Excerpt from Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I've tried to tell Bernie. She doesn't care. She says: O my fucking god, Jackie. She says: You can't psychoanalyse everything. She says: See if you say this is why you can't pass your driving test—

Bernie doesn't hate me for it, but she wasn't there.

2

We have lectures called Housekeeping. There are lots of rules. It's hard to find the way to the Anatomy Department because the University wants it hidden: people have, in the past, tried to steal bones.

I don't know that I like the people I'm with. I let what they're saying move over me until I can decide. We sit in a clump. There are hundreds of laptops.

The professor has a PowerPoint of photos of different tools/instruments: pincers, surgical scissors, scalpels on a steel tray. The colours are bleached coming through the projector. Each slide has a header with the professor's full name and the long letters of eight qualifications in its wake.

The professor talks about the importance of Anatomy. We are shown sketches from da Vinci's notebook. We are told these are crucial; we are told these are key. (I saw da Vinci's sketches in the museum. They were horrible: he drew travelling people as predators, as thieves. I stood wanting somebody to say it was terrible, the images reproduced on thick paper, framed.) The professor says the most important thing is respect. The professor says that if we miss a session, we'll be disciplined; that this will have serious, potentially devastating, consequences for our careers; that what we will cover in the sessions is vast; that he once had a student expelled for coming to Dissection chewing gum.

This is when I am poked by the person next to me. The girl at the end of our row grins and when each of us have turned, like sunflowers, she blows a pink slabbery bubble.

The others think this is great. I am so embarrassed to be with people who find this funny that I start to sweat. They leave slowly after the lecture, standing together as a group, making plans. I don't want to dislike them so soon (it's Week Two).

I start walking home.

I get in well before Bernie's back from school.

I turn on the TV. I don't care who's talking.

I get bored.

I log on to the Student Portal on the computer. There're videos that're compulsory to watch for the sessions. The professor said admission would be refused to anyone who hadn't seen them, that the Student Portal shares this information. (Bernie would say: A surveillance state.) The folder is called Anatomy. The videos are three minutes each. They've been filmed at an over-the-shoulder angle. There were, I think, maybe only two people involved in their production: the hands with the camera, filming, and the hands with the scalpel. Three people, I think, correcting myself. Three people. The hands will slice into the third person's skin.

The pale hands turn the scalpel round; a voice-over defines and explains certain features. Then the hands and the scalpel move to the flat surface below them, getting closer, as the camera picks up freckles, hair follicles, and the surface is skin; the scalpel slices through skin as though through soap; the scalpel is substituted for pincers to peel back the skin's first thin layer.

I don't mean to lose focus, but the video is slow and unreal. There's glare all over the computer screen, fingerprints and marks from where mum's tried to wipe them.

I check my phone (the first sign of Lack of Respect).

Mum's sent a video into our group chat. She forwards me and Bernie stuff she's been sent on WhatsApp. There's always that warning above: forwarded many times. It's the way chainmail was to me and Bernie when we were small: pictures/animations/stories sent on and on and on. I remember jumpscares, Thinking Of You prayers, badly spelt, long-winded: SEND THIS TO FIFTEEN PEOPLE OR THE KILLER CLOWN WILL BE ABOVE YOUR BED WHEN YOU WAKE.

That was when Michael Madigan died. They're not connected; it was just the same era. Me and Bernie sat at the computer, pushing the back out of the swivel-chair, and my mum sat on the sofa minding Michael Madigan. It happened like that. We sat at that computer, scrapping, and there was, somewhere, some other place in the house, the noise of the shower, the vague sounds of Michael Madigan being washed, the sound of the water and its draining and a slow, chugging extractor fan, the escape from the bathroom of soft wet air, warm and translucent. She brought him back into the TV room, wheeling him carefully. She put on some movie (Die Hard/Live Free or Die Hard/A Good Day to Die Hard) and she closed the blinds and she put down a towel and she cut Michael Madigan's fingernails, while they were soft and surrendering, pushed back cuticles. She made a scrub with coconut oil and thick brown sugar. She put his feet into a basin of warm water (the boke-basin) and she scrubbed, her hand in a pink exfoliating glove, until Michael Madigan's bare legs were matted with rolls of dead skin. She patted his legs dry and coated them with lotion that smelt of factory-flowers. She shaved Michael Madigan's face and she used tiny curved nail scissors to cut the hair out of his ears. Now he'll hear us when we're talking to him. She put a blanket over his knees. They sat on the sofa, at the TV; me and Bernie sat behind, at the computer. I don't know. It's how it happened. There was pain relief. There was infection. There were syringes/alarms/nurses, saying, I've never seen this before. It was, there were, afterwards I knew all these colours: brown as in piss, black as in spit, boke as in yellow, as in blood-red. All these bits. All these speckles. Lumps. There's a spine, bending; shoulders falling down round him. Michael Madigan needed course after course of IV antibiotics and mum thought we were too small to leave at home by ourselves so she drove us all to the hospital and wheeled him in. My mum sat beside him on the sofa in front of us and she told him about this thing Bernie'd said, she was round at a friend's, and they'd been half-watching Titanic, and Bernie'd said to this girl's mum, I've a bad feeling about this, as the ship started to sink. It was funny, they'd said. There'd been tears of laughter. Bernie and I heard her. She had Michael Madigan in a towelling dressing-gown, his feet in a pair of disposable slippers. She told him about Bernie. She said it again.

Excerpted from Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn. Copyright © 2026 by Liadan Ní Chuinn. Excerpted by permission of FSG Originals. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.