Fiona McKay
Civil Twilight
There are a thousand gulls on our roof, their throaty squawks drilling through me, and I picture them lifting the house, like a fallen tree, roots and all into the sky. It is July, the heat unbearable, these houses built for cold weather, lapped in thick padding, insulated. I turn over in bed, seeking a cooler place on the sheet, disturbing my husband who is also awake. I feel him rock in the aftershock of my angry turn.
‘It was just one drink,’ he says, and I feel heat flare through me.
Too many words build inside me, I can’t speak, and then: ‘It’s not just the drink. She’s only fourteen. And there was the boy too.’
I spit the words out into silence, but there is no silence. The flocks of gulls on our roof shriek and keen, soaring up and resettling. I tell my husband I can’t hear him because of the thousands of gulls, and he laughs the laugh of someone who has listened to my hyperbole for twenty years. There’s still kindness in it.
‘There are, like, two gulls up there,’ he says, ‘You know this, it happens every year. The chicks are fledging, and no one is going to sleep for a few nights. It’s normal.’
I don’t want him to be reasonable; I want him to say something I can fight with. It’s too hot to argue, hotter than last year, hotter than any other years, and I flap the thin, lacy fabric of our summer blanket – a double-bed version of the baby blankets we used to swaddle our girl with – aggressively to make a breeze, but end up hotter, clammy, sweat on my thighs, in the grooves of my groin.
‘We shouldn’t have left her,’ I say. ‘She’s too young for the responsibility.’
‘Jesus, we went out to a dinner,’ he protests, his voice rising, expanding. ‘There has to be a first time, and really it was fine.’
It’s the kind of conversation where he could tell me to calm down, and that could be the thing that pushes me over the edge. I wait for it. Hope for it? Maybe.
The noise on the roof starts up again. It might have been last year he told me about the chicks, or some other year – maybe the year the gulls kept me awake while my newborn dozed beside me and I thought I would die from the exhaustion, with the love, the life I’d had before fast slipping away. Maybe it was then he’d explained that the chicks, unable yet to fly, are tipped out of the nest to learn.
‘I don’t mind that she had friends over,’ I say.
‘Friend. One friend,’ my husband cuts me off. I don’t know if he’s saying this as a defence, or to be as scrupulously exact as he always is, but it slices like a paper cut: nothing, nothing, then the sharpest pain. It stabs my heart that my girl thinks she’s unpopular. What would she do to make herself popular?
‘One boy,’ I say. Try not to think of hands and mouths and drink and stupidity. I push down my girlhood when it threatens to rise in my throat. The things you do for popularity. The things I had done. A time of my life I’d never talked about to my husband. Or my daughter. Maybe I should. Maybe now is the time. Hands and mouths and drink and stupidity.
The chicks are on the ground outside our house, stomping around. Have they even been asleep? Have I? my husband’s breath is deeper now, more even. The room is not as dark as it was, the sun hovering just below the horizon. Astronomical, nautical, civil twilight as the sun angles its way up and over the line. I used to count the sleepless hours that way when my girl was a baby, a child. Getting through the night with feeds, with sickness. Willing the day to spin around again, so there might be appointments, or playgroup, or people on the street exhaustedly pushing buggies that I could stop and make common cause with for a few minutes. Better than the cries in the night.
If a gull nests on the roof of a house, and the chick falls out of the nest, there’s no way for the chick to make it back until it learns to fly for itself. The chicks howl, their throats distended from their hungry baby cries, beaks open wide. But there is nothing the parents can do. They patrol the rooftops, hurling squawks of abuse at any human or animal threatening their kid. Watching from a distance. Powerless, really.
He takes my sweaty hand in his cool, dry one.
‘It was one friend, and one drink. Nobody threw up, nobody did anything stupid. She’s a smart kid. I think we’re alright here.’
I want him to be right. I want to relax into sleep like a cool swim. I lie there, my hand in his hand, and the shiver of early morning passes through me. I close my eyes, waiting for the gulls to drag me back to the surface, but it’s all quiet. They’ve moved to another rooftop vantage point. Maybe something has happened to the chicks – a dog, a speeding car – sending the gulls down to the road to investigate. Or maybe, the chicks have taken flight.
Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead, (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2025) and The Top Road (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023), as well as the flash fiction collection Drawn and Quartered (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). She was a SmokeLong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow in 2023. Her flash fiction is in Gone Lawn, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, The Forge, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Fractured Lit and others. Her work is included in Best Small Fictions 2024. She lives in Dublin, Ireland.
