Sunburn

by Chloe Michelle Howarth

Even at my small age, I understood that there were limits to love, and I felt sure that one day people would run out of love for me.

As much as I like getting older, parts of it make me feel guilty and uncomfortable.

I say a prayer that I won’t think about it tomorrow. Like always, my prayer goes unheard, and I struggle through four days of intense focus on her jaw, her incisors, and her amylase. I wish I could explain it.

I could not feel my bony knees on the carpet at the altar rail anymore, I could not feel the draft of the church. She took her eucharist before me, and I quietly apologised to Jesus for the downgrade from her tongue to mine. It was a feeling of deep shame which I still don’t understand.

It’s alright, I’m sure in every group there is one friend who is superior to the rest, and everyone admires this friend. I am sure the other girls look up to her the same way.

We start spending all of our weekends together so that she doesn’t have to be on her own. So that I don’t have to spend a moment without her.

I try not to think about how we will grow up. I try to focus as much as I can on the moment that I am in. It makes things easier.

Whether she regrets leaving her job or is very happy as a housewife, I will never know. Mother is not the sort of person to be honest when she could be ideal.

It’s presumptuous, yes, but now that I’m getting older, I can’t help but wonder about her experience as a mother, and as a woman, and how different her life might have been without children or with different children or at least without a daughter. Who would she be with one less child standing between her and freedom?

Ooft

She is not as harsh as she seems, she is just too busy to be sweet.

Mother has been hounding me about posture and diet and manners, readying me to impress boys and their mothers. Is she really so afraid that I will end up a spinster? Nothing stops her from reminding me that I will soon be a woman, and that there is a certain sort of woman that she wants me to be.

Maybe I’ll marry a farmer’s son, who would give me a few children and a home to keep. I might enjoy it. I might drown myself in the baby bath. Who knows? Oh, I am faint from not knowing.

Me af

Perhaps I will forget the effect that homemaking has had on Mother, with her bright eyes now dull as old dish rags, her spark extinguished by my father and the house and all of us tireless children.

since I started to see her as a person beyond a parent, I have seen her as a grave misfortune, and now I cannot go back to the way I saw her before. Without all the mysticism of being my mother, she is just a woman, exactly like me, only with less time ahead of her, and – I’m beginning to think – all the same uncertainty.

Apart, we are weeds, but together, we are wildflowers, we make a beautiful garden.

STUNNING

It all seems very graphic and unnecessary for girls of our age. Those rude, unwashed boys, why would I want to imagine such intimate pieces of them?

Facts

Besides the step in Martin’s hair, Mother has full faith in him. He can hold a conversation, he doesn’t smoke, and he is a skilled hurler. In Crossmore, that is the making of a fine man.

Good luck, babe! plays in the distance

And still I wait for Susannah at the door, holding it open with my foot, because I don’t want to leave her alone with him. I don’t want to spend a minute without her. My very best friend, my most frightening interest, I hope I am not as laughable as Liam.

It’s her spit in my mouth. It’s her racing through my mind. I don’t mind it. It makes me sick. I like it.

I think that sex may not be the sacred union that I once imagined it to be. Rather, it seems to be a secular thing: condensation on a car window, squeaking skin on rain-soaked bales, a wonderful disgrace. That’s what I have learned from the talk of my friends and from the talk of the older girls.

I welcome Martin’s intensifying attention. The slow and sluggish creep of it, coming ever closer as we walk quiet evening boreens, under a dim sunset, the hood of his jumper covering my eyes. The comfort of him. The threat of him.

I don’t want to be with him, but I cannot be without him. It is selfish, but I don’t want him spending his thoughts on anybody else. Maybe that’s love. I don’t know. It’s best not to think about it.

Good luck, babe! Plays even louder

The girls hate her because they think that she is my competition. Rita is not my competition, she cannot blend in, she is far too pretty for either.

I could say that it’s our loyalty to each other that makes us behave viciously, but sometimes I think we are just vicious. I’m glad to be in the group and not outside it.

If I’m not enough for Martin, I may never be enough for anyone. There’s no dignified way to say that to the girls. When we get to my house, they want to talk at the back step all night. At eleven, Mother knocks on the kitchen window and beckons me inside, and I’m so glad to see them leave.

‘Come on, she’s such a ride. Are you gonna see her again?’ For the first time in years, it’s like he has actually heard me when I speak, and he laughs, and says, ‘You sound like one of the lads.’ Such a warm and welcome insult. I feel the most wonderful relief as I devolve from a glimmering image of unknowable beauty to the uninteresting tomboy he once knew. At last, we are going back to ourselves.

His mother won’t let him forget that I am only down the road, with my lovely farm, with my two parents and all my nice, traditional ways. Similarly, my mother won’t let me forget that teenage romances don’t last and that all that camogie will give Rita awfully muscular legs and that men may wander but they always come back.

There are so many unhappy people, I just don’t want to find out that I am one of them.

Introspection is like cyanide.

My heart lurches, as if it wants to leave my awful body and go make a home in her.

I am still here for her. I want her to know that I would always be here to disappoint her, if she would only give me the chance.

When she is close to happiness, I don’t mind being a casualty.

L, Sound for the letter. I hope you weren’t taking the piss when you wrote it, because I read it while I ate dinner and on the sofa and in bed, and I think I’ll read it a thousand times more. It was nice to have some company. I know that sounds sad. I’ll take another if you want to write it haha. You’re the best. x S

Sound for the letter. I hope you weren’t taking the piss when you wrote it, because I read it while I ate dinner and on the sofa and in bed, and I think I’ll read it a thousand times more. It was nice to have some company.

Of all people, I think he is the one I could talk to about this honestly and openly. And yet I don’t. What would I even say?

I would drape my own soul over her body to protect her from eyes like mine.

Her softest exhale is like my own personal dog whistle.

Martin is water, I am smoke. She is fire. He keeps things in line. He makes me what I am. We are inevitable. I hardly think of my answer.

Oh Martin, buddy 💀

I wouldn’t want to live not knowing the goodness of Susannah. She is fresh air, and warmth, and mornings in July. What is there to fix? There is evil in my yearning, I know, I just can’t see where yet.

Dearest Susannah, Today you let me know that I like you. If I could only tell you all the ways that is true. Isn’t it sad, that you have such a hold on me, and yet you are not mine? What I feel goes beyond words.

Susannah was wrong when she said that I like her. I love her.

I am not afraid of the nuns anymore. I have been in Eden all Summer long, I know divinity better than they ever will.

This is fucking class

‘I think he just has a crush on me. He’ll get over it.’ I try to look away, but she locks her eyes on mine, and she is so quick and so earnest when she says, ‘No, he won’t.’

Rather than speaking, she moves further into me. This says much more than I could manage with words. Where her body is pressed into mine, our skin glows. These parts of me are beautiful.

He wants his girl next door. I want the girl in the big, echoing house on the other end of the village.

It’s hard to feel such heavy things like this while pretending that I don’t feel anything at all.

She is looking at me with bad eyes, her hair is fire against the foxgloves, and the last of the summer sunlight is sacrificing itself to fall on her. The wind slows till it is less than a breath. How calm the air can be; look at how she smoulders.

She is too cool for my frenzied heart.

It is simple. It is natural. I move, I kiss her. This instant is eternal. My hand on her cheek, her lips against mine, her perfect and glorious mouth. The nervous breath stammers out her nose and onto my cheek, one she has been holding in all her life. Her hands find my back. We are eternal.

She holds my hand and walks me through the fields. It’s like she is showing me Crossmore for the first time. We can see the ocean from here, where it meets the sky. Blue on blue.