Cassandra Voices

Category: Literature

  • Two Poems

    All the while the windows wait for no one

     

    While there were those who climbed,

    It was only you who knew the spaces through the ladders.

    The dent of shadows

    Upon the tumbling walls.

     

    When the door is too small to walk through

    And the gate shifts at your hip.

    All the while the windows wait for no one.

    Like miniature hats.

     

    Where idle hope feasts on the cavities of the rooms

    As soaring beginnings roar.

    Where the seamless thread that shapes your brow

    Falls hollow into your skin.

    As the walls of the dolls’ house

    Can no longer keep you in.

     

    *******

    I am not…

     

    I am not just around the corner,

    Or held in the palm of your hand,

    like a scent escaping the rose.

     

    I am not fully heard in the howl of the gulls,

    Or in a scattering of dandelions raw through the air,

    like condensed smoke.

     

    I am not in the taste of the salt of seawater,

    Whose splash is seeped into your skin.

     

    I am not to be touched through your feet on the grass,

    Or in the chill of the heat of your summer’s loss.

     

    I do not scream through the silence of the stars,

    I am not hounded by your tears

    Or held in the rubble of your fingertips.

     

    I am not in the sworn word that returns to your mind,

    As sword or scythe through the kind air.

    If you see me in the shadows I am not there.

     

    I am far closer than all of this.

     

    Paul Downes’ poetry has been published in the Wallace Stevens Journal and EUR/OPEN. He has also published books and journal articles in areas of philosophy, psychology, education, law, anthropology and social policy and has given keynote lectures and invited presentations in 29 countries. His books include, The Primordial Dance: Concentric and Diametric Spaces in the Unconscious World (2012), Inclusion of the Other: Concentric Space as a Life Principle Beyond Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Ricoeur (Routledge, forthcoming 2019). He is Associate Professor of Psychology, School of Human Development, Dublin City University, Ireland.

    Did you know that Cassandra Voices has just published a print annual containing our best articles, stories, poems and photography from 2018? It’s a big book! To find out where you can purchase it, or order it, email admin@cassandravoices.com

  • RAT RUN

    They turned up at the door dressed all in black,
    from their baseball caps and bomber jackets down
    to their DM boots, and they hustled in like hitmen
    or bouncers, or bailiffs, or the Old Bill
    or some kind of security syndicate,
    shifting on their feet, in uniform,
    black-gloved hands bearing black briefcases.
    One of them did the talking, one was silent.

    I told them of the massacred bananas,
    savaged in their skins on the kitchen table,
    and how I’d thought it was the live-in landlord
    tripping home from a spree whose bitter end
    involved the bananas taking an awful beating.
    But seeing the state the place was in next day,
    he’d thought the same of me. That’s when we knew
    there were some hungry monsters in the kitchen.

    So, casing the joint, the men inhabit the kitchen
    and fall to all fours, closing on the kill.
    The dishwasher gets dragged out, and it’s like
    lifting the stone on a woodlouse colony.
    The wall had been unfolded from the floor
    like a turned page; and the cave’s mouth revealed
    the shredded remains of the wall, the copper pipes
    and a burial mound of apple cores and nutshells.

    So then I told them of the landlord’s apples
    taken from the bowl and, one by one,
    carted up the corridor and left
    like the scene of a lynching or line-up execution
    after the firing squad had done its work:
    the butchered fruit, at two-foot intervals,
    arranged like a sacrificial offering
    in a ghoulish symmetry of rotting heads.

    And I told them of the unfathomable noise,
    that thumping from behind the walls at night
    like a house party got out of control
    somewhere down the road, or maybe next door,
    or in the next room. When you went to look
    no one was there. All you found were the scraps
    churned up from the dustbin and flung to the floor
    as the scratch of claws retreated across the roof.

    Back in Calcutta, Ajit would impale them
    on a spear, standing over the manhole
    killing rats like shooting fish in a barrel.
    One time, from behind my bedroom door,
    a writhing hairy thing the size of a hen
    appeared on the end of a prong, under my nose,
    as I drank my rum; and I jumped out of my skin
    as Ajit took off laughing down the hall.

    Here in the kitchen, the men recall the foxes
    they’d stalked this morning halfway to the heavens
    in the open air at the pinnacle
    of the latest mile-high plate-glass monolith
    rising out of the rubble at London Bridge,
    reaching an impossible perspective
    seventy storeys upwards, in the grey
    and swirling skies directly under the flightpath.

    They’d been living on the sixty-seventh floor
    of Europe’s tallest tower as it went up,
    surviving on the builders’ scraps, said the quiet one.
    It’s dark when we clock on. If you miss your step
    no one would catch you; no one would know you’d gone.
    The city was a circuit board, its grid
    lit up with diodes in the night, then dawn
    was spread like a map in pink and grey beneath you.

    And to hear him tell it, me and the landlord
    hang off a cliff, transplanted by vertigo
    down to the streets below, looking out through the eyes
    of animals on the sprawl that, at first light,
    the foxes contemplated from the sky:
    rabbit warren, anthill, molehill, rat run…
    You could step out into the atmosphere, he said
    with a faraway look, go strolling down the river.


    Timur Moon works as a psychotherapist at hospitals and clinics in London. Formerly a journalist, he worked as a reporter and correspondent based in the UK, South Asia and the Persian Gulf. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and continues to write poems. 

  • Casino

    Part I

    You know your father used to go to school next to the Casino at Marino, him and his friends would play around it.

    For years I would ignore my dad’s connection with the Casino, it was too incongruous a pairing to stick. Two histories known to one site but held discordant in my mind and never sitting side by side—always one leaving as the other entered. One is a topic of the history books, with its subject clearly delimited through Italianate paintings and Enlightenment-era discourse. An illustrious period of history, as we are taught, basking in the light of privilege. The other is closer to the bone, a murky memory passed down a generation. A privation I didn’t know in detail, in language, but rendered visible over time as his years crumbled away into tragedy.

    Only later when studying the history of art would the two discrete worlds surface once again in my consciousness. Following the official account propagated by the history books and further confounded by the classroom teachings, the image of my father was conjured up and left floundering, left groundless against the staunch record that preceded him.

    A casino is traditionally a small house designed for leisure and entertaining, a folly for the upper-classes typically built on the grounds of a stately home. The Casino at Marino, as artefact, took up just a snippet of the curriculum. Its teaching, however, echoed the rehashed idealism of neoclassicism, where a masterly imitation of nature was replaced by a masterly display of the idea, of the rational mind or idealised subject. The Casino at Marino was taught as any phenomenon set steadfast in the history books; its features analysed; its fashion surveyed; a few connections to important men told. I am history, it said.

    As the record goes, for about two hundred years after Poussin, Lorrain, and Rubens, the institutional practices of the academies would nurture a host of painters across western Europe and, in turn, would see them ossify in their galleries and studios, regurgitating one mythological tableau after another. ‘History painting’, after the Latin historia, meaning ‘story’ or ‘narrative’, was the most hallowed genre of painting at the time. This ‘grand genre’—so admired for its glorified rendition of myth or historical event, or a blending of the two—justified a return to old styles and a retreat from the present.

    At college we studied the revival of classical architecture as fashioned in the homes of the landed classes in Ireland. The gentry lined their great houses with columns and pilasters, their halls with Roman busts and figurative sculptures set back in niches, an erudite display cultivated from their travels on the Grand Tour. Of the Casino, I learned that it commenced construction in the 1750s and it remains one of the most admired examples of neoclassical architecture in Ireland. I learned that it was the seat of Lord Charlemont, James Caulfield, an important figure in fashioning the tastes and minds of Dublin’s high society at the time. And so on.

    Such a history—stagnant, impervious to change, insisting on grand narratives—called for a re-examining. Looking askance, I learned that the land on which the casino resides used to be called Donneycarney, but as a sense of place is so tied to a sense of class, on acquiring the estate its new owner necessarily rechristened it ‘Marino’ after his beloved Italian destination. Thus, in one stroke, it was lifted from a locale that seemed too provincial, too mundane, and repositioned in the mind’s eye of its landlord. It earned a kind of classical placelessness, a new lofty trans-setting. In their world, everything became ‘grand’: the ‘grand genre’ of history painting; the ‘grand tour’ of Europe to sites of classical history; the ‘grand style’ of Michelangelo or Raphael, to be assiduously copied by academicians.

    Over a hundred years after the Casino was founded, with that golden light of the leisure classes waning, the estate came into the ownership of the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of lay disciples who set out to get those poor-ragged boys off the street, offer a ‘basic’ education and to prepare them for industry, but most of all to teach them the ‘value’ of ‘hard work’ and religious observance. Their institution spread worldwide, as did the abuse.

     

    Part II

    Apparently he used to write poetry when he was younger but one day decided to burn it all. He said he used to write it spontaneously, squeezed into the white spaces of bus and train tickets.

    The Casino at Marino—in a cinematic turn, as I envision it from a history lesson that breathes so close to me—was then recast in an altogether different light. Snapped out of its delusion only to confront a stark grey reality. Those inner-city boys, my father included, playing around the Casino were shunned both literally and ideologically from the gold-lit world of the Casino’s origins. That beam of enlightened thinking, so preciously preserved in the history books, entirely bypassing generations of poor boys living on the very property. For those boys who chose to notice it, I imagine, the Casino lingered about their playing grounds like an apparition — an idealised past further haunting the gloominess of their present day.

    Allegations of child abuse against the Christian Brothers would start to emerge around the 1980s. Starting with a handful of easily dismissed complaints to an outpouring from the Brother’s global institutions. In a rare and reluctant admission of guilt, in 1996 the Christian Brothers released a statement starting with the line: “There are signs of that death in our congregational story.” It continued,  “Such signs include undue severity of discipline, harshness in Community life, child abuse, an addiction to success, canonizing work to the neglect of our basic human needs for intimacy, leisure and love.”

    “Signs of that death”, a phrase that both acknowledges the insidious force of clerical abuse whilst averting a direct collision with the issue. “There are signs of that death”, a clumsy sentence, weak and faltering in its expression of something so horrid. But it is a haunting set of words all the same. Clamouring, clasping at an expression that might hold the full weight of its implications.

     

    Part III

    Like flints from a fire History sparks into being. It wilfully shoots and splinters, enlightening some and leaving others in the dark.

    Through the telling of this oft-repeated story of history, as I experienced in the classroom that day, I saw the elaborate structures of ‘history-proper’ crash into the shadow it cast upon my father and family. I was told his story without his name being mentioned. I became the child I might have been, proud of her father, and, despite everything, in defence of him. I thought, his story can be told, maybe shame doesn’t have to bury it and uncertainty doesn’t have to muzzle it. I felt the staggering height and glory of the Casino’s tale owed something to my father’s life, or perhaps, owed something to mine. Where history fell silent was the moment it laid claim to my life.

    To see him, to talk to him, is to relive that death, not a sign, but an aching reality.

    I am beginning to see my life. I am beginning to see the forces that shaped it, that weighed upon it, and nearly snuffed it out. I am beginning to see my life from the position of the end, from the imprint of a negative allowed to fester for too long, stumbling through histories and plaguing generations, fusing many to the same struggle.

     

    Leah Reynolds is an art writer based in Bristol. Her latest piece explores the genre of auto-fiction, combining her academic background in the history of art with a personal narrative.

  • Twinned

    Storrington

    Place of storks and green-
    clad chalk. Are the Gypsies still
    perched on ‘The Warren’?
     

    Camargue

    Flamingo heaven,
    white horses, black madonna.
    Heart’s grey forgiven.

    Camargue

    Red dust on the shoes
    of Gaditans carrying
    Sara-la-Kali.

    Storrington

    At the age of eight:
    the camp fire by their wagon
    shed heavenly light.

    Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Faber and Faber published his Selected Poems in 2016 and he is editor of their 20th-Century Italian Poems (2004).

  • Nonetheless

    A cormorant dives to feed,
    then perches, its wings
    spread to dry.
    There are fish, there is
    a break in the clouds.

    A freighter embarks, laden
    with necessary goods,
    including toys, 

    much as a researcher
    presents his findings.

    This world is henceforth one in which
    these things have taken place,

    and the gates that would prevail against them
    have so far failed.

     

    J.D. Smith’s fourth collection, The Killing Tree, was published in 2016, and his individual poems have appeared in publications including Dark Mountain, New Verse News and Terrain. His other books include the essay collection Dowsing and Science and the children’s picture book The Best Mariachi in the World. He works as an editor in Washington, DC, where he lives with his wife Paula Van Lare, their rescue animals and no small amount of trepidation. More information and occasional updates are available at www.jdsmithwriter.com.

  • Two Poems

    Anthony Caleshu’s forthcoming book, from which this pair of poems is taken, is titled, A Dynamic Exchange between Us (Shearsman, 2019). He is the author of three previous books of poems, including The Victor Poems (Shearsman, 2015), and Of Whales: in Print, in Paint, in Sea, in Stars, in Coin, in House, in Margins (Salt, 2010; named a ‘book of the year’ in The Daily Telegraph). He is also the author of three books of criticism on contemporary poetry, most recently as editor of In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi (Wesleyan UP, 2018)). He is Professor of Poetry and Programme Manager for the MA Creative Writing at University of Plymouth.

  • My Fellow Americans – A Short Story

    When I first moved to Dublin, I thought there were a lot of out-of-shape athletes living in the city. I later learned that my misconception was the same as the basis of a joke that had been topical fifteen or twenty years before I got there.

    The joke was about a politician opening a shopping mall but not having been properly briefed by his PA first and thinking that he was opening a gym. I was never told the proper wording. But when I made known my little athletic observation one time to George Sexton, that’s what he told me: “Oh, that’s the same as this joke about the Square in Tallaght.” It wasn’t like him to be dismissive like that, so it emerges from time to time out of the settled silt of the memory of our less remarkable share of moments.

    I’d come to Ireland for my Junior Year Abroad, in the early years of the new century. My explanation for going there was simple: I wanted to live in the city of James Joyce’s Ulysses. That’s what I told myself at the time. In retrospect, I know I was looking for love.

    I preferred the works of William Faulkner to Joyce but Faulkner’s city of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County don’t exist, so Joyce’s Dublin seemed like the perfect alternative. I made my application and was accepted at Trinity College.

    I arrived in the rain in late September and as I struggled to figure out the best means of getting into the city I felt the full and cold lonesomeness of solitary travel. Eventually I found a big blue bus, which took me right to campus, where I’d be staying for the year.

    It was on the bus ride in that I first saw the athletes. So, this is Dublin, I thought, looking out the window at the people in the brightly coloured shell-suits, ambling round O’Connell Street looking to score drugs; and I was feeling ever more confused and lonely.

    After getting settled in my room, I set out that evening to try and find some of the local character for which Dublin is famed.

    *******

    The next day, the school had organized an orientation day for us American Juniors and our European equivalents. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally have gone to but when the time came, I was quite relieved. My bar-hopping adventures on the first night had not exactly gone to plan – most of the people to whom I spoke seemed surprised that I would try and make conversation with them.

    And when I arrived at the lecture theatre, there they all were: my fellow Americans. It wasn’t so much that I thought I wouldn’t like any of them, it was more that, that wasn’t why I’d come over. I’d declared that I was going to Ireland, to live amongst the Irish. I was looking for something different. Determined though I was, for almost the first three months I spent there, I hung around almost exclusively with two of these orientation-day Americans: Dave and Eddie.

    They were there that first day, at the library, like me, looking conspicuous amongst the sensibly dressed Europeans and kids from the Mid-West.

    “You guys about ready to bail too?” I said on our way out of the introductory talk, when I saw them diverge from the tour.

    They were roommates it turned out and so had met already. Dave, from Southern California, had even managed to source some weed too, so we went back to their room to get high.

    A lot of our time there was spent like that, smoking weed – back in my place usually – listening to old jazz records and discussing literature. Often, as evenings wore on, Eddie, who was a Whitman nut, would end up declaiming impressively lengthy sections of Song of Myself; be it in a bar, a party, or even back in one of our rooms. I always felt a little embarrassed, but Dave encouraged it with such seriousness that I never dared reproach or make known my uneasiness. All this was before Eddie lost his marbles and his father had to come get him.

    *******

    It was the week before we were due to break for Christmas that we first met George Sexton.

    George? It seemed so strange a name for an Irishman – it still does: George. But he was Irish all right, that’s for sure.

    The name of the bar was Doyle’s, if I recall, a dive joint not far from the college. George was there wearing a cravat with funny little dogs on it, which themselves were wearing cravats and his eyes had that wild look they got sometimes. Eddie had met George in a class once, which prompted him to come over.

    “I remember you from that tutorial I went to,” he said by way of greeting as he sat down. This surprised us, as it was unusual for any of our Irish classmates to initiate engagement. That evening we were there with a mixture of English kids, which may have had something to do with him coming over, I guess.

    The four of us talked a while on the edge of the group. He asked a lot of questions – interesting ones – his brow stern with thought throughout.

    He was silent for a time then and I’d almost forgotten he was there when all of a sudden, he leapt up and roared in this guttural Pan-American brogue, “Butter up my eyes, Shove tin-foil in my Ears, Tell me lies about Vietnam!”

    It sounded like those old recordings of Nixon, oddly.

    Dave said, “That’s the most dramatic thing I’ve ever seen!”

    And then he was gone.

    Three days later I was on a plane back home for the holidays. Two weeks of family and snow. But all I could think of was George Sexton. It frightened me a little. I would have to meet him again when I got back.

    Which was easier said than done. On my return, I called Dave. He and Eddie had stayed in Ireland over the Christmas period. Dave sounded a little out of sorts when I spoke to him but glad to hear from me nonetheless.

    As soon as I met them, it was clear that Eddie was unwell. Dave hovered about nervously, looking to me for a reaction. I tried to suggest to Eddie that he’d maybe had enough to drink as he went to refill his tumbler again. He became angry immediately, spitting poison at me.

    His drinking got worse as the weeks went by. He became increasingly messy and had completely given up going to class. Dave, who was quite a bit upset by the whole thing, kept apologizing, saying he hadn’t seen it coming, that suddenly one day he was just like that, drinking whiskey out of his pocket, like a secret, eyes like an injured dog.

    They’d spent a deal of time while I was away hanging out with George Sexton, but nobody had seen him much since I got back. Then out of the blue one day, he appeared. He’d heard about the hospital, he said, and tried to visit Eddie but had been told that Eddie had skipped out already.

    Things had gotten completely out of hand and of course, Eddie’s father had to come for him in the end. Dave and I were unable to say a word to the man as he looked from us to what had become of his son.

    George called by that evening. He was unshaven by a couple of days, which served to accentuate his lips, which were full and red like an open wound amid all those shocking black bristles. I felt repulsed but couldn’t look away from it either – George’s mouth.

    “Hello again,” he said to me quietly before asking after Eddie. Eddie – who had already left my thoughts, like all he’d been was a portent of George.

    The three of us sat up a while then, trying to remember signs or indications which might have warned us about our friend’s decline. By turns it seemed obvious, then not at all, that things would wind up the way that they did.

    “We should meet again,” I said as he got up to leave late on.

    “Sure…” he replied, his eyes indecipherable. The thought seemed to impede his ability to put his arms through his sleeves; he stood still, his shoulders pinned back by his heavy coat. “Yes,” he answered finally, poking his hands free.

    After that, we saw quite a bit of each other. We’d meet daily at coffee shops, and talk, sometimes for hours. George studied French and Art History. He knew what he liked when it came to literature but it was Art about which he felt most strongly. He dressed impeccably but not just like an old-school dandy or flâneur, learned from a book. He had genuine style, consistent and inimitable. And he moved with such effortless grace. I never felt as oafishly American as I did when I was with George.

    He had come out of a relationship just before Christmas time, having broken the poor girl’s heart seemingly. He had no interest in getting tangled up in something like that again, he kept saying. And the offers were always there: it wasn’t just that he was handsome, people just generally wanted to be around him. Always.  Everybody loved him. I’ve never met anyone since who had the same effect on people as George had then.

    He could be generous and good-natured and had a capacity for asking piercing questions which had a way of making you feel that he already knew you better than anyone else you’d ever met. He was perceptive, in a way that people took personally – almost as a point of pride. But there was something else too. A certain fatalistic fearlessness which made him frightening from time to time. In moods like that, he could disappear for days on end.

    I’d ask him where he’d been and he would just smile and say, “No-where,” hiding a bruised knuckle or even a limp. And he’d be back to his normal self then, buying drinks and generally being the object of everyone’s attention.

    “Delicious to see you George,” they’d say.

    George’s response was always non-verbal. He’d smile his mischievous smile, full to the brim in his eyes, while his mouth danced around between smirk and genuine delight.

    *******

    It was just after exam time. Which, of course, meant a party. It wasn’t the very last time I saw him, but it was nearly so. My heart was heavy with the knowledge that I would soon be leaving but I remember feeling dizzy too about that night and what it might entail. The sense that my time was coming to an end made it exciting – an end-of-days feeling.

    The afternoon was warm and mostly dry. George suggested that we have a barbeque at this perfect little beach he knew about before going to the party. Just the two of us. We locked our bikes at a nearby Dart station. George led the way and between the two of us, we managed to secure our haul of beers and charcoal to our destination.

    The sun went in and out behind the clouds, like it was in a ritualized dance of courtship with the sky. George lit the fire: he was practical like that, yet he always had such neat hands and dress. He went down to the shore then, to wash the coal off, and after, suggested we go for a swim. “It’s nice,” he claimed. I was reluctant, I remember, and pointed out that we’d already lit the fire and that I was hungry.

    We ate, and drank beers cooled by the sea, lying on the grass.

    The sky cleared after a time and George was adamant then, as it warmed up: we had to swim. We stripped to our briefs and went in search of a spot from where we could jump straight in, neither of us courageous enough to wade in from the sand.

    “Here will do,” George said, standing on a rock above the placid sea. It didn’t strike me as being terribly safe but I didn’t say so, I just followed George’s leap into the blue.

    I was completely unprepared for the shock of the cold. I thrashed madly, gasping and looking all around me for the quickest way out. George just floated and laughed at the sight of my antics. The relief of being out of the water was enormous.

    After a quick swim, George got out too – rather more graciously than I – laughing still and shaking his head.

    We sat quietly then, smiling and watching the sea as we dried out in the sun. The delicate make-up of his features was echoed in the neatness of his torso; his taut narrowness glistened.

    *******

    When the sun weaved its way in behind the cloud cover, the cold air touched our skin all over and I remember all the while that I was all atremble. It was the most exquisite feeling and it’s then that it happened. That’s when George said to me the thing that I’ve thought about ever since. It was so silent by the sea, I could have willed that moment to last forever. When George whispered to me, “Phillip, we’re all alone now, you know? It’s just the two of us.” It had been just what I was thinking, and it made me stop dead. George was looking at me expectantly and for a second, I couldn’t be sure whether he had said it or if I had just imagined it. I froze. I didn’t know what to say, I was so full of longing and dread. I could feel my heart thump like it was trying to escape.

    “George, I know…” I started to stammer, considering his confident gaze as he edged closer to me.

    “Why are you trembling Phillip?” he asked.

    I closed my eyes.

    And then my phone rang.

    I answered it.

    It was my older brother, Paul, calling to say that he’d pick me up from the airport in a week’s time.

    When I got off the phone, George was looking at me still. But I looked away then.

    “It’s getting late,” I said. “We should get going.”

    “Whatever you like Phillip,” George smiled back. “Whatever you like.”

    *******

    The party was at a run-down, three-story house on Leinster Road, with the whole place rented as one. We arrived at around nine or ten and it was alive already. We were quickly separated in the throng of chit-chat about summer plans. Everybody oozed that invincibility which flares so brightly towards the end of college life before reality snuffs it out. Everyone had something to say. And more than ever, I wanted to speak only to George.

    Dave was there. He seemed happier than I’d seen him in a while. Round about midnight we fell in to talking about our wild first term. Eddie was doing better, he told me. I said I was glad and we discussed what our respective Senior Years held in store for us and what we might do afterward.

    A guy he knew passed then and he introduced us, explaining that his friend, John, played the trumpet and that he thought I’d very much enjoy hearing his band play.

    I tried to put George out of my mind for a while as John and I got caught up in conversation. We had the same obscure records and he talked about music just the way I felt about it. Dave left us to it, saying he’d see us later. I wanted to ask him to look out for George but didn’t know how.

    John, from Connecticut, was over in Dublin full-time, studying music and math. He’d had a band called the Ice-Cream Men the whole time he was there. He tried to keep the band members as American as possible, for authenticity, he said.

    It was getting late by then and I was worried about where George had gotten to. An urge to rush out and find him, to see him before morning at all costs, washed over me. I had to ask him about what he’d said on the beach earlier, and thought that if I could, it might all still come right.

    I didn’t know how to abandon John, while he rummaged in his bag, looking for an eighth of whiskey he had. He re-emerged excited, showing me a record he’d bought earlier that day.

    “I completely forgot! We have to play it!” he said, his eyes aglow, “There’s gotta be a record player here somewhere.”

    “I’ll go search the place,” I said, jumping at the chance to look for George. John followed after me.

    We bled back into the party, pushing through the other bodies. Hunters in a wood of flesh, John bearing his LP; me, seeming to be searching for a record player, while really I searched for George.

    Nearing the top of the building, I’d pretty much given up hope.

    There were two rooms off the top-floor landing. It seemed utterly pointless at this stage but we persevered nonetheless.

    John made for the room on the right, so I went to the one on the left.

    I reached for the door-handle and out popped George.

    “Hi,” he said shyly, a little breathless. A girl, smiling, stood behind him.

    “…Phillip, this is Cathy.”

    His face had that same inscrutable smile as it had on the beach earlier, like he knew just a little bit more than everyone else.

    *******

    I don’t remember what album it was that John was trying to play.

    The week after the party, I went to see The Ice-Cream Men. That’s where I met Trudy. We were married the following fall.

     

    Donal Flynn was born and grew up in Limerick. He lives in Dublin and works in retail. He has a story in the current edition of The Honest Ulsterman. 

  • Psalm 95

    95

                   While someone exhorts us
               In song to sing to God,
	I've looked askance and asked, is he
               Among us here or not?
And found that question, off its no-man's land
               Uptaken then in hand,

               Lies with sheep in shade,
               And takes its rest in space,
           Beneath a large-leafed chestnut, bright
               With burning candles, placed
At intervals upon it, by that same hand,
               Which forms from sea dry land.

               Can it be we have
               A second chance of rest?
        I labour to hear a voice whose sworn
               Obscurity you blessed,
Like a bright cloud above unharvested grain,
               A clear heat after rain.

    Edward Clarke’s latest book is called The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry.

    Featured Image: Daniele Idini.

  • Gitanjali – after Rabindranath Tagore

    I am made endless for your pleasure

    Again and again emptied and filled

    A frail vessel ever with fresh life

    And melodies eternally new

    Breathed through me

    As though a little reed flute

    Cast over the earth

    And at your hand’s immortal touch

    My small heart loses all limits of joy

    To create ineffable utterances

    And on these small hands of mine

    Your infinite gifts are received

    Ages pass and still they pour

    And still there is room for more

     

    Navika Ramjee was born in South Africa in 1950 into an Indian family. Her family history is marked by that of the British Raj. She now lives in Oxford. Her work has appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal and Aerodrome, a South African literary journal.

  • Spirit Animals

    ‘I had a dream about you last night.’

    Sarah, stuffing wet tuna into pitta pockets and wondering if she could just put the same tangerine, uneaten from yesterday, back into Noah’s lunchbox, stiffened. The now-familiar tightening of her neck, shoulders and arms at the sound of Juliette’s voice went through her like one of those lock-and-load scenes in shoot-em-up movies; a rippling of ‘click, click, click’, on and on until everything tensed.

    ‘Me?’ Noah said. He put down his spoon. ‘What dream?’

    ‘I dreamed first of a snow fox, then of a snow wolf.’

    Sarah could hear Juliette settling into herself, into her dream and her visions. She leaned closer to the little boy. Her voice dropped; mysterious, revelatory. ‘The snow fox was running and leaping through deep, white snow, glad to be alive. Then the snow wolf appeared and at first it hunted the fox, but then they became one and together they were more powerful than before.’

    ‘Where was I?’ Noah asked. ‘In the dream.’

    ‘You were the snow fox, but then, when the wolf came, you were the wolf too. So I know now – a snow wolf is your spirit animal.’ She paused, for drama. ‘And Noah, it’s an incredibly powerful spirit animal. It means you have an appetite for freedom.’

    Sarah wished there was a polite way to tell someone who sat in your kitchen, lived in your house, to shut up. Not someone though, Juliette. Juliette, who had the word ‘fearless’ tattooed on the inside of her arm, and ‘I was not built to break’ in curly script under her hipbone. Juliette, who marked herself before life could do it for her. As if that could stop anything.

    Juliette. She had been christened Juliet, had added the final ‘t’ and the ‘e’ herself, ‘because it sounds better,’ she had once explained to Sarah.

    ‘But they’re silent,’ Sarah had protested.

    ‘Not entirely,’ Juliette had said, smugly. ‘They draw the sound out at the end, just enough.’

    Enough for what Sarah had wondered? Enough to be incredibly annoying?

    That was before Juliette, after yet another failed relationship, another failed attempt to live ‘a meaningful life’ – meaning she seemed to find only in weird diets and crystals, Sarah noted, never in work or anything useful – had come to live with them. Now, Sarah tried not to remark on anything she said, in case doing so prolonged conversations she didn’t want to have.

    Are you finished in the bathroom? Can I change the channel? Those were the realms where she wanted conversation with Juliette to stay.

     

    ‘What is a spirit animal?’ Noah asked, not unreasonably Sarah thought. She closed the lunchbox with a snap.

    ‘Noah, finish up. You need to hurry,’ she said.

    ‘Your spirit animal is the shape of your soul,’ Juliette said, ignoring the urgency in Sarah’s voice, the urgency of a Wednesday morning, with school and work and time-pressure – all the things Juliette had decided not to bother with. ‘It’s your guide and helper, in this world but also in the other world.’ She dropped her voice low on ‘other’, drawing it out long.

    ‘Noah, come on.’ The irritation Sarah felt seeped into her voice, making it sharp, so that Noah looked up too fast and said ‘What’s wrong?’ too loudly.

    ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. Just that we’re going to be late.’

    ‘Ok.’ Then, ‘what’s your spirit animal,’ he asked Juliette.

    ‘A black panther,’ Juliette said.

    ‘Of course it is,’ muttered Sarah to herself as she grabbed Noah’s coat. Of course it bloody is. Funny the way no one ever had a mouse or a rat as a spirit animal. Or remembered past lives in which they were filthy, flea-ridden serfs; always Egyptian pharaohs or high-born ladies. Was it only the very powerful who reincarnated, or did every crackpot suffer pathetic delusions of second-hand grandeur?

    ‘We’re off,’ she called from the front door. ‘See you later.’ She wondered would Juliette clear away the breakfast things, or leave them there for Sarah to do when she got back from work. It could go either way, she knew.

     

    ‘She’s supposed to be looking for a job,’ Sarah had complained to Brian only the day before. ‘But all she ever does is meditate and cook horrible desserts made with barley malt and cocoa powder.

    ‘I know,’ he had said, rueful, but not angry, ‘I buy the ingredients. They cost a fortune.’

    ‘So stop buying them. Say we can’t afford it. She can buy her own. We’re already not making her pay rent, because she’s your sister and you feel sorry for her.’

    ‘Sarah, she can’t afford to. You know she can’t,’ Brian had said gently. ‘That’s why she’s here. I know it’s hard, but it’s only for a while, until she gets herself sorted out.’

    ‘It’s been months, and she doesn’t show any signs of ever leaving.’

    ‘Just give her time. She’s good with Noah. He loves having her here.’

    ‘That’s the worst of it. She fills his head with nonsense. She talks to him about such rubbish – his aura, the healing power of the mind, how he can do anything if he visualises it.’

    ‘But he likes it.’

    ‘Maybe, but it’s not good for him. He pays it too much attention. You know he does.’ They didn’t talk about Noah that way, so she veered off. ‘He should be outside, playing with other kids, not in with her painting pictures of his aura.’

    ‘It won’t be for much longer,’ Brian had said.

    ‘You keep saying that.’

     

    In the car on the way to school, Sarah tried to do what the teacher had suggested to her at their last talk: prepare Noah for the day ahead so that he understood what he would be doing. In its own way, she saw, this wasn’t unlike Juliette and her ‘visualising.’ Except that this was practical. Had purpose. And so it was nothing like Juliette.

    ‘You’ve got your hurl and helmet,’ she said. ‘It’s hurling practice today.’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘And you’ve got reading in the morning, before Little Break. You’ve done your book report for that.’

    ‘Ok.’

    ‘And I’ll pick you up, same as usual.’

    ‘Ok’

    Every day, his resignation hurt her more. She felt she was driving a small, scared prisoner who had learned not to thrash or fuss. Had learned that no help was coming. She imagined him counting hours the way prisoners counted days in the old films; vertical lines scratched on a wall: one-two-three-four-five-six then a diagonal line through them for seven; another week gone. Noah, counting hours until she came to pick him up: first the morning session, then Little Break, then the middle bit, then lunchtime where the trouble might come, then the last bit, then home.

    Every day, he was waiting for her, bag hoisted on his shoulders. Around him, other kids played, wrestled, jeered each other cheerfully, begging for five more minutes to play. Not Noah.

    ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

     

    ‘Juliette says my spirit animal is a snow wolf,’ he said now, proudly. ‘And hers is a black panther. What’s yours?’

    ‘I have no idea,’ Sarah said airily. ‘I don’t really believe in that stuff. It’s just stories.’

    ‘But if they’re true?’ he persisted. ‘What would you be?’

    ‘I don’t know, maybe a chicken.’

    ‘You wouldn’t be a chicken,’ he said, offended on her behalf. ‘Maybe Juliette knows what you are.’

    ‘It’s just stories,’ she said. ‘Juliette doesn’t know.’

    ‘Juliette has pink hair,’ he said then.

    ‘She dyes the front of it pink, yes,’ Sarah said. Then ‘You have art today as well. You like that.’ Even though she knew he didn’t. Not in school anyway. It was one of the ‘relaxed’ classes where children were free to wander around the classroom. Wander and linger and question and prod. ‘Your smock is in your bag.’

    ‘Ok.’

    At the gates, she slowed down. ‘Do you want me to park and come in with you?’ she asked. ‘Carry your helmet?’

    ‘No thanks,’ he said.

    ‘I love you, darling, see you later. Have a good day.’

    ‘See you later.’ He never said he loved her at the drop-offs, although he was vocal about it at other times, especially before he went to sleep. ‘I love you so much mummy. You’re the best mummy in the world.’

    ‘And you’re the best son in the world,’ she would answer, rubbing his nose with her nose.

    But in the mornings, he wouldn’t play that game. Instead, he started shutting down as soon as they left the house, so that by the time they got to school he was the silent, reluctant child his teacher described.

    She watched him now, squaring his thin shoulders beneath the heavy bag as he walked across the playground. She wanted to run after him, grab the bag from his back and say ‘not today! Let’s not go today. Let’s go somewhere else, just us.’ She wanted to hold him tight; be the person who protected him, instead of the person who abandoned him every morning to a fate she pretended she didn’t understand. How much longer would they give it, she wondered as she drove on to work, lurching from red light to red light, speeding up, slowing down, stopping, going. Another month? A year? Til he was in First Class? And then what?

    ‘He’ll settle,’ Brian had said, after that first awful meeting in junior infants, where the school suggested they have Noah “assessed” so they could “give him the support he needs”. ‘He just needs time,’ Brian had said. ‘He’s young for his age.’

    Sarah had agreed ‘Of course he will. He’s nearly the youngest in the class…’ even though she knew that Brian didn’t understand that it wasn’t just being babyish that set Noah apart. It was something else, something that was in him. A weakness the other children sensed through smell or instinct, that made them turn and want to hurt him, not help him.

     

    ‘Let’s go,’ Noah said that afternoon. He was, as she had known he would be, waiting. But before they could escape, Ms Ryan was upon them.

    ‘Can I speak to you quickly before you go,’ she asked, a hand out towards Sarah’s arm.

    ‘Yes, of course.’ Sarah’s heart sank. ‘Noah, wait here for me, I won’t be long.’

    The classroom smelled of chalk and feet and cheap disinfectant. The smells of Sarah’s childhood. More and more, the smells of Noah’s childhood.

    ‘There was an incident during hurling practice,’ Ms Ryan began quickly. She looked shifty, so that Sarah decided that this one would be complicated. Sometimes they were, sometimes they weren’t. ‘I didn’t see how it started,’ Ms Ryan said, ‘But Noah hit another boy with his hurl.’

    Complicated.

    ‘I see.’ Sarah waited. Experience had taught her that it was better to wait. Let them fill in some of their own blanks.

    ‘As I say, I didn’t see what happened first, and Noah did say that the other boy started it, but I asked the other children, those who did see—’

    The officious little girls, Sarah was willing to bet. The ones who brimmed over with ‘Miss Ryan, Miss Ryan, Noah spat his lunch at me.’ ‘Miss Ryan, Noah said Johnny was a pig.’ ‘Miss Ryan, Noah isn’t doing his work, he’s just drawing pictures on his copybook.’

    ‘—and they said that the other boy didn’t do anything physical.’ No, Sarah thought, he wouldn’t have to. Not at this stage. The groundwork had been so effectively laid.

    ‘Noah wouldn’t hit anyone without provocation,’ Sarah said. ‘Even then, there would have to be considerable provocation.’

    ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Ms Ryan said, ‘but at this school we have a policy of no tolerance for hitting.’ Of course you do, thought Sarah. Anything easy, you have a policy for. Where is your policy for protecting a child for whom every day in your care is confusing and lonely, and now dangerous?

    ‘I was wondering,’ Ms Ryan continued, ‘if you had thought any more about an assessment?

    ‘I haven’t.’

    ‘Perhaps you should. At the moment, I am left with no choice except to take action in accordance with the school’s code.’ Give me an out, she was clearly saying. Give me an excuse, a piece of paper that says ‘spectrum’ or ‘disorder’ so that I can use it and spare us all from this.

    ‘I’ll think about it,’ Sarah said.

    And she would have to, she knew. Even though she didn’t believe that whatever it was about Noah could be pinpointed by an ‘assessment,’ or helped by bending the school’s policies in the light of it.

    Whatever it was about Noah, it was more, and less, than could be detected by the kind of process they described.

    ‘Let’s go.’ She took his hand on the way to the car because the playground was empty now, and he let her. She led him to the car, hand held tight, wondering would he ask what Ms Ryan had wanted. He didn’t but he was more silent than usual on the drive home. Normally, the self that he put away on the journey to school – the funny, curious boy who chatted to her about what he saw and thought – would slowly re-emerge on the trip back. But today he stared out the window and said nothing until they reached the house. Then ‘what day is it today?’ he asked.

    ‘Tuesday,’ Sarah said. ‘Why?’

    He didn’t answer, but she knew he was calculating in his head: if it’s Tuesday then tomorrow is Wednesday, then it’s Thursday and then Friday, and then the weekend.

    It was what he did. Broke his week into bits so that he could manage it, always striving forward towards weekends and holidays.

    They went into the kitchen where Juliette was baking. She had cleared the breakfast bowls but there was cocoa powder on the pale wooden countertop and some of those red goji berries that she ate. They stuck in her teeth, like she’d been gnawing on raw meat.

    ‘I’m making chia brownies,’ she said, to both of them. Then ‘do you want to help?’ to Noah.

    ‘Yes please,’ he said. ‘Can I stir the bowl?’ She pulled a stool out for him and lifted him onto it.

    ‘Of course you can stir. It’s hard work, because of the chia seeds but they’re incredibly good for you. They have loads of protein to make you strong.’

    Sarah watched them, the boy’s head bent over the bowl, wooden spoon in his hand as he stirred the thick mixture. It looked disgusting, she thought, with bits of black in it like flecks of soot, and was clearly thick as mud because he could hardly get the spoon round. But Juliette put her hand over his, to help him, and together they stirred the sludgy mixture.

    ‘That’s good, Noah,’ Juliette said. ‘You’re getting so strong.’ And Sarah, just as she had known that the concern in Ms Ryan’s voice was fake, heard that the love in Juliette’s voice was real.

    ‘Tell me more about Noah’s spirit animal,’ she said suddenly. ‘It’s a snow wolf, right? So what does that mean?’

    ‘It’s a really powerful sign,’ Juliette said. Noah stopped stirring and turned his head to look at her.

    ‘Go on,’ Sarah said, pulling out a stool.

     

    Emily Hourican is a journalist and bestselling author. She has written features for The Sunday Independent for 15 years, as well as for Image magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, Time Out and Woman and Home. Her first book, How To Really Be A  Mother was published in 2013, followed by The Privileged in 2016 and White Villa in 2017. Her latest novel, The Blamed, is out in June 2018. Emily grew up in Brussels, where she went to the European School, then studied at UCD. She lives in Dublin with her husband and three children.