‘Apple’ by Nuala O’Connor

How to send love to a now-gone lover? Like scribbles across landscape, a heart’s store of moments passed, the clash-and-thrum of skin, the soft phrases lightly shared, the hard ones broken from the tongue. He is away this love, taken perhaps up into the sky, above the western peaks that gave him shelter in the end, over water, seawards. Or he is there still, on his headland, sentry of life and death, there at the salty end of the bough, as out of reach as Sappho’s Apple.

From issue #8: spring/summer 2019

About the Author
Nuala O’Connor’s fifth novel, Nora (Harper Perennial/New Island, 2021), about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, was named as a Top 10 2021 historical novel by the New York Times and was the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala won the 2022 Writing.ie Irish Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards for her story ‘This Small Giddy Life’ from the New Island anthology A Little Unsteadily Into Light. Her story ‘Gooseen’ won the UK’s 2018 Short Fiction Prize and was published in Granta. She is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk.