‘Too Small to be Seen’ by Lauren Mackenzie
In criminally reductive paraphrasing, Freud posits that the objective correlative of your first sexual stirrings will mark you for life, be that a shoe, an old woman or a teenage boy, leaving you in the impossible situation of trying to recreate that particular bliss, all the while time’s march drags you in the opposite direction.
When I lived on Togher Road, just off the motorway, I watched my neighbour stretch his garden hose across his lawn to the other side of the road to wash his son’s blood down the storm water drain. The child had been on his way to playschool when thunder rumbled, and his mother thought it best to run back inside for his raincoat. A truck driver took a wrong turn and came down our road. The child loved trucks. Unlucky? Hard to say. So many coincidences can look like a plan.
I’ve seen a bus hurtle through red lights a mere breath away from a crowd of antsy children about to cross to school. I’ve seen a boy with a halo of singed hair and a blackened face after his father’s cigarette set the vinyl couch on fire. I’ve seen a baby dug out from under three floors of a bombed apartment building. Is that luck? If there is someone or something up there watching over us, whatever your affiliation, he/she/they does not enjoy children like I do. I am not a child, nor do I have any compulsion to behave like one, nor do I wish to molest one. I simply want to keep them safe.
I have been told that the magnificent beauty of our world is the only evidence needed for God, our mighty creator, our munificent benefactor. Someone once described the dusky hues of a dawn sky as a good morning greeting from the maker himself. I laughed till I cried. That dawn sky is simply the result of indirect sunlight filtered through the atmosphere. I’m not immune to what people talk about when they talk about God. I too have felt my heart swell to a near unbearable pitch of ecstasy while listening to Monteverdi’s hemiolas. A decent Burgundy has also come close. Mine is not a popular stance in County Offaly. Feminists can shout ‘all men are bastards’ and get more airtime than people like me but when I say God is indeed a waste of letters on the screen, I’m told to STFU.
I was four when my little friend’s skull burst like a tomato under the truck’s wheel. They told me God wanted another angel by his side. I became an atheist before I knew what it was.
It was hot as hell today but still a mother left her child in the car. She’s on the television news pleading for God to keep her baby girl safe. Her baby girl is safe. She’s in my kitchen sucking on an ice pop. I guess that makes me God. I think that’s hilarious. Don’t you find that hilarious?
From issue 7: autumn/winter 2018
About the Author
Lauren Mackenzie grew up in Sydney, Australia but now lives in Dublin with her family. After a long career as a screenwriter and editor in film and television, she returned to fiction in 2017, completing an MA in Creative Writing in UCD. She was shortlisted for Cuirt New Writing Prize, Hennessy New Irish Writing, and Fish Short Story Prize. She has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Banshee, The Irish Times, and The Lonely Crowd among others. Recently she was awarded Literature Bursaries by the Arts Council of Ireland and in 2023, her novel, The Couples, was published by Hachette.
