“Bog Premonitions” by Éabha Ní Lionáird
flash fiction
Photo by Christine Stoddard
He was a man, probably. Now he’s a body. Warped and drowned and bronzed and flattened. He’d lived and died. For an age he breathed beneath watery peat but now lay mangled under museum lights.
He is a bog body.
I thought it had to be illegal to look upon his frozen face. I was seven after all. Even I knew seven-year-olds shouldn’t see between a parent’s curation. I enjoyed bedtime at eight and careful monitoring and no bodies in my vicinity, but my mother had brought me to this glass casket, and so I had to watch.
“He’s dead?” I asked her as I held onto her sleeve.
“It’s a display.” She responded, as if his fingernails and ginger hair were less human having been submerged in the earth for a while. Time turns people into artefacts, tragedy into an uncomfortable feeling in a child’s stomach. Was he a person still? Or did he just wear the beaten skin of one?
I thought myself a part of the dirt, too, so maybe we were alike. I’d play in it often, digging myself a burrow, hunting for worms. My skin was filthy with it.
When I’d dig, moments of paralysis would seize my groping hands, followed by visions of a withered face peaking at me from under the soil. My premonitions were too fleeting. I’d dig on, determined to catch the oracle, the lurking pervert who lived in the dirt.
I hoped I wouldn’t have to see him, but I took pleasure in my fear. I had knowledge of not knowing, and that felt forbidden. There was a dangerous monument before me. Around me, it hugged me tight, my loved ones too. It covered the world in its weight and mass. I couldn’t understand it, but bog body did.
I started to see him in other places. At the train station, while I skipped over the yellow line, he was there. He’d press his scraps over the tracks and wait. My head was too close when the train came. I was craning to see him there, to finally ask him the question. The whiplash of its sound stung my eyes with fat tear bulbs.
He was also at the swimming pool. Inside the filter, I’d see his fingers squeezing out from between the grates. They looked like frayed yarn, bobbing under the water. His body was in there, twisted through the pipes, hidden from me. My chest would burn as I clawed at his prison, air forgotten. I knew when I resurfaced, he would be gone.
“What happens after we die?” I asked my mother one Saturday morning as we put on our rain shoes.
“You go to heaven.” She answered too quickly.
“Then why are people in the dirt?”
Her mouth had settled into a grim line, and she busied herself with my coat buttons. I thought she might tell me the secret. Instead, she clicked her tongue.
“You don’t have to worry about that.”
Beneath our feet, the bog body disagreed.
Éabha Ní Lionáird is an English Literature student at the University of Galway. She likes to write about humanity and the natural world as well as injecting melancholy into nostalgia. Her goal is to create discomfort that curls up inside your chest and follows you home.
Christine Stoddard is a multimedia creator and artist named one of Brooklyn Magazine’s Top 50 Most Fascinating People and Style Weekly’s Top 40 Under 40 of Richmond, VA. She co-hosts the comedy TV show Don’t Mind If I Don’t with Aaron Gold, and runs the YouTube channel Stoddard Says via her production company, Quail Bell. Her artwork, fiction, and poetry have been featured in the Queens Botanical Garden, The Portland Review, Ms. Magazine, So to Speak, Jimson Weed, The Brooklyn Quarterly, and beyond. Stoddard is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, The City College of New York-CUNY, and VCUarts Cinema. @StoddardSays