Make me a poem, he said and I am thinking of all his red hair, his red eyebrows and his yellow fingers. A Viking, I thought of him in the beginning and now I see him reach his house in Kiruna, see him fix the frozen pipes, walk over snow to visit his neighbours and then, sitting down to make my face out of wood.

The Galway train is announced.

Órfhlaith Foyle is a short story writer, poet and dramatist. She’s published a novel, a poetry collection and three volumes of short stories, including her last collection, Three Houses in Rome (Doire Press). She also wrote and directed the radio dramas May’s End and How I Murdered Lucrezia, which were both adapted from her short stories. She lives in Galway.

About The Other Poet Drives a Black Mercedes: I was travelling down to the Write by the Sea Festival in 2023, in a black Mercedes driven by another poet who decided to look up an old friend of his before we reached Kilmore Quay in Wexford, and while the poet checked to see if his friend was at home, I stretched my legs by the side of the road. The first line of the story came into my head. I repeated it until the second line came along. I had the beginnings of a narrative poem and our journey continued.
I saw seventeenth-century farm sheds and the fields once owed by the Normans, and thought how close Ireland’s different centuries actually are, since time is an illusion, how close life is to death and we need only step towards each other.
‘The Other Poet Drives a Black Mercedes’ was first published as a poem in Lines in The Sand (The Dithering Chaps) but my own publishers, Doire Press, convinced me to explore it as a short story, and because my collection was proving to be my experiment in autofiction, ‘The Other Poet Drives a Black Mercedes’ is a mixture of my imagination and my experience.

■■■

Doug was a hand surgeon. This seemed, at the time, impossibly adult. He was forty-three. We were twenty-four. He wore a thick, braided leather bracelet around his wrist. When Cora — my girlfriend — saw the leather bracelet, she leant over and whispered, ‘leather bracelet’.

That was all that needed to be said. 

The conversation was giddy and good-natured. We hadn’t seen Jasmin for a long time, and so we didn’t mind that she’d brought Doug. He drank a large sweating goblet of gin and tonic. We were all showing off a bit, about how close we were, in front of him. In some strange way that made him the focal point of the evening. 

We were pretty drunk by this point; the pub was filling up. Cora was making a concerted effort to be more ‘playful’ after listening to a podcast hosted by two comedians. She wasn’t very playful by nature. So far this consisted of taking to court each couple’s most high-stakes, low-stakes argument. The idea was that you’d bring to court the argument you had most consistently that meant nothing, really, but which had gained a special significance by virtue of being returned to over and over again.

Ours had been our sleeping arrangement. Cora needed to spoon me to sleep and I preferred to sleep not spooning. That was what it boiled down to, in the end. It was that simple. 

Jas said she thought it was romantic. Under the table she brushed my leg with the side of her foot. This was part of a game we’d been playing; what started as an accident had very quickly shifted gears. Now there was purpose. Her toes curled upwards, separating my trousers from my leg, and then the cold sole of her bare foot slid up my shin. My stomach tightened. I was trying not to think about Jake. We all were. Just over a year since we’d been organising text chains, calling friends and friends-of-friends. Long, quiet dinners with his family. The sound of cutlery scraping china.  

Cora was elaborating her thesis about spooning. I was expected to protest, and so I did. Our argument was a little too practiced, a little too domestic. The energy around the table slouched. 

‘So what’s yours?’ we said to Jas and Doug. They’d only been dating four months, but Cora clearly thought they had something to offer. 

‘I don’t really want to do ours,’ Jas said.

But Cora and I got off on pushing her, because as far as we could tell she’d only brought Doug to show off. We resented the fact that she thought we would be impressed by Doug. And we also resented that we were, maybe, impressed by Doug. 

‘Yeah,’ Doug said. ‘Does anyone want a beer?’

‘No,’ Cora said. ‘It’s only fair.’ 

‘I can get us a round,’ Jas said. 

‘There’s nothing,’ Doug said.

‘Well,’ Cora said, ‘there obviously very much is something.’ 

‘I really don’t want to do this,’ Jas said.

I made eye contact with Doug. Jas’ foot had come away from my leg. 

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

Cora kicked my shin where Jas’ foot had been just a second ago. The two sensations briefly layered and became a singular dull heat. 

‘We can talk about the Milgrams,’ Doug said.

Jas closed her eyes and said, ‘please.’

‘I just have this thing that happened to me,’ Doug said, ‘and every time I tell someone they jump in and correct it.’

‘Correct it how?’ This was me again. 

‘They refuse to accommodate the reality of the situation,’ Doug said. 

‘I really, really don’t want to talk about this,’ Jas said. 

Cora sighed. ‘Then don’t.’

Jas made a face that was totally unreadable. Then she huffed and made the face again but this time tighter, like she was clenching a thumbtack very very hard in the palm of hand. She went to go and stand by the bar. I joined her. 

‘Sorry about that,’ Jas said. 

‘It’s all good,’ I said. These were the kind of platitudes I was offering at the time. 

‘So,’ she said, ‘do you like him?’ 

I was thinking about Jas’ bare foot against my shin. I had been with Cora for three years. Just the week before Jas had texted me — while crashing on our sofa so she didn’t have to go all the way back to Camberwell —  are u still awake. 

‘He’s nice,’ I said. 

‘It’s cool that he’s a surgeon,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘It’s so grown-up.’

‘Yeah, it is.’ 

Jas looked at me, unimpressed. I could tell she wanted me to say some more. I rose to the occasion. 

‘He has very beautiful hands,’ I added. ‘For a surgeon.’ 

A queue had formed behind us. It felt like we were learning this new thing between us moment to moment. I wanted to stay in it a beat longer, the tip of her shoe now pressing down on my toes, but she was picking up the drinks and heading back to the table. In the interim, Doug had started talking about the Milgrams. 

‘I’m from Milwaukee,’ he said. ‘Or just outside.’

‘Where’s that?’

He traced a loose outline of the USA with his finger, and jabbed towards the top of it. 

‘About there.’ 

‘Awesome,’ Cora said. She was putting on the faintest American accent, taking the piss out of poor Doug. He didn’t realise. How could he? He liked us. He thought we were ‘chill’. 

‘I thought Milwaukee was a city,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Doug said. ‘And I’m just outside it.’

‘A little way outside?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘A little way outside.’ 

A cough, a shuffle. Doug began his story. It went like this:

When Doug was growing up he lived opposite a family called the Milgrams. They were blonde, all-American. Quarterbacks and station wagons. Every Christmas Eve Doug was sent over to the Milgrams with a bowl of white bean dip as a gift. It was in a big plastic bowl and he would have to run over when it was still warm, hurrying his little legs along so it didn’t freeze. On this particular Christmas Eve, when Doug was nine, the Milgrams didn’t answer the doorbell as usual. He tried several times. Eventually, Doug just put the dip on the doorstep and headed home. But it was so cold — ice slicking the sidewalk, huge shadowy drifts of snow — that halfway home Doug turned around and came back. He would make sure the Milgrams got their dip, unfrozen. Picking it up from the doorstep, he went round the back. 

The screen door that led from the back porch to the house was open. Our Doug went inside. 

The Milgrams were not there. In fact, almost nothing was: the house was bare. The walls were stained yellow and streaked with what looked like rusty water. A young couple sat on a single, sagging couch in the corner of the otherwise empty room, facing a muted television. He could see his breath. I felt a wild empathy for little Doug at this point, I should add. A hot stab of it straight through my centre. It was a feeling I can only describe as ‘paternal’. The man on the couch was passed out. He was so skinny that you could see where the skin tapered to fit the bone. The crooks of his elbows were scaly and bruised. 

The woman sat with her knees together. She watched the screen, mouth hanging open. Her hair was so thin it exposed a pinkish spot on her scalp where the skin was dry and flaky. Something gummy gathered around her ears. A cigarette that was just a pillar of ash smoked in her left hand, above a white porcelain plate on the floor where two further cigarette butts lay. Baby-pink lace underwear exposed her distended stomach. She turned to Doug. They stayed like that a while, staring at each other. Her eyes had a sad, blanched quality. 

‘Hey baby,’ she said. 

And when Doug ran home and told his parents they marched him right back over, only to find the Milgrams as they should have been, in a house full of Christmas lights and warmth and the smell of glazed ham. Doug’s white bean dip, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was as if the couple had disappeared, and the Milgrams — the real family; the beatific white smiles and college jerseys — were a skin stretched thin over the place. 

‘And that was it,’ Doug said, ‘no one ever believed me.’ 

‘Because it didn’t happen,’ Jas said. 

I could kind of see why she was angry. Doug was relentlessly normal. He really was. And this admission was, to his credit, truly and totally deranged. 

‘So they were there,’ Cora said, ‘and then they — I don’t know — weren’t?’

Doug nodded sagely. ‘I think of it as two bubbles,’ he said, drawing two bubbles in the air, ‘one inside the other.’

‘I don’t even know what that could mean,’ Jas said. 

Doug shrugged.

‘You’re a surgeon,’ Jas said, ‘you save people’s lives.’ 

It was getting awkward. I made an excuse, and went for a piss. Doug joined me. He tapped me on the shoulder when we opened the door to the toilet and pulled me into a cubicle. This was the closest we’d ever been. I was in awe of the size of him, his sheer physical bulk. He took out a small bag and a key. 

‘I didn’t know surgeons did this,’ I said, gesturing to the cocaine. 

‘We don’t,’ he said, sniffing hard. 

‘What if you’re called in?’

‘That just won’t happen,’ he said, with a supreme, blinding confidence, ‘that is just not a thing that will happen.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Shoot,’ he said.

‘The Milgrams,’ I said. Then I raised my eyebrows and held out my hands like, go on. 

He dipped a key into the bag and held it up to my nose. I obliged. Twice. 

‘You’ll get older,’ he said. ‘Things will make less sense.’ 

‘That’s very profound,’ I said.

‘I don’t know why she doesn’t believe me,’ he said. ‘I think both things can be true. Both states can exist at the same time.’ 

‘Like the bubbles,’ I said. 

‘Sure.’  

‘You know,’ I said, ‘the surface area at the point of contact between two perfect spheres is zero.’ This was a fact I’d just learnt. For some reason, I wanted Doug to think I was ‘esoteric’. 

‘Right,’ he said. He frowned. ‘You’ve had a lot of drugs.’

I think I was feeling bad about Cora. And Jas. And also about Jake. I started to see Doug’s leather bracelet as something profoundly honest. I was staring at it. It became, for a moment, all the things he wanted it to be: masculine, rugged, true. 

‘I’m good,’ I said, ‘I’m awesome.’ 

‘Maybe we cool off on the partying for a bit.’

‘The partying,’ I said. I used a tone that I hoped would signal to those who weren’t there — Jas, Cora, Jake — that I was above this, separate somehow.

‘Do you think Jasmin loves me?’ Doug said. 

I blinked. We were still inside the cubicle. There was piss all over the seat. Up close, I could see his age: wrinkles at the forehead, crow’s feet, something heavy behind his eyes. 

‘Sorry,’ he said, with a pause, ‘this must be really weird for you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘But it must be hard.’

‘No,’ I said, firmer this time. ‘It’s fine.’ 

‘So?’ he said. 

I thought of the way Jas had started putting her face against my neck when we hugged, how when we were alone we’d just sit in silence as if something awful was about to happen. We still hadn’t spoken about it. I imagined what it would be like to sleep with her. I imagined my thumb in his mouth: his thumb in hers. He had very beautiful hands. 

‘Charlie?’ Doug said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘She loves you,’ I said. 

Doug watched me for a while. After wiping at his nose, he left the cubicle and then turned, framed by the doorway. 

‘You should stay here,’ he said, ‘and pretend you were having a shit.’ 

I obeyed. I stood there in the cubicle, door open, in front of the toilet like I was waiting. I tried to piss but nothing came, so instead I grabbed a wad of toilet roll and cleaned the seat in case someone came in behind me. 

That was the last time I saw Doug. I didn’t tell Cora about Jas. Doug became a distant memory. He and Jas had a painful, confusing break-up. Cruel texts, twenty missed calls, blocked numbers. He folded up his own life and took it to Reading, then down the asphalt neck of the M4 to Cardiff. The Milgrams stayed. Cora and I took the story into our relationships’ vernacular. If we lost something, we would claim that it might be with ‘the Milgrams’. Lost keys, passports, misplaced scissors: the Milgrams had disappeared with it all. 

*

Cora pulled me into the toilet so I could help with Jas’ meltdown. She’d got my attention with a complex sequence of gestures towards her phone, which I think was meant to indicate the scale of the issue at hand. Jas was on the other end of the line. We were thirty-four – a decade since we’d met Doug. The house party was a dud, so I didn’t mind missing out. Cora wasn’t drinking, so I nursed my beers in solidarity. The whole evening had this weird feeling of never quite starting. It felt like sitting in a parked car by the side of a busy road. 

When we were younger, parties like this had been our ‘M.O.’ Jake was always the first to arrive; then he’d hit a French exit somewhere in the early hours. He’d text Jas, who’d confirm his departure with an affectionate roll of the eyes. We’d then pile into a taxi, linking back up at ours to have an ‘afters’. Just the four of us talking until the early hours. Orange juice and vodka, muted episodes of Dawson’s Creek. The smell of clothes drying. The night always seemed more alive, sparklier, in retrospect. There were people to tear apart. Mistakes others had made that they’d tell themselves, we knew, lying in bed the next morning with a ringing headache, that no one would remember. No one except us, who’d dissect, pry, and then transform them into expansive bits that we’d still quote months later. I suppose we weren’t very ‘nice’. At the time, that didn’t seem to matter. Why would it? We loved each other; that was enough. 

Now, of course, with our thirties dragging on, the parties were lifeless. People had kids, families, ‘important jobs’. Drug use was discreet and kept to a minimum. Conversations revolved around area codes, tax brackets and rent hikes. Everyone who was sober would either group together to discuss sobriety in detail or, worse, talk of the possibilities of a Sunday morning sans hangover, of trail runs and walking holidays. It was hard to imagine what Jake would have been like if he were still with us, but I could picture his small, hard eyes finding mine in a crowded room, and a smile that meant, you can have some if you like, and, did you just hear Jas?, and, I’ll let that slide, if you will. But he wasn’t here. He hadn’t been here for a long time. 

The toilet Cora had pulled me into already had an occupant. Cora waved a hand. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘We made friends earlier.’ 

The stranger sat on the toilet, underwear bunched around her ankles. It was pink and frilly. I remember this as it was a hard image to shake: private and suggestive. I noticed the curves of her calves, the way one knee was turned inwards. There was a purplish, coin-shaped bruise on her thigh. 

‘This is Dawn,’ Cora said.

Dawn smiled at me. 

‘Hi Dawn,’ I said. I tried not to look at her. I turned away, and studied a collection of creams and ointments by the sink instead. Dawn was still visible in the mirror behind. 

‘Sorry,’ Dawn said, ‘I find it hard to go if people are around.’

‘I can leave,’ I said.

Dawn laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’ 

Dawn had thin blonde hair, carefully coiffed. She was beautiful in a waifish, aloof kind of way. There was an American twang to her voice. That, or an international school cadence of sorts. I could never tell the difference. 

‘Guess Dawn’s surname,’ Cora said. ‘Go on.’

I looked at Dawn as if her appearance might give me a clue. She tilted her head to the side. 

‘No,’ I said.

‘Milgram,’ Cora said, beaming. 

Dawn shrugged and, from her seat on the toilet, did her best half-curtsy. 

I thought of Doug, and I realised the night we’d met him at the Southampton Arms had become inextricably linked to Jake. Even though Jake had died the year before, that evening was the first time we’d seen Jas with someone else. It was the first time I had  stepped outside of the feeling and experienced life in its dreary fullness without him. I thought of Doug’s gesture, a bubble within a bubble. I remembered the night clearly: Jas’ foot on my shin, Doug’s hands. It was all inseparable, existed firmly within Jake’s accident and everything that came afterwards. I was close to tears. 

‘Jake would have been thirty-four today,’ I said.

‘I know, baby,’ Cora said. 

‘I can leave,’ Dawn said. 

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ 

I was embarrassed. Cora was paying no attention now. She was handling ‘the crisis’. She was offering Jas advice that operated on an emotional register entirely out of my reach. It was impressive and, all things considered, quite moving. 

‘So,’ I asked Dawn, ‘are you from the States?’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Milwaukee.’ 

‘Just outside it?’ 

Dawn shifted again, watching me in the mirror. She took a small vape from her handbag. After taking a hit, she started to urinate as if the nicotine had released a valve somewhere inside her. She pissed for a while and then stopped. 

‘Why all the questions?’ Dawn said, wiping. ‘It’s very flattering.’ 

She put the vape back in the bag, which I imagined filled with all the things I’d lost. Her hand lingered there a while. 

‘Jas says hi,’ Cora said. 

I was still thinking about Jake. All those years ago, about a month after Doug and the Southampton Arms, Jas came over and we had sex on the sofa so we wouldn’t stain the sheets. And it was like the whole time we were looking past each other, seeing the other body as a prop, a tool to move past the feeling and into something new. We were applying pressure at the weakest point. Afterwards we agreed that it had to stop, which it did, but we’d call every now and again and talk about everything but Jake. Sometimes she would send me photos of her face, expressionless, or her reflection in a pane of glass. That was our ‘deal’. I looked at Cora and she blew me a kiss.

‘Dawn Milgram,’ Cora said, ‘can you believe it? Dawn Milgram from Milwaukee.’

‘I think I need to go,’ I said.

‘I’ll only be five,’ Cora said. She inflated her cheeks like a chipmunk.

I went to stand outside. Dawn appeared by my shoulder. She put a cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and handed it to me. I didn’t smoke but I took it anyway. When we made eye contact I could see something dissolute and sad. I wondered what she was seeing within me. What bubbles there were inside. 

‘I think I did it all wrong,’ I said. 

‘She loves you,’ Dawn said.

‘I know.’ 

‘You should tell her.’

‘Tell her what?’

‘Oh,’ Dawn said. ‘Okay.’

I waited to see if she’d pull a face that might indicate what she meant, that would give me a clue as to what she was getting at. But nothing came. Her face was blank, her mouth set hard.

On the drive home I asked Cora to pull over. We sat in silence for a while. I wound down the window, and we listened to cars pass. The moon was yellowish and smudged. Two days after Jake died, Cora sat on the kerb and let me put my head in her lap. She stroked my hair and wiped my nose with the hem of her dress. She said maybe there were things we just weren’t meant to understand. And little Doug trudged back through the snow for his white bean dip. 

In the car, Cora turned to me.‘What are we waiting for?’ Cora said. 

‘I don’t know.’

I thought about Jas’ cold foot against my shin. Doug’s leather bracelet. 

‘There has to be something,’ Cora said. 

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘yeah. There has to be.’

Max Lury is a British writer based in London. His debut novel—No Ghosts—was published in April with Peninsula Press, and was featured in The New Statesman’s ‘Best fiction to read 2026’. He won the 23/24 Galley Beggar Short Story Prize, and his short fiction has appeared in 22 Fictions, The End, and Tar Press, amongst others.

About The Milgrams: The story started with Doug. I was drawn to the idea of an outsider bringing everyone else in a group closer together: someone to point at, to laugh at, evidence of an in-group intimacy. I knew I wanted Doug to have a secret which was strange and would charge the rest of the narrative. The Milgrams then appeared as something slightly sinister and inexplicable: a kind of rotten core to the story. Then came the other characters’ secrets. Some of these come to the surface explicitly; some stay buried. Once all of this was in place, it was then a question of playing around with how these secrets would manifest. Charlie, Cora, Jas and Doug reside within their own realities — worlds within worlds — and I wanted to see whether or not their private realities could be reconciled. They’re trying to bridge the gaps between them in their own ways — trying, I think, to articulate things that are so much bigger than they have the words for.

■■■

I stay at home now and take care of Franklin. He’s four and beginning to ask questions I don’t have the answers to. Sometimes they’re the big unanswerables—you know them—and other times they seem simple—‘Is my mum like Felix Baxter’s mum?’—but which I can’t answer because I don’t know who Felix Baxter is. 

He’s started making this face, Franklin. He brings his bottom lip over his top lip and makes it touch his small nose. It makes him look older somehow and like he’s disappointed in me. I remember feeling disappointed in my father when I asked him simple questions and received complicated answers. I don’t know if I ever made that face. Any answer at all would be better than what I give Franklin. 

Once, when Jenny called me from the hospital I stood there listening to the sounds of the A&E department behind her—the different frequencies of beep—and felt the most relaxed I’d ever felt. I didn’t hear a word she was saying to me. Another time, around Christmas, again on the phone, I said that we were like ships in the night. Jenny said I didn’t understand the expression. More like if one ship was docked in the harbour while the other ship endlessly circumnavigated the globe, flashing its lights each time it passed by but not sounding the horn so as not to wake Franklin up, she said.

The evenings Jenny makes it home she sits at the kitchen table and eats a few mouthfuls of leftover pasta. Sometimes the kitchen grows dark with her inside it and she startles me when I open the fridge and the small light falls onto her back. Now and then she’ll come into the living room and sit beside me on the sofa and ask to watch the news but she usually leaves and goes upstairs a few minutes into the main story, when they update the daily toll. 

Franklin asks the most questions when he’s about to fall asleep. Recently: ‘Is the moon always at work, even when we can’t see it? How often does it get to go home?’ 

•

By some miracle, Jenny didn’t have to go to the hospital last Sunday. 

In the morning, still half-asleep, I felt her climb on top of me and guide me inside of her. She braced against my shoulders and began rocking back and forth with her eyes closed and her hair falling down over her face. We fell asleep again for what felt like just a few seconds before Franklin walked into our room as though he were being guided through fog in a dream. He climbed in bed between us and we all three fell asleep. 

An hour or so later I woke up and left them curled like fossils and went downstairs to make pancakes. Jenny came down with Franklin in her arms and placed him, still sleeping, into a chair at the kitchen table. He began to stir as the first scoop of batter hissed and foamed in the pan. Jenny asked if I’d turn the radio down. I stood there making pancake after pancake, placing one on Jenny’s plate, one on Franklin’s. When I turned around with their plates they were staring at each other across the table. The weather was beautiful so I suggested we walk through the park after breakfast. Putting our shoes on in the hall I bent down and inhaled the pancake-and-sleep smell coming off both of their heads. 

•

We weren’t the only ones who’d had the idea: friends and neighbours we hadn’t seen for what felt like years were in the park. Franklin ran back and forth reporting to his mother everything he’d found worthy of praise. A squirrel on a branch. Orange balloon stuck in the roof of the bandstand. A few friends had never met Franklin and they made a fuss of him, or tried to in the brief intervals he was back delivering his report. A slow dog that looks like a sausage. Jenny didn’t talk much to the families that were missing husbands and sons and they didn’t raise their eyes from the ground to look at her either. Red corkscrew in the trunk of a tree.

On our third lap of the park I saw someone else I hadn’t seen for years. John Witford–he’d been two years above me in secondary school. He and Jenny had worked together before we’d met. I was surprised to see him because he’d moved away. He was wearing a green woollen coat, buttoned up, which was odd given the heat. Jenny and I had met at his leaving party almost five years ago and he’d introduced us, if I remember right. 

We exchanged some small talk. Franklin huddled close to his mother and started tugging at her until she relented and followed him into the trees. He led her by the arm and pointed in all directions to the source of some wonder.

John grabbed my arm. He looked me dead in the eyes and told me that he and Jenny had spent three years on the boat together. He told me the wounded sailors—young, beautiful, innocent men– had with their dying breath asked Jenny to kiss them a final time as if she were their own mother and she’d never refused, not once, despite the blood and everything that was coming out of their mouths. This experience had formed between them an unbreakable bond. He repeated the phrase and tightened his grip. An unbreakable bond. His fingers made a complete circle around my arm. I was trying to understand what he meant when I saw Jenny leading Franklin back out of the trees and John walked—almost ran—away. 

We lived close to the sea, just a ten-minute walk away, and I couldn’t remember the last time we’d walked along the shore, the three of us together on such a fine day. 

•

It was, somehow, an even finer day by the shore, as if the sun was taking two steps back for every one forward. We walked along the path which ended at the foot of the cliff and the steps up to a small ceremonial lighthouse. To the left was farmland and to the right the shore. Cows in the field licked their lips at the tang of salt in the air and a flock of oystercatchers took off suddenly from the field, flew in a perfect circle above us, casting brief shadows on the path and dipping their wings in the surf, before landing again in the field, in the same spot. The waves coming in and drawing back over the shingle sounded like velcro shoes being taken off and put on again. 

Franklin resumed his reporting, skipping over the rocks. Blue rope on a rock. Green coat. 

A slight haze obscured the view of the farther shore.

That’s funny, isn’t it, I said to Jenny. Sometimes the nicer the day is the less far out you can see. When there’s a bit of cloud, you can look right through the front windows of the houses across the shore. Jenny said I sounded ‘folksy’ and maybe I did. A pair of bird’s wings but no bird. 

‘Folksy’ is how she used to describe her mother’s sayings, the ones she had prepared for any occasion. When Franklin was touch and go for a while after he was born, her mother burst into the room one morning saying ‘it won’t always be dark at six o’clock.’

•

Jenny says I don’t see things until they’re in the rearview. Looking at the water and the blurred horizon, I started thinking about the poem I read at my father’s funeral. It was one of the requests he made before he died suddenly but not unexpectedly. When my sister told me the poem he’d requested, it brought back this feeling I used to have. I’d never seen him read anything—a book, a magazine, an instruction manual, a menu—ever in his life; anything he couldn’t get out of reading he handed to my mother, then when she wasn’t there anymore, to me. I got it into my head that he couldn’t read and cried about it at night when I was young, just slightly older than Franklin, in case anybody on the street or at school found out.

•

A boy a few years older than Franklin rode past us on his bike. He jumped off, the wheels still spinning, abandoning the bike in the middle of the path and picking his way over the pebbles and between the larger stones down to a boulder—eight feet high and double that around—that we call the Wren’s Egg. There’s six or seven Eggs along the shore but this one’s the biggest. The surface of the boulder looked smooth but the boy knew every hand and foothold and clambered up and sat on top like a drunk prince. 

I asked Franklin if he’d like to walk up the cliff steps to the lighthouse. Jenny asked if we could turn back; she didn’t feel comfortable—she wasn’t dressed right or something—so we started home.

There was a quicker way home up a steepish path with a row of houses on one side. As we walked, Franklin asked if his mum could be at home tomorrow as well but I didn’t answer and he stopped and made that face. 

Every house’s front gate was almost completely rotted, the wood bloated and sagging but dry and brittle like animals washed up on the beach. The hinges were all rusted too, and split as if they’d been forced open the wrong way. Further up the path, the poem was coming back to me a little—something about looking out far or in deep—but it wouldn’t stick. It was going in one ear and out the other. I stopped and looked at the sea, trying to remember it. What had been perfectly blue and serene down by the shore was, from up here, green and grey and the waves seemed to burst against the rocks intentionally. 

‘Where’s that man going?’ I heard Franklin ask. Jenny had carried on walking. I turned and saw how far Franklin was down the path. He seemed miles away. He was watching a man walk up the cliff, taking the steps two at a time with his hands on his knees.

‘He’s walking up the cliff to the lighthouse,’ I said, going back towards Franklin and taking his hand. I felt much better, being able to answer him.

Dane Holt ’s writing has appeared in Winter Papers, TLS, Granta, The London Magazine and elsewhere. His debut collection of poems, Father’s Father’s Father, was published in 2025 by Carcanet. He lives in Belfast.

About Nor in Deep: There’s an ‘event’ around which the story orbits and which the characters are affected by, but it isn’t mentioned. To the charge of ‘cop-out’ I can only offer my favourite line from Hamlet: ‘by indirections find directions out’. I approached the story like I’d approach writing a poem—through oppositions and mirroring, but of character rather than image or sound. I think prose allows for the tensions generated by people talking and living at cross-purposes, which I think the story is also about; or at least my intention was to maintain a narrative of misunderstanding without ascribing ‘blame’, which I don’t think is the same as being guiltless. It’s also about aftermaths and how to survive in them. Or not survive. And emotional shame and failure. But I don’t know any of this for certain. The only thing I know is that the kid who leaves his bike on the footpath and climbs on top of the big rock is, to misquote Raymond Carver, the hero of this story.

■■■

shine/yes/shining/up/step/step/push/windmill/
fall/brush/brush/brush/step/roll/and burst

Again, the teacher says. 

They follow along the words punctuating the flow, reminding limbs where to go, feet where to step. 

shoulder roll/breathe/and frame/thread the needle/frame/hand to chest/
step/hands/step together/one/sway/right/step/and left/
lift up/chin/head drops/sway/clasp/chin/sway

Clarissa is near the back. She is always near the back. There are politics to the placement of bodies in the rehearsal room and Clarissa has never been more than two rows from the back.

The teacher barks and immediately they realign. They know this bit.

froggylegs/step/step/lean/turn/step/drop/two/three/
reverse/breath/breathing/in/step/and down

Moving through it, Clarissa considers the bodies ahead of her. Those in the rows at the front. How they can fold themselves up and stretch out like plasticine. 

Those girls don’t have what you have, her mother says. They’re dull. You’re earthy. Unconventional. In my industry, she says, it does you good to stand out. They don’t have your passion. 

Clarissa thinks a lot about passion. About this secret ingredient her mother has told her she has. If she has passion, the girls in front of her have something else entirely. Perhaps an ingredient her mother has forgotten. Whatever it is, this unnameable thing, it is not invisible. When thirty girls go up on stage performing identical moves, each with their own precision and delicacy, your eye will still be drawn to one, maybe two of them. These girls, and whatever they have, will take the gestures and translate them into something beautiful, while everyone around them is stuck performing something pretty. Clarissa thinks maybe it is really these girls who have passion, and her mother is hoping by saying it enough, Clarissa will become one of them. 

What Clarissa does have is a nervous disposition and an unquenchable desire to appease her mother. She never asked to be a dancer, but it is something her mother feels is essential, even when they are running out of money, and she shuts the bedroom door to have screaming phone calls with people. 

I can stop the classes, Clarissa suggested before. 

Don’t be stupid, her mother said. I’d rather go grey and starve than have you give them up. 

So if her mother wants her to have passion, she’ll keep looking for it. 

So far it has gotten her two rows from the back and destined to play the part of any animals or foliage in the recitals, though she is hoping to be upgraded to a human role this term. 

*

After rehearsal, in the changing rooms, the girls are undressing and discussing the new show. They will be performing a dance interpretation of Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market. The girls have been divided into maidens and goblins and the two lead roles of Laura and Lizzie. Clarissa, is of course, a goblin, but right now she is grateful that she is, if not human, at least humanoid. She can imagine a version where she was cast as a peach or a crab-apple. Two front-row girls have been cast as Lizzie and Laura. 

I can’t believe it, the Laura says. I really can’t believe it. 

Everyone else can. She has previously played Rapunzel in Rapunzel and The Little Red Hen in The Little Red Hen. Titular characters are well and truly in her repertoire. 

You’ve worked really hard, the Lizzie says. Really. You deserve it. 

Yeah, a second-row girl says. And Miss was really impressed with your breathwork. And your flow. 

Yeah, your flow is amazing, the Lizzie says. You had to be Laura. 

I’m just happy to be a maiden, another girl says. I hope we have costumes like the children in The Pied Piper. With all the ribbons. 

What about the Goblins? someone asks. What’ll they wear? 

Masks, the Lizzie says. They’ll have to be in masks. None of the parents will want to know who’s who with the Goblins. 

Why? a girl asks. What do you mean? 

The Lizzie shrugs. Well, they’re the rapists, aren’t they? 

The maidens and goblins wait for her to go on. The Lizzie has four older sisters and has accepted her role as deliverer of unfortunate truths. She had to explain abortion to the girls before the last show.

How are they rapists? the Laura asks. Everyone else exhales in appreciation. 

Oh, come on, the Lizzie says. They want to steal the fruit? Sweet juicy fruit? It is not good for maidens to loiter in the glen?

Everyone is still looking up at the Lizzie.

The fruit is our virginity, she says. Obviously. 

Oh, a maiden says. 

I thought it was just about Goblins, the Laura says. 

Well, it’s layered, every good piece has subtext. 

Right, another girl says. Of course. 

I get it, someone else says. 

Clarissa is feeling less content with her role as a Goblin now, and she looks around at the other unlucky girls. She tries to figure out what has distinguished her and the others from the maidens. It seems to her a pretty clear divide between those who have and have not started shaving their legs. Clarissa has been wondering how to solve the issue of the hairs poking out through her tights for some weeks now, but every time she attempts to bring it up with her mother, Clarissa clams up and has to rush to the bathroom and splash her face with cold water. 

As the girls are leaving the changing room, their dance teacher calls Clarissa aside. 

I’ve just had a call from your mother, she says. Something about work. And that your father will collect you, just to wait in the foyer. 

Clarissa blinks. Are you sure? she says. 

Of course, the teacher says. Come on, I’ll bring you up. But I can only wait a short while. Get your things. 

Clarissa already has her things. She is holding her drawstring bag containing her leotard, tights, her socks, dance shoes, a notebook, a pencil and an old apple that’s started to wrinkle from sitting at the bottom of the bag for over a week. If she had known today was going to be the day, she might have packed differently. She grips the strings of her bag but feels completely empty handed.

*

The things Clarissa knows about her father are as follows: he is a salesman, or he was a salesman; he was a lawyer, or else, he could have been a lawyer; he speaks Russian; he occasionally sends brown envelopes with money to her mother, with notes Clarissa has fished out of the bin which alternately contain the phrases I’m sorry and You bitch; and his name is Terry. 

She knows she looks like him too, because once, with her ear pressed to the wood of her mother’s bedroom door, she heard her mother crying: If you could just see her, Terry, please. How she’s grown. She’s your portrait. She’s like a portrait of you. 

*

In the foyer, the teacher sits beside Clarissa with her coat on, checking her watch. 

It’s okay, Miss, she says. I’m sure he’ll be here soon. 

Yes, I suppose he’s on his way. 

I’m sure he is, Clarissa says. 

It’s only that I have another appointment. 

It’s fine, Miss, Clarissa shrugs. I’m fine. 

Right, well I’ll get the receptionist to make you some tea, and she has a phone behind the desk if you need it. You know the numbers, do you? For your parents? 

I have the home phone and my brother’s number written down, Clarissa assures her. 

She takes a sip of tea the receptionist brings over and scalds her mouth. The tea tastes of nothing so she stirs in three sachets of sugar. 

She notices him before he notices her. His face disturbs her, in its resemblance to her own. But his is hardened, almost waxy and his hair sticks out in tufts from under a flatcap, like a scarecrow. Looking at him she thinks: Of course I am a Goblin; I am destined to always be a Goblin if this is my blood. There is something goofy about him too, like he could be a toy with a string at the back which when pulled would force him to tell jokes or pull out a tin drum to beat repeatedly. 

Well, he says, finally spotting her. 

He puts his hand out in front of him, his fingers shrivelled and thick like parsnips. You’re Chrissie’s girl, are you?

She takes his hand and says, That’d be me. 

That would make me your old dad, I suppose, he says. 

That’s what I’ve been told. 

You’re a right little Nina Ballerina then, are you? 

My name’s Clarissa, she says. 

Isn’t that something, he says.

And though she knows under normal circumstances to not follow a man she doesn’t know to his car, he says, I got an earful from your mother this morning, so I said I’d better help her out. And the casualness, the ease with which he mentions her mother and the strange familiarity of his face means she does follow him, and she finds herself nodding when he says, You’re gonna help me on a few little errands this afternoon, how about that? She looks back at the desk as she leaves, but the receptionist is holding the telephone between her ear and her shoulder repeating the words, I know, baby, I know, so she doesn’t see Clarissa’s little wave. 

He opens the passenger door, and she gets in. A patch of the seat is slightly sticky and above the dashboard she can see the torsos of people passing by and some chimney stacks in the distance. One chimney has hearts cut into the top of it, and she wonders has anyone else noticed this before. The car smells like cigarettes and there’s some other oily stench she can’t name. Traffic is heavy around the city, so they move slowly away from the dance school. Occasionally her father looks over to study her and looks back at the road shaking his head and smiling. 

I suppose you have a lot of questions, Miss Clarissa, he says. 

She shrugs. I do and I don’t. 

Well whatever you want to ask, I’m here now. Let the interrogation begin. 

She looks out the window at the people on the street. A woman dressed head to toe in green, a man walking a poodle, and a girl, about Clarissa’s age, wearing a red coat, one Clarissa has admired before in the expensive shops near her dance school. 

Honestly, her father says. Shoot. We’ve got time. And he beeps the horn, she supposes to show her that this car isn’t going anywhere quickly. 

Were you in love with my mother? she asks. 

And he laughs, his face crinkles up and she sees his teeth properly for the first time, all square and yellowing, fighting for space in his mouth. 

I’ve got a thing for alley cats, he says. I might have known your mother didn’t want to be brought home with a collar on, someone serving her milk on a saucer. Some people can’t be, you know, domesticated. 

Clarissa considers this, and she can think of no one who would like more to drink metaphorical milk from a metaphorical saucer than her mother. Her whole life, Clarissa thinks, has been a hunt for the pourer of this mysterious milk. 

And you, she says. Are you domesticated? 

He laughs again. 

You take one look at me, little dancer, what do you think?

Are you homeless? Clarissa says.

He looks at her then, not smiling. 

I suppose I have to watch myself around you too. 

The cars ahead are moving more steadily now, and they push through across to the other side of the city. 

Now, he says. First on the list. Won’t be long. Just over here. 

He takes a sharp right and pulls up outside a row of houses. 

You stay put, I just need to pick up some bits and pieces. 

He heads into a house with wooden boards over the windows, and she pulls open the glove compartment to inspect its contents. She finds a bottle of cologne that smells metallic and peppery, she finds scrunched-up empty wrappers of KitKats and a notebook in which are scrawled addresses, phone numbers, and bad drawings of stick men. 

When she hears her father returning, she shoves everything back into its place. He looks breathless and pink-cheeked and is holding a big cardboard box. 

Open up, princess, he says from outside, so she gets out and opens the backseat door. He places the box on the seat and covers it with a mouldy blanket. 

A good magician never reveals his tricks, he says, and winks at her as they get back into the car. They drive on again, back the way they came a bit and then down some streets Clarissa doesn’t recognise. 

You don’t have to be shy, he says, after a while. Really. But she doesn’t respond. It’s turning into evening and everything around them is grey. 

I’m sure there’s a lot you want to ask, he says. I’m an open book, I’ll answer anything. Except what’s in the box. He laughs then, teeth exposed again, spit flying out like little sparks. 

No, I’m joking, he says. But really, any questions. You ask, I answer. 

She just shrugs. She feels there is nothing good to learn from this man. 

I know what I need to know, she says. 

Oooh, he says, making his voice high and pouting his lips. I reckon there’s a lot you don’t know, little miss. But some people want to remain ignorant. I know a lot of these people. 

She folds her arms and turns to look out the window again. 

Nah, he says. You’re a sharp one, aren’t you? Any kid of mine is gonna have brains coming out of their nostrils. You’re only giving me a hard time. 

I wasn’t trying to, she says. 

No, I get it, he says. Don’t take any shit. That’s right. 

Okay, she says. 

Okay, he says. What about you then? What sort of person are you? 

I don’t know, she says. 

A chancer and a dancer, is that right? 

Something like that, she says. 

You any good? 

I don’t know, she says. 

Well, you got any shows? 

Yeah, she says. It’s about rape. 

He nearly doesn’t see a red light and puts his foot rough to the brake. 

Jesus, what are you, like, eight?

It’s just the subtext, she says. 

Subtext, he says. Okay. 

I’m eleven, also. 

Huh, he says. 

And I’m one of the goblins, she continues. The goblins aren’t the ones that get raped. 

What kind of dance school is this? 

Contemporary, she says. 

The traffic moves forward again and some of the streetlights come on around them. 

So your mother’s finally booked for something, he says. 

I suppose so, Clarissa replies. Out the window she can see the warm lights on in other people’s homes, the glow of their tellies lighting up living rooms. 

It’s a big one, he says. She said it’s a big one. Huge, she told me. 

Oh right, Clarissa says. 

But it’s always huge with her, isn’t it? 

Maybe it is this time. 

Now, he says. One more stop. And then how about some ice cream? 

Sure, she says. 

They pull up outside a pub and he flattens his eyebrows in the wing mirror with his index finger. 

Won’t be long, he says. 

I need to use the toilet. 

Can’t you hold it? he asks. 

I haven’t gone in ages, she says.

He sighs. Right, okay, up you get. 

He pushes open the door of the pub, and the sound of chatter and smell of smoke pours out. 

You! a woman shouts from across the bar. I told you not to come back here!

Tanya, Tanya, Tanya, he says. If I could stay away, I would.

Enough, she says, and comes over to let him kiss her on the cheek. Jesus, Terry, what are you doing with this one? 

He puts a heavy parsnip hand on Clarissa’s shoulder and says, I told you. Before. Didn’t I? This is Chrissie’s little girl. 

Tanya flips the tea towel she was using to dry her hands over her shoulder and stares at Clarissa. Clarissa can feel that Tanya should be saying something, but she isn’t, so she puts her own hand out and says, Nice to meet you. 

Tanya gives Clarissa a warm, damp hand to shake, walks back behind the bar and says, Well, she didn’t get her manners from you. 

Clarissa goes to use the bathroom and when she comes back Tanya says, He’s just in the back room so you just take a seat somewhere. 

Clarissa walks to a table near the fire and warms her legs. She sits for a while, then gets up to look at all the old photos of men on the walls. She sits then for another while and counts all the knots in the wood of the pine ceiling, starting again each time she loses count. 

Tanya comes over with a packet of crisps and a glass of lemonade. 

Remind me what’s your name love, she says. 

Clarissa, Clarissa replies and takes a sip of her lemonade. 

And he’s your dad, then? she asks. 

That’s what it seems, Clarissa says. 

That man, Tanya says. 

Clarissa opens the packet of crisps and starts to eat them one by one, sucking the flavour off first and letting them soften between her tongue and the roof of her mouth so that when she crunches them it’s not as loud. 

And is your mum still modelling? Tanya asks. 

She wants to do films now, Clarissa says. 

She was always beautiful. I remember her. 

Yeah, she is, Clarissa says. 

I’ll go check on Terry, Tanya says, and goes through the door to the back of the bar. 

He doesn’t come out right away but when he does Tanya follows with a stack of empty glasses. 

How’s it going, little miss? he asks, standing beside her. 

Okay, she says. 

You got something to eat? He points to the empty crisp packet. 

Clarissa nods. 

Terry sits down on a stool opposite her and crosses his arms on the table. 

Do you have any friends, kid? he asks. 

Some, she says. 

Like good friends?

Yeah, I have a few. 

You reckon you could stay with one of them tonight? I don’t know where your mother is. And I don’t want to drag you into it, but, well, she made threats. And it’s not that I’m not having a good time hanging out. But you know, well, there was a lot of pressure. And normally, I’d be doing other things. Work and things. 

Okay, Clarissa says. 

So if there were any friends you could call. Tonight just isn’t good, you know? And your mother, well, I don’t even want to get into it. 

Yeah, okay, she says. 

And he slaps the table. Great, he says. That’s actually great. I’m not trying to jump ship or anything. But that’s great. So you’re sure? 

I have friends, she says.

Well, great, he says. 

Can I use a phone? she asks. 

Tanya, he calls across the bar. The lady needs to make a call. 

Clarissa stands up and wipes her fingers on the edge of her jumper. 

She pulls out her notebook from her bag and flips to the last page. First, she calls her home phone, in case her mother has returned. It rings out and she imagines the sound of it, there in their empty corridor. Then she dials her brother’s number. It rings. And rings. Then a man answers. 

Hello? 

Is Billy there? Tell him it’s Clarissa. 

She can hear the muffled call of her brother’s name. Then his voice. 

What’s wrong? he says. 

Hi, she says. It’s me. 

Are you all right? Did something happen?

I was just wondering if it would be possible to maybe come and stay with you. Tonight?

What? he says. Did Mum make you call? 

Technically, Billy and Clarissa have the same mother. She has seen pictures of him and her together from when he was young. Billy on her knees, in her arms, her mother smiling as she pushes him on a swing. Content, happy to be there. This is not a woman Clarissa knows. 

No, she didn’t, Clarissa says. 

I told her I have classes, he says. I have work to do. 

I won’t be in the way, she says. 

I have things to do, he says. 

She lowers her voice: I’m with my dad.

Jesus, Billy says. 

Yeah. 

What’s he like? he asks. 

The usual type, Clarissa says, looking across at Terry, a pint of cider now in front of him. 

Where are you? Billy asks. 

A pub. 

But you’re okay? You’re not hurt?

I suppose. 

You’ll be fine, he says. Mum will be back tomorrow. 

Okay, she says. 

She can feel it but she doesn’t have the word for it: what keeps him from coming to get her, or reassuring her, or saying anything about love. She feels if she poked the air, the silence between them, it’d be solid. And then he hangs up. 

*

Her father is halfway through the pint and a story which he doesn’t pause as Clarissa returns. 

Well? he says. Any takers? Laughter around him.

 It’s late notice, she says. Everyone’s busy. 

Whatever happened to a bit of spontaneity? Everyone wants a plan now, a big elaborate plan. 

She shrugs. 

Not to worry, he says. Pull up a pew. 

Clarissa takes a stool from a nearby table and sits opposite her father. 

You want anything? he asks.

Can I have some more crisps? she asks Tanya, who looks at Terry, who reaches into his pocket and pulls out some coins. Tanya tosses Clarissa a packet of salt and vinegar. 

A woman at the table pulls her stool closer to Clarissa and says, I’m Nell. 

Clarissa, Clarissa says. 

What are you drinking? Nell asks. 

I was drinking lemonade, Clarissa says. But I’m done now. 

Have a sup of this, she says, pushing her glass over. 

Watch it, Terry says to her.

Nell says to Terry, Like you’re a saint. 

Clarissa takes a sip. It’s sweet and sharp, like 7 Up with metal in it. 

Like it? Nell says. 

I think so, Clarissa says. 

Nell tips half into Clarissa’s glass. 

I said watch it, Terry says to Nell. 

The girl has an empty glass in front of her, Terry, I’m being generous. 

I like it, Clarissa says. Can I have one? 

I think I need another myself, he says, and takes his empty glass to the bar.

Clarissa can feel Nell looking at her and she tries to think of something to say. She thinks Nell is probably doing the same.

Do you have any boyfriends? Nell asks. 

Clarissa shakes her head. 

Don’t worry, she says. Some people grow into their looks. I did. 

Do you have a boyfriend? Clarissa asks. 

Another woman at the table laughs, She wishes she had a boyfriend! 

Stop it, Carol, Nell says. Don’t listen to her. But they both look over to Terry at the bar. 

You like… him? Clarissa asks. 

They both laugh. 

It’s not really like that, Nell says. 

So you don’t like him? Clarissa says. 

I wouldn’t say that, Nell says. Terry’s an old friend. It’s just—

Sex complicates things, Carol says, nodding emphatically. 

Oh, Clarissa says. 

Carol leans forwards, and Clarissa can smell alcohol, sour on her breath. 

Let me tell you something about men, she says. It’s like this: women are expected to have a big fortress up, gates and pillars, a moat. And men will be begging and begging to be let in, so you lower the drawbridge, they come in for a party and everyone has a good time. And then they’ll say you’re trying to keep them prisoner. 

Exactly, Nell says. 

They don’t want to be domesticated, Clarissa offers. 

You’re a funny one, they say. And they top up Clarissa’s glass. 

What are you ladies talking about? Terry says, returning to the table. Not corrupting my little one just yet, I hope. 

He places a lemonade down in front of Clarissa and winks at her. 

She’s a firecracker, Terry, Carol says. 

Is that right, he says, and smiles across at his daughter. 

The room grows hazy from everyone lighting cigarettes and it seems to Clarissa like Tanya has turned the music up. 

Around her people are talking, but not really listening to one another. Clarissa can’t concentrate on anything people are saying but she watches and sips her drink. Terry is talking to a man beside him about another man; Carol looks like she might fall asleep, eyes starting to droop, she’s nodding in response to no one; Nell is talking about some trip she took where all her bags got lost. 

It really freed me, she says. I’m so grateful for that. 

She lights up a cigarette and exhales a cloud of smoke. It catches in Clarissa’s throat, making her cough. 

Oh God, Nell says. You never had a cigarette before? 

I don’t smoke, she says. It’s bad for dancers. For their lungs. 

Are you a dancer? Nell asks. 

Sometimes, Clarissa says. 

That’s amazing, Nell says. To have a talent like that. I could never dance. Too clumsy. 

It’s so beautiful, Carol says. Moving, just beautiful, just wow. 

I think so too, Clarissa says. 

Show us, Nell says. Show us something. 

Oh, Clarissa says. No, I’m not very good. 

Come on, Nell says. 

I’m still learning, Clarissa says. And I’m tired.

Come on, up you get. Nell stands and pulls Clarissa up by the wrists. Have some fun with me. She starts clapping. Clarissa is going to show us her dance!

We’re getting a show, says the man beside Terry. Terry looks over. 

Clarissa is a little unravelled and she can feel everyone staring at her. She can’t close her eyes because she feels wobbly. She tries to steady herself, to listen to the music, to see if there is something in the rhythm she can move to. The music seems to be swelling and deflating, vibrating like it’s leaking out of the speakers and moving around her. She tries to imagine this stuffy old pub as her dancehall. She lifts her arms to start: 

shine/yes/shining/up/step/step/push/windmill/
fall/brush/brush/brush/step/roll/and burst

She does it a few times, staring at a point on the wall to keep her balance like when they were first taught to do turns. She keeps going. She spins around and around. And when she stops the whole room keeps spinning and she feels dizzy in every part of her body, in her fingers and her brain. 

Nell claps and cheers and the group at the table half-clap as well. 

See? Nell says. You are so good. I knew you’d be good. 

Like a little butterfly, Carol says. 

A spinning top, Nell says. 

Clarissa just stands there, feeling the dizziness. She catches her father’s eye. 

So, one drink turns you into a show off. That’s good to know. He takes a slow sip from his drink. 

She looks at the table, the people. Everyone is melting, everyone’s limbs have grown floppier, their speech slowing, eyelids drooping. Her own head feels heavy; she wants to lie down, to curl up somewhere. 

Come on, then, Terry says, finishing his drink. Looks like you’ve had enough. 

He pulls on his coat and tells her to get her things. 

Bye, Clarissa says, but no one hears her. 

*

Outside, Terry struggles to find his keys in his jacket. He pats his front and back pockets repeatedly. Then he pulls the keys out of his front left pocket, which he’d already checked. 

Aha, he says, and gets into the car.

The roads are quiet, but Clarissa crosses her fingers, hoping to see someone, another car or a bus, or maybe someone walking their dog at night. She’s not sure why, but someone seeing her, noticing her in the car would make things better, she thinks. 

Terry burps a few times, and it smells like acid and onion. 

Sue, he says, after a while. That was my mother’s name. Your grandmother, I suppose. 

I suppose, Clarissa says. 

That’s what I would’ve called you, he says. But your mother said it was plain. I suppose she expected a movie star for a daughter. 

I don’t know, she says. 

Well, you just keep your feet on the ground. There’s no good filling your head with big ideas of yourself. You’ll only be disappointed. 

Okay, she replies.

And it’s quiet again for a bit.

You don’t say much, he says. 

I guess not, she says.

And you really don’t want to know anything? 

She shrugs. 

Nothing you want to ask me? Come on, now. Nothing? 

What’s in the box? she says. 

He presses his lips together slightly before he replies, Batteries.

When they pull up outside the house Terry turns to her. 

I didn’t have time to prepare for a visit, so don’t go expecting a palace.

That’s okay, she says. 

She follows him up the path to a house. I’m on the second floor, he says. So the journey’s not over just yet. 

The hallway is carpeted red, but its dusty and marked with black burn stains. On the stairs Clarissa is slow. She grips the banister, but each step takes great effort.

All right, Terry says, up you get. He takes her into his arms. She doesn’t protest. She lets him carry her up to his door.

He leads her inside to a half kitchen, half living room. One side is wallpapered orange and there are stacks of newspapers everywhere; the other has grubby white tiles and a greasy cooker and stacks of dishes by a sink. Empty tins of beans and tuna fish. On the coffee table there’s an ashtray, more newspaper, magazines and a plate of toast crusts. 

Oops, he says, don’t want to be tempting the other houseguests. He sticks his teeth out like a rat. Sit yourself down and I’ll make some tea. 

She sits on the sofa, leans her head against the arm rest. Bleary eyed, she takes in the room around her. Tries to imagine how Terry must spend his time, and wonders if he ever gets lonely. 

He makes two cups of milky tea, and finds a blanket for Clarissa. She pulls it around herself and takes a cup from him as he sits into the armchair next to her. 

I don’t have pyjamas, she says.

You’ll be okay.

He settles into the chair and, remote in hand, flicks the telly on. Clarissa pulls the blanket around her. A black and white film plays out into the room and the actors’ words—urgent, desperate, full of feeling and devotion—blur into low rumbling which blurs into nothing. 

 She wakes then. In the living room, the orange walls, the patterned carpet. She wonders how long she’s been there. She stays a little longer under the blanket, not quite sleeping, but feeling time pass around her and through her. It’s light outside and Clarissa sees seagulls fly past the window. She sits up and takes a jumper from the arm of another armchair. It smells like the cologne from the car. She pulls it on. It’s cold in the kitchen and she can see her breath. She pours some milk into a mug advertising a tyre company and drinks it, scanning the room. Her father’s snores get louder and catch in his throat; he splutters but doesn’t wake. He looks so unguarded. One sock has a hole at the top and she can see the tip of a toenail.

Terry’s coat is on the floor by his feet, his wallet poking out of its pocket. She pulls it out and takes two notes. The red coat with the buttons, the paint set in the enamel tin, enough to buy them both, maybe some left over to help with the telephone bill. Then she slips out the front door, and onto the street. It is bright. It must be early, because people are in suits and workwear, waiting at bus stops and checking their watches. People move around her, so deep into routine that do not see their surroundings, but move through them with the ease of habit. She walks away from the house and into the town, the money gripped in her fist, like it’s something that can keep her safe. As she walks, she exhales and lets go of something tight and knotted inside of her. She exhales and realises that nothing bad happened. Nothing bad happened. None of the things that she hadn’t allowed herself to think about happening, happened. She is fine. She feels a pang of hunger. She reaches a crossing in the street and turns to the left to see a hill sloping down, and at the bottom a sliver of blue sea. She walks this direction. Outside a shop, she spots a big plastic ice-cream cone, taller than her. Inside, she breaks one of her notes to buy a 99, some Kola Kubes and a bottle of Pepsi. She walks further, down to the beach, and sits down on the pebbles. She remembers herself in the dancehall, how that was only yesterday morning. Stretching at the barre, staring at her reflection in the mirrors. She watches the waves, the pull of the tide and the crash, then, into white foam. Pull and crash. Pull and crash. Ice-cream has melted onto her fingers; she licks it up and digs her feet into the pebbles.

Rosa Mäkelä is a writer from County Galway. Her stories have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Pig’s Back, Banshee and Channel. In 2025 her writing was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award.

About Breathwork: Breathwork started with an image of young girls in a dance class; the awkwardness of their bodies and all the humour and poignancy of them competing and growing and testing the limitations of their expectations and experiences of the world. Then Clarissa’s father waltzed in and the story spun off in a different direction, bringing different images of ambition and expectation. When I started it, I wanted to remind myself how fun it could be to write a short story, and I remember writing it with such enjoyment, making myself laugh with certain lines of dialogue or imagining the girls in their costumes. It is such a huge honour to have this piece recognised and to know that others enjoyed it as I did.

■■■

I see him then, second line from the front in the crowd. On his phone, eyes jittering, roaming. This is how I remember him. He looks up, waves, smiles in mega wattage, the smile he used to crank up when he had to.

I move towards him. He takes a step back, appraises me. I am covered in goose pimples and sweat.

Hello daughter, he says. Looking beautiful, as ever. 

I wish I wasn’t wearing my too-tight jeans and crop-top.

He goes in for an awkward hug.

Well, welcome to Texas! He beams. 

His teeth are bleached, all traces of coffee and Guinness erased.

He takes my suitcase and my carrier bag without asking. I feel strangely bereft without them. 

He speaks into the phone as he walks away and I follow. Hi Darling, I’ve got her. We’re on the way back. About an hour, okay? Big kisses. He disconnects.

Who the fuck is Darling?

You did know, right? He throws over his shoulder. 

I shake my head.

Her name is Lianne. She’s smart, like you. He nods, like that settles something.

How long? I am talking to his back. 

Oh, about five years now.

About the same length of time since I last saw him.

He stops, takes out a packet of minty-fresh-breath chewing gum and pops one in his mouth. He rolls it around, sucks on it and chews hard in a way that makes his jaw click. He looks like a cow with faraway eyes, chewing cud. A flash of Mum telling him for God’s sake to stop masticating. He always looked like someone who would rather be somewhere else.

We walk through a revolving door, down a flight of escalators and out into a car park where an intense wall of heat and light slams up against me. I do my best to focus on the bulk of his broad sweating back which stops outside a shiny black 4×4. The car sits diagonally across two parking spaces. The man who was my father back in Dublin would never have been seen dead in one of these fuel-guzzling monstrosities (a favourite he would swear at drivers, particularly fat-cats in their suits. School uniforms for conformists.)

Bleep. The automatic sensor. I laugh.

Something funny? he says.

Nice car, I say.

A radio station blares such shitty muzak that I double-check to make sure this is, in fact, the man who was my father back in Dublin. He said to the voice on the other end of the phone: I’ve got her. Maybe I was being kidnapped, sold into slavery. Which seems more palatable than the fact that this is the same man who drove a fifteen year old Mini the last time I saw him, with Dylan blaring out the crummy windows that wouldn’t roll up, so that we were permanently rain-spattered in the back, my brother and I, as we fought to sit in the central aisle where no one wants to sit. This beast is all air con, leather and shine, with tinted windows tightly shut. He places his phone in the hands-free bracket and swipes the screen. She answers, I miss you. They only spoke about two minutes ago.  Her voice is a little girl’s whine. The car is full of her, and I find myself pressing my body against the centrally locked passenger door, willing myself to shrink, to dissolve into the hard plastic.

Are you hungry? he asks, staring straight ahead at the road. 

I answer that yes, I am hungry –although I want to throw up– because maybe that would buy me more time before meeting Darling with the little girl’s voice. 

Take your pick, he says, waving his hand in the general direction of the Dunkin Doughnuts, Wendys, Texan Steakhouses and Taco Bells that flank the sides of the wide, flat, perfect tarmacadam roads. 

McDonalds, I say, as I see a familiar yellow M flash before us. 

That’s my girl. 

Memories of our Ronald McDonald family outings with balloons, chocolate shakes, rubbery beef, ketchup, and puke weirdly comfort me. The flatlands roll on by, until at the next intersection, he pulls the car into the right, and we are in a drive thru. He’s on his phone again: I’m at Mackers. My peasant daughter has decided she wants a burger. He side-winks at me. Can I get you anything? The voice makes a disgusted sound and warns him off the perils of eating horse meat. Don’t worry baby, I wouldn’t dare.  

He proceeds to order and eat two Big Mac meals – mine and his. I see now why there’s a pouch where his chin used to be.

We steam straight on ‘home’ sharing a few words back and forth. 

Him: Are you tired? You must be tired. 

Me: I guess so, yes. That was one word for it. 

Home is a McMansion with a pool in an estate full of other McMansions: stucco, fake-turrets, a fountain in the neatly mowed lawn, and a sprinkler spinning and lightly sprinkling. I wonder why – the grass doesn’t look real.  I think of our two-bed semi-d in the estate with all those other semi-ds. The room I shared with my brother bifurcated by a black marker pen down the middle. The garage doors here are controlled by the same bleeping device that opens the car doors, and, as I’m soon to discover, the pool cover. Our father with a pool cover. I can’t wait to tell Trev all about this. I wish he was here with me now. He play-punched me the last time I mentioned I was planning on visiting Dad. I could do with some friendly thumping now to distract from the spectacle of the New Woman standing at the back door, leaning against the door frame.

Welcome to our home, honey! 

I go to shake her hand before she pulls me in for a hug. My body doesn’t want this. 

I’m shown to my room by The New Woman, which is ensuite with a Rainforest Shower and sunken bath, big enough for four. As soon as I’m alone, I pour a bath and slither out of my too-tight jeans. I lower myself into the hot water and press a button which spurts jets. The waves of cramps have been hitting me, so I have been barely able to breathe. Now I am just one big wave. 

The New Woman speaks through the door: Your dad and I are going out for a quick bite. You want to join us?

No thanks. I think I’ll just rest.

Good call, honey. 

The next morning the sky that greets me is blue and huge. My head is hammering.

Good morning. Sleep well? Your father’s gone out to play a round of golf. 

Those nine-hole assholes with balls plugged up their arses, who only ever use golf as an excuse to escape shrewish wives and demanding kids, and perhaps to visit their mistress whore if they had enough imagination, and ‘balls’ to do so. Hohohohoho, he’d chuckle to himself at his brilliance and their stupidity, and Trev and me would join in on these rants and laugh ourselves into spasms.

I notice a half-finished cup of coffee on the white marbled island. He must have been in a rush to leave. The fridge is covered in magnets: Home is where the heart is/Good vibes only/Today is a gift.

Lianne says she has to go out for a while but to make myself at home. I spend the morning padding between the fridge, bulging with salmon pate, blue-veined cheeses, saucissons, pickles, dill, mayo, mustard, chutney and the cupboards with posh crackers, gourmet potato snacks and rye breads. I ram it all down my throat. I eat and I eat and then I get into the pool. My painfully bloated stomach makes sinking seem a possibility. I was never any good at swimming anyway. I lie on my back staring up at the unbounded sky. I have never seen such a concentration of blue. Not even a streak of a cloud.

I hear the bleep of the garage door. I climb out of the pool, cover myself with a towel, and stand under an umbrella.

Yoohoo. Oh look at you all pink and hiding out from the sun!

I stick my tongue into a welter in my cheek. 

I see you had a feast, she says, and I wonder does she have CCTV footage of me ramming the food into my mouth, and then I realise I pretty much emptied the tubs of pate and pickles. 

Uh, yeah. Sorry about that.

I imagine your growing days are over. You’d want to be careful. 

I must remember to stuff my face every opportunity I can get.  I am twenty-one, firm and toned, in contrast with her miserly forty-something aerobicized skinny ass. 

I peel away my towel and reveal my lithe, fertile body. (Can she see I’m wearing a tampon?) I walk to the deep end of the pool and tip up onto the balls of my feet, arms stretched above my head, back arched, poised to do my best swan-like dive. A spasm in my calf muscle causes me to lose my balance and I hit the water stomach-first at an angle that slaps and stings. When I surface, she is there, at the pool edge wearing a look of mock-concern. Ouchy, she says before she turns her back and click clicks in her peachy pumps with the neat little heel onto the marble floor in the kitchen.

Want a Martini? she shouts. 

Sure, I say, though when confronted with the green olive on the cocktail stick in the top of the glass I don’t know what I’m meant to do with it. I watch her carefully, dipping and sucking, and finally swallowing. 

We sit side by side in our bikinis, sipping our Martinis and my eyes land on a scar on her toned but loose-skinned stomach, running from her belly button to below the top of her bikini bottoms. Oh fucking typical. A tummy tuck or lipo, or some such shit. It’s a really bad job though. She notices me staring. Ovarian Cancer, she says. At your age. Do I imagine it, or does she smile as the word hysterectomy tumbles out of her mouth? 

My stomach, bright red from the water slap and the earlier sunburn is starting to show signs of bruising. I didn’t know you could do such a thing: bruise yourself by hitting water. 

You alright there honey? she asks. 

I nod and make my way back to the pool’s steps and slowly wade in, covering myself in all that water. 

Sucker for punishment, she says. 

I force myself to go under once more, more carefully now. I submerge.

I’d like to show you off to some friends, Dad says later that evening. 

Fuck. I’m expected to be sociable.

The restaurant is vast, all plush red leatherette and faux mahogany, with chrome lighting and ceiling fans. There are booths to the sides and big round banquette tables in the centre. We pass by an aquarium just as a hairy hand dips in and picks up a giant live crab whose claws are tied. We approach our grand, round table in the centre of the room where I am seated at the pinnacle. The light is so bright, everybody’s teeth seem blue. My wet hair is dripping onto my dress making water marks on my breasts. 

Dick and Ange arrive: Oh my isn’t she Darlin’.

Then Doug and Babs come in, Babs squealing about what a dark horse Dad is. You didn’t say she was such a Cutie pie. You sure she’s yours? 

Then, a surly man with nicotine- stained fingers and teeth, who is introduced as Dan, sits with a grunt and barely a glance at me. I decide I like him best. 

Dad doesn’t look at me. I am seated to his right and Lianne to his left, burbling in his ear. His hand is resting on her thigh, and I imagine him tracing her scar with his fingertips. I try to engage Surly Man in conversation. He keeps excusing himself to make a call.

Addicted to the net, says Babs. He never meets them, not a one. It’s all cyber projections. He wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman.

They all have a story to tell about recently divorced Dan who hit the bottle, and the net, hard. I know that when I excuse myself to go to the ladies, I’ll be the subject of their clacking. I can’t imagine what Dad would say. It really is rather inconvenient, probably, or she just wouldn’t give up. I could imagine Lianne adding her story of the ravening Irishwoman’s appetite and her car-crash of a dive, stomach-first. 

Ouchy, I think I hear her say to the gathering as I return to the table.  

I order a tenderloin steak. I’m no longer a pescatarian, having seen the hairy hand descend on the stunned creatures in the tank, in bondage. This hunk of meat is far from tender, and so huge it hangs over the edge of the plate. I ambush the bloody flesh with my serrated knife, and tear into it gustily. 

Hungry again? Lianne’s voice. 

I look at her with a mouth full of meat and smile openly, revealing mashed up saliva and steak. Her delicate nostrils flare as her dainty foot in its white kitten-heeled mule strokes my father’s leg under the table. Up and down, up and down, she rustles, allowing me a full-frontage view. 

This old man is a randy goat in bed, she announces to the table, who all laugh, except Dan and me. She strokes the back of her hand on my father’s cheek. I continue to hack and to chew, mouth open. Dad is looking at me now. Go on Dad, I dare you. And sure enough, he leans in and whispers in my ear: Maybe you could close your mouth when chewing. I lock eyes with him then and, in a perfect imitation of him chewing gum, I close my mouth and munch noisily. Chomp, chomp like the greedy little calf I am. My jaw cracks, just like his. 

That night I can’t sleep. At home I’d masturbate for a kind of release, but here, in my father’s home there’s no way that’s going to happen. 

Hi Sinead. You up there, honey? Dad’s voice calls out to me the following day. I’m in the bedroom, reading Bonjour Tristesse. Reading French, even when I don’t understand it all, makes me feel a little less intense, a little less alien. 

Yes, I shout down. 

Want to go out for lunch? Just you and me?

OK. Give me a few. I put the book in my bag.

You look well, he says as I come down the stairs. Sleep well?

I nod, sensing this is what he wants. 

Where would you like to go? We have the best restaurants here. Anything you like at all, just tell me. 

A veggie place? I say.

He laughs. This is Texas, and you want veggies?

Uh-huh.

OK. I believe there’s a place downtown. I’ve never been, but it looks authentically crusty enough. 

What music do you like? he says, as he fiddles around with the car radio.

Dylan, I say, hoping to break through.

You’re so retro, he says.

He alights on some country and western crooner, see how ironic I can be, and sings along. I don’t even try to engage; I just stick my nose against the window and squash it against the pane. Nothing to see out there anyway, beyond concrete roads and nail bars and steakhouses and burger joints. I don’t know how he lives here, this man who used to love swimming in the Irish sea in any weather and climbing hills, all muck and sweat and high on nature.

The heat haze outside has a presence, a shifting, menacing quality. It has weight and substance. The sky overhead is too vast, too uncontained. None of it seems real.

Is this to your liking then? he says. ‘Downtown’ turns out to be a suburban mall, with a stab at a European sensibility. Cool, huh?  The restaurant is dark and smells of incense and disinfectant. Cheese on everything. Lovely, I say, as I order a burrito, no cheese. Are you one of these vegan types? the waiter asks. I’d like to be, I say, but it’s hard, and he looks at my father and they both suppress a laugh. 

So, how’s your brother?

Why don’t you ask him yourself?

He won’t talk to me these days.

Don’t give up on him, I say. 

How’s your mother…?  His eyes glaze over.

She has to clean houses.

His phone rings. He looks at it, lets it ring out. 

I have to waitress four nights a week on top of college work, I want to say.

The phone rings again. He looks apologetic. 

I’d better go check on her. He stands. She gets anxious when left alone.

I look down at my refried beans, a congealing brown gloop.

Why don’t you treat yourself to something nice, honey? This is the best mall in the area. Cool leather stuff.

He throws a fifty-dollar bill on the table.

I’ll be back for you in a couple of hours, OK?

He’s gone before I answer.

I swipe my phone with shaking hands.

Trev?

Sis? You okay?

Trev?

I knock over my iced coffee as I try to smooth out the bill.

Yuh. I’m here you weirdo. How’s the old man?

I don’t know him.

It’s been five years. What did you expect?

I don’t know that I want to know him.

Well, I guess you had to go that far to find that out. 

I start to laugh. I’m bankrupt. I used all my savings to come here.

Steal from the fucker, before you leave.

I’m going straight to the airport now.

I fold the fifty in half.

Shit. That bad?

I hear myself exhale.

How much will a return flight cost you?

No idea. But I have an overdraft of 3,000. That better cover it.

I’ve no card. Sorry.

I know. 

Call me when you have times and stuff.

Not that he’ll meet me. It’s not his style. 

Will do. And Trev?

Yuh.

Just…

He laughs, sounding exactly like Dad, the old version.

I know. And he disconnects. 

The taxi driver quotes 35 dollars to get me to the airport. No luggage? No. No coat? No. He tries some small talk which doesn’t exactly catch fire. Have a nice day y’all, he says to me as I leave. Hope you find him! I hand him the folded, stained fifty-dollar bill. Keep the change.

I go straight to the Aer Lingus desk. Say it’s an emergency. The woman is really kind. Which is unexpected and makes me cry. She offers me a tissue, which makes me cry even more. She gets me on the next flight back, with just a change of flight fee. 

It’s cold on the plane and the air hostess offers me a blanket. The pain in my stomach is intense. Period cramps and something else, sharp and stabbing. I wonder if I have internal bleeding. I pull up my t-shirt and look at my purple, yellowing belly. Ouchy. Laughter bubbles out of me, caustic, a front for something else. The guy to my right looks at me. 

Hope you don’t mind…? he says

I don’t, I say. 

How on earth did you do that to your stomach?

A water slap.

A huh?

A wall of water.

In Texas?

I laugh and he laughs and the woman to his right says, Do you mind? 

He leans in and whispers, Weirdly cute.

A memento, I say.

It’ll heal, he says.

Maybe, I say, as I take my book out.

You studying French?

Yes, and politics.

Brains and beauty!

He orders a whiskey and soda and peanuts. He offers me a drink. 

I’ll have what you’re having.

The woman to his right asks the air hostess to be moved.

I look at the guy. He’s older, not unattractive, wedding ring. 

Tell me all about you, he says.

I start. All the things I wished I’d said to my father. About college, how hard it is, my grades slipping, the waitressing, how much I had to work since he’d stopped supporting me, about Tom and our on-again-off-again thing – why was that? – about Trev and his drinking and Mum’s drinking and my worry for them.  I don’t stop talking until I realise the man has fallen asleep. 

I open the book. The words, musical notations like little spiders scuttle across the pages. I press my fingers down hard, squashing them.

Lisa Harding is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her debut novel Harvesting won the Kate O’Brien Award and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards and the Kerry Group Prize. Her second novel Bright Burning Things was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Today Show Book Club Pick, and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and a Dalkey Literary Award. Her most recent novel The Wildelings was featured in The Observer, The Economist, Harper’s Bazaar, the Irish Examiner and the Irish Times.

About A Bellyflop Shouldn’t Hurt Like This: I was thinking about John Cheever’s ‘Reunion’ while writing this story, and the choreography of a brief encounter, how much is performance, how much is withheld. I often work in a heightened, theatrical register. Here I was interested in restraint, in absence, and in what holds when language doesn’t. Too much has already passed between these characters for anything direct or settled to be possible. What remains is a kind of performance, the only way they can stand in the same space. I tried several endings: towards reconciliation, towards confrontation, towards a quiet understanding. In the end, the story moves towards separation; she cannot connect in any real way and slips away. What remains is what could not quite be spoken. In this story, that failure of language is carried into the body: appetite, discomfort, excess, refusal, and what is eaten, withheld, endured, or carried long after the encounter is over.

■■■

—
– — –

There is a photograph from Dom’s first trip to the Amazon. He is crouching down, lean, fit-looking and perfectly balanced on his haunches. He is wearing nothing but red swimming togs, a rucksack on his bare back, sunglasses pushed up on his head, looking intently through the viewfinder of a small, rather antique-looking film camera. He still lives in London but has visited Brazil a few times already, increasingly drawn to the country that, within three years, will become home. The photograph was taken at the end of 2004 and Dom is spending the New Year holiday with the Brazilian friends that will make this move so easy. He is on a beach, on the island of Marajó: the world’s largest riverine island, which sits in the mouth of the Amazon river. 

The long afternoon shadows that he and his friend Otavio Cury cast on the wet sand indicate Dom is looking through the viewfinder towards the west. Two and a half thousand kilometres in that direction—roughly the distance from Dublin to Kyiv—is the Javari Valley where, seventeen years later, he will be murdered on a reporting trip. A film-maker, Otavio will work through his grief at his friend’s murder by making a deeply felt short in which he imagines Dom remembering their trip together to Marajó in the moments before he was shot dead. 

The photo belongs to Otavio but, being in it, he obviously did not take it and I’ve never asked him who did. Instead, I like to assume it was taken by his cousin Henrique Cury. It was Henrique who first brought Dom to Brazil. In the 1990s, he was a partner in Floresta, a pioneering club in São Paulo’s burgeoning electronic music scene. To those of us who know Henrique, it seems perfectly natural that he would send an unsolicited fax to Mixmag, the scene’s London-based bible, inviting it to come and visit. To those of us who knew Dom, then Mixmag’s editor, it seems perfectly natural that he booked a flight and went. 

It was the start of a beautiful friendship, between Dom and Henrique, between Dom and Henrique’s many friends and finally, between Dom and Brazil. There are many reasons why he eventually moved to the country but an important one was the obvious deep affinity he felt with it. He initially landed in São Paulo for a year’s sabbatical while he wrote his book on Britain’s superstar DJ culture of the 1990s. But even as he was finishing the book, he was already planning to stay. 

He would occasionally mention the trip to Marajó, but did not give any sense that the Amazon loomed especially large in his decision to remain. It would be a few years before he would go there again; another holiday with his old Mixmag mucker David Davies visiting from London. Instead, Dom would organise hiking trips closer to home in São Paulo and later Rio, where he moved in part to be in closer contact with the great outdoors than was possible in the relentlessly urban metropolis that is São Paulo. 

So it would be some years before the Amazon came to play a major role in Dom’s Brazilian life. When it did, it was due to his excellence as a reporter. He had already demonstrated this in the first—British—half of his career, which saw him emerge from the world of self-published music magazines to become Mixmag editor during the cultural moment when the UK’s underground rave scene went mainstream. Then, after Superstar DJs Here We Go! had been delivered to his publisher, he turned to his second—Brazilian—act. He quickly learnt Portuguese and immersed himself in Brazilian life and culture. He had a boundless natural curiosity for his new home, allied to the ferocious work ethic of someone always hustling for gigs. 

In those first years freelancing in Brazil, there was never any sense that he wondered about his trajectory from the editorship of a prominent UK magazine to jobbing in a country London editors did not fall over themselves to commission stories from. Perhaps he was confident that his natural talents and deep experience as a reporter would see him get his chance once he got up to speed on his new home. Whether he was or not, that is what happened. Within a few years of arriving, he’d gone from Brazil novice to stringer for some of the most important English-language vehicles, and was widely respected among colleagues as one of the best foreign correspondents writing about his adopted home.

He was now working for publications, first the Washington Post and later The Guardian, that had the resources and commitment to cover the Amazon. Most Brazilians never set foot in it. It is far away from the major population centres in a country larger than the continental United States and, for reporters, it’s expensive to get to and time-consuming to travel around. Though still a freelancer, Dom now had the institutional backing to do so. A decade on from his trip to Marajó, he began his serious engagement with the world’s largest rainforest. 

This allowed him to marry the personal and professional sides of his personality. Raised in a Merseyside family that would take the camper van off on hiking holidays, Dom loved the outdoors. Not just loved it, but had a deep sense of connection to it. Remember, it was in part the reason he moved to Rio, a city wrapped around forested mountains and washed by the ocean. Time spent in nature fulfilled him in a very real sense. The gruelling details of reporting trips to the jungle would be recounted with his typical self-deprecating humour, leaving you in no doubt he had loved his time on what half-sounded like a particularly gruelling season of Survivor.

And, with his highly refined journalistic instincts, Dom also knew that the Amazon is the most important story in Brazil. Its billions of trees absorb and store billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it a crucial bulwark in the fight against climate change. It is also a key climate regulator, pumping rain into central South America’s vast farm belt, which plays a strategic role in the global food supply chain. The fate of the Amazon has planetary implications and Brazil is home to sixty per cent of it, including its central core. With the remaining forty per cent distributed among eight neighbouring countries, it is fair to say the rainforest’s destiny will be decided in Brazil. 

Yet the Brazilian Amazon is also a critical frontline in humanity’s war on nature, on the only home we have. The depredations of the logging, mining and ranching industries—sometimes encouraged by the state, sometimes ignored by it, too infrequently confronted by it—mean great tracts of it have already been lost. Between 1541 (the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana, credited as the first European to traverse the jungle) and 1970 (the year Brazil’s military dictatorship initiated construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway) humans cleared just over two per cent of Brazil’s portion of the jungle. In the next half century, that figure rose to somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent.

Dom covered an astonishing range of subjects during his years in Brazil. He was not an activist, just a reporter, but a very good one who wanted to do serious work. So it makes sense that the longer he lived in Brazil, the more the fate of the Amazon became the focus of his reporting. His pivotal Amazon reporting trip was one in 2018 to the Javari Valley. He joined an expedition by Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency into one of the most remote corners of the jungle to monitor isolated indigenous communities, peoples under threat from a growing spectrum of criminal outsiders. It was on this trip that he met Bruno Pereira, the Brazilian indigenist who led the expedition. His subsequent article makes clear he was deeply impressed by Bruno for his personal charisma and his dedication to vital work. 

At some stage, Dom started to think about doing another book, one that would focus on people like Bruno and the indigenous peoples attempting to defend their territories. The title he settled on was How to Save the Amazon. Lest anyone think he was putting forward his own solutions, the subheading was to be ‘Ask the people who know’: people like Bruno and the leaders of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley, a group he worked with to monitor and prevent illegal fishing in a region the size of Portugal. 

Dom took time off from his regular reporting to work on the book. His professional investment in the project was total. He even moved from Rio to the cheaper city of Salvador to make the finances work. In part he was driven by an urgency that came from witnessing first-hand the consequences of the assault on the rainforest that followed the disastrous elevation of the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency. His final reporting trip would take him back to the Javari. After that, he would return home to his wife, Alessandra, and write. Instead, on June 5^th 2022, as he headed for home, Dom Phillips was murdered alongside Bruno Pereira as they made their way down the Itaquaí River. Dom was 57, Bruno 41.

*

A large network of Dom’s friends and colleagues, with the help of donations from supporters, came together to complete and publish How to Save the Amazon. It is now a book of two parts. The first four chapters are those Dom had largely completed by the time he was killed. The remaining six are by contributors tasked with following his original plans. These later chapters are not an attempt to ventriloquise Dom, but to complete his work by, in the words of the project’s editor Jonathan Watts, entering into a dialogue with him.

Like all of Dom’s wide circle, I was shocked by his murder. I remember little about the ten days between when he and Bruno were reported missing and their bodies being found, except the solidifying dread that something terrible had happened, punctured by willed bursts of wild optimism that they would emerge from the forest, shaken but with another Amazonian tale to tell. Brazil is a violent country, but there was anger at the first murder of a foreign correspondent because of the work he was doing.

The completion and publication of How to Save the Amazon is a collective response to this, a determination that his killing would not silence Dom, an attempt to rescue something positive from that terrible June day. His original insight, the thing that drove his project, was itself hugely positive. Again, the book’s full title. How to Save the Amazon: Ask the people who know. That is to say, we can save the Amazon. There are people there doing this work already. We just need to listen to them, empower them.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable rise in planetary doomsterism which is caught up in a feedback loop with creeping public and private inertia on climate change. I know this to be true because at times I succumb to it myself. In 2010, I reported on how ranchers in the Amazonian town of Novo Progresso now accepted that the bad old days of slash-and-burn to open up tracts of forest for cattle were over. Town officials earnestly explained to me they understood that while they would continue ranching on the land they had already cleared, they were to be guardians of the forest that remained. I wrote an optimistic article about how Brazil seemed to have finally got Amazonian deforestation under control.

Just a decade later, Dom was reporting from the same town on its ’fire day‘ of August 2019 when local farmers, emboldened by the recently inaugurated Bolsonaro’s contempt for the environment, torched large tracts of surrounding forest. When helping get How to Save the Amazon ready for publication I was struck by how heavy much of its reporting is, considering what a natural optimist Dom was. The book’s optimistic parts, like the reporting on ranchers reforesting their lands because they see it makes economic as well as environmental sense, sit alongside fire days, land grabs, deforestation, murder and the corruption that allows all this to flourish. 

Inevitably, my reading was coloured by Dom’s fate. But even so, it struck me how destruction and violence stalk the book’s pages. Its very title had to be changed from How to Save the Amazon: Ask the people who know to How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s deadly quest for answers. How to hang onto the positive solutions to the crisis in the Amazon when Dom had been murdered seeking them? Or the fact that charges against various suspects in his murder have been dropped? And that the investigation into the wider criminal network within which the illegal fishermen who confessed to the killings operated seems to have stalled? Or that Beto Marubo—one of the leaders of the indigenous peoples of the Javari, Bruno’s great friend and the writer of the book’s afterword—has said that the two would likely be killed in the valley even today because the criminal factors that caused their murders continue to hold the region in their grip?

But I am doom-spiralling from São Paulo, a couple of thousand kilometres from the Amazon. Dom knew the region much better than I do, knew all the challenges it faced, the threats to it, much more intimately. I don’t imagine that he thought he was risking his life to report on it, but he knew risk was involved. And yet he went, not just to record the violence and destruction there, but also the people making a positive difference, trying to construct a better future for the rainforest and our planet. He knew these stories matter. An instinctive reporter, Dom knew where to look, knew who to listen to. His murder should not negate his reporting or overshadow its optimistic message: that we can still save the Amazon. Dom asked the people who know to tell us how. We should listen to them. And then it is up to each of us to work out what we can do to help, to help them to protect us all from ourselves.

– — –

How to Save the Amazon is published by Ithaka, an imprint of Bonnier Books.

Three bells ring in quick succession. Dang, dang, dang. In the blink of an eye, all of the students are standing silently in lines like tamed lambs. I run to make it to the first line, beside Ahmad. Unlike other days, the headteacher goes straight to the platform and quickly reaches for the microphone. Instead of telling us to sing the national anthem, he makes an announcement.

‘Alright, dear students, today we have a guest from the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. No one may talk or ask questions. Until the Mawlawi arrives, recite salawat loudly.’

The sound of salawat swallows the entire school.

The Mawlawi appears on the platform. His shirt is wrinkled, and his trousers are a hand’s breadth above his ankles. The grime on his black turban glistens in the sunlight.

He tucks a black whip under his arm, reaches up to his beard, and scratches it. From a distance, his beard looks like the burnt wicks of our old oil lamp that Mother threw away. His hawking and spitting crackle through the microphone, and a second later, a glob of his saliva hits the ground. I feel something rise up from my stomach. Quickly, I cover my mouth with my handkerchief. Ahmad, who’s standing one step away, gives me a curious sideways glance, but he soon realises this isn’t a signal to attack.

‘Alright, children—’

The Mawlawi hasn’t finished his sentence when a faint beep comes from Ahmad’s watch.

I turn my head slightly towards him, trying not to be noticed, and whisper, ‘Did you bring yours, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about the stones?’ 

‘One.’

‘Why didn’t you bring more?’

‘Couldn’t. They searched my bag at the gate.’ 

‘Alright, we’ll attack after the third beep.’

We are both standing in the front line, directly facing the platform, slightly uneasy. I’m nervous because, compared to Ahmad, my throwing and aiming skills are weaker. Even though for the past two months I’ve secretly practiced at home, in the garden, in the toilet, on the way to school, night and day, anywhere out of Mother’s sight, I’m still not confident about my aim.

This operation is important to us. Very important. Even more important than lessons, homework, or solving riddles. We can’t mess this up, because Ziwar’s fate is at stake.

Ziwar’s story began this spring.

*

On the first morning of spring, as I was getting ready for school, I saw Ziwar sitting quietly, sipping her tea, in no rush to leave. She hadn’t even put on her uniform. Mother told me to hurry up and finish my tea, because Timur would take me to school on his bicycle.

‘But Timur goes to Allamah School,’ I said in surprise. ‘It’s not the same direction as mine!’

Without looking at me, Mother’s forehead folded into a hundred creases—just like Ziwar says it does when she’s angry. 

‘Timur will drop you off first, then go to his school.’

I stamped my foot and said, ‘I’m not going anywhere with Timur! He yells at me the whole way. Last year I went with Ziwar. I want to go with her again this year.’

I hated Timur with every fibre of my being. In year one, we used to walk to school together. He was so mischievous with the other boys along the way that we always arrived late. To punish me, the teacher would make me stand on one leg in front of the class. When I complained to Mother, she gave him a good beating so he’d stop fooling around on the way to school. That was the start of the enmity between Timur and me.

After that, every day he threatened that if I tattled on him again, he’d tell Hamid, the boy from our neighbourhood, not to let me play marbles with them anymore. And that’s exactly what he did. In the end, our fights grew so bad that Mother transferred me to Ziwar’s school.

Year two was wonderful. On the way to school, Ziwar and I solved “name the family” riddles and counted backwards from 100. Sometimes she even bought me shir-yakh ice cream, corn, or bolani flatbread. She helped me with my homework and knew the answer to everything.

And besides all that, Ziwar knew karate—like Kung Fu Panda. Ever since she’d knocked Hamid down with a karate move, no one on the street or at school dared look at me sideways.

‘Ziwar isn’t going to school any more,’ Mother said.

Ziwar not going to school? How strange! Mother was always telling Timur and me that Ziwar had never missed a single day of school in six whole years. Whenever she mentioned this, her face turned beet red, her eyebrows arched high, and her eyes grew so wide I thought they were frog eyes, not Mother’s. She’d glance towards Timur and continue, her face flushed, ‘Do you know how many awards Ziwar has received? She’s the top student of the school!’ Then she’d say mashallah and start blowing puffs of air left and right to protect her daughter.

I looked at Ziwar in surprise.

‘Why?’ I asked.

No answer. Her head was lowered, and she was spreading jam on her bread.

‘There’s no time to talk,’ Mother replied. ‘Hurry, or you’ll be late for school.’

Timur took me to school on the bicycle Father had bought him last autumn. Now it was spring, the first day of the new school year and, surprisingly, we arrived on time. I was shocked that Timur didn’t say a single word the entire way. He didn’t even go after Hamid.

As always, all students had to line up in rows early in the morning. We’d sing the national anthem and then recite the Qur’an. That day, there were hardly any rows at school. Very few. While the headteacher was speaking, I quietly counted the rows: six. Last year, there had been twenty. How strange. Hadn’t spring come already? I looked towards the school trees—they were blossoming.

Spring, to me, was defined by three things: the plum blossoms by the pool, where we would swim when summer came; the reopening of schools; and collecting worms to bribe Grandfather’s chickens so they wouldn’t peck at me anymore.

This spring was nothing like the ones before. The plum tree had blossomed, but so sparsely that I could count each flower. Grandfather wasn’t happy either. 

When I was digging in the dirt to collect worms, he said to Mother, ‘Ever since these infidels set foot here, blessings have vanished from both the earth and the sky.’ 

Then he shook his head.

Infidels? Who were the infidels?

I remembered something Ziwar had said: “Code red!”

Ziwar loved to turn everything into a game. She came up with secret codes and new names for everything and made riddles out of them. When Grandfather shook his head, that meant “code red”: we had to stay out of his sight for a while.

When we walked to school together, she’d make up riddles for me to solve. If I gave the right answer, she’d announce in a loud, triumphant voice, ‘Officer Nick Wilde, your answer is correct!’

Then she’d turn towards Laila and Nargis, who walked with us, and say, ‘Ladies, please give a round of applause for our young officer!’

And I, as per our agreement, would place my hand over my chest, bow my head, and say, ‘Thank you, Detective Judy Hopps.’

We’d borrowed the names from Zootopia. We proudly used them whenever our detective instincts kicked in to solve a mystery.

Then came the headteacher’s voice, loud enough to make everyone’s ears ring: ‘Dear students, Qaari Aziz has been appointed as the new deputy headteacher, as Miss Zohra will no longer be working with us. From now on, if you have any issues, report to Qaari Aziz.’

I nudged Ahmad with my elbow and whispered, ‘What do you think happened?’ 

‘Why?’

‘Look—only six rows today. Miss Zohra isn’t here. And neither is Miss Gulalai!’ 

‘Maybe they’re sick and didn’t come in.’

‘But the headteacher didn’t say they’re sick—he said they no longer work with us.’ 

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think there’s something going on that they’re not telling us.’

‘Oh yeah! Ziwar didn’t come in either, and neither did Laila or Nargis. Maybe they’ve done something!’ 

‘Like what?’

‘Maybe they told everyone not to come to school.’

‘But Ziwar isn’t the headteacher. Only the headteacher can say not to come to school.’ ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

‘Do you think this is another riddle?’

Ahmad shrugged his shoulders and tilted his head. The corners of his mouth dropped—his way of saying I don’t know.

‘It’s a riddle, idiot,’ I said. ‘Because neither of us knows.’ Ahmad was silent.

‘Let’s look for clues,’ I suggested.

‘What’s a clue?’

‘Oh, my God! It’s something—a sign—that helps you solve a riddle. Ziwar always says that to solve a riddle, you have to start by looking for clues.’

‘Where do we find a clue?’

‘Everywhere! School, street, home. How about this time you be Officer Hopps, instead of Ziwar? I’ll look for the clues.’

He turned fully towards me, his eyes wide, and said, ‘You mean that rabbit police officer?’ 

‘Yeah!’

‘But she’s a girl. I’m a boy. Boys can’t be girls!’

‘Ziwar says you can be anything you want in your imagination.’ 

‘No. I want to be Kung Fu Panda.’

‘Panda can’t solve riddles, idiot. He only does karate.’ ‘Well, I like karate, not riddles.’

‘Right now, we have to solve Ziwar’s riddle first. Then we can be Kung Fu Pandas later.’

We agreed that to solve the riddle and find clues, I would keep Ziwar under observation.

For weeks, I watched her every movement and reported back to Ahmad, hoping we might discover the answer. I noticed that in the mornings when I went to school, she was still asleep. In the afternoons when I came back, she was in her room and didn’t come out for the rest of the day. If she did, she only went to the kitchen, ate something, and returned to her room.

I tried going to her room a few times, pretending I needed help with lessons, but she wouldn’t open the door. When I complained to Mother, she didn’t get angry at Ziwar. 

She just said, ‘Ask Timur to help you instead.’

Even Ziwar’s appearance had changed somehow. Sometimes she looked like that chubby blue girl from Inside Out, the one with big glasses and her head always down, and sometimes like the red character, when smoke comes out of his head and he starts screaming.

She fought with Mother too. Once I heard her shout, ‘Online classes cost money! The registration alone is five hundred afghanis. And then where am I supposed to get money for the internet?’

Mother replied, ‘Just register for now. Your father and I will find the money.’ 

That day, the key to the riddle was revealed: money!

Ziwar wasn’t going to school because she didn’t have the registration fee. I had to find money so she could enroll again.

Mother always said Father didn’t have much money, not enough to buy us new notebooks every day. So I shouldn’t tear pages out or lose my pencils. Father had a small stall where he sold fruit and vegetables, and sometimes in the afternoons, Mother went out, too.

One day, Hamid said his mother had given mine some money. Later, I found out Mother had earned that money by doing their laundry.

I discussed the money problem with Ahmad, and we agreed to save one afghani each day. When we reached five hundred, we would give the money to Ziwar so she could register herself. A week passed, then two. We counted the money every day, but it never reached five hundred. It was partly Ahmad’s fault: whenever he saw Ben 10 stickers in the shop, he would spend all his money on them. In the end, he said he wouldn’t be contributing anymore and took the money we had saved. I had to find another way.

I began selling my drawings to the other students. A Barcelona logo drawing, or Real Madrid, or Manchester United, for two afghanis each. In the end, I made twenty afghanis. After a week, no one bought any more. The only option left was the chickens. When I came home from school, my first task was to check the chicken coop. But it seemed the hens had realised I was selling the eggs, because they stopped laying them. 

When I asked Mother why the hens weren’t laying eggs in the afternoon, she said, ‘They can’t lay twice a day on an empty stomach.’ 

Worms were a good solution. I gathered worms every day and fed so many to the hens that one of them started laying eggs again in the afternoons.

After school, when I returned home, I would slip over to the chicken coop and secretly put an egg between my schoolbooks so I could sell it to Karbalai’s shop the next day. Keeping the eggs hidden was the hardest part. I had to be careful the whole way so my box didn’t bump into anything—even so, sometimes eggs broke and ruined all my books and pens. I lost track of the exact amount of money and just started throwing the coins into my money box. I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d reached five hundred, but from the weight of the box, I guessed a good amount had been collected. I decided that after the end-of-term exams, I would give the money box to Ziwar so she could register for school.

On the day of the last exam, the weather was very hot. The headteacher announced over the loudspeaker that we would be dismissed an hour earlier than usual so we wouldn’t suffer in

the heat. All day, my eyes flicked between the wall clock and the teacher’s mouth. At last, the moment came, and I rushed home. As soon as I entered the garden, I heard Mother and Ziwar arguing in the kitchen. I ran to grab my money box.

‘I’m not wearing that sack, and I’m not going outside!’ I heard Ziwar scream.

‘So what, you’re going to waste away staying at home all day? Put it on and go out. Nobody will be able to tell who is under the chaadari,’ Mother shouted back.

‘I don’t care about anyone else. I’d rather die at home than wear that sack.’

Why did Mother tell Ziwar to wear the chaadari? I was frightened of it. It looked like a blue ghost moving about. Worse, there might be a kidnapper underneath it. Mother had said herself that children who play outside after lunch instead of going to sleep are stolen by kidnappers who hide under chaadaris and run away.

I went into the kitchen and greeted them loudly. Mother and Ziwar looked first at me, then at my hand.

‘Why aren’t you at school?’ Mother asked.

‘The headteacher said it’s too hot.’ Then, hurriedly, I thrust my money box towards Ziwar and said, ‘Here—this is the answer to the riddle.’

‘The riddle?’ Ziwar looked at me, confused.

‘Yes. I’ve solved the riddle. You’re not going to school because you don’t have money.’

Ziwar stared at Mother in astonishment, then came close to me and asked, ‘Who told you I have no money?’

‘I heard you tell Mother the other day.’

‘I’m not going to school because the Taliban banned girls from going this year.’ 

‘Who are the Taliban?’

‘The ones who come to your school every month and have long beards.’

‘Mawlawi! The one that looks like the magician from Ben 10?’ 

‘Yes, the one that looks like that bad magician.’

‘Well then, why don’t you use karate on the bad man like Kung Fu Panda does?’ 

‘Bad people have whips and guns, you can’t fight them with karate.’

*

At the first beep, our hands slide into our pockets. The slingshot bands, like freshly hatched snakes, coil between Ahmad’s and my fingers.

For a month, we have been planning to attack Mawlawi the magician, just like Ben 10, on this very day. Every afternoon when Mother was out, Ahmad and I would go into the garden and make slingshots under the shade of the tree. The hardest part for me was leaving the house.

Ever since the egg-selling scheme was discovered, Mother’s control tightened. Sometimes, just as I was about to go through the main gate, Mother would appear out of nowhere and shout, ‘Boy, I can see you trying to go outside!’ Ahmad was luckier because his mother didn’t usually ask where he was going or what he was doing.

At the second beep, stones secretly take cover in our slingshot bowls, like missiles hidden under the earth, ready to be launched. The target is clear: Mawlawi’s eyes. Mawlawi looks just like the magician who enchanted Ben’s town and turned people into spirits controlled by his eyes. The magician attacked people with his staff; Mawlawi attacks with his whip. There is only one way to destroy the magician: attack his eyes. So to get rid of Mawlawi, we have to blind him.

‘We should hit his legs so he won’t come back,’ Ahmad suggests.

‘No. If we hit his legs, he’ll still be able to see that Ziwar is coming to school.’ 

‘Then we’ll hit his eyes, so he’ll be blind and won’t see Ziwar.’

At the third beep, and right after the bell sounds, Mawlawi’s scream fills the whole school. Blood streams from between his fingers pressed over his eyes.

‘The magician is blind! The magician is blind!’ shouts Ahmad.

Three bells ring in quick succession. Dang, dang, dang. 

All the children, like mischievous rabbits, surge towards the school gate and shout, ‘The magician is blind! The magician is blind!’

The next day, flyers are distributed throughout the town. Any child found holding a slingshot will receive one hundred lashes. Any child who attacks with a slingshot will be executed.

This story was produced as part of Paranda, a writer development program and global network for women writers in Afghanistan and the diaspora, facilitated by Untold Narratives, a development program for writers structurally marginalized by community or conflict, and supported by KFW Stiftung.

Marie Bamyani is a psychologist and writer. She completed her degree in psychology at Kabul University after which she went to India to complete a master’s degree in communication management. Living back in Kabul she worked as a communications manager for various NGOs whilst also establishing her own women-led counselling service, called The Meaning of Life. Marie is a contributor to My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird (MacLehose Press, 2022), Rising After the Fall (Scholastic, 2023), My Dear Kabul (Coronet/Hodder, 2024) and Tongueless Speaker (Nogaam, 2025). Her short stories have appeared in Moveable Type, The Markaz Review and Writers Mosaic. Marie now lives in Germany.

Zubair Popalzai, PhD, is an author and multilingual professional whose work bridges public policy, international development, and language. Based in London, he is Director of Monarch Linguistic LTD, providing translation and related support across the legal, literary, governance, political, and charitable sectors. His work draws on academic training and experience with multilateral organisations and government counterparts, alongside long-standing expertise in language services. Since 2020, Dr Popalzai has worked with Paranda Writers, translating short fiction from Dari into English, and was one of the translators of My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women (MacLehose Press, 2022).

About Slingshots Will Be Executed: MB When I wrote this piece, one question was on my mind. Am I able to echo the voice of Afghanistan’s girls and women and even men to the world? Does my story have this power? Then I remembered: Yes. Stories have power. When I read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee I was able to understand racial injustice from another corner of the world. Maybe this could happen in other contexts as well. As a writer I feel obligated to share the stories of my land. I believe this is not the time to sit in silence and do nothing. It doesn’t matter what position we find ourselves in, it is always the right thing to speak out against injustice and discrimination.

■■■

‘Knock when ye are ready,’ said the tipstaff, a sneer in my direction as he closed the door behind him. 

Leaving inside this room the twelve of them, and me. 

Some I knew by sight but not to speak to, from shops in the town, or from the fair. One or two were widows and still wore their widow’s weeds. Mostly they were Mam’s age, though one was younger, a heart held by two hands in the manner of the Claddagh on her finger. Another was much older than the rest, with a long cream shawl and hair like a sheep’s fleece of purest white. 

One spoke up. Small and stout, she wore a yellow bonnet. 

‘Have any of you done this before?’ she said.

The white-haired crone was about to speak but appeared to think the better of it. 

‘Because I have.’ Yellow Bonnet was clearly proud of this dubious achievement. 

‘Then you should be our foreman,’ said another, and the rest murmured their agreement, since Judge Weedle had directed that they select one amongst them for this office. 

‘Forewoman, better say.’ Yellow Bonnet tittered and gave a little bow. ‘But I thank you for this honour.’ 

Then she turned to me, and her face darkened. 

‘Up on the table, girl,’ she said, ‘and we’ll soon see what’s what.’ 

*

I could have no quarrel with the original jury’s verdict, or so Farrington told me anyway. Agent McNally was as dead as dead could be, and by my hand. Beside the hearth in a lake of his own blood the peelers found him, his head split like a walnut by the axe. I was prepared to meet my Maker, though I had no immediate wish to do so. But to endure, for even one more day, McNally’s stinking breath and groping, ale-stained fingers and thrusting crotch when he came calling for the rent seemed to me a fate far worse than Hellfire. 

‘A bad time to put yourself on the county.’ As he spoke to me in the cell beside the courthouse on the morning of my trial, Farrington was eyeing up the young assistant he’d brought with him. He munched a buttered scone. ‘The land’s aflame with tithe disputes, and tenant-wars, and the like; this jury will convict you without drawing breath, for fear their own pockets will be robbed next.’ 

At this prediction Mam let out a whimper. I said then I was no Ribbonman, nor cutpurse neither, since I’d not touched a penny of McNally’s ill-gotten gold; and what was he, Arthur Farrington, Queen’s Counsel, going to do for me, now that Mam had sold the brown heifer to pay his fees? 

‘I warned you she was a strap,’ said Crilly the solicitor, but Farrington raised his hand and Crilly fell silent. 

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what happened.’ 

So I told Farrington about McNally calling each week when he knew that Mam and the smallies were not home, and how he’d hunt me round the cottage, until I’d that day put an end to his filthy business. The heat rose in my cheeks, and my lungs fought for air as I spoke; and Crilly, taking this for shame, said he’d fetch the priest, since the most that could be hoped for was to save my sorry soul. 

But Farrington held up his hand again, and his assistant, who had been looking at me most curiously, whispered something in his ear. 

*

Yellow Bonnet stepped towards me. I backed away but she kept coming until my arse was up against the table. 

‘C’mon now, lassie,’ she said, ‘you know what’s to be done.’ 

She grabbed my arm and tried to shove me back onto the oak. 

‘Let go of me, you sow!’ I shook my arm free and squirmed away from her. 

‘Oh, she has spirit, this one, hasn’t she?’ Yellow Bonnet beckoned the others, her eyes glittering. ‘Help me here, please,’ she said, though it sounded less of a request and more of a command.

Two burly countrywomen stepped shyly forward and stood either side of me. 

‘Get her up,’ said Yellow Bonnet. 

At first they hesitated, but when she rapped the table the pair of them hauled me up on top of it by the oxters like some stricken beast, and though I lashed and kicked until I thought the wood might splinter, I could not escape their grip. 

‘Her legs, hold her legs.’ At Yellow Bonnet’s command two more came forward to clutch an ankle each, so that now I was pinned at all four corners. 

‘Get your hands off of me, you stupid bitches,’ I cried. But no matter how I wriggled and twisted, nor what obscenities I shouted, there was no deflecting them. 

‘Now, then,’ said Yellow Bonnet. 

And she began rucking up my skirts. 

*

‘There is a matter I must discuss alone with my client,’ said Farrington. 

After Mam and Crilly and the assistant had left the cell, my counsel stared at me in a silence I found most unnerving. Then he withdrew a small flask from some inner pocket, unscrewed the top and took a swig before proffering it to me. Initially I declined, but at his further prompting I took a shallow sip, my eyes watering as the whiskey lit a fire in my throat. 

Farrington took back the flask and stowed it in his jacket. 

‘A day may come, Miss Sweeney, when what McNally did to you will set you free, but I fear instead that the morrow will see you hoist upon The Hill.’ 

Up to then I had been strong, but now I trembled and began to snivel. I had witnessed hangings on The Hill; the roadsides thronged with onlookers drunk on moonshine, baying as the prison cart hauled its latest wretched cargo to the summit where no tree grew but the one that dangled from its single branch our whole town’s rotten fruit. 

Farrington produced a handkerchief, which though grubby still retained some hint of perfume. As I snuffled in its folds, he whispered, ‘If you will only say it, you may yet escape the rope.’ 

I snuffled harder, pretending not to know his meaning, and anyway not seeing how acknowledging my secret would bring me anything but disgrace. 

He leaned in closer; our heads were almost touching. 

‘She is still learning, my sweet assistant,’ he said, ‘but she misses nothing, and about you she is right, is she not?’ 

‘What do you mean?’ I did not dare to look at him. 

He touched me very lightly on the hand. 

‘I hold no torch for the Church,’ he said, ‘nor for the noises wagging tongues make in this town. My only concern is that your life is spared’—he gestured at my stomach—‘as well as the new life growing inside you.’ 

*

‘Should we not… question her first?’ 

The one who spoke was thin, dressed in widow’s weeds, a squint in her right eye. 

‘Because maybe we can find out from asking her if she…’ The widow’s voice trailed off, her distaste evident for the job that lay ahead.  

‘Well, maybe.’ Yellow Bonnet paused and looked at me. ‘When were you last in your flowers?’ 

I stopped wriggling; I had not heard this phrase before, and did not know its meaning. 

Yellow Bonnet took my hesitation for dissembling. 

‘Oh now, you’ll not pull the wool over my eyes, lassie,’ she said, and she hoicked my skirts up further. 

‘What she means,’ Squint Widow said, not unkindly, ‘is: when did you last bleed?’ 

Ah, that. 

‘Twenty weeks,’ I said, and although I did not mean to, I gave a little sob, since I was reminded then of Sean, my Sean, who’d left almost five months ago, his limbs entwined with mine as we lay together the night before his ship set sail. 

Squint Widow turned to Yellow Bonnet, eyebrows raised. There’s your answer, her face said. 

But Yellow Bonnet was not done. 

‘Twenty weeks is nothing either way.’ She put her hands on my knees. ‘Spread your legs so we can take a look at you.’ 

I tried to keep my knees together but could not. ‘Leave me alone, you hag,’ I said, blubbing tears and snot as she prised my legs apart. 

‘Not the first time she’s obliged, and not the last time either, I daresay.’ Claddagh Heart smirked at her own wit, and one or two of the others giggled also until the white-haired crone shushed them, to remind them of the solemnity of their duty. 

A thought struck Yellow Bonnet, and for a moment she released my knees. 

‘Of course, if you are with child—’ 

‘Quick with child’ corrected Squint Widow, since this had been Weedle’s direction to the twelve. 

‘Yes, yes, quick with child.’ Yellow Bonnet’s patience was wearing thin. ‘And a shameful thing it would be for you to be in such a state, a girl of nineteen summers, and with no husband by her side.’ To this prim castigation some of the others added their own murmurs of disapproval. ‘But if you are,’ continued Yellow Bonnet, ‘who, then, is the father?’ 

A silence: she had the interest of a good number of them now. Eyes widening, they waited, appalled by my loose morals yet anxious not to miss out on any tittle-tattle. 

‘Who is he?’ said one. 

‘Tell us,’ said another. 

‘Yes,’ said Yellow Bonnet, ‘you have to tell us.’ 

*

Farrington had been right. Earlier, at the end of my trial, less than half an hour after they had been sent out, the first jury were back. 

‘You have a verdict?’ asked Judge Weedle, whose gloomy, long-faced countenance reminded me of a particularly stubborn mule.

‘Guilty, m’Lord!’ cried the foreman, his eyes shining in triumph. 

A growl of approval rose up from McNally’s family and hangers-on. Other land agents roared their vigorous agreement. At the back of the packed courtroom one or two Ribbonmen shook their fists, shouting in anger, while others muttered darkly about vengeance. Mam hugged the two smallies and wept. 

Weedle looked simperingly at the jury. 

‘May I say,’ he said, ‘that I wholeheartedly agree with your verdict, and have no hesitation in imposing the sentence required by law.’ 

He motioned to his tipstaff, who handed him a small wooden box. Weedle took from it a square of black cloth and placed it on top of his wig. 

‘The sentence of this court is that you be taken from here to a place of execution—’ 

‘M’Lord, there is a matter I must bring to your attention.’ 

Farrington was on his feet. The prosecuting counsel looked at him, bemused. 

‘M’Lord, I have reason to believe that my client, Miss Sweeney, is with child.’ 

Amid gasps in the public gallery, Mam raised her head from the mesh of her hands. She tried to catch my eye, but I could not look at her. 

‘And if this be confirmed by a jury of matrons,’ continued Farrington, ‘the sentence you have imposed following the verdict’—and here Farrington glanced witheringly at the jury —‘cannot be carried out, since to do so would be to punish the innocent within the womb for its mother’s crime.’ 

There was a ripple of excitement along the benches. The prosecuting counsel conferred hurriedly with his flustered junior. 

‘Matrons?’ said Weedle suspiciously. ‘A jury of matrons? This is news to me.’ 

‘But not to the legal system of this land, whose laws you have promised to uphold.’ Farrington smiled sweetly at the judge as he handed up four dusty tomes, which had been passed to him by his assistant. 

‘These precedents show that if my client “pleads the belly,” it is her right to have another jury—a jury of matrons— appointed to inspect her, so as to confirm her pregnancy. A right, m’Lord, going back almost six hundred years. Before even you were appointed.’ This last line he said barely audibly. The assistant stifled a giggle. 

‘This is 1846, Mr Farrington. Not the… the Dark Ages.’ Weedle’s jowls wobbled in exasperation. ‘And did you not hear this conscientious jury’s verdict?’ Here, Weedle raised an inquiring eyebrow at prosecuting counsel, who could only grimace back, shaking his head: perhaps there’s something in the defence’s argument after all. 

‘I do not contest the verdict.’ Farrington was a model of reasonableness. ‘But the case-law makes it clear that this court cannot execute an innocent. And if twelve matrons decide—’ 

‘Women, Mr Farrington! On a jury?’ From Weedle’s mouth the word came like a lump of horse-droppings from underneath his buckled shoe. 

‘Yes, m’Lord. Given their particular expertise in matters of such delicacy. “Discreet women,” as the cases say, “with some presumed experience of childbirth.” Whatever that means,’ muttered Farrington as an aside to his assistant. 

‘Quick with child, it says here.’ Weedle was flicking one of the book’s pages back and forth, searching in vain for an argument against Farrington’s proposal. He glanced sullenly in my direction. ‘She does not look “quick with child” to me.’ 

‘We are perhaps of like mind on that, m’Lord,’ said Farrington, artfully nodding in agreement. ‘But as the law makes clear, it is not for you or I to decide. This is a matter for the matrons.’ 

*

‘Actually, she doesn’t. Have to tell us.’ 

Another one spoke. Tall and graceful, her long black cloak gave her the appearance of a crow. 

Yellow Bonnet rounded on her challenger. ‘But surely we must first know who the—’ 

‘Never mind who the child’s father is.’ Crow would brook no argument. ‘It may as well be Daniel O’Connell, for all it matters.’ One or two of the women whinnied indignantly at this impertinence concerning The Liberator, though I’d heard it said that not for nothing was he known as the “Father of Ireland”. 

‘What matters,’ continued Crow, ‘is whether a child is quickening inside this girl or not. So, ladies, since we have this task to perform, let us set to it before the men outside deny us even this.’ 

I kicked and struggled; I even tried to bite the hands that held me. 

‘This is for your own good, girl,’ cried Crow over my screeching, ‘how else are we to find out if what you say is true?’ 

‘There is a baby inside of me, there is, I know it.’ By now the tears were spilling down my cheeks. 

‘Well, then,’ said Crow, all business, ‘you best allow us our inspection, so that we can confirm you are indeed with child.’ 

Maybe it was the logic in what she was saying, or maybe I had just grown weary of the battle; but for whatever reason, I lay back with my eyes closed and my legs open as they crowded round me. Some were shy to even touch me at first, but sooner or later almost all of them laid hands on me, prodding my stomach, pinching my skin, palping my breasts for early milk. They were most of them gentler than I’d imagined, though one made me yelp, her cold fingers probing up my gowl. How long they took I cannot say, for though it felt like hours, it must surely have been less. The windows in the jury-room were too high to see out to the street, but the light of day was fast declining, and already one or two were muttering about sending out for candles when Crow stopped proceedings. 

‘Ladies,’ she said, ‘I think we have laboured here enough.’ 

Nods and whispers amongst some of them. 

‘I think,’ continued Crow, ‘we now know that this girl is no more pregnant than that slack-jawed fool of a judge who tried her case.’ 

‘Too right!’ cried Yellow Bonnet. There were further murmurs of assent, and she knew that she would soon have the whole room. ‘I think,’ she said, her voice rising, ‘that we twelve should go back in there and tell the truth; that there is nothing in this belly but piss and wind.’ 

‘Wait,’ I said, ‘please, wait.’ Though none seemed to be listening; and by then I was so tired that I began to doubt even my own body, my own instinct: what if I was wrong? 

‘I wonder should we not first vote?’ Squint Widow at least wanted to do the right thing. ‘Since the judge told us we must all be agreed?’ 

‘Well, perhaps so.’ Crow looked diffidently towards Yellow Bonnet. ‘Maybe you can put it to a vote?’ 

‘Indeed I will.’ Yellow Bonnet’s cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘I say our verdict is: there is no child quickening inside her. All in favour, raise your hand!’ 

Already she had her own hand high above her head. She seemed to me possessed of a particular urge to punish, yet nine other hands rose also in the air, with varying degrees of reluctance, making ten. And then, eleven, when Squint Widow apologetically raised her arm. 

‘But we still are not unanimous,’ the widow said, and she sounded almost relieved. 

Yellow Bonnet was staring at the one remaining holdout: the fleece-headed old crone sitting in the corner. 

‘What doubts can there be left for you not to vote with the rest of us, woman?’ asked Yellow Bonnet, and there was a razor’s edge beneath her silken tone. 

The high windows were almost dark; the light was very nearly gone. ‘Candle, we need a candle,’ said Crow. She knocked on the door of the jury-room to wake the tipstaff snoozing outside, who quickly produced wax and flame. 

The door sighed shut. In the amber glow of the new candle, the old woman began to speak. 

‘The thing is,’ she said, looking first at Yellow Bonnet, ‘I once before witnessed a woman plead the belly. And before we condemn this girl, there is something I would like to see.’ 

She stood up and waddled towards me. With her white shawl and whiter hair, she seemed ghost-like in the candle’s guttering light. 

‘In this condition,’ she said, ‘the piddle a woman makes is different, or so it is said. Can you please bring me that basin?’ 

Young Claddagh Heart duly obliged. 

‘Now, you,’ said The Ghost, addressing me, ‘sit up for me, please.’ 

As I raised myself on my elbows, she lowered her head over me, just beneath my belly button. One hand stroked my skin, while her other hand held the receptacle below. The other women peered at us, waiting for the basin to fill: was this some fairground trick, some witch’s spell? 

I tried to piddle but could not. 

‘There, you see.’ Yellow Bonnet had had enough. ‘There is no child inside her, and she knows it.’ 

‘Just wait.’ The Ghost was patient. Yet still no piddle came. 

But there came something else instead: a movement, down almost in my crotch, like the ticking of a mouse’s heart. 

‘Aha!’ cried The Ghost, for she felt it too. 

She looked at the others. Another flutter came, and then another, making me gasp. 

‘You see?’ The Ghost removed her hand. 

Tentatively, Crow and Yellow Bonnet each placed a palm on my stomach. As they huddled in to watch, some of the others stretched out their hands and did the same. Again there was a stirring, stronger this time, then another and another. And then, definitely, a kick, that made Yellow Bonnet flinch. 

‘Well, then.’ The Ghost spoke quietly. ‘We are all of the same mind now, I think?’ 

One by one she scrutinised the faces gathered round me; each nodded their agreement, even Crow, until it came to Yellow Bonnet. Her mouth was tighter than an agent’s purse; she glanced around, searching for support, but not one of the eleven spoke, except through their determined silence. 

‘So it would seem,’ Yellow Bonnet said eventually, with an exasperated horse-fluttering of her lips. 

A couple of the women let out small sighs of relief. As Yellow Bonnet turned to knock on the door so as to alert the tipstaff that the matrons’ jury had a verdict, The Ghost took my hand and helped me down off the table. ‘I wish you well,’ she said, her eyes glistening. ‘Whatever may be next for you, I wish you well, you and your baby.’ 

*

On the quayside hawkers moved amongst the passengers and their families, thrusting handbills about Monster Meetings and the Corn Laws to anyone who would take them. A stevedore grunted as he swung sacks of grain into a ship’s hold. 

The baby shivered. I tightened the shawl I’d swaddled round him, and he stopped. 

I clutched my steerage ticket. The way Farrington had explained it after the matrons returned their verdict, I had little choice. ‘Once the baby is born,’ he said, ‘the law requires the mother to return and serve her sentence. And though the Crown may pardon you, or sentence you to transportation, you’d be best advised instead to arrange some transport of your own.’ 

Mam was trying not to cry. ‘I’ll pray that you’ll return,’ she said, her lip quivering as the two smallies tugged at me, wanting one last chance to hold their nephew. 

‘Of course I will,’ I said, though whether this would happen neither of us could know. 

After one last embrace, I turned and wiped my eyes. As I walked down the pier towards the gangplank of our ship, I thought I saw a long white shawl in the distance, and although it was not her, I could not but think of all of them, Crow, and Yellow Bonnet, and Squint Widow, and The Ghost, and the rest of those twelve women who had saved us. I kept walking, my mewling baby nuzzling against me as above us the canvas sails flapped and billowed in the breeze.

John O’Donnell ‘s work has been published and broadcast in Ireland and abroad. Awards include the Irish National Poetry Prize, the New Irish Writing Awards for Poetry and Fiction, and in 2023 the RTE Francis McManus Short Story Award for his story ‘Mr Hoo’. He has published five poetry collections. His previous collection of short stories Almost the Same Blue (Doire Press) was nominated as one of the Debut Books of the Year in The Irish Times and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. His debut novel, Second Skin, was one of the winners of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2024. His new short story collection, Mr Hoo and other stories, is published this week by Doire Press.

About Pleading The Belly: At a meeting in the office of Niamh Howlin, Associate Professor in UCD Sutherland School of Law, I noticed on her table a book she’d written about juries in 19th century Ireland. I was struck by the cover, which featured a painting of twelve female jurors; as far as I knew, women were not allowed to serve on juries in Ireland until the 1920s. Niamh explained that this was a so-called jury of matrons, twelve ‘lawful and decent women’ selected to inspect a woman convicted of a capital offence who nonetheless claimed to be pregnant (‘pleading the belly’). If the woman’s claim was found to be true, her execution would have to be postponed, since hanging the woman would also end the life of the innocent child within. The idea fascinated me: as well as the compelling drama of a pregnant woman being charged with murder, the concept of an all-female jury spoke to the patronising squeamishness of men, as well as providing a rare opportunity for agency to women during that time. I began to imagine them all in the jury room together; the distraught young woman, the twelve ‘matrons’, and the lives they held in their hands.

■■■

On another night she might join the card game, but she didn’t have it in her to be sociable this evening, to be the carefree Irish girlfriend who loved a party, who smiled at their stories from home as if she recognised the places and people alternately lauded and reviled within. At the start she found the camaraderie unsettling; now she was used to it, the manic inclusiveness, the quick, concentrated intimacy of the expat life. 

To stop herself from staring she focused on the television above the bar whose muted coverage continued to show the same looping images of vigils and fundraisers taking place across the city for the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Politicians in dark suits, crowds with placards and candles, the older footage of the smoking towers. She’d been traipsing Midtown with her resumé when it happened, trying to find a waitressing job without papers, missing her friends who had gone back to Dublin after the summer, as she was meant to do herself. They had flown home on Labour Day, leaving her with nowhere to live and a constant, gnawing incredulity at her own decision to remain behind, which was subsumed in the mad weeks and months that followed the attacks into a more general disbelief at the world, the city, at life itself. 

The urgency to leave the bar returned. She rose from the stool, ducked under the hatch, tossed the dregs of her wine in the service sink and rinsed the glass. At the rush of water hitting the basin, Mark looked up from the till receipts.

‘Are you away?’ he said. 

All she could do was nod. 

Walking the length of the bar, he drew her in for a hug. She wrapped her arms around his wiry torso and tried to find the words. Instead she asked him how late he would be. 

‘Not too late,’ he said. ‘I promise.’

There must have been something morose in the way she gathered her purse and the white envelope of tips into her bag because just as she was about to leave he said, ‘Ni, is everything all right?’

She might have told him then were it not for the roar that came from the corner of the room. Eddie began to pace around the tables, the bantam strut of a man who had gone all in. 

Mark smiled. ‘Here’s trouble.’

‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘See you soon.’

*

Though it was just gone ten, the street had a lonely, late-night sheen, steam rising in bitter wisps from the manhole covers. Many businesses had closed for the anniversary and there was, for the people with no dead to mourn, a giddy sense of unearned freedom. She had a sudden memory of a snowball fight with her older siblings, when she was six or seven, in their snatch of back garden on Donore Avenue, the spectral winter trees, and a big, protective figure that had to be her father, helping to fill her sock-covered hands with icy ammunition. But she could only really see the shape of him, vague and featureless, dark hair and brows on a faded face. She had lost the habit of thinking about home; it all seemed too long ago. 

Glancing up the street in the direction of the subway station, she pictured the black hole of the tunnel, the wait. Slowly, through the muggy air that still held in its shadows the remains of the day, she went instead towards Queens Boulevard, where almost instantly a cab pulled over to her outstretched hand. 

Niamh gave her address to the driver, an elderly man with a turban. He edged his way into a line of traffic. She found herself asking how his night was going, in the hope he might talk to her. 

‘Busy,’ he said.

She had a longing for a Dublin taxi driver who would have half his life story told before the first set of lights. As the cab trudged forward she checked her cell for new messages but there was nothing. Nothing from her mother, or either of her brothers, only the text her sister had sent a few hours before, the initial words of which were visible with their dreadful entreaty: Niamh, please call back … 

The letters started to blur, the screen felt too bright, and she grew dizzy, closing the phone, then her eyes.

‘You feel sick?’ the driver said.

She opened her eyes. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m grand.’

‘Many people drunk,’ he said. 

‘I’ll bet.’

‘Crazy day. A day to remember.’

Slow tears began to fall on her face.  

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, my dear.’

She apologised, started to laugh, which made her cry more. 

‘It’s just–my father.’ A short, strangled sound came out of her. ‘You see, he died.’

The driver said some words in another language that were maybe a prayer. 

‘I mean,’ she said, ‘he died today.’ 

When they reached her apartment block the man wouldn’t take the money. She thanked him and went quickly inside before she could meet anyone else. 

*

In the bedroom she turned on the juddering air unit, sat against the headboard and tried to get a hold of what she knew was true. The starkness of her sister’s voice: Emma had delivered the news efficiently, without emotion. They’d both understood it was over, the time for angry phonecalls and accusations of heartlessness had passed. Time to get real, as their father might have said, which was the nearest he came to cursing. 

She wondered if he had, in the end, any sense of his life, if he had an inkling of the man he had been. He used to say that living well was simple, all you had to do was forget yourself. As a child, while her siblings watched cartoons, she followed him around the garden in all kinds of weather, cleaving to his quiet wisdom, his stillness, to the peace of the outside world.

When she was thirteen she had to write a poem for English class to a person she truly loved. She couldn’t remember it now, just the opening line with its juvenile rhyme—her father’s rusted, trusted rake—and how the poem upset her mother so much that she regretted writing it at all. 

When she was seventeen her father found out he had Alzheimer’s and they would have given anything to go back to a time when their biggest problem was a poem. She had remained at home for college, tried to help her mother. Life grew colourless and hard. 

On her J1, she wasn’t thinking of the future, just wanted a reprieve from the present—her mother’s complaining, the panicked grasp of her father’s hand. Without consulting anyone, she’d dropped out, moved to New York, slept on a mattress in the living room of a fourth-floor walk-up on Fulton until she found a job that didn’t require a permit. There were ways to get home, she’d heard adventurous tales of train rides from Buffalo, pretend excursions to Niagara Falls, but that was before 9/11, before they cracked down on illegals. 

She knew many who took the risk and were punished. Mark’s brother Andrew went home to Scotland for their mother’s funeral last November and couldn’t get back. Might never get back. Andrew. Maisie. Orla. Peter. Seán. The waitress from Aberdeen who called herself Fifi. 

*

As it neared midnight she went to call Mark, hearing at the same time the scrape of his key in the door. False, excitable voices: Jean and Eddie, yakking about baggies and lines. While she tried to contain her anger a message bleeped on her phone, from Emma, telling her not to worry about the cost of the plane ticket, they’d refund her at home.

Down the hallway the living room door banged. Mark came into the bedroom, all six foot two of him filling the space. He sat on the end of the bed.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said.

She tried to avoid his eyes, the green she loved diminished by the pupils. ‘What were ye at?’ 

He cuffed her ankle with his hand. ‘Jean’s a bit upset. Her job is in danger again.’

‘You have to tell them to go–now.’

Mark dropped her leg in surprise. ‘What’s wrong?’

She started to cry.

‘Niamh,’ he moved towards her, ‘you’re scaring me.’

‘My sister rang. It’s my dad.’

‘Oh, baby.’ 

He came for her and they held each other, and for a few minutes she felt okay. Then he went to get rid of the others. Through the wall the pumping music gave way to voices. With difficulty she went out to them, grateful for the dim lighting as she accepted their condolences, these people who had never even met her father. They left in a slew of sombre farewells. 

‘Niamh,’ Mark followed her into the bedroom, ‘we have to figure–’

She shook her head, pulled him down on the mattress, snuggled her back into the warmth of his body.

‘Wish I could go with you,’ he said, kissing her ear. 

The uselessness of the comment annoyed her. A familiar despair. There were no other women, nothing like that, he was loyal and honest, but almost five years in she wasn’t yet as important to him as his sister, or his closest friend who had left Scotland with him. Sometimes she thought this was how it should be, and sometimes it made her feel lost inside her own life. She turned towards him, in longing or loss, unable to distinguish between them. ‘I have you,’ he said.

*

At Jamaica station the following day she almost missed her connection by waiting on the wrong platform. With seconds to go she hauled her small suitcase of black clothes onto the train. The doors bleeped and the automated message announced no more stops till JFK. As the train picked up speed, hurtling through stations with unreadable names, she remembered the drive to the airport when she left for the J1, her mother refusing to let her take the coach with the other girls. Early morning weekend Dublin, the city still asleep. Her mother had parked up, come into the terminal with her, gripped Niamh’s arm at the escalators and said, ‘Come back to us, you hear?’ She had hugged her mother tightly, told her not to worry. Stepped quickly onto the metal comb plate. The last thing she had seen from the moving stairs was the desolate figure watching her leave. 

*

Outside JFK she smoked two cigarettes in the deadening midday heat, just to remember what real sun felt like, just in case. Think positive, Mark had said to her at the station, she might be lucky, some were, and if not, he knew a woman in Nova Scotia who could help for a fee. 

In the departure lounge she stopped at an information booth to buy a phonecard, searched for a payphone with privacy. The phone rang twice before her mother answered with a startlingly clear hello. 

Niamh forgot how to speak. 

The overhead announcer issued a last call for a Delta flight to Paris. 

‘Hello? Niamh, is that you?’

‘Hi, Mam.’

‘What time is it there?’

‘Gone twelve.’

‘Are you checked in?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Check in and ring me back.’

‘It’s ok, I’ve plenty of time.’

‘You’ll miss it,’ she said. ‘You’ll miss your flight.’

‘Don’t worry, Mam, I won’t.’

‘Do you have good clothes?’ 

She wondered if this exchange about logistics was all that either of them could bear, but then, as if her mother could read her mind from another continent, she said, ‘He’s really gone, love. Daddy is gone.’

‘I’m so sorry, Mam.’ In the chrome surface of the phonebox her reflection blurred.

‘He asked for you,’ her mother said. ‘He kept asking.’

She clutched the receiver. ‘Please, Mam.’

As the talking continued she blanked her mind in the old way, held the phone away from her ear. Eventually she heard Emma’s voice on the line, the words loose, distant, full of instructions about people she no longer knew. This much she retained: her brother had arrived from London last night and would meet her at the airport in their father’s old Fiesta. 

At the check-in desk, the agent examined her passport, asked her questions she answered robotically. The conveyer belt jerked to life behind the woman’s head, the long tongue lapping the luggage. A button was pressed and the belt stilled.

‘Your waiver has expired,’ the woman said sharply.

She nodded.

‘They’ll pull you up on it, doll.’ 

The kindness in her voice was harder to take. Niamh studied the queue at an adjacent desk, where a family, a smiling father and mother and three young children with unbearably innocent white-blonde hair, were dressed in matching tropical shirts. When she refocused the agent was saying something about a delay, handing her a ticket, a form for immigration, waiting for her to put up her bag. 

‘Is it too big to carry on?’ 

‘Whatever you like,’ the agent said, ‘but better off to stow. It’s a walk to the gate.’

She pretended to consider the advice, then she gathered up her bits and pieces and rolled the bag away.

*

By the time she got back to the apartment it was late afternoon, the rackety air con the only source of life. Though she had no appetite, she poured herself a glass of milk and made two slices of toast from the fake, spongy loaf that passed for bread in America.

In a daze she cleaned the kitchen, tidied the shelves, unpacked her suitcase, all the while letting herself imagine she had returned as an adult to the place where she was still a child. Taken the flight, gone to the funeral, comforted her mother. Honoured her father. As she bent to put the empty case under the bed his face came to her for a moment in such startling definition—his broad forehead and deep-set hazel eyes, the neat row of teeth when he smiled—that her own breath seemed to go in and out of her father’s mouth. Then the face, the image disappeared; just the case again on the dusty floor. With sudden exhaustion, she dragged herself up to lie on the bed, sent a message to her brother and turned off her phone. Later in the bar they all would be full of sympathy and mitigation, but here alone in the deserted apartment there was no one to protect her from what she had done.  

Sarah Gilmartin ’s novels Dinner Party: A Tragedy (2021), Service (2023) and the forthcoming Little Vanities (2026) are published by One. She was the 2025 Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University.

About Living in America: Stories can take me a long time to write, sometimes longer than a novel, but this one was particularly slow. I started writing it around six years ago and it was, in its earliest iteration, over twice the length, and in a different perspective and tense. I worked as a waitress in the US in my 20s and was always struck by the stories of friends and colleagues who had chosen to remain there illegally–what it meant to live so precariously, without rights, in an adopted home. What they had lost or could potentially stand to lose, which sadly seems even more relevant today than the in noughties backdrop of the story. At certain points I considered doing likewise, and the possibility has always stayed with me as a kind of shadow life, a road not taken.

■■■

She double-checks: keys, phone, wallet. She has an umbrella in her bag, just in case, and yes, she is wearing sunscreen also, and yes, she has her scarf in her bag, in case they end up sitting for a while, and yes, she is prepared for all actualities. It’s warmer than it looks when she steps outside, so she walks slowly, to avoid arriving looking too sweaty or ruddy-faced. At the traffic lights, a toddler is crying because someone’s dog has barked too loudly. On the other side of the road, a couple holding hands are waiting to cross, smiling secret smiles to each other. She is the only person she can see who is on their own. She doesn’t feel the need to tell anyone where she is going and what she is doing. She is not scared of being kidnapped and raped on a Sunday afternoon in a park full of buggies and kids on scooters. She is a bit nervous that Adrien will find her dull, or annoying, but she is not scared of that. She has been raped twice in her life, once digitally by a friend at a house party when she was eighteen, and the second time by her boyfriend when she was 26, when he was drunk, when she was trying to break up with him. She knows intimacy is much riskier than meeting a stranger in a park. Across the road now and the large, white gates are in her view. She foosters with her hair, pats it flat. She can see the park is already teeming with families. They have agreed to meet at the gates but she doesn’t see anyone yet who might be him. She wishes she could check a mirror quickly, fix whatever might need fixing. She could take out her phone and check herself in her camera but it would be awful for him to happen upon her doing that. Anyway, most of the things that bother her about her reflection she can’t change. 

She half-considered putting 36 on her profile, but in the end decided to be honest and write 38. At some point in her mid-to-late thirties, people started speaking to her differently. She had not realised how youth had made her likeable without having to do anything at all, but now she knows, now she sees it in how people speak to young women, and she is able to observe this because she is no longer the one being spoken to. Men don’t try to garner her attention as much as they once did, and it turns out that this is a relief, mainly, aside from the slight knock to the ego. Sometimes she’ll forget her age, but then be reminded of it suddenly. In Penneys last week, she asked a staff member where the pyjama section was, and the staff member appraised her for a second before asking, ‘For adults?’ Róisín realised then that she looked like a woman who might have children, who might be buying pyjamas for them, who might be going home to a husband and small versions of herself running around, rather than someone going back to a three-bed flat she shares with strangers.

‘Róisín?’

She is snapped from her thoughts by a tall, handsome Frenchman standing in front of her. He looks better than in his profile photo, more facial hair, more rugged. His brown eyes are striking even in this dull, cloudy light. And he even pronounced her name correctly.

‘You must be Adrien!’

She hears that her voice is bright and high, full of nerves.

‘Yes.’

He smiles; it’s a cute smile.

‘I’m so used to French people calling me rosin,’ she says. ‘Or raisin.’

‘Like the grape.’

‘Yes. Your name must get butchered here too.’

‘Oh no, I’m fine with being called Ay-dree-in,’ he says, drawing out his name with an Irish accent. She laughs.

‘You’ve been here a while then.’

‘Six months. I am getting used to Ay-dree-in. Anyway, it is not wrong, it is just another version of my name. But raisin, raisin is incorrect. I checked how to pronounce your name. There are a lot of Youtube videos about how to say Irish names, in fact.’

‘Am I the first Róisín you’ve met?’

He nods. ‘Most of the people I work with are American.’

‘Ah. They usually get my name wrong too.’

He looks her up and down a little, then looks around at the park. He has very good posture, she notices. City bred. City-level confidence.

‘Which way do you normally go?’ he says, indicating the path.

‘Oh, any old which way,’ she says, feeling a little embarrassed, cursing herself internally for being unable to make even the smallest of decisions. ‘Let’s go towards the pond,’ she says. ‘There’s a coffee cart there too, so that might be good, maybe.’

Walking side by side now, it’s more comfortable, although she thinks about pace, wondering if she is walking too slowly or too quickly for him. She tries to think of things to ask him, but everything going through her head seems basic and obvious and stupid.

‘So do you like living in Ireland then?’ she hears herself say.

‘Everything except the weather,’ he says, smiling. She waits, but he doesn’t say more.

‘I lived in Paris for a year, actually, when I was younger.’ She is speaking again. ‘I was in the 13^th, in a chambre de bonne, tiny wee place.’

‘You can get good Chinese in the 13^th.’

‘Yeah. I spent most of my time in the 10^th though, that’s where I was studying, and there was this amazing falafel place on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. I ate falafel almost every single day I was in Paris, I’d say.’ She laughs, she doesn’t know why. She wants to put her fist in her mouth. Why can’t she say anything normal, or cool?

‘I lived in London for a year before I came to Dublin,’ he says, completely ignoring her falafel talk. ‘I thought Dublin would be very similar, but actually,’ he pauses.

‘It’s different,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

They are at the pond now. They stop in front of some ducks. Over on the other side, a woman is giving bread to her toddler to throw in the lake. They watch the toddler toss the heel of a loaf into the water, almost hitting a duck. Róisín tries to think of something else to say.

‘It’s not good to do that,’ Adrien says, half under his breath, watching the woman across the pond.

‘You mean give them bread?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It’s bad for them. It can hurt their stomachs.’

Róisín knows this, and she likes that he knows this too. Maybe they are a match. Maybe they are two of a kind. A match made in heaven. Maybe this is the one.

‘I got in trouble once,’ she says, ‘For actually saying that to someone who was feeding them bread. It didn’t go down well, in the end. I had to leave.’

He doesn’t say anything for a moment and she worries she has said something stupid, revealed herself to be strange or off-putting. But then he says:

‘I had heard the stereotype that Irish people like to fight, before I came here. But now that I have been here a few months I can see that it’s not really true. It’s more common to be, comment on dit, passif-agressif.’

She laughs, relaxes a little.

‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘You’re not meant to say things directly. More in a roundabout way.’

‘Comme un rond-point?’

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Just like a rond-point.’

‘Hmm,’ he says, ‘I struggle with that.’

They look over at the woman and toddler again. The ducks are going mental for the bread. Róisín doesn’t mean to talk but she feels her mouth moving without her will, blabbering to fill the silence.

‘I found it strange when I went to Paris—all that directness, I mean, the way people are so straightforward. Well, also, because I was around a load of English people who were on the same course as me, and they’re even worse for the directness, would you believe. You’d think they’re joking when they’re actually being serious. But the Parisians also—and I don’t mean this in a bad way, just that it’s different—but like, I learned that if I was at someone’s house and they offered me a drink I had to say yes the first time if I actually wanted it. You have to say no a few times here first. Like, say no at least twice and then the third time you can say yes. You’re meant to let the host convince you into having a cup of tea, otherwise you’re being sort of rude, you’re being pushy. You’re meant to pretend you don’t want it at first.’

She manages to stop talking, but to her surprise he looks genuinely interested, like he wants her to continue. ‘Really?’ he says. She reddens at the feel of his gaze.

‘Well, it might not be too much like that anymore, actually.’ She thinks. ‘No, probably not.’

The toddler across the pond has fallen over and is crying. His mother picks him up and takes him away. The ducks squawk after them.

‘But when I moved to Paris I was young,’ Róisín says, ‘I was in my early twenties. I hadn’t, I hadn’t even spent that much time in Dublin really, at that stage.’

‘Ah, so you are a paysan?’

There is a twinkle in his eye and he is standing close, a little closer than before, she notices. Maybe she has not ruined things with her blabbering. Maybe he even finds her blabbering charming.

‘We call that a culchie,’ she says.

‘Culchie,’ he repeats, and then sounds out the word again, as though he is enunciating for Duolingo, ‘Cul-chie.’

She laughs, and he looks at her, and laughs then too. She relaxes some more. She can be unserious with him, she feels.

‘There is something I should probably tell you, before this goes any further,’ he says then, and of course, of course there’s something—he doesn’t do monogamy, he has six months to live, he’s only into very specific sexual acts and she needs to sign a contract before they move forward. She is already dreading the thought of more swiping and admin.

‘Okay,’ she says, and she has turned her face towards him, she has already put a wall up, and she will keep her face exactly as it is, no matter what he says.

‘I have a small baby attached to my torso.’

She fails to keep her face exactly as it is.

‘What?’ she says, and he says again, the words:

‘I have a small baby attached to my torso.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she says, ‘What you are trying to tell me.’

He repeats the sentence a third time and she is looking at him, and he looks totally normal, he looks like a totally normal person standing in front of her.

‘You’re going to need to show me what you mean,’ she says.

He doesn’t seem overly surprised by this request, and obliges, gestures towards some bushes nearby. ‘Let’s go there,’ he says. As they are walking towards the bushes Róisín catches the eye of a woman with a stroller, and then they both look away from each other. Adrien goes through the bushes first. Róisín looks around to see if anyone is watching her before following him through to a small clearing, surrounded by brambles. He stands at a very polite distance from her.

‘I would prefer, maybe, no touching straight away,’ he says.

She doesn’t know what to say to this, but he waits, he is waiting.

‘Okay,’ she says.

He opens his coat and gently lifts up his T-shirt. And yes, there, at the side of his abdomen, just between his hipbone and ribs, is a small baby. Partly inside his body, partly outside. More like a foetus than a baby. A growth. But a growth that is moving: little limbs waving ever-so-gently, as though through water. Its little head is nestled just underneath Adrien’s lower ribs; its tiny feet dangle on top of his hip bone. Belly the size of a plum, the kind of belly you’d want to give butterfly kisses to. Most of it is inside of him, just the front of its body out to the world. It is so small, maybe only the length of her hand, she thinks, were she to put her hand there. Tiny scrunched face, closed eyelids—the baby is sleeping. Róisín notices how the baby’s skin is lighter than the skin of Adrien’s belly, and hairless too, distinctive in how hairless it is in comparison to the man-body it’s attached to. She notices now that Adrien has an extremely hairy belly. She has not finished looking but he rolls down his top, straightens his coat. It feels like a long time since she looked at his face, although it must only be a few minutes.

‘It’s a condition,’ he says, ‘It’s called Torso Baby Condition. It used to be called Torso Baby Disorder but they changed it.’

‘Right,’ she says.

He still looks like a normal human in front of her, albeit with a well-fitted coat, suited to his frame, to his needs. What does he do in summer, she wonders, what does he do in changing rooms? What does he do in bed? What if he rolls over and kills it?

‘I see,’ she says.

‘I’m perfectly healthy, by the way,’ he adds. ‘It’s just something I was born with, like the way some people are born with birthmarks, or moles.’

Róisín thinks of her birthmark, the red splotch on her upper arm.

‘It’s a baby,’ she says.

‘Well, yes,’ he says, ‘Mais, tu sais, functionally, it’s just like a birthmark. It doesn’t stop me from doing any of the things I want to do.’

She realises she is not even looking at his face as he speaks, she is looking down at his coat again, at the area where the baby is. She forces herself to look back at his face and sees that he is studying her. He has had this conversation before, she thinks.

‘It’s just a part of my life,’ he says. ‘It’s not a disability. I don’t call it a disability. I live a normal life. I do normal things. The only negative impact it has on my life is that sometimes women find it strange.’

‘No shit,’ she says.

Somewhere in the bushes, a small animal moves, a bird, or maybe a mouse. She remembers where they are. The pond, the ducks, the crying toddler, all feel very far away now. Light moves across Adrien’s face. The sun has come out, it is making its way through the trees. He puts his hands in his pockets. She sees that city confidence again.

‘I’ve had some bad experiences,’ he says. ‘It is worse, in fact, the longer I wait before telling someone. I have concluded that it is better to tell people very soon. It is better to say on the first meeting. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, my time, or your time.’

She had felt so prepared when she walked out the door of her flat this morning. 

‘What do women usually do?’ she asks. Maybe this will help her, to know how others have reacted, to show her how she should.

He seems frustrated by the question. She notices in herself, and finds interesting, that she cares a little less now about whether he likes her or not. She doesn’t mind if she frustrates him. She wouldn’t mind frustrating him further.

 ‘Does it matter what other women have done?’ he says. ‘We’re here now. You and me.’

‘But like, have you been on a second date?’

He laughs then, and looks at her the same way he did when she said she was from the country. ‘Je suis pas vierge, putain. I have been in relationships, of course. It’s just, when it comes to the beginning, to dating, it is better for me to tell you now, than to tell you in a few weeks, or months, and then you, comment on dit, ghost me.’

The sky has clouded over again. It’s good she brought her umbrella.

‘Oh, okay,’ she says. ‘Right.’

Somewhere nearby, on the other side of the bushes, laughter. A moment later, the sound of a bicycle bell.

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ she says.

He nods.

‘Most people don’t have this, like,’ she says.

He nods again. She is still the one saying stupid and obvious things, and he is standing there so comfortable and steady in himself, just waiting for her to catch up. How can this man be so sure of himself, Róisín thinks, when he is so strange, so different to the people around him? It’s almost offensive, the level of comfort he has with himself. She looks at her shoe, where a wet leaf has attached itself. Fiddles with the straps of her tote bag.

‘I’m sure you have questions,’ he says. ‘Feel free to ask me what you want. Don’t worry about offending me. I’ll answer as best as I can.’ His face is open, waiting. ‘And,’ he adds with a grin, ‘You don’t have to ask me three times.’

She half-smiles.

‘It’s a bit strange,’ she says.

‘Plenty of people are a bit strange,’ he says, ‘You just don’t usually find out until later.’

‘Can I see it again?’ she asks.

He opens his coat. She notices how loose his T-shirt is, the way it hangs, you’d barely notice. He lifts it up and yes, there it is, just as before, the baby. Still sleeping. Tiny cherubic cheeks. It moves its lips ever so slightly, and a small bubble comes out. Róisín wants to reach out, see if the baby will curl its hand around her little finger. Maybe Adrien sees her desire because he pulls his top down again, says, ‘We don’t need to disturb her right now.’ The pronoun drags in her mind: her.

‘Alors,’ he says, putting his hands in his pockets, and asks her again, with all the nonchalance of a waiter taking an order. ‘Des questions?’

She tries to pick one.

‘Is it growing? Is it going to be a toddler one day?’

‘No, she stays like this.’

‘Like a bonsai tree.’

‘Yes.’

‘There’s no nappy,’ she says. It’s not a question, but she wants to know.

‘No. She is a part of me, she gets her food through me, she evacuates through me. She doesn’t need anything, she doesn’t need milk, or toys, or anything else, she is just there.’

‘Like a foetus.’

‘Well, in a way, yes.’

‘But you call her a baby.’

He’s not getting impatient with her, even though he must have gone through this before. That’s another plus, she thinks. That and the fact that he doesn’t give bread to ducks.

‘Well, it’s called Torso Baby Condition,’ he says. ‘I don’t know, it’s just called that. I wasn’t in the room when the doctors were deciding the name.’

‘Do you want children? Wait, can you have sex?’

‘I can have sex, of course I can have sex. Children, ah, I don’t know. It is maybe a bit soon for us to talk about this, non?’

‘You think it’s too soon to talk about children?’

‘Ouais, un peu.’

‘You’ve just told me that you have a baby.’

‘It’s called—’

‘Torso Baby Condition, yes, it’s a baby on your torso, that means you have a baby, and I, I don’t want a baby.’

It’s the first time she’s said it out loud, ever in her life, and she knows it’s true.

‘It’s just not for me,’ she adds.

He looks a bit thrown for the first time. Maybe the other women didn’t say this to him. She hadn’t even planned to say it herself. Something has relaxed in her chest and when she looks at him now she feels a tenderness, a desire to reach out. Because it must be lonely for him, she thinks, going through life this way, so different from everyone else. He steps a little closer to her, puts his hand on her shoulder. The first touch. She doesn’t move away.

‘We haven’t even got a coffee yet,’ he says. ‘Let me buy you a coffee, at least?’

Those beautiful brown eyes, even more beautiful up close. Small flecks of yellow around his irises.

‘I’m not sure I want one,’ she says.

‘Maybe get one just to have,’ he suggests. ‘In case you want it later.’

‘But then it’ll have cooled down,’ she says. ‘I definitely don’t want lukewarm coffee.’

‘Well then you’ll have to drink it now, I suppose.’

‘Okay then,’ she says. ‘Coffee. Coffee sounds good.’

They exit the bushes, him following her this time. They follow the path around towards the coffee cart, shoulders brushing off each other. The coffee cart has croissants, she remembers, he will probably make fun of how bad they are. They pass the pond, where new people are feeding the same ducks.

‘Do you have to eat for two?’ she asks, and almost goes to lightly elbow him in the side, before she remembers. He laughs a little, out of politeness, probably. He must have heard all the jokes before.

‘I eat well,’ he says. ‘Well, as well as I can here.’

‘In Dublin.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where the food is bad.’

‘Yes.’

‘Because French food is the best in the world.’

‘I’m glad I don’t have to convince you.’

They are at the coffee cart. The barista has long fake nails, all different colours. They join the queue, peruse the chalkboard menu.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ Róisín says to Adrien, putting her hand on his arm, as though they have known each other for a while, as though they go to the park every Sunday to go into the bushes together to inspect his torso and then get coffee. ‘Get settled on one of the benches. I’ll bring us over our drinks.’

‘Okay,’ he says, touching her other hand, lightly, briefly.

‘What would you like?’

‘A flat white. Oh, and get a babycino, also.’

‘A babycino?’

But he has turned already and is walking towards the area with benches. Maybe the babycino was a joke, she thinks. She looks at the menu again, ponders what she would like for herself. There are only two people in front of her now. She needs to decide.

She glances behind her, to see where Adrien has sat. Ah, there he is, or rather, there they are, for she sees now that Adrien is sitting with their little girl, Ciara-Mathilde, who is growing up so fast, three years old already, oh how time flies. She’s sitting on his lap in her favourite red dungarees, rubbing her little face against his beard and giggling. A group of people walk past Róisín, blocking her eyeline. After they pass, she sees it is just Adrien again, sitting on his own on the bench, waiting for her. No baby. No toddler. He smiles at her. Another group pass by and then, the scene has changed again: Adrien is older now, his hairline receding slightly, and there is a sulky teenager beside him. Ciara-Mathilde, in her Doc Martens and denim jacket, shoots her mother a scathing look. Oh how she wishes she’d never been born. Another few people pass, blocking Róisín’s view, and there, look, now it’s true, Ciara-Mathilde was never born at all, Adrien is sitting on his own again. The queue has moved. Róisín is next. The barista looks at her expectantly. 

‘What can I get you?’

‘Actually,’ Róisín says, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

Miriam Needham is from Manorhamilton, Co. Leitrim. Her work has been published in Banshee and HOWL New Irish Writing, and placed in competitions such as the Dingle Lit Short Story Award and the Cúirt New Writing Prize. She is working on her first collection of short stories.

About Sometimes Women Find It Strange: I wrote most of this story while on Inis Méain earlier this year, thanks to a residency with Áras Éanna. I was often asked if I was writing about the island (no) and if I was writing in Irish (also no, followed by a small pang of postcolonial guilt). I’m not much of a planner; there’s usually just an image or feeling I’m working towards. In earlier drafts, Adrien was an American tech bro and there was a lot more of Róisín’s backstory. The more time I spent with these characters, the fonder I became of them. Maybe I’ll put them in a story set on Inis Meáin one day.

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