Portals

I’ve a little deal running for the next few months where you can subscribe for 30% less than usual. Avail at the link.

I have on my keyring a number of keys to some houses in which I lived briefly. I couldn’t tell you what key to use for each door. I’d struggle to find said doors in a street line-up, to be honest with you. I feel like a creep. I could post them, look for addresses in my email. But then I would be returning the keys to new tenants, the originals long gone, scaring them. 

I remember various radiators. Furnaces to the touch, they suffused nothing and never met the sharp cold wet air head-on. Showers whose taps were an enigma machine. I remember tiles that would be slimy with near moss, living things you’d choke with Cillit Bang and scrub with half an abused lemon and sprinkle with clumped baking soda. Hissing, fizzing, then slow lazy bubbling. Efforts in vain really, because these not-that-old houses cling to damp. They envelope anything dry. 

On my keyring, there are also loyalty cards for businesses that no longer exist. My accumulated points rest somewhere on an excel sheet. Useless, probably eating up storage leaching off a data centre somewhere, which in turn eats water as if it is lava. At least, that is what I understand they do be doing. 

I remember staying up late on a Saturday night as a teenager to watch Sex, Lives, and Videotape on TG4 on the one television in the house which picked up the channel. It was a small machine in the kitchen on a sideboard next to the fridge. Sometimes, the picture would be bad on it but if you put your hand between the television and the fridge and held it there, the image would be perfect. And that is how I, almost embracing the television, watched a fictional character played by James Spader tell a fictional couple played by Andie MacDowell and Peter Gallagher, “I just like having the one key, it’s clean.”

P.S. I’ve a piece of flash fiction in the latest Banshee (an Irish literary journal). Paid subscribers might recognise it from something I sent/made earlier. You can buy the journal on the Banshee website (or in select shops, including Nano Nagle Place which has a very lovely gift shop if you’re in Cork now or soon). There is a launch of the journal tonight in Books Upstairs, Dublin where some contributors will be reading their pieces. I’ll be in a community college instead as I’m doing a short course on Tuesday evenings under the glare of sharp lights. They are a kind of artificial brightness that makes me feel microwaved. But the course is very good.