Jennifer McMahon

Fiction

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Aloud, reading Langston Hughes on Patrick’s Street, needing to be dug – black dog pretty girl afro styled mother’s shrieking yell. I have a street to walk, shelter down back ways I can’t tell if this is living or loving or hell. Making love with you last night still in my mind swooning laughing falling down, oh it was so funny after, then you went home and I was gabbling garish naked, no masking insulation. Hum a tune loves me not, I thought this might be the start of something good and painful. 

How can you tell it’s love if it doesn’t hurt? 

I text it to you with a quote, smiley face comes back, you dig. If you come over later I’ll peel myself for you, expose my fleshy bruised insecurities, show you what’s in my bank account, never enough but Ginsberg said nothing is sacred. Sarcasm abounds, he was no capitalist and this is my penniless excuse; there are no lessons I won’t learn, no mistakes I won’t make, no promises I won’t break. Am I joking? I text you again:

I think I’m going mad. Obsession. I babble endlessly.

A swift reply:

It’s the change in the weather. Drives everyone nuts.

See u later?

See u later.

Great. 

~

I’m intellectually impoverished, my mother’s fault, an incontinence of excuses for it otherwise. Beatnik days are here again, these troubled times their resurrected words mean what they meant before, a man can be a prophet only once but his prophecy can be biblically retold. Different beats tonight, stereo on you lay me down and skelter me to climax. I want to text your pretty face a kiss, smash it in to make it stick, you plaster my insecurities mind still not still never ends. Ego breaking boundaries, you nibble my ear. Slush fuss of breath against my cheek. 

‘That was nice,’ you hush, single digit eyes meaning amplified.

See you as you are, all human, once a little boy you’ve hardly grown but your body has and mine too. We were little and wanting to be big but the inside grows slower than the outside and we are brittle broken rifting on a beam of light. We are God’s broken children or someone’s, anyone who’d claim us, celestial orphans with no adoptive hope. My feet need a hug. My time is dear.   

Very,’ I say, kiss cuddle you, jittering wait the coming of going, rejection is a bitch on steroids. When it comes disjoined I will be fade away melting sunsets wanting. ‘Stay tonight,’ I throw it out.

‘I have an early lecture.’

‘My place is closer to the college.’

‘So it is,’ you say. ‘But I need my books.’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘Goethe said—’

‘Goethe now, is it?’

You plug me with a kiss. ‘He said a useless life is like an early death.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I have to go, or I’ll die. You don’t want my death on your conscience, do you?’

‘What’s a conscience?’ 

‘You said you were going mad.’

‘You’re too late to save me.’

‘Story of my life, girl,’ you say. 

You leave, redundant me, I’d rather be unhappy anyway with happiness stability fails, always waiting for the drop. Misery is its own reward, wanting needing life’s energetic particles. I am a nuclear weapon and there’ll be blisters if you don’t text me in the morning.   

~

Lonely me in UCC, day long thinking in the Quad, grass like glass, like ice skin, voices call the echoes of memory, snap patter feet, come find me when you’re free but you don’t. I should have more friends or even one to start with. Jesus kept his friendships short, Buddha was too into himself for me, I am a master of yogic insanity. This mind is body too, with needs. Hen’s eggs all in a basket, dusty flight of starlings, flash scattering of swallows. You are my summer days my blues and greys, my fade away. 

Where u?

Lecture. 

For what?

My future, I suppose.

I mean what’s lecture about?

God knows! Jacobite something. Jacobytes, lol! You?

Quad. Waiting.

Why?

U had to ask, and now I have to think about it. 

U think too much. Is why ur mad.

Love u.

Lol!

Forgetting, this is the reason for my life, forget the screaming birth the living dying aching burst of feel fail fall. Words are tools for wise men and for fools, the first to craft the other to wield. Lecture, pathos, futures – do any of us really have one and how much do they cost?

Walking home, the city streets itself around me, Cork is a happy asylum of bright faces turning down the centuries. I could live here endlessly beside the Lee, entertaining notions of the South Mall and Grand Parade, swing my shoes to soul and blues, scratch old grooves to new waves with indulgent pleasures weaponised. Across the water in Tennessee, masked Nazis march with open glee, Sieg heil the stars and stripes, swastikas dusted off and their blood flag hauled from secret basements where fertiliser bombs dream of restless death in countries undiscovered. The KKK all hide away behind skirts and sheets, stolen from Mama’s clothesline. How many cheers they get! It’s a wonder, the price they’ll pay, for ruining everybody’s day. 

No shelters protect against the weapons we make, manufacturing personal annihilation. Matter is nothing, a scattering of atoms, a blinking random eye. To live in this age is to be afraid, is why I need your sanity and square attitude. I have opened up my timeline and my life to fit you in.

Late night, you don’t call and I am fabulously lost, my ecstasies burning fiery bridges, the river blazing skyward under complicated stars. I text again:

U didn’t come.

Agonised for your reply, at last I get:

Busy. At a party.

WTF? Without me?

Ur too needy. 

That’s my shuffle.

Weirdo. I need some space tonight.

What imagination does is deadly. I have no words.

Haul my ass tornado bluster, out into the city startled night, cluster bombs of insobriety mangled onto streets, proud boys throwing shapes down alleyways piss against a wall smash a head, live-feed it to their friends. I need to be expressed, exist, beat generation lost to dust and this is their needed age, when a madman’s mind devours dogs and cats and a crazy lady breaks gangsta to bust a cap in a canine’s ass for being what it is, a predator with razor teeth, so who’s the killer now, bitch? Makes me mad but not like her; my delusions are a gentle jive, I want only to escape the hive. 

One hour later, two beeps, a text from you:

U awake?

Yeah.

Am drunk.

Shocking.

Getting cab to yours.

Ur using me.

Is that okay?

Just saying, is all. See u soon.

You come sloppy staggering, substance clouded eyes like democracy’s last and dying hope, if there’s any left it’s in the hearts of decent folk who wonder if there is a God, not believing what a fiery preacher proclaims from fascist ideology. Refrain, refrain, sing the refrain loud and clear, holy fucking holy sins to finger-point at difference in all the time-worn ways. A mob doesn’t care where you’re from, my friend, it wants only to be fed. What refined creatures we can be when our minds are set to better purpose! I take your hand, kiss your bones away to my bed before I surprise myself with uncustomary maturity.

‘Why have you been so crazy lately?’ you say.

‘Why have you been so sane?’

‘Seriously, though.’

‘I’m terrified by what’s happening in the world. Aren’t you?’

‘You’re so hot when you’re vulnerable.’

‘Really?’ I say.

‘Really.’

‘You’ll stay tonight, then?’

‘Sure. I’ll protect you from the blackhats.’

We coalesce, two mostly liquid creatures, water and dust and a hint of brain, eyes to see, ears to hear, lips to kiss, kiss, kiss you. Watch your step; the road is littered with landmines of misunderstanding and hurt feelings.

‘Why can’t you commit?’ I say.

‘Do you want commitment?’  

‘Well, I…’

‘Do you?’ Cheeky grin, you pinch my arm. ‘Seems sort of anti-beatnik to me.’

‘Yeah, I’m all about the beat.’

‘And don’t forget the bass.’

‘Bass is too base a tool for me,’ I say. ‘Rhythm is everything, and swing.’

‘Got to have the swing. Do you really think I can give you what you want?’

This gaze we hold, communication without words, a deeper instinct speaks through eyes, no artificial stupidity could devise the means to say so much, to be so wise. ‘No,’ I say at last.

‘There you go, then. You expect too much.’

‘Why is that so wrong?’

‘Because everything comes at a price.’

‘Even love?’

‘Love most of all. Not the answer you wanted, but now you know the truth.’

‘I can still love you, though?’

‘Knock yourself out, girl. I’d better sleep.’

~

I declaim at dawn, St. Patrick’s Bridge, to echo cries of gulls and men, from beatnik bards, their pens emboldened by sinewy visions. Lest we forget is long forgot, my faith is in gravity and causal flow. You dream in my bed, I walk these streets, my step light my thoughts high, I am a million people from moment to moment, casting ideas about me in an unthinking world.   

Om, as Ginsberg said, as he said so very much.

No laments, the sky too blue to be blue, I turn back towards my place, backstreets favoured rising city car blast bell rings noise life waking, alive and coming into being, into me and you. If I can’t be dug then it’s okay. My jive, if I have a phrase to burn, is to dig and ask for nothing in return.

Jennifer McMahon is represented by Brian Langan, Storyline Literary Agency. She was the overall winner of the 2024 All-Ireland Scholarships Creative Writing Award (public category), a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, has been shortlisted for Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards (2023), the Bridport Short Story Prize and many other notable awards, and was nominated for Best Of The Net 2024. She was also a second-place winner of the Oxford Prize (winter 2023), and was twice longlisted for the Bath Short Story Award. Jennifer’s work appears in Crannog (2023 and 2025), HOWL, The Irish Independent (New Irish Writing), The Galway Review, Oxford Prize Anthology (2022 and 2023), Fractured Lit, Heimat Review (issues 2 and 6), Empyrean, Frazzled Lit, Books Ireland Magazine, Loft Books (issues IV and V), the Retreat West ‘Swan Song’ Anthology, the Cowboy Jamboree ‘Motel’ anthology, Orphic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Mythic Picnic, The Irish Writers Handbook (2024 and 2025) and in other places. Jennifer is also the joint Editor-In-Chief of Frazzled Lit (frazzledlit.com).

Photo Credit: D.W. White