Catherine O’Brien

The morning was openly tearful and offering a tacit admission of its guilt but people on the morning commute were more concerned with a bear who had absconded from the zoo. 

Tragedy happens most opportunely in secluded places or at least that’s what it would have said had it been interviewed. Instead, he stood before the steady blinks of their lenses and out of his mouth flew torrents of undammable lies. 

He’d betrayed slumber and its delicate fretwork of dreams. He’d drank black coffee by his blank walls. He’d worn the shirt with the satin-flower pattern she’d chosen. His untruths formed a perfect circle in his mind. She was hypnotic, she was first. His voice was scratchy like a crow’s who’d forgotten how to cough. The bottle of water the reporter had shared with him was tepid and coached the hurt how to heal.

‘Tell us about her.’

‘She was a sweetheart. She called me her Teddy Bear.’

They’d cut to a commercial break before he had to mention that he’d tranquilised her trepidation with a knowing but friendly smile. He’d told her later that life is sharp and short. He’d daubed something resembling love over the hellish graffiti of her disbelieving mind. She’d said ‘I need someone like you’ as she dove into his raconteur arms. She’d been shocked by the cannon-ball largesse of her falling for him. He’d forgotten to explain that his heart didn’t take bookings and operated a queue system when busy. 

“Currant bushes can pollinate their own flowers, so you only have to plant one variety to get fruit, although you’ll get bigger fruit if you plant two different varieties”, she’d told him this but for him metaphors were as maddening and wispy as a mackerel sky.

He felt terribly unfortunate to have witnessed the desiccation of her hopes and dreams. He saw the bear ambling down the street and sprinted to his front porch. She’d marvelled at his intellect when he’d told her ‘the polygraph is always a polyglot.’ She’d asked him then about his work, asinine questions if he were to be frank, but he’d tolerated them because he liked how it felt to be respected – a light massage for his philosopher’s mind. 

She’d rounded the corner back into their street with nothing but a dog biscuit for that cheeky pup two blocks over that nuzzled her palm. He’d seen her scream that unveiled her protruding teeth. He’d been entombed by fear for his chicken-hearted person. He’d watched as extravasated blood left without a sound. He’d thought about life as an algebraic expression made up as it is of constants and variables. 

Catherine O’Brien is an Irish writer of poems, flash fiction and short stories. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in English Language and Literature. Her work has most recently appeared in Comhar, Splonk, Mythic Picnic, Ink Sweat &Tears, Full House Literary, The Gooseberry Pie Literary Magazine, Flash Boulevard, BULL and Bending Genres. She featured on the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist 2024 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions (2023). You can find out more about her and her work on X @abairrud2021.