Today, I want to highlight four beautifully crafted short stories you might have missed, from these Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025 shortlisted writers:

• Riley Johnston

• Mike Corbett

• Aisling Owens

Submit to Issue 4 thru October

Submit to Issue 4 thru October

Issue 3 of Frazzled Lit features nineteen wonderful short stories, and we’re so grateful to our readers for the warm reception they have received. Today, I want to highlight four exceptional stories you might have missed, from these writers:

• Alison Langley (Highly Commended)

• Seamus Scanlon (Finalist)

• Judy Birbeck (Highly Commended)

• Seamus Moran (Highly Commended)

Listen to Gary reading his winning story:

This morning, Magaluf

‘Close the door, Degsy, will ye?’ I shout. ‘The head’s hanging off me.’

No reply from your side of the apartment.

Outside, a recycling truck empties a bottle bank into a smashed glass mountain. Its erratic tune fights a distant siren’s wail. And shouting. There’s always someone shouting. The sun screams through the crepe-paper blind in the bedroom, hauling my mind into the ache of morning.

My phone is dead and time is molten. It could be five o’clock, could be ten. That’s what we came for. To escape routine, to reset before college.

We ignore the thought that this is the end of something. Forget how you hated me for studying on Friday nights, like I was breaking some childhood promise, trying to screw you over, leave you behind.

‘Degs! The balcony door!’

I burrow my head between the mattress and pillow, annoyed now, my brain marinated in beer. I pick at my index fingernail until it breaks.

We agreed on Day One of the holiday: whoever’s on the futon should pull the curtains and close the sliding door. It was you who came up with the house rules. You got all domestic after winning the toss to sleep in the bedroom.

You, the lad who says he’s moving out of home if he gets into UCC, but doesn’t bin his pizza boxes, can’t operate a washing machine. You’ll be taking a Lidl bag of boxer shorts and Spanish ants back to your mam’s house on Saturday.

Yesterday evening

A slip of paper slid under the door, a written warning from the Recepción. You read it to the group in the style of a lispy Spanish town crier with a few drinks on him.

‘Señores,

Atención: no music after 10pm.

Your travel company has received notificación.’

The teachers used to threaten to tell our mams at the first echo of laughter in the school corridors. Now the hotel has ratted us out to the holiday rep and threatened to evict us.

Last night was our fourth night of seven and you were half-joking about sleeping on the beach. No thanks. I turned off the tunes, suggested we drink in one of the other rooms. We have three between the eight of us. They’ve only had verbal warnings, nothing in writing.

The lads replaced the silenced dance music with their hand-clapping rendition of Freed From Desire while you folded the warning into a paper plane. Then you set it on fire, launched it into the night from the ninth floor, watched the flame burn out.

The sun-scalded Welsh girls on the balcony next door joined the chorus of N-na n-na n-nas.

When you scored Nia from Bangor on the first night, you left me small-talking to her bored-looking friend. I got nowhere, as usual. Nia was acne-stippled and quick-witted and keen as a Sambuca shot. None of that mattered. You would have shifted anything just to tick it off your list. Been avoiding the Welsh neighbours ever since.

You ducked back inside, angled the cap of a San Miguel against the table, chopped it with the heel of your hand, drank deep. Another chip in the table, the security deposit written off days ago.

This morning

The room is as still as a summer windsock. Cans and take-away boxes decorate the white-tiled floors. Sounds like there’s a fight outside.

I lie here wondering whether you were happy for me on Results Day. You’d arrived at my door with a fresh buzz cut and warm scones your mam had made to busy away her anxiety.

‘Suppose you’re delighted with yourself,’ you said. ‘Fair fucks.’

‘Cheers Degs,’ I said, afraid to ask how you’d done. ‘Want tea?’

I felt more relief than joy. Got about twenty points over what I’ll probably need for Law in UCD, although I won’t know for sure until the college offers land at lunchtime.

That’s if today is Wednesday. I'm ninety percent sure it is.

My world has slipped steadily out of focus since we counted up our points last Friday, as though an optician has been gradually overcorrecting my vision to the point of headache.

With the mystery gone out of the Leaving Cert results, we had a few quiet cans in your house. Then a few in the pub and a few more at a house party thrown by some lad we’d ignored for six years of school. I was in danger of catching sobriety the next morning until you put a pint in front of me in the airport bar. We’d waved goodbye to our parents, angst-shook by the idea of us flying out of sight for a week. Swear to God they’d been more relaxed on Results Day, our futures swinging in the breeze.

From then on, days and nights have been a shapeless blur of cans and shots and smoke and suntan lotions. The only handle I have on time is that every other night I get to sleep in the bedroom.

Yesterday evening, after your Town Crier performance

Did we ever have a proper row before? All I’d said was that a ‘quiet night in’ might be a nice change of pace, then back to destroying ourselves on Wednesday after the college offers.

‘We don’t want to get thrown out,’ I said, my shoulders offering a slouched apology.

I hadn’t got it in me to brave the nightclubs again, with the peach schnapps and failed chat-up lines, the broken sleep and thirsty mornings.

‘We’ve done three nights straight,’ I said. ‘And the nights began at lunchtime.’

You lost it. Called me a sad gimp, said I was boring. I told you to relax, asked if you were worried about college, said I was sure you'd get a place somewhere.

Bad move.

‘Thinks he’s Einstein, this prick,’ you said. ‘Just cos he fluked a distinction in Junior Cert maths.’

The laughs from the gang reminded me they were more your mates than mine. They only tolerate me because you and I grew up next door to one another.

‘Give it over,’ I said, but your engines were revved.

‘Pities me trying to scrape into college while he’s collecting his fucken scholarship medal!’

‘Chip on your shoulder, Degs.’

It was the lack of conviction in my voice that lost me the room. Maybe the room was always lost. Their bodies leaned away from me.

‘What did you say to me?’ Your face was in mine, dead-eyed, as if ready to bite down on my lip until blood flooded your chin.

I don’t know which of the lads put the hand on your shoulder: ‘Chill Degsy, it’s cool, it’s cool.’ I was too busy pretending not to be afraid.

You read the room, no appetite to sour a big night.

‘I’m messing, lads! God’s sake ‒ take the joke! C’mere to me, you.’ And you hugged me and thumped my back and we all laughed, and I suppose it was fine again. But we were definitely going on the town and this time you had the hunger on you.

‘Tequila for the road!’

We marched down the strip swigging petrol-blue cocktails from plastic cups, you setting the pace, your long legs tanned since Day Two. Stopped to chat up girls from Belfast, sang rebel songs at Sheffield lads who refused to get remotely aggro about it.

The bars all had the same music and drinking games, same smell of perfume, sweat and vapes. You danced and sang like the night would last forever. I just needed to get through the week, collect stories to tell in the local pub, and then get busy with college.

In the meantime, shots. Limbo under a glittery pole, win a shot. Sing a karaoke song, win a shot. Down five shots in a row, win a fucking shot.

‘Might take a year out,’ you roared into the ear of a student nurse from Manorhamilton. ‘It’s overrated, college. I’m more into health and fitness, career-wise, y’know?’

When you went AWOL, I reckoned you’d scored. Then you reappeared with pupils like buttons, full of the joys for the hour until your eyes began to dim. I took you outside, envious of your lust for risk, and annoyed by the burden of your intoxication. You hugged me, told me to lighten up, called me man, while I grilled you about what you’d taken and where you got it.

‘It’s alright, Degsy, just tell me. Do we need the hospital or–’

‘I need a piss and a hug, man, that’s all. And a big fat dirty sleep.’

You leaned over the knee-high wall of a dry fountain in the heart of the old square. They stopped the water to avoid drownings; now it just gathers sand and sick.

Impatience was brewing in the group. They wanted you dragged up so we could push on to the next bar. The lads were exchanging Leaving Cert results and college hopes with a crowd from Mallow who were heading to The Twisted Shamrock, happy to fold us into the mix.

But you looked worse in the karaoke lights, even after a pint of water. You slumped onto a table, spilled someone’s bottle of Breezer and sparked a bout of pushing and shoving, until we were all outside, motion sick, standing still in our sticky t-shirts.

The gang said I was ‘sound’ for taking you off their hands. Made sense for me to be the one to get you home. Your roommate, classmate. Used to say best mate, but we both know we’ve been drifting. In primary school, we were the same, inseparable. Secondary, you got popular, got girls, got stoned. This past year, while I was panicking about exams, you were pub-crawling around our three-pub town, living your best life.

You were a mess on the slow walk back to the hotel.

‘I love you,’ you said. ‘Brothers since the minute we met, yeah?’

You cried in the lift, said your mother will be in bits if you don’t get Arts in Cork. Said you were afraid you’d end up dropping out, and you wanted to be a personal trainer.

‘Don’t forget me after the holiday, when you’re off in UCD.’

‘I won’t forget anyone.’

‘Don’t go getting fancy new Law friends,’ you said. ‘I’m your fucken friends.’

I told you we’d talk tomorrow, which must mean we’ll talk today.

‘You’re a sound man, man. Sound man.’

This morning

I’m swinging between sickness and starvation, an acidic emptiness in my stomach. Chances of getting back to sleep: nil.

I’m shouting into the void, my eyes closed.

‘Degs, will we eat?’

You’re either asleep or can’t hear me for the racket outside. Sirens, raised voices. I sit up on the edge of the bed, drain the last beads of water from a plastic cup, and bring myself to an unsteady stand. Hold it there for a minute, tell myself I’m alright, not going to puke, just need water and plain food.

A phone rings. Can’t be mine, mine’s dead.

I shuffle into the kitchen. On the table, a vibrating screen lit with the word MAM. Your Mam. I can’t answer it.

‘Degs, are you in the jacks? Your mam’s ringing …’

Bathroom door’s open, but you’re not there.

The phone falls silent. I pick it up, tap in your birthdate and see a rake of WhatsApps.

➢ Fair play Derek, love Auntie B

➢ Good luck in Cork Degs ye langer! am I sayin that right?

➢ Congrats ‒ knew you had it in you love Mam [heart]

Footsteps pound up the corridor. A fist batters the door.

‘Who is it?’ I shout.

There’s screeching from the Welsh gang’s balcony, a string of Oh-my-Christs!

Out through the open doors, into a sheet of sunlight, the hot tiles sting the soles of my bare feet.

‘Hey guys.’ I nod at the girls, clear my throat. ‘What’s the story?’

Nia, through her hands. ‘There’s someone down there!’

Gary Finnegan's fiction has appeared in Litro, The London Magazine, Howl, Ropes, and The Irish Independent. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was selected for the Freedom to Write Award in 2024 by PEN/Ireland & The John Hewitt Society. Gary has an MA in creative writing and is working on a novel.

Listen to Jess reading her story:

It has been 729 days since I was last touched and now I’m on a minibus inching away from Reykjavik. The rain has sheeted down relentlessly for the past week. The receptionist at the hotel says Icelandic rain has a special quality, it comes from every direction. From the sky. But also upwards, from the ground, and sideways, from the swirl of the wind.

Each successive excursion wears a groove in my brain. Geysers. Waves. Rocks. Wind. Cold. The bus is small and stuffy. The driver is enthusiastic. He talks of history, geology. I try to listen. I watch the raindrops skittle across the bus window. There is lava as far as the eye can see, frozen in motion, so the stones look as if they could stand up and walk away at any moment. On top of the lava is a strange green moss; a key ecological lynchpin, though the driver does not use the word lynchpin. He says the moss is important. It is the product of a symbiotic relationship, unique to Iceland. My fellow passengers and I are dutifully impressed for a minute then, as the lava field continues beyond all reason, the novelty wears off and it is just grey and green tumbling on forever, interspersed by floating clouds of steam.

Today’s trip is to the split in the mid-Atlantic ridge, known as Silfra. The driver tells us this is the Icelandic word for silver. Through the window, the lagoon appears as smooth as a mirror. The surface shimmers, fractures concealed beneath.

I follow the others down the steps. My face is needle-pricked with cold, despite the hood on my expensive coat. Mist hangs heavy over the cliffs. The driver introduces us to our guide for the next activity. Here, we will snorkel between continents. I am unable to make meaning from any of this. The scale is off. The activity seems absurd. I can’t remember why I thought this would help.

After day 365 passed, I waited to be healed. A year gone. Friends encouraged me to get out more, to try harder. I wanted to try. Somewhere between day 365 and now, I come to realise I am a symbiont, locked in association with you.

On day 721, I took a flight. A week and two days until I would mark a second year. Too long to be quivering still.

I booked the holiday in the hope it would help me become a less faulty version of myself. A good sign, people told me. New horizons. Progress. I nodded along.

I didn’t say, if I let go of the grip with which I contain myself, I will scream and scream until my insides are outside and a wildness takes over.

I didn’t say, I am terrified to move beyond this place.

I don’t say, I am bored of my own thoughts and impatient with my own fissures.

Up the steps. Into the plane. I stowed my luggage. Buckled my seatbelt. Looked down and watched as a string of islands gave way to the emptiness of ocean.

The trailer smells of sweat and dried out rubber. It reminds me of PE lessons. My heart stutters at the sight of the diving suits. The rack rattles as one after another we clamber into the changing space. The suits shiver on their hangers, as if occupied already.

We are told to undress. I haven’t taken my clothes off in front of other people for even longer than 729 days. The guide tells us Icelandic people are very at ease with communal nakedness. I feel heat rise up my throat, a panic spreading.

The guide laughs when he sees the looks on our faces.

- Don’t take everything off, he says, - Keep your leggings and thermals on. Just lose the outer stuff.

The guide holds himself with the ease of someone whose body obeys him. He reminds me of you because of that. For the first time in a long time, I feel my attention snag. I take the drysuit by the hanger, careful not to brush fingers and he smiles at me as I do.

Some six months before I start counting days, you walk into the pub with my friend Beth and get a round in. Beth slides the tray of drinks onto the picnic table and it lurches as you sit down. I like the way you split open the crisps, making it clear they are for sharing. I lick salt from my fingers and think you seem nice.

On that night in the pub, I fizz gently with possibilities. It’s nearly summer. We stay until the sky turns inky and the midges drive us out of the beer garden.

Inside the drysuits, all bodies are smoothed blank. We are the same now except for the things that can’t be changed. Our height. Our hands. I feel the boundary of my hidden shape, encased in another skin. The suit seems to contain the memory of the glacial lake we will soon be swimming in. I worry I will freeze. My thighs are cold already.

Back outside, we are told to line up. Our physicality is assessed. To stop water finding its way into the sleeves, straps are positioned, cuffing each wrist. As the guide looks me in the eye and pulls a rubber strap tight, my stomach spasms. Next it is the neck straps which are thicker, longer. Something inside me trembles. As he steps into my space, the air around me shifts. I’ve not let anyone come this close for the longest while. This time he doesn’t make eye contact. More gently than I expect, he folds the excess collar of the drysuit down. We are given hoods to cover our necks and heads. The guide helps me peel the hood over my skull. The rubber grips with an intensity that makes me feel I am already underwater. It’s difficult to hear. His mouth makes shapes but I can’t discern the individual words. When he moves my hair so it is captured by the folds of the hood, it is the most intimate moment I have experienced in months.

Then he looks at me.

– How did you get that? he asks, finger almost touching my face. He means the scar.

It's been 729 days since I was last touched. There’s a scar, just under my right eye. I got that on the last day I was touched. When you last touched me.

The guide hands out snorkels. He demonstrates how to bite down on the mouthpiece. We are told to suck the pipe to get used to how it feels. Already my breath is changed. I am suspended, caught between two states. Above us, the sky has lightened. The rain stops.

On day 2, they told me I was lucky not to the lose the eye. I nodded and tried to feel lucky. They asked what happened.

– Fell into a coffee table, I said.

– Oh aye? Come at ye did it? said the consultant. I pressed my lips together and refused to say anything more.

In the waiting room was a poster saying ask for Ani if you needed to talk to someone without your partner present. No relevance to me anyway. You weren’t there. You left as soon as the blood leaked from my face. I might have shouted at you to go.

There is a ladder into the water. The first moment of descent; a pause to see if the drysuit will hold. Below my eye, my skin tingles in the place where his finger didn’t quite touch. I try to focus. The guide tells us not everyone makes it into the lagoon. He says people expect scuba to be like skydiving, where after the first movement, you let gravity do the rest. But it’s not like that. You have to propel yourself forward, you have to choose to move. Staring into the deep, the sensation of falling and not moving at the same time, it confuses people. Then there is the cold. Despite the straps and the hoods, water does seep in wherever there are joins. My cheeks go numb. My lips feel too large.

We are instructed to practice rolling. Lie back, says the guide. Look at the sky, take out the snorkel. Breath normally. Float until rescued. The suit will keep you buoyant.

This is new. It hasn’t occurred to me that physical things could protect me. I wonder if this is escape.

By the time my eye healed, 67 untouched days had passed. Of course, that’s not true. Lots of other people touched me after that night; the anaesthetist, the consultant, innumerable nurses. They were all very careful to tell me what they were going to do before they did it. Their touches don’t count.

When the stiches dissolved, I took the eyepatch off. Seeing the world with two eyes again felt like an assault. Too many edges. Too much space. I did a lot of blinking. I avoided bright lights. And being alone with other people.

Diving is a head game, our guide tells us. You have to override your body’s instinct to get you out of a situation in order to experience what you came here to see.

I roll and roll and roll.

Face down, face up.

Breathe out, breathe in.

Water, sky, water, sky.

Water.

When I keep my face down I’m stunned by how the cavern drops away. The water is diamond sharp. Sunlight shafts uninterrupted and the rocks and spaces beneath me fall through layers of green becomes blue becomes brown until only darkness remains. Some reflex kicks in, my head jolts up and back. Water trickles down the pipe, liquid ice burns the roof of my mouth. I understand now, why depths frighten people. My senses are screaming. I am falling. I am stuck still.

Day 0.

There was a moment between impact and the bloom of pain spreading across my cheekbone. My fingers dabbed in wetness, not knowing if it was blood or tears or the contents of my eye socket. I was on my knees and you were above me. The wash of relief when you left. In different circumstances I might have shouted after you not to slam the door.

We swim further on. There is no shore, no horizon, only below or above. The difference between our languid pace and how each new glance reveals something freshly incomprehensible makes me dizzy. Our guide points to make sure we realise what we are looking at. This is the section they call the cathedral. Instead of spires grasping upwards, there are pinnacles inverted. On land, I thought this a fanciful name. Now, I see the schism where two continents continuously wrench apart, the fracture between them. I am undone. Within the gap is the detritus of the shock, the perpetual movement of the earth. I exhale. The air hisses through my clenched teeth. I suck and the cold rasps my mouth.

A moment. Only look down.

Spit the pipe.

Water. Sky.

Water.

Jess Dolan is the recipient of a New Writers Award 2025 from the Scottish Book Trust and her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2024. She is based in the Scottish Borders and writes about the relationship between people and places.

Listen to Emily reading Amy’s Mom:

After Amy’s mom drops dead, like literally drops right in her driveway, groceries spilled all around her, we sit in my basement and get high and plan what to do if ours do too. Meaning our moms. Meaning if they just drop dead.

Chrissy pulls her socks up and pushes them down, one leg at a time, over and over. Sarah kicks her to get her to stop, but she just moves out of reach and keeps going. I pack the pipe and hand it to Sarah, who takes a hit.

“I mean, fuck,” I say, and Sarah nods as she holds her breath. After a moment, she exhales through her nose and cough-barks, and on any other day, we would laugh, but today we’re just too weirded out that Amy’s mom is dead. Just yesterday she texted me to see if I wanted to go to Cincinnati for the long weekend with them. She said she would call my mom if I wanted to, that it would be nice for Amy to have a friend along, as if I was doing them a favor. That’s what she was like.

Chrissy makes a high-pitched noise, a whimper, and I realize she looks like a meerkat. I’m about to say that out loud, but Sarah starts to cry, and I’ve never seen Sarah cry, not even when her dad left, and she says, “I don’t want my mom to die,” and Chrissy keeps pulling her socks up and pushing them down, and I realize it’s going to be on me to pull our shit together.

“We’ll be fine if our moms die,” I say, “We’re already self-sufficient.”

“No we’re not,” says Sarah. Turns out she looks just like her mom when she cries, which is weird, since Sarah is way taller and we all know she looks exactly like her dad, the douchebag. “How the fuck would we pay for shit? How’re we going to get places?” She hands me the pipe and the lighter. I take a hit and pass it on to Chrissy, who stops with her socks long enough to smoke.

Yesterday dead moms wasn’t even on our radar, but now we know it could happen to any of us, because Amy is the good one, the one who does everything right, and her mom, who’s dead now, who died in her driveway surrounded by little glass jars of expensive yogurt and lemons and probably whole wheat pasta, went to Pilates every day, which we used to make fun of, sure, but we were also like, Jesus, she looks good for a mom. And our moms don’t. Chrissy’s mom’s drunk all the time and Sarah’s mom doesn’t eat and my mom’s too depressed to get out of bed most days to check if her fifteen-year-old daughter’s getting high in her own house. I wonder what they were like at our age, if they sat around in a basement getting high talking shit about their moms. I don’t know about Chrissy and Sarah’s moms, but I can’t picture mine passing a joint and laughing.

“We’ll make a plan,” I say. “In case.”

I figure we can watch Amy and see how she does it, because if anyone can pull off being motherless it will be Amy. She’s always the one of us that makes shit look easy, but not in an annoying way, not in a way that makes you want to punch her in the kidney or cut her hair while she’s sleeping or stop going to her house after school every day. She just kind of floats over shit, like she’s put together and light and bounceable in a way that makes us feel that way too. She’s just like her mom.

“I always thought it’d be my mom,” Sarah says, and I don’t argue. Sarah went to live with her uncle for six weeks last year because her mom wouldn’t eat anything but cucumbers and rice crackers. We found her passed out at the bottom of the stairs one day after school with a knife in her hand and no clothes on. We called Amy’s mom and she came right over without even asking any questions, like she knew exactly what to do and who to call and how to get Sarah to let go of her mom’s arm long enough to get her in the ambulance.

I Google meerkats and it’s uncanny how much they look like Chrissy, with their dark, wide eyes and their skinny arms and the way they look around like they know shit’s about to go down, like they’re ready for it. Chrissy’s whole family look like meerkats, even her step-father. I can picture them all standing on a little hill, their ears twitching, Chrissy’s little brother hiding behind her like he always does, as if that’s going to help.

Sarah passes a bag of Doritos to me. I put the long side of a triangle in my mouth and try to close my lips around the whole thing. Amy’s mom would never buy Doritos. Maybe she’d buy those organic ones, the ones with natural cheese and no preservatives, but probably not. For my birthday last year she made me a chocolate cake from scratch, which Amy must have told her is my favorite, and we sat around her kitchen table and they sang to me and then Amy’s mom told me to make a wish, which I said I did, even though I didn’t, and then we ate cake and drank milk like we were in a fucking dairy commercial. It was amazing.

“We’re lucky,” I say, and I’m about to make up a few reasons why, but Chrissy stops playing with her socks and I think she might say something. Sarah leans towards her so she’ll be able to hear. But Chrissy just reaches for a Dorito. If she did speak, I wish it would be something like, “Are you kidding me right now, Jen? I mean, are you actually fucking kidding me with this lucky shit right now?” I wish Chrissy talked like that. It would be good for her, I think, to get mad, even if it’s just at me.

“What do you think Amy’s doing right now?” I ask, wiping orange cheese on my jeans. I picture her in her bedroom. It’s all soft colors and she has a feather comforter with a Moana duvet cover, which we make fun of, but Amy doesn’t care. She says Moana makes her happy. That’s what she’s like. She doesn’t care if someone makes fun of something as long as it makes her happy. I think she gets that from her mom.

“Probably missing us,” Sarah says, and we all nod, even Chrissy.

“We should probably go see her,” I say. I look at my phone to see if she’s texted, but there’s nothing. “Things’ll be different now,” I say.

If Amy’s mom was still alive we’d be at her house, probably sitting at the kitchen table, and she would be asking us about school and putting out cheese and apples and shit, or pouring us iced tea, the kind with no sugar in it, and we’d be rolling our eyes, but really, we’d be eating it up, all of it, the questions, the cheese, the apple slices, the way she’d rest her hand on our backs as she walked around the table, stopping at each of us as if she knew we just needed someone to touch us, and I would probably be saying something stupid about math class, and Amy would be laughing, and Sarah would be interrupting me every two minutes to say something about some boy, probably Stephen, and Chrissy, well, Chrissy would just be there, not talking because she never talks, but she’d be looking so, safe, I guess, because that’s what Amy’s mom made us all feel. Like she was looking out for us, like maybe we’d actually be okay some day, like maybe we’d grow up to be just fine.

“We’ll be okay,” I say. I reach out slowly to put a hand on Chrissy’s foot and she doesn’t pull away. I pick at a scab on my arm.

Emily Rinkema lives and writes in northern Vermont, USA. Her writing has recently appeared in Variant Lit, Flash Frog, Fictive Dream, Ghost Parachute, and Wigleaf, and she won the 2024 Cambridge Prize and the 2024 Lascaux Prize for flash fiction. You can follow her on X, BS, or IG (@emilyrinkema).

Listen to a reading of this story (reading by Vero Auclaire):

Callie dies first, because of course she does. She’s a cheerleader. Diamond thigh gap in daisy dukes and perky boobs her boyfriend’s daddy bought her, if you pay any mind to the rumors around school, which obviously we do because we’re sixteen and seventeen and if we know anything at all it’s that gossip is currency we can trade for social capital. In any case Brittany mentions it at the start of the movie – Ryan’s dad paid for those, right? – so that fourteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds later when the camera pans over Callie’s naked chest you’ll probably wonder too: real or fake? You can pause it there, for a second, if you like; examine the body that Callie will be in for as long as you suffer the moment to last. She doesn’t know that Ryan is dead or dying already, bleeding out in the shower. When she feels the dip on the mattress beside her she doesn’t turn to look, only smiles and says teasingly: ready for round two? She hates that line. So porny: cringe! she says, and wrinkles her nose in that way Madison always said made her look like a guinea pig. We didn’t like Callie back then, although I like her well enough now. But I’m prevaricating, to hold off what comes next. Unpause.

When the knife makes its breach the camera follows. In and out and then in again it goes, thrusting, out and in, wet squelch and wordless gasp and arterial spray pulsing in wild rhythmic bursts. And then silence, stillness, and no more Callie. Parts only: crimson streaks on long lean thighs, flat midriff standing out golden brown against suggestively tangled white sheets. The blood is corn syrup, mixed with some other stuff. Callie says it tastes of cherries and America. When she tells us that she sounds wistful and there’s a faraway look in her eyes and I can tell she’s thinking about being the top girl in the pyramid, turning cartwheels in the lilac light of the neon diner sign, Ryan’s grimy truck with the vintage leather seats idling on the long stretch of tarmac that leads out of town and off into the wide horizon, into a future she’ll never see. Real? Or fake?

After Callie, Marcy Ann; after Marcy Ann, Laura. But Brittany’s is the hardest, I think. She wants to live so badly. She doesn’t believe in God, so no hereafter, no beyond, no next time; only this and here and now. When whatever his name is – Jason, Michael, Billy? – breaks in through the dining room window she takes her little brother’s hockey stick and waits in the shadow of his bedroom doorway. And you know what, she puts up a real good fight. Doesn’t stop her from dropping like a stunned steer when he stabs her in the back of the knee, though. (Laura sighs and says well, that’s her hockey career over before it ever even got started). For Brittany’s end the camera grants her a dignity it does not often allow, the reward she earns for fighting, and drifts instead to the blood-spattered framed family picture that hangs above the landing: Brittany and her brother, knotted ocean-breeze hair and gappy elementary school teeth. She stopped going to church with the rest of her family because her brother was diagnosed with leukemia when he was ten and even though he got better she says she can’t believe in the existence of any higher power that would have let him suffer like that when the worst thing he’d ever done in his entire life was flush her math homework down the toilet in third grade. I remember that story as I listen to the rasping gasp of her dying breaths. It’s not so bad, really – Brittany’s a fan favorite, an audience-friendly blend of tomboy spunk and kittenish mien, so they bring her back in the third movie. Not alive, but she gets four lines of dialog in the next killer’s hallucination, a few ethereal seconds in Madison’s dream sequence. She says that’s a kind of afterlife, I guess. It is what it is. Loose shrug, rueful snap of gum, practiced nonchalance that turns to a hollow grief when she thinks we’re not watching. But we’re always watching; we can’t look away.

When the killing started we all knew Madison would be the one to make it. I was her best friend – I knew it most of all. I don’t know how to explain that certainty except to say that she was always a person, and I was only ever a girl. A handful of impressions: pictures of pop stars in a high school locker, long hair obscuring the name on a varsity jacket, sneaker-squeak echoes on a polished gym floor. Like if the Mona Lisa caught fire and everything burned all up except for the smile, and also she’s wearing shiny pink bubblegum lipgloss. A cipher pretending to be an enigma; a whole lot of fucking nothing. But Maddie, Maddie was the whole damn painting, the artist’s muse, a real presence outside of the glass and the gilded frame. A person. You feel it inside of you, when you’re just a tag-along extra to somebody else’s deal. Even my death wasn’t about me. The audience can project whatever they want onto the spectacle of my butchered body: death of an innocent, death of a whore, death of the American Dream. What do I care? Maddie, Maddie, my final girl. In the sequels my picture hangs on your wall. Maddie, my love, I haunt your narrative. An ouija board spelling out: ell-em-ay-oh, a string of knife emojis and a solitary dancing girl.

I don’t want to talk about the ending, Jason/Michael/Billy’s neck opened on his own blade, Madison walking out of the woods in her blood-soaked prom dress. You know all of that already. Hers is the image that persists; not Callie’s seamless tan and long blonde hair, not Brittany swinging that hockey stick like a wild thing, not the way I looked at Madison as though the sun rose and set in her eyes. We are the ashes in which she was reborn, the blast shadows of her nuclear ascension to godhood. We are transfixed in celluloid like beetles trapped in amber: inert eternity. Brittany smiles her funny lopsided smile and says, bet you can’t say that five times fast, huh?

I want to talk about………. math class. I was always the best at trig even though I pretended not to understand it because I was afraid of not being like everyone else. Stupid, right? When I was a little kid I wanted to be a vet. Back then we had a golden retriever named Donatello after my favorite turtle and I used to practice bandaging his paws in gauze until he ate one of the bandages and we had to take him to the vet for real. Then I realised that being a vet was kind of gross, actually, you have to put your hand in cows’ buttholes and stuff, and I decided to be a ballerina instead, and I made my mom pay for lessons all the way up until I hit puberty and my body changed in all the wrong ways for ballet. By the time I turned seventeen I didn’t know what I’d be.

Callie’s cartwheels, Brittany’s brother’s blood cancer, my dumb dog and my good grades and the way boys always liked Maddie best. Stories we knitted together out of props and set dressing and that we tell each other over and over again, like ghost stories at a camp-out. Flashlights shining under our chins as we spin our tales. The more we repeat them the more they begin to feel like memories. Do you know how much it sucks to be seventeen forever? Sugar and spice and all things nice, as if! More like: menstrual blood and backstabbing and scabby knuckles from making ourselves puke after every meal. We inhabit an ecosystem of our own devising, speak our own coded language. We are impenetrable to those without, unless you come wielding knives. But don’t you love to watch?

Go on: rewind, press play, rewind again. Back past the corn syrup blood and the eye drop tears and the carefully coached screams, all the way back to the start. There I am, look! Scene one, INT: high school cafeteria, tossing my braid back over my shoulder and smiling, perfect orthodontics and a spray of freckles across the bridge of my nose. Oh my God, I’m saying to Madison, can you even believe…? Isn’t it soooo funny. Fingertips on an iPhone keyboard tapping out ugh, so hot. Take me back to the beginning. Rewind. Play. Let me come alive for you again.

Robyn Jefferson is a short story writer and aspiring novelist from Bristol, England. Her work has been published widely online, shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and awarded third place in both the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize and the GWG Literary Prize. In 2022 she was the first place winner of The Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Competition with a chapter from her debut novel, Calling Out. She has a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing, for which she earned a Distinction.

Vero Auclaire, who read Robyn’s story, is an artist from Southern California, with paintings currently exhibited in a gallery in Laguna Beach. Working primarily in acrylics and mixed media, her art is known for its vibrancy and emotional depth, drawing inspiration from color, nature, and emotion. A lifelong animal lover who has been active in animal rescue for years, she shares her life with her Newfoundland, BamBam. In addition to her visual art, Vero brings stories to life through narration and welcomes commissions, collaborations, and inquiries from collectors and art lovers. For inquiries, contact: vero@veroeauclaire.com

In Galway I walk along the canal from University Road all the way down to the end of Dominic Street. Black heavy clouds hang low over the grey streets.

My mother and her best friend Nancy use this route on Saturday nights to walk into town. They hold hands in the dark. They blow Sweet Afton cigarette smoke into each other’s faces. And drink vodka and orange from Galway Mineral Red Lemonade bottles. Later on, they will walk out to Lower Salthill to the Oasis in The Warwick. It was behind the Warwick I was conceived ten years ago. My mother is 26 now. I am 10. Do the math.

Ma was a wild girl from Mervue. She went to the Mercy. She fought the posh Taylor’s Hill girls and laid them out on Galway’s wet shiny streets. Her father was a murder man. Her mother was a nurse from Mayo who was broken by them both. Ma told me she was going to name me Oasis but decided on Séamus. I would have preferred her first choice.

Ma lived with her beau Jimmy in a tent near the Cotton Factory near beside Scoil Iosagain for years until Jimmy fell through the front window of Anthony Ryan’s Menswear on Shop Street just as two Gardaí were passing by on street patrol. Jimmy wanted a suit to make a good impression for his appearance at the court House in Galway the following Friday. As he was looking at the suits on the manakins in the display window he tripped over something and went head first through the window pulling a suited manakin with him. He went to Mountjoy for three years. He said it was because he had no suit. When Jimmy was sentenced she found out she was pregnant. That’s how Galway love stories happen.

Ma moved back in with her mother and then found Nancy. She was an exotic dancer from New York who had come to live across the road from us in Mervue. She said she had some Irish roots. Nancy had dreamy languid eyes. She had tanned taut thighs (that’s a long story). She said she had to get out of New York fast. She was fast she told me but I thought she was talking about cross country running or something.

Nancy stayed with her aunt and uncle, the Leepers (I called them the Lepers), and their daughter, Oasis – joke – it was Mary. She had only one hand. Not sure what happened. Her father was a famous butcher in High Street. I am just saying. I was always fascinated by that missing hand. She wore an elegant lilac colored glove. Anytime I saw Mary on the street I would rush across the road and put out my hand to shake it. I feigned having a club foot so she would not feel self-conscious. I am all heart.

They were best pals from day one. Myself and Ma were not.

Ma said I held her back. Ma said I made her bleed inside her head where it really counts. Ma said ‘if I had your perfect skin, I could have been Miss Galway. Or at least Miss Mervue. ‘

Nancy would wink at me, lean down and whisper – “it’s just the drink talking. And the pain. And the loneliness. And the way she was made. And what she went through. And her father being a murder man fat far away now over in Broadmoor. And Jimmy – the thick - having no balance. And no suit. And the Galway weather. And fish on Friday.” And on and on.

Nancy also gave me stolen hugs. And crisp fivers. And Tayto crisps. And told me to get ‘that hair’ cut. And to stop running wild. And to stop pulling knives. And to stop arsing around. And to drop Mary Leeper. And to stop being Galway’s number one (and only) arsonist. And to stop sleeping out in the back garden. And to stop telling people my name was Oasis. And to wear shoes when I walked along the canals of Galway with their black deep water and their strong silent currents that carried babies and forlorn boy-girls out to the far sea.

Ma and Nancy sit on the flat granite flagstones along the canal bank, their feet dangling over the edge, the humid night air folds them in, the swans of the Claddagh float quietly by, the bells from the Poor Clare’s ring out from Nun’s Island, the snouts of black seals break the surface, the fog horn from Mutton Island is a sad mellow echo, the diesel engines of trawlers heading out from the docks strain against the incoming tide, boot boys stride past with their German shepherds tethered to their wiry teenage wrists, their metal cleats striking the footpaths. The melodies of Galway town fall down on them.

I watch Ma and Nancy from the dark shadows.

Their love laughs throaty and rich.

Their faces adored and adoring.

I look away.

Inside I am hurt deep.

Where it really counts.

Seamus Scanlon is a working class author from Galway, Ireland. He writes fiction, flash fiction and drama. Recent accomplishments include The McGowan Trilogy play production in Kilkenny (May 2025); Inclusion in the 2025 Fish Anthology (Jul 2025); The 2024 Fish Anthology (Jul 2024); The 2025 Bath Flash Fiction Anthology (Dec 2025); The 2024 Bath Flash Fiction Anthology (Dec 2024); The Fuel Poverty Anthology (UK, Feb 15, 2023).

Bernie Duffy dropped her fist down on Dee’s gate. ‘Hear about the wee lad down Duncairn?’

Dee puffed a ring of smoke into the air and said nothing.

‘Coma,’ said Bernie. She drew an exclamation mark with her head then stomped off with a child in tow.

‘Aye,’ Dee replied; an unheard drawl, because Dee wasn’t for having the likes of Bernie Duffy barking tales of wee lads in comas at her on her stoop. She spent all day on her stoop. There, in the open, as a favour to her neighbours whose kids she minded as they played in the street. Dee looked after her own grandkids too, of which there were four now and Dee was awful proud of this. She had her first at sixteen and, although people frowned on kids having kids, Dee was proud of hers for doing it, like she did, at sixteen and eighteen. Here she was now, at forty-two, with four grandkids and all the energy in the world to mind them. Dee wasn’t here for anyone’s judgement. She smiled at the kids in the street, who drew pictures with chalk on the pavement.

Another thing Dee did for her neighbours was to put a wee carrier bag on her gate. For rubbish. Every few hours, depending on the day, she’d empty it into her own bin then replace it. It was mostly plastic bottles and she’d just buck them straight in the wheelie bin out the back. Dee wasn’t in for all that recycling and climate crisis carry-on the young ones got their knickers in a twist over. Wasn’t it all about the ozone layer in her day? Not even allowed to spray your deodorant and now they’re saying the ozone layer is grand, actually. There was no need for all that hysteria and it was the same with the climate crisis. Plus, Dee didn’t give a hoot about bumblebees. Them things stung kids and no one ate honey anymore, except hipsters and they only pretended to like it because they thought they were better. Dee couldn’t be doing with hipsters and do-gooders and all them ones cycling and crying over wildflowers and reusing nappies. Dirty bastes the lot of them. It was Dee’s opinion that people needed to wise up over the climate. Do no harm to have a bit of heat and fewer bees bumbling about.

There used to be a big black metal bin on the street but the council took it away because the kids set it alight. Dee didn’t mind being the replacement bin. It suited her. The kids all knew the routine. They’d turn up with a wee bit of rubbish in their hands and they’d go, ‘right Dee? What’s the craic?’ and then slide their wee bit of rubbish into the bag and keep Dee’s eye while they did it. Dee would know. She’d get off her stoop and take the two steps to the wall, say, ‘how’s your ma?’ or da or sister or whoever in the family was presently in a bit of a bad way, then she’d reach into her dressing gown pocket and deposit the yoke on the wall as she leaned. She’d talk loudly then so everyone could hear because Dee had nothing to hide. Depending on the age of the punter, she’d tell them a wee bit of news about her kids or grandkids like who was going on their holidays or out for the night or if someone got a new bit of kit or a car. She’d tell them all about it. The neighbours would be in no doubt that she was just having a wee chat about her kids because she was - as she told them all often - very proud of them.

Technically, Dee worked for her eldest, Darragh. Dee preferred to see it the other way round. She was the one with the entrepreneurial flare whilst Darragh was just the money man, supplier…heavy. His wee one, Curtis was old enough now to do the odd run. Just round the estate, mind. It saved Dee leaving her stoop which she couldn’t be doing too often, not after your one up in the new houses phoned the hotline and Dee nearly lost her disability allowance. And sure, she had to keep an eye on the kids who were playing. Wee Curtis ran laps and earned himself a quare bit of money. He was saving for a Beamer like his da’s, he told Dee and she was dead proud of him being sensible with his earnings. She watched him now, playing in the street with the younger kids. Every time one of them drew a picture on the kerb, Curtis would go over with his bottle and squirt lines of water through it. Dee laughed. He must have put a wee hole in the top of the bottle to make it squirty. Curtis was clever like that and Dee would never discourage him from expressing his creativity. He was just like his da and Dee loved to think about the wonderful things he’d get from life.

She was disrupted from reverie by a text message alert on her phone. Irritated, she replied with one word: ‘right’. She wouldn’t hurry to deliver, not while Curtis was having so much fun. See, Dee had a philosophy: you’re here for a good time, not a long time. She said those words out loud at least three times a day to people passing by. No one passed without a chat. Dee wouldn’t have it. She thought it was awful rude not to stop and talk to a person on their stoop who minds kids all day. Now, there were a few around the estate who wouldn’t even look at her. Stuck up, Dee called them. All jealous of her. How many forty-two-year-olds could boast of having a big loving extended family who all adored their granny and be able to party ‘til the wee hours on a night out? Dee rubbed it in whenever she could. A few stuck-up neighbours needed to hear how blessed Dee was. When her grandkids got picked up, Dee would stand on her stoop and shout ‘love you!’ as they got into the car. And they would all chorus back. Then she’d walk behind the car as it drew out of the street and shout, ‘love you!’ again and the kids would have the windows down now yelling it back in their wee high-pitched voices and it would go on for ages. Except her Danni, who lived just up the road. She and wee Gracie-Jo would walk down to Dee and she’d hear the I love yous fade in the distance as they left the street. It was class.

‘How’s it going, Mary?’ she said to Mary Devlin, who shuffled past the gate.

‘Weather’s great isn’t it?’ Mary replied, wrapped up in a beige raincoat and struggling to haul a shopping cart behind her up the slight incline.

‘Aye’ said Dee. Being old looked shit and Dee didn’t know why everyone wanted to be healthy and last for ages. Dee ate what she wanted and smoked like a train. She’d been a fierce glue-sniffer as a child. Did her no harm at all. None. Dee reckoned some people were just tougher than others. That’s the way life is. You take what you can get - luck-wise - but when your time’s up, it’s up. Not that Dee didn’t mourn her dead. There was nothing Dee enjoyed more than mourning her dead. Her house was filled with photos of her dead and wee keepsakes and ornaments and whatnot. Dee was very into the dead. But she wasn’t afraid of it. When your time’s up, it’s up. She told people that a lot but not as much as she told people, you’re here for a good time not a long time.

She’d the odd nightmare, had Dee. Mostly the same one. It was more of a flashback, she supposed and Dee figured its reoccurrence was just a wee ghost of the seizures she had from time to time. Back in her glory days, it was. Thirteen years old and afraid of nothing. She and her mates would go up City Cemetery with a bag of glue and a packet of fegs between them. Months of bliss and not a school day done. That was, until one of their crowd went too far. A novice. It was her face. They had to look at it for ages because by the time someone went to the main road and knocked a door for help and by the time the ambulance found them in the cemetery, it had gotten dark and it was cold and the moon was out and it reflected off the wee girl’s skin and her eyes were white and wide.

It got some people that way. That’s the way it goes. But as Dee said – and this would be third on the list of her sayings, fourth, if you count the love yous – but you could be hit by a bus just as likely. Or back in the day, shot by B Specials or blown to bits by a pipe bomb. You’ve to make your own way. Dee said that too, to her kids and grandkids. No one matters but family. She had that stencilled on the wall of her kitchen. You could get hit by a bus.

Dee’s phone buzzed again. The same person. Dee sighed. Diazepam was her biggest seller. Gummies didn’t cut it for the older ones. Dee was prone herself. Some nights she tried not to because business picked up at night and she had to be ready to scoot to the back door for people at their wits’ end, rattling the handle and threatening to end it all there and then.

‘Curtis! Stap that nai!’ Dee guldered into the street.

That was Curtis’s cue. He sauntered over, looking all meek like she’d trained him. Dee leaned into his ear and he nodded, did his best chastened face, then off he ran, duty bound. Dee sat back on her stoop and lit another feg. Sure, it was only Diazepam. Thoughts of coma kid flittered into her conscience. Same age as her mate in the cemetery. She drew hard on the feg then blew the smoke out again slowly the muttered, ‘Here for a good time’.

Riley Johnston is a secondary school teacher from Belfast. Her writing has appeared in The 32: An Anthology of Working-class Voices, Ireland: An Invitation and on BBC Radio Four. She was first runner up in the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award, 2022.

Listen to Mike reading his story:

The firs are heavy with rain. Their old boughs creak. Sigh in resignation at the gathering storm. Branches swaying, stretching. They knock against the window. Like Old Man Time.

They had grown unruly. Too large. Too close to the house. More than once he was advised to cut them back or down. But he resisted. They had earned their place – a right of residence. They had been there long before him. They would still be there long after.

He put down his book and stared through the window. Against the deep green backdrop his reflection stared back. Unseeing. He looked like some old tree-spirit. An ancient dryad. Old Silenus himself!

How had he accumulated such age? Without an awareness of it happening? Time had trickled towards him. Imperceptibly. Rippled over him. Like water over stone. Enveloped him completely. Then rushed headlong by. Gathering. Deepening. Circling. Slowly at first. Then faster, faster (or so it seemed). Whirling. Like a vortex. Drawing everything into its empty eye.

Whoa! That’s a bit heavy. Too much first thing in the morning – that’s for sure. Such thoughts have their time. But not before elevenses, thank you very much.

They will return, no doubt, along with others. When light is banished beyond the edges of our world. When the clock on the mantel chimes beyond midnight. When we start from sleep. At our darkest hour. When God Himself seems absent. But for now? Sort it out, man! Such thoughts must not prevail.

He glanced at the volume beside him. Back to the task at hand, his old Professor would say.

Back to the task at hand, Mr Wiseman…

Our very own Homo Sapiens!

The face of his old classmate flared before him at the memory of the running gag. But he had to stay focussed.

He awoke that morning to the recollection of an old conundrum. Uninvited. Out of the blue. What’s more, he had felt alert, clear-headed. Ready for the challenge.

He found the book first go (knew exactly where to look!) and flicked it open to the poem in question. Number 21: Gallus and the Soldier. He was looking forward to renewing an old acquaintance.

It felt a little strange, truth to tell. This clear-headedness. Memories appeared. Fully-formed. Yet unbidden. Without order or control. It unnerved him.

Lately they were more about people or events from the past. From his childhood really. He had no trouble recalling details from that morning. Goldfinches. A pair. Face to face at the feeder. Their red masks poised. Like dancers at a ball. But then it was London. His first day at school. The face of his teacher in full 60’s technicolour. Long, auburn hair. Lashes heavy with mascara. Sky-blue shadow on the lids. Chalky, peach lipstick. What was it that linked the two? The vivid colours..? Masks..? Perhaps.

Yes, he could recall these details. But what about the in-between? The vast expanse of adulthood and ageing – between the roll-call of that first day and the pageantry of the morning. What about the most important part of his life?

His children were both adults now. Embarked upon their own journeys. Many times he thought to call them. Text them on some detail from his day. But he almost always didn’t. They had enough in their own lives – with their own families – to keep them fully occupied. And his wife. Blue girl. Blue-eyed and golden. Until. Well... just until.

His family was what made it all worthwhile. But their faces didn’t come easily to him now. Sometimes he had to struggle. To concentrate. Beneath the occasional thrill of full recall (moments like this morning) it was an ever-present, beneath-the-surface sadness. An undertow of guilt. And loss.

He jolted himself awake. Back to the task at hand. Propertius Book 1, Number 21. Only ten lines in total – but what a cracker! Multiple versions of the text and as many (mutually exclusive) interpretations. Partly because of the manuscript tradition. But also due to the enigmatic nature of the poem itself. Never underestimate the enigmatic!

Essentially, there were three key questions within the poem: the condition of the speaker (Gallus); the identity of the sister (soror); the nature of the request. It came back with a clarity that surprised and delighted him. Okay then, seize the moment! Take them in order. One. Two. Three.

Is Gallus dying or already dead? That is the question. If dead – is it his corpse, or just a scattering of bones, that “addresses” the passing soldier (miles)?

‘Hey you… soldier... Tu… miles...

Why do you start, wide-eyed, at my groans?’

(Propertius 1.21, ll.1-3)

Three lines in. A good start. Dramatic. Arresting. Enough to make the miles (and the reader) stop in their tracks. So far so good.

The soldier is wounded. Running from the site of battle. Desperate to avoid a fate like Gallus’. But why is he so terrified? Because he is being hailed by a dead man? Or a disembodied voice? (Either reason enough cause for alarm, God knows!). Or does he imagine the voice belongs to one of his potential pursuers? Is it fear of capture that clutches at the soldier’s heart?

And if Gallus is dead (or even dying) – as long as his body was intact the miles might surely recognise him? After all, they probably fought together – possibly even side by side. (It was common for neighbours or relatives to fight beside each other in the local militias that resisted Rome).

‘Pars ego sum vestrae proxima militiae’

‘I am your brother-in-arms – part of your militia.’

(Propertius 1.21, l.4)

Perhaps Gallus is bloodstained – his features masked and difficult to discern? Either way, the mystery begins. The secret heart of the poem. Encoded. Subversive. You see, for Caesar, there was no welcome in the hills of Umbria. Old families and allegiances were what mattered there. But this was not the time to celebrate such things. Or to acknowledge older kinships. So the poem becomes allusive. Elliptical. Bloodlines are implicit. Identities are blurred.

The knocking made him start. He stayed in his chair. Unmoving. Waiting for his senses to return. Then just as soon it stopped. Maybe it was his imagination. (Perchance a ‘waking dream’?). More likely just the postman. Or perhaps his sister come over to check on him as she often did. Either way they had gone now. Left a card – or would try again later. Not a problem. Tho’ he would like if they had seen him. Poring over his old books – alert and studious. They wouldn’t have expected that. He would like to have seen their faces!

He should get up. Move around a bit. Put something on the fire. But he is still. Propped on the arm of his chair. Struck by a sudden, uninvited memory. A visit from the past. His friend had called. Out of the blue. Caught him reading Vergil (Aeneid Book 4!) in a desperate attempt to salvage the academic year…

‘At Regina….. But the Queen…..

Gravi iamdudum saucia cura

Already wounded by a deep desire…

(Vergil, Aeneid 4, l.1)

He recalled the Professor’s booming delivery of that great opening salvo. His voice revelling in the broad-vowelled syllables. The long ‘a’ of the ablative (cura). The staccato of the mandatory dactyl (saucia). One long, two shorts –

Like the joints of your finger –

Check it out, Mr Wiseman!

From the Greek “daktylos”…

The past came rushing back. Overwhelming him. He could not keep it out. It had a separate, irresistible momentum –

Or the flight of a swallow –

One long, two shorts –

Look closely next time you see one, Ms Kelleher!

But what does she do, class?

Anyone..? Mercedes..?

(Much to a classmate’s horror the Professor had learned her middle name was Mercedes – “A beautiful third declension name”)

What does the queen do..?

“Vulnus alit venis.”

That’s what she does, Mercedes…

“She feeds the wound with her life-blood.”

It was Jerry who had called that day. Rained off a dig in an ancient city. Drove through the wretched weather – just to check in and say hello. Votive knocking. April’s icy draughts. Like an array of Cretan arrows. Rent the air. And Jerry. At the door. Beaming. A young Octavius. His damp face framed by curls.

Kindling crackled in the cast-iron grate. Braziers glowed beneath old city walls. Sacred fire shimmered along cold temple floors. We chatted. Laughed. Put whiskey in our tea.

He really should make an effort. It seemed like the day had passed him by. Light was fading – evening gathering in. He should get up. Make some tea or something light to eat? And he would – but not just yet. In a while perhaps. His sister might call again later. He would wait until then. They could have supper together.

Speaking of sisters. He had strayed far from the task at hand. (Forgive me, Professor, mea culpa). Left the soldier petrified, in mid-stare. And Gallus – nebulous forever. Not good enough! He must return. Lead them where they are destined to be.

And so to the soror. Who is she? Gallus exhorts the soldier to go. To leave him. Make it back: to his home; to his parents; to the soror.

‘Sic te servato, ut possint gaudere parentes’

‘Save yourself, so your parents might rejoice’

(Propertius 1.21, l.5)

But whose sister is she? Gallus’..? The miles’..? Wife to one, sister to the other? But whose wife? Whose lover? Things become complicated. Less and less clear. And – to make matters worse – from here… the manuscript is corrupt!

Which brings us to final crux. The nature of Gallus’ request: full disclosure; partial disclosure; no disclosure. Does he want the soror to know of his death? The texts are in conflict. The acceptance of ne (not) for et (and) can change the sense completely.

‘May she (not) guess at these events through your tears.’

(Propertius 1.21, l.6)

Or is it the manner of his death that he wishes to conceal? How he, Gallus, having escaped from the midst of Caesar’s swords (per medios Caesaris ensis, l.7) could not evade the hand of a common assassin (ignotas manus, l.8). Is there a hint of soldier’s honour here? Or just an irony too cruel to reveal to a loved one?

Either way, the final couplet arrives:

‘Et quaecumque super dispersa invenerit ossa

Montibus Etruscis, (haec)/(ne) sciat esse mea’

‘And whatever bones she finds scattered on these

Etruscan hills, may she (not) know these to be mine.’

(Propertius 1.21, ll.9-10)

Did he mean for her to find his bones? Or not? (A simple ‘ne’ changes everything). Either way, the elegy concludes.

He was beginning to struggle now. The clarity he enjoyed earlier was starting to dissolve. To dissipate. He couldn’t be certain which reading he once favoured. (Although he had argued it passionately back in the day). But that was long ago. Few cared back then. Truth be told. Fewer, or none, would care now.

Daylight was draining away. The hills beyond the trees were darkening in hue. In the half-light they could pass for the hills of Etruria. You might just glimpse a soldier in a desperate descent to the valley below. Where a sister is waiting. Anxious. Unaware of what is about to unfold. And Gallus, propped on an arm. Imagining the scene in his mind’s eye. Dying. Perhaps already dead.

Night had fallen. Starless. The wind had strengthened to a full-blown storm. The old firs groaned and swayed. Waved their weary limbs in futile defiance. They easily reached the window now. Raking the panes with their branches. Needles tapping the glass. Like fingers. Warning. Beckoning. Into the night. Into the fury. Into the darkness beyond.

Mike Corbett lives in the parish of Monagea in West Limerick. He started writing again in recent years and has enjoyed some success in the HISSAC short story competition. His stories often merge the personal with “half-remembered tales of Greece and Rome”.

On a cool April morning in East York, a demolition crew arrived at 106 Winderly Avenue, a modest redbrick house a couple blocks north of Pape and Danforth. The city had seized the property following over a year of unpaid taxes. A small development firm had purchased it at auction, intending to knock it down and build townhomes.

They expected mould. Maybe asbestos. What they found instead was a bunker. A sealed, soundproofed chamber hidden behind a false wall in the basement. And inside that bunker: two people, very much alive.

One was George Tassopoulos, a 76-year-old retired high school teacher with no next of kin and no one who had reported him missing. The other was Alison Flynn, a 33-year-old Irish woman whose disappearance had captivated two countries. She had not been seen or heard from in eighteen months.

The Lodger

Alison moved to Toronto from Galway, Ireland, in late 2017. She was 24, on a working holiday visa, wide-eyed and hopeful. She booked affordable short-term accommodation in a slightly dated but welcoming home in Greektown, where George and his wife Eleni, both retired TDSB teachers, lived quietly.

Alison stayed two months. Eleni made her soup, folded her laundry voluntarily. George talked politics and transit delays. They were kind but old-fashioned, the kind of older couple who still sent cheques to pay bills and had a 416 landline.

After Alison moved into a shared apartment near Yonge and Eglinton, the visits grew infrequent, maybe twice a year. She built a life: retail jobs on Queen West, then a junior buying role at a department store. She made a large network of friends, joined a spin class, fell in love with the city.

Somewhere along the way, the two-year working holiday visa turned into permanent residency, and then, without much fanfare, Canadian citizenship, formalised on a 45-minute Zoom call one Monday morning. She hadn’t planned to stay forever - and yet she almost did.

She shopped at Value Village and Aritzia. Frequented SpinCo on Saturday mornings. Biked to the Scarborough Bluffs on half-day Fridays. Made memories on patios. Attended overpriced birthday brunches. Watched GAA matches at Centennial Park with her fellow Irish expats. Painted watercolours in her bedroom and posted the best ones to Instagram. Tried to meal prep, but usually ended up ordering Uber Eats by Wednesday.

By 2025, she’d returned to Ireland, burnt out from North American corporate city life, but with a lot of love for her years in Toronto. Her 2026 visit was meant to be short. Nostalgic. She just wanted to walk her old routes, see some familiar faces, and quietly remind herself that she’d once built something special, half a world away.

Mira

Mira Bouchard was seventeen when she met George and Eleni in 2021. She was a high school dropout from Thorncliffe Park, moving between foster homes and transitional housing. The connection came through a local youth outreach group, one of the few still offering limited in-person support during the pandemic. Mira had recently enrolled in a GED programme and needed help catching up on math and writing.

She was sharp, guarded, and sceptical of most adults. But George helped her with fractions and sentence structure, and Eleni guided her through reading comprehension and science modules while tea brewed and something simmered on the stove. Mira often left with food wrapped in tinfoil and printouts for her next session. There was no formal arrangement. She wasn’t their foster child. But she came by regularly - sometimes to study, sometimes to eat, sometimes just to sit. She grew close enough to the couple that they gave her a spare key to their home.

When Eleni died later that year from COVID complications, not much changed. Mira continued to turn up at 106 Winderley Avenue. She stopped and started various programmes and jobs, always running her ideas by George, who edited her applications and printed off resumes when needed.

By autumn 2026, Mira was twenty-two and working part-time at a restaurant on the Danforth. On the night of Monday, September 21st, after a long shift, she left work and began walking toward Pape Station to catch the bus home.

She never made it.

She was the third victim in what would become known as the Broadview shooting spree - a senseless act of violence that left nine dead and the city in lockdown. Mira’s phone was recovered at the scene but never searched in detail. Her death was ruled tragic, but unrelated to anything larger.

No one realised that she was the missing piece in a much bigger story.

The Disappearance

Alison was meant to fly home to Dublin on Tuesday, September 22nd. Her boarding pass was downloaded. Her window seat selected.

That Monday, the day before her flight, she made an unplanned detour. It wasn’t in her itinerary. She hadn’t texted her friends. She was just popping by to say hello to George Tassopoulos - a familiar figure from her first months in the city. They hadn’t seen each other since her move back to Ireland, but she’d always promised to drop in if she ever returned. Just a quick catch-up. Then back to her Airbnb downtown to pack.

While they sat in his kitchen, the city changed.

Phones across Toronto lit up with an emergency alert: a gunman had opened fire near Withrow Park. Then again near Chester Station. CP24 shifted to rolling coverage. Sirens echoed along the Danforth. Toronto Police urged all residents to shelter in place as a citywide manhunt unfolded across the east end.

It was one of those surreal, city-defining days - the kind people would later talk about in terms of where they were, who they were with, how close they lived to the danger. The Broadview shooting spree would ultimately claim nine lives. For a brief window, Toronto was a locked-down city.

George, already prone to worst-case scenarios, didn’t hesitate. He suggested they wait it out in the shelter - just overnight. Alison knew about the bunker from her short stay in 2017, when George had once pointed to the hatch and mumbled something about being prepared. Back then, she’d laughed and forgotten about it. But now, under the sudden pressure of a city in panic, it felt like the sensible choice.

The shelter wasn’t a recent creation. It had been built in the early 1970s by George’s father, a Greek immigrant who’d lived through war, fled a military regime, and believed another global crisis was inevitable. Officially, it was a Cold War fallout bunker: a sealed concrete room beneath the house, with a reinforced steel hatch, a hand-crank air vent, shelves for food and water, and a chemical toilet curtained off in the corner.

Most families let those kinds of spaces rot. George didn’t. He maintained it quietly over the years: replacing batteries, checking locks, stocking tins and bottled water. After Eleni died, his anxiety deepened. He installed a secondary lock on the outside hatch - meant to keep looters out, he once told Alison - but it also meant that once the door was closed, it couldn’t be opened from within.

A relic from another time, kept intact by a man who never fully trusted the present — and, eventually, couldn’t escape the past.

They climbed down with sleeping bags and snacks. “Just for the night,” George said. “Mira’s coming tomorrow. She has a key. I’ll text her and tell her to open it tomorrow.”

There was no Wi-Fi in the bunker. No cell service. The hatch could only be opened from the outside.

And no one else knew Alison Flynn was there.

The Search

When Alison failed to arrive in Dublin, her family in Ireland reached out to her Toronto friends. Her friends had assumed she flew back as scheduled. She’d been quiet, but not alarmingly so. When it became clear she had never boarded the flight, panic set in.

Within 48 hours, her family filed a missing person’s report.

The Irish media exploded.

“Irish Woman Disappears in Toronto Before Return Flight”
“Alison Flynn Missing: ‘She Never Just Vanishes,’ Says Family”
“Desperate Search Underway for Irish Woman in Toronto”

A photo of Alison, smiling under a neon sign at a Queen West bar just days earlier, became a banner image. True crime podcasts speculated about sex trafficking, random violence, cults.

No one mentioned George.

Eighteen Months Below

The bunker was small. Eight feet wide, twelve feet long. Shelves of canned goods, pasta, water, a treadmill, a transistor radio.

George had built it to wait out a crisis. He hadn’t planned for silence.

At first, Alison tried to count the days - tally marks in pencil along the concrete wall. But she lost track after thirty-six. The food was bland, the air stale, her sleep fractured.

George rationed everything with quiet precision. He boiled water, adjusted the dehumidifier, logged everything in a notebook. For a time, Alison rebelled - refusing meals, screaming into a pillow, scratching at the hatch door until her nails split.

Then she stopped. They fell into rhythm. At night, George read aloud from old paperbacks. Alison imagined herself somewhere else - a bookstore in Galway, a wedding in the Algarve, a grocery aisle where nothing was running out.

Weeks passed. Then months. She stopped expecting to be found.

The Discovery

In early 2028, the City of Toronto auctioned George’s house after over a year of unpaid taxes. No family had come forward. The property was classified as derelict and sold to a development firm.

On the second day of demolition, a contractor swung a sledgehammer into a false wall and found cold steel behind it. A hatch.

The Aftermath

Alison was malnourished, but stable. She flew home within the month. George was arrested but released after psychiatric evaluation. He was deemed paranoid, but not malicious.

Alison declined to testify. In a written statement, she said:

“George made a terrible mistake. But he was never trying to hurt me. I believe he thought he was keeping me safe.”

Mira’s death was reclassified. Police recovered George’s final text to her: “Going into the bunker overnight. Let yourself in and open the latch tomorrow like I showed you. Stay safe.”

The message was timestamped. It had been marked “read.”

What Was Missed

When Alison didn’t arrive in Dublin, her family assumed a delay. Then a mix-up. Then something worse. Calls were made. Friends in Toronto were contacted. A missing persons report was filed.

But no one thought to check George Tassopoulos’s house. Her friends hadn’t known she was visiting him. The police believed she had disappeared somewhere downtown. And George, a reclusive widower with no employer, no visitors, and no next of kin, simply faded from view.

Mira Bouchard was the only person who knew where they were. But no one connected her death to Alison’s disappearance. One woman was deeply missed. The other, quietly buried. And the man who tied them both together, without meaning to, waited underground for someone who would never come.

Eighteen months later, during routine demolition ahead of a housing development, city workers found the sealed hatch beneath the old Tassopoulos house.

Alison quietly returned to Ireland. There was no press conference. No televised reunion. Just home - and the long, slow work of rebuilding something like a normal life. In Galway, she lives with her parents again. She paints sometimes. She walks a lot.

George was placed under psychiatric supervision. He never faced criminal charges. Most agreed: he had retreated into a world no one else believed in. And when it closed around him, he simply stayed there.

Aisling Owens is a hobbyist writer from Roscommon. She spent seven years in Toronto, a city that continues to shape her stories.

Listen to Seamus reading his story:

Anyone who knew JJ McHale growing up said he was singing before he could talk. That’s probably an exaggeration, but who was he to contradict his elders? He was definitely very young when he first began to take the floor at Meitheals and Seisiúns to entertain his neighbours. He had no memory of the songs he had sung back then, but his parents’ friends loved them and adored him, especially the women: women as big as heifers, women as delicate as wrens, women from eighteen to eighty. They would wrap their arms around him like a big blanket and snuggle him into their chests, crowing giddily.

‘Ooh, come here, a graween.’

‘Couldn’t ya just eat him up?’

‘He’s like a cup of fresh cream.’

‘Wouldn’t you slip him under your shawl and take him home with you?’

The warmth and softness of their bosoms as they squeezed his face tightly into the tender, fleshy masses, made him feel safe and cherished for those moments. The memory was warm, whiskey coloured. Life doesn’t stay like that though.

He remembers very well the day his mother died. He would like to recall that it was a frosty day in February or a dreary, rain-sodden late afternoon in November, after a day picking cold, wet potatoes out of the hard, broken earth. He knew it wasn’t. It was a day in mid-May, the month of Mary, the blessed virgin, whatever that means. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous day and he sped home from school, hoping that his mother might be well enough for him to help her out of her bed for an hour, so she could maybe take him back the boreen to pick wildflowers for the May altar in school. But he was met instead by his father, dressed in his best, black, Sunday going-to-Mass suit, his face fixed in an angry glare. It was like he had lassoed a dark cloud and was carrying it around on his shoulder, like Jesus carrying the cross to Calvary.

‘Get cleaned up. The priest is coming.’

When JJ got inside and called to his mother, she didn’t answer. Probably asleep. She often was when he got home. She’d been sick abed for a while. So, he climbed the stairs quietly and tip-toed into her darkened room. The floral curtains were shut, the window too. The air was stale, sickly, a vomity, sweaty sort of smell that the single lighted candle couldn’t mask.

‘Did you not see the candle? You fuckin’ loodremawn!’ His father had shouted later.

Why the hell hadn’t it dawned on JJ what was after happening, with the closed curtains, the smell and the stupid fucking candle? His father was right; he was a fucking eejit. Thinking she was just asleep, he had edged forward and planted a delicate kiss, like a petal on her cheek, his lips barely brushing it. He felt the iciness and sensed the hardness of the stretched skin. Her face was as still as the far lake in summer. Was there even breath coming out of her? It was already becoming difficult for him to imagine that set mouth ever again smiling or laughing or singing along with him in the chorus of a favourite song, their very breaths in perfect harmony.

‘She’s gone from us, son. Now get cleaned up.’

But how could she be gone? His mother would never leave him. Surely she must have been taken. Some diabhal, a pooka or some fairy maybe, something unnatural or supernatural, like in the stories she used to tell him, must have slipped in unnoticed after he left for that damn school this morning. It must have stolen her, right from under his fuckinggobshite-of-a-father’s nose. God damn and blast it! Why hadn’t he stayed home from school altogether? If he’d been here with her, he’d never have let anyone, man nor beast, ghost or goblin take his beautiful mother from him. He’d have minded her. He glared angrily at his growling father.

‘Go on I said!’

JJ was eight years and one month old.

It rained the day of her funeral.

‘The angels are crying for your mammy, JJ.’

He sang ‘Amhrán Mháinse’ at the mass. He could sing it, feel the music of it, but he didn’t understand a word, back then. As he sang in the cold, darkened church, the auld wans bawled their eyes out. He didn’t sing for a whole year after that. When he did, it was different from before. The listeners still loved it, were even more gushing in their praise, the women even more generous with their hugs and cuddles. But when he had sung in the past, he had been aware of only notes, melody and words. He had simply hopped, skipped and skimmed from crotchet to quaver, like a harvesting bee, or a fresh breeze playing with autumn leaves. But now when he sang, he felt like he was being swallowed by the song and was floating around inside it, being tossed and turned by the melody, chilled and warmed by the sounds of words he often didn’t even know the meaning of but could feel the full weight of. It was like he was the flower now; he was the leaf being played by the breeze.

The first time he did sing after that was in the house of the prettiest of his neighbours’ wives, Fionnuala. At least to his young eyes she was. Her hair was long, soft and wavy, like golden clouds shrouding her plump face. Her bosom always seemed too big for her frock and her smile made him feel like the sunshine used to. It was Fionnuala’s birthday, and she begged him to sing her favourite song. She held his face in her soft-as-a-buttercup hands, planted a motherly kiss on his forehead, promised him an extra slice of apple tart then hugged him close, his cheek squeezed against the exposed flesh of her breast. He agreed to break his musical silence, not for the slice of apple tart but in return for the delicious thrill her hug had sent shuddering through his young body. The skin of his cheek was still tingling when he reclaimed it from her embrace.

‘If I was a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing…’

If he had known that day that he would spend the next eight years in a sullen glowering contest with his father, he would have run away right there and then. But he didn’t, because you don’t think like that when you’re still only a child. No. When you’re a child you search only for the next possibility; you ferret out the positive; you treat your life like a great, endless adventure. And that’s what JJ tried to do, but his father was having none of it. If he had taken off his black suit in itself after the funeral was over, there might have been some hope for him. Instead, he chose to keep it, or the shadow of it, always about him. JJ never again saw the man smile. His touch that had been manly and strong, became rough and ungenerous. His language spiteful. His words sharp. His emotions tight. And JJ seemed to get the worst of all of them. He was the youngest, ‘the baby,’ as his father constantly reminded him in a snide, cutting drawl.

It wasn’t like JJ didn’t try his best to fit his father’s mould. He’d helped out with the milking, in the bog, at the hay in the summer, kept the house clean and tidy, though he would never do that as well as his mother had. But he was only a boy, and a boy whose head was full of dreams and imaginings, quicker to spot an opportunity for adventure in the woods or down by the river than to spot a cow stuck in a drain or a job that needed doing. Between his father and his two older brothers, there was hardly anywhere on his body that wasn’t black and blue from digs and belts and horseplay. In a house of grieving men, he became a punch bag. By the time he was big enough to hit back, he had lost interest in them and their pettiness.

‘Sure, if he was even any good at school in itself?’ His father would often sneer.

School had always been a prison for JJ too. He could never understand why supposedly intelligent adults believed that locking children in a schoolroom for hours on end was good for them. What of use would they ever learn caged in like that? They’d have been much better off being released into that great, big, wonderful world outside the window that was just sitting there, waiting to be explored, discovered, tasted and relished. He could never take in much of the weighty knowledge the teacher was imparting in suitably sonorous tones, yet he would have a song or a story after only hearing it a couple of times. He spent most of his time staring out the classroom window dreaming of escape and wondering would his life ever be happy and carefree again.

There was one young teacher who did make an impression on JJ. He was a trainee or substitute or something, so was only with them for a short time but he had a great love of plays. Not the literature of them, not the technical why and wherefore of the themes, the rhymes or the structure, but the blood and guts of them. He talked about the characters as if they were real. What drove them on? What stood in their way? What was their fatal flaw?

‘We all have a fatal flaw children,’ he would say. ‘Not one that will necessarily kill us, but one that could hold us back and prevent us reaching our full potential. These plays are lessons for life,’ he would declare. ‘Life is a series of obstacles that we must overcome and learn from so we can grow and flourish!’

When JJ was finally released from school for good, it was the best day of his life since he had lost his mother. He was fifteen years and two months old. His father got him a job in the village grocery shop, thinking it might suit him, since he seemed to be allergic to hard work. JJ loved it. Why the hell couldn’t the gobshite have done this long ago? Was it trying to torture him he’d been? But that was all spilt milk under the bridge by then, so no point looking back. This was what was happening right then and there, and it was good. No. It was very good. It got him away from that den of bitter men. He had money in his pocket, what his father didn’t take from him, and as it was mostly women did the shopping, he was in his element.

Between keeping a smile on their faces in the shop by day and a twinkle in their eyes at the night-time singsongs, life had really started to look up for young JJ McHale. And when the women hugged him then, there was more than a tingle running through his pubescent body. Oh yes. JJ McHale had started to smile again. To dream again. Search for the possibilities. Sense that true independence and liberation lay out there somewhere, beyond the narrow confines of his constricted world, just waiting to be grabbed. Although his ultimate flight to freedom, on the squeaky bicycle of a cuckolded farmer, was still two years and four months off, JJ McHale had finally grown into his voice, had found his feet and his steady march towards his destiny had well and truly begun.

Seamus Moran is an actor, director and writer for stage and screen. He has written three plays, Have A Heart, Squinty, Dolly and Mick. Seamus wrote and directed three short films and a half-hour drama for TG4 entitled Síle. He began writing short stories at the start of this year and was longlisted for several prestigious competitions. ‘Finding Voice’ is the first of his stories to be published.

Listen to Geraldine reading her story:

Twenty-one is a tender age. Not that you realised that at the time. No, you forged ahead, seeking adventure, wanting to get away. With your BA under your belt (your Dad asked what BA stood for, your mother said ‘bugger all’...) With your newly-minted degree, you landed an admin job in the east of France, not an hour from the Swiss border.

You loved answering the phone. You’d rattle off ‘Bureau des Relations Internationales’, and allow the torrent of the caller’s French to sweep over you, picking out key words, repeating what you’d understood, checking for holes in meaning. You loved getting the list from the boss, Jacques, every morning, and ticking off the tasks one by one throughout the day. You hated filing, but got better at it as time went by. A necessary evil. So things wouldn’t get lost. Or mislaid.

Louis was your colleague, a laid-back French guy, who gently smiled when you made mistakes, most famously when you declared ‘Je suis une Slave’, while wanting to say ‘I am a slave’. But he also got you out of linguistic landmines when dealing with irate students. There was a kind side to him, like when he bought you The Cranberries latest CD. He said your accent reminded him of Dolores O’Riordan’s. Maybe all Irish accents were the same to him. All French ones were certainly the same to you, though he teased that you were acquiring the Franche-Comté slow drawl. Maybe you were. Unknown to yourself.

The job was 9-5, Monday to Friday, but you were flat out, submergé. The office could have done with more staff, but Jacques was miserly and preferred to hire sparingly. You went to lunch with Jacques and Louis in the college canteen every day, where everything was served with cous cous (far from it you were reared), and you used to finish off the meal with a tiny crème brûlée and an espresso like rocket fuel. Jacques and Louis enjoyed your stories of Ireland (they might have been embellished, or they might not – but the aim was to entertain).

One Friday evening, Louis said he was going over to Switzerland the next day to visit his grandmother, and would you like to go with him? You hesitated, knowing he had a girlfriend, a leggy blonde who sometimes stalked into the office, and glared at you with narrowed eyes. As if reading my mind, Louis said:

‘Oh, Isabelle is working tomorrow. I’ve told her I’m inviting you. She said it would be a chance for you to do some sightseeing.’

You knew this didn’t sound like anything Isabelle might say, but you were sick of your apartment on the outskirts of town. It was up three flights of stairs, with no lift, and there was little source of entertainment, except for the tiny téléviseur in the shared kitchen. Your flatmates were a mixed bunch – Japanese, French and American. The more you all minded your own business, the better things worked out. So you told Louis you’d go on the trip, and he said he’d pick you up the next morning at 8.30.

You went to the boulangerie first thing for pain au chocolat and bottles of water, so that you and Louis could have a mid-morning snack in the car. Switzerland was renowned for being expensive, and what Jacques paid wasn’t going to make millionaires of anyone. Louis arrived at 8.30 on the dot (as punctual as the French buses, he was). As you drove out of Besançon, he put on a CD, some French singer with sad-sounding songs, and you settled into a semi-comfortable silence.

As you approached the Swiss border an hour later, it was like entering a Christmas card. Snow-capped mountains, winding roads, lakes as big as oceans. He drove for another thirty minutes and then pulled up on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, an expanse which reminded you of the sea at home on a calm day. As you poked in your bag for the pain au chocolat, tears stung your eyes. You thought of all you’d left behind – parents, friends, your dog, PJ. You rubbed your eyes furiously, before Louis could notice. But Louis was no daw.

Next thing, his arms were around your shoulders, and he was moving in for a kiss. His woody aftershave was overwhelming up close, like the scent of millions of pine needles. Nevertheless, you turned your head to meet his lips, and in that kiss everything dissolved – the stress of living through a second language, of keeping up with Jacques’ demands, of being away from home. Louis smiled then, and though you tried to read his expression, it was impenetrable.

Your mind racing and your body tingling, Louis dropped you in Neuchâtel and he headed off to his grand-mère’s nursing home, which he said was out in the countryside. You strolled around the city, admiring the perfect houses with their shuttered windows, and in the background evergreen trees dotted the horizon. After a while you succumbed to temptation and stopped at a café for an espresso and a croque-monsieur. Although April, it was warm enough to sit outside on one of the wooden fold-up seats. An elegant old lady sat opposite you, her hair coiffed high in a bun, her poodle on the seat next to her, equally well-groomed. The lady smoked Camels like her life depended on it, one after the other, the smoke rising in curls. Anyone would think she was on a film set. What a pity you couldn’t ask her for advice. She looked like a woman of the world. She’d know what to do if her colleague had made a move on her.

You didn’t know how to manage your guilt, especially as you felt the kiss was the best thing to have happened to you in ages. But if it was the best thing, then why did you feel so cheap? And what would happen next? You ordered a second coffee from the waiter – it wasn’t as if you were going to sleep much that night anyway. A plan formulated in your mind. You’d root out your TEFL cert from the bottom of the suitcase and drop a CV into the private language school. They were always looking for extra tutors. Going back to Ireland wasn’t an option. You’d only be met with a chorus of ‘I told you so’s’ from Mam and Dad.

You met Louis outside the Hôtel de Ville as planned, and let Dolores O’Riordan do the singing on the way back in the car. You thought you’d never get back to your apartment, to the sulky flat-mates and that crumby téléviseur. Louis drummed his hands on the steering wheel in time to the music and smiled away to himself, that enigmatic little smile.

‘See you Monday,’ he said, as he dropped you off. Totally nonchalant, as the French would say. Not a bloody bother on him, as they’d say at home.

Whenever you hear The Cranberries now you think of him, and all the complicated feelings rise up, like the waves on Lake Neuchâtel on a windy day. He and Isabelle got engaged that summer. You moved to the International Language School, where the wages were better and the hours shorter. You were far better at teaching than at admin anyway.

Twenty-one was a tender age, and you were learning new things about yourself every day.

Geraldine McCarthy lives in West Cork. She writes flash fiction, short stories and poems in English and Irish, and her work has been published in various journals. Geansaithe Móra, her flash fiction collection, was An Post Irish Language Fiction Book of the Year 2024.

Listen to Alison reading her story:

I thought I was a goddess this morning when I slipped on the new Ultra Pro Air XReality Gigi gave me for my birthday. Everyone had been itching to try this latest iteration because of its seamless biofeedback and ease of use.

It tracks eye movements, even. Gigi demonstrated the new features.

A blink, a nod, all hands-free. I was impressed. The biofeedback was so seamless I could even control my own neural responses -- pain signals, emotions, everything.

We'd spent a glorious night with the old VRs, my pulse hitting 185 before we collapsed back on the pillow laughing. Then she showed me how the new glasses used low-voltage electrical impulses but with protections.

The phone holds your encryption keys and identity markers. That's why they're such a matched pair—one experiences, one authenticates. It’s super safe.

I shuddered.

We may never leave this bed.

Gigi snuggled into my neck, murmured something about ultra-fast wireless charging, and I made a bad pun about that. It was going to be a memorable day, I whispered in her ear, not understanding the varied meanings that word would hold.

Eventually, I pulled myself away from Gigi’s bed, but she told me the birthday presents weren’t done yet. With a naughty grin, she suggested I walk to work with my XR on. As I glided down the street, Gigi sent me subtle arrows which appeared on the sidewalk guiding me toward my next birthday surprise. This was silly; I was a kid again, but my gait was steady until I tripped on a sidewalk crack and my glasses nearly fell off. I pushed them up with my finger and accidentally shared my screen with everyone in the area.

We laughed.

Do not do that again. Her voice admonished me, but her tongue-red lips were smiling. I don’t want to share you with anyone.

I think it was because I blinked at the same time? I was still getting used to the new commands.

On I walked. She pointed out the bistro where she had once teased me. Naturally, I entered.

With a nod, I shared my screen, stepping into a damp rainforest with vines and primary-colored flowers. She slipped into my projection and I watched her lie down in the moss as I sipped my latte in the cafe. I could barely keep a straight face or my coffee cup steady. She tortured me in what was for me, at least, plain sight.

Your fitness stats today look ecstatic! An unwelcome notification floated in front of me, partially blocking my view.

Because of you. I gushed, and Gigi giggled.

Gotta turn those notifications off, babe.

Yeah. They moved the controls for that.

I tilted my head to zoom in on certain body parts; I got wet when Gigi's virtual fingers traced me. As I moaned, the neural-mapping feature must have misinterpreted my emotional spikes as a command input, and the system read my arousal as enthusiastic consent.

EXPERIENCE SHARING ACTIVATED: ALL CONTACTS.

I jumped, the glasses slipped, and I had to punch the nosepiece to stop them from falling off, accidentally activating broadcast mode again. I blinked, unsure if that had happened.

But a blink might be the command to go live with anyone in the area. Or not? I was unsure. I darted my eyes and the XR, using the live function, turned my shared photo into a live event. It misinterpreted my eye movements. It all went too fast.

NO! I yelled too loudly.

Everything ok? The barista jerked her head up.

I was frozen in panic. Did that just happen? Please. No.

The other café patrons wearing XRs entered my rainforest. They were watching. Undo. Undo!

Did you just upload a video? Gigi’s voice confirmed my disbelief. She threw covers over herself. Are we live?

Notifications flooded my vision.

No. I mean, yes. Fuck!

Delete it! NOW. Gigi disappeared from my rainforest.

Messages floated in front of me, now easily readable. I instinctively turned my head, but the DMs, replies, voice memos were all inescapable.

Get the fuck out. You’re not safe! Gigi shrieked.

I grabbed my phone and bolted for the door. The phone was hot - wireless charging? - but I didn’t care. Outside, I glimpsed the traffic and piss-stenched sidewalks behind the beauty of my virtual world. But the rainforest was no longer habitable as avatars flashed me; demonstrated what they’re doing while viewing my reel, telling me what they wanted to do IRL with me. I sobbed.

I was still in there, though, unable to turn it off as I blindly ran down the sidewalk, terrified. I raised my hand to block a car, but the XR misinterpreted the gesture as a command.

There must be a glitch in the new system. Get out! Get out! Gigi’s scream did not help my panic.

ENVIRONMENT SELECT: NEUTRALIZE

The rainforest pixels dissolved into the default calibration grid. Suddenly I was suspended in a neon green void, my limbs still moving as if walking while my actual body stumbled forward into traffic. Reality and virtuality desynchronized.

A car horn blasted. I screamed.

I slipped, caught myself on a parking meter. I fumbled with my anchor point, but the notifications and avatars tracking me made it impossible. The reels were unstoppable. Fire emojis. Hate mail. I knew how this worked: the higher the engagement, the more people saw my posts. Then AI auto generated more content, and I’m in all of them.

The words they used to describe me flashed before my eyes. I raised my hand instinctively to block out my hunters, and suddenly the pixels dissolved again and I was running through the yellow grasslands of the savannah. On the street, people wearing their XRs sneered; I bashed into an abandoned scooter and cried out in pain. My shin pulsed; blood trickled out. Sadomasochistic DMs followed. The sharp sting pushed me back into my body, but my mind was distracted by the flickering lights and pings that chased me. I didn’t know if I should focus on the blood seeping through my jeans or the storm of notifications.

In multiple language, instantly translated for me, I learned the number of ways CUNT could be expressed. I limped on faster; changed avatars; swapped out usernames but Ping! Ping! I was still traceable. Others told me to stop so they could meet up, but adrenaline fuelled my pace onward.

An overload warning flashed; lines blurred; my renderings flickered. My phone burned hotter with each step until it seared my flesh. I threw it down, but in doing so, I raise my hand again above my head and the pixels dissolve once more.

The blinding sand of the desert, where my AR environment has now transported me, was no place for someone with a hand that seethed. I blew on it but that only increased the notifications. I heedlessly climbed red jagged rocks which cut into my burned hand, until, resigned, I slumped on a boulder unsure if it was virtual or real. Panting.

Are you okay? Gigi came back into view and I cried with relief. I wanted her to hold me, dab my wounds.

I gotta stop for a minute.

No! Keep Moving!

I staggered a few paces to a park bench. Humiliated. Embarrassed. Defeated.

Immersed in fear, the electric light of agony surged. I groaned, registering the unbearable hurt - of my shin, of my hand - while the visual notifications ceaselessly rolled past my vision. It occurred to me to turn off the spinoreticular tract to numb my emotions, but what I really wanted to do was erase my memory.

I ripped off the glasses.

I slow my breath, as I blink in the sunlight, my vision flickering in and out. Slowly, the world settles. I’m in a city park now; it’s midday. My brain registers snowfall just before my skin feels the cold. I shiver. A freak snowstorm blankets the ground, the trees, the bench with a hushed layer of white. All is quiet. The damp, earthy smell of wet soil matches what I feel and see for the first time all morning. My body aches but the scene calms my beating heart.

The heavy, wet snow packs easily. I press my burned hand into it, the cold numbs my pain just as I have shut off all emotion. It melts all too quickly against my hot skin, so I scoop up more. I drop to my knees so I can more easily sweep up the snow, which soothes my shin where blood has coagulated in an ugly bruise. My tongue detects the metallic taste of blood but I’m not sure if that’s real or imagined. I’m still shaking.

I found you!

I have to blink a few times to register that Gigi is really walking up to me, smiling. That purple puffy jacket she bought ages ago at a vintage shop is so familiar that I think I want to cry but I’ve numbed my emotions.

I realize I’m staring at her wild-eyed; cold, wet and shivering, but her dark eyes are kind. Her warm touch reassures my clammy hand as she helps me onto a bench.

There, with emotions switched off, I am robotic; neither she nor I are burdened with the snapshot and reel. I can’t speak, hear only my pounding heart and Gigi’s kind voice. It’s fine.

She picks up the glasses, dries them off. Finds my phone and turns it off; makes another joke about wireless charging gone wrong, but I don’t laugh this time.

They’re still going to come, Gigi. Those avatars. They’ve geo-located me.

Shhhh.

They do come. One by one. Not avatars, but people. Real.

Gigi spins wildly around, searching for an escape path while I rock back and forth on the bench, comforting myself. Neither of us able to speak. But they, too, are silent; and they step as gingerly as they can, so as not to spook us. They raise their hands to show they are safe. All of them, too, have marked hands.

They’re women, a few men, many androgynous. They are still wearing their glasses, though, the tinted shades still hiding the glare of reality.

This small group envelops Gigi and me in a circle.

Different story, same scars. One says.

The circle enlarges as more people arrive.

Gigi slips on her glasses, but I can’t. I need my spinoreticular tract light to remain off. What counts as a safe space these days? What is consent in a world where technology has blurred the lines almost to nothing, I wonder.

But Gigi understands now. Consent is more than an agreement; it’s a lens through which we understand ourselves. It’s how we relate to others, she tells me as she pats my back. Urges me to turn it on; feel the emotion; reclaim your body as a site of wisdom.

Each sensation deserves its space, someone with a marked hand nods encouragement.

You are allowed to take up space, the group chants silently.

XR can’t silence you. They tell me.

The lingering burn, my throbbing shin, the notifications that I’m sure are still coming, Gigi's presence beside me, these gentle folk around us -- must be felt. A symphony of nerve endings singing their rightful place.

My hand hovers. Gigi waits.

My hands are jittery as I adjust my glasses as they teach me. I now see us; see each person clearly as we are: wrinkled, dumpy, tattered, vulnerable. Their tenderness feels fierce – like snow against a burn, like truth against shame, like everyone who know exactly how much courage it takes to stay soft in a hard-edged world.

Now switch it on. The emotions. Ready? Gigi’s voice is soft.

I exhale and press on. Consent isn’t a checklist. It’s a culture. We get to create it, not the algorhythms. Every body. Every relationship. Every day.

I’m comforted for now, like the snow that won’t heal my scars. I’m still here.

Learning.

Alison Langley is a former journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, among others. Her novel, Budapest Noir: Ilona Gets a Phone (Dedalus Books, 2024) won the Irish Writer’s Centre Novel Prize. Langley's short stories have appeared in various literary journals, and The Date was shortlisted for the 2024 Bournemouth Writing Prize.

Listen to Helen reading her story:

The tumour is a glaucous ruby red plum, ripening to burst through my skull. When removed, it leaves a scar like a furrow, that leaks sticky brain juice. The surgeon hands me the decaying fruit of the glioma on a petri dish. The flesh is fibrous, like muscle. The smell of rusting pig iron. Strange, I think, for a vegan to grow meat. I look at myself in the mirror and struggle to organise my Playdoh features. A left melon eye that droops, a peach cheek that sags against my newly formed jowl. My partner, Tariq, smiles nervously, wondering if our newly planted love will blossom. Words won’t come. The Speech and Language Therapist is a ginger spun girl with an effervescent mouth. She froths words at me, but I can no longer speak.

I wander the garden that I have cultivated in my head, and choose words singly like seeds, ‘Euphorbia,’ and ‘Myrtle,’ rooted to my tied tongue. Words of shade and sun and temperate green earth; ‘Bergenia, Date Palm, and Crocus.’ Tariq stares at me, shakes his head. He says he doesn’t understand. He speaks slowly, syllabically as if we are speaking Arabic. ‘Alhaqiquh,’ he says. ‘Jesus, Aaliyah, why can’t you let the truth speak.’ I hurl expletives back at him; ‘Nerium Oleander, Aconite, and Water Hemlock.’ Tariq’s eyes are plunged into darkness. He signals to the nurse, and I am given a sedative. But the roots and neurones still push through.

We met at the end of the tube line, London stewing in a dry, visceral heat. I couldn’t remember the way to my front door, and Tariq walked with me, keeping a safe distance on the opposite pavement. It was the beginning of the blackouts, the dissociation. A time when common green; clover, chickweed, and grass crushed underfoot, began to turn brown. The sky as colourless as diamonds. Even the silver willow turned black. Tariq moved in with me, after only a month, bringing his small suitcase and he taught me to cook. Baba ghanoush, Mahshi, sweet figs and Kunafeh with syrup. Sweets made with rose water, and cardamon. In Syria, we pick the ripe fruit from the trees, he said. Everything grows. We talked about the future. It was a time for love when everything was still possible.

The botanist neurosurgeon says that I have parietal aspasia. Nature is a fickle thing. I must train the plum espalier, cultivate it after he has removed the dead and diseased spurs. New growth takes time, and we must be patient. In my hot house brain, thick succulent words are fleshed, Dracaena, moth orchid. Too fat to form and roll off my tongue. Some days I am silent and wait for rain. In the dark, I whisper extinct words almost in reverence; the ‘Azorean Veitch Vicia Dennesiana,’ lost in a landslide. Tariq holds a glass of water to my lips, speaks softly as if his words might bruise me.

Tariq cleared the scrubby back garden, the earth parched and cracked into deep splinters. We planted wind born seeds of pineapple mint and myrtle, nurtured green shoots in plastic Tupperware boxes. Saved drops of water in baked bean cans and in wrung out cloths. A new responsibility for survival. The only thing that changed was the angle of the sun. High. So high, it tore the sky apart. By July, the raw heat melted the black shine roads. Birds no longer nested. I fell into a stupor, and Tariq brought me here, to be cultivated.

I look out of the clinic window into the dark sky scape, afraid of the emptiness. The world has taken on a gangrenous fluorescent glow. I shout carnivorous words to laugh in the face of death, ‘Bladderwort, Pitcher and Drosera.’ They echo round the ward and the night staff sedate me. Some patients are already dormant; waiting for rain that will never come. When I wake, Tariq is reciting the Quran. He tells me to hold on, and talks about the temperate summer, when we lay on the grass in Victoria Park, the broad leaf trees giving shade. Cream silk magnolias and amber Acers growing over the Chinese pagoda. In my head, I circle the Piccadilly line, and my past seems miles away.

The dawn light makes me want to sing, ‘Pushing up daisies,’ Bellis Perennis. I press the alarm bell in joyful voice. Everything in the garden is growing. Synapses are in bud. Tariq squeezes my hand and holds me as if I am a single precious stem. I search for resilient adaptive words that have the capacity for survival. ‘Azolla, Sedum, Bamboo, Kernza Bracken Fern.’ Sustainable language to fix nitrogen. I hold on; rooted to life. My senses heightened, the raw smell of pine and Lavandula. The touch of Tariq’s petal soft fingers in mine.

The world turned bleach white. The air stung like nettle beds. People began planting plastic, bottle tops and straws, refillable coffee cups. The earth was dying. Its core turning molten and the pull of the conglomerate cities, built on rare minerals sparked fires that raged for months. Hackney became a ghost town, closed greengrocers, and corner shops that used to take up box space on the pavements. The silenced slang of market traders. London tilted as the river Thames dried.

The Botanist neurosurgeon prescribes infusions of Binomial Ginko Bilboa, Taxus, and photosynthesis treatment under heat lamps. He speaks slowly, sounds every word and Tariq translates. There are new lesions in the left anterior lobe, short stumpy spurs that have regrown. I have the capacity for regeneration. To capture nature in carbon and cell growth. In an induced coma, I will be able to remain dormant, overwinter until the planet can sustain life again. I will be harvested with words.

I slip away to the sound of Tariq breathing heavily. Transported to a garden with the scent of sweet tamarind, eucalyptus, and citrus orange blossom. Around me are thorny and glossy-leaved fig trees, thick with fruit. ‘Marhabana,’ Tariq is saying. He threads wild jasmine flowers through my hair and leans down to kiss my lips. I am laid out on the dewy grass in a white robe and know that I am sleeping. My brain, a herbarium, to press and preserve words no longer spoken.

Helen Kennedy is a writer of short and Flash fiction who has been shortlisted and published by NFFD, the Bristol Short Story Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, Fly on the Wall Press, Reflex and the Aurora Prize for Writing . She had recently completed a debut novel, ‘Blessed Women’ and a second novel about fertility and Irish Folklore.

Find her on Insta @helenkennedywrites

Listen to Mary reading her story:

The man in the framing shop narrows his gaze to the clear plastic bag I’m dangling in front of him. ‘What is it?’ ‘An umbilical cord’, I say, then I laugh even though it’s not funny. ‘Want to hold it?’ He moves back, stuffing his weather worn hands in to his pocket for fear I’d force him. ‘Umbiblical cords are disgustin’ yokes’. I nod, in tacit agreement, but say ‘Still, if it’s possible I need it today.’ He shuffles away, through a door behind the counter. When he re-emerges, his hands are gleaming in golden yellow gloves. ‘Leave it with me an hour’ he says, taking the plastic bag containing my brother’s umbilical cord. He waves me out of the shop as he disappears into the back room.

The air on Shop Street is thick with the smell of factor fifty. It is pavement melting weather. Dripping cones in every hand. The weather is inhospitable to those of us carrying the unborn. I have five months of a thing weighing me down. Still, Joely doesn’t care. ‘Women give birth in the mines’ she often says. ‘The mines’ covers all manner of difficult places women give birth. My mother is from a wave of feminism that her daughter can’t fully understand, and it bothers her. She punishes me with tasks like taking Art’s eighteen-year-old umbilical cord to a framing shop.

I walk down on to the Spanish Arch in the hopes I’ll catch some river spray. Cans, sunglasses, high pitched laughter, the place ablaze with youth. They all look young to me, in my thirties and growing a thing. They travel in packs, young ones, and here on the Sparch they are congregated in groups of different sizes. Pairs, throuples, dozens. Two boys on one of the benches get up to let me sit down. They don’t look at my face, they see only my stomach. My feet hurt enough to ignore the sting, the reminder that I am older and more invisible than I’ve ever been.

The social expectation that we must wear shoes feels barbaric to me now. I kick them off and let my feet expand to the size they want to be. I spot the boys from Art’s school travelling across the bridge. Jumpers hung over shoulders and tied around waists. Sweat patches on backs and underarms. There must be twelve of them walking in convoy with Art, their leader, sashaying along smiling, laughing, glorious.

My brother isn’t like other teenagers, though as of today, he’s not a teenager anymore. Eighteen. Eighteen years to the day since I watched him explode out of Joely’s vagina. It had grown so wide I could’ve stuck my own head in there, mop of black curls and all. The blood. So much blood. I’ve tried to block out the visual over the years, but it lives on my skin. The screaming lives in my head, and I keep it alive, replaying it over and over when I’m in bed at night. I’ve been hearing it more frequently lately. Probably because of the thing I’m growing. I want to hold on to Joely’s screams, they might help me when the time comes. Violent, guttural noises that came from a depth she didn’t know she had. The screams of a Trojan warrior. The screams that said this child is mine and mine alone, that said I will kill for him.

He doesn’t see me, Art. He’s stopped seeing me, too. Talks to my stomach. He walks on by with his friends. His hair is floppy around his perfect face. Unblemished by the freckles I have. He has Joely’s sallow skin. He becomes more beautiful in weather like this. Helios is his friend, worshipping him like a God should be worshipped. Joely is obsessed with him and as a result, so am I. Our perfect boy.

I was fourteen, when he was born. Old enough to witness the complete annihilation of the vagina. He was perfect from the beginning, Joely said, because of his umbilical cord. I had long known that my own one had severed any real relationship Joely and I could have. She nearly died, with me. Told me on one of my birthdays. She waited until she felt I was old enough to understand the sorry story. The placental abruption. The blood. It was the umbilical cord, she said. Too short. Weak. Frayed. Our tether flimsy and dangerous. That’s why she burnt it, she said. It had failed us, and she wanted it gone. Burnt it at the Samhain Festival she goes to every year, offering it up to whoever she believes in. After she told me the story, we blew out my five candles and had non-dairy ice-cream. That night, I told my invisible friend Enid that my I’d almost killed my mother.

She’s planning a garden party for his eighteenth, with some of Art’s friends and her sister, Aunty Marjorie, who likes us to call her ‘Goddess’. She’s been preparing the picnic all morning. Beetroot hummus and crispy chickpea sandwiches, vegan sausage rolls, potato and turmeric focaccia, and tofu spring rolls. I’ve recently started eating meat again, for the thing. I’d missed it. I never really chose to be vegan, but Joely said and so I was. Art is still a vegan, but these days its cool.

Art is out of sight, gone up the street, absorbed by the cobbles. He stayed here, on the Spanish Arch, yesterday. He didn’t see me then, either. I was on my back, shoes off, eyes closed, sweat eking from every pore. I heard his voice. Milky G4 accent, loud when he forgets himself. He had forgotten himself, yesterday. That’s what I’ve been telling myself since it happened. He had been momentarily distracted, drunk on attention. He had forgotten who he was, what he believed in, his mother’s teachings.

I walk back to the framer’s. He’s finished. ‘When you have a difficult job to do, best to get it over with’ he grunts, not making eye contact with me. That was one of my lessons, for Art. He had Joely for literature, history, feminism. He had me for common sense, my humble asset. His navigation of secondary school, that was to be my great epitaph. ‘Don’t talk about menstruation when you’re dousing your sandwich in tomato ketchup. Don’t ask for tofu in the canteen. Don’t tell people who your mother is.’ I had succeeded in reshaping him for societal constructs. She was sending him to a famous boys’ school, famous for its footballers, hurlers, politicians, stand up male citizens. It was out of character, I thought. If she could’ve sent him to the girls’ school she would have. But she had motive. She wanted him to spread the gospel. Be the saviour. The son of woman. He was going to help these fragile 21^st century boys who were turning on us, who were sick of us having it all our own way. He was going to be Jesus. I couldn’t let it happen, couldn’t let him be the freak I had been. Before he walked into the cesspit, I had to save him so I gave him his options. Be the freak or be invisible. Be Joely’s son or listen to me.

He listened, for a time, but ultimately, I thought he rose the ranks by being himself. Boys were desperate to befriend him, girls desperate to love him. By the time he was seventeen, I thought that Joely must have been right, about the power of umbilical cords. A perfect being.

I tell myself that everyone makes mistakes. We’ve always held him to a higher standard because our own lives, my mother’s, and mine, were so consumed by his. Joely’s interest in me revolved around how I could serve Art. I didn’t mind. I’d never had friends. I was her daughter. The odd mother who dropped me at school in bare feet and wouldn’t allow me to play with the other children for fear I’d infect them, as my umbilical cord had infected her. Art became my friend, my everything. His happiness was mine. It didn’t feel like a sacrifice, at the time.

I hadn’t expected to see him yesterday. He led his apostles to the grassy area by the river. When they sat, Art’s back was to me. He was laughing, loud, carefree. ‘G’wan man’, one of them said. ‘Seriously, how’d you get her to do it?’ I didn’t need to hear anymore, but I did. And it was everything Joely had ever feared for him. That he would become one of them. A man of power. What he ‘got her to do’ was revealed in short, bullish phrases, belting out of the mouths of the boys. ‘A photo? Aw man, show us, go on, awwww she’s tashte, seriously, class’. Shielded by my sunglasses, I sat up, and looked directly at them, passing the phone around, while Art sat like a High King. Helios, being worshipped as he should be worshipped.

The framer is curt. ‘€80’ he says, handing me the bubble-wrapped frame with one hand and taking my card with the other. ‘Smells’ he says, as he processes the payment. ‘Of what?’ I ask. ‘A rotting thing’ he responds, not making eye contact. He hands me the receipt, nods, then disappears out the back. I step out on to the street and rip away the bubble wrap. He has done a great job, red rimmed inset and wooden frame. The cord sits still, perfect, in the centre.

I hear his laugh echoing down the street. He is with one boy now, making his way back to the Spanish Arch to meet me, as we had agreed. ‘Aw, Blythe, hey’, he says, unashamedly moving towards me with pace, hugging me. ‘Hi loveen’, I say. ‘This is Ciarán’, he says, introducing his friend with the confidence of a thirty-year old. ‘See ya, man’, he says, after Ciarán has looked at me, blushed, and scurried away.

We walk towards the car, Art talking incessantly about the various birthday celebrations the school held for him but I’m in my own head. Common sense. Everyone makes mistakes. He is young, and foolish. Reality hits as we sit into the car. Young and foolish is one thing. What I saw is another. And I know it, but I won’t say it.

I feel the thing kick inside me as we drive home. Its father doesn’t exist, or at least he doesn’t to me, and won’t, to the thing. A one-nighter. My first and only time. A drunken release from my tightly wound life. Just as my father was erased, so will my thing’s be. When Art was unborn, I didn’t call him a thing. A boy. A perfect boy. It was because I feared for him that I protected him so fiercely. Told him how to be, made him who he is. I made him who he is.

I started calling the thing inside me a ‘thing’ yesterday. Up to yesterday, it was a boy. From now on, it’s a thing, because until it comes out and grows up, I don’t know what it will be. I won’t assume that because it’s tied to me, that I will love what it is. I refuse to love it too much.

I thought that Art and I were tethered together by an invisible string made of gold, fashioned by the Gods. But it was fashioned by blood and yesterday, for the first time, it started to wear. It’s now a frayed string of shared pain and experience of our mother. I should never have believed her when she said he’d be perfect.

My thing won’t be perfect. It’s just a thing, unknown to me. Art is just a thing now. A rotting thing.

Mary Coleman was born in Co. Galway. She was shortlisted for the Eamon Keane Full Length Play Award at Listowel Writer's Week 2022 and was the recipient of The Patricia Leggett Scholarship for Playwriting from The Lir Academy 2022, completing her MFA in Playwriting at The Lir in August 2023. Mary won the Lough Corrib Short Story competition in 2022 and was a prize winner in Sonder Magazine’s Morning Coffee Short Story competition 2022. She received a Pavilion Theatre Studio residency in 2024. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in The Irish Times and on Sunday Miscellany on RTE Radio 1.

Golf balls, we called them, like giant malignant tumours nestling among the hills of the Yorkshire Dales. From the top of the ash tree I gazed at the white radomes of Menwith Hill, the American spy base, maybe a dozen, big and little, with a perimeter fence topped with razor wire. I had seen two close up whenever Mum drove past the gate, great towering round behemoths, their looming whiteness listening for enemies. Spellbound, I forgot the crows’ nest Grandad asked me to destroy, till the crow returned with its huge angry beak and I scarpered back down.

Every Friday I went to my grandparents’ for a piano lesson and sleepover, and after the lesson I would shin up a tree to stare at the unearthly white spheres. Mum forbade me to wander near because armed police patrolled the fence.

The day I started high school, Nana died and we moved in with Grandad. She had a heart attack on the drive and he found her. She’d been shopping and the apples had rolled into the road. Afterwards he stayed home and played the piano all day, the same music over and over, called Twilight Peace, which he’d written for her in a manuscript book in blue ink. Mum said he must have an eagle’s eyes to read the minuscule crotchets and quavers in that dim light.

After school I joined him. With his waistcoat and front-creased trousers and immaculate toothbrush moustache he sat straight-backed at the piano in the best room. Dark cypress trees crowded round the bay window, blotting out the sun, and all the furniture except one chair and the piano and stool was draped in white sheets, while his bony hands, barely an octave wide, drifted over the keys. Dust-motes danced in a solitary beam. I sat motionless. A shaft of sunlight sneaked through a gap in the foliage onto his glossy bald crown and his veins twitched till his fingers rested on the last chord. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed behind his glasses. My hand clutched the conker in my pocket.

‘When you grow up, you won’t want to bother with old folks like me,’ he said, his upper lip quivering.

‘Yes I will,’ I said fiercely.

On impulse I thrust the conker into his hand. I had planned to pickle and bake it and impress friends with its size and hardness. It was a giant, a twelver, oily and gleaming with wavy concentric streaks like contour lines on a map. He just stared at the shiny brown lump in his cupped palm and his eyes filled with water again.

Less than a year later, Grandad took poorly in the middle of writing a letter. In the hospital I held the bony hand with paper-thin skin and slate-blue wrists and looked into the watery, pleading eyes.

His voice was frayed. ‘Sorry we left a mess for you young ’uns.’

His hand flopped and his face went blank. I cried as I had never cried before. Mum said old people often pine away when their partner dies.

Soon after, she installed a man with a German shepherd dog. He had Lego hair and a shirt collar worn at the edge, and a four-year-old son who stayed every other weekend. The man said, laughing through yellow teeth, his son barked before he learnt to speak. The man stank of smoke, which Mum didn’t notice. Behind the shed he kept a cut glass ashtray crammed with cigarette ends standing upright in a pyramid, which turned brown with a pool of treacly gunge underneath. She didn’t notice that either. I sat in an ash tree to spy on him in his smoking hideout.

The man scythed Grandad’s meadow almost to bare soil, whipped off the dust sheets in the best room, ripped up carpets, threw out the gas fire and bought an electric one with mock flames leaping behind a glass front. He changed Grandad’s tasselled lampshade for a steel spotlight, and I was allowed to play the piano only till six. The grandfather clock went to auction. He wanted to sell the piano and have a drinks cabinet instead, because I was the only one who played.

‘But Dad left it to Daniel,’ Mum said.

The man glanced round at me.

‘Did he say it must stay in that room? Did he say it must stay in this house?’

I scowled and disappeared. The only vestiges of my beloved grandfather were the piano and roll-top bureau. I salvaged the dust sheets to make a den at the bottom of the garden.

The dog and I were enemies from the start. A sparrow flew into the kitchen and I rushed to the rescue, but the dog got there first.

‘Too late,’ the man said with a smirk.

I was distraught, but Mum just shrugged. I sat and played Twilight Peace and thought of Grandad finding Nana on the drive and the apples rolling round. The dog sat under the table while we ate. Grandad would have had a fit. The man fed it a sausage without Mum seeing.

After tea, I slipped into the best room. I heard the man’s knife-sharp voice say, ‘letting that red-haired one have his own way,’ and launched into the Funeral March. From then on, every day after school I played, for Grandad. One day Mum came in and listened.

‘It is a bit bulky,’ she said with head bowed. ‘Mebbe we could take out a couple chairs.’

The man had the cypress trees felled and paved the front garden. Sunlight filled the room. It felt wrong, disrespectful. I protested loudly.

The man showed his yellow teeth. ‘That’s it. Piano has to go.’

‘Hang on a minute,’ she said.

Next week while she was out, someone took the piano and she never uttered a word.

Years later, I learnt of Mum’s death. I was granted compassionate leave and drove back in a sweltering August. The man was long gone. The house and garden and street were smaller than I recalled, except for the ash trees, and all the front gardens were razed for parking.

In a drawer in her room was a child’s tea set of shiny black pottery wrapped in tissue, and documents including her birth certificate which, puzzlingly, showed her place of birth as P.O. Box 1663. I unlocked Grandad’s roll-top bureau and there, winking at me from a small pigeonhole, was my champion conker, the one I meant to pickle and bake, but gave to him instead for solace. I cradled it in my palm and stared at it for a long time. I remembered him saying, ‘When you grow up you won’t want to bother with old folks like me,’ and felt ashamed. He’d shown me nothing but kindness, and I had hardly given him a thought all through my teens and student years. The papers were immaculately ordered, hundreds of letters protesting the existence of the spy base, and replies. A folder contained information on Menwith Hill which I read halfway through the night till I could stomach no more: snooping on people, including British citizens, gathering data against commercial rivals, facilitating drone warfare in the Middle East, killing civilians in Yemen.... A lump of anger sat in my throat and would not go down. The spy base was accountable to no one, not even UK authorities. I felt as though I were balancing on a queasy knife-edge. For centuries my family had lived here in Yorkshire, yet I, Daniel, was classified as a foreign national on my own soil. I was the enemy, everyone was the enemy. Someone was probably poring over my digital footprint at that very moment.

In a large unmarked envelope I found tiny black-and-white photos of a hall with sedately dancing couples, friends relaxing with a drink at home, a log cabin, people on horseback, a jazz band, groups of smiling men and women, Nana holding a baby, and I wondered why they were not mounted in albums like those of the wedding and family growing up. I tipped up the envelope and a small metal object fell out: a sterling silver tie-pin with a large A and the word bomb between the legs of the A, and round the edge the words Manhattan Project. My heart sank with dawning awareness that my beloved Grandad had helped to build the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I untied a bundle of exercise books tied with a green satin ribbon. The top one was labelled ‘Diary 16th of July 1945—’, the ink was faded to a pale blue and the last page read, in wayward, quivering letters that went increasingly skew-whiff:

16th of July 1945

Still shaking with excitement twelve hours later. Last night we left the Hill by a secret back road in camouflaged buses and arrived at Alamogordo at 2 a.m. to witness the test. The bomb was mounted on scaffolding ten miles away from us. Dance music blasted through loudspeakers. We waited an hour for a storm to pass over and lay face down with our feet towards the site, and put on rectangular dark glasses. Then came the countdown. An eternity. I feared it would fail and feared it would succeed, but I feared failure more: all that hard work, for nothing.

At 5.29 a.m., while it was still dark, I saw a searing white light a thousand times brighter than the midday sun in the sky over the hills. We expected just a flash, but it carried on so long, I began to think we’d started a chain reaction which would destroy the whole world – something we had discussed before. I couldn’t resist whipping the glasses off and peeping round. A purple cloud hung there forever before going up into a ball of orange and purple and green and red and yellow flames. It kept boiling and churning and growing, much bigger than expected, it was coming towards us and I was afraid it would envelop us, ten miles away. I was temporarily blinded. My arms were covered in goose pimples and yet my ears were glowing from the heat of the blast. A full one and a half minutes after the piercing white light there was a huge growling roar, the likes of which I have never heard before.

We were awestruck and euphoric. After all that work and the long hours, an enormous sense of accomplishment and relief came over us. We did it! Back at the lab at Los Alamos we partied and the partying went on for two or three days, Dick was sitting on the bonnet of the Jeep, playing the bongos, and everyone was drinking and singing.

7th of August 1945

Can hardly write, I’m so shocked. Did I really think they wouldn’t use it? Dreadful shaking, couldn’t sleep all night. Yesterday Oppie called us to a meeting in the auditorium in T Building, strode down the isle, mounted the stage and read out a message: ‘Clear-cut results, exceeding TR test in visible effects’. Everyone was cheering and stamping their feet. Me too. But I kept thinking, we’ve killed thousands of innocent people. We’ve let the genie out of the bottle. Now everyone will want one. What have we done?

A trembling started in my fingertips and spread throughout my body. There were no more entries, nor later diaries. Grandad did that. And celebrated.

The ash trees were taller and laden with new keys. From indoors I fetched a large whisky and soda and sat in the blistering evening sun, watching swallows gather. I pondered the angry monsters that lurked beyond and their stranglehold, cradling the conker in my palm and staring at it, as gleaming and oily as ever. The meadow had sprung back after the man’s ravages and the frothy pink flowers of a hemp agrimony were crawling with insects. Hope.

Judy Birkbeck is the author of a novel, Behind the Mask is Nothing, published by Holland House Books. Her short stories have been published in Litro, Lampeter Review, Unthology, Aesthetica, Manchester Review, Leicester Writes, Mechanics’ Institute Review, The Shadow Booth, Lighthouse, Aftermath Magazine, Shooter Magazine and others. Find out more about Judy and her writing at http://www.judybirkbeck.co.uk/

The girl keeps to the margins—ink shy of the paper’s edge. Her English name, Ayane Nishida, floats up classroom registers in the wealthy New York suburbs the way a pale koi surfaces in water too clean to taste of river. Tarrytown, 2005: Abercrombie polos, razor-burn gossip, Destiny’s Child lilting through hallway vents. Locker doors slam. Ayane is sixteen, tenth grade, eight years exiled from Nagoya. By now she should have more friends. Instead she’s learned the acoustics of invisibility: glide, nod, vanish.

She’s scribbling in the corner of her physics notebook when the announcement crackles: cultural-exchange assembly, period seven. Nobody cheers—assemblies usually mean a PowerPoint on bullying or a pep rally against gateway drugs. Still, it’s a reprieve from class, so the auditorium swells to capacity.

A visiting youth band from Medellín, Colombia, the principal explains—impoverished barrio riddled by gangs, exceptional talent, brass as bright as the Andes at sunrise. The curtain lifts and the stage blooms: trumpets flaring, clarinets curling vines around trombone stems, timpani thrumming like a mountain heart. Ayane’s gaze magnetises to a boy half-hidden in the second-to-back row. He tilts his head the way Orlando Bloom does in Pirates, that just-let-me-loosen-the-plot smirk. Sun-lit ends of his hair glow bronze.

When he plays his trumpet, the auditorium exhales. Notes rise, then dive, then soar again—linger on a wistful blue note glancing over its shoulder before it vanishes. In that moment she sees a wavering shadow behind his grin, the same lonesome tint she wears inside her own ribs. Ayane feels something shift—the school’s false ceiling suddenly transparent, a slice of sky pinned overhead.

Applause bursts. Teachers herd students toward their next class. Ayane lingers, clinging to the echo. Her crushes normally reside in magazines bought second-hand at the Korean grocery, but this boy is alarmingly three-dimensional.

Backstage smells of valve oil, polyester, and jet-lag. The musicians chug water from crinkled plastic bottles. Ayane slips through the lattice of instrument cases, heart flexing like an accordion. She fingers a sheet from her notebook. She remembers first grade, the lunchroom roar when she mispronounced ‘mayonnaise,’ how she vowed never to speak before she was sure of every syllable again. The vow frays now, tugged loose by brass. She takes a leap. One sentence in textbook Spanish: ¿Quieres conocerme mañana después de la escuela en el río? She adds Me llamo Ayane and a hesitant smiley.

The boy looks up as if summoned. Their eyes snag—two travellers spotting the only familiar face in an alien airport. He reads. A smile unspools, slow as ribbon. “Tomás,” he says, thumbing his chest. The note disappears into his inside pocket, close to the hum of lungs.

Riverfront Park, the next afternoon. April sun, gulls quarrelling over a French fry, the Hudson breathing brackish secrets. Ayane finds Tomás already there, trumpet case balanced on his knees. She raises the deli bag in greeting. He answers with an almost-salute, half shy, half stage bow.

Tomás thumps the stubborn vending machine until two Sprites lean forward but stick. Ayane slips out her sky-blue wallet from her backpack, feeds the bills, and the cans drop with a bright, grateful clatter.

“Next time, I buy,” Tomás says, grinning.

“Deal,” she answers.

They settle on the graffiti-scarred bench—K+M 4EVER, EAT THE RICH, a Sharpie dinosaur roaring above both lines. Traffic brooms the distant bridge; gusts lift pigeon feathers into tiny, uncertain orbits. Ayane’s cheeks feel too warm.

Conversation proceeds in hopscotch: her Spanish verbs missing shoelaces, his English nouns wearing mismatched socks. They point, pantomime, laugh in the same off-balance rhythm birds use when they hop sideways on the grass.

Brothers? she asks, and he counts on fingers—two younger, one older—then mimes a toddler yanking hair, an older teen flexing muscle. Ayane shares she’s an only child. She almost tells him how dinner at home is three bowls, one kept steaming for a father late at the office, night after night, but the words come apart like over-boiled noodles. Tomás nods with startling gentleness, as if loneliness is a language he speaks fluently.

They peel sandwiches, nibble corners first. Bread fluff drifts like dandelion seeds across their hoodies. A gull lands, head cocked imperial. Tomás tears a morsel, tosses it.

Tomás nudges open the trumpet case, lifts the horn just enough to breathe a four-note phrase—soft, unfinished. The sound hangs between them. It skims Ayane’s skin, slips inward, nestles in a hollow below her collarbone.

A Metro-North express barrels past—their bench vibrates, soda cans shimmy. Tomás’s hand twitches toward hers. She meets him halfway. Their fingers tangle awkwardly, then settle, palms learning each other’s pulse as though matching metronomes before a duet.

“Treinta y cinco minutos,” Ayane says when he aims a question at the train tracks. Thirty-five minutes to Grand Central Terminal; another commuter screeches past to prove it. Tomás whistles, eyes wide: freedom measured in timetable columns. She tells him about the Met—marble wings, tombs that glow like captive dawn. She speaks of Broadway marquees, letters ablaze in rain. He listens, eyes bright, as if each syllable grants him citizenship. They trade dreams: her yearning to slip the choke-collar of suburbia, his thirst for anywhere else. Hands meet again between empty brown bags. His thumb graffitis circles into her heartbeat on her wrist. She confirms the planet still spins.

He asks—halting—if she’s climbed the Statue of Liberty. She admits she never has. They decide that next time he visits they’ll go. Próxima vez rests luminous between them, uncertain future tense carved into air.

The river slap-laps against the embankment. Cargo barges toil south, Manhattan ghosting the far-south horizon, a graphite mirage. Tomás closes his eyes, inhales. Ayane studies his profile: the way afternoon light feathers his lashes, the faint scar near his ear shaped like a comma. She raises a finger towards it, wondering what stories follow after it.

She pauses when Tomás opens his eyes.

“What word in English,” he asks slowly, “for when… what you want is big, but place you stand is small?” He spreads thumb and forefinger, pinches them smaller.

Ayane sifts through vocabulary: yearning feels too Victorian, ambition too mercenary. Finally she says, “Longing?” then, softer, “Homesick, but for a place you’ve never lived.” The definition startles her even as she speaks it. It tastes exactly like her own mouth.

Tomás tests “longing,” rolling it with the trumpet-player’s sensitivity to vowels. He repeats it until it fits, then taps his chest twice—I carry this. She mirrors the gesture—yes, me too—and wonders if this means they’re bound forever with this shared burden. For a moment it feels like they’re holding a clandestine instrument between them, an invisible cello humming on the same low string.

Dusk pulls the river over its head like a quilt. Tomorrow, final concert, then JFK. She asks about home. He opens, then closes, his arms—bougainvillea and bullet-holes woven into the same gesture. Medellín, he says, learned to bloom after teaching itself to bleed.

Bougainvillea—he prints the word in her notebook, block letters vine-thin.

The bus brays. Texts from her mother ping like tiny alarms, homework and curfew. She rises. Walks backward until distance forces surrender.

When she finally turns, Sprite fizz still prickling her tongue, Ayane counts—eleven steps, twelve—before chancing a glance. Tomás remains by the bench, silhouette against river shimmer, hand lifted. She lifts her notebook in reply, breeze riffing pages like applause.

Saturday’s finale unfurls. Ayane perches front row, heart a timpani roll. One empty trumpet chair stares at her, accusatory. The conductor starts anyway. Music surges, triumphant yet thinner. Backstage, teachers search restrooms, check stairwells. A phrase filters through: he never got on the morning bus.

Ayane’s stomach knots. She checks her backpack. Her wallet—gone. Sixty dollars birthday money, Barnes & Noble gift card. Betrayal tastes peri-metallic, like licking a battery.

Monday, local news: Colombian teen missing—suspected runaway. Grainy file photo of Tomás flashes. The anchor mispronounces his surname into something American. Online forums flare with jokes about visas and border tunnels. Ayane douses her laptop in blankets.

That night she keeps the cordless phone beside her pillow, as if the FBI might consult tenth-graders at 2 a.m. She clicks through news sites until each refresh feels like CPR that will not take. One rumor says a trumpet case was found in Yonkers; another claims he boarded a Chinatown bus heading south. In homeroom the next morning two boys joke about “the Colombian Jason Bourne,” and Ayane’s cheeks burn so hot she tastes copper behind her teeth. By Friday the posters on the school entrance doors curl at the corners, damp with rain.

Days expand. Cherry blossoms confetti the cul-de-sac. She mangles Chopin on her piano. Each discordant note prints his name onto her metronome heart. She Googles bus routes to Queens, deletes history. Tomás becomes folklore: a trumpet note trapped mid-air, reverberating as echoes in myth.

Then a postcard appears in her mailbox—no stamp. Central Park in autumn, leaves swirled like embers. On the back, neat letters:

Hudson reminds me of you every day. Gracias, T.

An initial, a promise, a loose atom.

She pictures sixty dollars funding an urban odyssey: train to Grand Central, subway to Jackson Heights, maybe a cheap bus south. She imagines him street-corner busking, brass bell catching neon drizzle, strangers dropping coins that sound like double-exposure wishes. She also imagines him cuffed in a van, trumpet confiscated. Both images overlay—light leak and scorch mark.

June, humidity thick enough to spoon. Ayane volunteers to design the Sophomore Farewell program—sanctuary among glue sticks and whisper-quiet paper trimmers. She paints a bridge over water: left bank, hillside shacks; right, a softened skyline; midspan, a lone figure with a trumpet case. Classmates flip through the booklet. “How poignant and hopeful” a teacher says. “Kinda sad,” says a classmate.

July. Ayane’s name badge reads BOOKSELLER. Barnes & Noble hums with chilled air and decaf regret. A boy enters—trumpet case slung. For a breath Ayane is sure, but this boy orders iced chai, laughs about driver’s-ed, vanishes into History.

Later, on break, she slips twenty dollars and her replaced gift card into El Guardián entre el Centeno. Shelves it where Spanish titles gather dust. At closing she checks. The book is gone. Coincidence tastes faintly of sugarcane, diesel.

September’s first cold front rustles suburban maple leaves like pages turning too fast. Ayane bikes to the river-bench. Their butterfly knife initials are blurring—T + A now looks like a math problem with no solution.

She fishes a postcard from her backpack—skyline at dusk, windows beginning to kindle. On the blank side she writes:

Play loud so I can hear you over the water.

She signs with her kanji, folds the card once, then tucks it beneath a splintered slat.

A commuter train hurtles past, windows flashing like empty measures of music. Wind kicked by its wake lifts the postcard, nudges it half-free, but the paper clings, trembling, still undecided on whether to stay or to go.

Ayane rests both palms on the bench. River light scallops across the water. Gulls wheel, practice landings they may never perfect. She realizes she isn’t waiting for Tomás, not exactly, but for the girl whose heart jumped key the moment a trumpet brushed a lonely blue note in an American auditorium, the girl who believed a three-line note could rearrange the geography of a future. When another train rushes by, she understands this girl won’t be here forever.

She throws her leg over her bike to head home, bike chain ticking in hard, even beats. She counts: melody found, note passed, boy met, wallet lost, boy missing, memory fixed, hope in motion, freedom uncharted. Silver flashes peripheral off the Hudson. She chases it, legs burning, sunset bright as trumpet brass ahead of her, breath snagging in her throat, a little dizzy, feels the motion.

Mizuki Yamagen is a writer from Japan, currently living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with her half moon and two very spoiled farm dogs. In her writing, she explores humanity on the brink, or simply people in strange places and strange times. Mizuki is the Grand Prize winner of The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2025. Her writing has also appeared in HAD, Flash Flood, Five on the Fifth, and is forthcoming in Flash Frog, The Citron Review, Does It Have Pockets, and other places.

Listen to Jo reading her story:

The night before my funeral you snatch a single round of REM in the thinnest hours of daylight and dream of lanky grey aliens stalking through cornfields. You’re still stuck in sleep paralysis when you see them slipping into your room — not your room — the tiny box room in your mother's house. I know you've been avoiding coming here since you left, but you can blame me for the necessity of this visit. The aliens and I watch you panic for a while before you realise where you are, what day it is, and that there's no point closing your eyes again.

The day of my funeral your mother looks at your hangdog face and asks what's the matter with you, as if the dissipated matter of me is not obvious enough. You don't tell her about the aliens in your room or how you nearly puked on the train down here when you passed the spot where it happened. You don't know yet that you will feel the track-rattling impact in your guts every time you pass through a tunnel for the next ten years.

Your mother says you should eat something but you're still young enough to survive on coffee and a cigarette which should make you feel worse although maybe there's not much worse to be felt today. I should be sorry about that but I don’t have the synapses anymore. If I did, I’d tell you the nothingness you think you’re feeling is an oxymoron and you’d probably tell me to go fuck myself.

The day of my funeral I'm still young enough that I’m wearing school uniform in ninety per cent of the photos in the memorial collage. There’s only one friend-of-a-friend who can drive but her shitty little red Citroen breaks down on the way and you want to hit her over the back of the head with the car jack when she acts like the whole thing is a fucking adventure. You don't want to be funnelled off to the overflow in the community hall with the rest of the latecomers — so many people are sad about me they don't even fit in the church — but my mother has saved you and the others a space in the third row.

I'm still young enough that all they talk about is the future I almost had. My mother picks a song we danced to in the kitchen a few days before because it’s the last good memory she has. She invites everyone to sing along but nobody can, and you all sit there for the whole three minutes while she taps the offbeat on the lid of my coffin. You don't know yet that you will forget what you wrote in your letter to my mother. That you will lose the reply she sent back, somewhere between houses, between decades. That you will often wonder how she kept standing as she sang along by herself, staring back at a wash of faces just wishing the song would end.

My sister and her friends shave their heads to match mine; to raise money for the kids' charity I'd been volunteering for — turning my life around, except for the part where I fucked it up — and you wonder if you'd have had the balls to join them if you'd hadn't moved away.

You never knew my sister very well and you'll forget what she looks like eventually, but the haunting on her face will indelibly imprint on your brain when she tells you what they found on the train tracks afterwards. Scraps of my t-shirt. A shoe full of blood. They don't talk about that at my funeral, or what I’d taken that night, or if someone tried to talk me out of it, or what the fuck possessed me to climb out the window of a moving train. The news clipping from the local paper says it wasn’t the first time I’d done it. You’ve climbed over enough padlocked fences with me that you can believe that, but you wonder still if you'd have been able to stop me if you'd been there. Or if you’d have taken the bait, too.

You're wearing kitten heels because you're young enough not to have a proper funeral outfit and they’re the only formal shoes you could find at your mother’s house. They sink into the dirt in the graveyard with every step. You want to yank them off and shotput them over the hedge. You wonder if it’s weird to walk barefoot on soil full of dead people. If anyone would say anything. You can’t look at the hole they’ve dug for me — too square and too neat, edged with plastic astroturf — so you squint at the cloud cover and imagine your shoes soaring above the crowd in a perfect arc.

The church is surrounded on three sides by greyscale farmland. They’re not cornfields but you look for aliens anyway; for a sign you’re still back in the dream. You look for me, tightrope-walking the flint wall, losing my balance because I’m laughing at your stupid shoes, saying let’s go make crop circles.

You're young enough that none of you know what to do afterwards. You manage one drink at the local where we used to play pool, except it’s been gentrified since you were last here and the daylight is far too loud and no one has anything worth saying to each other. You can’t actually remember when you were last here. Or when we last spoke. Or when you started telling stories about the things we did instead of being in them.

You stare at my sister’s soft-stubbled head and wish you were already on the train back. Except you don’t — you wish you never had to get on another train ever again. You wish you’d never come down in the first place. Wish you’d never had to. Wish we were all still young enough to be satisfied with climbing fences. That we’d all got to escape. That there’d been enough to stay for.

You wish you could ask me what the fuck I was thinking. Except you don’t, because you already know. And maybe, if I still had the synapses, I’d be sorry about that too.

On the drive back, the friend-of-a-friend puts on the radio to fill the chloroform nothingness and the kitchen-dancing-coffin-tapping song starts playing. The fields swim by on either side and you all shut up even harder. The air hardens, as if it might crack. As if you might somehow hold your breath for the whole three minutes. And if you can do that, if you can stay upright like my mother, then in the space between this song and the next, you might just hear me say hey.

Jo Gatford is a short writer who writes (mostly) short things. Her work has most recently been published by The Fiction Desk, HAD, Flash Frog, and was selected for Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions 2024. She has been teaching creative writing for over 15 years, edits other people's words for her supper and chases creative glimmers at The Joy of Fixion on Substack. Read more of her work at www.jogatford.com or find her on various socials @jmgatford

Listen to Mark reading his story:

Johnny Moran is tryin to be funny. He wants to make Sharon McBride laugh so he’s makin jokes about my mum.

Hey Jay, is it true?

I try an listen to Ol science teacher Santini chattin about sunlight on plants.

Don’t be blanking me.

Only fools like fightin. I don’t wanna hit them but it’s the same on the estate, at home, in Maccy D’s, the top deck of the bus, walkin to the shops, wherever. Idiots desperate to flex what they got an show that they’re buffer than you, thinkin it earns them respect an blow jobs. Johnny Moran wants the baseball cap life, pimpin with his grillz an gold, thinkin he’ll cruise around in his open-topped BMW, hos in the back, ready to machete anyone that gives him side-eye.

The flexin is a billion times worse when girls are around.

If Sharon McBride didn’t have big jugs, no one would be fussed about her, I swear.

Oh no, she ses, he’s still blanking you.

She’s such a stirrer.

I know that if I do look at Johnny Moran something major-bad is gunna happen.

I mean to him, not me.

This psycho feelin has been like a sound system boomin in my head all week long. I’m okay when I’m cuddlin my cat, Flapjack. Cats have this magic about them that make you feel better when they nuzzle into you an purr. I don’t know how they do it. Shame I can’t stay in my room with her cos it’s when I unlock my bedroom door an step into the world that these basslines of war crank up an I wanna start bustin faces. Whenever I hear mum talk or teachers or the fools in my class, all I wanna do is knock their lights out. It’s not like I can chat to anyone about it. No one cares. They act like they do, askin how I am an givin me sweets an shit, but they don’t, not really. They’re fakers. The teachers. Mum. I know my bro, Mike, ses he’s gunna be back home once he’s outta prison, but I’ve been thinkin about how he kinda lived with his shady mates an ghosted me in the weeks before he was arrested.

I tell myself dad ain’t like them but I’m not so sure either, neither, cos where the fuck’s he gone?

People chat one thing, but it’s what they do that tells you the truth.

Apart from Johnny. He’s so dumb he can only chat about what’s on his raisin brain. He ses to me, Your mum finishes work when she gets out of bed.

Sharon McBride does her fake, extra loud laugh.

Ol Santini ses to her, Stop that.

I get off my stool an pick it up. Johnny raises his hands to defend himself but he’s too slow. He does a fish mouth as I jab one of the stool legs into his eye an smash him over the head.

I leap on him an dish out the murders beastin inside of me.

Mr Leonard orders me to stay seated by the door to the Headmistress’ office.

Don’t move, he ses. Mrs McNeil will be with you shortly.

Fools pass in the corridor smellin of chip butties. They see me on the chair in front of the Office of Pain. They point an shake wrists an one of them shouts, Someone’s getting expelled, an they burst out laughin before a teacher goin by yells at them. I realise it’s Robinson. The faker who said she was gunna speak to mum an try to meet her, promisin to help me. She stands in the corridor an she ain’t lookin at me. It’s as if she’ll catch diseases an I wonder if that’s her shame makin her scared, cos she’s another one of the liars.

I call out, Mizz.

She walks off like she ain’t heard me.

Do you care about my welfare, Mizz? Do you care about my welfare, Mizz Robinson? When are you gunna speak to my mum? When are you gunna meet mum for the coffee she don’t even drink?

Mr Leonard appears an ses in a firm teachery voice, Silence. Not another word. Do you understand me?

I don’t bother lookin at him.

I got more beasts roarin inside of me. Believe.

Mr Leonard knows about murders too with his coffin tie. That’s his real job. Buryin kids alive. The whole teacher act is a cover up. He ain’t here to educate. He’s here to exterminate. Diggin a mass grave for us paupers. This school is really a cemetery where hopes be dyin.

You are in serious trouble, Jason Smith.

They had to take Johnny Fuckadoo to hospital for stitches. The same A&E where they took Krish after Sara Zondi went batshit crazy on him, tearin out his hair in strips. Both beastins happened in Ol Santini’s science class. Madeline Booth ses there’s a hex on that classroom an blamed fools doin Ouija board shit.

Do you know where your mother is? ses Mr Leonard. We’re trying to reach her.

Ha-ha.

Joker.

I’m empty. The same as those shelves in the budget supermarket on the estate on Sundays, where people walk around the aisles, carryin their baskets with stupid expressions cos there ain’t nothing left, wishin they had the moolah to go to Sainbury’s.

Is your mother home, Jason? Her phone keeps going to voicemail. How can we reach her?

I don’t speak.

Edgar arrives, carryin his rucksack.

You’re his friend, right? asks Mr Leonard.

Yes, sir, ses Edgar.

Are you okay to sit with Jason while we try to contact his family and get some assistance here?

Sure, ses Edgar

It’s imperative he stays right there.

Yes, sir.

Mr Leonard goes back into the office to use his big words when chattin about graves with Mrs McNeil, who is a Born Again, Bible bashin Christian who hates poor people.

Jay, are you okay? ses Edgar.

I never get that question. What is, Okay? It don’t matter if I am or ain’t okay. Don’t make no difference. I know he wants me to talk. They all do. If people aren’t tellin you to shoosh, they’re on at you to talk. There’s no way to win.

He takes a pack of Monster Munch from his rucksack. Here, do you want some? he goes, tearin it open.

My stomach is pinchin an foldin. It hurts like fuck.

Edgar holds the pack in front of me. Take them, he ses.

I want to but I can’t seem to move my hands.

I heard what you did, Edgar ses.

I don’t chat, cos, like, seriously, why bother?

Edgar rummages in his bag an pulls out a chocolate bar. What about this? he ses. You like these, Jay, don’t you?

He don’t know how badly he’s temptin me with his bribes.

It’s going to be okay, he ses. I’m sure you won’t be expelled. Everyone knows what a loud mouth that freak Johnny is.

I reckon the word, Okay, should be banned.

Edgar slips the chocolate into the pocket of my jacket. We sit there an he starts to understand that I’d like to chat if I could cept it’s best for me to stay on mute. I know they’ll have to bring in support services an do their safeguardin shit. I reckon they’ll do a visit to mum’s flat an when they see where I’m livin, they’ll be tellin me that puttin me in a Home is for my own good.

Edgar reaches over. He wants to hold my hand. I flinch at first. His touch is such a surprise.

It’s alright, he ses.

He puts his hand around mine. He’s not stressin about fools seein us an I’m not sure I give a fuck. Whatevs.

As words go, Alright, is better than, Okay.

Mrs McNeil’s voice booms from her office. She ses, Mrs Smith, we need you at the school immediately I’m afraid. Yes, Mrs Smith. It’s your son, Jason.

Edgar ses, You should come back round to mine. We can play Fifa. You’ll come over, won’t you? Mum likes you and will cook us food again.

McNeil ses loudly, Your son has been involved in a major incident. You must come to the school now.

You can eat as much pakora as you like, ses Edgar.

Mrs Smith, it’s difficult to make sense of what you’re saying. Do you understand what I am telling you?

Mum ain’t Mrs no more.

I think about how Ol science boffin Santini bangs on about beauty of the universe shit in his lessons.

In between us launchin nuclear war on each other.

Edgar squeezes my hand.

I wanna be in bed with Flapjack—the two of us together forever an ever.

I kind of know for a fact that I won’t see Edgar after today. I’ll be another one of the school’s disappearin acts.

I close my eyes to see large planes fly high above in the stratosphere, droppin hundreds of bombs that glide down through the air like prehistoric birds an land on the school, explodin on the brick buildins an the portacabins. I watch one crashin through the ceilin an blowin up at my feet in a hot flash of white light, blastin us to smithereens… Shadows on walls… Atoms… Base elements.

Oxygen. Nitrogen. Hydrogen. Evil carbon an some other stuff.

Everyone fusses an acts buff, but that’s all we are.

Mark Burrow has published a novella, Coo, which is about an alcoholic turning into a pigeon in a world where people turn into birds (Alien Buddha Press). His short stories have appeared in a range of titles, including AEOS Magazine, Punk Noir, Flight of the Dragonfly and Underbelly Press. He’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (by Frazzled Lit) and Best of the Net (prose and poetry). He lives in the south of England.

Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world...

Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;

Selected excerpts from Tithonus, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Do you forget that he – him, my Tithonus – was just one of many princes of Troy? What else could he have been, when his shine was so unjustly overshadowed by the much-fated Priam? What would he have been but another plaything of us gods, another used-up corpse on that much-bloodied battlefield, if I had not loved him?

I knew him from boyhood. He would awake in the dark and face east, waiting for me with the same constancy with which I broke each morning, rosy-fingered and new. I am the dawn and all that is alight by my hand owns me in part, but even then it is to him I wished to truly belong. I bathed him in my warmth and chased away all shadows, leaving his beauty burning like my brother god the sun, lingering long and leaving skies tinged misty pink as mortals finished their fast and began to work the fields. My siblings teased me mercilessly but it was glorious, to be patient. To discover suddenly what it was to wait for time to pass.

I have been bed mate to the stars, have birthed the winds, but in all my endless days it was the possibility of what this mortal child could become that felt like true godliness;

for at first, he was but a promise: so golden and splendid in his coltish love. As the days grew shorter and the winter paled and quickened my light (though its dimness was a necessary, fleeting thing) still, still! He shivered in pelts and leant into me, eyes closed and lips wistful. Would any other worshipper have done so?

I caressed him as best I could through all seasons, tracing the lines of his slow broadening shoulders, rising as leisurely as I dared over his thick, honeyed hair. My light is cyclical, but my love was constant and

how I loved him, I loved him, I loved him.

Besides Tithonus, dearest to me were my brother and sister, Helios and Selene, the sun and moon. They watched over him when I could not; though often they liked to have me beg and plead to know how he fared when I was without him.

‘He is princely and wise, loved by the people, respectful to his father and honouring of his mother,’ admitted Helios.

‘You have strange taste, my love,’ Selene sighed, ‘though by firelight he does sing beautifully.’

How I ached to hear him sing.

Still I kept my distance, though on my most restless nights my sister might be persuaded to make for her bed early; and on occasion that my yearning should bring me to tears, Helios would take me with him as he rode out across the sky. While he flew across the mortal Earth and beat constantly onwards towards dusk, I looked backwards, always back, to see where Tithonus stood.

So I, Titan-born, waited. I waited until his beard had begun to grow and his spear had been bloodied. I waited, and handmaidens sighed with longing and nymphs and foreign princesses let their glances linger, but Tithonus was unwavering, he looked only for me. He could have chosen another then; when his beauty was known by all and the power of his stride shook dust from the earth, but when I at last bade him come away with me, he came willingly.

I took him to the end of the world, to Oceanus, so that we may lie by the river unseen by mortals or gods. There at last we kissed, and there at last I tasted the imperfections of his lips, smelt his hot sweat, the reek of him, felt his shallow, shaking breaths—

‘Eos,’ he whispered, ‘Aurora, oh sweetest of all goddesses, most lovely, most loved–’ I kissed him again, lest even at the edge of everything he was overheard, and his reverence for me taken as disdain for all others. To keep him hushed I placed my hands upon him, and my mouth upon him, and together we lay as man and wife.

After, I asked him to sing me a song.

So many men have written of me, of my loveliness and my brilliance and about all they would do for me. They would swim the wine-dark sea for my love, slay monsters and vanquish tyrants. They would walk through flames to keep me warm – me. Warm.

I have listened to so many promises of what men will conquer for love of the dawn – for the love of any goddess, any woman, any god or man –

it was entirely new to hear what a man might surrender.

You see? Even then he stood apart, my husband, my love. There in the grass he sung to me vows of sacrifice; how he would forsake all others to worship me, would give up all his strength to see my bright dawning, would bend low to see me soar –

the magnificence of my pleasure might have wrecked him, so I hid my smile in the salt-soaked crook of his arm.

You could have made me mortal, then. If you had come to me in that moment, sated and most beloved and asked, ‘Will you forsake your power and all eternity for this man?’ I would have told you yes, without hesitation. I would have veiled myself and followed him across land and sea, worked the loom and dressed his wounds. I would have cooked his meals and mixed his wine and let my teeth rot in my head. I am almost sure of it.

But the sun sets, he always sets. And then comes the moon and I must follow. So each morning I left my young husband sleeping on and went bleary-eyed to announce a new day.

To love a mortal was to perceive time, and now that was terrible. Never before had I considered anything I did to be a waste, nor had one thing deprived me of another. Yet now if I must rise – I must, always I must – then I must be away from my beloved. And though he himself was still too young to believe in its inevitability, I knew that sown alongside the bloom of his youth, his vibrant beauty, was the seed of his death, our parting.

My love became a savage thing. In the in-between of moon and sun, half-awake and greedy, I pressed my fingers over his breast. I could have pressed myself further, sunk through skin and snapped bone to reach his heart. I could have scooped it out whole and brought my mouth down to meet it for a first delicious bite, torn out the thrumming remnants of his heartbeat.

I am nothing, the world becomes nothing, if I do not dawn. But I would have done anything to hold back each day and keep Tithonus with me, to stop him going where I could not follow.

And so, I turned to Zeus.

It is no easy thing to beg a favour of the king of the gods, harder still to beg out of love for a mortal man. Mortal lives mean so little to him, and as for love, his melts quicker than beeswax. How many times had I watched him flee at the coming of my light, out of the bed of some nymph or goddess or queen or slave girl? How often had I seen him return, unashamed and still swollen with pleasure, in the form of some giant bird or beast or man, to lie beside his wife?

‘But he does come back,’ Hera would say, ‘he always comes back.’

And in the aftermath, he never interceded with whatever form Hera’s wrath took, lest she listed her grievances to him. No: the fate of most humans – no matter how great or terrible – had little meaning to Zeus, and for him Tithonus was naught but a freckle in my golden eye. I used all my loveliness, risked everything, to get what was needed.

So my eternal love took eternal form. In the after, invigored by his new immortality, my husband begun to follow me when I rose from our bed. As I worked above he hunted in the blaze of my rose-fingered light below. Across the land he ran, he ran, he ran, relishing his strength, revelling in his speed, counting each hot beat of his invincible heart. When I returned to him, the air was thick with richly laden herbs and the roasting of animal flesh, and I suckled the blood of his prey from his fingers. We were meeting again anew, the infinite now before us, and dawn came late for much of the seasons to follow. In that time I bore our two sons: our sweet, blessed boys, Memnon and Emathion.

As they grew, confronted by his seeded legacy – my other gifts – Tithonus started to take stock of himself. All that I had once catalogued with dread I now beheld with cherished reverence, and I smiled to see it become apparent to him. The beginning of an ache in his bones, the echo of his brilliant, crinkled smile lingering at the corners of his eyes.

‘Do you regret it, my love?’ he asked me then.

I told him no. Did he?

I ask you this: if I had chosen mortality, if I had succumbed to sagging and stooping and greying as I watched him do, would he have been able, truly, to love me still, as he does my godly form? And if with his immortality I had also begot him eternal youth, made him forever beautiful not just to me but to all who gazed upon him, could he have truly forsaken all others? You see then that I have saved him the anguish of making his young self a liar. That I have made him the rarest of things, alone among all creatures: an honest man.

When his bones began to wither, I let him lap ambrosia from my cupped hands, and though it soon became necessary for me to stop all my wifely caresses for fear of causing him pain, I was never anything but (am always nothing but) loving to him. Age has fractured his mind, so I have confined him to his chamber so as to keep each shard of memory contained within its walls. He picks through them endlessly, muttering as he works. I watched his once great city fall and wept alone over the broken bodies of our children; what does he have to recall but a life as sweet as honey?

When my work is done and the sun is high, I rest my ear to the door of his room and let the rhythm of his words soothe me to sleep. Sometimes, even now,

I hear him call my name.

There is the story of Tithonos, loved by Dawn with her arms of roses
and she carried him off to the ends of the earth
when he was beautiful and young. Even so was he gripped
by white old age. He still has his deathless wife.

                    —	The beat goes on (fragment 58), Sappho

Ruby Allen-Cadman is an author and editor based in Edinburgh, Leith. She runs a social enterprise dedicated to diversifying publishing and storytelling called To Be Read, writes and performs stories for children and adults, and is incapable of finishing a cup of tea.

Find out more about To Be Read at https://linktr.ee/tobereadCIC

Ruby’s personal substack is at https://substack.com/@rubyallencadman