Tunnel of Toads

BY

Chris Beausang

The following is an extract from a novel-in-progress, Tunnel of Toads, forthcoming from Marrowbone Books later this year.

You have finished college. Your head has been sewn with gossip from the personal lives of post-war American poets, the formal pressures attending the sonnet, the chiming couplets which round off one or two poems about the first world war by the same one or two first world war poets. Having none of the family connections or private sources of income you need to become an academic you will never harvest the crop, but rather depart the field as it appears to you now: fallow and aggrieved. You have read enough Shakespeare to know men with best friends are in comedies and men without them are in tragedies, but not enough to know what being a friendless woman means. You scan the faces borne on the bloated convoys of tourists, an apparatus which underlines more than any other the fact that this city cannot accommodate groups thicker than single-file, trundling out the doors of pubs which used to be yours to drink in before they were re-modelled in heritage kitsch, before every snug began to whisper overproduced reels into the porches of your ears. The selfies taken by these people have captured each side of your face thousands of times. You have this in common with many from your graduating class, and are always prepared to note from among the faces of the rabble one you recognise, but will never be above pretending that you do not, because on this side of the city, where some of your former classmates have had the gall to get hired by someone, you cannot afford to use the ATMs because they only dispense fifties.

You live in a more or less permanent state of nostalgia, not just because your hangovers are getting worse. You have a saying about happiness, depression and acceptance written on a piece of paper tacked to the wall just high enough to be visible before you leave your room in the morning. You read advice columns. With its restricted number of new entrants, daily journeys from a to b, acquaintances disappeared into jobs, cities and couples, your life has assumed the shape it will retain. What you are doing with yourself these days remains a rumour among those absent. As one who has been called to it, you know loneliness is a practice, a vocation and the closest you are able to get to a job. You have read articles and astroturfed blogs about friend apps, and have some awareness of the respective merits of each one, but you have not downloaded any, you do not see yourself as someone that far gone. You are bored of dreaming about trying to find your departure gate or missing your train; the metaphors are banal ones.

       Your room is one half of a converted attic, it is the sixth in the house and the second smallest. You sleep on a double mattress on the lino floor, next to a chest of drawers not quite pushed up against the wall because the low ceiling gets in the way. The radio alarm on your bedside locker is tuned to Lyric, for the constant access it offers to inoffensive music to read to during the day, jazz, piano and world music to smoke to in the evening. When the last presenter has signed off, what you presume to be an automated playlist begins. It is not the meditative nocturnes you would expect a classical music station to play at night, nor is it any grander orchestral works, rather it consists of jaunty baroque music played on string instruments by trios or quintets. As each piece moves to its conclusion, every five to eight minutes or so, you are returned to feelings of specific times in your life when you heard the variation on the leitmotif which plays during almost all the idents or advertisements on this station plucked on violin strings, while a woman’s voice you recognise from one of the late morning, early afternoon shows tells you ‘You are listening to Lyric, through the night’. It used to be that the last show in the schedule, slow jazz on trumpets and saxophones, Irish singer-songwriters mumblings in their own accents, continued until two in the morning, long after you had turned the radio off and gone to sleep. It used to be that you would hear the woman’s voice tell you that ‘You are listening to Lyric, through the night’, on the broadcast’s further side, some morning you woke at five or six and you would spend a few hours in bed, reading the feed until your alarm went off.

You know the treads of your housemates, the particular sound their throats make when they’re being cleared, their flatulence. When you come home to lie on your bed and look at your phone until it’s time to sleep, your body can tell you how many of them are at home. All this evolutionary adaptation accomplishes is to crowd your mind with reminders that this space is not yours. Your landlord told you once that he thinks it’s racist that he is not allowed to speak his mind about immigrants, and that this is a worse kind of racism than actual racism, the racism that everyone else accepts is racism, because it goes unrecognised, and though you did not agree with him you did not make that clear. He collects the rent in cash. There is no lease.  He also owns the house next door and neither are registered with the Residential Tenancies Board. Once you move you out you will make a point of reporting him. He talks about replacing the stained linoleum kitchen floor but he never will. He does not talk about replacing the washing machine which floods the kitchen once a month, hence the stain, and he never will. As long as you are seeking employment, you will be furnishing this man with 115% of your income. Still, you are one of the lucky ones, you used to work with someone who talked about their landlord quizzing them about their sexual habits in the same tone you might use to speak about an unreliable appliance.

The house smells like everyone else’s house. When all of you used to crowd into someone’s front room and sit on ruined furniture to drink warm cans, not taking off your hats and coats until condensation began to gather on the sash window like the top deck of a bus in the winter, the smell was there, but it was not until you used the bathroom which branched off from the main living room that the smell greeted you. The bathroom is where the smell lives. The words for the smell are damp, heavy, dense, but none of these words can summon its cosier associations. It is not uncomforting after all, it has been your companion for these past few years, it is the smell of time one has for oneself in the mornings, when you’re the first into the windowless bathroom with the fraying white paint on the ceiling, the black stains clustered around the hole in the wall where a fan used to be. You can spend your whole shower staring at these stains without realising that that is what you are doing, thinking to yourself that it is probably black mould and how few options you would have in the event of it indeed turning out to be black mould. Your landlord would use it as a pretence to throw you all out and bring in new tenants, jacking up the rent by another eighty, ninety, one-hundred euro. Yes, you cough a bit in the mornings but you’re a smoker. And it’s not as bad as what you had in your old place on the North Circular. When the city’s climate began to shift, you would walk down to the shops, buy a pair of rubber gloves, a face mask, and a few iron wool sponges mounted on the end of a plastic handle. You would boil the kettle and spend an hour or two scrubbing out the brood of properly cultivated-looking mushrooms from behind the loose tiling, then revenge bleach on the grouting, where you imagined the hyphae to be, latent until next year. In more honest moments you think of the process of living in this house – as it wrings your throat of moisture in your sleep, garnishing your lungs with microbes – as spiting him, depriving him of the additional income. The water pressure in this shower is too low, it less shower than dribble, an embarrassment of puddle steeps your ankles in tepid water, cloudy with suds and dirt. You try to feel a circularity to this process, as if you were a droplet in a water cycle localised within your bathroom. You are you in the bathroom, you are you in the shower, you are Toad in an ecosystem, you are your clothes in a washing machine being boiled in a lather, filth beaten from the threads of your flesh until someone yanks your body outwards, creases it at its halfway point over a clothes horse, fresh and new and smelling of someone.

—Sorry the quilt’s a bit wet, it accumulates a dew in the morning I think.

—But it’s so sunny outside.

 

—I don’t think it’s anything to do with the temperature actually effects it, dampness is like a ventilation problem. A lot of Irish houses have it.


—Do you get any, symptoms?


—Symptoms?


—Yeah, from the dampness, like a cough.


—Not really.


—In my last place I used to get all these weird allergic reactions and like an itchy throat in the mornings? I thought it was just dampness or hay fever, but it went on through the summer. I think it’s called sick building syndrome?


—Did you ever tell the landlord about it?


—Tell the landlord?


—Yeah, that their house was an allergen?


—Have you met landlords?


One of your friends used to carry a disposable camera, and took pictures on nights out, pre-drinks, birthdays. When they were developed, they always looked pre-aged, in a manner more fundamental than the badly vivid photostat filters that anyone can use to treat images on their phones before uploading them to the feed. Whether this was the uncanny gloss of photograph, ink held in the hand, the revival of loose blouses and big hair that took hold while you were at university, or some compound of these you are not sure, but these photographs seemed meaningful. By affording you a retrospect on your youth while you still lived it, they seemed to promise you a future, the possibility of their being mounted in a photo album, on a shelf in a furnished apartment. It was you who could afford to live in a flat five minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street on the dole, and even though divorce, like sodomy, contraception, and suicide were illegal, you and all your friends still found ways to enjoy themselves, all before the nineties ended, the pH level of the ocean changed, or the road’s tar began to melt in thirty-eight-degree summer heat.

This life is not your own, but you will recognise it, if you have watched the universe’s fattened edge turn from you, leaving the emptied remainder which composes its bulk for you to grasp after.

You never have to wait much longer than a few minutes for one of the five buses that go into town along the Navan Road. You try to avoid two of them which turn off along Blackhorse Avenue rather than going straight onto Stoneybatter or Phibsborough, but sometimes you are not in a hurry. This morning the bus takes a turn through the Phoenix Park you do not recognise. The road begins to dip and to move low between two walls on an incline, as if this road has been built over a tramline.

Two old buildings close in on either side, reminding you of the flats along North Strand, but without the chest-high walls installed outside each door. If someone was to stand outside one of them, there would be nothing between them and the open air. The facade of the one on the left has been treated by garish pinks, blues and yellows but this does not alleviate the sense of dereliction. Behind the windows, many of which are cracked, broken or gone altogether, plasterboard advertisements for exhibitions held in the National Gallery over the past few years have been pasted up; dates, places and details regarding discounted rates appear next to Vermeer’s ‘Woman Writing a Letter’, Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’, Jack Yeats’ ‘The Liffey Swim’.

The one on the right is still in use. Two fat older men with Connolly moustaches and rolled up shirtsleeves stand outside their office doors, one on the second floor, another above him on the third. The first stands, smoking a cigarette, looking at the passing bus without seeing, smoking and exhaling, rotating the heel of his shoe. The other sits on a plastic chair that looks as though it belongs in a school prefab, faces the wall with his head propped up by his arm against a window ledge, looking at his phone.
      It takes ten minutes for you to get from Stoneybatter to the quays, so you get off at the Sirens Hotel, cross Grattan bridge and because you are thinking too much, forget to avoid Temple Bar. There was a novelty food outlet set up in such a way that you could not move from one side of the square to the other without walking through it, past images of hot savoury pies held in the hand to go, one large for 4.50. He was leaning up over a counter varnished to look as though it were old and battered. You saw and recognised him before he did you and you lowered your head, trying to get from the entrance to the exit without having to exchange glances, but he sped up to catch you.

     After, sitting in the dense silence which attends students at screen, in the basement of a building nestled against one of Trinity’s far walls, you congratulate yourself on not asking him if he had not died five years ago. What was it that you expected him to do? Reach his hand into his stomach in a mode of jocoseriousness, to plunge his fingers in, like ghosts in cartoons and demonstrate their emergence out the other side?
   You pull the monitor towards you, type in your old username and password and watch a small blue circle complete eight circuits of itself.

You log in to mywelfare.ie and begin work on a form that asks you for your aims, objectives, goals, anticipated forecasts of deliverables as part of an all-encompassing life development plan, complete with a projected schedule and a progress-to-date, thereby justifying your access to the Graduate Rental Bursary, not to be confused with the Graduate Rental Support Scheme, which will provide you a vote of confidence from the state that you can take to the bank in order to receive a top-up on your salary proportionate to the gap between the cost of your rent and your gross earnings. Receiving this sum of money will allow you to avoid moving to Athy or Portlaoise, or somewhere else where the rent is, for now, only half of the median wage. You will have to find somewhere else to live; only tenants renting properties from landlords registered with the RTB are eligible for the scheme, but this later headwreck of a task will be worth accomplishing in order to avoid a daily four to four and a half hour commute.

You have some of your answers saved in your drafts, both because the website is somehow both an old one not optimised for contemporary browsers but also overloads the capacity of the machine. Writing them was your chosen means of procrastinating in the weeks leading up to your final exams. Insolvency, both financial and academic, could appear to you as a kind of sublime and you dotted your answers with abuse, insults and other attempts to distress whatever bureaucrat fancied themselves responsible for deciding whether or not the state should keep you afloat. You would have submitted it too if you had not lost your interest in emigrating and if someone had not told you that most applications are assessed by algorithm and any submission that made injudicious, never mind repeated, use of the word ‘prick’ would never even reach its intended target. You decided that putting your anti-depressants beyond your ability to pay for them, without even having the satisfaction of ruining a welfare officer’s day, would not have been worth it

In addition to the form, you can also expect a battery of tests assessing your worthiness for being a recipient of state-backed private largesse. These tests are divided into three parts: ‘Diagrammatic Logic (8 minutes)’, ‘Situational Judgement (7 minutes)’ and ‘Psychometric Tests (18 minutes)’. The website provides no further information or insight into what each test will look like. You read the e-mail again, search a few key terms and find complaints about their unfairness, how they do not allow sufficient time in which to complete the exercises, but nothing helpful or encouraging.
      Most of the other questions on the form are stupid and tedious and require you to put together sentences which make you wince as you write and read over them again and again. The buzzwords are necessary, but you are in danger of using them in ways that no longer make sense as your brain goes numb and you can no longer trust yourself to convey the impression that you are paying attention to what you are saying.

tunnel of toads

by

chris beausang

You have finished college. Your head has been sewn with gossip from the personal lives of post-war American poets, the formal pressures attending the sonnet, the chiming couplets which round off one or two poems about the first world war by the same one or two first world war poets. Having none of the family connections or private sources of income you need to become an academic you will never harvest the crop, but rather depart the field as it appears to you now: fallow and aggrieved. You have read enough Shakespeare to know men with best friends are in comedies and men without them are in tragedies, but not enough to know what being a friendless woman means. You scan the faces borne on the bloated convoys of tourists, an apparatus which underlines more than any other the fact that this city cannot accommodate groups thicker than single-file, trundling out the doors of pubs which used to be yours to drink in before they were re-modelled in heritage kitsch, before every snug began to whisper overproduced reels into the porches of your ears. The selfies taken by these people have captured each side of your face thousands of times. You have this in common with many from your graduating class, and are always prepared to note from among the faces of the rabble one you recognise, but will never be above pretending that you do not, because on this side of the city, where some of your former classmates have had the gall to get hired by someone, you cannot afford to use the ATMs because they only dispense fifties.

You live in a more or less permanent state of nostalgia, not just because your hangovers are getting worse. You have a saying about happiness, depression and acceptance written on a piece of paper tacked to the wall just high enough to be visible before you leave your room in the morning. You read advice columns. With its restricted number of new entrants, daily journeys from a to b, acquaintances disappeared into jobs, cities and couples, your life has assumed the shape it will retain. What you are doing with yourself these days remains a rumour among those absent. As one who has been called to it, you know loneliness is a practice, a vocation and the closest you are able to get to a job. You have read articles and astroturfed blogs about friend apps, and have some awareness of the respective merits of each one, but you have not downloaded any, you do not see yourself as someone that far gone. You are bored of dreaming about trying to find your departure gate or missing your train; the metaphors are banal ones.
   Your room is one half of a converted attic, it is the sixth in the house and the second smallest. You sleep on a double mattress on the lino floor, next to a chest of drawers not quite pushed up against the wall because the low ceiling gets in the way. The radio alarm on your bedside locker is tuned to Lyric, for the constant access it offers to inoffensive music to read to during the day, jazz, piano and world music to smoke to in the evening. When the last presenter has signed off, what you presume to be an automated playlist begins. It is not the meditative nocturnes you would expect a classical music station to play at night, nor is it any grander orchestral works, rather it consists of jaunty baroque music played on string instruments by trios or quintets. As each piece moves to its conclusion, every five to eight minutes or so, you are returned to feelings of specific times in your life when you heard the variation on the leitmotif which plays during almost all the idents or advertisements on this station plucked on violin strings, while a woman’s voice you recognise from one of the late morning, early afternoon shows tells you ‘You are listening to Lyric, through the night’. It used to be that the last show in the schedule, slow jazz on trumpets and saxophones, Irish singer-songwriters mumblings in their own accents, continued until two in the morning, long after you had turned the radio off and gone to sleep. It used to be that you would hear the woman’s voice tell you that ‘You are listening to Lyric, through the night’, on the broadcast’s further side, some morning you woke at five or six and you would spend a few hours in bed, reading the feed until your alarm went off.

You know the treads of your housemates, the particular sound their throats make when they’re being cleared, their flatulence. When you come home to lie on your bed and look at your phone until it’s time to sleep, your body can tell you how many of them are at home. All this evolutionary adaptation accomplishes is to crowd your mind with reminders that this space is not yours. Your landlord told you once that he thinks it’s racist that he is not allowed to speak his mind about immigrants, and that this is a worse kind of racism than actual racism, the racism that everyone else accepts is racism, because it goes unrecognised, and though you did not agree with him you did not make that clear. He collects the rent in cash. There is no lease.  He also owns the house next door and neither are registered with the Residential Tenancies Board. Once you move you out you will make a point of reporting him. He talks about replacing the stained linoleum kitchen floor but he never will. He does not talk about replacing the washing machine which floods the kitchen once a month, hence the stain, and he never will. As long as you are seeking employment, you will be furnishing this man with 115% of your income. Still, you are one of the lucky ones, you used to work with someone who talked about their landlord quizzing them about their sexual habits in the same tone you might use to speak about an unreliable appliance.

The house smells like everyone else’s house. When all of you used to crowd into someone’s front room and sit on ruined furniture to drink warm cans, not taking off your hats and coats until condensation began to gather on the sash window like the top deck of a bus in the winter, the smell was there, but it was not until you used the bathroom which branched off from the main living room that the smell greeted you. The bathroom is where the smell lives. The words for the smell are damp, heavy, dense, but none of these words can summon its cosier associations. It is not uncomforting after all, it has been your companion for these past few years, it is the smell of time one has for oneself in the mornings, when you’re the first into the windowless bathroom with the fraying white paint on the ceiling, the black stains clustered around the hole in the wall where a fan used to be. You can spend your whole shower staring at these stains without realising that that is what you are doing, thinking to yourself that it is probably black mould and how few options you would have in the event of it indeed turning out to be black mould. Your landlord would use it as a pretence to throw you all out and bring in new tenants, jacking up the rent by another eighty, ninety, one-hundred euro. Yes, you cough a bit in the mornings but you’re a smoker. And it’s not as bad as what you had in your old place on the North Circular. When the city’s climate began to shift, you would walk down to the shops, buy a pair of rubber gloves, a face mask, and a few iron wool sponges mounted on the end of a plastic handle. You would boil the kettle and spend an hour or two scrubbing out the brood of properly cultivated-looking mushrooms from behind the loose tiling, then revenge bleach on the grouting, where you imagined the hyphae to be, latent until next year. In more honest moments you think of the process of living in this house – as it wrings your throat of moisture in your sleep, garnishing your lungs with microbes – as spiting him, depriving him of the additional income. The water pressure in this shower is too low, it less shower than dribble, an embarrassment of puddle steeps your ankles in tepid water, cloudy with suds and dirt. You try to feel a circularity to this process, as if you were a droplet in a water cycle localised within your bathroom. You are you in the bathroom, you are you in the shower, you are Toad in an ecosystem, you are your clothes in a washing machine being boiled in a lather, filth beaten from the threads of your flesh until someone yanks your body outwards, creases it at its halfway point over a clothes horse, fresh and new and smelling of someone.

—Sorry the quilt’s a bit wet, it accumulates a dew in the morning I think.

—But it’s so sunny outside.

—I don’t think it’s anything to do with the temperature actually effects it, dampness is like a ventilation problem. A lot of Irish houses have it.

—Do you get any, symptoms?

—Symptoms?

—Yeah, from the dampness, like a cough.

—Not really.

—In my last place I used to get all these weird allergic reactions and like an itchy throat in the mornings? I thought it was just dampness or hay fever, but it went on through the summer. I think it’s called sick building syndrome?

—Did you ever tell the landlord about it?

—Tell the landlord?

—Yeah, that their house was an allergen?

—Have you met landlords?

One of your friends used to carry a disposable camera, and took pictures on nights out, pre-drinks, birthdays. When they were developed, they always looked pre-aged, in a manner more fundamental than the badly vivid photostat filters that anyone can use to treat images on their phones before uploading them to the feed. Whether this was the uncanny gloss of photograph, ink held in the hand, the revival of loose blouses and big hair that took hold while you were at university, or some compound of these you are not sure, but these photographs seemed meaningful. By affording you a retrospect on your youth while you still lived it, they seemed to promise you a future, the possibility of their being mounted in a photo album, on a shelf in a furnished apartment. It was you who could afford to live in a flat five minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street on the dole, and even though divorce, like sodomy, contraception, and suicide were illegal, you and all your friends still found ways to enjoy themselves, all before the nineties ended, the pH level of the ocean changed, or the road’s tar began to melt in thirty-eight-degree summer heat.

This life is not your own, but you will recognise it, if you have watched the universe’s fattened edge turn from you, leaving the emptied remainder which composes its bulk for you to grasp after.

You never have to wait much longer than a few minutes for one of the five buses that go into town along the Navan Road. You try to avoid two of them which turn off along Blackhorse Avenue rather than going straight onto Stoneybatter or Phibsborough, but sometimes you are not in a hurry. This morning the bus takes a turn through the Phoenix Park you do not recognise. The road begins to dip and to move low between two walls on an incline, as if this road has been built over a tramline.

Two old buildings close in on either side, reminding you of the flats along North Strand, but without the chest-high walls installed outside each door. If someone was to stand outside one of them, there would be nothing between them and the open air. The facade of the one on the left has been treated by garish pinks, blues and yellows but this does not alleviate the sense of dereliction. Behind the windows, many of which are cracked, broken or gone altogether, plasterboard advertisements for exhibitions held in the National Gallery over the past few years have been pasted up; dates, places and details regarding discounted rates appear next to Vermeer’s ‘Woman Writing a Letter’, Caravaggio’s ‘The Taking of Christ’, Jack Yeats’ ‘The Liffey Swim’.

The one on the right is still in use. Two fat older men with Connolly moustaches and rolled up shirtsleeves stand outside their office doors, one on the second floor, another above him on the third. The first stands, smoking a cigarette, looking at the passing bus without seeing, smoking and exhaling, rotating the heel of his shoe. The other sits on a plastic chair that looks as though it belongs in a school prefab, faces the wall with his head propped up by his arm against a window ledge, looking at his phone.
   It takes ten minutes for you to get from Stoneybatter to the quays, so you get off at the Sirens Hotel, cross Grattan bridge and because you are thinking too much, forget to avoid Temple Bar. There was a novelty food outlet set up in such a way that you could not move from one side of the square to the other without walking through it, past images of hot savoury pies held in the hand to go, one large for 4.50. He was leaning up over a counter varnished to look as though it were old and battered. You saw and recognised him before he did you and you lowered your head, trying to get from the entrance to the exit without having to exchange glances, but he sped up to catch you.

After, sitting in the dense silence which attends students at screen, in the basement of a building nestled against one of Trinity’s far walls, you congratulate yourself on not asking him if he had not died five years ago. What was it that you expected him to do? Reach his hand into his stomach in a mode of jocoseriousness, to plunge his fingers in, like ghosts in cartoons and demonstrate their emergence out the other side?

You pull the monitor towards you, type in your old username and password and watch a small blue circle complete eight circuits of itself.

You log in to mywelfare.ie and begin work on a form that asks you for your aims, objectives, goals, anticipated forecasts of deliverables as part of an all-encompassing life development plan, complete with a projected schedule and a progress-to-date, thereby justifying your access to the Graduate Rental Bursary, not to be confused with the Graduate Rental Support Scheme, which will provide you a vote of confidence from the state that you can take to the bank in order to receive a top-up on your salary proportionate to the gap between the cost of your rent and your gross earnings. Receiving this sum of money will allow you to avoid moving to Athy or Portlaoise, or somewhere else where the rent is, for now, only half of the median wage. You will have to find somewhere else to live; only tenants renting properties from landlords registered with the RTB are eligible for the scheme, but this later headwreck of a task will be worth accomplishing in order to avoid a daily four to four and a half hour commute.

You have some of your answers saved in your drafts, both because the website is somehow both an old one not optimised for contemporary browsers but also overloads the capacity of the machine. Writing them was your chosen means of procrastinating in the weeks leading up to your final exams. Insolvency, both financial and academic, could appear to you as a kind of sublime and you dotted your answers with abuse, insults and other attempts to distress whatever bureaucrat fancied themselves responsible for deciding whether or not the state should keep you afloat. You would have submitted it too if you had not lost your interest in emigrating and if someone had not told you that most applications are assessed by algorithm and any submission that made injudicious, never mind repeated, use of the word ‘prick’ would never even reach its intended target. You decided that putting your anti-depressants beyond your ability to pay for them, without even having the satisfaction of ruining a welfare officer’s day, would not have been worth it.

In addition to the form, you can also expect a battery of tests assessing your worthiness for being a recipient of state-backed private largesse. These tests are divided into three parts: ‘Diagrammatic Logic (8 minutes)’, ‘Situational Judgement (7 minutes)’ and ‘Psychometric Tests (18 minutes)’. The website provides no further information or insight into what each test will look like. You read the e-mail again, search a few key terms and find complaints about their unfairness, how they do not allow sufficient time in which to complete the exercises, but nothing helpful or encouraging.
   Most of the other questions on the form are stupid and tedious and require you to put together sentences which make you wince as you write and read over them again and again. The buzzwords are necessary, but you are in danger of using them in ways that no longer make sense as your brain goes numb and you can no longer trust yourself to convey the impression that you are paying attention to what you are saying.

Chris Beausang was born and continues to live in Dublin. They have had work appear in gorse404INKBanshee and The Globe and the Scales, a short story collection edited by Jake Regan.