‘You’ve mislaid your comma.’
That’s what Ruaidhrí had said to her the first time they’d met.
Clara lived her life as a run-on sentence and didn’t tend to embrace commas. At least she didn’t back then.
He’d handed her a turquoise Air Pod and grinned so widely she’d smiled too without knowing why. His confidence lived in the microbiome of the filthy rich. His dreams were an orgy of colour.
It’d been on the number 47 bus and the day was just rolling out of bed with all the subtlety of a noisy landslide. Ruaidhrí was an Adonis or that’s what the girls at her school would have said if any of them spoke to her. He’d sat beside her with their knees gently nuzzling every time the bus lurched. His uniform had the sort of creases a caring hand had left, hers had the holes and faded hue a year’s worth of cheap detergent and mild neglect left.
‘So, what does a girl like you listen to anyway?’
His bold as brass voice conferred him with a masculinity from which few withdrew.
‘A girl like me?’
‘Now why would a boy like you need to ask a girl like me something as personal as that?’
He’d looked at her then, serious-faced and she’d enjoyed that concern. He’d wanted to be liked even then.
‘I’m joking you, idiot!’
He’d blushed then and it’d been like watching the colour being restored to an old photograph.
Clara had pursued him. She’d have told it differently but she did. She deserves credit for that. He was quite the catch.
There’d been the white lie that she’d struggled with maths. There’d been her fawning words ‘You’re my hero’ and ‘thanks so much this will give me a head start’. There’d been the slate-grey mornings that had seen him pouring over her homework as she’d studied his pout and the way his eyelashes curved so that they couldn’t be described as too long.
‘It’s almost as if you knew where you would go wrong.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, this calculation, see right here.’
He was even polite when he pointed.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s the second last thing you did, it’s almost perfect’
‘Hmm… maybe I just need to try again.’
He nodded. His emerald-green eyes were still scanning her pages for errors. He was too preoccupied with the maths homework to see what was happening.
She wanted to be around him. Around him was good and secure. Around him were shapes and sounds and sameness didn’t exist. He’d been good for her. That’s what people said when they heard. She’d have told you that he hadn’t just broken down her walls, he’d projected the art she’d been hiding onto them for all to see.
‘You, Miss Clara - you bring out the best in me.’
The accident that changed it all happened while the village was asleep. A still frost had been hanging around for days. Garda O’Donoghue, the least poetic man on planet earth, had been first on the scene and he’d described it as a flowering inferno. Ruaidhrí’s brother had died upon impact. His new motorbike was a shining tangle of metal and mushed up dreams.
The village said it was an awful waste of a young life. The village also decided he didn’t suffer. Clara didn’t like to but did wonder how they knew. She had gone straight to Ruaidhrí when her mother told her. She’d felt the dull crescents of his closed eyelids with a rescuer’s hand. She’d touched his head and heard a whelp but remembers it as being more textured than an ordinary sound, more fragranced with grief. She’d hated the grief for the poison and his brother for the devastating mistake he’d made and herself for thinking a lot or too little she wasn’t sure.
The next time they kissed it was as if a tablespoonful of vinegar had been and not gone. She’d wiped her lips and he’d looked at her with arrows in his gaze.
The next day he wasn’t leaning against the wall outside her Geography grind with an arm poised in midair waiting to encircle her waist. He also wasn’t there when she wowed the crowd as Sandy in her school’s production of Grease. He’d gone missing. He’d gone to his unhappy place.
She’d fallen short of herself by grafting herself to his sounds. The sound of his hands when he rubbed them hungrily together, the thud of his schoolbag when he abandoned it in the hallway, the slow laugh he built to a revelation - to the most pleasing of melodies.
Clara didn’t like handling the fragile pain of her mistake. She also didn’t like knowing she’d let someone hurt her.
Again.
When she told him she needed a break from their relationship, he looked at her like she was an ill-constructed sentence he couldn’t fix. His silence was riotous. His lack of fight something she fed on as if a singular hate could lessen the heartbreak.
Months passed and Clara taught herself how to mentor sound. Her sister Ava became a mother and she became Aunty C and the laughter breathed for her when she thought she’d suffocate without him around. Her father patted her back and smoothed her hunched shoulders. He left silly jokes taped to the inside of her Bento boxes. Even Mrs O’Reilly, the sternest teacher at St Catherine’s, had cackled and that had made Clara immeasurably proud. Her mother offered her scantily-clad fables about the heart and she’d kissed her mother’s forehead as if each kiss might be their last. She wrote him illegible covenants of love that never left the confines of a box beneath her bed and sealed them with masking tape to keep out prying eyes.
Slowly she moved past tears. She repaired herself as best she could. Nothing could have prepared her for what happened next.
The scream that erupted from her mother’s chest was so coarse she never gave it words lest it would find some kind of peace. Her father had been helping a neighbour to fell a tree. It was an accident - a terrible accident but nonetheless an accident. A standard size tree - absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. A beech, or was it an ash? The blood loss was so complete a russet tone had adorned their lawn until her mother had paid a landscaper to turn the ground leaving an ugly sort of a frown behind.
He’d come to her then persuaded by death to hinder her pain. Even death she’d thought didn’t like listening to its own song.
It was different though. Mechanical.
Soon she realised that she’d lost interest and he should have hurried back into not being around. Soon she realised his suffering began a joy in her. He held her hands in his and she felt the entrails of their grief splutter and choke. She imagined placing him upon a pyre, the flames dancing as he accompanied her underground.
People said she was stoic but also gossiped that it was odd that she didn’t shed a tear.
He’d hung around like a stalactite and she dropped her anger upon him because he was the real debris.
He started to serve his time as an electrician. She commenced her training to become a beautician. He kept in touch and they were described by those other than themselves as on again off again.
As summer sunsets bled into autumnal scenes, she met Matthew. She’d written about him in her diary. The entry had read ‘How much prettier it is to find a butterfly who cannot fly.’
He would help her complete the live export of another’s life. Matthew commended his soul to her willingly, eagerly. She wanted Ruaidhrí to want her but she didn’t want to want him anymore.
Matthew was a perfect delight. She felt a wish had dispatched him to her. His hands never strayed and his eyes melted into affectionate folds when he looked at Clara. He was the ideal plinth from which to launch her recovery song.
He seemed resigned to his own insignificance and Clara saw the gorgeousness of this gift.
He worked at the bank stuffing wads of cash into sleek drawers and killing time for Clara.
It was a Tuesday in mid-November when Clara received the call she’d been waiting for. She watched the goosebumps pepper her skin as he spoke.
‘Can I see you? I need to see you.’
‘Of course. Is everything okay, Ruaidhrí?’
‘Yes, yes…everything’s fine. I’ll explain when we meet.’
She met Ruaidhrí in a pathetically lit café at the corner of Baggot Street. He pulled out her chair and shoved a little too hard against her as she took her seat. She wore a tight, sequined black dress and her hair was loose. The waitress had sighed at least ten decibels too loudly when they had said in unison that they hadn’t had the opportunity to view the menu.
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too.’
The starters arrived too quickly and Clara chomped on an edible flower to relieve some tension.
He examined his biceps for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke. She noticed the beginnings of a bald patch that would eventually defy artistic combing.
‘Clara, I need you to be truthful.’
This struck Clara as unfriendly fire and she felt her jaw clench.
‘Did you ever really love me, Clara?’
Clara took some time to think.
‘I know you loved me.’
She felt light but in a heavy way because it was important and if she hadn’t given the response, she did it wouldn’t have been possible for love to rescue itself again.
‘I did!’
‘Did you, did you really allow yourself to love and be loved?’
‘Being in love makes me angry with being me.’
He reached for her and she continued with his fingers wrapped around her pulse. He exerted a gentle pressure. A bridge gently curved over the river of tears. He was patient because he was there to find the colourful glow hidden in the embers.
‘Because I’m scared, I’m scared I might accidentally surrender too much for a lie dressed up as perfection.’
With that she started to sob. Quietly at first but as she felt his arms criss cross her chest it rose to a steady and throaty roar. Other customers began to stare. Grooves of concern replaced furrows. A baby began to cry in sympathy and a new mother rushed outside. Her husband stayed and sipped his posh tea. The chef stuck his head through the partition, his teeth parted in a snarl.
He held her close then because it’s important to remember being held. He rifled through his mind for useful words but none came.
Her eyes were closed and his lips were cold when they sealed over hers and he took it. He wordlessly took the last of her baiting breath away.
Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. Her work has most recently appeared in Ghost Parachute, Irish Country Magazine (winner December 2025 short story comp), BULL, Comhar, Splonk, X-R-A-Y, Frazzled Lit Magazine, Full House Literary, Trash Cat Lit and Washing Windows V. She featured on the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist 2024 and 2025 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions (2023). You can find out more on X @abairrud2021 and Bluesky catherineobrien.bsky.social.