HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
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 21st 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.