Don’t you ever want to touch someone’s dick instead of, like, your phone?
Look, sex isn’t for everyone. I get it! Don’t have it if you don’t want to, but there’s nothing wrong with doing it (often……) if that’s what you want. Shit’s like ordering pizza. Enjoy it by yourself, or with a partner, or a few partners, with as many or as few toppings (or tops) as you want. Or don’t eat it at all. I know a lot of people who just don’t eat pizza. But I, um, eat pizza… a lot.
At least I used to.
Quick sketch of my upbringing, cuz I hate when people launch into their little Internet Stories without any context of who they are first. I’ll always end up imagining some burly bearded dude when the narrator turns out to be a fifteen year old girl. Feels like I’m getting vaguely catfished, nothing pisses me off like getting catfished. Like, if I’m ordering pizza, I want to actually get what I ordered, you know what I mean? The amount of men who have said eight inches…..
Anyway, I’m Saoirse, 24, American (sorry), university graduate, and I just moved back to the states from Dublin—because nothing screams ‘successful postgrad’ like spending a year living with your Irish grandmother.
Yep, I was living with my grandmother. Granny Caoimhe, pronounced Keevah, but I’ve always called her Ceemy. Granny Ceemy. Honestly, I’m lucky to actually know her, cuz lot of my family, and I mean a lot, is severely estranged. Like, I have an uncle, three aunts, five cousins, and entire half-sibling I’ve never even met; that’s how bad it was. Honestly, though, they’re all missing out, because they don’t get to know me. And I genuinely fucking love me.
I truly do love myself, head to toe, inside and out. It’s a rare gift, I think, but one I take advantage of; the ability to actually like yourself. There’s really nothing about myself I don’t like. It sounds like narcissism and, honestly, it might be, but it’s carried me far. I do genuinely think I’m hot as hell, that my body shape and facial features are really attractive, and the fact that I think this seems to make everyone else think so too. It’s like… confidence contagion. If you think you’re pretty, the people around you will too. Still, as I found out, looks can’t actually get you everything.
Basically, I graduated college, but I couldn’t find a job.
Without steady employment I couldn’t get money, and without money, I couldn’t pay rent. My parents, assholes, wouldn’t let me live with them without paying rent…… but my grandmother would. I had never been so glad to have Irish citizenship. Cue an impulsive loan, a frantically-booked flight across the pond, and a year in Dublin, living with my grandmother.
Ah, Ceemy. She’s honestly not bad! The only thing that really bothered me is how much she complained about me not speaking Gaelic. Like, whose fault is that, dumbass? You didn’t teach my mother, so how could she teach me?
Ugh. But as the months wore on, I warmed up to her, really got to know her. I learnt her likes, her dislikes, her fears, her mannerisms, and even her favorite jokes. She’s a very old woman with a macabre sense of humor, and whenever she had an ‘old person moment,’ like walking into a room and forgetting why she walked in there, or forgetting a person’s name, or enduring flareups of the arthritic pains in almost half her joints - she’d chuckle and tell me, “Watch out for the Banshee, cuz she might be wailin’ tonight.’” And then she’d explain what a banshee was, even though I already knew: a screaming spirit, and if you hear its hair-raising wail, it means someone in your family is going to die. The implication of Granny Ceemy’s “joke” was that she was so old she was about to die, so any night I might hear the banshee wailing and fortelling her death.
Yeah, she’s a weird old lady.
Anyway, I was preoccupied by the fact that I couldn’t find a fucking job. Look, I don’t know what axed my prospects more: the literal coronavirus, or the fact I was an English major. But anyway, true to form, as I scrounged around from interview to interview in Dublin, I decided to see what else (actually, who else) I could do in my free time.
That’s when I met a guy named Nathan.
I hate to say it, but it actually was a dark and stormy night. Like, it was wild. The rain sprang up suddenly while I was out, and I hadn’t brought an umbrella, so I ducked into the closest open building: The George, Dublin nightlife’s rainbow-lit cultural staple. I felt a bit weird, since it was a gay bar, but I evidently wasn’t the only forlorn heterosexual seeking shelter from the storm, as I soon encountered Nathan. From his accent I could tell he was American like me. I soon found out we had the same cultural background, which was really neat. Sheltered from the whipping wind and rain, nestled amongst transcendently happy lesbians and awkward gay men, we found… well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a spark, but I was bored and he was damn good-looking. Face, bod, whole deal. He bought me a cocktail, which nobody had actually done before; the best I had previously scored was a Guinness. Anyway, he had a screwdriver and I had a porn star, and then we had a conversation, and then we had a shared Uber back to his place, and then we had sex. Er, pizza.
But while it was going down (or rather, while he was going down), I was briefly pushed out of the moment. The storm had gotten even worse, and the wind was screaming. I mean, screaming. I had never in my life heard wind shriek like that. It was piercing; it set my teeth on edge, and I half expected it to break the glass windows. If not for the fact it was so clearly not-human, I would be worried there was actually someone outside in danger. The screaming wind went on and on, rising and falling and pausing periodically as if the screamer needed to take in more air, and I thought - strangely, maniacally - of my grandmother’s legend of the banshee. Because if I were to imagine what a fated, mournful shriek of haunted inhuman warning would sound like—I swear on my life, it would sound exactly like that wind.
That “wind.”
Anyway, the scream died down, and we finished up the… pizza, and Nathan was satisfied, and I was satisfied, too. I would have stayed the night, especially because it was already almost three AM, but the screaming had unsettled me more badly than I wanted to admit. Thoughts of Granny Ceemy’s “joke” coming true had begun to haunt my post-coital mind, and I decided against staying a couple more hours (or rounds). Ceemy was, after all, a very old lady, and I wanted to check on her to see if she was okay. So, as delicately as I could, I told Nathan I’d like to go.
By then, Nathan was sober—at least, he insisted he was—so he drove me home, despite my protests of “but the distance!” and “but the storm!” We took the ride mostly in silence, and he dropped me off, and I kissed him goodbye; then he drove away, soon swallowed by the lashing rain. I didn’t watch him go; I went inside and promptly yelled for Granny Ceemy.
“WHAT?!” she hollered, pissed as hell to be woken up.
Relief filled my heart, and I beamed.
I immediately felt silly and irked at myself for ditching Nathan early, but honestly? The relief I felt about Granny Ceemy was even stronger. With a light heart, I washed up, dried off, and hit the hay.
Just before I fell asleep—barely audible beneath the thunder—I heard the sirens.
The next morning, the entire neighborhood was murmuring about the accident. I got the details slowly, in tiny chunks. Six blocks away, between three and four AM, a young man, possibly intoxicated, had fishtailed on the wet asphalt and wrapped his car around a pole. The front half of his body had been jettisoned through the windshield. Instant death.
With a slow coil of dread in my stomach, I remembered the screaming. How prophetic it had seemed.
“Granny,” I said slowly, as we gave the police cars and ambulance a wide berth. “Banshees foretell the deaths of family members, don’t they?”
“Yes, Saoirse,” she said.
I breathed very carefully.
“Do you know my half-sibling’s name?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said. “I hope you meet him someday. His name is Nathan.”
So anyway, I don’t do hookups anymore.