The first time I kissed her, her mouth tasted of burnt carbon.
“You still don’t want to know?” she said. “How all this ends?” Her fingers trailed
beneath the waistband of my jeans. I bit her lip in answer instead.
Missives slipped through the letterbox every morning: people pleading to know
if their mother would get better, if their girlfriend would leave them, if the cat
nextdoor would stop bringing them gifts of starling and rabbit guts. Aoife spent
her evenings answering them from the couch. It was one of the few ways in which
she paid for school. By now the walls were nearly covered in her looping script, the
projected stars buried in a borrowed sky. I sat next to her sorting through her hate
mail. Vitriol sharp as teeth seethed beneath my fingers. I couldn’t get Orla’s words
out of my head.
“Why do you answer these?”
“What do you mean?”
“Pets and girlfriends and job offers...” I pushed the envelopes from my lap. “You
could be warning about natural disasters. Accidents. Deaths.”
She did look at me then. Her lip was blue from chewing her pen.
“Small choices are fine,” she said.“But consider trying to wrestle the immensity of
a vision into words. The bigger the thing,
the harder it is to corral into something
definitive and clear. Think of fractals. The
more significant something becomes, the
more choices split off at every turn. I can’t
predict all of them.”
I didn’t understand. Julian of Norwich hadn’t hesitated to share what she saw;
Joan of Arc had burned for it.
“You mean you’re scared to get it wrong,” I said.
“I mean,” she said. "That I’m likely not to be believed.”
The trouble with prophets: nobody likes what they have to say.
There was a gas explosion. Three people died. I saw the footage displayed on
screen after screen on my way home from work. A hand so swollen and pale, fingers
swinging down from a stretcher. A wall of flame. The house collapsed into a charcoal
sketch of itself: two tall sides, the roof slumped between. From a distance, silhouette
turned hieroglyph. It looked familiar.
When I realised where I’d seen it before, I ran the rest of the way home. Aoife was
hunched on the couch watching the T V, her long feet tucked up under her. The smell
of a Chinese takeaway suffused the room. I skidded in front of the far wall. There it
was: a logogram bold with Aoife’s brush strokes. A church tower in the background.
The sickle moon. Two tall sides and a curved line between.
“You knew,” I turned to her. She paused, chopsticks dangling in one hand.
“I knew it was possible,” she said tightly.
“But did you tell anyone?”
She was silent.
“If you’d tried to save —”
“I told them!” she snapped. Anger flared across her cheeks.
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