'When my mother was at Lourdes' by Helen Kennedy

I got home from school early to find a woman sitting on the sofa with a detonator between her legs. Silk cut lips, sling backs and sugar spun hair. Her red dress tight like vocal chords. She laughed, a silly girl laugh, even though she was a grown up.  

My father quickly buttoned up his shirt, to hide the moist shadow of his chest. He wiped the lipstick tint from his mouth. ‘Holy Mother of God,’ you’re back early,’ he said. 

I remembered that I had seen the woman before, leaning up against the railway bridge, in a cloud of embassy smoke. My mother had said that women like her wouldn’t go to heaven.   

My father’s eyes pleaded with me, before  the bomb went off.

‘My Mammy’s gone to Lourdes with The Sisters of Mercy,’ I said. The woman stopped laughing then and reached for a cigarette, uncrossing her legs to reveal the pale white sheen of her thighs.

I wanted to tell her about the fungus that ate my mother’s breast, the musty, mottled tissues she hid in her bra cup. 

My father got up and offered me an ice lolly from the freezer. I shook my head. 

‘Do you believe in miracles?’ I said to the woman. ‘Mammy says they happen to good people.’ 

‘I do,’ the woman said and she smiled, an uncertain smile. 

She reached out her arms and held the small wreckage of me in her arms. She wasn’t my mother then, but it didn’t matter. 

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Helen Kennedy is a writer of short stories and flash fiction and has just completed a novel. @helenkennedywrites