Evenings and Weekends

by Oisín McKenna

She was afraid all the time, and she only sometimes felt beautiful,

With Maggie’s announcement, she’s ushered the future into the present, and Phil feels like he’s fallen behind.

That feeling was irresistible though, of being part of something.

if she and Phil were together for such an event, an event that people will always recall, then she’d be a major event in his own life too, a major memory in his mind, a person who looms large.

He feared that it would be too dramatic a gesture, that it would make him look ridiculous, pathetic, desperate to love and to be loved in return, which of course, he was.

‘It’s just, you know, casual. Isn’t it? You shouldn’t make decisions based on me.’

ugh, my heart TT

He had wanted the guarantee of love, someone to protect and feel protected by. These are now desperately humiliating things to have wanted.

She remembers thinking, after the man threw the beer at her, that everything good about this country was good because of migration. Everything. London wouldn’t be half the city it was without the people who had dragged themselves there from all over the world.

‘Funny boy.’ She smiles, and he smiles back.

there will be an inevitable blow up but here theyre cute

He had been walking so fast that it was almost a sprint, and the air is damp with early evening heat. It will rain later, he thinks. It is almost undeniable, the love, the rain.

She wants to note down everything, all the details of her life. She finds a receipt and pen in her purse; a small part of her wonders if years from now this old receipt will fossilise and be retrieved by an archaeologist. They would dust off the clay with their delicate little brush, and they would gesture to their colleagues to come see, come look, come bear witness to the past. Look, they would say. Look. There once was a woman and she sat in the pub and these are the things she wrote of her life.

Even when she wants something, her first instinct is to say that she doesn’t. Even when hungry, her first instinct is to say that she’s full.

‘She was crushed by the weight of her own body.’

He then begins to think: what is the correct way to stand? How should a person at a party arrange their limbs?

‘Phil wasn’t the only boy on the estate who liked playing games in my bedroom.’ Maggie looks at Phil; Phil looks at Kyle; Kyle smiles, winks, and then walks away.

and there's the bomb

Does a dying person need to be convinced that they might not die, or do they need to be helped to accept that they will?

The priest says that love isn’t a feeling. It’s not the butterflies in your tummy you get in the giddy early days of a relationship. The butterflies don’t last, he says. Love is something you deliberately decide to do through repeated actions of care. Love is something you make.