Time Immemorial (The Milk House, 2021)

The Milk House is a rural writing collective. In April 2021, it published Gráinne’s essay Time Immemorial, on the quiet power of country graveyards. The piece was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2021 and Best of the Net 2021.

Opening lines:

Graveyards are memory places. Rural graveyards, in particular, with their shades of grey and green. There is a mossy feel to them, soft and damp. They shift by seasons, from hopeful green to birdsong green, then dappled green to inky green. Graveyards glisten. They hold weather. The evidence in their disrepair and flourishing, the hardness softening, the green taking over. Every Irish country graveyard has a sense of it having just rained or being about to. As if the memories there need frequent watering. Nature doing our work for us.

When I was small, I watched a television programme that invited me – and every other child too young for school – into a place of discovery. Come with me through the magic door, it said. I cannot enter a graveyard without that line shivering through me. The threshold of a graveyard requires a slowing down, a suspension of the daily world.

Graveyard gates creak, no matter how new. As if wherever and however such things are made, whether factory or forge – it seems the kind of thing I might have seen through the magic door but have long since forgotten – the gates for graveyards are made on a bockety belt, where the tongues and grooves and metallic bits and bobs never quite align. Reminding us that nothing is flawless, not even the person now gone, who, too, was once gloriously and imperfectly alive. The gate calls us to ourselves, reminds us where we are. That this is no ordinary gate. No side-of-the-house gate. No kissing gate at the start of a coastal walk. No walled kitchen garden gate. No theme park entry gate. No country house museum gate. No high-latched playground gate. No childproof gate at the bottom of your stairs. There is nothing childproof here. Beyond the gate, the creak says, our daily nonsenses cannot pass. Be respectful of that or stay outside.

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Safekeeping (Fish Anthology 2020)

In 2020, Fish Publishing expanded their anthology to include a lockdown category to reflect our strange pandemic year. Gráinne's short piece Safekeeping was selected for inclusion.

Opening lines:

My daughter’s lunchbox is not empty. Though it holds no banana peel or sandwich crusts,

no pips from grapes or the half-licked lid of a yogurt carton. No air-softened cracker crumbs

or rubbery carrot sticks, cut late last night with too much grumbling and too little gratitude.

I gather into the beeswrap, instead, the crumbs of resolve that remain

after the nightly horse-trading of screens and stories,

the weary backdrop of homeschooled tears and pleas for five more minutes

for the important things forgotten all the rest of the day.

A hug. A biscuit. The hind leg of the dog left unfondled.

The Agatha Christie Bookclub (RiPPLE Anthology 2017)

As a Creative Writing student in Kingston University, Gráinne's short story, The Agatha Christie Bookclub, was included in the RiPPLE Anthology 2017 (Kingston University Press).

Opening lines:

Do call me Jane, won’t you? And you are? With a ‘y’? Oh, I see, how very modern. No, I’m afraid I am not familiar with that particular show. It’s nice and quiet on the train today, don’t you think? Is this a regular route for you? No, I didn’t think so. I might be getting on, or, as my friend Julia says, I might have already got there, but I believe I should remember you if I had seen you. Your hair, you see, is quite the same shade as my living-room lamp and that’s not a thing a person would forget, don’t you agree? Yes, I’m often on this train. I don’t live up this way, heavens no, but my book club meets on Wednesdays and ever since Hilary broke her hip we have been travelling to her house for our little gatherings. She would be a loss to our group, we all agreed, of course, there was no question of making the effort to continue to include her, but she is such a slapdash host, Hilary, one always has the sense that one is somehow imposing. And yet now that we have begun this habit of meeting at her home it’s so terribly difficult to undo without causing offence. It’s the little things, you know. A biscuit selection never lies. Are you on your way home from work? Yes, I can see how that might make work difficult, how fortunate that there are such a variety of allowances available.

Full of Grace (Nivalis 2015)

Gráinne's story Full of Grace is the opening story in the Nivalis anthology.

Opening lines:

'Who am I telling?' she says to the statue, when the light comes back. 'Don't you know better than anyone?'

The statue says nothing, her pale face impassive above her cloak, bight against the ashy-grey cardigan of almost-morning.

She can hear Tadhg upstairs in the back bedroom, his breaths wheezing through the floorboards like the ghost of Chirstmas-yet-to-come. She has told him over and over to go and see the doctor but, no, he is of that age and generation that sees the doctor only in A&E. The old fool. She told him again only the previous day, on their way back from their weekly visit to the bank to lodge the weekend's takings, heavy hearts in a light envelope, nothing much to be said.

After, in the café, she watched him come out of the ladies' room, fumbling at his fly with too-late dignity. She would know the sound of his step anywhere, that dragging noise as though he is in his slippers even when he is wearing his good shoes. He walked like that always, even as a child. Back then, they were not what you would have called friends; she has no real memories of them ever playing together, just his shuffling steps up and down the hallway outside her room, the soundtrack of their childhood. He sat down beside her, panting gently, fumbling the coins from his pocket. He stacked the coppers into trembling towers on the table between them, counting out enough for his tea, her scone. In their younger days, she would have scolded him for this precision, its implication of too little. Now, she sucked back words and breath, itself an effort.

'The bar wants opening,' she said, finally, and they got up to leave, walking out to the slap-swoosh of his summer sandal, thickened with a sock to cushion his corns, his one shiny shoe clicking behind him, like the drawing of a cruel child.

Frank & Alfie (Irish Literary Review, 2015)

Gráinne's story Frank & Alfie was published in the Irish Literary Review, Issue 5, January 2015.

Opening lines:

‘You broke its heart,’ she said, when I first brought Alfie home and he sat mute in the cage. ‘I thought it was all chat with the poor fool that had it before you.’

She was planted in front of me in one of the outfits she had adopted in recent months, a draped curtain of one thing over the other, all the same colour only lighter on the bottom than the top. ‘Layering’ she called it, as if giving it a name didn’t make her look like she was dissolving from the ground up.

‘Take it back,’ she said.

‘He needs time to get to know us, that’s all,’ I said, poking my little finger in between the bars of the cage, touching the brightness.

‘A fool and his money are soon parted,’ she said with a satisfied nod. As if all the years of marriage had led to this moment of victory.

‘You sound like your mother,’ I said. Once upon a time it would have been enough to send her to bed in tears and Gina, our eldest, would have had to be sent up to coax her back out to make the dinner.

‘Just because she said it doesn’t mean it’s not true.’

‘It’s all talk-talk-talk round here,’ I said to Alfie. ‘No wonder you’re waiting to get a word in edgeways.’

‘I liked you better out of my sight,’ she said from the doorway. It was a new-ish arrow, a comment she had added to her repertoire to fit the circumstances of my retirement. It had lost its snap crackle and pop after the third or fourth spitting, like everything else.

‘Let’s see what’s new in the world, Alfie,’ I said, and turned on the television.

Old Dogs (The Short Story, 2012)

Gráinne's story Old Dogs placed second in The Short Story competition, 2012

Opening lines:

And, just like that, I'm back in the world. Can't stand the smell of hospitals, never could. And him: standing here, mesmerised by his own shiny shoes, wrinkling his nose at my smell, a rabbit in a white coat. Tests, he said. Antibiotics for a couple of days, he said. A drip, he said. A trap, I thought. The nurses sighed and swooned and turned their backs, and I left; the young lad down the quays can get me all the pills I need. A dizzy spell and a bit of a fall, that's all it was, no big deal in my world.

You don't just find yourself on the street, you know, never mind what the St Vincent de Paul say; gobshites and money-grubbers the lot of them, using half the donations to pay for offices and conferences and Christ-knows what else. It takes work to get here. There's a long list of people you work your whole life to push away. Husband, parents, friends: push, push, push, and eventually your life's your own. Or the junkies and the alkies, it takes them a long time to get to the bottom, to get everyone to give up on them, that's a lot of work right there.

And, just like that, I’m back in the world. Can’t stand the smell of hospitals, never could. And him; standing there, mesmerised by his own shiny shoes, wrinkling his nose at my smell, a rabbit in a white coat. Tests, he said. Antibiotics for a couple of days, he said. A drip, he said. A trap, I thought. The nurses sighed, and swooned, and turned their backs, and I left; the young lad down the quays can get me all the pills I need. A dizzy spell and a bit of a fall, that’s all it was; no big deal in my world.

You don’t just find yourself on the street, you know, never mind what the St. Vincent de Paul say; gobshites and money-grubbers the lot of them, using half the donations to pay for offices and conferences and Christ-knows what else. It takes work to get here; there’s a long list of people you work your whole life to push away. Husband, parents, friends; push, push push, and, eventually, your life’s your own. Or the junkies and the alkies, it takes them a long time to get to the bottom, to get everyone to give up on them, that’s a lot of work right there. We’ve all earned our place here. Except the gypsies; born into it, trained for it, flooding the market with their tricks and experts. Nobody talks to them much. Nobody tells them the latest scams, or who died in the frost in the night. Three years I’ve been living rough now, give or take. It gets easier when you get older, when you look older; people are that bit more ready to pity you, push money at you, look through you. There but for the grace of God.