Popshot Magazine – August 2019

I didn’t believe in the immediacy of catastrophe.
It didn’t occur to me till later that she had not meant what she said as conjecture
or hypothesis. It was a warning.
Two weeks after I’d moved in, I still hadn’t seen her much, what with the new
job and classes and my tendency to run headlong into bad decisions. One evening
I shrugged on my jacket to head out into the night. Aoife was where she’d spent
the last few evenings: balanced on a stool, transcribing herself onto the living room
walls. Brush in hand, she wrote across the white paint in a slow, deliberate thrall.
“You should take your helmet,” she said.
I glanced back at her. I was fairly arbitrary in my adherence to cycling safety, with
much the same attitude to which I approached things like smoking at parties, and
swimming naked on New Year’s. She hadn’t turned around. I hesitated.
I took the helmet.
She came to find me in the emergency room later, her small strong hand winding
into mine. Her skin was hot and burning. She stayed while they stitched my other
arm, although I knew she hated blood. When I turned my hands over, both palms
were scored scarlet from their run-in with the gravel.
“Stigmata,” she said, nudging me, a soft smile colouring her mouth.
I’d make a bitter saint: gravel darned into my knees, the taste of blood livid on
my tongue. Still, I watched for my hands to heal over the next few days. When the
wounds scabbed over and their red stripe faded, relief wove with an unfamiliar
catch. I understand now it was the savour of disappointment — that I hadn’t been
chosen. That I couldn’t be more like her.
“What is it she’s writing?” Elif asked me. We were drinking the expensive wine
I’d meant to give the party’s host, swinging our legs out of a window into the cool
dark summer air. It was the kind of party everyone had that year: inchoate and
effusive, new friends among old. Until then I hadn’t realised I thought of Aoife’s
work as private; something secreted inside itself.
“Latin,” I squinted. “Symbols - Akkadian — numerical dates. Who knows?”
“It's bullshit,” Orla laughed. “She told me dating Calum was a bad idea.”
“It was a bad idea,” Elif said. “He was terrible.”
“But not by fate.”
“We all said the same thing.”
“Then who’s to say what she said was really prophecy at all?”
Orla straightened, a plume of smoke blooming from the corner of her mouth.
“It’s just carnival-work, intuition. I could do it.” She tilted her chin at me. “You
will be haunted by your mysterious and sordid past.”
“Fuck off,” I said easily. “Leave my tragic backstory alone.”
“Fine,” she said. "But she should make us a real prophecy. With blood in it.”
I could see Aoife where she stood at the other window, the dark rope of her hair
winding around her neck. The strap of her dress had slipped from her shoulder, and
her collarbone gleamed in the yellowing light.
“You want to put a prophet to the test?” Elif asked.
Orla smiled. “I want to know what kind of god crouches in her head.”