‘From Far Away …’ is closely based on real events, a fire at St Joseph’s Orphanage in Cavan, the Irish Free State in 1943. Here, as elsewhere, Jolly seems drawn to characters whose voices have been erased or cannot be heard. There’s a paradox then in the form of the story which is so polyvocal. Everyone in the town has something to say about what happened, and there is all manner of details about fire hoses, keys and fire escapes, who saw and did what, which belong to the register of the legal enquiry. A narrative of attempted rescue is interlaced with a collective ‘we’ – a group of girls trapped in an upstairs dormitory as the fire advances. The tension is desperate, but long after reading this story, you wonder about their voices and the plane from which they speak.
First published in The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jenny Minto Quigley, Anchor Books, 2021. Collected in From Far Around They Saw Us Burn, Unbound, 2023
A Personal Anthology 