The Hanged Man I associate the tarot with my early teenage years, a particularly disempowered time when there was nothing to do but when every moment was saturated with an indefinable yearning. At fourteen, I couldn’t even get a job as a lounge girl in the local pub, the means by which most of my friends gained some independence, working there after school and sneaking drinks with the barmen after closing. I wandered around town with my printed-out CVs, dropping them in front of managers who binned them as soon as I left the shop. In those days, time stretched and warped around us. We were waiting for something external to come and change our lives. The tarot promised us a message from the beyond. The Hanged Man smiles as he hangs upside down. I often drew this card as a teenager, and his expression troubled me. That (ironic?) smile...

Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022 Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not...

Not finding a four-leaf clover in the playground. Taking two leaves off one clover and holding the stalk up to a full one, then going around boasting about my fake four-leaf clover, knowing in my heart it could only bring bad luck. My mother in a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit at the hot sulphur pools in Fontpédrouse, and the snow on the mountains behind her. The colour and shape of the fallen maple leaves in Phoenix Park, walking around on my own after taking oxycodone. Ice-creams in the corner shop like little pink feet. The girl from the school next door who used to hang out in the bushes where we went to smoke. She had cigarette burns all down her cleavage. She said she let her boyfriends do it and seemed to find it funny. Watching a video of a bullfighter being gored to death and the camera panning...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Online Only, May 2025 Over the years, we’ve published a series of casual conversations between writers in Tolka. We have paired authors such as Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, as they have reflected on how they write their books and discuss the fundamental underpinnings of their art, as well as talking about what they’ve had for dinner and seen on the telly recently. We’re now delighted to publish a new conversation between Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh. Lucy and Aimée first met in 2022, when Aimée took Lucy’s Faber Academy course on the short story, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since. Lucy and Aimée are both writers from Belfast. Lucy is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories published by Faber: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021) and, most recently, Openings (2024). Her most recent novel, These...