Daisy Chain
Isobel O’Donovan | Tolka Issue Four, February 2025
I remember my mother’s voice in the kitchen, as though choruses of her could spill from an opened cupboard. Among the delft and vocal cords, a nestle of laughs and cries pushed through the yellow yolk of the sun streaming through the window. My infant head laid on her chest, ear pressed to lung like a shell whispering of the sea. The place where sleep seeps through a tablecloth like spilt milk, ink.
When the Internet unfastens my limbs from my mind, it is to this warm, lullabied body that I long to return. Something punctures the memory – a niggling feeling of is that all? Such multitudes of experience shaped into an apron by the cookiecutter of nostalgia. It’s better now, I think, as the clock counts hours that are just for me, no nappy cloth frozen solid on the line. My phone flashes with a suggestion: Twelve things your OB-GYN wishes you knew about your vagina. A vulva spreads its pixels across the screen, and still the feeling: is that all? My mother told me she used to get the split ends of her hair singed off, as though the latent witch ever-present in women retreated to just the driest tips. Like a hashtag used to indicate a town square on a map, a centre from which information spread outward. O, ancient tool of aggregation. O, broken attention span, pigeons fighting over crumbs. My last brain cell pipes up: bring a bucket and a mop for this wet ass pussy.
*
To be commanded by culture is to stick your hands up when Beyoncé tells you to, even though you are thirteen years old and have never been kissed by anyone other than your mother. To be commanded by culture is to strap a Wii Remote to your wrist and believe you are stroking a pony. My mother mistook my cousin’s TikTok dance for genuflection and rewarded her piety with a packet of beef-flavoured Hula Hoops. Her movements belonged to the larger movement of her generation through cyberspace. The speculative location of it glows with the same mystery as faith: a ring light for a halo; a hype house for a stable.
*
I walk in the park, turn a familiar corner and the view unwraps my heart. Rain falls gently on my body. I am here, I breathe, this is where I am. The rain eases; the grass is covered in cobwebs beaded with droplets; slugs slide over wet grass with reckless abandon. A hawk glides over my scalp in search of mice. I yell songs at the hawk as though my voice is a kite and I’m gripping the string.
Grip the string till it thins to a thread; the yolk of the sun hides behind a cloud. My phone buzzes in my pocket. I tease the thread through the notification – pull, pull, pull. The park unravels like a cardigan snagged on a bramble. There is no retracing back to the moment of the rain, to eyes resting into the detail of trees, birdsong like teacups singing from their hooks on a dresser. There is only a white window of screen; whites of eyes fatigued by blue light; red veins. My voice retreats from the blue sky, from the birds. I am the single gesture of the blunt tip of a finger. I walk home on tracked steps and travel for miles on my thumbprint. My brain full of Bernie Sanders’s mittens at the inauguration – a mood! – my hand freezes to grip the image.
*
A document untouched for days begs for the abandon of the park slugs. Write what you like to read, I am advised. I am most absorbed when I rediscover an old coat with pockets full of receipts, forgotten days pieced back together through past transactions. I smooth the wrinkles from a Boots receipt and try to relive a bout of indigestion that required me to buy Rennie eight months ago. To finish writing the novel, keep buying and buying and forgetting? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Ha! It’s been four years since I lost a prescription for thrush medication at the university canteen and I still think about it sometimes. A day can be ruined picturing a half acquaintance finding the pink carbon slip on the floor – discreetly folded – recognising my name and then putting my name together with the yeasty itch that Canesten Cream brings to mind. How to choose where to look when the edge of every screen softens, thins to the embryonic glimmer of a contact lens. My eyes strain like horny dogs on leads; the picture that flashes up this time is Bernie photoshopped into my graduation picture. Lolololol! Please, anything not to feel shame.
*
My secondary school was named after Saint Ursula, who led a thousand virgins to their deaths rather than renounce her faith. Somewhere inside the first utterance of the phrase moth to a flame lay a future in which an ice blonde smile of influence would lead her million loyal followers to the purchase of a pair of Fabletics leggings. I tap her image and links bloom under my fingertips to shop the look. I am willed on by faith; the idealised version of my body that I hold in my mind is the future I live inside. She relies on me, my relentless gazing. Her fingertips navigate the screen to post and I, the other side of the transaction, click. Through the window of our screens our fingers briefly unite, a missed connection like angel hands reaching through the Sistine Chapel to touch us lowly sinners. At school, we were given the words for our bodies in Latin, as though the sweaty, acned flesh under our uniforms were ancient scriptures we could not possibly understand, could not touch without damaging with the grubby oil of our hands. During Lent we were taken to the chapel to pray before the open, empty tabernacle, the absence of His body charging the air with the static crackle of the invisible. Those hours spent focusing on the void at the centre of the gilded box were not so different to the flimsy hours I lose to the thrall of the screen, its magnetic gulf bursting with bodies I might never touch, but I believe, nonetheless, exist. I post a boomerang of my ass and what, exactly, do I hope will come flying back to me? The pastel curve of pert perfection that I believe I deserve? To be spanked by the hand of God himself?
*
I don’t know how to tell you this, but it’s going to take a lot of ugly mistakes to learn how to salsa.
His blue eyes brim with the same innocence as soft, buttered soda bread at the edge of a bowl of soup. His face is illuminated by the glow of his phone, inside which two men are gyrating their hips with open shirts. I see the body he holds in his mind, his face on the neck of one of those men, his fingers snapping in time with the movement of his hips. When the dancefloor started to sweat at his sister’s wedding, the anxious seagull that usually perches on his chest took off. He swung his arms from side to side as though he was drawing the shape of a long, low hammock in the air. His feet stamped smouldering sparks out of the burning carpet of his mind. Seated onlookers envied him; they were waiting for the right amount of alcohol to invite them to where he was now. My heart burst for him that night. In fact, I let him finish on my breasts.
Salsa would take some time to practise, by which point he would want something else.
The same way that no one is willing to really do the work of inventing a user-friendly printer. But my God, the smell of hot paper.
*
At the studio, at my desk, I watch videos of couples together salsa dancing. The cursor on my laptop flashes like a woodpecker boring into a tree. So far I have spent more time watching salsa than typing. The printer blinks ominously yellow and announces it’s low on toner – a problem I have no idea how to fix – and a petal of belief that I will be a writer falls from the daisy inside me. Today it would be more accurate to describe myself as a salsa-voyeur than a writer, castanets click with pathos. Click, click, click.
*
A man who does burpees to camera has become a national hero, and he’s inside my TV telling me to push through the burn in my glutes. We’ve bought the legs, bums and tums package again. We take great care to make our ‘before’ pictures as awful as possible, to emphasise the arc of our anticipated transformation. For his, he sits on the toilet and his belly folds like pizza dough. I lie on the bed, so my breasts fall away from each other and the lightly downed dome of my stomach rises between them, the moon. We don’t imagine our new bodies to be the products of hard work, but utopic destinations where we feel full after a bowl of yoghurt and we dress in the crisp white linens of department-store beds. I prepare the meal the hero has chosen for us; as I spiralise a courgette I wonder what he does with all the flabby stomachs of his victims. As we nibble through our rabbit meal, is he cackling and wearing our old love handles as hats? I worry that when I have sex with the ‘after’ version of my boyfriend that my hands will be unable to grasp at his muscle. Perhaps we will roll off each other like raindrops on a waxed jacket.
We turn out the lights and say I love you. We drag our thumbs over other lives we might have lived. I’m seething with jealousy over a wood-panelled kitchen when I feel him press against me. I grab his folds a little tighter as we make love.
*
I am a TV chef on heat. I bend seductively to pick up the grape that has been lodged under the fridge for weeks, its thin green skin furred with mould in a puddle of its former sweetness. I long for the rolling-pin girth of him until I see that he hasn’t taken the overflowing bin downstairs even though I asked him to this morning. We are trapped inside an argument that predates our birth, as though the shape of a woman is given only to stir her dreams into stodgy cakes, as though the shape of a man is formed only to put up shelves with an anus choked with retention. The dream of a family in a semi-detached home doesn’t fit either of our ambitions, but we try to make it bend to accommodate two creative careers, a sense of gender equality, and the unshakeable presence of a dog – the continuous and blameless mascot of the nuclear. Despite our sex toys and shelves of feminist books, we are living inside the outlines of a ball and chain, our rented flat the stage of this infinite restaging. Oh, look, a sex-positive illustration of an orgy from Etsy. And here! An internalised gender role.
*
At the studio I cheat on him with a packet of instant noodles. The permed square relaxes in the boiling water, noodles slowly break free and unwind their curly fronds. I’ll be gentle with you, I say, as I tear the serrated edge of the square foil flavour packet. I sprinkle it with memories of chicken and dehydrated peas, the rage my grandmother felt at the time she wasted making suet pastry rises in the stifling steam.
*
Resurfacing for air, hands inexplicably searching eBay for old brown mittens, as though my palms alone deserve to feel sheathed in refusal. A memory of the hunger with which I used to read as a child, a dog bent on running after a rabbit, tongue streaming from mouth. What sort of dog are you?! The document is white, empty, flutters like a sail awaiting a gust. My pocket buzzes full of bees.
*
Before the Internet I had no output for my first flickering feelings of desire. With no blueprint, my hormones poured into the martyrs of the Irish state who we learnt about at school. Kilmainham Gaol was a sticky place in my fantasies, the rough stone walls damp with the gasped breaths of the consummation of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford’s doomed marriage. On a school trip to the gaol when I was fourteen, the floorboards creaked with orgasms. I hoped that if I panted that captive air hard enough some fibre of their lust might touch my insides. We studied Yeats at school and the earnest yearning which floods his poems mirrored my urgent desire to become someone. The few boys who did touch my teenage body did so searchingly, as though their fingers were encountering a series of knobs and buttons which needed to be diffused by flicking and squeezing. I offered myself to them with the same innocence as a communion wafer dissolving on a child’s tongue, hoping a miracle might occur on this girlish body of mine that would transform it into a woman. Tread softly, I urged my early suitors as they stroked my goosebumped skin.
*
It’s just like working in an office, I say, as he helps me to move a new chair and desk into the studio. We rise in the lift past the rooms of cubicles splattered with oil paint, plaster, cut-outs of seventies porn stars. The housewife’s competency can be measured by inspecting the contents of her larder and waste bin and finding nothing in either that does not belong therein. The fridge in the kitchenette contains a mouldy jar of hotdogs suspended in porky, embryonic liquid and half-full bottles of Indian ink. A condom calcifies in a binbag hung from a cupboard door, a tear of salty joy. I love him for how seriously he takes the notes pinned to the wall, how he overlooks the printer that has been stood on under the desk. He agrees with me wholeheartedly that maybe it was the desk, definitely the desk, that is preventing me from finishing my novel.
I daisy-chain extension leads to boil the kettle for our coffee. I feel a squeezing around my waist, as though an apron is tightening its own strings – a snake.
*
Our nightly scrolling takes us places it is hard to describe. The closest thing to it was a week of work experience at my uncle’s doctor’s surgery in rural Kerry.
Patient one: manual bowel emptying.
Patient two: buttock injection for schizophrenia.
Patient three: lumps on tongue likely caused by e-cigarettes – referral.
It wasn’t so different to the platters of my favourite nonsense offered by the screen, again and again and again. A notification appears for a new episode of a podcast I want to listen to; a book I really ought to read burns on the nightstand; my grandmother’s ghost urges me to knit. I feel, not for the first time, that I want to pour my attention into multiple channels at once, for there to always be multiple options for consumption – to feel, finally, full up. I wonder – would it really be that bad if I put in my AirPods while we have sex?
*
We’re in this together, say his eyes as we hold a squat in unison, our bums burning as one. Hundreds of years ago he would have given me twelve children and syphilis by now. Tenderness blooms. Our phones sit together on the sofa awaiting our return, the many hundreds of me and him that live naked in our DMs cheer us on, willing our bums to harden like marble, like GOALS.
*
Hair extensions rustle at a bar with his workmates, dutiful girlfriends smile like the brand insignia that legitimises an ugly polo shirt. So, tell me about you? asks a lash lift. Who are you outside of work but inside your body? My eyes grow itchy, salty rings like the margarita glass I’m clutching. I go to the bathroom and climb through the phone’s window. I scroll through my profiles to try to encounter myself as a stranger. I can’t shake the feeling that my being is two-dimensional – that I am no more than a body which happens to coincide with a soul and a rented flat – that with one big huff and a puff the whole straw charade of it could come crashing down. I zoom into my smile on the screen and search it for joy, a butterfly in my belly spreads its wings and hopes to feel warmed by the sun. I flush and gaze into the bathroom mirror and I don’t look like myself. A feeling of covert deception lingers, like when the person who served you in SuperValu turns up on your follow suggestions and their life looks more fun than yours. I return to the table to smile. Us girlfriends start to spin, spin and spin, then skip – our boyfriends’ dicks are the Maypoles around which we dance. In the distance delftware falls and shatters.
*
When we got bored of the bed we thought it would be romantic to have sex outside. We began as Adam and Eve, our desire filling the peaks and cycle paths beyond the footpath of the canal. He was in the process of fashioning me from his rib when something pinched my cheek. Ticks can carry Lyme disease in areas where sheep graze, Google told us. Our faces formed question marks as we asked each other how much of a dog is a sheep – the field of our love was peppered with the shit of dogs who had their own Instagram accounts. The voice of 111 told us to draw around the edge of the welt. My buttock grew ballpoint pen rings like a felled tree as the weekend progressed. The symptoms of Lyme disease are vague enough to set off an alarm in my chest at every unexplained ache. When I feel sleepy before eight p.m. I blame the tick and my boyfriend’s dogged passion. He holds his tail between his legs – the silent fat goose at the centre of the pinch – could I write about this?
*
The punchline of the joke dances ahead of me, ever on the horizon; pull refresh on the ellipsis of the sun. I, dutiful chorus girl, join the mirth as though the canned laughter lives inside me. The part I play is already written; my hot take on the pineapple-on-pizza dichotomy laid out for me by my fairy godmother tech bro. Does a horse know it’s doing dressage? Does it sense the artifice in the flick and prance of its wild animal limbs? I want my words back, I think, as popular tweets swim ashore in my mind in place of feeling, a voice, a teacup hung dutifully on a hook. A mare leaps over a gate decorated with an abundant harvest. I am briefly master of the righteous school of dolphins; if you think pineapple belongs on pizza you weren’t hugged enough as a child. I am euphoric as the throng briefly unites under my despise.
*
Gradually, people make it or they don’t. From the jumble of graduates dressed in charity-shop nightdresses and ironic sweatshirts, some bear pregnancies conceived in Bumble algorithms while others don the new aesthetic of academia: a short, blunt fringe; a greyhound with its own jacket; a specialism in relational aesthetics. I meet friends for coffee and we discuss a mutual who has just published a new anthology. We weave our praise for them across the table like a basket into which we place the picnic of our dreams of becoming well known.
*
We toss like fleas in our bed, unable to sleep. He rolls over, mumbles I think I’m having a panic attack. I shape my body like a marshmallow around him and practise slow, controlled breathing. When his body slows he whimpers that he cannot, just cannot stop thinking about bridges. I throw a wet towel over my laughter as he explains he saw a clip of two men dancing on London Bridge just before we turned out the lights, that some glitch in his brain is playing it over and over and over on loop. I try to ground him within the third floor, two-bed reality of our home, describe the garden behind our building, the brambles behind the garden and the train tracks behind the brambles. The train goes over a fucking bridge, he moans and rolls away from me like a postcard slipping through a letterbox. We fall asleep and I sense we share a dream in which we marry and our first dance is a perfectly executed salsa.
*
Ink, ink, ink poured all over the brain, choking. The memory of clambering inside the space left for an ear inside a mother’s lullaby feels like a myth. Sleep is a glitchy blink stolen from the phone. Facts quiver just out of sight, my brain unable to reach for their full knowledge. The tip of the tongue blankness of it itches my brain and I long for an app that really has all the answers, a Shazam for the half-formed musings of me, an album of holiday snaps where I’m unwittingly in the background. Elastic-band pain in the tunnel of the wrist, muscles whose presence is unnoticed until overuse, scroll scroll scroll, scroll of paper and feathered quill, on and on and on and on, can you relate?
Isobel O’Donovan is an Irish artist and writer currently based in North Yorkshire
‘Daisy Chain’ was first published in Issue Four of Tolka (November 2022). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
