Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.

I sent it on the balcony. If I threw my phone over the railings, I’d never see if he replied.

Maybe Edith didn’t notice me at all and touched me as she would a small appliance.

There were potted bonsais on all conducive surfaces, including one in the lift. Edith said having children was like growing bonsai. I asked what growing a full-size tree was like. That, Edith said, was a question of temperament.

With a clarity I blamed on alcohol, I knew precisely what I felt: envy.

It sounded like something a therapist might have told her, oddly phrased to squeeze developmental insight into not very many words.

We agreed also that the British obsession with dogs was creepy, both because of the volume of other animals they ate and in light of their historic and contemporary level of regard for humans.

At the start of June my nine-year-olds finished irregular plural and compound nouns, and moved on to collectives: a flock of sheep, a clutch of eggs, a shower of wankers.