by Justine Sweeney

 

Their distant clap was whipped into our infant milk and fed to us during the night. Their drone cheered us on as we surprised ourselves by flipping from our bellies to our backs after weeks of channeling all of our strength into the manoeuvre. We’d crawl – nimble in our diapers – across the tall grass of a shaggy rug, driven to reach the shiny brass of a fireside poker set, only to be scooped up into our mothers’ arms and lifted high. Meanwhile, outside, a camouflage-patched Westland Lynx roared urgently across our clouded skyline. 

Some days, we’d be dozing in a stroller on the backstep. Our mothers peeling potatoes and humming along to Johnny Logan on the radio – or Mary Black if they felt like a bit of melancholy. The rattle of a neighbour’s bin. A dog barking. The rhythm of car tires squelching through the remains of an early morning rainstorm. All blended with the quick-chop of a long-tailed Puma HC Mk1 as it transported British troops from one army base to another or let them out onto armed patrol among the head-down people of an Irish border town.

At school we formed our letters. Mixed up our ‘b’s and ‘d’s. Wrote in our jotters with fat-trunked pencils. On the playground we’d run and duck and tag, shouting: ‘You’re it!’ while the black blades of a low-flying Gazelle – an agile animal – cut up our yells and laughter, its glass eye surveying the narrow streets and alleyways around about us.  

By our teenage years we’d sneak out to meet our mates. Our parents watched news of explosions and tit-for-tat shootings. We didn’t care about soldiers crouched in doorways, rifles pointed as they guarded the streets from people like us, the people who lived there. We navigated our path – Walkman blaring – in search of some other identity, and fully immune by then to a helicopter’s whoop-whoop-whoop: its series of quick-intake breaths which never got released.

Even now, decades later, we are grown and the skies are mostly quiet, but still we find ourselves oblivious to the buzz of a radio station’s traffic surveillance craft, until it comes very close. Or until one of our peace-time children throws their scooter to the ground, raises their eyes and arms to the sky and shouts ‘fly, fly, fly’.

 

Justine Sweeney is an Irish writer. Her stories appear or are upcoming in journals and anthologies such as the Dublin Review, BansheePress, Moon City Review, Bath Flash, Inkfish Magazine, Trash Cat Lit, Blood+Honey, Flash Fiction Magazine, Milk Candy Review, Fish Publishing and Fictive Dream. She’s a 2025 Best Small Fictions nominee and her first collection of stories was shortlisted in the Bath Novella-in-flash Award 2025.