The first thing out of Seán Peiste’s mouth is wrong. 

‘I’ll just have a Tequilla  sunset, please.’ 

‘The tequila sunrise, is it?’ The waiter smiles and his breath drips of cold coffee and a sinus infection. 

Seán laughs. Áine laughs. The date is going well. They order a wagyu burger with a  wheel of Casu Martzu in the bowels of a 200-year-old church, now, thank God, a chain  restaurant. Above them, in the genuine restaurant, there are stalls in old pews where plastic  statuettes of Mary take orders from iPads. Áine chose this place. 

‘It’s nice,’ she says. ‘Apparently, down here they found a catacomb, originally. The  kitchen is an old subterranean.’ 

Souterrain, he thinks, and doesn’t correct her. ‘Really?’ 

‘Yeah!’ 

‘Wow. That’s mental.’ 

The waiter, wordlessly, places the tequila sunrise on the table and spills it a little. 

Áine ignores him. ‘It really is. It’s nice to get a restaurant like this out our way. I  know it’s for the tourists, but still, it's nice.’ 

He leans in and smiles. ‘You get tourists in Shannagary?’ 

‘Well,’ She prods at the empty tablecloth with her fork. ‘We’ve a castle.’

‘T’be honest, I’d only know it for the service station.’ 

‘It’s the biggest shop, too,’ She smiles again now, and Seán Péiste wants to smash his head against the neat stonework wall. 

But Áine is good. She doesn’t drink and she doesn’t smoke. She has a crucifix around her neck, it’s silver and without any additives to discolour the skin. She has a thick layer of  abdominal fat to keep her organs safe. She has all her limbs, fingers, toes and teeth. She’s  never broken a bone. Her eyes meet Seán Peiste’s and they are a dark, matte brown. It’s good; her odds of getting eye cancer are low. She smiles for a third time, briefly, and there’s  no smell of rot or infection from her mouth or her throat. Seán Péiste dabs his forehead with a red cloth napkin as fever white sweat crawls from his scalp. He drinks the tequila sunrise in  three distinct swallows. 

The drink washes over my face, and it burns. 

I hate the body I’m in. 

I hate it not only because it so obviously does not belong to me, but  because every feature accentuates the contradiction between what I am and what I ought to  be. Smothered in fat and hair that gathers oil, from the thinning scalp he tries to hide down to  his scarred ankles. It covers all of him; prickling a bulbous and grotesque body. It climbs  down each uneven limb like a great, lame spider. All of him, bar his naked, red face. This  face, alongside his sloped limp from an engorged liver, gives the impression of a newly  discovered type of bog-side ape. His nose is snubbed and fleshy, his cheeks hollow. His  deep-set eyes are not a mark of hard work but rather a quarter century of alcoholism. Every  attempt I’ve made to polish his tongue is weighed down by these stained teeth on loan; a  tongue that is heavy and burnt from eating too fast and too much, and a throat long since  worn down from Silk Cut and cement coated air. Even now, I can feel my own chitinous lip  under his Adam’s apple, and I beg it were my voice and not his that spoke. A parasite should  not be this picky. I blame him for every neurosis I’ve somehow developed. Summarily; I hate the animal that I’m in. 

But tonight, I’m changing things.  

A single kiss, that’s it. 

I’m her. 

I’ll be human. 

A small candle burns in the middle of the table, stinking like a vanilla car freshener  and smelling like a head-ache. 

‘Casu Martzu…’ Áine taps her teeth with a bare fork. ‘It’s a, what, cheese?’ 

‘Sardinian delicacy. I’m not surprised they have it, given the whole, Cork-cheese fromager thing they’ve got going on.’

She smiles like it hurts, and he sounds like a pretentious ponce. Seán Péiste checks his  notes app list ofcharismatic first date questions. He rubs his calloused hand against the red,  plastic tablecloth; the sharp sound makes his teeth water. Why is he still sweating? At a  certain stage it’s a medical issue and, Áine, this is just one of a hundred reasons I can’t wait  to be with you. 

Finally he asks, ‘What’s your favourite fairy tale?’ and drags out his thick, yellow  teeth. 

She shrugs. ‘I used to have a kid’s Bible, if that counts. I used to be obsessed with the  frog plague in Exodus, where they’d pour from the sky? They drew them really cute. I don’t  know.’ 

Seán Péiste laughs too loud; so loud it hammers and runs around the basement room  like a tantrum. 

‘That’s so funny!’ He slams his hand on the table three times. ‘Cause my favourite is the princess and the frog.’ 

On the nose, Seán. Jesus, too on the nose. Having him spew the lines I tell him to say must be how directors feel working with talentless actors. It’s good material, and here he is,  fumbling it away in his fat cheeked mouth with an agricultural accent so thick the muck falls  off the syllables. Of course, then came the silence, and with it the bored tinkling of forks  against glasses. 

Áine raised her eyes to the naked stone ceiling, trying to call up to heaven for help.  That, please help me God, why did I go on a date with a fella from a dating app called bloody  Salt, look. Her hosannah chokes on a drainpipe. 

‘Y’know,’ Seán Péiste starts up again, ‘there’s a type of worm, right? A type we get  out in my part of the country. We call them, ah, Broodsacs. They climb into the eyes of  snails, and then they writhe. Green and white and zebra striped. They wriggle. Which makes  them look like a caterpillar, yeah, fair-enough, ‘whatever,’ you say – but they make the snails  stare at the sky when they do it. So, the birds come and eat the snail. Apparently, so they tell  me, the worm can only shag inside the gullet of a bird.’

Áine stares at Seán, and then, with enough desperation to dislocate her eyes, she  throws them to heaven again and shuts them tight. I don’t understand why. The angels are all  extinct. Nothing is coming to eat her. 

‘Y’alright, Áine?’ 

‘Oh, no, yeah. I’m doing fine.’ 

Food, thank Áine’s God, arrives. A wagyu burger with Heinz mayo staining the flesh,  aligned with salted thick cut chips and a water. For Seán Péiste, a thick, rancid wheel of Casu  Martzu. The eating portion of any date is good, since Seán’s mouth is too full to say anything  stupid, and maybe, by merit of the price, she’ll give him a pity kiss. That’s all I need. So, I  suffer for you, Áine, I do, dodging chunks of rancid cheese that bloom sour flavours. It’s all  unenjoyed as it’s smashed between rotted, mechanical teeth and a tongue that hasn’t really  tasted anything since 2009.

Áine gives up eating quickly; half the burger sits uneaten. Her expression watching  Seán Péiste eat his Casu Martzu is… disturbed, and poorly hidden. 

‘You have a little…’ 

‘Hm?’ 

‘Something. On your face.’ 

Seán catches the small, rice sized smear on his lip by his finger tip and frowns, wiping  it onto his pants in a thick, yellow stain. Áine’s eyes don’t rise to heaven anymore. They dart  for the stairs; tracing and following the waiter’s reapproach. 

‘Anything for dessert?’ he asks, and he’s tried to hide his disease from his manager  with a pathetic little breath mint. 

‘No, thank you, I’m good.’ Áine waves her hands as she speaks, and then pats her side  to really sell the fact she’s full. 

‘Just the bill, please.’

‘Certainly.’ 

Bollocks. No dessert was an issue. Somewhere upstairs a child was screaming, crying, and elsewhere below I could feel the pulse of something related to myself. Each sound  squeezes against the ears of Seán Péiste like the pressure of an ear infection. Áine, for her part, was unpacking and repacking her purse, pretending to not be able to find this… and oh,  there’s that… and no, I can’t look at Seán Péiste right now, there’s a vital find deeper inside.  

I get it, Áine, I do. I hate him too. 

But I’m not used to dealing with someone like her. I’ve had, in my short life,  about twenty hosts. Mostly men; I’m not the experimental type. With them, if you feed them  enough drink and keep them late enough into the night they will unfurl and share themselves  in soft intimacy without any resistance. At least, that’s how I remember it. I remember there  being others, and I remember being them, but I don’t feel like them. The taste of memories  from another’s mind, lingering, on the tongue. I don’t remember how I got into Seán Péiste. I  know he was an alcoholic at nineteen, just as he was a farmer and a pervert, as he is likely to  remain as such for the rest of his life. Did I always hate him? Or did he look desirable, once?  

Giving yourself to someone, entirely, and them to you; it changes you. In a way it kills you,  and in a way you are born from it.  

I’m afraid. 

But fear hasn’t ever stopped me before. 

Seán Péiste closes his eyes and he leans in. 

Hair brushes his cheek. 

Air brushes his lips. 

But the table is empty. Bar the two of us. As usual. 

I tried to call for her in my own voice, and it choked in his throat. So, I’m here,  forgotten in a damp, cold, forgotten corner of Seán Péiste. Still, I do hope, someday, with  gentler eyes, someone will really see me.