‘Imbolc’ by Jamie Stedmond

CIGARETTES AND HURLYBURLY: The three of them, in a circle, sit behind a low-slung drystone wall. Coastal wind scuttles over bluffs and bare limestone flats. The wall wards off the wind where it reaches them – they are pocketed in an adjacent world, stowed close with grasses, orchids, and mountain avens. Ciara sits with her back to the wall. She fiddles with reeds, fidgeting them between fingers. To her left is Dearbhla, to her right, Anne, who just then lets out a long, smoky breath. Ciara sticks her head over the wall and scans the path for people. Dearbhla takes a deep, exaggerated drag, the lit end of her cigarette flaring up – a little red dot, bright against a background of greys and greens.

Ciara’s fingers twist the reeds more fervently. She half-stands, nervously surveying beyond the wall before taking out her tobacco and assembling a rollie in seconds. She motions to Anne for the lighter and quickly flicks up the flame – a burn mark in the air – and sieves the world through it, exhaling it all as smoke. Ciara takes the smoke deep into her lungs, feels it in her belly. The gentle grip of it, the lightness, moves softly through her. She relaxes then, follows nothing but the odd floats and twists of her thoughts. Listens to the sounds of far-off plashing waves, circling birds, exhalation, wind. Dearbhla stubs her cigarette out against the wall before hiking her skirt and climbing over. Anne follows just after her.

‘Ciara, get your arse into gear,’ Dearbhla shouts back.

Dearbh is always getting on to Ciara for being a spacer. Ciara doesn’t mind, or doesn’t seem to, the difference is unclear even to her. She looks on at the clouds and the sunlight filtered through them, split into bright fingers which point down instructively, illuminating little anointed patches of field. She pulls a last few long drags then tosses the spent rollie into the high grass before heading after her friends. Anne and Dearbhla are strolling either side of a raised ridge of soil and grass that runs all the way along the path. Ciara falls into step with them, walking awkwardly along the hump in the middle, searching in her schoolbag for her jumper.

‘Smell me, Anne,’ she says, tugging on Anne’s sleeve, ‘for the fags.’

‘You smell,’ Anne sniffs noisily, ‘you smell grand, now do me.’

‘Yeah, you smell fine.’

The three of them walk the rest of the way to school with the wind at their backs carrying the scent of smoke as forewarning of their arrival.

*

CLICK/CLIQUE: The three girls reach Coláiste Bríde and the morning’s washed-out brightness has faded, a more pervasive grey hanging overhead. The wall that runs along the square schoolyard is grey too, made up of exact stacked cinderblocks. Ciara lets her hand run over the grainy coping as she walks alongside, feeling the roughness on her fingers. Her fingertips are numbed by the cold, the vibrations. She rubs feeling back into them as they walk under the arching black gate.

Inside the schoolyard are some two hundred girls and boys in green jumpers. Ciara’s eyes pass over them: forest of limbs, thronging and neatly sorted, they are the same as every morning. Ciara remembers when she was just starting secondary school, back when she still used a lunchbox and had a dedicated notebook for each of her subjects, her mother had told her not to be getting involved with cliques – she said girls were terrible for cliques. She had pronounced it a clipped clicks, like an insect word.

‘C’mon,’ Anne says, taking her by the crook of her arm and guiding her over to Medbh and Laura, the final two-fifths of their clique. Cleek as Ciara says it now – a smooth chromium word. Ciara had thought her mum old-fashioned for her distrust of in-groups. There was a natural magnetism to people that was pleasant and easy to follow. There were things people shared. Her and the girls share raccoonish eyeshadow, badges on schoolbags, thumbs poking through holes in their sleeves.

‘Here Anne, d’y’ve the French done?’ Laura shouts from under the eaves of the main building.

‘Hello good morning lovely to see you too.’

‘Y’know Doyle, she’ll go psycho on us if we don’t have our translations.’ This time Medbh speaks, though Ciara often finds that what Medbh and Laura say is mostly interchangeable.

‘God, yeah, d’you remember when Eamonn forgot his copy –’

‘Dearbh’ll have it done. She always does her French,’ Ciara says, surprising herself with speech.

‘Where even is Dearbh?’

‘Moynan,’ Anne says, flicking her ponytail in the direction of the pair. ‘She’d sicken you.’

Dearbhla is sat next to Harry Moynan on a bench by the yard wall, huddled conspiratorially with the big lad, all giggles. Ciara asked Dearbhla once, prodding: why, if she liked these lads so much, did she not hang onto one. Dearbhla called her a stupid cow, asking her had she never been on a rollercoaster. She didn’t care for keeping them, she just liked it when her stomach dropped. She liked the falling-feeling part of it all. Ciara was suspicious of that in the way she was always suspicious of things she had not experienced firsthand. She had chatted, smiled, danced, listened to stories drawn out and exaggerated for her approval – and it only ever wearied her. Her eyes would glaze over like the first thin layer of ice on a winter lake. She drew lads in, drove them away, both without meaning to or caring much about any of it.

The bell rings though surely not enough time has passed and the girls are channelled towards class by a flow of bodies. Ciara floats along, hearing it all distantly: her friends whisper-shouting about homework, text messages, fresh gossips. They and those outside them turn the corridor into a tunnel of jostling green shoulders and echoic noise. Ciara looks back. She means to shout to Dearbhla to come on or they’ll be late but as so often happens these days she just wanders on, eyes fixed and mouth half-open, impacting the world as a ghost does – as she feels it, not at all.

*

STRAWBERRY GIRL: When Ciara was small she had Lego: a trustworthy yet fairly limited set. She repurposed the same bricks in different ways every morning. She made planes, castles, trees, what was meant to be a mermaid but always just ended up looking like blocks. Eventually she got bored of her Lego as she reached the finite limits of what could be made; what she could think to make. Ciara thinks of the hard plastic bricks now. Her days now are divided into blocks of time. They share a similar hard and unmalleable energy.

Chemistry. Revision. O’Shea at the head of the class with a fifteen-year- old’s head on his thirty-year-old body trying to inspire them by telling them the particulate nature of everything for the hundredth time. Nothing is solid, everything is made of particles, themselves falling apart.

Ciara puts her head on the desk: cold, carved with Daithí ’08 and Daithí ’09 and Daithi loves cocks in a different, more jutting style. She feels her heartbeat under her jumper. At least she thinks she can. She counts one hundred beats, matches them with forty breaths, then lifts her head off the desk. Daithí is gone. The desk under her now is shiny where the other one was matte, brown instead of a worn and ink-stained grey.

‘Can you give us an example, Ciara?’

‘Strawberries,’ Anne whispers beside her, looking ahead, barely moving her lips.

‘Eh, strawberries, sir.’

‘Good. Paul, another.’

Anne gives Ciara a look, Ciara shrugs. She looks up at the board. She is in Biology now. Asexual reproduction: revision words, sleek and Grecian. The first time around Ciara went red in the face arguing with Medbh and Laura, who had kept telling her that she was a strawberry, that she would have to reproduce asexually because she was such a frigid. She used to hate being teased.

She puts her hand up to ask: ‘Sir, can I go to the bathroom.’

‘Go on,’ says Mr Deckard, ‘but be quick.’

*

DAITHÍ LOVES COCKS: Ciara sets down the cold plastic lid. Smooths her skirt. Sits. Leans her elbows on her knees and stares at the granular texture of the brown tiles, the black in their grout a fact of time and indifference. In her peripheries she sees the standard cry-for-help graffiti: I have no friends, I hate myself thinly masked with some cheap white paint, but legible still. She thinks for a second about writing Daithí loves cocks, or maybe even Daithí is ambivalent towards cocks, on the door.

From out her skirt pocket Ciara takes a fag rolled previously, unconsciously, under the desk. She stands up on the toilet lid to smoke it out the window. Outside is hard black tarmac broken up by yellow lines, a mesh-wire bin in the corner, beyond that a shaggy pitch bookended by lonely net-less posts near two rival thickets. Lazy greyness drifts up from off behind the trees. Someone must be burning.

Her and the girls sometimes sit on the slope of grass which leans down toward the field, watching the lads try to squeeze five minutes of playtime in between expeditions to forage for the ball in the treeline. Pointless creatures, Dearbhla called them once. Anne likened them then to Sisyphus and, not knowing who that was, someone had put her in her place by saying shut up, Anne, you’re a sisyphus.

Ciara opens her front camera, wanting to see herself smoking. Wanting the double-feeling of it. She looks at herself pull on the end of the cigarette, filling up the chest under her jumper, shirt and skin with smoke. She can’t see in her eyes any reaction to the heavy, pleasant feeling it brings over her. She is so pale, almost translucent. She puts the phone close to her face turning it at angles to examine all the different aspects of her features. Her dad doesn’t want her anywhere near the tanning beds, understandably so, but sometimes she chooses not to understand him. She could ask her mother of course, but that wouldn’t be fair, really.

Before putting her phone away, she pulls her hair back with her hand held at the top of her forehead. She takes another drag. She would look prettier bald, almost.

*

WOMEN’S TROUBLES: Ciara steps back into class. Mr Deckard asks her what took her so long and she begins her excuse before being told alright, alright, just sit down. If Deckard paid any attention – if he didn’t have what Ciara has diagnosed as an innate male repulsion, and fear, towards girls – he would surely realize that Ciara obviously isn’t getting her period on an almost weekly basis. But he does, and so he doesn’t, which suits Ciara fine.

*

HEARD IT THRU THE GRAPEVINE: ‘Where is it again?’ Ciara asks, bag at her feet, back leant against the wall.

‘Moynan’s,’ Anne tells her.

‘Where’ll his parents be?’

‘At some thing in Cork staying overnight.’

Ciara wonders is the bottom of her bag getting damp where she has left it on the grass.

‘So are you coming yeah?’

‘I dunno, sure it’ll just be her and Moynan all over each other the whole night.’

‘Who cares, there’ll be loads of people.’

The school looks out on the coast, which looks in on the school, continuously. Pine-green children file past them, their shapes framed by the swollen sea. They head off toward cars, the path up to town; some, seemingly, drift down to the sea itself.

‘Are you drinking?’

‘Yeah, like,’ Anne says, taking out her phone to check her lock screen.

‘How are you getting drink?’

‘Sarah,’ she says, focused on her uniform rows of apps.

‘Can she get me some too?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Can you ask her?’

‘I dunno, Ciara.’

Anne opens Facebook, scrolls without looking, and closes it again. Ciara feels like snatching the phone out of her hand and adding a few cracks to the spiderwebs that already half-obscure the screen.

‘Why not?’

‘She’s already doing me a favour, I don’t wanna push it. She’s fairly antsy about buying me drink as it is.’

‘I won’t go so.’

‘Don’t be childish.’

‘You’re the one being childish – afraid to talk to your own sister. I’m not gonna turn up at Moynan’s like a fucking eejit with no drink.’

Anne locks her phone and looks at her friend. Ciara stares back at her, aggressively nonchalant.

‘Christ, alright, I’ll ask her if she can get you a naggin.’

‘Sound.’

Ciara looks at Anne, and can feel, horribly, that she has been pitied. Anne pities her now and she cannot smile at her or thank her further. Out beyond, the sea moves in on them, mercilessly, only to be rebuffed, continuously, by the staunchness of the coast.

*

FATHER 1: Ciara lets the heavy door swing shut behind her, stands with her back against it. She watches dust flecks float in sunlight, itself diffused into glow and milkiness through the thick and textured glass panels of the old front door, whose wood is chipped and paint is peeling. The light seems to warm the walls of the hallways which are coloured like mint ice-cream and seem to be melting, but that’s just the dampness of the house loosing: wall-sweat, house-tears, melted ice-cream drips to dribble down the wall on which Ciara puts her hand, only to take it away again, and see the outline of her five fingers formed there.

Ciara’s father is sitting at the kitchen table, in that same muggy air and grey radiance. Most of the windows in the house are small, deep-set into thick walls, filtering the light so that it has an anaemic quality by the time it reaches inside and gilds all the dusty furniture: the saggy armchairs, outdated couches, creaky presses, and smooth wood-grain chairs, in silver edging. Ciara moves across the silver-green floorboards towards her dad who sits staring into space, into his own flue of dust motes, with his tea in front of him in the same thick woollen jumper he had been wearing the day before and like yesterday Ciara leans in to work a hug around his tense frame, him accepting the gesture, pressing his face into her arm.

*

FATHER 2: Ciara’s dad slaps a flat hand on the table, rattling forks and spoons, spilling his cold weak tea over the rim of his mug. Ciara gives a little jump.

‘Fucking Christ Ciara.’

‘Dad what –’

‘Ah don’t Dad me, what in the fuck is wrong with you,’ he says thickly. Ciara’s father sits again, having half-stood to speak to her. His full-moon shaved-bald head, unkempt black beard, make the rising redness of his face stand out all the more. He turns his head to her now, raising his eyebrows, his jutting chin and pursed lips angled in accusatory fashion – with what looks like curiosity. Ciara knows this look and knows the trick in it. He has no interest in what excuses she might have.

‘Well? I’d really, genuinely, love to know what is wrong with you.’

‘Dad, please, can we not leave it,’ Ciara mumbles to the floorboards.

‘I would sorely love to leave it – d’you have any idea? Do you? Nah, you haven’t the beginnings of a fucking clue.’

He looks at her, waiting. She doesn’t flinch though there is much in her that wants to. Instead, she looks through her father, through the hard plate of his chest to the fireplace behind him which is empty of its purpose and full of off-white ash. It hasn’t been lit in weeks, months. She misses it – in its present state it represents a break in her life’s continuity. She continues staring and realizes eventually that the fireplace is in front of her in actuality. Her dad has moved away. Quickly as it started it is over now. The drop of his gaze is the signal that he has relented.

He stands over the sink, a poor actor’s impression of washing a mug.

‘Could you not just bin them? Fuck, could you not even hide it better, for my sake – so that I don’t have to smell the reek of them off you as soon as you walk in the door?’

‘Da, I’m sorry, it’s just ...’

‘No, no. Not a discussion Ciara. I don’t have the energy.’

Ciara stalks up the stairs and gives her bedroom door a fuck-you slam that her father doesn’t hear – him having settled already back into his sentry position, at the tea-dripping table, to watch the dust float by.

*

LILIES: The upstairs bedroom down the hall from Ciara’s is the brightest room in the house. It has a large gable window that allows light to stream in widely and be suffused throughout as it reflects off cream-coloured walls and smooth ash floorboards, freshly painted and varnished respectively. The window is open. The tide of air that rolls in makes the room smell salty and fresh. Ciara sits in a chair by the bed, watching her toes curling and uncurling, gripping the thick fibres of a rug. In the bed lies Ciara’s mother, her head awkwardly propped by a shingled pile of pillows, her face an oval blur, as seen from the corner of Ciara’s eye.

‘How was school, Kiki?’

‘Grand.’

‘What did you have?’

‘French, History, Chemistry, Biology. Something else.’

‘Sounds like a real riot,’ she says.

Ciara has recognized lately that flat wryness is the dominant mode of adult humour.

‘Oh yeah, big revision party, wild stuff.’

Her mother’s head moves in a nod off to the side. She is a silent for a moment.

‘I meant, to say to you, to say –’

Her mother is cut off, coughing her hacking cough into a crumpled tissue. Ciara focuses on the flower on the bedside table, trying to ignore her mother’s melodrama, which isn’t half as good as her wryness. A single white lily sits in a thin teal vase. Lily, a fleshy word.

The flower splays its bright white face to the world, nods the golden tips of its stamen in time with the breeze, peels its silky-soft petals back in leaning forward towards her. It’s a bit of an affectation, the whole favourite flower thing, in Ciara’s opinion. But of course her dad had run off down the shops the moment her mother had mentioned, wistfully, the lilies that bound the old-house garden where they had the long-gone dogs, Skippy and Jack. A throwaway comment, and now there is a fresh lily on the bedside table every day.

Though Ciara waits the coughing does not subside. Her mother coughs like one of those strange videos that loop around perfectly, like image become mechanism. Ciara closes her eyes, counts breaths and heartbeats again. The moment will not go. The seconds tick by in order. Sixty of them in a row. Outside the window erosion takes place, huge chunks of cliff-rock give in, half the molecules in the world trace place with the other half. Inside, Ciara’s feet bunch up in the thick carpet until they cramp.

‘S-sorry, I meant to say to you –’

‘Ma. Mammy, it’s alright, leave it. I’ve to go get ready to study at Anne’s.’ Ciara leans in quickly to give her mother a hug. Glancing back as she exits, she sees the waxen skin, thin and quivering – like it could fall away at any moment and be carried off on the breeze, and of course it could, those lily petals, half attached and half afloat on air.

*

CAREFULLY CHOSEN STUDY-SESSION OUTFIT: Ciara creaks softly down the stairs in: an Avenged Sevenfold hoodie (oversized, black); underneath, a loose tank top (racer-back, grey); denim shorts with laddered tights; thick, shin-high socks (black); scuffed-up Converse (white, doodled on for effect); heavy foundation; thickly applied black eyeliner; poorly blended blush; no eyebrow or lip make-up; assorted neon-coloured plastic bracelets; pink nail varnish chipped so that only an uneven patch in the centre of each nail remains; and a brunette fringe, back-combed and puffy.

*

7:21-8:08 PM: Her stealth is unnecessary. The front door slams, the car door slams, and no one in the wind-scrubbed house could notice. Anne’s iPod is hooked up to the radio and Ciara says her hellos over ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ blaring. Ciara starts on her naggin and suppresses a hot-spirit cough with another overeager mouthful. Sarah reverses out, not bothering to hide a deep older-sibling scowl. Ciara chats to Sarah about college and feels grown up, the soundtrack morphs between ‘Teenagers’, ‘Mr. Brightside’, ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ and the tarmac narrows, becomes gnarled and knobbled, the headlights swooning over barely-roads as the ditches encroach, brushing the sides of the Avensis. ‘Knives and Pens’, ‘Numb’, ‘Bring Me to Life’. Sarah asks Anne to just ring for directions – just ring, please. They turn around. Turn around again. Round and round, and Ciara begins to resent it all as her head spins mercilessly already. ‘Misery Business’, ‘Sextape’, ‘99 Problems’. One last bend is wound round; then, proclamatory, the dull thump of bass is heard.

*

WELOME TO THE PARTY: Ciara and Anne walk up the lane to the Moynan farmhouse. It is wet and mucky and Ciara has to be careful, walking on tiptoe across small islands of stone, so as to not destroy her white canvas shoes. The dark yard they reach looks to her like a Jurassic Park of large machinery: a pack of high-necked farm vehicles sleep in the shed; half-disassembled cars wait for prey beyond tufts of grass near the back, their rust like animal markings; a new and well-kept Jeep stands guard by the front end of the house. Music, light, and shouting spill out of an open side-door and she can see shadowy – human – bodies moving around inside. They stop and each take a swig of their naggins before heading in.

The music pounds from an unseen sound system. A group of lads in white shirts and jeans are gathered around a large wooden kitchen table. They are red-faced and can-happy, jostling each other in a sort of jumping dance. They look Ciara and Anne up and down as they walk in, sniggering to themselves before going back to whatever ritual has emerged in the first forty-five minutes of party. Ciara and Anne look around, unable to spot anyone they know.

‘SHOULD WE GO LOOK FOR THE GIRLS?’

‘WHAT?’

‘SAID, SHOULD WE – fuck it.’

‘WHAT D’YOU SAY?’

They stand in the doorway for a little while listening to the furious drums and speedy, high-pitched voices of the music. They study the boys clattering each other on their backs and spilling cider on the floor. Anne taps Ciara on the shoulder, pointing. The sitting=room door has opened, more lads emerging from within, and through that doorway Laura and Medbh are visible, sitting on a plush purple couch, smoking.

‘Come on,’ Anne says, taking Ciara by the crook of her arm. The lads shout ‘wahey!’ as they walk by.

The Moynans’ sitting room is full of shelves heavy with trophies, framed photos of boys on pitches, ornaments from sun holidays, wool rugs, and various electronics, including a new flat-screen television currently flashing colourful, grainy images of battle. The whole room is fibrous and unhappily taking in the tobacco smoke of Laura and Medbh, who are sat back, lounging. Anne closes the door behind them as they come in.

‘What’re you two at?’

‘Hello how are you lovely to see you too,’ says Laura, next to Medbh.

‘Where were you?’ Medbh says, next to Laura.

‘Sarah kept getting us lost, stupid cow – what are ye doing in here though?’

‘We’re watchin’ – what is it again Medbh?’

Medbh squints. On the television a man screams and dives off-screen, leaping away from a column of fire.

‘Bridge on the River Kwai, I think.’

‘What the fuck, like.’

‘I dunno, it was on when we came in.’

‘And the lads are just awful, can’t talk to them at all – bar Moynan but Dearbh has him to herself.’

Anne looks around the room, her arms tightly folded.

‘Where is Dearbh, even?’ Anne asks.

*

THE HOME OF THERESA AND PAUL MOYNAN: Ciara wanders out the other side, no need for the sitting-room conversation, she has seen that one before. She walks the halls of the Moynan household looking at Harry’s big wide face in all the family photos. The noise of the party thuds in the background like a nervous heartbeat. She finds the bathroom, white-tiled with blue bath mats and a bath-shower combo. Beside it is what she assumes is Harry’s bedroom: furnished with a bed covered in a thick blue duvet, a desk, and two posters. One is of a Mayo footballer, the other a golden-brown girl sprawled by a swimming pool in some tropical setting. The room smells like what she assumes her brother’s room would smell like, if she had one. She hangs in the doorway for a moment, watching the empty room and all that goes on in it.

*

AN EDUCATION: Beyond the back door Ciara discovers another scene in the party. Upwards of five lads, and Dearbhla, the sole girl, sit on logs in a leaf-carpeted clearing. They are hunched tightly around a roaring firepit, chatting and can-drinking in the deepening dark, the growing flame-flicker.

‘Ciara!’

The word wakes Ciara up to herself, her surroundings. Soon Dearbhla is around her, smelling hot and sweet in cider and vodka tones. Dearbhla’s hug, like her scent, is heavy and long with drunkenness. Her warm hand takes Ciara’s cold one and guides her to a log, to be seated beside Dearbhla herself at her right hand, to match Harry Moynan on her left.

‘Ye all know Ciara yeah?’

The lads mumble ambiguously, Ciara only vaguely recognizing the faces. They are mostly older lads from town. Some sixth years. Some of them she has never seen before. Dimly, she feels the previous chatter stunted by her addition.

‘Here Ciara, tell them what you were saying, about O’Shea?’ Dearbhla says, breaking the silence excitedly.

‘What?’

‘You were saying, at break.’

‘Oh, I was just saying that he, sort of like, looks like yer man, Frankie Muniz ... off Malcolm in the Middle.’

A welcoming chuckle goes round the circle. In the half-cast light of the fire the men look distorted and sinister to Ciara.

‘I had Shay, a cunt of a man as I remember,’ a bulky, fresh-shaven lad says.

‘Ryan,’ Dearbhla stage-whispers to Ciara, giving her a nudge that everyone can see.

‘Is Decks still teaching there?’ he asks.

Ciara pauses before answering, half not realizing that this question is directed at her, half wondering at the years that would prompt the word ‘still’.

‘Yeah,’ she answers, ‘he is. Biology, still.’ She turns to Harry, trying to divert attentions. ‘What’s the story with the lads inside?’

‘Awh stop, the lads from the U19s? They’ve let themselves down tonight – I think they scared the rest of your mates away, Dearbhy.’

‘You should get them to come out – your mates,’ Ryan says, re-asserting himself in the conversation.

‘They’re too invested in Bridge on the River Kwai at this stage,’ Ciara says hazily.

‘You’re gas,’ Ryan says, smiling, but not laughing. ‘Here, you’re nearly finished your naggin.’

He holds out a can of cider like a baton and stares at Ciara. Dearbhla nudges her again, pucking her in the ribs with a hard elbow. Ciara feels double-clothed, a second outfit of stares draped over her.

‘There you go, a nice cider for the lady.’

Ciara follows the cursive lettering on the can, Applebury, an Anglo-Saxon word. She steels herself before asking Ryan a question. Because she can hear music she plumps for music – does he like My Chemical Romance or Black Veil Brides or Paramore?

‘God no, I have some class like,’ he says, scratching his bare chin, easing back his over-sized shoulders. ‘Radiohead, Flaming Lips, Funkadelic, King Crimson.’

Crimson, crimson word. Her head is fuzzy.

‘Are you after inviting a bunch of emo-listening philistines, Harry?’ Ryan says, opening his arms toward Moynan to suggest he really is trying his level best.

‘Sorry Ryan, we can’t all be Pitchfork connoisseurs like yerself.’

‘I’ll make you a mix,’ he says, back to Ciara again. He takes a nonchalant swig of his can before asking her what was her name again.

‘Ciara,’ Ciara says.

‘I’ll make you Ciara’s Mix. It’ll be an education.’

*

THE CODE: Things start to swim and sway as time goes on. The fire takes on a dreamy quality, drifting beyond its bounds, appearing in places it shouldn’t. The other lads disappear at intervals, joining the impromptu World War II movie marathon that has started in the sitting room. Eventually just the four of them, sat in a fireside circle, remain. Ryan talks and Ciara’s head drifts up and down in an approximation of nodding. Harry sits with his hand on Dearbhla’s knee, his nose buried in her hair. Slowly or suddenly, Ciara can’t quite make out, Dearbhla stands up.

‘Me and Harry are headin’ inside.’

‘Gis a second and I’ll come,’ Ciara says, around a hurried swig of cider. The other three laugh like she has said something funny. The icy shock of embarrassment crackles along her skin. When Dearbhla and Harry are nearly inside Ciara lurches after them. She grabs the sleeve of Dearbhla’s jacket and drags her away from Harry.

‘Dearbh, you can’t just leave me out here with him.’

‘Ciara, Christ, could you be a big girl for once,’ Dearbhla hisses. Her anger comes out of left-field; Ciara has misjudged how far longstanding association, recent pity, general human comradery could take her.

‘Dearbh, please, I don’t feel well.’

Dearbhla tries to phase Ciara out of existence with a blank teenaged stare. ‘Please, you know, you know you know you know, my head just isn’t okay.’

‘Ciara, I love you,’ Dearbhla says, making Ciara’s stomach drop and her chest heave with anger, ‘but I’ve been saintly to you, and like, I’m at my limit. You just need to take care of yourself for once, I’m sorry.’

Dearbhla stalks her way back to the house. Ciara does not feel pitied by Dearbhla, she feels scorched. She feels the air move like tide around her. She feels staunch, blank, endlessly rebuffing all that is thundering against her.

*

QUEEN CRIMSON: Ciara stumbles back to her log and sits. The fire looks small in front of her, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. Then, Ryan’s arm around her shoulder, stiff and uncomforting. There is a headland of darkness between the garish light of the house and the weakening firelight.

‘You and your friend have a fight did ye?’

Ciara hears herself say that it was nothing. It sounds like her voice is coming from behind a pane of glass.

‘Ah she’s just off her head, don’t mind her.’

He drinks from his can and hugs her harder.

‘Could you leave me alone.’

‘She’s mad about you sure,’ he continues, ‘she was telling us about how she’s always looking after you, being there for you like, with your Mam and all that.’

‘Could you leave me alone please,’ Ciara says, feeling breathless.

‘Don’t be like that,’ he says briskly, giving his head a little shake.

Ciara looks at Ryan’s doughy face, his 2am shadow stubble coming in, thin dandruff-flecked eyebrows, pale lips which are drawn together tightly now. She decides very quickly to hit him as hard as she can. And then her arms whip, connecting more effectively than she envisioned. It feels good to beat at the soft crown of his skull. She swings at his head, his arms, any part of him she can reach. Eventually his hands find her wrists. He squeezes them tight enough that if they were her neck she would choke.

‘You’d do well to not be acting like a little cunt when someone is being nice to you.’

He pushes her arms away from him and stands up, jaw clenched. His fists are balled. Ciara can see how much he wants to hit her. Sees him think it over, again and again. She sees his little victory, his pride in himself, when he decides to walk away.

*

CIARA: Ciara sits for what feels like hours. She pulls up close to the fire to ward off the cold, rolls herself cigarette after cigarette, breathes the whole awful day through her. Everything so large and complicated that she can’t even look at it properly. Like Cthulhu. Shut up Ciara, you’re a Cthulhu.

She examines her face in a bathroom mirror, her boots muddy on the blue mat. She stubs out her cigarette in the sink and washes the ash down the plughole with a turn of the tap. Her phone screen is blank and dead when she checks it. There is a sudden banging on the door – she makes a small sound as she drops the phone onto the tiles.

The firelight litters the clearing with colour. Black and orange leaves wave on branches in front of broad bars of nighttime clouds. She checks her phone. The screen remains spiderwebbed, cracked – welcome evidence of solidity, linearity. She throws dry branches into the pit to keep it going, drinks abandoned cans and sits alone. Her lighter finally fails her and she finds herself trying to light a rollie off the fire, but it won’t catch. Her fingers tingle at her side, something coming through from beneath the blanket of drink.

Curious, she leans back and puts her toe to the fire. Nothing. Slowly, like she is at a rock-pool edge, or some stony stretch of shingle, she dips the tip of her shoe, then her whole foot, into the fire. She watches as a shoelace catches, hosts a tiny flame: orange at the base, strawberry-red through the middle, a soft white at the tip.

Ciara stands, the volume of the party dims, seashell sounds of wave crest in her head. She wades into the firepit and feels the weight of the sea on her chest, inhales the smoke of herself, feels, feels a trickle of her pain. From somewhere, strangely, she smells char – someone must be burning. All this, before a hand on her arm pulls her back, before Anne pulls her back, panic-stricken, beating at her with a blanket. The lightening sky rolls above Ciara as she is dragged along the ground, elbows and knees rebounding on the carpet of leaves and twigs. In her warping field of vision she can see the house, the shifting phantoms of shouting party guests sprinting out towards her. Anne is talking ceaselessly – no matter – when every atom of herself and all around her, everything is unfurling brightly and soft, like lily petals peeling. Ciara’s senses are livid and blooming, she feels a wealth of feelings, feels time righting itself, the coast reassembling stone by stone. She lies flat and looks up at a sky spider-cracked by branches. A morning to end the night is nearly here – morning, a hopeful word.

From issue #11: spring/summer 2021

About the Author
Jamie Stedmond is an emerging Irish writer. His work has previously appeared in The Tangerine, Poetry Ireland Review, Into The Void, Crannóg and elsewhere. He can be found on Twitter @JamieJamston where you can show him unconditional love and support in these trying times.