Listen to the author reading this story:
Looks like Beirut in here.
The words zip like sniper fire through the years to hit their mark every time. It was our shorthand, you see, standing for a scene of utter destruction, usually a bedroom (how can you live like this? You can’t even see the floor), or a kitchen after a cooking attempt (you’ve used every pot and pan in the house!) and it became one of our dad’s habitual sayings.
Of course, none of us had ever seen or been to Beirut. Even then it wasn’t the sort of place one visited. It was piped into our living room TV for so many years that the horror subsided to familiarity through repetition, and eventually we came to recognise the characteristic piles of rubble and tumbling walls of the civil war bitten citadel.
I didn’t know, then, the colours of the sunset when it kissed goodnight to the high rises as they gazed out across the easternmost Mediterranean, which reserved a matchless blue only for Lebanon. I hadn’t yet found the joy of hiding from the early sun within the shaded, narrow streets of Hamra, shot through with the taste of bitter coffee and honeyed baklava. I hadn’t yet heard the blend of Muezzin and church bells calling all to prayer, arresting everything except the dawning impression of five thousand years of people and all their faiths and all their destinies landing up here in this place sentenced to rebuild itself in perpetuity.
I hadn’t yet swallowed the hot fear evoked by the look of bored malevolence in the eyes of the gangs roaming the plaza near the museum at noon, nor felt the weight of tiredness in the sigh heaved by the captain as he took my statement after I’d had my wallet lifted from my pocket on the bus. For the second time.
It wasn’t until our dad’s sayings were as dusty and well-used as my dig-bag that I found myself in Beirut as a post-doctorate joining the works to reopen the National Museum’s basement collection. My secondment put me directly in line to care for the thirty-one Phoenician sarcophagi, all from the Ford Collection, and all needing painstaking cleaning, cataloguing, and displaying. The cool of that basement became my home and, when we lost electricity, which was frequent, we would close the museum and decamp around the corner to the Director for Antiquities’ sandstone building or across to the park to swap food and histories.
Beirut taught me the fragility of beauty and the foolhardiness of taking anything for granted, even the ground beneath your feet. It also taught me the power of human resilience and the true meaning of endurance. These lessons I relearned every time an ERW – an explosive remnant of war, yes, it’s a term – hollowed out a street I’d trodden just the day before. I was always struck by the speed of the returning hustle after a blast.
Looks like Beirut in here.
The voice that spoke these words is gone forever and here we are in the small dark maisonette in Portsmouth which is the last place he called home. There’s a precise shade of dismay reserved for clearing a house of a parent’s belongings; it has a quality like dust or ash. The dismay is darker when the parent was a hoarder. Neither my brother’s mouth nor mine can shape the words, even though they are the perfect fit. They are stuck in our throats like blast-dust. Perhaps it is too soon. We have two days.
Afterwards, my brother flies to Beirut-Rafic Hariri with me to stay for a week or two on his way back to Thailand. It makes sense to us both in an as-the-crow-flies kind of way, but the truth is probably closer to this: once we part, all the rest of time will unfold into everything that comes after he died, and we’re not ready for that just yet.
We descend into the dusty blue and brown of mid-afternoon, and touch down on the simmering tarmac. The crosswind comes straight from a furnace, whipping our clothing and scorching our nostrils. The building we’re making for looks like water. We are silent amid the scream of jet engines idling. Inside the airport, the gloss of the wide boulevards and boutiques is obscured by crowds leaving and arriving in time for Eid al-Adha. There’s barely a square metre of white marble visible between the knots of people greeting, goodbying, gathering bags of gifts and gazing longingly at the departure boards. We drag our cases of grief and what treasures we excavated in Portsmouth through the faltering crowds, and come to a standstill amid the throng of bodies that will funnel us to the taxi rank. I wish he wouldn’t, but my brother leaves me to queue while he gets coffees.
As I try to spot his return through the crowd, an angry shout pursues two men sprinting from a storefront. We all watch the chase as it rounds the corner to meet a luggage train, which swerves to correct its trajectory away from the runners and the people they barge through. A hundred of us hold our breath as three of the carts topple in slow motion. Suitcases and bags crash and skitter across the polished floor. Something busts open, and a consternation of possessions blurts onto the floor.
The crowd is moving now and I am moving with it. I take a long glance back, anxious about my brother and the busted suitcase, worrying that the scooping of the luggage is too uncaring; that something precious will be missed. My eyes meet those that are most like mine now that our father is gone, and they follow my gaze to the tumble of suitcases and bags, people shouting.
Sheesh. Looks like Beirut in here, he says. My laughter is a bubble of ugly crying that bursts out in sound and snot, making him laugh at me. We cling to each other, helpless and speechless, borne along by the exiting horde. We draw stares from the people nearest us, making us cackle even more. We are grateful for the cover of sunglasses as we’re claimed by the aggression of the taxi rank and Beirut heat.
Ali McGuire writes fiction and poetry which have found publication most recently in Sparks, SWERVE, Sans. PRESS, and Frazzled Lit. She was a 2024 Novel Fair finalist and has received mentorship and funding through the IWC and Arts Council. She holds an MA in creative writing from DCU and calls County Wicklow home.
This short story is an accomplished and quietly devastating meditation on language, inheritance and the uneasy closeness between personal memory and geopolitical trauma. It moves with confidence between domestic, historical, sensuous and elegiac registers, without losing its emotional centre. It is literary fiction that understands restraint as both a moral and an aesthetic choice.
The story’s governing phrase, “Looks like Beirut in here,” arrives with clear self-awareness. At first, it is a throwaway idiom, a careless inheritance from family speech. The narrator does not excuse this language; the story patiently interrogates it. What begins as shorthand for mess and disorder is stripped of easy metaphor and returned to lived reality. This change is one of the piece’s great achievements. The phrase becomes a refrain whose meaning deepens each time it returns, until it is no longer casual or flippant, but almost unbearable in its layered resonance.
Structurally, the story is elegant. It unfolds along three interwoven timelines, childhood ignorance mediated by television, adult intimacy with Beirut through scholarly labour, and present grief after the father’s death. These movements are fluid and well judged, never clumsily signposted and never confusing. The voice carries us across decades, anchored by sensorial detail rather than strict chronology. This is the mark of a writer who trusts the reader.
Beirut is rendered with exceptional care. It is not romanticised, and it is not turned into spectacle. It is experienced through temperature, colour, fatigue, danger, taste and labour. The passages on Hamra’s streets, the museum basement, ERWs and the rapid return of daily life after explosions are precise without being voyeuristic. The narrator’s professional role is particularly striking, tending Phoenician sarcophagi while the modern city repeatedly fractures above ground. The metaphor is subtle and powerful, history preserved below while the present destroys and rebuilds itself.
The father is drawn sparingly and effectively. He exists mainly through voice and habit, which feels exactly right. His absence is felt not through sentimentality, but through the material ordeal of clearing a hoarded home. Grief described as “dust or ash” is quietly devastating, and the refusal to utter his old phrase in the Portsmouth maisonette is one of the story’s most honest moments. Language, here, is both inheritance and taboo.
The final scene at the airport is superbly handled. The chaos of toppled luggage mirrors the earlier imagery of rubble without heavy symbolism. When the brother finally speaks the phrase aloud, it lands as release rather than irony. The laughter that follows, messy, public and inappropriate, is a true representation of grief. It accepts that mourning is not only solemnity, but rupture, hysteria and sudden, disorienting joy.
The story offers rich ground for discussion, metaphor and inherited language, the postcolonial gaze, and the personal costs of historical shorthand.