Now an established Irish writer of both fiction and non-fiction, Baume is also an artist. Her breakthrough as an author came with the short story ‘Solesearcher1’ which was awarded the Davy Byrne Prize in 2014. But before that she had published a handful of short stories in The Stinging Fly, the first of which appeared in the winter 2010/2011 issue. ‘Still Turning Slowly’ opens thus:

“Once it was a butchers shop with bloody aprons on the coat hooks and a queue of smartened housewives out the doors and down the main street, queuing for their turkeys at Christmastime. But the old signboard is long gone now, along with the slicers and cleavers and ratchets, the smell of slopped guts and marinated chops. And Tabitha Byrne can never be sure, when she puts the key in the switch and jerks it to twelve o’clock, whether the shutter will open or not. It is rusted raw and paintless – frayed in the middle like an overwalked step. The objects displayed inside the shop front judder to its rhythm and it groans like a thing possessed as it climbs. The fact that it has never once faltered in two- and-more decades does nothing to reassure Tabitha. She knows only that, one day, it will.”

What follows is a precisely observed, gently-paced description of failure and a miserable marriage. The rains fall constantly, torrentially, and there is a threat of flooding (a subject Baume would later revisit). In a nearby funfair an empty ferris wheel rotates slowly above the rooftops, while in the failing pet shop she manages for her awful husband, hamsters scamper feverishly towards Syria, turning their own little wheels, getting nowhere. Tabitha, the wife, keeps a small wad of emergency banknotes in an urn containing her mother’s ashes. A sense of inertia, of lives stalled, recalls the social paralysis of Joyce’s Dubliners.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 11, Vol 2, 2010, and available for subscribers to read here