World Keeps Turning: A new short story by Ruth McKee

A hand print is somewhere between a word and a painting.

My hands are small, compact, the hands of a person who makes things, who touches keys and strings. They are deft; they no longer shake the way they did when my heart was an uprooted succulent on a dry windowsill. They have lost the dimples on each knuckle I had as a child. There are no rings, no polish. There are three lines around my wrist which I circle with my thumb and index finger; there is a familiar ache for touch.

I am making a sign because it is a primal instinct.

I’m using oil paint which I suppose won’t last; this is typical of me, not thinking things through. The paint is cold, claggy, I feel it slink and settle under my nails; my instinct is to wipe it on my jeans. It feels overwhelmingly inappropriate to be wearing denim. What did our ancestors wear when they were placing their hands on a cave wall? Were there special animal furs for rituals? Maybe someone went into the back to get out the good buffalo skins. I think of skins and have a passing stab of lust for a smoke, but I observe it and it passes. Craving something that is impossible to procure is not a road I want to go back down.

The mirror and the mask

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Trump’s ‘terrifying’ temper, taste for show tunes, and call to ‘defend the size of his penis’

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Stuart Neville: ‘Why I will no longer hide my accent’

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I was here.

Veni, vidi, –

I like the omission, it makes me feel clever. It’s a pity nobody is here to appreciate the lacuna. I feel a bit foolish now I’m here; it’s not even a proper cave that I’ve chosen, just a small inlet where I used to sit on a rock, throwing stones for my dog.

People say stone age people painted animals to represent the hunt-but I think of someone a million years ago scratching out the limbs and face of their companion animal, both of them harbouring the same emotional vocabulary: the word for stay; the word for good; the word for hunger.

There is someone who would say: this is county Antrim, not Constantif***ingnople, who do you think you are? He liked to cut everything down to size. I hid the poetry of myself from him the way you would a fungal nail, covering it in shiny cynicism, trying to make myself down-to-earth.

This handprint is not for him.

I dallied with using blood for the mixture but even my sense of melodrama baulked at this; you’d need an awful lot of blood for a few handprints, and soon there will be nobody left to recognise it as blood. This ritual is for me. This is what I tell myself-but making a sign implies an observer, a reader, a listener. Did the Mesolithic people who made those hand-prints in the caves at Lascaux anticipate the eyes of others? Why make a handprint if you don’t expect someone to see it? They couldn’t have imagined that thousands of years later their cave would be discovered, filmed-how all over the planet people would save to photos and fire off the image of their millennia-dead hands to strangers on the internet.

What a time to be alive.

There is a land mass the size of Britain somewhere under the North Sea: the Stone Age centre of the world. It was discovered just before the term mass extinction became innocuous. Something to do with oil and capitalism meant they dredged up ancient skulls-of woolly mammoths, of those weird giant deer, of animals which sound mythological but actually existed. It doesn’t matter if they really existed or were mythological; it took me a long time to appreciate this. Their known world vanished with rising water. What goes around, comes around.

People wrote academic papers about it, with clever things articulated after a semi-colon; nobody will be around to write the dissertation on the disappearance of our world. Am I catastrophising? It’s hard to know when there is a catastrophe.

But the first hand prints weren’t by Stone Age people; they weren’t by homo sapiens. They were by Neanderthals. Those hand-prints were pre-human, pre-story. The art instinct pre-dates the species.

But if those hand prints are telling a story to you now, then they are hardly pre-story. This was from someone who loved to analyse; he was so keen to debate intellectual subjects, to win the argument, that he couldn’t see the atrophy in my heart.

This hand print is not for him.

Neanderthals. I picture them making a mixture for the wall. Researchers say it was predominantly females who were responsible for cave art, but until recently nothing much was made of that. Turns out we’ve been saying fucking typical since before history. I see them work in the quiet. Did they speak? Intone? We don’t know if pre-humans spoke, whatever speaking is. The more you say the word speak the more meaningless it becomes. Speak speak speak speak speak speak speak.

There was a man who spoke a lot about love. His lies turned him as rancid as a dead clam. I discovered his deceit the way gigatons of ice fell into the Arctic Ocean. He said I completed him, days before he was completing someone else in the front of his Ford Fiesta.

This hand print is not for him.

Just before everything, when we still had pubs and coal fires and digital time wasn’t absurd, there was a man. He had under-water dark eyes like those paintings of Kathleen ni Houlihan and he had lived the lives of many different people. His stillness was self-conscious; I wanted to open him up like a fig. I thought I could say something that would make him reach over to touch my cheek with his fingers.

He didn’t.

This handprint is not for him.

I begin. I press one hand against the cold wet wall, and feel the contact spread down my arm. It feels unremarkable, silly. When I take my hand away it’s clear I need more paint on my hands, need to press harder, for longer. I put my hands into the paint again, this time submerging them, surrendering to the uncomfortable sensation.

I reconsider writing something. I didn’t bring any brushes or pens but I could dip a piece of flint in the mixture, or a stick, etch out something. Maybe sic gloria transit mundi. If you’re going to be portentous you may as well do it at the end of the world. I wanted that as a tattoo once, here passes the glory of the world, but the man I was with said it was too long, too gauche. His lip would make a little curl which I found erotic to begin with, but soon associated it with reflexive mockery.

This handprint is not for him.

It’s conceivable a handprint might one day be recognised, but there will be nobody left to read. When you think about the act of reading it is a miracle it ever happened. There will be billions of words left in books but nobody to decipher them. Where do all the metaphors go?

Ladybird ladybird fly away home, your house is on fire and your children have gone.

I said that as a child, to the stickling creature on my palm, psychedelic red against the grassy green background of my front garden. I knelt in speedwell that I called forget-me-nots by mistake. We have neither ladybirds nor speedwell now. We no longer have dandelions, dent de lion, lion’s teeth; they have gone, as have the animals they were named after. We learned that language is fluid, but I think of it like sand, running through your fingers, to be made and remade, forging glass, shattering, existing endlessly in one form or another. I look into my bucket of paint. There is ample. Ample is a word like plentiful, which sounds Biblical, like the word harvest. There are so many words without things now, signifiers without signified.

There was a man I didn’t love who called me beautiful twenty times a day. He’d whisper all the lost words into the nape of my neck: petrichor, hawthorn, dragonfly, spring.

This hand print is not for him.

We should have stayed with small pictures, the cave-art of antelope and buffalo, of sunrises and corn. Human beings are blind to the big picture; by the time we are wise enough to see it, it’s too late. The world burned on the internet; we saw pictures of the lungs of the world go scarlet from space. Still we went on, doing online shops, school runs, worrying about collagen, oestrogen, testosterone, weight gain. We clung to capitalism; it was a sinking ship.

As high up on the wall as I can – I think of rising waters – I place my hand and I press it to the stone, keeping the pressure even, letting my flesh merge against the solidity of the rock, feeling what I imagine those early humans did, those pre-humans did.

It is a syncretic act, primal.

Collige, virgo, rosas.

There was someone, before the world had grown old, when we hadn’t learned yet how to dissemble. We drank cold milk on a sun-burnt wall. He read words from Greek myths in funny voices. His body was tanned and neat, like his artist’s hands, small, fingertips stained in turquoise and canary, the slip-syrup of our gaze an ancient forest moon. I can see the curve of the lunulae on his fingernails as I press my hand to the stone, the bloodied red pattern exclamation, lament, prayer.

There are seagulls echoing. They are hardy, survivors. Other species have dwindled or disappeared: the thrush, the wren, the greenfinch, starlings, swallows and swifts. Soon the last blackbird will call out to her mate and there will be no reply.

Hasn’t it always been so?

Ruth McKee is editor of Books Ireland. A writer, editor and researcher, she has been twice nominated for The Hennessy New Writing Award, was joint winner of The Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair and her second book, The Day I Die, is out on submission. She writes short reviews for Irish Times Books and works with RTÉ Arena.