Popshot Magazine – August 2019

“I took your advice, and I told them, and they told me to fuck off. What kind of
person leaves their house on the advice of a random girl?”
I’d never seen her so angry. I began to apologise, but the temper had already begun
to slide back from her features. All at once she seemed exhausted.
“Don’t.” She returned to excavating her noodles from their paper carton. Grease
glistened on her lower lip.
“But Aoife —”
She shook her head. A long moment bent and stretched. I sighed and came over to
sit beside her on the couch, both of us hunched forward watching the news. I held
her hand in both of mine.
She began writing to politicians and policemen, fire brigades and ordinary folk:
warnings about traffic accidents, landslides, the insidious creep of carbon monoxide
— all in her clear, steady hand. She went in person more than once, as if the lambent
shine of her eyes might be more convincing.
Sometimes they listened. For the most part they did not.
It hurt her, to watch the consequences. A teenager died, even though she’d been to
his house three times that week. Instead it happened not at the salt-pricked cliff face
she’d foreseen, but from the branches of a tree in his own backyard. A storm dragged
a whole fishing boat beneath its waves.
“Some things cannot be changed,” she said.
There were wins: a carful of pilgrims, an undrowned boy, and once an entire power
plant diverted from meltdown. It was worth it to see her flushed with pleasure. I
could kiss her and skim the happiness from her tongue. But she was extending her
gift, and it demanded a price. More and more she withdrew to the confines of her
room. There was less singing. Fewer ravioli. Every inch of the flat became covered
in her black impenetrable script. At times when she stopped in front of the wall I
thought I could see the stars shining right down to her bones. In bed her pale skin
seared against mine.
We went to an exhibition at the local gallery. I was glad to see her out of the house
— to see her eyes focused on something anchored in the real. She stopped in front of
a photograph broad and brilliant with light. It showed a bonfire. A pyre, the woman
in it dazzling. On the placard was a quote: "If I surrender my body to the burning,
and I am without love, then shall I have nothing."
I wrapped my arms around her narrow waist.
“Do you want to know how my Nonna died?” she said. I buried my face in her
hair. I didn’t want to hear about death. I wanted to seal us off against the future.
Jamie visited her the next week. Orla’s brother; the kind of man my mother called
eaten with ambition. He had a face like a knife.Whatever he came to ask of Aoife,
she answered him.When I saw him again, it was at another of their parties. He was
blurred with drink. He looked eaten by something else entirely.
“What did you ask her?” He leaned in close enough for me to smell the sweet fetid
rise of alcohol, his sweat rancid beneath.
“I asked her,” he said, “when I was going to die.”
I couldn’t tell if he was joking. “And what did she say?”