My girlfriend and I watched ‘The Truman Show’ half-plastered on Connemara whiskey and asked the question about Truman’s wife, Meryl Burbank/Hannah: she was a corporate sex worker, right? Was that legally stipulated?

yes she was, and yes they wrote it in the contract: ‘Hazardous Duties, Performed’

this wild reality stemmed from dangerous laughter in a lawless boardroom.

to Veronica, a PA outside on her first day,

it sounded like her neighbour’s 2AM television

coming through the wall

Our cat twisted herself into an art installation, her coma uninterrupted, her paws aloft and twitching under the weight of the night sky. She was young and needed bigger dinners every day. The whiskey was tapped. Our slurring minds fixated on how to replace it.

the moon wasn’t right, and sleep was a non-starter

she missed how her mother used to pick her clothes and leave them

folded on the bed’s bottom left corner

just at the edge

I wondered where the cat-food/human-drink money would come from—how the cost of things perverted their joy. Worries of a swelling sobriety. Then, we found a stowaway—an old bottle of fortified wine shying behind the flour. The storm had passed.

in time

she returned to Seahaven, seeking closure

but the wound

was having none of it

Jake McAuliffe is a cancer researcher from Cork, Ireland. He has also been published in perhappened mag. Follow his Twitter @JakeMcAwful — or don’t, that’s okay too.