Art O’Connor

Short Fiction

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Helen Mulgrew and the Hollow Tree won the Grand Prize in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, judged by Michael Nath.

What / a fine thing! What unannoying / romance!

Marianne Moore

You’d know she was a native.

She seems to correspond intimately with the surrounding landscape: the snatches of wool on barbed wire; the hoofprints full of water; the crooked, hillside hawthorns—all seem somehow to acknowledge her presence, to reflect her possible action upon them. All seem somehow to have assimilated the essential tenor of her misery—so that the gloom, she feels, is not incorporate.

It has a life outside her body.

She sits in the mouth of a hollow tree, gazing out at the fields and drumlins, and puthers away at a cigarette, disobliging the resident songbirds. From the various sorts and conditions of wildflower that touch her where she is seated, she plucks a random daisy.

“No doubt you are gifted, my dear daisy, but can any poet be called truly great, in this day and age, who has not made use of Instagram?”

With a sad little shake of her head, she brings the daisy right up against the smouldering bulb of her cigarette and watches the petals crinkle from white to green. 

“Die, you little fucker,” she says.

Her name is Helen Mulgrew. She’s 20. She’s home from university for the weekend and has just discovered that her boyfriend, Aaron, has been cheating on her.

The prick.

And with Ciara Culkin

of all god’s hoes.

Helen is not, by nature, a jealous person, but she can’t stop picturing them together.

Ugh 

swine 

muck

-savages

may they

die

roaring

She considers hanging herself from any of several sturdy-looking boughs in the vicinity but opts instead to investigate more circuitous forms of self-destruction. She swigs from a naggin and channels Oscar Wilde.

“Well, Helen,” she says, in the dandified, Anglo-Irish accent she always adopts for internal debate, “had you rilly to be so nosty to that dahling daisy?”

This is Helen’s fatal flaw: self-mockery.

She can’t help acting the clown.

Even alone on the hillside, in the silence of a hollow tree, she can’t allow herself earnestly to sit with her heartache. To look it in the eye. There is always this blather, this minstrelsy—always this attempt to ingratiate herself to an invisible audience. She employs countless voices, characters, theatrical gimmicks, and in the confusion of this pageantry, her own personality winks out like a love-letter in a house-fire.

She is aware of this compulsion in herself—to trivialize her own feelings, to dissociate from pain—but she consoles herself that there are numerous examples in literature of radical self-alienation as a necessary precondition of self-becoming.

“Daphne, Syrinx, Spiderman…”

She consults her phone for the hundred-and-fortieth time. It is now almost 3 p.m., and she has still not heard from her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend. This seems to violate some natural law of cause and effect. Shouldn’t the prick be grovelling by now? Pleas, apologies, protestations. Surely that’s the logical sequel to infidelity? His last message, shortly before midnight, warned that his phone would die. It ended, as all his messages ended lately, not only with a breathless declaration of love but with a durative adverb—always!

When had he become so hyperbolic? So manifestly insincere?

Presumably around the same time he had started fucking Ciara Culkin.

But how had she not noticed this? Or rather—because she had noticed it—why had she not wondered what this tendency functioned to betray?

Presumably because she could not then imagine him fucking Ciara fucking Culkin.

Helen is pretty sure she bears no deep-seated malice towards Ciara the illiterate inchworm Culkin but she’s also aware that Ciara the chinless inbred lizard Culkin is now unavoidably implicated, in various complex rational and sub-rational ways, in Helen’s self-determination, such as it is, so that she might, were they to bump into each other, feel compelled to break a jar on her head, or riddle her with staples, or piss in her hat—but would in all likelihood do nothing of the sort, both because Culkin is much stronger than she, and because her contempt for these swine—(hock-puh!) – for Aaron and Culkin and their ilk—is sufficient to inaugurate a sort of cavernous apathy, a bonelessness – a misery so physically neutralizing it is functionally indistinguishable from full-on, levitating Buddhahood.

The only sensible course of action, she concludes, is to continue sitting under this tree.

But sitting under this tree

she has to admit

(and all 

credit

to

Siddhartha)

is get

-ting

a wee bit

fuck

-ing

bor

-ing.

She sighs and rises slowly to her feet. She casts about the clearing for – something, anything – but puts a flat tyre in everything she lays eyes on.

In despair, she texts her best friend, Sophie Adeyemi

Soph, I’m fucked, come and rescue me

and Sophie, within seconds, responds

omg hon he’s such a fucking loser. and with ciara culkin of all god’s hoes. do you want me to come over?

to which Helen

lol omg you knew? thanks for telling me! yes please. i’m not home though – at the trysting tree, quaffing the verdure

whereupon Sophie

everyone knows. was going to tell you later. which pub are you closest to?

in consequence of which Helen

in my current mood i am equidistant from every pub in the country

in clarification of which Sophie

you don’t want to go to the pub?

in confirmation of which Helen

of course not

resolving all difficulties, Sophie

ok, I’ll come and find you 20-30. pick me a flower.

Helen lights another cigarette and gazes across the fields. These sounds

the distant snoring of a tractor

the prattling syllables of water on stone

the half-asthmatic creaking of the beech trees

come to her faintly, without distinction, like voices in a procession, barely touching her yet somehow refining her solitude, so that she seems in her seclusion to occupy a substance more fragile than silence, more problematic to disturb.

A dreadful imminence hangs over everything. And the overcast sky—so uniformly grey and unaccented as to linger on the verge of unreality—accentuates this sense of—

“Ah, fuck it anyway,” says Helen, in a characteristic emotional reversal.

change of plan, soph. meet you at GSCW in half an hour or so xoxo

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GSCW stands for The Grey Sunken Cunt of the World, but the pub in question is officially licenced to sell alcohol under the name SHEEHAN’S. It is a simple rectangular wooden affair—four walls and a ceiling—broken up into a hierarchy of drinking chambers: snug, booth, and barstool – and rudimentary toilet facilities. To Helen, it’s just another hollow tree. But to Sophie Adeyemi, there’s something disconcerting about the interior.

Maybe because of the bagpipes nailed to the wall, Sophie associates Sheehan’s with the uncanniness of Irish pubs on the continent. Pubs whose décor—at best: Pan-Celtic; at worst: Recklessly Eclectic—tended to implicate the country, and not for the first time in its bitter history, in a lazy and imprecise metonymy.

Helen, ever the controversialist, had rechristened Sheehan’s The Grey Sunken Cunt of the World last year after taking a class on Ulysses, in which the phrase occurs. Helen was very taken with Ulysses. She felt at the time that Ithaca, the penultimate episode—and specifically the response to the question “What in water did Bloom, water lover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?”—was the most masterful thing she had ever read.

Although she had also to admit that she arrived at this verdict without knowing what half of the words in it—rhabdomantic, homothetic, luteofulvous, etc.—meant.

There are three auld fellas sitting at the bar when the girls enter, swimming sullen looks across the surfaces of their pints.

“Well, men,” says Helen gruffly, readjusting her imaginary ball-sack, “how’s she cuttin’?”

Sophie buries her face in Helen’s shoulder, in kinks of laughter, and whispers, “Stop, you eejit. You’ll get us thrown out.”

The drinkers at the bar regard the girls with mild bewilderment, as though they might be a hallucination. One of the men raises his hand, as if to greet them, then lets it drop halfway, in confusion, without saying anything.

The girls slide into the snug and unwind their scarves. 

“What’s the occasion?” says Pat, who put the -tender in bar-, looking pointedly at the clock on the wall. “Ye’re early at it.”

“Just dumped a body in the river,” says Helen with sharp eyes. “Fucker might turn up in a trawler in Killybegs next week, but we’ll be long gone by then.”

Pat laughs.

“You’re gas women.”

“Two pints of Guinness and a packet of cheese-and-onion, please, Pat. We’re on the lash.”

“Right ye be.”

Helen stretches herself out in the snug and begins—in a transparent attempt to deflect whatever personal question Sophie is about to ask her—to declaim.

“The problem with intellectual kids in the Northwest of Ireland is that they go off to uni in Dublin or wherever, learn about Parmenides or whatever, start wearing vintage coats and whimsical tartan scarves” (she gestures to herself in exasperation) “or whatever—and then just feel totally fraudulent whenever they come home. Which leads to all this posturing and pantomime. You have all these supposedly Bright Young Things—away at Trinity or UCD or wherever—but whenever they meet some salt of the god-honest sod former classmate, some classmate who has stayed at home to work on the farm—”

“The farm, is it?” Sophie laughs, rolling her eyes.

“You know what I mean! Whenever they meet one of The Ones Who Stayed, they end up mumbling monosyllabically—“Ah, grand sure”, “You know yourself”, “Sure this is it”, “Ach, I suppose it would alright”—as though their brains have stopped metabolizing oxygen—”

“Jesus, Hen—”

“Or worse! No, listen—or worse—and I’ve witnessed this myself—they end up reaching into an ancestral vocabulary—exaggerating the rusticity of their diction, if you don’t mind—producing totally implausible phrases like Bless us and save us—in a hilarious imitation of naturalness—phrases they never used in their lives UNTIL they moved to Dublin. It’s almost oirish the way they go on.And it’s all motivated by guilt, probably—like everything else on this island—reflexive guilt over class or education or having notions or whatever—over knowing what the words rhabdomantic and luteofulvous mean—”

 “Luteofulvous,” Sophie inserts mock-pedantically; “pertaining to the use of Vaseline in a conjugal setting.”

“—but not knowing how to say, in Irish, “two pints and packet of crisps, please”.”

“Dhá pints agus an pacéid von Tayto, le do thoil,” Sophie proffers. “Ar nós na muice! Ar muin na gaoithe!”

Helen laughs and shakes her head, concluding.

“But it’s mad like because no one ever talks about it. All this Paddy Irishman shite. It’s literally rife.”

Sophie shrugs her shoulders and makes a non-committal face—chiefly a tenting of eyebrows—before fixing Helen with a more penetrating look.

“To begin with, you’re one to be talking about other people putting on voices…”

Helen nods submissively, as if to say Ach I have an enormous capacity for self-contradiction alright.

“For another, contemporary Irish identity is largely a product of immigrant nostalgia—”

“Ah now, hold on—”

“—which is to say nostalgia for something that never existed, or never existed with the existence ascribed to it by its eulogists. You have all of these diverse and seemingly incompatible strains of hibernicana mulched into recognisable congruence under the amalgamating impress of our nostalgia—”

“I will arise and go now / And up the fuckin’ Ra,” Helen supplies in a quavering voice.

“—until the only thing separating Irishness from Oirishness is a transparent sheet called self-awareness.”

The girls’ shite-talk continues in this vein—callow, facetious, pretentious, declamatory, ironic, full of liquids and lengths, and love (but so much love)—for several pints. Regarding Helen’s discovery of Aaron’s infidelity, Sophie garners only the bare facts (and these with difficulty):

– That Helen guessed his Instagram password at the first attempt (hilariously: AudiSportQuattroS1).

– That Aaron had been disseminating dick-pics to every marriageable woman in the hinterland.

– That Aisling Cleary (hon the Clearys!) had responded to his dick-pic, I’ve seen bigger men on a wedding cake.

– That Ciara the venereal even-toed ungulate Culkin had been more than happy to reciprocate.

After three or four pints, Helen is in flying form. But as the pub fills up, her morale begins to plummet. The few schlupps of the naggin earlier are catching up with her. She’s steamed—the gentle, cascading sensation behind her eyeballs reaffirms this fact at every moment—and her habitual inhibitions are thus temporarily annulled. She feels the standardized constraints of her conscience, saying, No, no, don’t you dare! gradually being replaced by the insistent divilment of her more primal impulses, saying, Yes, yes, hon t’fuck!

She’s thinking: a wee bit of carnage wouldn’t do me any harm.

Leaving Sophie in the snug, she heads out back to the smoking area and bums a light off an auld fella in a tweed cap.

“Do you never get sick of looking at ugly people in GAA jerseys?” she asks him. “Tidelines of fake tan? The same old shite-talk week after week? The glumness and the fuckin’ begrudgery and the grey nameless longing coming in off the Atlantic every morning, noon and night like a pestilential fog?”

“Is that young Mulgrew?” says the auld fella, laughing. “You’re in tight shape, hi.”

“That’s young Mulgrew, alright,” Helen parrots him. “The first Mulgrew ever set foot on the moon.”

“Cheer up, t’fuck, Mulgrew,” says the auld fella, laughing even harder, and patting her on the back. “It might never happen.”

“Lookat, fair play to you,” says Helen wearily, depositing the butt of her cigarette in a potted plant, “but let’s try to expand our conversational horizons next time. Big Bill Broonzy, the Asrar al-Tawhid, Inter-universal Teichmüller theory, Finn Harps’ chances of promotion, whether Genesis 1:26 justifies the belief that God has a sensible form—the world’s our oyster. Good man yourself. I’ll see you later. Up the Ra.”

Just as Helen’s about to re-enter the pub, she freezes.

“What do my elf eyes see?” she murmurs, squinting across the smoking area.

It’s her alright.

And isn’t she only gorgeous?

From the ragtag gathering of townies, boggers, and beanie-headed rural hipsters milling around the smoking area, she stands apart as though 

i t a l i c i z e d

with the big blonde head on her glowing under the fairy-lights like a Maybelline halo or a tizzy of midges or an aerosol love potion or a bioluminescent moss

—and every fucker in the place squinting like Eugène Delacroix to appraise the monogamy-mocking contours of her jeans on the transverse, sagittal and coronal planes.

“By the reeds of St Bridget,” says Helen, crossing herself and taking a comical oirish brogue to the tip of her tongue. “If it isn’t Culkin the Cucker, me sworn & mortal enemy.”

Giddy with fear, Helen performs a swift mental comparison between she and her adversary:

TALE OF THE TAPE

Taking a glass ashtray in her right hand, Helen starts across the smoking area with murder in her stride. Her inner Oscar twits her as she goes.

“Now, Helen, steady on. We must afford Miss Culkin every consideration. She is after all a human being and in that respect represents on the part of Nature a unique and perhaps even an audacious experiment…”

Culkin sits alone at a picnic table, back turned, smoking a rasper. She stares fixedly at her cocktail, as though contemplating its chemistry.

Just as Helen is about to bring the ashtray down on the back of Culkin’s head, she stops dead. Her whole body quivers in an immobilised surge. Her hatred of cowardice inclines her to attack. Her hatred of violence inclines her to retreat. Her propensity for mimicry inclines her to consider the possible conduct of various of her heroes under comparable circumstances.

According to their capacity to gratify her bloodlust, the following options appear before her mind’s eye in descending order: kill > maim > forgive.

According to the likelihood of their providing moral nutriment, the following options appear before her mind’s eye in ascending order: kill < maim < forgive.

When no clear solution presents itself, she taps Culkin on the shoulder.

“Sweet mother of fuck,” says Culkin, turning around.

She’s not pleased to see Helen. These subtle indications:

– The scrannel friction of her bangles 

which she fiddles with unconsciously.

– The precarious neutrality of her mouth

which bristles, like a gun in the shade of a sycamore tree, with suppressed hostility.

– The arresting purity of her contempt

shining like a sequin in the corner of her eye (in that dark and quiet corner where all the knives are drawered).

Having initially intended to follow the Inigo Montoya template—MY NAME IS HELEN MULGREW. YOU FUCKED MY BOYFRIEND. PREPARE TO DIE—Helen is surprised to find herself, in accordance with some recondite sequence of associations and internal references, saying instead:

“Did you know he went to primary school in Dunfanaghy for a year and was bullied so badly that his parents decided to move down here? It was when his Mum discovered that the other kids were calling him Cardboard—”

“Cardboard?”

“Yes, Cardboard—that was his nickname—due to a lack of psychological attributes, a general dullness in speech and manner. I suspect that his current persona—the manically up-for-it lad-about-town—was cultivated in response to this trauma. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this but I think I should probably confess before I say anything else that I came over here with half a notion of staving your head in with an ashtray—”

She brandishes the ashtray meekly.

“Jesus fuck,” says Culkin, scooching further down the picnic bench.

“—because I was thinking of Bourget: love would not be love unless it could carry one to crime. But here’s what I’m realizing: I don’t think I really love Aaron. The reason I’ve been so upset all day is that he was like the family dog to me—his primary characteristic, or so I was pleased anyway to delude myself, was his loyalty.”

Culkin’s face reddens, not out of embarrassment, but in clarification of some essential stubbornness. Scorn and boredom colonise her eyeballs. She doesn’t respond, but nor does she look away.

“And I’m pissed off, too,” Helen continues, “because I was genuinely really good to him. Like, I made a conscientious effort to demonstrate my affection creatively and energetically. I didn’t just beam it at him silently from my pineal gland, you know? I actually tried to make him feel valued, to make his life better. And so it would have been nice to feel that those efforts were reciprocated.”

“Jesus, Hen,” says Sophie, appearing suddenly at her shoulder. “That’s beautiful. I’d nearly ride you right now.”

“Ha! You tramp. I didn’t see you there.”

As this banter is transacted, Culkin’s friends come funnelling back into the smoking area. The night is flushed with voltage, complication. There’s a bit of sizing up, a bit of staring down.

“!!!!!!!,” says one of the Culkin contingent, or words to that effect.

“!!!!!,” says another, more succinctly.

“You’d wanna wind your neck in, doll” says a third, unparaphrasably.

The night wears on. The night wears thin. The moon swims in and out of ken among the rainclouds.

Helen feels suddenly very tired. She’s thinking: what prospect of what phenomena inclines me to remain?

Emboldened by the return of her cohort, Culkin exhibits a mean streak.

“Maybe if you weren’t so up your own hole, he wouldn’t’ve cheated on you.”

Helen doesn’t know what to say to this. Her habitual smart-arsery deserts her. A dense, black-staring anger forms the new centre of her personality.

She’s thinking: the obligations of civility have been traduced.

She’s thinking: death before dishonour.

She exchanges a quick, covert look with Sophie—full of silent reciprocities—and hefts the ashtray in her hand. That an artefact as commonplace as an ashtray can have such an immensely pleasing aesthetic aspect comes as no surprise to Helen; but that it might also be capable, because it is so humble, of moral instruction, is nothing short of a revelation.

With a heroic disregard of consequences, Helen flattens her palm and—

CHAOS ensues.

Glass is shattered, blood is shed, scalps are depilated by the frantic fistful.

Banter, it has sadly to be admitted, at least among the combatants, is thin on the ground.

The whole pub gathers to watch, and as the conflict trembles towards its climax, one breathless spectator is heard to cry out, to cry out with a bright chink of wilderness in her voice, to cry out because she knows that life is short, and death is long, and that these moments of genuine rupture are far too seldom to be met with—

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, A PINT! SOMEONE GET ME A FUCKING PINT!”

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An hour later, Helen stands before the trysting tree, a little bruised and battered, enacting her catharsis.

Her hair is long and stormy. Her posture is appalling. She has about her an air of cloisters, of romantic melancholy, of something faintly but identifiably bardolatrous. Her starblue vintage greatcoat, incongruous in this rural setting, functions as a terse autobiographical disclosure—a sort of leper’s bell proclaiming her exotic singularity. She sighs and rues and winces. She maunders on disconsolately. She carves in the trunk with a ballpoint rock a large, indented love-heart, and confides to its core, in a clean, mechanical hand, running dexter to sinister, the versified epitaph: 

“Legend,” says Sophie, who is standing beside her, admiring the inscription.

And again, with a vast and mysterious satisfaction. “Legend.”

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Art O’Connor is an Irish writer currently living in Greece.

Photo Credit: Briana Gervat received her B.A. in Art History at The University of Mary Washington in 2002. In 2014, she earned an M.A. in Art History at the Savannah College of Art and Design. After completing graduate school, she travelled to Rwanda to continue her studies on the Rwandan Genocide and the art of East Africa. She now lives in New York, where she practices photography and writing. Her prose, poetry, and photography have been published in anthologies, magazines, and online publications and her self-published works, two travel memoirs: Mosaic and I Once Was a Pilgrim, can both be found on Amazon.