The Queue
Seamus stood in the endless queue at the Spar, the fluorescent lights buzzing like trapped wasps overhead.
Dublin rain slicked the streets outside, turning the world to grey mush.
Forty-two years old, wedged between a pram-pushing mammy and a tattooed lad scrolling his phone, he felt the weight of it all – the mortgage on the flat in Tallaght, the job at the call centre where voices blurred into complaints, the wife Maria who stared at the telly each night, her laughter gone flat like yesterday’s Guinness.
Paralysis. That’s what it was. Not the dramatic kind, no strokes or accidents, just the slow seep of nothing.
Twenty years married, two kids glued to screens, and here he was, buying milk and bread like every other Friday.
The queue crawled. Why don’t I just leave? Walk out, hop the Luas to the airport, book a flight to somewhere hot – Spain, Greece, anywhere the sun doesn’t mock you. But no. The till girl scanned items ahead: biscuits, fags, lottery tickets. Dreams on credit.
His mind wandered, unbidden. Milk first, then bread – sliced pan, not the fancy sourdough Maria hates. Hates? No, tolerates. Tolerates me, the house, the routine. God, that holiday in ’09, Crete, her in that red swimsuit, sand between toes, laughing real laughs. What happened? Kids. Job. Rain. The what-ifs piling like unwashed dishes: What if I’d finished uni? What if I’d said no to the transfer? What if I up and left tomorrow, her screaming, kids crying, but free – free like the gulls out there wheeling over the Liffey, no chains, no bloody queue –
“Next!” The till girl’s voice snapped him back. Seamus dumped his items on the conveyor: milk, bread, teabags.
His hands shook slightly as he fumbled for his card.
Paralysed, yes—trapped in this loop of smallness, the city pressing in like a wet coat.
As the receipt printed, his eyes caught the window.
Beyond the rain-streaked glass, an old man shuffled past, bent under an umbrella, pausing to light a fag. Nothing special.
But then – the man’s face turned, lit by the streetlamp, eyes hollow, mouth twisted in a half-smile that said I know, lad. I know. Seamus’s heart lurched. Not pity, no – recognition. The old boy’s life mirrored his own: the unspoken regrets, the daily grind that stole the soul drop by drop. That’s me in twenty years. Or ten. Unless…
Epiphany hit like a pint glass shattering – sharp, irreversible. This wasn’t living; it was waiting to die.
He grabbed his bag, shoved through the automatic doors without waiting for change.
Rain lashed his face, but he didn’t care.
Maria would fume, the kids would sulk, but tonight he’d talk – really talk.
Sell the flat, move to the coast maybe, start that carpentry course he’d eyed online. No more queues, no more drift.
Seamus strode into the downpour, the city alive around him for the first time in years.
The Static Hour
Grey. Everything grey today. The damp clinging to the wool of the coat like a desperate thing, smelling of wet soot and old tobacco. Malachy. Why is he standing here? The GPO a giant stone ghost watching the crowds swarm. Swarm like bees in a rainstorm, umbrellas clashing, black silk domes colliding in a clumsy dance. Turn left at the Spire, no, right, always right, the safe direction, the circle, the loop.
Siobhan’s voice in the wind. You’re a stone, Malachy, a heavy stone in a shallow creek. Creek? No, the Liffey. The brown, sluggish Liffey hauling the city’s secrets out to the bay. I could just walk. Walk till the pavement ends and the salt takes me. But the shoes are worn, the soles thin, the spirit thinner. Why bother? The tea is cold at home. The radiator clicking in the small room on Moore Street. Click. Click. Like a clock that refuses to move forward, a heartbeat for a house that forgot how to breathe.
Stuck. Just stuck. Like the gum on the underside of a desk. A lifetime of “perhaps tomorrow” and “almost then.” The ghost of a gesture. He remembers the way Turlough used to laugh, a loud, rattling sound that shook the windows of the pub, but Turlough is gone now, drifted off into the fog of the coast, and Malachy is the only one left to hold the silence. The silence is heavy. It has a weight, a thickness, like wool soaked in brine.
Stop. The window of the chemist. A reflection.
There. A man in a grey coat. Not a man, really—a smudge. A blur of a person against the neon glow of the pharmacy signs. He looks like a smudge on a lens, a mistake in the composition of the street. Is that it? The sum of it? To be a smudge on O’Connell Street?
The sudden sharp crack of a bus brake. Screech.
The light changes. Green. Everyone moves. The current of the city pulls them away in a sudden, violent surge of purpose. And he is the only rock in the stream. He is the anchor, but the ship is gone. He has been gripping the rope with white knuckles while the boat drifted a decade ago, leaving him alone on the pier.
The rope is just a thread now. A thin, fraying thread of habit.
I can let go, he thinks. The thought is a small, bright needle piercing the grey. I can just… let go.
He doesn’t move, not yet, but for the first time in years, he feels the ghost of a breeze against his cheek, and the smudge in the window seems, for a fleeting second, to breathe.