Still & Quiet Things
by Rebecca O’Connor
Somewhere in the Midlands a newly bereaved husband sits watching television with his three small children. A couple plants Jerusalem artichokes on their allotment in Zone 6. Up and down a street in Bromley, a window cleaner overhears family arguments. In Wiltshire, a woman and her daughter collect potting compost from molehills on the village green. A man in Coventry finishes his thesis on bats. Eggs are delivered to the neighbours, campers moved on from Flynn’s Pass. In Honolulu, an elderly lady completes the first draft of her book about her murdered friend while her husband teaches online. A woman plucks a stray hair from her nose. Mules stand in a field. A man in Bray posts a picture of an object he has thrown up into the sky. A boy falls off his bike and breaks his leg. Lilac grows. Two small children sleep in a teepee in the living room. Their mother is one of the first people in Naples to get a haircut. In California, a man films his husband playing the piano. A family’s new puppy shits on the kitchen floor again. A woman in Glasgow is told not to set foot outside her door for twelve weeks. Food parcels are delivered. Teenagers make love in the back seat of a car. On the island, a woman walks through the woods in her wellingtons and a kimono. A farmer tears out two hundred metres of nesting hedgerow. Ponds are built, an origami eagle. A vet straightens a surfer’s broken nose on Pendine Beach. A boy finds a crayfish in the lake. His younger sister falls headfirst out of the boat. Someone’s ex dies. A girl poses in her parent’s back yard. A young woman listens to birdsong outside her Leyton window. A mother of two small children is told her tumour is enflamed. Her husband cycles three times around the lake. In upstate New York, her sister pins a rhinoceros beetle in a display case. Twin girls run naked through a large house. An artist couple kiss in front of his paintings in their studio in Szczecin. Funeral services are broadcast live. In downtown Toronto, an aunt sits in her apartment surrounded by her life’s work, including the coffee table. A hare runs the circuit of a yellow field. A radiologist cancels outpatients. A man cooks a lone steak on a barbeque. Someone pays ten euro for a tape of other voices to harmonise with. A sculptor chips away at a stone horse. A teacher praises her student’s meticulousness. Children look blankly at their grandparents’ faces.
Rebecca O’Connor’s debut collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Irish Times Shine Strong Award. She is the recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize and was a poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust. Her debut novel, He Is Mine and I Have No Other, was published by Canongate in 2018 and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award. She lives in rural Ireland with her husband and three children, and is co-director of The Moth (www.themothmagazine.com).