Mairead Fagan

Listen to Mairead read her story

I don’t mean right away, like hot pizza, flesh stringing from between teeth like melted mozzarella, blood sheeting over her chin and drip-drip-dripping onto my fuzzy newborn head, puddling in my fontanelles. No. She brought my placenta home in a waxed paper bag and fried it. She ate it like steak. I believe wine was involved.  

My father relishes telling this story to his lovers. ‘I suppose it was her way of absorbing a little of our daughter back into herself,’ he says as he tops up a proffered gin glass, ‘before she abandoned us.’  At this, his handsome chin wobbles, his manly brow crumples, and the gin glass is placed to one side so pale, elegant hands can cup his own. Before long the wooden headboard in his room is slamming against the wall to a cacophony of grunts and groans and, on one occasion, a full aria; Puccini, I think.

I should have moved out long ago, but I’ve grown close to the entomologist my father employed to curate his large and disorganised insect collection. She lives in the library, sleeping in a hammock strung between shelves. Every day, she flits between glass-fronted cabinets, ordering and arranging and labelling. 

‘Why would a mother leave her child?’ I ask the entomologist.

‘Most insects leave their young before they’re hatched,’ she says. ‘Perhaps your mother was a moth, or a mayfly, or a mantis.’

‘She ate my placenta,’ I point out. 

‘Some species consume their own larvae,’ she says. ‘In others, it’s the mother who’s consumed.’ Her kind eyes gaze at me, enlarged by her black-framed glasses. ‘It’s about survival,’ she says.

At dinner, my father introduces me to his latest flame. An imago; younger than me, pheromone fragrant and shimmering with dewy skin. I smile politely, wondering how long it will be before her sheen has worn dusty and thin, before she finds herself floundering, spiralling, desiccated. I excuse myself and wake the entomologist from her cocoon. We pull open velvet lined drawers to see cicadas’ empty exoskeletons, fleas immobilised on glass slides, impossibly patterned lepidoptera with open, vulnerable wings. 

‘I found this,’ she says nervously, handing me a video tape. ‘It was hidden amongst the specimens.’

The footage shows a young woman, who talks to the camera, to me, in a whisper. ‘Your father is a dragonfly,’ she begins, before explaining everything. 

The entomologist quietly holds my hand as I watch, her touch light and electrical. ‘Dragonflies,’ she says, as the tape reels to its end, ‘so dazzling, but so voracious. They consume anything and everything.’  

‘Come with me,’ I say. 

On the first day of our escape, we pin each other down in the chirping grass and examine every inch of spiracled skin. We kiss our mandibles into soft bruises and wrap long legs about each other’s necks, unfurling tongues orchid deep until we’re so brittle we can feel our too tight skin cracking into perfect husks.

We burst into something else. Something winged. Something new.

Mairead’s prompts were: During the First Day of…, any ‘Ologist, Found Footage

Mairead Fagan lives in the South West, UK. She walks her dog, writes stories, reads books, drinks coffee, eats biscuits, plans world domination, eats more biscuits, and sleeps. Her stories have been published in anthologies and in literary magazines. SL Bridport, winner Bath FFA, some other fancy stuff: @maireadwrites.bsky.social