Cosmo Hinsman
Short Fiction
Achilles Grieves was named a finalist in the 2025 Clarissa Dalloway Prize for Short Prose, judged by Diane Josefowicz
I am on a rocky beach looking uphill at the tower, at ocean-gray stones mortared into a powerful cylinder with no exit but the gunports. Behind me, ancient bodies float in a small, churning bay enclosed by jagged stones. On land, they speak in a foreign but not incomprehensible language, saying, “What’s the crack?” and lilting always with the half-humble poetry of their people—he made that, the man in the tower. Or, he made what I could recognize within it. I imagine him frail and blind, James, JJ, the prick with the stick. I hide behind a rock naked from the waist down as I slip into my trunks, and wind touches my ass nearly covered by a wool sweater. Small heads appear at the tower’s crown, looking down at the floating bodies. The small bay is walled by seaweed slime hanging from rocks to where knife-sharp barnacles emerge and submerge, where the leathered backs of old men flex with their breaststroke. The heads look down at me. I am Achilles, come to this foreign beach to take what is in that tower, and its associated glory.
When I was in High School, two older boys drowned in the ocean. They were on an overnight field trip and snuck out of their hotel to walk on the beach. The riptides in Oregon are quick and invisible, blacknothing rising from blacknothing like the course of time rising from history—this was how I imagined their death, not tragic but somehow profound. I feel that same hot jealousy following Irishmen who walk unflinching into the water, accustomed to the cold in a way that seems inhuman.
Cora’s white leg reddens up to her bathing suit when from the bottom of concrete steps she dips a toe. Cora looks back at me and I smile. She’s my oldest friend, and I am not a strong swimmer. She jumps and the water opens, collapsing over her body and spraying cold foam on my feet. She gasps and looks back at me again, now swimming. My body doesn’t want to jump. Even in summer, Ireland is an ugly place. The water is deep in the middle where smooth rock walls descend into darkness, but she is looking, and I think about those dead boys and focus on that deep place and flex and run my fingertips over the muscles in my front. I have never been so strong. I am perfect, a perfect body jumping bravely into the water and then I am rasping, drawing huge breaths and floating and turning to look back at the tower, which is small but close. Soon after my mother got sick, she said, “I hope I go to Ireland again. Of all our heritage, I am most proud of being Irish. I know you’ll go, Cosmo. It’s the most splendid place in the world.” I didn’t care or didn’t trust her, but long after she stopped remembering places like that, when I was in college, I read Ulysses, a book about an angry, intelligent young man who lives in a tower on the Irish coast and swims in the freezing water there, and all the poetry of his people bursts from him like he is at once creating and destroying it. James Joyce was a singer before he was a writer. I float on my back watching my breath spray around me, feeling the air and water, that fluid separation of densities, and remember the feeling that he stole something, this Irish boy at the court of all literature. He took that most beautiful bride—The Odyssey—and kept her in this remote tower. Precious arrogance!
Cora and I had taken a train to Blackrock and walked through Sallynoggin and Bullock, where the man in the tower asked, “And how well do you lovelies know Joyce?” Even here, it felt embarrassing to know anyone. There were tin plate portraits and quilled letters in the tower’s chamber, and all I could think about was a date—Joyce sitting on the beach, 16th of June 1904. He set his novel on that day, the date of his first soiree with his lover, Nora Barnacle, who gave him a handjob as they looked out at the sea. How literary he must have felt, thinking of Odysseus even then! Cora and I climbed a spiral staircase to the lookout where cleansing wind came from all directions and we could see straight down to the bay where old men swim, where I imagined dangerous barnacles pointing out with slit-mouths like the penis head pointing to the ocean. And I decided there what I thought of my mother, who spent her last healthy years telling me many stories, or the same story many times, of basalt cliffs and thistled fields overlooking what tiny fishing vessels bob in the water—I decided now that I was looking at those ugly volcanic rocks, it’s Oregon! Except for the accents, it’s no different from our real home, that place that killed the boys.
In the water, even while so cold, my limbs tuck and stretch squid-like. Joyce lived in that tower for six days. The landlord shot a rifle above his head—he hadn’t paid any rent. The singer left and retold that story in his novel, but with the landlord as a woeful lunatic whose nightmares caused him to shoot that bullet. I am only just learning to lie. I am only now learning what art is. Cora calls “How’s the water?” from across the rippling surface and I say, “Splendid my darling,” in my worst Irish, pulling my feet to a crouch, holding cold toes in my hands while I breathe out and roll over, pointing down, and cold squeezes my head like a warrior pushes thumbs into a fallen man’s eyes. And I swim down, deep as I can into the bay’s middle, down where the waves’ pulse is a gentle, spaceless inertia. I used to think that history was a punching bag, something that only the strongest or sharpest tools could mark. I’m realizing that history is a stalagmite in a huge, empty cave. Its tip is the present. The drops of water are people running down and leaving their mineral trace, before falling into the black emptiness of the future. It is a reaching, pointing thing. Maybe it will meet something. And I’m at the surface gasping again, struggling for that ladder. I imagine the great men of history as extra large droplets, rich with pale minerals.
As soon as I knew that my mother was dying, I wanted to be a writer. Maybe I knew, even back then, that I was dying too. It’s why I prefer Achilles to Odysseus: there’s nothing for me in the tower, in a home, but it’s in those paths between here and there, twisting as ancient Irish roads do from the sea to hilltop where there is glory. I will die from the same disease that killed my mother; a neurologist told me that, a prophesier. I had a literature professor who said, “There are two types of stories: stick stories and bag stories. Stick stories are about fighting or conquering, and bag stories are about saying, ‘Look at what I found.’” What she meant was, there are boy stories and girl stories—incorrect! All stories are for boys because all stories, in the end, are about killing. The true difference, I think, is between killing reluctantly and killing joyously—between old Odysseus on his desperate journey, and young beautiful Achilles hearing the battle rage outside his tent. Some people are born old men. My right hand braces against rock and a wave breaks against my head. I imagine a utopia where a man could go to war whenever he likes, a non-stop killing zone where any man could die with honor, violence, and emotion. It would’ve been quite like that bay: bodies bouncing off each other in a cold fluid exertion. Joyce got syphilis from a prostitute. That’s another thing he stole: the fate, the esoteric mania of diseased children. I can’t decide whether the hate I feel is pleasurable or painful.
Even from behind clouds, the sun warms me. Rock presses in my wet heels as I approach where Cora sits near the old men, patting a towel on her chest. I motion to her, scooping up. She throws her towel to the side and picks up a pair of black pants, knowing just what I meant, and points to a phone and I put my hands behind my back. I love her. I flex my chest and look down regally at the camera. I remember a painting I once saw of Stephen Daedalus swimming. I’d like to fight him. I wonder if Paris ever swam for fun. There’s a line of men waiting to jump in from the concrete stair, all fat with shoulders wide as oxen’s, nothing like that American equation, thin is in. They are the strongest men I’ve ever seen, like Brendan Gleeson’s Meneleus. One is looking back and I see how thick his lips are, and how his expression is neither happy nor unhappy. I wonder if that’s the most American thing about me, that I’m smiling. He falls to the water and his wide, pink palms break the surface. Then he is a collection of shapes, a heel, an elbow, and a head. I have never been comfortable in water. Outside the bay, crashing waves’ spray rises in clouds. The crash is unusually quiet, just a box fan’s sssss as the cloud falls and white rivulets combine and drain from the stones. I am tracing letters on my chest, on that dip below my breast, the valley of the sternum. When I trace a nail from my clavicle over my pec and into that dip, it tingles, like I can feel all my skin, all temperatures at once: the cold wind on my neck, the skin warmth between my thighs, even the damp air touching my organs on a deep breath, they all outline, in my mind, the stunning, muscly thing under my head. One of the men catches my eye and says, “Where are you from, lad?”
I say, “New York.”
He tells me that he took his wife to the city for their anniversary, then describes Times Square. Every Irish person has been to Times Square. Along his forehead, a fringe of white hair traces his large temples and follows the curve of wide ears. He lists his favorite American towns: Yonkers, Cape Cod, Key West, the Coves at Smith Mountain. I list where I’ve been in Europe—Bordeaux, Etna—and I almost tell him he should visit Oregon, then catch myself thinking he should not go there, that place is too similar to this one. His eyes are pointed right at mine and we are like two mirrors. How could Joyce make art out of people like this? I remember how: he lies and seduces, taking what little treasure these brutes, these Meneleus’s, have. I smile imagining the world as an economy of cuckolding, and wonder what this big man has taken from me.
“Visit Oregon,” I say. “It’s the most splendid place in the world.”
Then I nod over to Cora, like she’s expecting me, and leave.
Cora is nothing like my mom. When Cora sees me silently watching the tower with, I’m sure, many emotions changing my face, she doesn’t ask what I’m thinking. When my mother dies, I won’t feel anything. I wonder if Achilles grieved his mother, the deathless Goddess, maybe when he first learned that she would never die, or when he learned that other mothers would. The Greeks knew that death was not a matter of living or not living but of distance. When Achilles says, “Mother, you birthed me for so short a life,” he isn’t grieving himself—a hero’s death is nothing—but lamenting the dissonance between life-as-memory and life-as-flesh, as one craves a plum while looking at a still life. There are so many joys in prophecy. All the men are in the water. The wind is making whitecaps beside their shoulders. I am twenty-five years old, and Cora and I met seven years ago. How many more sevens will there be?
“You look worried,” Cora says.
I tell her it’s nothing, but I’m a bit cold. On the road that spirals down the hill to the small houses of Sallynoggin, where a scattering of blue pushes east behind the point of a distant church, we walk side by side looking over the water. There’s a layer of wet under my sweater dripping in my armpits. It’s cool and hot scratching, and I swing my arms to feel how it itches. Cora’s shoes squeak. For the first time, my head feels empty and I wonder what Cora is thinking. Her neck strains. We turn onto the through road and Cora points to the wall of a dilapidated house—dilapidated yet beautiful in that way that can happen in Europe but not in America—and I nod. She points again, but I don’t see it.
“That’s a house,” I say.
She stops and points with her whole hand, so I stop. On the corner of the facade is a bit of red graffiti that spells “DISMO” in curly letters.
“Dismo,” I say.
We are standing and looking at Dismo. A raindrop touches my cheek and the hiss of the ocean sounds from each end of the street. I ask Cora what it means. She says that Dismo is the evil Cosmo who has come here first. I laugh. He’s marked his territory. I crouch under Dismo and she takes a picture.
Cosmo Hinsman is a writer from Oregon. He is a recent graduate of the MFA at the University of Florida, and he is currently querying his novel about counter-culture in pandemic-era New York.
Photo Credit: Mike Callaghan’s work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout North America and Europe, including at among others, Griffin Museum of Photography, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Reece Museum, Soho Photo Gallery, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Gallery 44, Center for Photographic Art, Propeller Gallery, John B. Aird Gallery, Elysium Gallery and PhotoIreland. Mike Callaghan earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
L'Esprit Literary Review 