Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022 Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not...

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...

Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Five, August 2024 K. arrives at the cottage first. It is still covered in red, white and blue bunting a month after the jubilee, as are the rows of cottages and the detached houses in the village, the community centre with the yoga class, the café with decent coffee, the shop selling basics including newspapers and artisan local products, and the three pubs triangulating the square – one standard fare, one gastro, one wood-fired pizza. These amenities had been advertised in the house’s listing, which pinpointed their distance from the doorstep in fractions of a mile. The local walks in the famous landscape were also listed, including one that takes you up to a twelfth-century shrine to the Virgin Mary that had been restored and reopened to pilgrims in 1961 after centuries of ruin. This and other walks are circular or could be made that...

Brian Dillon | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 I was fifteen years old when it first appeared. I’d cycled to school as usual, survived a flummoxing maths lesson without shame, settled into the day’s second period and opened my science textbook, when I found I could not see straight. I blinked hard at the page; something remained in the way. I tried to get the object in focus, the better to banish it, but it would not resolve. The thing was not exactly there, no blurred patch or dark hole in space, instead pure absence, as if one side of reality had simply dropped away. I recall thinking that whatever this was, it would be hard to put into words. I looked up from the book and there the nothing was still, obscuring several classmates, half the blackboard and an array of chemistry equipment on the teacher’s desk. Surely I...