‘The Next World’ by Laura-Blaise McDowell

It is winter and Ava is sitting at the bottom of her family’s swimming pool, surrounded by leaves. In front of her is the body of a red squirrel and at the other end of the pool is a snake, shifting lazily.

This morning, before breakfast, Ava’s father Bernard took a phone call from his other wife, who informed him that their daughter Cecily would be coming to stay with him for Christmas. Bernard explained this to Ava and her mother Grainne over breakfast while pouring two large glasses of wine.

‘Cecily, to stay for all of Christmas?’ Grainne breathed.

‘Cecily. For all of Christmas,’ Bernard repeated.

Bernard held his glass up. Grainne’s hand shook a little as she tipped the glass to meet his, sprinkling over the marble tabletop, dappling the oranges and eggs with scarlet.

Ava has never met her father’s former wife, and is preoccupied with the mystery stretch of Bernard’s life which came before her mother and herself. She finds it almost impossible to think of his life as linear, and rather fancies that existence splits into two separate strands. The first is his life with Cecily and Caroline, in the suburbs of Kent. The second is with Ava and Grainne, in Wicklow. Though now he lives primarily in Wicklow and hardly ever spends time in England, Ava can’t help but be acutely aware of the other family existing alongside hers, in a strange parallel, across the sea.

Grainne had no children before Ava, nor is Ava aware of her having had any previous relationships. To Ava, her mother’s life divides not lengthways but horizontally. While her father’s diverges in two directions like a hair or a vein, her mother’s splits in half like a chopped log: before Bernard and Ava and with Bernard and Ava. After all, Ava arrived fairly shortly following her parents meeting, leaving hardly enough time for them to get married, by Ava’s calculations.

When Ava had started asking questions, attempting to negotiate the idea of life before herself, her parents told her they had met at a bar.

‘With friends,’ her mother added.

‘Through friends,’ her father agreed.

‘There was tapas,’ her mother nodded. ‘So it was more of a dinner, really.’

What if, Ava often thought, Grainne had taken a wrong turn on the way to the bar and got lost, or had tripped and twisted her ankle. Would she and Bernard ever have met? Would Ava even exist?

The snake was not there as Ava climbed down the ladder, the metal smooth and cool beneath her palms. It was late morning when her sandals landed on the grainy layer of the pool floor, sending a cloud of dirt shimmering into the air, but now it is mid-afternoon. Once in, she sat down cross-legged in front of the squirrel, whose one visible eye gazes upwards, unseeing. Its front paws curl and its tail lies limp in a curve behind it. She knows red squirrels are a protected species, she has seen them on the native Irish wildlife posters in school. Recently, her class has been learning about ancient burial rites, how some cultures placed coins on the eyes of the dead, to cover their fare to the world of the dead. She didn’t have a coin in her pockets, so instead began delicately arranging leaves around the squirrel so that it looked as if a child had painted it glowing with thick orange strokes like the sun.

It was as she was doing this that she heard the soft thud at the other end of the pool and looked up to see an enormous snake pouring itself down the wall. It seemed endless, its body shimmering as it piled on the pool floor. She thought that if it kept going, it might fill the entire pool. Her first instinct was to run, but she found herself unable to move, barely able even to breathe and certainly not to scream. An illustration from a book about wild animals over which she’d poured as a child flashed before her eyes, the bronze and ochre flashes of the boa constrictor.

Though scared, Ava is not as surprised as she might have been to see a boa constrictor appear in her November garden in a country that has no snakes. Just the day before, a Guard had rung the bell to their gate, and through the intercom, warned the family that they had received reports of a snake on the loose, an escaped pet. In their part of Wicklow, there are a number of large, secretive houses surrounded by trees. There are rumours of a man with wolves, of someone else with monkeys. Bernard and Grainne had upended the house in search of the snake but found nothing. Having ensured that it was not indoors, they had closed every window and locked the basement. They had then advised Ava not to spend any unnecessary time outside.

‘Ludicrous,’ said Bernard, ‘having one of those things as a pet. Ludicrous.’

Now Ava sits facing the snake and remembering when the pool was full. Cecily had come to stay during the heat wave the previous summer, and the pool had been brimming with warm, blue water. Ava’s parents had tried to insist that the two girls ‘bond’, and swimming seemed the only thing on which they could agree.

Cecily was sitting on a red and yellow striped cushion on a white lounger. She wore a black bikini which showed off her pinkish skin, her long legs which, since turning fifteen, she had started shaving. Ava thought she looked like a plucked turkey, her newly bald body shining with sun lotion grease.

“God, what age do they think I am?’

Ava resurfaced from a cannonball just in time to catch Cecily’s remark. The older girl shook splashes from her curly brown hair and squinted in the sun.

‘I mean, what am I supposed to do? Play lifeguard while you splash about like a true idiot?’

Ava had little patience for Cecily at the best of times and felt a rush of resentment towards her half-sister, who was wearing, of all things, a silver toe ring on the middle toe of her left foot. It caught the light and glinted as she swung her ankle. It was the worst thing Ava had ever seen. She hated her. ‘You can do what you like and be miserable,’ she snapped. ‘I’m having fun.’

She kicked off from the wall and did a somersault underwater, propelling herself down the length of the pool and emerging at the deep end, only to see that Cecily had vanished from her lounger. All of a sudden Ava felt hands closing around each of her ankles and she was yanked downward. Startled, she swallowed a mouthful of chlorine water and began choking as the hands held firm, burning the skin of her ankles, a terrible roar struggling to release itself from her body. Ava thrashed in a blind panic, all arms and kicking legs and finally, she was released. She shattered the surface, launching herself towards the ladder where she clung, gasping.

‘Now I’m having fun, too,’ Cecily laughed, her voice distant over the sound of Ava’s bursting heart.

The snake shifts, moving its head a little to the right as if trying to get a better look at her.

‘If Grainne hadn’t made it to the bar, she may never have met Bernard and I would never have been born and then I would never have ended up here,’ she thinks.

‘If Grainne hadn’t made it to the bar, she may never have met Dad and he may have stayed with Caroline and they might have moved here together and it could have been Cecily who ended up here.’

‘If Grainne hadn’t made it to the bar…’

The snake moves its head back and this time to the left. Ava wonders what it must be like to have so much of oneself, to extend so far, to carry such power in one’s body.

She hears her father’s screech before she sees him. He appears at the other end of the pool in his suit, staring down, ashen faced, at the snake.

‘Grainne!’ he yells without taking his eyes off the snake. ‘Grainne!’

Her mother’s heels come hurrying across the gravel of the driveway. She arrives next to him and even from a distance, Ava sees her face drain of colour, her long skirt swishing around her legs. She looks once at Bernard, who stands, unmoving, and strides around him, down to the shallow end of the pool where Ava sits with the squirrel.

‘Young lady, you get out of there this minute, and fast!’

Ava jumps.

‘Now! Don’t give it a chance. Just move.’

She leaps to her feet and towards the ladder, scrambling up and into her mother’s arms in a clattering, knee-grazing hurl.

‘What the hell were you doing in there?’ her mother asks, though she does not pull away from Ava’s tight grip around her waist.

‘It wasn’t there when I got in,’ she whispers.

Over her mother’s elbow, Ava sees that at the other end of the pool, Bernard has sunk to his knees, gazing in at the snake, his shoulders heaving.

Ava eats soup at the marble table in the kitchen and gazes out the French doors while animal control extracts the snake from the pool, just out of her line of vision. The doors are open a little and the air moves softly. She can hear their voices only very faintly and hopes the snake would be okay, that they would find it a new home. She looks down at her hand, wriggling her fingers and watching the way the veins rolled back and forth across the bone, partially visible and then disappearing deep into her flesh.

At her feet, the squirrel’s fur is thin and oily. Ava gathers some larger leaves and places them over the little body like a blanket. She isn’t wearing a coat and she shivers as she stands up and begins walking the length of the pool, down the slope to the deep end where the snake had been. The grit on the floor has been disturbed, forming the footprints of the animal rescue team. She lowers herself, sitting first then stretching out, and tries to imagine that her body is as long and as powerful and as endless as the snake. She reaches her arms out and arches her back. The top of her head flat against the tiles, something catches her eye, glinting in the corner among the debris. Turning over and edging towards it, Ava sees a small, silver ring, too small for any finger.

She picks it up and, shaking herself off, walks back to the shallow end where the squirrel’s head protrudes from under the leaves. She lays the ring over the squirrel’s exposed eye, encircling it perfectly, to pay its passage to the next world.

Laura-Blaise McDowell is a writer from Dublin, with an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in The London Magazine, Banshee, Poetry Ireland Review, BBC Radio 4, The Irish Times, and Still Worlds Turning, an anthology of new Irish writing from No Alibis Press, among others. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Writing.ie Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. In 2021, she was first runner-up in the Costa Short Story Award. In 2023, she received a bursary from Listowel Writers Week to spend a week at Cill Rialaig and an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland to support the development of a short story collection. She is represented by Zoë Waldie at RCW Literary Agency.