EVERY ONE STILL HERE

The past is never far away in these debut stories about Irish intergenerational trauma.

Ní Chuinn (a pseudonym for a Northern Irish writer) takes up the inheritance of characters born after the Troubles, an ethnic and national conflict that took place in Northern Ireland from the 1960s to 1998. In “We All Go,” the narrator Jackie’s parents are carjacked, and his mother, too pregnant with him to spring from the passenger seat, goes into labor days later covered in cuts from the broken windshield. Named after his grandfather, who was interned by the British Army, Jackie longs to know more about his past, but his father is dead, and his family has no interest in reliving it, even though, the narrator explains, “they’re here, inside me…things unspoken as though that makes them unseen.” Elsewhere, in “Daisy Hill,” John, who has already lost so much, goes to visit his uncle, who’s in the process of trying to kill himself. John’s interest in the past drives his contemporaries crazy, but he understands that yet another member of his family has been broken by what he survived. Here, the unseen and unspoken become visible and loud in the story’s final section, which takes the form of a litany of violent acts committed by the British Army against Northern Irish children and adults. Calling these stories intricately woven doesn’t do them justice. In the ones set in Northern Ireland, complex extended family relationships sew together the fabric of the fiction in surprising ways; in the stories set elsewhere, Ní Chuinn gathers loosely connected narrative threads and perspectives, using juxtaposition to create unlikely connections. Both approaches suggest that pain and loss are sewn into the cloth of families and communities and that the cost of intimacy is too often suffering. “I missed my mother,” reflects the narrator of a story about named and unnamed generational violence. “Since I was a teenager, she’d broken in my shoes for me. She insisted. I had seen her feet bleed.”

Wholly original, quietly disquieting short fiction.