Icarus Vol. 74, No. 3 (2024)

I C A R U S MAGAZINE

F O R E W O R D

Charlotte cannot tell the time on an analogue clock. Eloise recently took a class on Ulysses, wrote an essay on Ulysses and has still never read Ulysses. Both of them felt uneasy about the prospect of writing this foreword. We cannot overstate how little we know.

The last time either of us recollect understanding anything at all was when we were respectively ten and good mates with the trees in our garden. A different universe with uncomplicated laws that allowed bedsheets to be ziplines out of windows. Where toy solar-systems qualified us to be astronauts and underwear choices were dictated by the fact that they literally had the days of the week on them. Ever since then, things have been rapidly progressing towards total nonsense. It’s looking increasingly as though this could be the effect of what some people are calling ‘growing up’.

This last issue knows everything and then suddenly, nothing at all. Not how to tie laces or poach eggs or love people in a way that doesn’t feel actually excruciating. In it, you’ll find tales of transatlantic longing, morphing into crabs and pitying teapots. You’ll stumble across the ache of missing your dad, the fear of the huge goat in your back garden and the thrill of running off with clotted cream. The joy and terror of knowing there’s no way back.

We do hope things will make sense, eventually. In the meantime, we trust these poems and paintings, stories and photos will not let you feel alone. They are equally baffled, disappointed and obsessed with existing.

Hang in there.

Yours, (forever) (and everandeverandever!)

Eloise and Charlotte

Lucy Caldwell

Fiction

Deirdre Sullivan

Nausicaa

Susannah Dickey

Oh! A Futuristic Crab!

How The Great He-Goat Has Always Come by Juliet Arpaç

And yet breakfast still needs to be cooked –Rashers on the hob, fat shrinking and spits of oil, The back door open so the walls don’t go sweat slick and the towels don’t stink.

A draft. Six crepes cooling in the oven.

And you turn to three cats sat in the middle of the tiled floor. Two ginger. A tabby. All blinking slow. The breeze sifts their coats with its hands. When they streak through the open back door, round the side of the house, You move the rashers off the heat and follow. And it IS NOT GOD IT IS NOT GOD IT IS NOT GOD IT IS NOT GOD IT IS NOT

The Great He-Goat sitting very still in the grass. Cloven hooves folded like an elderly lady. Side-ways eyes unblinking. Twelve and a half feet high. One ear twitching circles around a persistent fly. No shadow in the noon day sun.

You begin to tell him you are not scared (you are) You begin to tell him you know he has better things to be doing (you don’t) You go back inside.

The He-Goat presses his massive face to the window above the kitchen sink And it stops the sunlight getting in. Breath fogs the glass. Rheum smears. You can’t see the rashers properly so they burn and the crepes come cold. You eat alone, wash the dishes in the semi-dark and the draft crawls over your scalp all the while.

When you leave for the bus, his head turns backwards to watch you go, Eyes unblinking, ear twitching, hooves folded. He will see you again this evening Or perhaps in two weeks time.

This is how the He-Goat has always come. Still and unurgent. Over breakfast, Twenty two minutes in to a conversation, Three quarters of the way through a bad film, Seven hours and fifty two minutes into a heavy sleep. You can never put up with him, You could never be a ChristianSurely he has better things to be doing. But this is how the Great He-Goat has always come, Dreadfully still and unurgent.

Sulphur smells only of rotten eggs.

Cow and Baby

by Kim O’Leary

Skipping through and through the long green grass, Father sticks to the tire beaten dirt road watching as The grass tickles my shins and reaches for my knees. I know it hopes to someday pull me down and swallow me And I will be ready, coffin-less and festering.

She chows aside the barbed wire, Bored and wistless in the summer doze.

The baby smacks mama’s under belly with excitement

Kettling with teeming energy.

Suck gulp tail-wag swish.

We go uphill, uphill we go, so I have to be carried to make it to tea on time.

“Can’t be late for granny’s apple tart.”

For apples melted into mush between two darkened pastry sheets

My father’s tail wagged.

Wrought from ribbons of flames: picture me clay. Eying up my scars, pressing firm thumbs smooth, Icarian wren glancing salty spray, Cobwebbed water wriggles like a milk tooth.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men In a circle to watch my coming to. “How many fingers am I holding up?” Ten. Prone pre-Raphaelite; “Up, keep moving through.”

Jesus carries me down the beach, she Promises joy hung out to dry, bleached. Ahead awaits finger cakes and high tea, “Where are your manners?” the Doctors screeched.

Enter wren: uninvited, to spout her dreams, Before sneaking away with the clotted cream.

Sonnet: To Sixteen by Louise Norris

Child by Elise Carney Frazier

I still remember that time we went to Paris. And I still remember that photograph you took. I can show you, It’s in the closet upstairs, behind the box of your old things.

Or maybe I can tell you:

It was years ago. The porthole in the photograph tells two stories; Was it a submarine or an airplane that Brought us to that place?

I’m too small to know what to think of you, My eyes look up to see the whole of you, What was it that you gave me?

Maybe I can remember. There are certain things that I know:

The sound of sand and water, A background of tears and hunger, Remedies of salt and sugar,

The candyfloss!

How could I forget?

It befriends my little hands and Finds a home between my fingertips.

I put my hands up to your face

To ask you the French name

For the sugared heaven—

I run my fingers through your beard—

You whisper back a reply,

‘Barbe à papa’, you tell me, sweetly.

The Five Poems and It by

Sophie Brennan

BUSY AND IMPORTANT

She is on bus wondering if there is dead elf in the creases of the seat in which she is sat.

IS THIS LOVE?

I think someone turned me into Mouse and I am living with woman. I watch her shows with her, and eat crumbs of her cookingit’s wonderful. But she doesn’t know I am there.

AM I A CAT?

She never liked swimming because it would make her wet and she would have to go back to being dry again later.

WHAT COMES NEXT

There is a teapot on the stairs of an apartment block. It can’t walk.

THERE IS A DARK PLACE

I lie on ground in the darkIt’s just where I live.

Cocooned by Ella Sloane

Canyons of quilt, Weak-night of hilariously dense Mass unto mass, Bell knells and ricochets. My shoulders and chest, Plummet through the mattress. There you goAnchored remedy to your vertigo.

I take my tongue into my mouth And disgrace myself, And do a forward roll-duvet danish pastry. Snow-blinded by linen, It happens all the time, Breath-hotboxing-cotton-detoxify, It happens all the time. Choked-up waterboarded windchime, Limbo where I lie.

Turner by Alannah McElligott Ryan

Ritual by Finn Chatten

Every Sunday he sets up the cones the same way.

It’s early, early enough to be dark in Winter, and in the Summer the dew glistens under the first light and the field comes alive. And Michael’s there. Every Sunday. It’s the smell of coffee on his breath and the sound of water on his ear as he walks up the North strand towards the Community Centre pitches. It’s his walk – he commands it. With the footballs over his shoulder, the cones and poles carried together at the end of his stiff right arm. Passers-by are familiar but Michael’s not a big talker. A nod and a smile and a hello at best. The other early risers are usually lost in their own journeys anyway, it suits them all to stay forward.

It’s a sharp left away from shore, in between the gap in the hedges that open up onto Plainview and there it is. The pitches are empty and still when he arrives, and he drops his gear at the goalposts at the school end; and he sets up the cones. He goes about and he sets up the cones as he does every Sunday the very same way. And he’s done this for years; this same ritual, this same pilgrimage, building up his empire, his home, his something, brick by brick, cone by cone.

And soon he is joined by others, some of them friends. Sometimes there are many and sometimes there are only a handful, but there’s always company, and Michael always has his way. Most of the lads are not fond of the setup, but they too return. Sunday after Sunday. They too are building something for themselves. And after the guts of an hour, as the scene stirs to life around this harry of pilgrims, progress is made, every week. And Michael strides on home.

What happens after varies from week to week, and from year to year. Michael’s daughter is seven now. He tries to spend the afternoons with her, but she’s as stubborn as her old man. Ciara, he says, why don’t you come for ice cream with me and your gran? Because I don’t like her, she says.

And who could blame her? Michael’s mother is by no means a nasty woman, she’s a softie in her own way, but her world is so far from Ciara’s, that when the three of them squeeze into the same space, they can barely see each other.

Yet it happens.

Last Sunday it was Michael’s mother’s birthday. After he observed his own morning, he drove the twenty minutes with tired legs to pick her up from Aran Ash nursing home. This was her third birthday there. She isn’t ill but often jokes that she wishes she was. She’s ashamed of the attention she receives and embarrassed by her ailing body. Even after three years she is full of apologies and sheepish smiles for her carers when they help her to undress or use the bathroom. But beyond these discomforts she is happy there, and Michael is happy she is happy there, and they communicate this in the most typically ambiguous of ways. It’s grand she says. The nurses are lovely she says. The words mean little but she’s making the effort and she’s reading again so he believes her.

Together, on this third nursing home birthday, the two of them drove back into town and collected Ciara from her mother’s. Ciara had been to the zoo the previous day and had had her mind blown by the incomprehensible size and power of the elephants with their enormous alien heads and their alien trunks and tusks and their overall over-alienness. One elephant had come right up to the raised ledge upon which visitors stood at looked down upon them, and Ciara noticed the heavy-duty tag beneath the great sheet of its left ear. The thought of a domesticated alien depressed her. Afterward she insisted on buying an elephant plush which she held dearly close for the entire outing on gran’s birthday. She had freed it from its human captors. Joining Michael and gran in the car, the elephant’s foot caught in the slamming door and Ciara sobbed desperately until Michael explained to her how tough elephants are, and that the shutting of a car door was like the snip of a clothes peg to them – nothing but a pinch. Still, as they drove, Ciara could be heard whispering I’m sorry, I love you, until they had parked up at the head and left the car behind.

The head jutted out into the grey water, connected to the mainland by a thin stretch of road and sand. It was slightly elevated, and when they parked there, they had a view of the entire town. Michael’s mother would say to Ciara that they were on top on the world, and Ciara would look at her dad with an expression that he could not read.

From there, the trio sauntered around the harbour and past the playground, Michael wheeling his mother, Ciara dancing on ahead of them. It was a greyish afternoon, and both the harbour and the playground were fairly scant of life. A cold wind brought the waves in at the rocks, and the few fishermen at the pier’s end were wrapped in wool. Next to the playground at the foot of the pier there were some old, white-washed, cottage apartments. Michael had lived there years back before he had kicked the junk and the place was knotted up in some unsavoury memories. The whole harbour was. He was not a religious man, but he always blessed himself at this point of the walk. In one of the second apartment’s murky windows, he spotted a sign that read To Let – to let what? He would sarcastically snap to himself as they rolled on by, and for a moment he would strain to stop his mind from wandering down that familiar tirading path. They walked along the pier.

Neary’s is not a pub. It is, in fact, an ice cream parlour – exclusively. A repurposed lifeboat hut that sits on the end of the pier, a little bright blue backdrop against which the standing fishermen cast their Sunday shadows. It’s owned and run by an ageing Irish traveller named Anthony, known to local clientele as Don Antonio, the Ice Cream man. A big burly fellow with a delicate touch and a warm smile. Though there’s little conversation in the transaction, especially when Michael’s around. The Don remembers Michael from when he lived on the pier and Michael is aware of that, but his son and Michael kick about in the same park so the memories are buffered by a solemn show of mutual respect.

Overhead a solitary plane scratched the sky.

Three ninety-nines were bought. Michael paid and his mother scolded him. It’s your birthday, mam, he said. Fair enough, she conceded, and her shy smile fell into a restrained giddy grin – on the same day as the president’s! She chirped; can you imagine? How lucky she is to share a birthday with me! Michael offered a smile with sad eyes. It was a line he had heard a thousand times – as if that were how old she was and all she had to show for it was this shared birthday and the joke to tell about it.

But beside him, clutching the elephant, Ciara chuckled. And Michael’s mother chuckled back. And together they stood at the pier’s edge staring out at nothing in particular, wrapped in that unconscious mode of being, understanding each other and not understanding how, bound beyond their vastly different worlds through a mysterious feeling -- and ice cream. And the wind fell, and the fishermen fished, and the ice cream melted. The plane above had flown on and every Sunday he sets up the cones the same way; but what happens after is a mystery. That day they walked the harbour. That day they bought ice cream. That day they talked all the way home.

And Ciara will grow up and forget that her elephant is real. And Michael’s mother might have another birthday or two, and then she will die, and what happens then will look vastly different. But no matter. He’ll keep walking and he’ll keep building, and the journey is the purpose, and he is always here because he is always there. And until he is no longer, the next step is always the same.

Every Sunday he sets out the cones the same way.

by Fiona Claire McShane

Young gods are always gobbled up before they can grow. Confluence – greedy convergence. It keeps the heavens clean.

The brackish streams of the chalk country begin to bubble and bulge overspilling into dammed up damp soil for the sheep to lick at.

Ducks bury their eggs in the banks and die before they crack open.

Oomantic murmurings a century late, shrivelled yolk and empty shell. Scabs on the elbow of Alba, long dried up rubbed red anew.

The baker builds his house on the edge of town lest his oven implode. His wife stoops to send their baby’s basket downstream.

Ár nAthair, atá ar neamh…

The last trickle of the tributary carries the child into the valley where his colic cries are drowned out.

Haemostasis the water is cool and clear Uncalloused hands clutch at his head.

Haemorrhage new language on a tongue thick and heavy Proclaiming – There Was No Stream In This Marred Earth.

Sruthán

Letters to America by

Arabella Ware

A string-bound band of communications I hope this letter finds you well arriving at the post come first light I dreamt of you all of last night – there is Dublin – and there is everywhere else.

Two quid a stamp to tell you

Then all those strangers handing off the things we said through sweatypalm glances, sitting cold in the back of a steel post van. Paper secrets shuffling around in a bag.

I still love

I write these letters until they find my bedroom floor, bronzing beneath the pitter patter of my evening feet.

These my tethers between worlds, frayed seams between my teeth, pressed hard into your palm, rooting. It’s thundering in Texas today, Caught a glance of you in the voyeuristic rain.

Every time people saw us together

I looked freshly fucked.

I Have Company by

Violet Flanagan

Even if we’d just been talking about the weather, even when we came with coffees from the bookstore, my hair was curly from being caked in sweat and my cheeks were rosy from the context of it all. I was naked a lot back then. There were red wine stains on my bed sheets. I didn’t mind my body. I didn’t mind him seeing it. I remember him above me under the morning sun, beams of light hitting his eyes from the window. I remember him inside me like I remember the walk home from my kindergarten field trip to the fire station. Like I remember my mothers makeup bag on the counter, begging to be rifled through.

I was changed. I noticed more than before. I saw shapes in the clouds and made cookies by myself. I watched them expand in the oven like flowers blooming. Everything felt like pornography.

Eyes gazing at one thing then slowly shifting over to another.

Hands sprinkling bits of green in the tobacco, a tongue licking the paper. Buttering toast. Smoke twirling in the air.

I woke up once to him speaking Lithuanian with his mother on the phone.

Language that I didn’t have to understand sounded almost like music. But he told me afterwards, what he was saying. Turiu kompanią. I have company.

A Monotonous Life by Maggie Kelly

Foreign Language by

Vanessa Ackerman

Blue snow, yes, teach me ice cold shadows a lake traversed, the marshes and the broken forests, dangerous, and bluebells. The dream ends when I remember my questions- didn’t we say we’d live by the sea? Didn’t we say we’d meet in Berlin and Prague? and where will I sleep tonight if not here between your breaths, timid and skittish? Your hands shake, your voice climbs on top of mine. Translate slight, anointed, sinful touch. The dream ends. I understood your directionsOnce we start kissing, there’s no way back.

I do miss your kitchen

by Juliet Arpaç

I’m sorry I keep telling people about all the mean things you did

I think  I just Need to keep you as something sore – in my headI think it’s a bit too much to think  You weren’t so bad to think-

I think-

I think it just gets me too down to believe you  really wanted to sit in the  kitchen at four, and hold my feet in your lap, and still  treat me like that.

Brain-Eating Amoeba by Louise Norris

A Notice to the Lithuanian Draft by

Violet Flanagan

I’d give you the world If it wasn’t resting so calmly at our feet. In this economy, spring still comes. Cats still yawn and stretch their paws. People still hold each other under thatched roofs. You have to feel the wind sometimes. You have to forget it all. If you let the war follow you home, we won’t survive it.

The stool pushed outwards With force through the stand Erected with writhe of leg, Swipe of hand.

Colour drained of face Through strain and slack, Of mechanics and chains That release and contract

The suspense and the drop. Execution with clean wipe And neat folds of knots

Economises material.

Well hung he was, Bared privy on the plinth Jutting between two columns. Stillness dangling limp.

The Hanging / The Toilet by

Fraser Cattini

Eclipse by Andrew Row

The heavens give mistakes back to me as mulch children–Wailing spring dirt, smelling of incense and an open window and the passage of time. They cry for my forgiveness, mud hands still sticky with grass That stains my shirt.

Home state, earthquake, high winds, The sun is consumed, the last baby eaten by a tyrannical father.

In the wind storm, the dark sky, I put the kids to bed. Dirt on my lips as I kiss them goodnight. Singing the song my parents sung to me; A lullaby.

In the morning daffodil light The bed has flowered; Ferns, orchids, lilies of the valley.

De-grease the Boone by Liam Kelly

won’t you stick it to the robot printing mags of all the old rebels who sing tunes for ragged tuxedos in darkness waiting for nighttime aid amidst endless ruin?

[this here we call the gist of prosperity –assembly lines spaced out, pushing ages of reason and indulgence in all your strange desire, spilling blood on the books, paying fines]

release! said the liar to the cost, til cease! said the fire to the frost, each holding out a plate for snorting, guitars in the grey house, tunnels unread bomb away.

two sides coined by big screens beguiling massacres with straight faces, beckoning all the missiles with porn, glasses of water, good morning, good night.

with the machine grabbing mouths to foresee reactions, tongues stripped and swapped, healing babel with our hand, unthinking, unbound, unleashed upon the world.

Smock Alley Theatre 1662 by

Rosa Thomas

Did you know this theatre was once a church?

The tour guide says of the stained-glass exterior

The crypt underneath my feet and I

Corpse with gaping toothless grins.

This theatre is our church

Different Gods we pray to / maybe the same / that’s the question isn’t it?

Just as seedy

Rip fat fruit with sharpened teeth

Mediterranean handfuls

Just as greedy

Fuck mortals with rosy cheeks

Just as needy

Prayers sent to them every time we tread boards beyond the curtain

Some kiss medallions

Stolen off a dead granny

I do a little jig and say fuck you to Whoever made me this dancing monkey.

I’ve seen blood sacrifices made on stage

A blunted Stanley gone awry

The player summoning the big fat git in the sky

The scream was better than previous nights

The scream was better than previous nights.

I’ve been baptised with sudsy preview pints

And pissed on unlevel alleyways

Then walked that golden river

Until it flowed into the gutter.

Put out your hand Peter!

Float with us in disbelief.

Hospice Blessing by

Thomas Phalen

Priest stopped by each day in passing

To give my Love beatifying

From all grave ill and death protecting For mercy in extremis praying

Hands upon her head was laying.

Her eyes now closed that once were glistening

She silent in her bed was sleeping Alone of secrets deep was dreaming. For me, not her, this sanctifying

Had she known, perhaps defying.

For her all bets now I was hedging

For god’s compassion importuning.

Signum crucis I was making

The outward signs of consecrating

My head heart left and right were crossing

My father son and holy ghosting.

Priest’s magic words now of the blessing

Her life cut short were all hallowing. But last hope smashed by ruthless wasting I knew dead sure no one was listening.

Incantation by Vanessa Ackerman

And a mother dares to rest her head

On her son’s shoulders

His hands strumming her ashen hair

His voice, not yet breaking

And a man who does not wish to speak is asked to bless the sick: He offers no name

And a woman whose mind has been dismantled

Burns her fingertips on the candle flame

Begs for a strange, delirious lover

And children who know their games are violent

Play in a secret room

Guns at their hips

Arrows in their cries

Losing My October by

Thomas Phalen

In Violet Hill Park at dying of day

Losing my October when day is through. The ends of things, all beauties pass away. Sweet autumn wanes and then I’ll lose you too.

The sun in brilliant westering, glancing

On copper-rusted, golden, scarlet trees On the greensward hillside sparkling, glimmering. One more last day, time fritters dwindling eves.

Á brave blaze as day to darkness closes In dazzle brief, for you my fool’s hope leaps. The sky melts amber, apple-green to rose Sunset rainbow just like the flaming leaves.

But Rainbow Promise a cheap vow shattered For we drown here now in rising waters.

Beckon, Return by Louise Norris

Shrouded, a canopy bird

Singing with nothing

Sharpish at streamings & lit with dumb light

Where thought turned to water & slid around madly

I let sit the heart

Made still at soft padding

The twitching and rushing Of everything by.

Aside by Daniel Eoin Shannon

lucy caldwell

Fiction by Lucy Caldwell

You applied for the festival’s bursary, but didn’t win. Your mum was disappointed for you – more disappointed than you were yourself – and she offered to pay, insisted on paying, and after a while it was easier to be grateful than to refuse.

She lives alone now, since you went to uni. Two days a week she volunteers at a charity shop, on Tuesday nights she does French classes, Thursdays Pilates. You don’t know what she does at the weekend.

Your mum asks about the writer leading the workshop; if his work is good. You tell her it is. You don’t tell her you sort of read it more wanting to than actually liking it. There is one good story in his first collection, the sort you can instantly tell is properly good, about a young boy abused by an elderly family member. But none of the rest of the stories – what is it, you think, and how, how does it work? – quite feel the same.

The workshop runs for the five days of the festival, from nine till midday, in a secondary school on the edge of the town. You’re still not that long out of school yourself, but even the middle-aged women joke that it gives them the willies, walking the echoing corridors past the staff room.

There are eight of you in the workshop, just over half its capacity: the five middle-aged women, two retired men, and you’re by far the youngest. You go round one by one, introducing yourselves. Most of the others have done workshops before at other festivals: they set out what they hope to get from the week, and him. There are bursts of raucous laughter from the classroom next door where a younger writer, recently shortlisted for a clatter of major awards, is leading a sold-out course on the novel. You watch as your writer shuffles then drops his photocopies, runs a hand through hair which is thinning, clears his throat. He’s older than his author picture in the brochure. When he looks up, you try to smile encouragingly.

When he asks questions, you make yourself answer them, though you’ve never been the sort to speak up in class. You volunteer to read aloud from the story he hands around. You even ask a question about his own work, to show that you’ve read it. He asked to read work from participants ahead of the workshop, and you agonised over what to send through: your best two stories, or were they too similar, and should you show range instead, or maybe the thing you’d most recently written, though it still seemed unfinished, in case he could help? The festival administrator said, Just send what you’re happiest with, and so, in the end, you’d emailed her the two best. But he doesn’t refer to them, gives no indication, in fact, that he’s read any of your work. One of the retired men is writing his memoirs. The other a historical biography. Two of the women couldn’t get onto the novel course, though it’s novels they’re working on, and the other three are in a book club together and decided to give writing a go. You don’t think, from the exercises he sets that you read out in class, that any of them is particularly good, but then again, it’s hard to tell; it all seems so artificial, and not what real writing – whatever that might be – is all about.

You text your mum daily updates with exclamation marks.

After the final session, you all go to the pub, and after a couple of rounds he ends up sitting next to you. We haven’t discussed your writing, he says. We should discuss your writing.

Ok, you say. Ok. You push your half-pint of lager-and-lime away, reach in your bag for your notebook.

He lays a hand on your bag.

Not here, he says. Somewhere more quiet. I’ve got a thing at five, but what about after that, say six thirty, seven?

It’s the closing night of the festival and there’s an event with a writer you don’t want to miss. But you also don’t want to pass up this chance.

Thank you, you say, that’s so kind of you, thank you so much. Whenever suits best.

Great, he says. Well, why don’t we make it dinner?

Oh, you say, ok, and he says, Great, again, and names the place.

Your mum has texted wanting to know how the last day’s gone. You know you should call her, but you want to wait till you know what he thinks of your stories. You know too she’ll ask about the others on the course, why they’re not going for dinner. You wonder again if any of them heard him suggest it, and whether they minded.

Instead you text back it’s been brilliant, exclamation marks, and promise to call her tomorrow, from the train station.

Back in the hotel you wash your face and restraighten your hair, but you keep the same clothes on so you don’t look dressed up, and you don’t put on make-up, not even bronzer: you want to look serious, intellectual. Then you read and reread the two stories you gave him, until it’s time to go.

You’re early and he’s late. You sit there long enough to start wondering what you’re doing. One of the retired men from your workshop walks past, holding hands with his wife, and they stop at the door and look at the menu and you wonder if they’re going to come in, and what you’ll say if they do, but after a while they walk on. Eventually, in he blusters, battered satchel, festival tote bag, books under his arm, so obviously unembarrassed that you relax a bit too. The restaurant is modern, brightly lit; there are people on their own as well as couples, one table of friends. It’s seven o’clock: why wouldn’t you have dinner? It’s just a normal, practical thing to do. The writer talks – about panels he’s been on, about audience members who wouldn’t stop talking, moderators who got the title of his second book wrong. You smile, nod. He seems to have forgotten he’s not talking to another writer, a real writer. Here you are, talking writing with a writer at a festival, over dinner, no big deal. This is it, you think, what it’s like, this thing you’ve wanted for so very long, this world behind the curtain.

When the waitress comes you order risotto, in part because it’s the cheapest thing on the menu but also because you have a thing about eating in front of people, men, you don’t know; going back to teenage years spent with braces, the horror of food caught in them. Risotto you can eat in tiny bites, and you don’t even have to chew it. He orders the steak, medium rare, of course, and asks you if he should go for chunky chips or fries.

Go for chunky chips, the waitress says, the chunky chips here are out of this world, and once she’s said that, of course you have to say, Chunky chips.

When he says, What are we drinking, you gesture at your tap water: Just this is fine. But he insists on a glass of wine, then, Feck it, let’s get a bottle, shall we? Oh, you say, but the shall we doesn’t seem to be a question. He orders a bottle of white wine and you do the calculations in your head. There’s no way you can afford this, what with him ordering the steak too. Just risotto and tap water and a euro for the tip, you can manage. If you have half a glass of wine and just pay for that, say adding five euro, instead of paying for half of the twenty-five-euro bottle? But he’s already filled your glass right up and is raising his, Your good health, sláinte, and you find yourself taking a gulp. Slow down. You can put it on your mum’s credit card, which you still have for emergencies, and when she asks you can say there was a problem with yours, or something, you’ll think of something.

You try to focus on the conversation. You’re aware you haven’t contributed much: this can’t be fun for him, forced to do all the talking. You try to think of interesting questions to ask or witty things to say but your mind is a blank. You don’t know if you’re allowed to ask what he’s working on now. You think of your mum that time, going to see a prize-winning author in town. Your mum had loved her book, had bought a copy for you, and several friends. When the Q&A began, your mum asked the author if she’d consider a sequel. From her velvet chair on the stage, the author heaved an exaggerated sigh and rolled her eyes. If I had a dollar, she said, for every time I was asked that, I wouldn’t need to be here, any other questions?

The food comes, and he hasn’t yet mentioned your stories. He will, you tell yourself, he will.

You eat your risotto, and when he insists that you try his you don’t say you’re vegetarian, but just take a polite single chip and try to ignore the sauce.

The wine goes down much faster than it should. He orders a glass of red as well. His cheeks are pink.

You finish your risotto and lay your cutlery neatly down. Any moment now, you think.

He pushes his plate aside.

I’m away to the jacks, he says.

While he’s gone, the waitress comes to clear the plates. Are yez finished? That was lovely, thanks, you say as she lifts yours. Did yez like the chunky chips, she says. She lowers her voice conspiratorially: They fry them three times, that’s the secret. Then she goes on: Will your da be wanting a doggy bag, she says, for the remains of his steak. Oh, you fumble, feeling your cheeks get hot, I don’t think so, thank you anyway.

What’s that? he says then, coming back to the table, zipping his flies.

Oh, nothing, you say quickly, she just said would you be wanting a doggy bag.

And what did you say? he says, looking amused. I said, you say, still flustered, I didn’t know. Sure why would I be wanting a doggy bag?

Maybe you have a dog, you say, stupidly, and he puts his elbow dramatically on the table and leans his head on his fist and says, Oh really? Do I look like the sort of person has a dog?

I don’t know, you say, and he says, Tell me this, so if I’d a dog, what sort of dog would it be?

And all you can think is St Bernard, the flecks of spittle on fleshy pink lips, now suddenly so close, but of course you can’t say that, and so you just haver, say nothing, smile, smile, smile, and he puts a paw over yours, the black hairs on the backs of his white fingers, and he says, Now you’d be a whippet, wouldn’t you, or what do you call them ones with all the hair, a saluki, that’s it, that’s what you’d be. All jumpy and nervy and skittish. Relax, just relax!

And the horror of it all somehow galvanises you and you manage to blurt out: My stories. Can we talk about my stories?

Your stories? he says, as if you’ve said something funny. Then he sits back, freeing your hand from his. Ok. Fair enough. Your stories. Well, he says. What do you think about your stories?

Me? you say. I don’t know what I think. I mean I wondered what you think.

Well, do you think they’re any good?

I don’t know, you say. Well, no, not really. I mean I know they’re only drafts, but – I’m just not sure what to do with them next, or— Or what?

Or if they might be good enough to, I don’t know, to send somewhere. Or something.

Look, he says, I’ll be honest with you. Your stories are. What would the word be. Your stories are facile. They’re just too facile. There’s nothing there – is there?

I – don’t know, you say.

Well then, there you go, he says. If you knew, you’d know.

Ok, you say.

For the first time all meal, there is a silence. It is horrible. You can feel him watching you, watching as you try not to cry, watching as you try and fail not to cry.

When the waitress comes back with the dessert menu she looks at you, looks from you to him.

Just the bill, he says.

He lets you split it, seems happy to, in fact. You are shaking now, and can’t seem to stop the tears from spilling endlessly down your face. Your mum has paid for this, you keep on thinking. You feel so stupid, so wretchedly stupid. Oh, come on now, he finally says. You wouldn’t want me to tell you like it isn’t, would you? Don’t take it so personally.

When you finally get out of the restaurant, he suggests a drink back at the hotel bar. You manage to say no: you couldn’t bear for anyone, anyone else, to see you like this, but he says he’s walking back that way anyway, so what else can you do? You walk back together.

The hotel lobby is full of people, writers, workshop attendees, festival organisers, all streaming out of the closing-night session and into the bar. No one sees you, or everyone does, you can’t tell.

Look, you’re taking this too personally, he says again, and he offers to see you to your room.

Please, you say, meaning no, please no, please no, and you manage to turn and make it to the stairs and he doesn’t, he doesn’t follow.

In your washbag you have a little blister-strip of Valium, the generic sort, brought back by your flatmate’s boyfriend from his trip to India. The dosage depends on whether or not you’re used to it: you’re not. Would two tablets be enough? you think.

Enough for what?

Enough to just fall asleep, enough never to have to deal with any of this again, this suffocating shame.

Don’t be such a fucking idiot.

What, after all, has happened? Nothing. You try to imagine telling it as a story – writing it. You went for dinner with someone who didn’t think your writing was much good.

And, what?

He momentarily touched your hand? Nothing. Nothing has happened.

You can hear the revelry downstairs. It’s only, you think, just beginning. The nights here are legendary: the bar stays open until the last people have gone, which is sometimes when the first are coming down for breakfast. The writer will be there, the people from the workshop, the other writers, the other people from the other workshops. All of the organisers, the audience members, the volunteers. You could call your mum but of course you can’t call your mum. Breathe, you think, just breathe. The air in your room smells stale, though there are signs everywhere saying No Smoking! It’s in the fabric of the curtains, you think, and the carpet and the polyester quilt and the matching pelmet around the bed, and pelmet, what a ridiculous word. You open the window the two inches that it opens and the cool green air rushes in. If your laptop weren’t so expensive you’d hurl it out of the window and into the river somewhere below. No you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. Somewhere below, on the river path, people are laughing. Did I tell you this story is true?

deirdre sullivan

Nausicaa by Deirdre Sullivan

The sea goes up & down in waves and spirals flat on the page of the sand like a drawing from far away & then up close the bumps & dents appear the paper’s crumpled & then roughly, obstinately, smoothed out by a hand that ends up wet & salty.

Stella looked like a silent-movie actress only noisy & coloured in. Her face was smooth & pale with cheeky freckles. Capable. She looked like she could milk a cow & when she was finished the cow would be in love. No way to test that theory on the strand. Were there beach-cows way back when? She’d seen donkeys on postcards. She supposed you could milk a donkey, I mean you could technically milk anything with milk ducts. Any mammal. An antelope. A woman. But who’d drink it?

Stella didn’t say these things out loud. Made a mint from baby-sitting. Spent it on cigarettes & hair product. Healthy black Labradors were jealous of the sheen of Stella’s hair. A patina of glow. She’d hair like the uniform sea from a child’s picture book. Up down & around it went. Up, down & around. Repeat as required.

Stella minded babies on the beach. 3 of them. Back in the day, before the triple buggy, you would have needed fewer babies or more babysitters. The oldest baby sat in the back of the buggy, the youngest in the front, a bodyguard. It was a girl, not that you could tell. Sabhdh dressed them gender-neutral. The baby in the middle’s name was Simon. He’d loads of sticky dirt in the webs of his fingers, which made him hard to look at. Simon was doomed to be the filling in Stella’s lucrative baby-sandwich. A ridiculous name for a baby. He’d probably grow up to be the kind of kid who thanked his teachers at the end of classes. Stella didn’t care. She’d never have to put up with Simon haltingly asking her to his debs with a visible snot hanging out of his nostril.

Blinking & unblinking out to sea. The kind of blue the sky so rarely is. Framed by long, long lashes. Mascara optional. Stella loved mascara. Loved woman’s things. Powder to matten, blush to define, liner to eXAGGERATe, balm to moisten, highlighter to brighten, shadow to colour, stick to paint and polish, tan to tan & scent to hide the reek of human girl that clung to skin. She rarely used concealer. Didn’t need it, skin like milk her granny said she had. Only bought it because it came in a gold tube & looked lovely in her big transparent make-up bag. Skin like milk’s a weird thing to say. Milk is globs of fat that swim in water. A suspension. Not a solution. Also, she usually had a bit of tan on & copper-coloured milk is not for drinking.

She didn’t need those things but oh she loved them. Her see through-bag hot pink. She’d unzip the top, part folds, dig in & have a go most every day. School or no school. Her phone kept buzzing on the sand beside her. A boy was texting. Boys were always texting Stella, her ringtone was basically a soundtrack. The sea made noise. The babies had shut up. The phone was buzzing. Stella sitting down. Her friends were texting about the boy, the boy was texting about himself. She wasn’t replying right away. She was weighing up her options. Having a think & a smoke. Her Mam used to tell her to give her thumbs a rest before she went away for a while & Stella moved in with Nanny for TY. Stella’s thumbs did not need a rest, but they took one anyway. She was thinking about the boy.

The phone whirred. Holding hands. The boy had lovely hands, long thick fingers hers felt small & slender when he grabbed them. Held them tight in his but not too tight he let her fingers breathe and it felt nice. Her friend had liked him first this boy but Stella had him now & did she want him. There were other boys but there was this one more. There was more of him than there was of other people. He took up space. He was a thing worth looking at, worth thinking of & staring out to sea. He said things slowly turned them over in his mouth before he let them touch her. She wanted to be more like that. To be careful with people.

Sometimes when she was alone she touched herself & imagined that he was watching. It wasn’t weird or anything. She’d read in Cosmo that you should do that. To prepare yourself for the real thing. So you know what to do & don’t look stupid. The youngest baby puked white milk on to her little stripy bib. The other one, the one who wasn’t Simon, screamed a little. Almost time to go. She looked around.

There was a boat that bobbed. There was a deckchair that was folded-up. There was a curlew standing on a bollard. There was a man who stared at her & wanked. That sort of thing happened to Stella a lot, in parks, on public transport. After a while, you have to see the funny side. Stella raised her phone toward him and she snapped. The babies were upset and they were crying. Stories. Close Friends. The Sandymount Fiddler.

susannah dickey

An Excerpt from ‘Oh! A Futuristic Crab!’ by

In anticipation of my becoming crab, I become crab, destroyer of words. I jettison language, embrace that what is only capable in carapace. Love, didn’t you know? The vocab of the future is forming as we speak, language’s pleons flattening, its sternites fused. This is the move, love, from climactic atrocity to broken phoneme. More sea, less C, you see. We will, may, hit, are hitting a point (picture a ship, sinking – picture J Ismay slinking off without culpability) of diminishing returns. Don’t dismay though, love – crabs don’t know dismay.

* Across from me in a restaurant a woman orders spaghetti with crab meat. It’s the conceptual equivalent of eating your obsolescent body with your latent metaphysical model of thought. Looks delicious, though.

* Now to the harbour, where life is finding life! Is finding light! Despite the porphyria bleaching the coral white, despite the ructions of the old man’s cough.

Susannah Dickey

I watched you hold the sun’s wizening glow on your shoulders and I touched the places most warmed. Skin pixels absorbed gold and cast it back to the air, a symbiosis of the small with the cosmos.

To have felt a prism in this way! To offer the sun to itself, renewed and seasoned – it felt like it mattered even if it didn’t. Oh, how blistering! To try and outlast experience with description, to hope that in bed

a year from this, that exact light will sing as much through skin as it did, and that I, fulsome and well-

handled, will dandle my toes from the mattress edge and be made less etiolated for being reminded.

That harbour moment, post-prandial, was the feeling of being sun-slicked on drifting continent,

of absolute love on colliding continent. Oh! It’s enough to make me want to survive one more year,

One more sun’s revolution.

*

And oh! To the end of the bed, now, where there’s a half-consumed can of Princes’

Salmon Paste! It was torn into three months after that first morning we spent together, when the primacy of the moment’s joy was working to obviate the mind’s capacity to think

of a hundred futures not wanted, where the world Might perish, where two people like you and me might not want each other, might not want. The tinned salmon was working too, to obviate

the sad reality: salmon, as we like to visualise it, no longer exists! First morning’s love and red orb

dyed fish bellies are but vague recollections at best, now, are now sublimated by recreations,

by the tinctured pink roe that gets sold in cans and is mistaken for true, deep, vermillion feeling.

Keep me from canning what we have now, love. No matter how difficult things are bound to become.

ALANNAH MCELLIGOTT RYAN is the thing with feathers.

ANDREW ROW is a History major from Philadelphia. He loves listening to Ethel Cain and scratching dire warnings into window panes with his key.

ARABELLA WARE is a writer from Dallas, Texas. She considers feelings of home and belonging, layering these into the Dublin landscape. Music, art, the pub - these are things she enjoys.

DANIEL EOIN SHANNON is from Templepatrick.

ELISE CARNEY FRAZIER is a soon-to-be graduate (gasp! knock on wood!) in English Literature and History. She loves reading and writing poems, and some of them have appeared in Icarus and Poetry Salzburg Review. In deep introspection and existential despair, she will spend her summer in Dublin waiting tables and awaiting (or making??!) a new vocation.

ELLA SLOANE is over the moon to have fulfilled her lifelong dream of being featured in Icarus. She has recently finished four gruelling years of English literature and is currently seeking employment. She wants you to know that she has many, many skills and experiences.

FINN CHATTEN is from Dublin. He writes to fill all those empty spaces- but in a fun, quirky way. Intermittent faster. Friend to the Hat Man.

FIONA CLAIRE MCSHANE is probably playing Dungeons & Dragons right now. Find her work on Instagram @agscriobh.

FRASER CATTINI is a poet and musician from Essex, England but believes you shouldn’t let this fact prevent you from reading his work. When not writing verse or music he likes to roam various coffee shops, art galleries and public houses pretending to be bohemian.

JULIET ARPAÇ would like you to put sun cream on your tattoos.

KIM O’LEARY has four ducks. They are named after the March sisters even though she can’t tell them apart.

LIAM KELLY is a Third Year English student -- in other words, a waft of vapid mist masquerading as a storm.

LOUISE NORRIS is counting down the days until her next Wowburger.

MAGGIE KELLY fell into art because she likes to avoid work, but then she got kinda good at it. She’s a 2nd year psych student, who has really good mental health (evident through her upbeat work). She goes through a crisis every few months, but the paintings make it all worth it.

ROSA THOMAS is a writer and theatre maker based in Dublin. A graduate of The Gaiety School of Acting, She is currently completing a Dual B.A. in philosophy from Trinity College and Columbia University. Her poems have been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize and Hotpress National Poetry Competition. Her debut play ‘Prawn Cocktail’, premiered at Scene and Heard Festival 2023. She likes napping to the sound of rain and bugs that hide under logs.

SOPHIE BRENNAN is a tree.

THOMAS PHALEN is an Irish-American dual national and a retired lawyer. He is a doddering, geriatric student in the M.Phil Creative Writing Program at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin, who takes great pride in being older than all his classmates and all but one of the faculty. No mean accomplishment. It is not so much that he is able to write well, but that he is able to write at all, that is astounding. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and in Dublin, Ireland.

VANESSA ACKERMAN is an actor, writer and drama teacher based in Cambridge UK. She writes poems and plays, usually early in the morning or on train journeys.

VIOLET FLANAGAN is a writer living in Dublin and hoping to stay there forever.

E D I T O R S

CHARLOTTE MOORE is the Earl of Pesto Eggs and the Duke of Doc Marten. She loves people who love crisps. She posts her poems on instagram @ccam_poems.

ELOISE RODGER lives in your pile of laundry and is actively timing how long you brush your teeth for. She's gone under-cover and is investigating you. Do not be afraid. Follow her findings on @eloiseiswriting.

F E A T U R E D W R I T E R S

LUCY CALDWELL is Elizabeth Bennet from Pride & Prejudice, according to Buzzfeed’s Which Random Fictional Character Are You Most Like. The Beano says she’s Trevor from Ghostbusters Afterlife: You sometimes feel a bit lost in life, but that doesn’t get you down! You’re always ready for an adventure, and you’d do anything for your family! LitHub says she’s overwhelmingly Céline from Before Sunrise. She probably thinks of herself as a mix of Masha from Three Sisters and the eponymous Just William.

DEIRDRE SULLIVAN has written a different number of books in every bio. Reality is shifting around her all the time and she doesn't like it.

SUSANNAH DICKEY uses writing to fund her lifelong dream of catching and destroying the world’s longest worm-on-a-string.

F E A T U R E D A R T I S T

JESS SHARKEY is an art historian and freelance illustrator, who is running out of black ink and must remember to get some more. In warmer weather, the ink kind of congeals if it's left in the sunlight too long and especially if the lid isn't on right. If you want to see more of her artwork, check out her instagram @jessyphus.

She created this issue’s cover page, the editors’ portraits and the illustrations. throughout.

A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

theoretically, if we had to thank someone, we might consider the artists, who brought this issue to life. potentially trinity publications, definitely ourselves (legends). and possibly even you too, dear reader.

this is our final edition as co-editors. it's been really fun, we'll totally call you. no, we will! for sure.

Icarus is a fully participating member of the Press Council of Ireland. Serious complaints should be made to: The Editors, Icarus, Trinity Publications, Mandela House, Dublin 2. Appeals may be directed to the Press Council of Ireland. Information concerning copyright and permissions can be found at www.icarusmagazine.com

grow up, down, roundabout. just promise to never forget.

ta ra, old chaps.