Image: © Charles Eastwood
For thirty American dollars you gain entrance to the art museum. You walk through a metal detector and fear it will beep. You imagine if it did beep, how everyone would look at you, with full attention, in tension, and how your skin would vibrate. You would reach into your handbag with purpose, look around, and give these art pigs a good old scare. It doesn’t beep, anyway. You are unmetaled.
You round the round white entry wall, conscious of your round and awkward body. Ahead of you is an unkempt blond in a black hoodie that says We’re So Fucked in ivory script. You are delighted because the hoodie says everything that could be said, possibly, by anyone, about what’s happening now. No one who sees it will fail to relate. His face, as he turns to look behind him, not at you but past you, is milk-lipped and green-eyed and you want to eat him. He’s twenty years too young. It’s embarrassing and you feel filthy.
Up along the museum’s near-highest curve, an intern invites you to lock your phone in a pouch and enter a dark room. You like the dark room but don’t know about locking your phone in a pouch.
You say you’ll keep going and come back.
You keep going and come back.
Finally, you lock your phone in the pouch and make yourself small and squeeze through velour curtains and enter an alcove coloured by TV static and sit down in front of a wall-size triptych real-time surveillance display of the entire museum’s interior, complete with red boxes which track imperfectly the moving targets labeled ‘human’.
Two art pigs outside protest locking their phones in pouches. You hear the shame in their steps as they trot away. You realise the installation is designed so you’ll hear this echo of your own weakness, as you lounge and spy, and you try not to laugh out loud, and you admire it down past your bones.
The onscreen figures perambulate, oblivious to the red boxes that house them. You consider the space between the figures and their boxes—the slight delay, the slight imperfection of the surveillance mechanism—and wonder if, maybe, it means we’ll be alright.
But no. The artist probably made it faulty on purpose. Of course we won’t be alright. Your hope, followed by your resignation, is choreographed. Every emotion and realisation by you, the viewer, is part of the show.
You recall the hoodie, We’re So Fucked, and imagine fucking the so-fucked hoodie boy right here on this artistic leather couch under the eye of the triptych of future annihilation, and then you leave and collect your phone from the intern and smile because you’re both in on your mutual oppressor’s secret, you’ve got their number alright, haha, thirty dollars well spent, back out onto the hot February street of rain.
It has rained every day of your holiday. You’ve come from your new home, a capital of rain, to your old home, where it rains rarely but hard. The rain followed you, as they say. You didn’t realise the capital of rain was your home, and this town wasn’t, until you had the thought, just now, every day of your holiday, that tourist thought, every day of your tourism, that thought, the rain followed. And you loiter on the corner of the avenue across from the park, bareheaded, where you never used to loiter when you lived here, only on the grandest of occasions would you loiter on the avenue, and you smell your sweat under the grandness of the buildings and you smell the park’s verdure.
You light a rollie (not a done thing here anymore, or ever, only proper big industrial cowboy-corp cigarettes in the US of A, and these days only vapes and conical joints of marijuana, official, for the emergency anaesthetisation of citizens) and you stand, assailed by the treeline of the park and its jungle quality.
An early dark settles on the wet leaves, lengthening them. Just within the park you see an opaque pond rounded by concrete.
Then you’re beside the pond.
It is without ripple.
The rain has stopped.
You squat down, rippling your tight pants. You place your palms on the concrete for balance. You look in but see no reflection.
The pond eats the rollie with a sizzle. You imagine how a bulbous goldfish, innocent and unblinking, will suck up the filter and choke.
You bend further and your lips touch the water. They feel huge, like fish lips.
Lips in water, tip of nose, then chin. And eyes, unblinking.
Impossible, the cold.
But you need to see what’s underneath.
Your whole face under.
Nothing to see.
No fish, alive or dying. Nothing to save. Only the persistence of static and furious cold.
The rain is back. Your smoke is out. Your eyes are wet with more than rain and you taste salt and walk, city-fast, four blocks to the metro. You throw the dead rollie into the street because they don’t have ashtrays on public bins here, at least not on the avenue. Maybe you’ll stop smoking. You take a full breath all the way down to the bottom of your belly and further, you feel it all the way down to your ass insides, the root chakra they call it, diaphragmatic breathing they call it, and you hold it for a ten count in which you recall the milky mouth of the We’re So Fucked hoodie boy, on the artistic couch, and feel filthy again and embarrassed again, and it’s good to feel that way, the way you ought to feel, here, in your former home. You breathe out all at once and, satisfied that you can breathe a full breath and don’t need to quit smoking quite just yet, you descend the black drip of steps to the train on which you will enjoy the sensation of being seen and, simultaneously, unrecognisable.
____
Marianne lives in Howth, north of Dublin, where she works as a family carer and writes. She has a postgraduate degree in theology, with a special interest in mysticism, and also practices photography. Her work, ranging from fiction to poetry to creative nonfiction, has appeared or is forthcoming in Channel Magazine, The Belfast Review, Ragaire, and Strange Pilgrims, among other journals. Her story about identity loss in Arctic Norway was shortlisted for the Allingham flash fiction prize in 2025. She is working on several projects about the natural world. Find her at mdaigh.com.