...

‘What are you guys doing?’ asked Michael.

‘Planting a rose,’ said Sue, banging down the earth with a spade.

‘It’s called Dublin Bay,’ said Alison.

‘We buried my breast under it,’ Bridget said with a giggle and then began to cry.

God! Michael thought. Mum was weird. Mum with her women’s groups and incense sticks and her petitions to save bears and trees and political prisoners. And then there were her made-up ceremonies marking spring and autumn and now sticking a rose on top of her sawn-off breast. Michael hated that rose. Afterwards, when it flooded the supports of the verandah with blood-like blossoms, he would kick at the bush as he passed or bash at it viciously with his backpack.

Michael’s parents danced in the lounge. They did the rumba.

‘Now for the cucaracha,’ said Bridget. The two of them wiggled about, laughing and fooling.

‘We’ll be cockroaches together,’ said Dad, catching Bridget very closely in his arms.

Michael watched through the French doors. He wondered what his father thought of Bridget all lopsided under her clothes.

The first page of Coral's short story Dublin Bay, as it appeared
in The Dubliner (October 2001).